The "Accidental" Career of Susan Booth

BY Becky Brett

Susan Booth is sitting on top of the world. Her theatre, the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, just won the 2007 regional Tony and she serves as president of the board of the Theatre Communications Group (TCG).

Not bad for this “accidental director,” who begun her theatrical career as a dramaturg. Now she works out of a spacious, sunny office in the modern Woodruff Arts Center, which also houses the High Museum of Art and the Atlanta Symphony.

Although Booth is taking our theatrical nation by storm, her theatre roots lie solidly in Chicago. She attended Northwestern for grad school, and in the last year of her doctoral program, rather than the usual teaching assistantship, she received a Kemper Foundation fellowship. This fellowship assigned her to a professional theatre—in this case Northlight—where she would work as a dramaturg for a year. She was at Northlight when Russell Vandenbrook was the artistic director.

“Russell was a fantastic mentor and a true believer in the idea of a meritocracy. If you were good at what you did, then you would have an opportunity to do it,” Booth said.

“I bristled a lot when I looked around the field and saw so few women running theatres, so few women directing. I didn’t really spend enough time professionally as an actress to think in terms of what was available to me as an actress, but I was at Northlight for four years. When I finished my year as a fellow I was at the position where I would either write a dissertation or become a full-time employed person at Northlight. I’d like to say I chose the latter, but the choice was actually made for me because I was unceremoniously tossed out of the doctoral program at Northwestern. It’s my great embarrassing failure.”

At Northlight she served as literary manager, education director and eventually associate artistic director. She did some acting on the side with Footsteps Theatre, where she fell into directing. From reading scripts at Northlight she had access to a lot of interesting new plays and found a volleyball play called Dig, Volley, Spike that she thought would be perfect for Footsteps. She passed it on to the ladies at Footsteps who jumped on it.

“Through whatever happy miscommunication they came back to me and said, ‘We love it and when do you want to have auditions?’ I think they just assumed I wanted to direct it,” said Booth. The production was so well received that the producers decided to take it to New York. “So,” Booth laughed, “the first production I ever directed went to New York.”

She went on to direct shows around Chicago and eventually for Northlight, which led to a directing gig out of town. It was while she was away directing in Pittsburgh that she got a call from Michael Maggio at the Goodman, saying they were looking for a dramaturg who would focus on new play development. Maggio was very clear that they weren’t looking for another director, so the agreement that they made was that she could take a leave of absence to go direct shows elsewhere a couple of times a year.

“I think back on working at the Goodman with a huge amount of fondness; also with some rose-tinted glasses certainly,” says Booth. “You have some of the best directors in the national field 10 feet away from each other. So one thing that became real clear was no one was going to do you any favors just because. You really had to be so good at what you did to be considered as a director there.”

The way she became a director at the Goodman was completely unexpected. Booth was nominated for the Alan Schneider Award at TCG, which is a year-long directing fellowship. Past recipients include Kyle Donnelly, Henry Godinez and Charlie Newell. Each year four emerging directors are nominated, they come to New York for interviews and then the final recipient is announced.

Apparently a press release went out about the finalists. Booth was surprised to learn about it because she hadn’t told anyone she was up for the award. “I’m very Type A and I didn’t want anyone to know I was up for it if I wasn’t going to get it.”

As she recalls it, with great affection and humor, the way she found out about the press release was, “Falls came to my office with this piece of paper and said, ‘You’re a finalist for this,’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘Well it’s gonna start being embarrassing if you’re not directing here.’”

Booth’s relationship with the Alliance actually began as a dramaturg for Regina Taylor, who was developing a new play there. While in town, she went out to lunch with then artistic director Kenny Leon and said she wanted to direct there. He said when her own theatre hired her as a director, he’d hire her. So the minute she got her first studio slot at the Goodman, she was on the phone to Leon at the Alliance.

She went on to direct three plays there and when Leon decided he wanted to move on, he called Booth to find out if she would like to be considered for the position. Several “months and interview hurdles later” she was offered the job, just as she began rehearsals at the Alliance for Rebecca Gilman’s Spinning Into Butter.

“There should be a school somewhere for artistic directors. It’s the ultimate untaught job. I think I would have made an egregious amount of mistakes if I had gotten the job before I was ready to get the job. I have made an egregious amount of mistakes anyway…it’s just maybe a few less.”

It’s difficult to imagine such an intelligent, well-spoken professional messing up too badly. However, she did share one of these “egregious” mistakes: Programming A.R. Gurney’s The Fourth Wall right around the 2004 presidential elections. “It has some, what I thought were completely innocuous anti-Bush satirical comedy in it that just went over like a lead balloon. Oh, deafening silence.”

“I think I misread two things. One had to do with the immediate audience. But also if you’ll remember that election we were all screaming at each other and there reached a point of just, ‘Stop stop stop!’ I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I think the lesson was less about a regionalism and more about topicality in programming. Typically because of planning windows you can’t respond topically for a year to 18 months, at which point we have media saturation, topic exhaustion. So there’s a lesson about when is metaphor more powerful than topicality. In hindsight a brilliant play to have done during that election would have been Enemy of the People. But yeah, that was a great big bomb.”

When the Tony was announced, theatres around the country called in their congratulations and offered advice on how to pimp their Tony. “We were talking about how we should collectively start a Web site: pimpyourtony.org,” said Booth.

Receiving the Tony has increased the Alliance’s national visibility, but more importantly it has also resulted in greater community support. While in New York for the awards ceremony, Booth scheduled some fundraising calls and noticed, “Boy it makes those funder calls go a little more smoothly when you identify yourself [as a Tony winner].”

Getting the award does not mean great changes to the organization, though. “We’re gonna keep doing what we’ve been doing, which we’re very proud of, only maybe now people will notice,” mused Booth.

“The thing that’s so satisfying about it is it draws focus to work that’s been going on. I do think there are certain suppositions about a precipitous drop in cultural quality when you get below the Mason-Dixon line, but those are just specious assumptions. But then again you need to hear that from sources you trust. If Atlanta is saying it’s great, that’s one thing but if the American Theatre Wing says it…”

Of the work they currently do, Booth is intensely proud of their new play development program for graduate school students. The Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Competition is endowed with a seven-figure gift and was started two years after Booth began her tenure as artistic director.

“When theatres are hammering out their seasons and budgets, the question that will always be on the table is one about new work, because people respond at the box office to familiarity. I was looking for a way to make sure we had a protected, institutionalized commitment to new work,” Booth said.

The competition invites grad students in their final year to submit plays in a blind submission process. Their internal vetting system identifies five finalists, which are then passed on to an outside panel of advisors who read those plays. The play that is selected as the winner receives a world premiere production the following year, with interim development workshops.

Each year the Alliance works with a New York partner to do readings of all five finalists’ plays in New York, so that the finalists have the opportunity to meet other producers and directors who might be interested in their plays. Then in the spring, when Alliance produces the winning play, they invite all the finalists to Atlanta to be in residence and go through the process again and invite their colleagues to come check out the new work.

For the world premiere, it is important that the play be produced in a space appropriate for it. While Booth said, “Theatres must not get in the habit of ghettoizing new work to small spaces,” she also noted that their main stage is the full “purple velvet seat experience” and has not (as of yet) been an appropriate venue for the Kendeda-winning play.

In an interesting side note, statistically the gender balance in the new plays produced by the Alliance and vetted through a blind submission process, mirrors that of the nation at large with 20 percent of the new work having been written by women. Although Booth was quick to point out that the finalists were roughly split 50/50 between men and women authors, and that the reason they do it the way they do is that it “must be meritocracy.”

“Is this an unparalleled voice? Is this a non-derivative voice?” asks Booth. She also needs to consider where the premiere will take place. “A play that may be a fantastic New York premiere may not be a fantastic Atlanta premiere.”

When it comes to getting the winning play that ever-elusive second production, Booth acknowledged that “we all have premiere-itis. We try very hard to engage colleagues in conversation around the winning play from the get-go so people are interested in the work.” They also hire a director for the world premiere who, in addition to being the best possible director for the piece, brings some “professional leverage,” says Booth. “It’s somebody who has a professional network to automatically position that play. To give that play an imprimatur.”

One imprimatur Booth became uncomfortable giving was what could have easily been interpreted as the Alliance stamp of approval on other local theatre companies. When she first got to town, she found a “fantastic small and mid-size theatre community.” She felt the quickest way to get to know her colleagues would be to have a festival along the lines of Chicago’s Theatre on the Lake, which she used to program with Curt Columbus, Steppenwolf’s former literary manager who is now the artistic director of Trinity Rep in Providence.

Booth had only planned to do it for one year, but it was very well received by audience, participants and funders, so there was the immediate assumption that it would happen again. She did it one more year and put her foot down about going into year three, because then it would definitely be an annualized event. “I was uneasy with the arrogance that who am I to curate the city? It just wasn’t a relationship I wanted with my peers.”

Instead, she is looking to the Steppenwolf and Goodman models of inviting a theatre company to be in residence.

“This community has a very wide gap between the large theatre and the next largest theatre. We have a roughly $11 million annual budget and the next largest theatre has a little over a million. That’s a pretty serious gap, and so because the scale of work has been so different, I don’t think there was as much of a sense of ecology. It’s been really important to me because I grew up in Chicago and colleagues are why I love that city. Still, as a relative newcomer they have much more to teach me than vice-versa. It’s figuring out a way of collaborating with other theatre companies that is mutually respectful. I acknowledge that we have the luxury of significant resources. They have the luxury of very deep market niches.”

For example, Booth laughs and sighs when she says, “One of my favorites is Jewish Theatre of the South. I have such envy of Jewish Theatre of the South. It’s not like every play ever written by man is on the table. [Artistic director Mira Hirsch] is able to have a very deep vertical relationship with her audience. In the course of an average year 225,000-250,000 people come to this theatre. By definition we have to be the city’s theatre. This is a wild-ass polyglot of a city. We can’t do it by saying we are the All-American classics theatre. Our audience would in no way be representative of our city.”

This coming season the Alliance will be collaborating with Georgia Shakespeare to produce Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice. “They have a gorgeous space but it’s a very large space and their only performance space. Their artistic director, Richard Garner, hungers for an opportunity to work on a more intimate palate, but he doesn’t have the venue. My hope is going forward that this will be a regular part of our programming that we take another theatre company and we figure out a partnership that is mutually beneficial.”

Taking a look at the larger national theatre community, Booth took the helm as president of TCG’s board of directors on July 1^st. Over the past year TCG has undergone a significant change in leadership with the departure of Ben Cameron, and the installation of Teresa Eyring as the new executive director. Booth had nothing but great things to say about Eyring. “She has a great capacity to listen wide and synthesize practical.”

Over the summer TCG is conducting intensive strategic planning sessions. Booth said that among other things, they will be looking at their areas of re-granting and how American Theatre magazine is functioning.

“One of the biggest questions for any service organization is how much do you harvest the discussion and how much do you drive the discussion? We’re responsible for participating in both.

“It’s the role that any theatre has with their community. It’s all of our jobs here at the Alliance to listen to what Atlanta’s talking about and to be responsive to what they’re talking about, but also to participate in the dialogue in a persuasive and provocative way.”