The Young Man from Atlanta

Chris Coleman went west, all right—and shouldered the job of transforming Portland’s flagship theatre

an interview by Des McAnuff

EDITOR'S NOTE: Nobody could be sure it was a marriage made in heaven.

The groom was a brash and energetic 38-year-old actor-turned-director who had grown up in the Deep South. He’d spent most of his career running Actor’s Express, a lean-and-mean theatre outfit he co-founded in an out-of-the-way neighborhood of his hometown, Atlanta.

The bride was a gem of the Pacific Northwest with a bumpy history—a well-appointed LORT-B theatre company that, in the space of 12 years, had gone through three changes of leadership; a difficult split from its parent organization, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival; and a string of well-publicized budget crises.

So when Chris Coleman and Portland Center Stage hooked up in May 2000, curiosity about the match was running high. Would there be a clash of sensibilities? How would a director used to staging shows on a dime (including full-scale musicals) take to working in PCS’s sprawling 880-seat Newmark Theatre? Could his productions generate the kind of box-office revenue that would counterbalance PCS’s hefty accumulated deficit?

More than three years later, most of the questions that swirled around Coleman’s appointment as PCS artistic director have been answered, at least provisionally. Now on the other side of 40 and a committed participant in Portland’s cultural conversation, Coleman has renewed his contract with PCS through 2006 and counts among his accomplishments the acquisition of a whopping $1.35-million challenge grant that underwrites the theatre’s new vision.

In April, American Theatre invited Coleman to talk about his tenure in Portland with another West Coast artistic director—Des McAnuff, who recently returned to California’s La Jolla Playhouse, the theatre he previously led from 1983 to 1994. And, to add context to the conversation, longtime Portland arts writer Bob Hicks was enlisted to describe the personality of Coleman’s adopted city, a place, he says, where “dreamers and searchers” continue to set the tone. —Jim O’Quinn

DES McANUFF: How has it affected your life to be brought up in the South, in Atlanta, then to run an organization there, and to suddenly find yourself in the Pacific Northwest leading a large institutional theatre?
CHRIS COLEMAN: We could talk for four days about that. It’s been hard. Even though I ran a small theatre, I always fantasized about running a big one. And, for whatever reason, crazily, the notion of running a theatre that needed to move in a new direction rather than one in which everything was already working—that intrigued me, I don’t know why. So I knew that coming to Portland Center Stage would be interesting, fun, challenging. But I assumed that everyone would love me automatically from the start, even though I was changing the work. You don’t realize, when everybody begins to say, “We’re losing subscribers,” how the stresses and strains of the financial aspect are going to feel personally.

In fact, I came in to a big honeymoon here, but there were a lot of things coinciding in my personal life that made it hard. I left my partner—and I chose to do that—but I didn’t anticipate what the reality of dealing with it would be. Then, two days after I got here, my sister passed away suddenly, out of the blue. So in the middle of this time when I felt like I was running for political office—meeting people, selling my ideas and my vision in a more concentrated fashion than I had ever been called upon to do in my life—I really just wanted to sit still and grieve. I think coming into this community was also hard—it gets fun eventually!—because it took a long time to figure out what the code was here. For the first year and a half I would try to introduce myself or make a joke or whatever and be met with curious stares. Finally a colleague at another theatre told me, “The people here are not prudes, they’re not puritanical. They hang back—they’re pioneers. They give you your space and they see if you’re gonna last. And it takes them a while.”

The board brought you in specifically to bring innovation to the theatre. They felt that that was more in keeping with Portland’s image, perhaps. How important has that been in terms of transforming the theatre and starting to execute your own vision?
It’s been absolutely critical. I think if I hadn’t had the board’s emotional support, I probably wouldn’t have stuck it out. They didn’t cut and run—they really stepped up to the plate. They were scared the first year, as I was, then they began to see, “Oh, okay, this is going to work.” And now they’re elated. They could have gone with somebody far less progressive, but, for whatever reason, they liked me. I think they also felt that if this theatre was ever going to succeed, it couldn’t just be good. It had to be distinctive—there had to be some kind of personality and energy to it. I’ve really tried to help them understand why I respond to plays like The Devils and Flesh and Blood, and how these plays relate to our audiences, and what the value is of being part of an organization that’s bringing that kind of work to a community. We’ve gotten enormously positive feedback from our peers in Portland, and we’ve actually made some money off some of these things. So that’s fantastic.

PCS is a relatively young organization—15 or 16 years old. In what ways has that been helpful? Or has that presented you with any special obstacles?
Which traditions do you harness and which do you jettison?

Exactly. Which do you maybe even cherish? I’m curious about how you adapted to coming into an institution that already exists.
When I think about the work, there are two things. First, I got a sense from the board and from the staff that they were bored—so my first instinct was to really jump out there as far as we could and see where we would land. Well, the thing we hadn’t anticipated was: Where’s the audience? The audience may have been bored with the work, too, but they were subscribing. They were showing up. So, our initial message to the audience was, “Okay, we want to have permission to do different kinds of work—maybe more controversial, whatever.” But it was a big dance for a while. Am I too far ahead of the community? Should I speed up? Slow down? What?

The second thing was the advantage of a classical tradition—this is a place where you can sell Shaw. You can sell Shakespeare. You have people who’ve heard of Mrs. Warren’s Profession because of the incredible tradition down at [Oregon Shakespeare Festival in] Ashland. You get a really literate audience who’s interested in the background of the play and has read much more than the audiences I had been used to in Atlanta. That’s a huge advantage. So you want to signal, “Yeah, we’re gonna do crazy stuff, and wild stuff, but a part of the aesthetic will also remain the great plays, so don’t feel like that’s something we lost.”

Inside the institution, there were huge areas of learning for me. Nobody worked at Actor’s Express because they needed a job. We didn’t pay squat, so folks worked there because it was exciting and because they liked the work and they wanted to be part of it, not because it was a decent job. So the notion that people might be working beside you at PCS because of the health plan or because it’s a decent job was totally new to me. I had to learn that maybe it was okay for one of your staff to not be so in love with the work, if they were giving you the kind of performance you needed. That was a huge shift for me. I had to figure out how people plug in, what is realistic to ask in terms of connecting to the vision.

I think you’re describing one of the chronic artistic director challenges. We started La Jolla Playhouse 20 years ago—and there are a lot of advantages to starting with a clean-sheet operation, as we did. You get a balance in passion and skill level all through the organization, in administration and production—and we’re still going through that. Have you paid a lot of attention to the administrative areas and support staff in the last couple of years?
Yeah, because I knew it wasn’t going to be enough just to change the work. We were gonna have to change the culture of the institution, change who was on the board and what they expected of the organization, change the marketing, change how we talked to our audience. If we expected to get a younger and different audience—one that was going to eat up the work—we were going to be talking about ourselves in a completely different way and looking a completely different way. Maybe the people who were with me could do that, and maybe we needed other people. What’s your zodiac sign?

Gemini. What about you?
Virgo. Double Virgo.

A double Virgo? My mother’s a Virgo.
Scary.

I think when you’re running an organization that you created you’re able to be more nimble and responsive than you can when you’re running a larger operation. I was really struck today by the fact that you’re announcing a season a year away, projects that you’re committed to. I mean, here we are today in a war climate, when that’s on people’s minds…
What’s going to resonate six months down the road?

Exactly. Again, that’s got to be a profound difference in the way you operate as an artistic group.
Announcing the season here is always about cash flow. This organization is the strangest bird, because it started as an offshoot of Ashland. For six years it was a kind of a step-child, then Ashland realized they weren’t going to be able to make it profitable and so they stepped out and the company became a LORT-B theatre in its first year of independence. That first year, the company had a $500,000 deficit. I inherited this, and we’ve been chipping away at it. So, literally for cash-flow reasons, I have to announce the season in early March so we can get the renewals coming in, or else we can’t make the cash flow work. Which is the stupidest reason in the world to make an artistic decision.

But I’ve kind of gotten accustomed to it—I am a double Virgo.

One of the things I’m pushing for—and in our strategic planning, we’re not even close—is greater flexibility in our production schedule and in the planning process. We won’t be there until we’ve eliminated the deficit and we have an endowment and have a big enough subscription base so that there is more financial flexibility—because all that flexibility costs money.

One of the advantages of your coming to Portland with fresh eyes is that you were able to question everything. For example, when you choose a season—how do you go about doing it? How much freedom do you offer up to your colleagues to direct the shows? I’m not looking for a recipe, but are you developing a philosophy on that?
I don’t know if I’m developing a philosophy. I read, the staff reads, Mead [Hunter, PCS literary manager] reads. Usually, sometime in late summer, we come up with our dream list. There are a couple of things that I wanted to do this year that I haven’t figured out a way to fit in yet—Christopher Columbus and the Discovery of Japan, James Joyce’s The Dead. I want to do a King Lear. Once in a Lifetime is still on my list. We do our Just Add Water new play festival each summer, and for the past three years we’ve chosen a mainstage production out of it. I start by listening to everybody else’s opinion because I usually have about 20 plays that I want to do, and I need somebody to say, “Oh, I hate that.” I need some way to eliminate some of them. And then I try to figure out what the numbers are going to be. Which choices are going to advance what you want to build with your audience? For example, we struggled and struggled between Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog and Another Fine Mess, a Steven Drukman play, both of which offer very exciting things in terms of the season.

And you opted for the premiere.
We opted for the new play, but we went back and forth because Topdog is a known quantity, and the premiere initially looked like it would cost more. It was actually my finance guy who said, “You know, if all things are even in your heart, and one of our major strategic goals is to do work that we have developed ourselves, then that should be the play.” And I think he’s right.

I think that’s highly commendable at a time when we’ve been accused of swimming upstream. It seems to me that this creeping conservatism driven by financial restrictions is, perhaps, understandable, but it is not acceptable. The only way you get turned on to that kind of excitement is to stick your neck out and do it. One of the complaints you hear from a lot of artistic directors is that at a certain point you become the breadwinner for your organization. That can happen to an artistic director unconsciously, and it starts affecting your choices.
I think it becomes as much self-censorship as somebody else telling you what you should do. You start to try to guess what’s going to work—which, you know, never worked for me in Atlanta. When we did the premiere of Flesh and Blood last year, it was potentially very controversial for our audience. A lot of sex, several gay characters. It was going to be touchy. I was getting some real concern from board members, and I had a few very intense conversations about why the play was important for us. When we opened the show, it was totally embraced by the audience and by the critics. It did extremely well at the box office. Then, a month later, when I was presenting my next season to the board—the most conservative I’ve done, because selfishly I wanted to do Shakespeare and Shaw—the board member who had been the most worried about Flesh and Blood said, “Do you think this next season is too conservative, given that we are starting to make inroads with a more progressive audience?” That was a real watershed, because I started to see that I had planted these seeds and they had begun to grow and I couldn’t turn back on that now—I couldn’t get chicken. In fact, this next season is, I think, a much more accurate reflection of what I want the theatre’s personality to be. I think there is an audience for what I want to do in Portland. But my job is to not get scared.

I’m really struck by the fact that you’ve had a number of projects graduate from the Just Add Water program. Clearly you’re not ghettoizing the work—you’re involved in developing. Have you found it gives your audience a sense of ownership? Are they more invested?
Absolutely. Initially we had a very small but excited audience for the new-play festival. I think they didn’t really get it until we did the full production of Flesh and Blood and people liked it so much. This year Itamar Moses’s Outrage came out of Just Add Water. Our audience had never heard of this playwright—but the production had a very high subscriber showing. Now there’s an expectation that this “development to production” deal is going to be a pattern. And there is so much more heat around the new-play festival because of it. It’s so much fun for us, because I think we’ll sell Another Fine Mess just based on the reputation of its relationship to the festival, which is a great thing. My goal is, 10 years down the road, to be like South Coast Rep [in Costa Mesa, Calif.], where you have 400 people show up for a reading on a Friday afternoon—and they don’t know what they’re going to see.

They’re there with a spirit of adventure.
One of the things about this job that it took me a long time to realize was: You are running a mainstream institution, and you have to deal with mainstream tastes and values. You have to keep your eye on how far you can push the banks of that stream. Does that necessarily mean you have to do work that people have already heard of or by an artist who is famous? No, there are exceptions to that rule, even if they are few and far between.

Well, if you take the long view—and this is easy to say and not so easy to do—it’s been my observation that you build up a certain kind of trust, and the trust doesn’t have to do with, “We’re going to succeed every time out.” From time to time you’re inevitably going to hit the wall at 180 miles an hour, but if you’re attracting a crowd that likes to see high-velocity racing, then they will forgive you for that. Of course, it’s really hard to do when you’re the major institution in town, which you are. I mean, I don’t think it’s quite the same when you’re in a city like Seattle, where you have a number of theatres.

What are your dreams? If you could look ahead three years or more, what would be the things you’d most like to accomplish?
You know, the reason I took the job was because a group of people I met here seemed to believe that you could build something really unique—that this was a chance to look at the whole model of what regional theatre is in a new way. I would really like to be doing more premieres. Three or four years down the road, I would love to be doing more work that we had developed. I’d love to have more international artists with us. I’ll find out in the next few weeks about whether or not this new building we’re talking about renovating into an arts complex will materialize. If that materializes, it’ll be fucking cool. I love the Newmark (the theatre we currently perform in)—it is a beautiful theatre—but it’s not the theatre I would choose for myself in terms of scale. I’d like something a little simpler and…

…a little more Meyerhold.
A little more Meyerhold. And my notion is I would like the audience to look like people you see when you walk down the street in Portland—which is a very eclectic mix. And I think we’re starting to find them. The average age of our audience has dropped a decade over the last two years. We’ve had a lot more young people around, which is fantastic, and given where our marketing’s going next year, I think that trend is going to continue. I’d really love to see us build a home that feels as funky and cool and interesting as some of the other stuff in this city. And if we get to build that facility, we’ll be able to do that. We’d have two performance spaces and a cabaret space as well, located on the coolest block in the city. If that happens, it would be outstanding.

One of the things that’s allowed us to grow in this horrible economy is a big grant we got a year and a half ago from the largest foundation in town—$1.35 million over three years from the Meyer Memorial Trust. We had to match it. It was focused on capacity building, a recognition that this theatre had been historically undercapitalized, compared with its peers. If we were to survive, we had to change that equation. It’s made a dramatic difference: subscriptions grew by over 1,000 this year, single tickets exceeded their goal, and the overall budget has grown by a million and a half over three years—but it ain’t easy. And we need to go further in terms of the artists that we’re able to attract and the resources that we have to hand them. There are some really, really wonderful designers in this country that I would love for us to work with, and we have to upgrade what we’re prepared to bring to the table if we’re gonna engage them. We’re not quite there yet. There’s some real growth we need to do.

I think that’s dead on, by the way. Obviously we want everyone surviving—the people inside the institution as well as the artists who work there.

Des McAnuff’s next production is the world premiere of Tom Donaghy’s Eden Lane at La Jolla Playhouse this August.

Some things about a maverick city that Chris Coleman probably knows by now
by Bob Hicks

A few things you need to know before moving to Portland to take over a theatre company:

• It’s the biggest city in OR-e-gun, not in Or-y-GONE. 
• It isn’t the place with lobster, it’s the one with Dungeness crab.
• If you can’t stand the rain, stay out of the kitchen.
• Even with a metropolitan population pushing 2 million, it can’t decide whether it wants to be a small city or a big town.
• Beneath a surface sheen of polite boosterism, it’s a maverick place filled with visionaries determined to reinvent the wheel, even if they’re missing a spoke or two.
• A lot of those mavericks are young, creative and new to town.