When Sharon Ott took the helm of S.S. Seattle Rep last year,she had ample ground for confidence and even more ground for caution. In her 13-year tenure as its artistic director, the Berkeley Repertory Theater had flourished as few American regional theaters had during the difficult '80s and '90s, building ever larger audiences while challenging same with often "difficult," politically charged material.
It was an admirable, almost unexampled record. But would the same formula play in Seattle? Audiences in both towns are more venturesome and sophisticated than the national theatrical average. Berkeleans love their reputation for being ahead of the intellectual pack, while Seattleites are well known to cringe at flaunting anything, particularly brains.
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After a long series of Rep seasons in which artistic effort had centered on developing light comedies for Broadway consumption, there were additional reasons for Ott to tread carefully developing a playbill that could satisfy both her own artistic ambitions and the Rep's supposedly challenge-challenged subscribers.
In retrospect, the nervousness seems misplaced. Subscription attendance, stuck for years at a little more than 100,000 annually, jumped 8 percent last year to more than 114,000. Single tickets, boosted by 7,500 $10-day-of-show sales to those under 25, rose more than 70 percent, with total attendance topping 1997's by nearly 25 percent.
This record is all the more impressive because the lineup Ott chose for her debut season was less cautious than canny, with a number of works testing the audience's tolerance for novelty while inviting it to join in the unfamiliar fun.
Opening with a three-hour, over-the-top 19th-century melodrama (played straight!) is hardly a sure formula for success, but The Shagraun did very nicely, thank you. Even Le Cirque Invisible, too, tested both taste and patience: a full evening of silent solo mime and transformational movement on the mainstage? Hmmm.... And Stephen Wadsworth's revival of Wilde's little-known problem play An Ideal Husband was hardly a safe bet. How long has it been since a Rep audience has been expected to sit down, shut up, and listen—listen hard—to three long acts of high rhetorical style and glittering paradox? Yet all three shows prospered, despite mixed reviews.
The most satisfying success for Ott (because it seemed most hazardous before the fact) was Mary Zimmerman's fanciful musings on anatomy, perspective, and the nature of genius, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. The first piece of flat-out "performance art" to be presented at the Rep since Martha Clarke's notorious subscriber enrager The Garden of Earthly Delights back in 1987, Leonardo sold more single tickets on its own than most previous full seasons in the Rep's second house.
"I really wonder whether this all doesn't show that we've been seriously underestimating our audience," Ott said last week, shortly after announcing most of her 1998-99 Rep lineup. And indeed, Ott's biggest hurdle in shaping a second season to her satisfaction seems not to have been box office calculations but backstage economics. "Our first draft came in $1,600,000 over budget and some things just had to go"—most notably Bertolt Brecht's sprawling chronicle-play Galileo.
One of Ott's stipulations in taking the Rep job was more rehearsal weeks for shows that need it, most notably classics. With salaries by far the biggest cost factor in theater today, one week of rehearsing a huge-cast show like Galileo can cost as much as two full runs of smaller shows.
The newly chosen season opener Play On!, Sheldon Epps and Cheryl West's marriage of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night to Duke Ellington music, is no cheaper than Galileo to rehearse or perform, but its production costs are being shared by the Goodman Theater of Chicago, where the show will travel after Seattle. "These days co-production isn't just desirable," Ott says almost grimly. "Without it, there are a lot of shows we simply can't do."
Even after early rounds of trimming and tucking, the 1998-99 budget ($7.7 million, up nearly $750,000 over 1997-98) remains a couple of hundred thousand out of balance, but it's close enough for confidence that most if not all of the lineup announced May 1 will survive the final cut—particularly since Ott and her budgeters are projecting very modest, even pessimistic increases in ticket sales.
Just as importantly, each work has been selected with goals beyond immediate box office results. This applies even to the apparently odd pairing in a single season of two shows by Noël Coward. On its own, a revival of the quarter-century-old collage of songs and sketches representative of some of Sir Noël's most relentlessly frivolous work Oh Coward! would be hard to justify. Paired with Coward's 1933 comedy Design for Living, the musical revue takes on greater significance.
Design, on its surface a datedly "daring" piece of fluff about a bohemian ménage à trois, roils beneath its polished surface with what we call today issues of gender, identity, and relationship. Written as a star vehicle for (closeted homosexual) Coward and his married (closeted homosexual and lesbian) friends Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Design skated near the edge of the acceptable in its own day. Directed for the Rep by associate artist Stephen Wadsworth, a master of bringing out the deeper feelings and psychic ambiguities in the most artificial material, Design may well change the way we respond to his debonair pop and patter songs as well.
