New Leaders, New Visions: Raising the Stakes

Now firmly ensconced in Boston, PETER DUBOIS seeks to transform Huntington Theatre Company into "a 360-degree experience"

By Christopher Wallenberg

It must take an army of BlackBerry-toting staff members to keep track of the comings and goings, the plans, the ideas and the sudden brainstorms of Huntington Theatre Company of Boston's artistic director Peter DuBois. He's a whirlwind of activity, and following the movements of the man is a bit like trying to track a cyclone tearing through Tornado Alley. You're never sure where he's headed next, but you can certainly discern the path that he's carved out. The difference being that DuBois usually leaves vivid theatrical magic, not a trail of disaster, in his wake.

One week, he's fine-tuning a workshop production of a long-gestating musical pet project, Long Season, as part of the Huntington's Breaking Ground Festival of new work. The next, he's heading to the LAByrinth Theatre Company's summer intensive at Bard College, where he'll watch readings of new plays by such writers as Stephen Adly Guirgis and Bob Glaudini, both of whom DuBois is interested in producing at the Huntington in coming years. Then it's off to New York City, where he still keeps an apartment, for an orientation meeting at Theatre Communications Group to discuss a New Generations mentorship grant that will, in part, enable the Huntington to conduct post-show discussions after almost every performance at its theatres this season. Sprinkled amid this unrelenting midsummer schedule, DuBois also finds time to have dinner with a board member back in Boston; caucus with Paula Vogel at the playwright's home on Cape Cod to review alterations to her new play, A Civil War Christmas, which will be produced at the Huntington in December; then head back to New York to watch a rough cut of buddy Philip Seymour Hoffman's directorial film debut, Jack Goes Boating, an adaptation of the Glaudini play that DuBois and Hoffman staged at the Public Theater two years ago.

Over the course of three recent conversations—one at the spacious, homey apartment he shares in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, with his partner, Benjamin Bohen—DuBois proves himself to be a font of energy and ideas. He's smart and engaging, and has an insatiable hunger for new work. His enthusiasm is unflagging, whether he's chatting up his concept for a Sundance Theatre Lab-like summer retreat on Cape Cod (where the Huntington could develop and workshop new projects) or gushing about one of the local playwriting fellows, Lydia Diamond, whose Stick Fly will be produced at the theatre next spring, and whom DuBois credits with helping to clarify his thinking about how the Huntington can be a more effective resource and home for artists and writers.

For DuBois, who took the reins of the theatre in July '08, the first year at the Huntington was about listening. Now it's about moving toward articulating a larger vision for the organization. The hitch that could potentially skew that vision is the fact that DuBois assumed his post at the advent of the economic crisis, which has magnified the challenges facing many flagship regional theatres—challenges like reduced corporate funding, an aging core audience, the decline of traditional subscription-based ticket models, and shifting modes of communicating with audiences (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.).

And for DuBois, there are other overarching questions afoot: "How do you stay deeply rooted in the community, and at the same time have both a national and a global point of view and perspective with the programming?

"We want to have real purpose in our programming," DuBois avows. "Sometimes when I'm at a theatre watching a show, I feel I could close my eyes and be at any number of different theatres around the country. So I want the work at the Huntington to really have a singular perspective and point of view."

Despite the difficult financial climate and the myriad problems facing institutions like the Huntington, DuBois has plenty of reasons to be enthusiastic—even giddy—about the future. At 39, he is a rising star in a new generation of institutional artistic leaders. He's already set the burgeoning Perseverance Theatre of Alaska onto a path of financial stability and artistic growth and made a name for himself in New York as resident director and associate producer at the Public Theater. Now, in addition to helming one of the nation's largest resident theatres, he's earned a reputation as one of the hottest new-play directors working in the theatre today. His casting of the famous 4-foot-5-inch actor Peter Dinklage as the deformed despot in a well-received Public Theater production of Richard III captured the psychological underpinnings for the king's cruel and poisonous behavior. His 2006 staging of David Grimm's Restoration-era sex farce Measure for Pleasure won an Obie and earned DuBois a prestigious Callaway Award for excellence in directing from the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers. In addition to his pitch-perfect mounting of the Hoffman-headlined Jack Goes Boating in 2007, DuBois also scored a huge audience and critical hit last winter with his trenchant production of Gina Gionfriddo's Becky Shaw, a lacerating comedy about morals, marriage and social mores gone sour.

If there's a through line in DuBois's career, it's probably his unyielding commitment to developing new work and fostering an ongoing collaboration with playwrights. And he's vigorously committed to both of those ideals in his new gig. In his first season at the Huntington, DuBois filled his schedule with two world premieres (Richard Nelson's How Shakespeare Won the West and David Grimm's The Miracle at Naples) and a handful of plays getting second or third productions (including José Rivera's Boleros for the Disenchanted and Richard Goodwin's Two Men of Florence).

"I see the Huntington as a playwright's theatre, as a place where we wrap our arms around the writer," says DuBois. "Last season, with the exception of The Corn Is Green [by the late Emlyn Williams], we had every writer, for six of our seven plays, in residence at the Huntington—engaging with the community, with the staff and board, and with the audience. You learn so many things in conversation and in collaboration with the author. And when you're working on a new play, no one's more vulnerable than the playwright. They're the ones who have the most to risk because everything starts with the writing. So it's important that we offer them the support that they need."

DuBois also relishes the process of forging a bond with a writer while cultivating a new work. "I just really enjoy being in the room with writers and navigating the emotional map of a piece. You are pulled into an immediate intimate relationship with somebody that involves absolute trust, fearlessness, and a level of emotional intimacy that it could take years to achieve in other situations."

Pulitzer-winning playwright Paula Vogel, who was one of DuBois's mentors in the graduate theatre program at Brown University, calls him the consummate new-play director. She paired him with budding young writers like Gionfriddo and Sarah Ruhl, whose Passion Play DuBois directed an early version of while he was at Brown. "I wish I could give a young Peter DuBois to every emerging playwright, because he has the best perspective of how you approach a new work. He very joyfully wants to jump into another world, one other than the one we inhabit—to him, it's a new planet. You don't land on Mars and say, 'Oh, I don't like the soil here. I think you've got to repaint the rock to look like Earth.' You land on Mars and go, 'Wow! What is this planet? What strange, amazing soil! What is the color of these rocks?'"

Hoffman, the former co-artistic director of the LAByrinth Theatre Company in New York (not to mention an Oscar-winning actor), hails the director's empathy and lack of judgment while working on new plays. The two first began working together during the early years of the LAB's ongoing residency with the Public. "New plays are tender things and vulnerable things and sensitive things, and the playwrights who wrote them are all those things, too. So they need somebody who has the sensitivity to deal with that," Hoffman suggests. "Peter's a guy who walks into these artistic situations with openness and empathy for what will transpire over the time together."

If there are two seminal events that most dramatically sparked DuBois onto his current path in life, they would be the death of his mother, Jeanne, with whom he was extremely close, when he was a freshman in college; and the two years he spent in post-Velvet Revolution Prague making underground theatre in a dilapidated former Salvation Army building with likeminded young bohemians.

"I was always very independent-minded and had a bit of wanderlust. One summer I went on tour with the Grateful Dead. Another year I was hitchhiking up and down the coast of California. In college, I spent some time in England and in Ireland. Losing my mom was definitely a real catalyzing event for me, and I think it's very much connected to this sort of sense of abandon that I have in terms of how I live. There's a part of me that feels like the best way of honoring her memory and how she raised me is to be constantly in pursuit of the things that make me the most passionate, and make me feel like I'm most plugged into the world around me."

After graduating from Villanova in 1992, a newly emboldened DuBois made his way to the Czech Republic to soak in the burgeoning arts movement that had bubbled up in Prague after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Not long after arriving, he and a small group of budding young artists began "squatting" an abandoned Salvation Army center, turning it into a Bacchanalian hive of art, theatre and music called Asylum. After eight months, the police caught on and shut the venue down. But DuBois stayed in Prague for two-and-a-half years, directing pieces like No Tragedy (A Small Czech Macbeth), "about a man who basically destroys the world by not taking power," and Savage/Love, a work informed by the AIDS crisis that mashed up Samuel Beckett, Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin. His time there remains among his most treasured experiences.

Returning to the States in 1995, he enrolled at Brown, where Vogel scooped him up immediately. "Peter, for me, was like hitting the mother lode," she says. "I was so excited that there was someone this passionate, this savvy, this intellectually and emotionally curious, and this brave." After graduation, she recommended him for the artistic director post at Perseverance in Juneau, Alaska, and though he was just 27 years old, he landed the gig.

At Perseverance, DuBois honed his institution-building skills. During his tenure, from 1998 to 2003, he doubled the organization's budget to $1.1 million and raised $2.5 million toward capital improvements, facility upgrades and an endowment campaign. He created a professional training program with the University of Alaska Southeast, brought work to Anchorage on a regular basis and toured smaller-scale projects around the state.The company grew to become Alaska's largest producing arts organization. Artistically, DuBois mixed bold revivals with the fomenting of new work like Long Season, a musical by Chay Yew and Fabian Obispo about Filipino immigrants working in the Alaskan canneries, and the world premiere of Moby Dick, which married the Melville classic with the whaling traditions of the Iñupiat Eskimos.

"There's this kind of prevailing notion that populist plays can buy you the more experimental play," says DuBois of the most important lesson he learned at Perseverance. "If we program this traditional production of Gypsy or Blithe Spirit, then it buys us a deconstruction of Moby Dick. I remember feeling there were these trade-offs—I thought, I never want to approach thinking about theatre in that way again."

In 2003, DuBois decided it was time to swim into the big pond of New York. He landed at the Public Theater, where he was mentored first by George C. Wolfe and then Oskar Eustis. As associate producer and later as resident director, he oversaw residencies for cutting-edge companies like LAByrinth, the Wooster Group and the Civilians, developed or directed plays like Brett Leonard's Guinea Pig Solo and Glaudini's A View from 151st Street, shepherded co-productions with Dublin's Abbey Theatre and London's Royal Court, and served as the artistic liaison to in-house directors.

Meanwhile, prior to the arrival of former artistic director Nicholas Martin in 2000, the Huntington was producing occasional new work, mostly by August Wilson, of whom the theatre was an ardent supporter. When Martin took over, he championed the concept of the Huntington staging new plays on a regular basis. The company was about to open a 360-seat jewel box second stage and a black-box studio space at the new Calderwood Pavilion in the South End, and Martin envisioned them as incubators for new work. The theatre had also endowed a new American plays commissioning fund, which has increasingly trained its focus on local writers. DuBois hopes to build upon the foundation that Martin laid. The big challenge, DuBois adds, is to think about how the Huntington "can create a 360-degree experience around theatre."

"If you want to stay and talk about a play because it provokes something in you, or there's something you really loved about it, you should be able to do that," he says. "We want to make people aficionados of the theatre. We also want to start thinking about the theatre in a more expansive way—as a social space and a gathering space." In essence, he says, "The idea is to break dramaturgy out of the literary office and infuse it into every aspect of the organization."

This season the theatre will experiment with allowing drinks into the theatre and keeping its bars open after the show so people can hang out and discuss the plays. DuBois would like to utilize the video screens in the Calderwood lobby to give audiences information about a show or, perhaps, to post text-messaged reactions about a performance. "Boston is a real intellectual town," he says. "People want to talk about ideas." He also plans to grow the cabaret series that was started last winter at the Calderwood, as a way to lure in new audiences and foster a hive-like mentality in the building.

One of his most important initiatives is striving to make the audience at the Huntington reflect the diversity of Boston. "We've started a big push with the African-American community to really develop those audiences this year. And it's not just lip service. I think demonstrating a multi-year commitment, vis-á-vis the programming, can make a big difference. I've got work by African-American artists in the pipeline for the next three years."

Peering into the future, DuBois wants to import cutting-edge companies such as LAByrinth and the Civilians for residencies and co-productions. He's also baking the idea of expanding the Huntington's Breaking Ground Festival into, say, a bi-monthly reading series, rather than a once-or-twice-a-year event. But he's also grappling with hard economic realities. This year, the Huntington's budget shrank from roughly $13.3 million to $11.8 million, production budgets were slashed, and there were layoffs and even furloughs, including almost three weeks for both him and managing director Michael Maso. "I had a six-week period of time toward the end of the year when the pistons in my imagination were seizing up—I was really letting the stress take hold," DuBois confesses. "I told myself, 'Okay, you've got to let it go.' So the summer has been about unclenching and getting the creative juices flowing again. It's like a judo philosophy, where you deflect all of the pressure and the insanity and use the energy to drive toward something more fruitful and fulfilling."

While DuBois agrees that he still finds great joy in the process ("I am at my happiest when I'm in a room full of actors and artists, and we're cracking open a play"), he doesn't want to give the impression that making theatre is all one big party. "I think if the room is too happy—and this is a big lesson I learned from George Wolfe—there's a problem. If you're making good theatre, you're going to break eggs—you're going to wound feelings, there's going to be difficult moments. So do you try to eliminate all that tension? Or do you let it be in the room and work through it and let people not like each other for a little while? I think for the work to be really good, that tension of everybody fighting for their little plot of land in the play—whether you're the actor, the designer, the playwright, the director—is critical. When a play really soars, it's because everyone's bringing their 'A' game and fighting for the stuff they believe in."

Arts reporter Christopher Wallenberg is an American Theatre Affiliated Writer, with support from a grant by the Jerome Foundation.