Regenerative Artistic Leadership Change

In Best Available, a 2022 play by Jonathan Spector, a fictional theatre company in the United States, City Repertory Theatre, searches for new artistic leadership after the resignation of their founding artistic director. The play deftly and with grimace-inducing clarity lampoons the ties that bind search consultants, board members, and theatre staff during artistic director transition. Near the end of Best Available, Dolores, an eighty-year-old former board president, has died and narrates a video message attached to her will that establishes a trust for City Rep. This trust can supply 20 percent of the theatre company’s budget annually, but only on the condition that City Rep’s season reflects what Dolores would have approved of, had she lived to see it. In the message, Dolores tells the theatre artists of the play:

the thing you are making costs more than you can charge for it
your business model is a failure
so
you have an alternative business model
which is to please myself and my friends
and if you fail to do that
then you have failed
you are giving us a thing
this pleasure
and we are giving you a thing
this money
it’s an equal and honorable exchange.

Best Available reflects many of the anxieties of theatre company staff members and artists who see boards as gatekeepers preventing organizational evolution. In 2009, theatre researchers and strategists Todd London, Ben Pesner, and Zannie Voss reported that a sizable portion of United States playwrights believed that boards “hold sway, practically or implicitly, over artistic agendas.” In 2021, then-artistic director Michael J. Bobbit sparked a fieldwide conversation about the usefulness of theatre governance in his article “Boards are Broken, So Let’s Break and Remake Them.” Bobbit argued that boards require an immense amount of education while continuing to be “unrepresentative, out of touch, and more often oppressive than supportive.” In November 2022, the board of Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company published a letter denouncing board members that “silo themselves from the needs of the artists, administrators, and technicians who work to create the theatre they love and support,” signed by seventy-two other board members from theatre companies across the country. Theatre Communication Group’s 2023 snapshot survey of 171 theatre companies, named Compounding Crises, asked theatre companies to rank their most acute challenges. The respondents listed “Governance Issues” as the eighth most significant problem facing their organizations, with over one-third of organizations listing governance as a serious problem. Over the past fifteen years, the pace of evolution desired by theatre companies has become out of step with the governing bodies tasked with stewarding them.

Leadership of prominent United States theatre companies continues to turn over and shift, accentuating the tension theatre artists have with boards who take on greater responsibilities during interim periods.

It is also no accident that Spector’s play occurs against the backdrop of artistic leadership change. Between 2015 and 2021, 121 artistic directors left their positions at nonprofit theatre companies across the country, according to Bay Area directors Rebecca Novik and Evren Odcikin. In New York in 2023 and 2024 alone, prominent artistic directors who have left their positions or announced their departures include: Paige Evans at Signature Theatre; James Morgan from York Theatre Company; André Bishop from Lincoln Center Theater; Todd Haimes at Roundabout Theatre Company, who tragically died of cancer; Carole Rothman at Second Stage Theater; and Jeffrey Horowitz from Theatre for a New Audience. Looking ahead, Lynne Meadow has been at Manhattan Theater Club for over fifty years, and Oskar Eustis is planning on leaving his artistic director position at the Public in 2028. Leadership of prominent United States theatre companies continues to turn over and shift, accentuating the tension theatre artists have with boards who take on greater responsibilities during interim periods.

Best Available also speaks to the reality that theatre companies are particularly likely to decompose during artistic leadership change. In “Theatre in Crisis,” the editors of American Theatre magazine highlight reductions in programming and increases in theatre closures between 2020 and 2023. They list thirty-five different theatre companies or festivals that closed in that three-year period. While those closures have complex causes and are related to changing trends in arts consumption and philanthropic giving, in twenty-one of the thirty-five cases, the theatre companies that closed had also experienced a leadership transition since 2015. More recently, Cal Shakes, a beloved, multimillion dollar, fifty-year-old theatre company in San Francisco, announced its closure on 10 October 2024, two years after Clive Worsley accepted a newly formed executive artistic director position there.

Woolly’s board took proactive steps with Shalwitz to ensure that their artistic leader had the resources and institutional support to succeed. This preparation took time.

Nonprofit theatre governance predominantly relies on board members with status, wealth, and expertise outside of theatremaking while trusting them to make ethical and informed choices about theatre leadership. Theatre artists often see boards as predatory rather than interconnected to their work. The ecosystem is unbalanced, and in the absence of strong artistic leadership, the tenuous connections between boards and the organizations begin to fray. For the last two years, I have been conducting research and interviews on the performance of governance during executive leadership transitions at large, nonprofit theatre companies to better understand how boards define and re-compose their organizations during interim periods. Today I’d like to highlight one case study that speaks to how boards can regenerate their organizations: Woolly Mammoth’s 2018 artistic director transition from Howard Shalwitz to Maria Goyanes in Washington, DC.

Howard Shalwitz, who founded Woolly with Roger Brady in 1978, had served as the artistic director of the theatre company for almost forty years when he retired at the end of the 2017-2018 season. At the time, The Washington Post described Woolly as a “champion of the new—and frequently provocative—American play.” Woolly had recently premiered shows like Mr. Burns, a post-electric play by Anne Washburn and Bootycandy by Robert O’Hara. Maria Manuela Goyanes, then an associate producer at the Public Theater, was hired by Woolly’s board to replace Shalwitz in 2018. Under Goyanes’s leadership, Woolly increased its annual budget by $800,000, served as the pre-Broadway tryout for Michael R. Jackson’s A Strange Loop, and launched a full-time, salaried fellowship program funded primarily by the Miranda Family Fund.

The Woolly transition had the possibility of running into some of the major issues that have plagued theatre companies that have hired new artistic directors in recent years. Founder’s syndrome, a systemic organizational problem that strangles change while focusing on mythologizing a founder, could have derailed the search process or prevented a healthy move away from Shalwitz. Woolly, which hired a woman of color to replace a white, male artistic director, might have set up Goyanes to fall off the “glass cliff,” a metaphor for a kind of discrimination that predominantly places women in leadership positions at companies in crisis with little support. For example, a study from the Building Movement Project in 2022 surveyed over 5,200 nonprofit leaders finding that while 93 percent of white leaders with white predecessors claim their boards trust them, only 77 percent of leaders of color with white predecessors say the same. Leaders of color were also 53 percent more likely than white leaders to have funding withheld or withdrawn as they began their tenures at their nonprofits.

Woolly’s board took proactive steps with Shalwitz to ensure that their artistic leader had the resources and institutional support to succeed. This preparation took time. Shalwitz began working with Woolly’s board to prepare the organization for his departure in 2012, four years before he formally announced his intention to leave and six years before Goyanes began her tenure. An informal “succession taskforce” made up of Shalwitz and three board members met as a brain trust and research group examining leadership transitions at other companies between 2012 and 2016. They also created a three-page list of succession plan recommendations that guided the regeneration of a theatre company that was about to lose its founding force. Only 29 percent of nonprofit organizations have a written succession plan or policy to guide the board when a chief executive departs the organization according to a 2021 survey from a national service organization on governance, BoardSource; this is a serious problem for theatre companies, especially those which experience surprising leadership change (20). Woolly’s taskforce noted in 2013 that Woolly’s board did not have a sufficient understanding of the theatre company’s identity separate from Shalwitz. The board began incorporating visits from guest artists and staff to their board meetings, visiting Theatre Communications Group conferences, and being more active in gatherings for the Washington, DC theatre community. Woolly’s board was actively re-membering and re-composing itself as it prepared to regenerate the company with new artistic leadership.

When Shalwitz announced his intention to depart in 2016, the board responded by developing a new strategic plan for the theatre company before embarking on a search. The new strategic plan was less focused on specific tactics, goals, or strategies than a typical one might have been, but did contain a unified “general direction and vision,” according to Meghan Pressman, then-managing director. The goal of this plan was to align Woolly’s organizational mission and values internally before searching for a new artistic leader, which was widely successful. Shalwitz, at a farewell celebration in June 2018, celebrated Woolly as “not a set of plays or a building, but an idea, an inquiry, an experiment transmitted from person to person over time.” Woolly’s board helped articulate a philosophy central and unique to Woolly, creating new possibilities for what the theatre company might do with a new artistic leader. Shalwitz also agreed to continue working with Woolly after his formal departure, which according to a 2018 study by nonprofit consultants Jari Tuomala, Donald Yeh, and Katie Smith Milway is common in founder transitions, happening in 45 percent of cases. The main functions that they identified for departing nonprofit chief executive officers were related to “fundraising, ambassadorial visits, advocacy, and mentoring the successor,” all of which Shalwitz continues to do in his emeritus status.

In addition to the 2017 strategic plan, Scott Schreiber, Shalwitz, and other board members quietly launched a new fundraising drive called the Legacy Campaign. Schreiber describes the Legacy Campaign as having three goals: Shalwitz’s retirement fund, a pool of money to support a new artistic director in her efforts “to reach out and take risks and have a safety net,” and capital improvements to the theatre’s lobby and website. Schreiber recalls that the Legacy Campaign raised over $4 million, roughly the size of Woolly’s annual budget at the time. Goyanes remembers that some of the Legacy Campaign’s funds paid for events that introduced her to the Washington, DC community and that it had been in her use through 2023, over six years since it was initially raised.

Healthy nonprofit theatre governance, like other aspects of theatre and performance, is highly relational and depends on collaboration.

Of the board members involved in Woolly’s succession plan, Linette Hwu, the board president, was perhaps the most impactful. Board presidents hold unique positions of power during artistic director transitions and in the absence of an interim artistic leader may be seen as the guiding force of an organization. Perhaps the most important focus of Hwu’s leadership was on equity, diversity, and inclusion (DEI). At Hwu’s first Theatre Communications Group conference in 2017, it became apparent to her that Woolly had a significant artistic reputation, but that “there was a vocabulary that the field uses around DEI issues that our board had no awareness of.” For example, at this Theatre Communications Group conference Hwu heard the term “Latinx” for the first time. Hwu realized that for the board to engage in a prominent national search for a new artistic leader, they were going to have to become more aware of crucial concepts, like anti-racism, that they had not engaged with much at that point. According to Shalwitz, this was the first occasion at which formal DEI work had been done with Woolly’s board.

Looking back on the search in 2023, Shalwitz believes that the board’s partnership with Woolly can be assessed in the way they have retained their board membership. “It’s been quite a surprise to me, and a pleasant surprise: how many people who were dedicated to my leadership have remained equally dedicated to Maria's,” Shalwitz says. Michael Fitzpatrick, the search committee chair, described his involvement on the search as the heart of governance:

The apotheosis of what it is to be a board member–it's not to approve the minutes. It's not to write a check. It's not to listen to the readout from the artistic director. It's to actually roll up your sleeves, get dirt under your nails, and figure out who's going to lead this institution.

Cynicism about institutional theatre companies finds no greater target than the board, a group which can represent conservative funders, disinterested audiences, risk-averse volunteers, or threats to artistic independence. Healthy nonprofit theatre governance, like other aspects of theatre and performance, is highly relational and depends on collaboration. In 2012, Woolly’s board was ignorant of the theatre company’s practices and philosophies apart from what Shalwitz told them. They were not prepared to continue the company without him. By awakening themselves to the theatre company they governed, and by developing relationships with the theatre’s staff, guest artists, and their theatre artist neighbors, Woolly’s board gained the trust and respect of Woolly’s artistic stakeholders. They recognized that, in the words of Annalisa Dias, “To change everything, we need everyone.” The case I’ve just described isn’t radical in its approach to governance, but I do think it is regenerative. Regenerative in the sense that Woolly’s board did not attempt to conserve the organization that Shalwitz had built but were committed to the evolution and growth of an organization that was, to quote Dias again, “moving always towards new life.” Best Available positions governance as a transactional conservation of rich peoples’ playhouses, a live and in-person extension of their Netflix queues. Woolly’s case suggests that by developing boards that are interconnected to their organizations, governing bodies can renew and sustain our theatres through leadership change.