Molly Smith
“I think audiences can smell risk.” Molly Smith, artistic director of Washington DC’s Arena Stage, is reflecting on how the company has remained relevant for 70 years. “I think you have to be fearless about failure, and have to believe that your theatre organization and audiences expect that of you — that you're going to have great successes and you're going to have some flops. That's the way an organization moves forward.”
Smith is 23 years into her tenure at Arena Stage, and willingness to embrace the new and take risks marks her work as much as her ability sniff out a popular hit. From unflinching new play development to lush American musicals, Arena has tackled it all, earning a reputation as the nation’s flagship regional theatre in the process.
In her career thus far, Smith has directed on Broadway and at The Old Globe, Berkeley Rep, the Shaw Festival and many others, including more than 30 shows at Arena Stage. Under her leadership, Arena Stage has won a Tony Award for artistic excellence and a National Multicultural Institute Diversity Award. Arena’s associated performances and artists have won 100 Helen Hayes awards. Also (a favorite Smith fact), Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg officiated Smith’s wedding to Suzanne Blue Star Boy at Arena Stage.
But before her time at Arena Stage, and before she founded Perseverance Theatre in Juneau, Alaska in 1979, before she’d embarked on a career in taking risks, she was a kid in Yakima, Washington.
“I was always the little kid in grade school who had the big voice so I could read from the Bible, the Christmas story,” Smith explains. “I went to Catholic school for all of grade school, three years of high school and two years of college. So a long indoctrination into a particular religious form. And I would say I probably got introduced to the theatre by going to mass. Right? Some big theatre piece. And it's all about transformation, which is what theatre is.”
When it came time to enroll in the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, young Smith caved to family expectations and chose to study law… although not for long. “In that first year, a friend of mine and I traveled to Europe for three months. And while I was there — and it was right in the heart of the Vietnam War — I decided I was going to follow my heart and not my brain. And my heart was telling me to start a theatre in Alaska. I was 19. And I came back … and I told my teachers, ‘I'm going to start a theatre in Alaska.’ And they patted me on the shoulder and they said, ‘that's very nice dear,’ and I left.”
What about that trip spurred such a big change?
“There's always something about travel that takes me out of the every day and causes me to be able to follow my intuition and my instincts, and allows me to coalesce ideas in a way that being in my home place doesn’t,” she says. “Being in the world, being with other people, I just realized, why am I trying to follow something? … Why am I following this part of the family line when I'm not passionate about it in the same way that I'm passionate about making theatre? … So then I decided to do the craziest thing of all, which is to start a theatre company.”
The 19-year-old Smith headed east, to Washington, DC, where she studied theatre at Catholic University of America as an undergrad, American University as a graduate student.
“I will say that I didn't learn much in university work,” she laughs. “I have to say, where I really learned is by creating my own internship, and going to small professional theaters in Washington, DC. I went to New Playwrights Theatre and I said, ‘teach me how to read a new play.’ And they immediately put a broom in my hand and told me to go downstairs and wash dishes. But along with washing dishes … I also learned how to read new work, and that's stuck with me forever. I went to another theatre and I said, ‘I really want to learn how to run the box office and hey, I’ll stage manage for you.’ I just kept going from theatre to theatre to theatre. Because I knew when I went back to Alaska to start this mythical theatre that nobody believed I would start, I'd have to know something about everything. Because in the theatre, you can always spot a fraud.”
She began directing during this time, as well. “I was starting when I was 21, but nobody would hire me because I was a woman,” she says. “I wasn't hired until I went to a place called the Washington Area Feminist Theatre. And they hired me to direct Susan Glaspell’s play [Trifles]. And then they hired me to direct another two plays. But everywhere I knocked on doors to try and direct and it was ‘No, sorry. Can't use you.’ But clearly it was because I was a woman … They wouldn't give me a shot. But the Washington Area Feminist Theatre did. So I will always be grateful for that right play.”
Smith would indeed return to Alaska and found Perseverance Theatre, with the help of a gift of 50 free theatre seats and a lot of support from family and the community. “Alaska is a place that says ‘yes.’” Smith explains. “It says ‘yes this is something you want to do, yes i can help you, yes let's make it happen.’ Because on the west coast, and in a place like the Pacific northwest, you're always part of making something that hasn't been done before. You’re part of making history.”
Perseverance, with its focus on Alaskan stories and artists, would go on to become the largest professional theatre in Alaska, and Smith shepherded it for 19 seasons before again coming to Washington, DC, this time to lead Arena Stage.
Under founder Zelda Fichandler, Arena had already grown to great prominence with its focus on Chekhov, Ibsen and the European classics (although it was at Arena where The Great White Hope premiered in 1968, starring James Earl Jones and Jane Alexander). The company’s second artistic director, Douglas Wager, expanded that scope to encompass American musicals. When Smith came on board in 1998, she evolved that focus even more.
“When I came in, I focused on American plays, American ideas and American voices,” she says. “Because of this drive and desire to commission and to work with living writers, that just ramped it up for us.” She laughs and adds, “For many, many years we couldn't make a dime at Arena on new work, and now it's more than 50% of what we do. And it's one of our largest audiences. If you stick with repertoire long enough, your audience will come.”
In the years since, Arena Stage has evolved even more in its programming — perhaps most importantly in its embracing its role as community member and inclusive, accessible amplifier for BIPOC artists and stories. As the We See You White American Theatre movement has proven, all American theatre has a long way to go in these regards, but Arena is certainly a proponent of change and inclusivity in the regional theatre industrial complex.
“I think the work of art has always been to provoke, to entertain, to console and to wake up,” Smith says. “You know, you’ve got to wake people up … I actually think everything we do every day is political. Every choice we make is political. The kind of shirt I wear is political, the kind of books I'm reading is political. They're all political choices that we make. So of course, that's true in theatre as well. The kinds of choices, what we choose to put on the stage, what we choose to act in, what we choose to focus our minds on. And this moment, it's more important than ever for artists to speak out. The level of hate going on in this country, the level of white supremacy, which has absolutely been unleashed by Donald Trump in the most radical way, is something that, particularly we as white people need to speak out about. We need to speak out about the hatred toward Asians, toward Black people, toward Indigenous people … We need to be supporting programs and projects that are really combating this. We need to send money. We need to march, we need to speak out and speak up. Because we're in the crucible of the moment right now. If what happens with voter suppression in what places like Georgia want to happen, we are toast as a democracy. And Black and Brown people have been fighting this for generations.”
The company’s pandemic pivot embodies its love of writers, actors, craft and community, and digs much deeper than simply putting up video of performances. Their Artists Marketplace is an online home to purchase work from a variety of artists, providing both income and visibility to people affected by shuttered live performances. Also, the online Looking Forward presents engaging performances, talks and conversations with a wide spectrum of artists, with an emphasis on BIPOC voices and stories.
When I ask her opinion on the stance that online theatre isn’t “real” theatre, she laughs. “What I say to the people who say ‘it's not theatre, it's not this, it's not that,’ [is] ‘Go ahead sit on the side. Watch the world go by.’ There were a lot of theaters who did not move into anything online and they're now scrambling to catch up. Any kind of new form is complex. We have complex feelings about it, but I know that when we go back into the theatre again why wouldn't we, if we're creating a new play, also have as an offshoot a digital piece that explains it in a different way, or takes a scene and reconstructs it? All the work online, I think, is totally here to stay and it's here to stay in a whole different way.”
At the time of our conversation, Arena’s most recent digital offering has been viewed more than 19,000 times, and its audience includes viewers in Australia and England, far outstripping what a traditional production could achieve in just one week.
When Smith and I speak, she’s just come from a meeting with Muriel Bowser, Washington DC’s mayor, where they and other arts and hospitality leaders discussed ideas for getting the city open again. What does Smith hope for post-pandemic theatre?
“I hope we're moving into a much more thoughtful place as far as theatre. And by thoughtful, I mean even more thoughtful in the rehearsal hall than we've been before. More careful, more considered with each other … We have something [at Arena] called the Culture of the Rehearsal Hall … that’s all about taking the qualities and the principles of the rehearsal hall and feeding them into the entire organization. It has to do with collaboration. It has to do with respect. It has to do with teamwork. It has to do with ways of accepting difference and difference of opinion. It has to do with creativity.”
“I hope that's true with our audiences as well,” she continues. “I hope that what we bring to our audiences are pieces of such enlightenment, and such glory that they can't turn away from them. That they drop into the light that is within them. I've thought a lot about what happened after the Spanish Flu in 1918. It was the roaring ’20s. So I think that this next chapter for theatre will be a combination of champagne and soul. Both because I think there's the exhilaration — I was exhilarated because I was in that in-person meeting today for the first time in about a year … I can tell you I came home high. And I want to I want to bottle that for the stage. And soul because it's been a year when the earth has sent us all to our rooms to think about our lives and the life of the planet … in the same way that there's a racial awakening, I think that there is an awakening through the pandemic about our place on the earth.”
Learn more
(also, a cool lil’ fact sheet about Arena’s many firsts - ie, the first American company to tour the Soviet Union)
