The Quick-Change Artist

Diane Paulus has wasted no time revamping ART's outlook and aesthetic—and generating buzz and backlash

By Christopher Wallenberg

As dream jobs go, Diane Paulus always knew hers was a bit quixotic. It was in 1991, when she was an aspiring young actor living in New York City, just a few years removed from her undergrad days at Harvard, that Paulus first articulated her vision for one day running the American Repertory Theater. As one of 25 students in the inaugural New Actors Workshop, founded by a troika of theatre luminaries— Mike Nichols, Paul Sills and George Morrison—Paulus recalls a seminal moment during the last week of the program when a group of students were sitting around late at night talking about their futures over a few drinks. As they went around the circle and discussed their goals, some said they hoped to head to Hollywood to seek fame and fortune. Others talked about Broadway stardom. But Paulus had a different aspiration—one that was a bit esoteric to those assembled in the room.

"I'll never forget it," she says now, 20 years later almost to the day. "We were in the acting school's dinky, dank studio, and we had just finished a rehearsal. When the question came to me, I said, 'I want to be Robert Brustein and run the American Repertory Theater.' Most everybody in the circle was like, 'What are you talking about? What is that?' But during my time at Harvard, I had seen the most incredible theatre of my life there—Robert Wilson's The CIVIL WarS, JoAnne Akalaitis's Endgame, Julie Taymor's The King Stag. For me, that job was the ideal, the total apex. I could be shepherding the most exciting work in America."

Flash-forward two decades and Paulus, 44, is now ensconced in that very dream job. In May 2008, she was named the third artistic director in the 31-year history of ART, founded by Brustein in 1980 in Cambridge, Mass., as a repertory company doing often daring interpretations of the classics and avant-garde new work by the world's most visionary directors.

Paulus's dream-job comment may have been tossed off as a throwaway line in a late-night bull session, but she now figures that her theatrical ambitions started to coalesce in her mind that night. At the time, she was heading for an acting career. A year later, she would abandon that ambition and start focusing on directing, urged on by Sills, who sent her off to Door County, Wisc., where he had a farm, to start a summer theatre. Her experience being mentored by Nichols and Sills stuck with her, and she began thinking about theatre and acting in a fresh light. To this day, she credits Nichols "for developing my brain as a director."

These days, the neurons in Paulus's brain must be firing away like pinballs at an arcade. Entering her third season at the helm of ART, Paulus has shaken up the vanguard company with her audience-embracing, populist vision. Charged with revitalizing ART and stabilizing its finances, Paulus has seized her mandate to bring back audiences that were sometimes alienated by the daring, cerebral, yet often inscrutable programming of her predecessor, Robert Woodruff, whose contract the theatre chose not to renew in 2007.

On the heels of her exuberant, fourth-wall-obliterating revival of the landmark musical Hair, which was a critical and commercial success on Broadway in 2009 (and has just returned to Broadway for a limited run), Paulus splashed down for her first full season at ART, 2009–10, with two shows fueled by word of mouth. Sleep No More and her own The Donkey Show were both immersive, interactive spectacles that exploded at the box office and drew in droves of young audiences and new patrons, many of whom had never been to ART before.

Sleep No More, by the experimental British troupe Punchdrunk, was a sensory-overload mash-up of Macbeth and Hitchcock elaborately staged in a former elementary school as a sort of choose-your-own-adventure, in which the audience follows actors through a labyrinth of meticulously designed rooms as various scenes play out (the show is currently ensconced in a commercial run in a Manhattan warehouse, co-produced by Paulus's husband, Randy Weiner). The Donkey Show was Paulus's Studio 54 variation on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, set in a disco-pumping nightclub. It had originally played for six years in New York and had traveled around the world.

Two more productions in that first season heralded the arrival of a new ringleader in town: a presentation of Elevator Repair Service's GATZ, the seven-hour, word-for-word staging of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, magically brought to life in a drab office setting; and the premiere of Johnny Baseball, a new musical about the infamous Red Sox curse, directed by Paulus. Both played to packed houses, and press for Paulus was glowing.

Her second-season triumphs included the box-office hit Cabaret, directed by Steven Bogart and starring goth-rock diva Amanda Palmer as the Emcee (which garnered mixed reviews); the idea-packed one-man show R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe, written and directed by D.W. Jacobs, in which longtime ART favorite Thomas Derrah embodied the iconoclastic thinker; and a rock-musical version of Prometheus Bound with a leather-and-chains punk aesthetic, staged by Paulus to bring the Titan's battle against tyranny into the 21st century. The season racked up five 2011 Elliot Norton Awards, including a best-director prize for Paulus in recognition of her work on Prometheus, Hair and Johnny Baseball.

"I spent a year developing my ideas and meeting audiences and talking to people about revitalizing the vibrancy of the theatre," says Paulus, in one of several interviews at restaurants near her part-time home on Manhattan's Upper West Side, where she was spending time in May prepping her new musical-theatre reimagining of Porgy and Bess. "You know, when you take over a theatre, you can sort of gingerly, over many years, turn the ship in a different direction. But I guess that's not my nature. I really felt that I was going to have to deliver and show the audience at ART what I meant. So I went pretty deep pretty fast. That was my modus operandi: Let's not just talk the talk, let's walk the walk."

Paulus generated buzz, stoked tickets sales and stabilized ART's finances. But she also suffered slings and arrows from some longtime ART staffers, patrons and supporters who were unhappy with her radical rejiggering of a company that had long stood as a leading light of avant-garde theatre—one of the few places in the U.S. where audiences could regularly see work by imaginative auteurs like Janos Szasz and Andrei Serban. Though Paulus studied at Columbia University under such ART mainstays as Serban and Anne Bogart, in her programming at the Cambridge theatre she was criticized for favoring commercial, box-office-driven shows; for dismantling the stable of actors left over from the company's original repertory model; for the alleged populist warping of a theatre once known for its deep exploration of the psychological intricacies of human behavior through the reexamination of classic texts.

The backlash went into high gear last summer when the Boston Globe published a lengthy exposé about the "poisonous" atmosphere inside the company, the resignations of unhappy board members and accusations that Paulus had "isolated and devalued" longtime staffers. Former advisory board members complained she had turned the place into a theatre "to preview musicals heading for Broadway" and was creating shows "pandering to sexual appetites." Particularly harsh words came from one of the company's longtime actors, Will LeBow, who accused Paulus of exploitation, not reinvention of Shakespeare, and of fostering "an anodyne state in the theatre—pain controlled, and intellectually narcotized." Harvard's hiring of Weiner, her husband and artistic collaborator, to run ART's clubby new second stage, Oberon, also raised eyebrows.

Paulus was frustrated and blindsided by the scathing nature of some of the attacks. Yet she remained undaunted. "In the height of it, things got really unpleasant," she allows. "But in a way, it was healthy and had to be voiced. And it had the effect of rallying the base around the cause and actually enticing the undecideds. I had so many people around the country calling and writing me when that article came out. They were like, 'This proves you are doing the right thing.' I couldn't believe the outpouring."

When the controversy erupted, Paulus had vigorous defenders both inside and outside the theatre. One of her biggest champions, Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis (who had enlisted Paulus to direct Hair as part of the Public's summer season in Central Park in 2008), defends his cohort's focus on audiences, arguing that government subsidies and large subscription revenue are relics of the past. "It is living in a fantasy world to believe that somehow we can retain the institutional funding structure that the nonprofit theatre had in the '60s and '70s, and even into the '80s," Eustis reasons. "That simply is not a sustainable business model anymore. All of us in the nonprofit theatre have been forced to grapple with what it means to live in a completely commercialized culture, and we've come up with different approaches and different sets of answers. What I am sure of is that Diane is engaging in this debate in a highly principled manner that is driven by her artistic vision; it is not driven by financial or commercial considerations."

The backlash was probably inevitable, considering the radical nature of Paulus's makeover and the stature of ART locally and nationally. Almost a year later, Paulus feels more emboldened than ever. "Making change at an institution is hard because people are used to doing things the way they want. You have to deal with changing expectations. A lot of it has to do with how you communicate and how you continue to help people to understand what you're doing, and how everything you're doing relates to the mission of the theatre," Paulus reasons.

For now, it's full steam ahead. Her next project at ART is perhaps her biggest and boldest one yet. Always a multi-tasker, Paulus previously directed a slew of imaginatively conceived operas, including one based on the haunting David Lynch film Lost Highway and a ribald Kiss Me, Kate at the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, N.Y., with a dominatrix-styled heroine. Now her high-profile revival at ART of the Gershwins' Porgy and Bess promises to remake the landmark "folk opera" for the musical-theatre idiom, a form it rarely takes these days. Paulus points out that the show first gained its place in the canon as a musical, when it was revived on Broadway in 1942 under Cheryl Crawford's direction, then toured the country (seven years after its 1935 premiere at Boston's Colonial Theatre).

Adapted by Pulitzer-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and Obie-winning composer Diedre Murray, Porgy and Bess will open at ART in early September with a cast that includes four-time Tony winner Audra McDonald as Bess, Broadway baritone Norm Lewis as Porgy and actor-comedian David Alan Grier as Sportin' Life. With commercial producers contributing enhancement money, Porgy is pointed toward the bright lights of Broadway (where it hasn't been staged in almost 30 years). The stakes and the size of the endeavor have never been higher for Paulus, who knows the pressure is on to deliver a Porgy that does justice to the property's lofty status—and at the same time move her new vision of ART forward. "The first year, we had such a growth in audience," she says, "and now it's all about: How can we follow that up and keep surprising them?"

Paulus is standing, arms akimbo, at the center of Oberon, ART's club/theatre space, directing an early February rehearsal of Prometheus Bound, a musical retelling of Aeschylus's Greek tragedy featuring words and lyrics by Spring Awakening's Steven Sater and propulsive, infectious tunes by Serj Tankian of the alt-rock metal band System of a Down. Her creative team swirls around her as Paulus intently watches the actress Uzo Aduba, playing the maiden Io, maneuver around the room, climbing onto the bar and over cabaret tables and banquettes while belting out the melodic dirge "The Hunger." In the original text, the hero (played by Hair veteran Gavin Creel) is shackled to a rock and largely immobile, so Prometheus could present a problem of stasis in its staging. But Paulus has infused the action with crackling energy and visceral movement, with design and staging elements that reverberate with the zeitgeist.

Indeed, thinking about the audience is paramount to Paulus's aesthetic approach. "The idea of making audiences feel like they matter, that the theatre matters, and that they're a partner in the event—that's what fuels me as a director. In the '80s, you didn't think about the audience—you thought about the artist: 'What does the artist want to do?' And, 'If the audience doesn't get it, it's their problem.' But we know now that the theatre lives or dies on an audience. So I believe it's actually radical to think about audience. That's been my whole mission."

According to her Prometheus collaborator Sater, Paulus's greatest strength as a director is her ability to personalize a story and make it her own. "I brought her this ancient Greek story, and she found in it such personal reasons for doing it. She spoke to the actors as if she were imparting her own story, that it was an urgent issue for her to tell—about resistance and standing up to tyranny and fighting for justice. She crafted each beat of the story as if it were something she had lived and felt."

The same dynamic is evident some three months later in a midtown Manhattan rehearsal studio, where Paulus and her Porgy and Bess cast and creative team are ensconced in a three-week workshop, which will culminate in a spring presentation. In moving Porgy from the operatic form to the musical-theatre idiom, Paulus and company are spending a good portion of the workshop figuring out what dialogue should be spoken and what should be sung, and what musical recitatives should be retained. They're also tweaking scenes and dialogue, though always with a careful hand, often referring back to previous incarnations of the show or to DuBose Heyward's novel to clarify details.

When Paulus and Parks made their presentation last year to the Gershwin estate and the Heyward trust, which had expressed interested in reviving Porgy as a musical, the two women talked about a production that wasn't operatic in scope but intimately scaled—one that would zoom in on the interior life of the characters and flesh out their stories. "When most people think about Porgy and Bess," Paulus reasons, "they think about glorious, incredible music—but they don't really remember the arc of the show and how it flows. I want people to leave this production saying, 'Oh, my God, I never knew Porgy and Bess had such a great story! And those characters!' We don't want the characters to be clichés or reductive kind of sketches—we want them to be full of foibles and weaknesses and strengths."

This fleshing out extends even to the large ensemble. Before they wrap rehearsals for the day, Paulus asks the members of the chorus to start thinking about their Catfish Row–dwelling characters as individuals, not just as background window-dressing. "They've got to know who they are and why they're there and what they do for their living, what their dreams and their fears are. With a cast of 22 people, you really want the audience to fall in love with everyone on stage."

As she did with Hair, Paulus will make everyone in the chorus do a character presentation in front of the cast when rehearsals for Porgy start in Cambridge in July. "It forces the actor not to say, 'Oh, I'm Soprano No. 2.' No, it's, 'Who are you? What's your name? What's your greatest fear in life? What's your greatest strength? Where are you going to be in five years? What are your dreams?' I make everybody go through this exercise.

"Every choice I'm making with this production is to strip away any distancing gauze and make it feel immediate and visceral," she continues. "What's great about a show like Porgy and Bess is that it's all there—the incredible drama, incredible people, incredible emotions. But you can remove that distancing lens and make it immediate, which doesn't mean that you have to update it or make it modern."

Paulus and Parks are facing Porgy's thorny problem of racial stereotyping head-on. Parks talks about the script's flirtations with minstrelsy as a "shortcoming of understanding." As she puts it, "I see what the writers were doing. This was born of love for black people. We're not going to indict them, we're just going to keep working on it." Paulus, who taught a course on Porgy and Bess last semester at Harvard with the renowned cultural historian Marjorie Garber, adds unapologetically, "So we've gone in and just changed some things that are just not acceptable anymore."

More than 200 invited guests, including members of the Gershwin estate, came out to see the developmental presentation of the revised Porgy in early May. Broadway producers Jeffrey Richards and Jerry Frankel, who secured the commercial rights to the show, contributed enhancement money for the ART production, with the hopes that Porgy might land on Broadway as early as this fall. When the final strains of Gershwin's "O Lawd, I'm on My Way" rang out, the audience burst into a sustained standing ovation—a sure sign, Richards confirmed, that things are on the right track.

Still, for some of Paulus's critics, a Porgy and Bess with its sails set for Broadway is exactly what's wrong with the new ART. It's true that any number of well-respected not-for-profit regional theatres regularly present new musicals and plays with commercial ambitions—but there's something about that dynamic invading ART, with its three decades of history as a beacon for groundbreaking and avant-garde theatre, that rankles Paulus's detractors.

The artistic director and her supporters counter that entertainment and rigorous, artistically adventurous theatre do not have to be mutually exclusive. Says Oskar Eustis, "She is engaging seriously with the classics, but she's figuring out ways to do them that reverberate in the exact historical moment we're in right now. She's also extremely interested in theatrical event, and thinking about social transactions and using those ideas to create a genuinely experimental theatre that is not a reproduction of what anybody else is doing. It's not working within any received tradition; it's taking traditions and breaking and altering them."

Brustein, for his part, says he believes that Paulus should have the space to spread her wings and pursue her own agenda as artistic director. In an e-mail, he praised her achievements: "Diane has been doing some remarkable things at the ART, and has managed to attract a whole new generation of spectators, primarily through the use of music (often rock-oriented) in her approach to classical plays and new work.... The most interesting thing about Diane's work is its unpredictability. A single season can be a cornucopia." He also commented, "It is true that Diane possesses a more populist aesthetic than previous administrations of the ART, and her work is sometimes less an alternative to Broadway than an extension of it. And, personally, I regret the loss of our permanent company of actors. But it is also true that as private and public support for theatre declines, many previously partly subsidized institutions are seeking out other forms of income in order to survive."

The final dismantling of the resident company seems to be a particular thorn in the side of Brustein and others. But the truth of the matter is that, under Woodruff, the resident company model had already been largely de-emphasized. An ensemble that had once numbered as many as 12 in the '90s was reduced to 4—Derrah, LeBow, Karen McDonald and Remo Airaldi—who were cast in three to five shows per year. "I didn't inherit an acting company," maintains Paulus. "The policy at the theatre was that there were certain individuals who were getting work—but they were not on salary. If ART really wanted to have a repertory acting company, that would have been another agenda."

While Paulus's programming has been a boon to the theatre in terms of generating media heat and increased ticket sales, the transition to new ART leadership internally was a rocky one, with bruised feelings all around. "When a big leadership change like this happens, there are lots of vulnerable people," says a longtime former ART staff member who has also worked under Paulus. "And maybe she didn't have the administrative experience to really shepherd that transition smoothly. But she didn't come in and do anything malicious." The former ART staffer, who wished to remain anonymous, also believes that Paulus is still grappling with how to pay tribute to the history of the theatre while signaling that she's blazing her own trail. "For Bob Brustein, the symbolic thing was that in the lobby of the Loeb [Drama Center], there have always been these beautiful photographs of past ART productions, and suddenly they weren't there anymore. I think seeing that was a very tough moment for him—that's where the hurt comes from with the old guard. Some of them might say, 'Well, maybe she's trying to erase that history.' But I don't think she is. She's figuring out how to honor the past, while also saying, 'This is where we're taking that legacy now.'"

While ART's rich history no doubt resonates strongly for Paulus, right now she's intently focused on the theatre's future. The company's finances have stabilized for the moment (Paulus got Harvard to double its annual budget contribution to $2 million per year), and the new leader's infectious energy and unbridled enthusiasm have helped in raising money and bringing in new donors. One of her primary challenges, she says, is to figure out ways to make theatregoing a regular ritual for audiences. She's not interested in creating "eat your vegetables" shows that leave them baffled or exasperated, feelings familiar to some ART patrons prior to Paulus's arrival.

"I think my first three years have been kind of a miracle—I feel like we turned the ship completely around. I mean, it's radical!" Paulus enthuses. "And yet, for me it's an absolute continuation of the history of the ART. The most gratifying comments I hear are from people who have been supporting this theatre for years, and they say to me, 'You may be doing different things, but that's exactly what Bob Brustein was doing in the '80s and the '90s at ART—leading us into new territory.'"

New York City–based arts reporter Christopher Wallenberg is the former editor of Playbill in Boston and a frequent contributor to the Boston Globe.

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