New Leaders, New Visions: Beyond Identity

Courage is RAELLE MYRICK-HODGES's watchword as she succeeds Brava's founder and makes this San Francisco company her own

By Alexis Greene

Her managing director calls it Artistic Director Disorder, or ADD. It's when an artistic director starts speaking in tangents, because she has so many functions—so many spheres to keep track of. Kind of an extreme form of multitasking.

It's been happening a lot lately to Raelle Myrick-Hodges, who in February '08 took over as artistic director of Brava! for Women in the Arts and its headquarters, Brava Theater Center in San Francisco, succeeding founding artistic director Ellen Gavin.

"Our managing director, Hetal Patel, calls me 'tangent girl,'" Myrick-Hodges confesses with a zig-zag gesture and an animated smile. "Only I can go from being in the middle of a sentence about Lorraine Hansberry's Les Blancs to talking about health insurance. My day is about waking up, writing a grant, writing the first draft of a press release, checking with Hetal on what's happening with the construction work for the third space. When are the auditions? And oh, right, then there's the programming that I was actually hired to do."

Not that Myrick-Hodges is complaining. Interviewed at this writer's Manhattan apartment this past July, the 39-year-old director and producer—a tall, striking woman who exudes confidence—described the job at Brava as "exactly what I was looking for."

Although she has a lot on her plate, Myrick-Hodges finds herself in the happy situation where good task management can have an enormous impact. "I wake up every day doing what I want to be doing," she says. As she tells it, she knew she wanted to be the artistic director of a theatre from the time she was six years old, when she wrote and put on a play with another youngster.

"I would put the O'Jays on the record player, and my friend John Bell and I would put on skits in between. When you charge your parents money in their own house to listen to their own records, you are a producer."

That early enthusiasm and determination seem to have driven Myrick-Hodges ever since, despite detours and insecurities along the way. She lived abroad on and off for a few years, traveling and going to school in England ("and getting kicked out of school in England," she adds sardonically). On Dec. 21, 1988, she was scheduled to be on Pan Am Flight #103 from Heathrow to John F. Kennedy Airport, but missed it "because I happen to have been the bad kid who went drinking." Two of her friends did make the flight, which was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Born in Murfreesboro, N.C., Myrick-Hodges moved with her parents to Washington, D.C., when she was an infant, and then to Silver Spring, Md. Her father was in the military; her mother acted in community theatre productions.

She credits a supportive, European "second family" in Silver Spring for conveying that "I could do anything I wanted. It never occurred to them that being a woman or a person of color could be an issue." Still, she wrestled with those issues while growing up. "I come from the generation that is legally integrated. But there is still racism—and sexism—and I felt displaced a lot of the time."

As for her theatrical parentage, she pays tribute to a strenuous internship at Philadelphia's Arden Theatre Company and to the Azuka Theatre Collective (now the Azuka Theatre), which she started in Philadelphia 10 years ago (Azuka means "strong foundation" in the Nigerian Ibo language).

There also have been many directing assignments and numerous mentors, paramount among them George C. Wolfe, whom she came to know after receiving a TCG/NEA Director Fellowship at the Public Theater in 2000. Subsequently Wolfe tapped the young director to reproduce his staging of Suzan-Lori Parks's Pulitzer-winning Topdog/Underdog for the national company.

Says Brava's new artistic head, "The most important thing I learned from George: Understand your vision better than anyone else and be adamant about it."

Myrick-Hodges has tried to live that maxim since taking over, at times painfully aware of following in the celebrated footsteps of the organization's guiding spirit. Gavin, who founded Brava in San Francisco's Mission District in 1986, spurred and nursed the organization, turning a group womanned by volunteers staging readings of new plays into a multidisciplinary center with three spaces, including a 364-seat proscenium theatre, renovated from a former vaudeville house built in 1926.

One of the challenges Myrick-Hodges has faced head-on is the need to create a bold, new artistic identity for an institution defined in the past by its strong political and philosophical grounding. "People here go, 'Oh, but we haven't done it like that for the past seven years,'" says Myrick-Hodges. "And I'm like, 'Yeah, but you didn't do any plays for four of those years.' The hard part about succeeding someone like Ellen is having the people you work with trust you—and when I say 'trust,' I don't mean 'like.' That's what I also learned from George [Wolfe]—I'm not here to be liked, I'm here to make art."

What is Myrick-Hodges's vision for Brava?

Ken Foster, executive director of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, acknowledges the magnitude of the challenges that Myrick-Hodges faced onarrival. "Over the last few years," says Foster, "Brava had receded greatly. Raelle was following a legend who had let the theatre slide for the past few years—in its heyday, Brava was a real center of theatrical activity." One problem was an accumulated debt of $338,000, incurred before Myrick-Hodges came on board. "Funders had stopped supporting the theatre," says Foster. "Raelle had, and has, bridge-building to do."

Myrick-Hodges's uphill battle got steeper in December '08, when she underwent a radical hysterectomy. She was recovering when Brava was casting the West Coast premiere of Pearl Cleage's Song for Coretta; instead of using Equity actors, as Brava's union contract requires, the artistic director's surrogates cast non-Equity performers—an action that Myrick-Hodges and managing director Patel were left striving to repair.

"Equity came behind me making sure I could pay my staff and artists, and put on shows," she explains pointedly, then adds, "I promise not to mess with the acting mafia this year, though! I sincerely appreciate what they do. I simply think there should be easier ways for artists and companies to modify contracts in order to work on innovative theatrical ideas."

Up against the theatre's debts, a national economy in free-fall and the vanishing California budget, Myrick-Hodges nevertheless adopts a fiercely optimistic attitude. "Instead of saying, 'Ohmigod, we're in so much debt, what am I going to do?'—it's important to say, 'Wow, we've got this building, and now we have to pay off this much.' Emotionally it changes things enough so you have the energy to persevere."

Myrick-Hodges's first season has been viewed from most quarters as a dramatic accomplishment. She opened Brava's second stage, an intimate black-box space, with two world premieres. Brava reached out to the Mission District by participating in the famous Day of the Dead Parade with a healing ritual written by Andrew Saito. All told, Brava put on seven productions last season, including a chamber version of Sophie Treadwell's Machinal and Myrick-Hodges's own stagings of Kobo Abe's 1967 Friends and local playwright Brian Thorstenson's new Over the Mountain. "We had not seen that kind of activity from Brava in many years," Foster remarks.

Asked to single out a favorite, Myrick-Hodges selects the second stage's much-talked-about finale in May '09: Molly Rhodes's For All the Babies' Fathers.

Fathers, a play about men who don't want any connection with their children or their children's mothers, had received readings and workshops in the Bay Area. Myrick-Hodges hired Jessica Heidt, artistic director of the Bay Area's multidisciplinary Climate Theater, to stage it. "Although a play with a man at its center might seem unusual for a theatre dedicated to promoting women and women artists," Myrick-Hodges told Broadwayworld.com, "Brava has a history of supporting women artists who have challenged set ideas about how women are depicted. This play is extremely relevant to what's going on in the world today."

Robert Hurwitt, reviewing for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote that the play "leaves us wanting more—just as Fathers closes the first Brava season of artistic director Raelle Myrick-Hodges on a note of anticipation for her next one."

Longtime San Francisco critic Hurwitt is among Myrick-Hodges's local supporters. "It seems to me," he writes in an e-mail, "that she's rejuvenated and has been making Brava a much more important and much more active center for performance in an underserved part of San Francisco. She's thrown down the gauntlet to some of the more established groups that specialize in new work with her focus on producing the works of often overlooked local artists."

Matthew Graham Smith, founding artistic director of San Francisco's Precarious Theatre, agrees. "Raelle's level of ambition has been exciting for us in the Bay Area," Smith says. Brava and the financially strapped Precarious are collaborating this season on a "Kitchen Series" of staged readings, which will take place on Brava's main stage.

"One of Raelle's special talents," says Smith, "is her ability to be unsparingly honest in pursuit of the art. It is a real act of generosity on her part. If we artists are always congratulating each other, we're neglecting our duties. She always steers the conversation back to what we're making."

"Her personality bursts out at you—her I-will-not-be-deterred determination," corroborates Yerba Buena Center's Foster. "She could easily have stayed in the 'we-are-a-feminist-Latina-theatre' place, but she's not doing theatre of identity politics. She is doing contemporary, great theatre."

The 2009-10 season reflects Myrick-Hodges's artistic will, her affinity for collaborations within the local arts community, and a yen for cross-cultural relationships and content. The more than 10 entries include Action! Futurism Projected and Performed, a joint presentation of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Italian Cultural Institute, Performa '09 and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; a series of solo work by women; a revival of Hansberry's unfinished Les Blancs; Ramble-Ations, written and performed by D'Lo; and the zany San Francisco performance troupe Fou Fou Ha!

Perhaps Artistic Director Disorder really means "brimming with plans"—and infecting others with enthusiasm. Myrick-Hodges says she has made an "A.D. rule": If you work in administration at Brava, you must talk about the company once a week during personal time, be it to a bartender, a taxi driver or the dry cleaner. "How do you create a community of people who are interested in theatre? It's not, 'Here's a postcard.' You have to convey that you love what you do."

If her presence at Brava irritates anyone left over from the previous administration—well, so be it. As Myrick-Hodges says, "I'll take interesting-fun-crazy-and-talented over boring any day."

Alexis Greene is a New York City-based author who writes frequently about women in the theatre.