Pam MacKinnon tapped as ACT head at a time of major change in Bay Area theaters

Tony winner Pam MacKinnon will be American Conservatory Theater’s fourth artistic director, officially taking the helm on July 1 from Carey Perloff, who will step down after 25 years at the Geary Street theater. In the meantime, MacKinnon and Perloff will collaborate on planning the company’s 2018-19 season.

The theater company, the largest in the Bay Area, made the announcement Tuesday, Jan. 23, at a time of unusually big changes in the Bay Area and national theater scenes. Berkeley Repertory Theatre and TheatreWorks Silicon Valley are also looking for new artistic directors, to begin in 2019 and 2020, respectively, and at least 20 artistic director positions are open nationwide, according to an open-source Google Doc created by local freelance director Rebecca Novick. Additionally, ACT Executive Director Peter Pastreich, who initially signed on in an interim capacity, will probably “not be in that position for a terribly long time” says David Riemer, vice chair of ACT’s board and the chair of the artistic director search committee.

MacKinnon’s directing credits on Broadway include Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (for which she won her Tony, one of three the show took home), the currently running “The Parisian Woman,” Bruce Norris’ “Clybourne Park,” “Amélie, A New Musical” (whose Berkeley Rep world premiere MacKinnon also directed), the world premiere of David Mamet’s “China Doll,” Wendy Wasserstein’s “The Heidi Chronicles,” and Albee’s “A Delicate Balance.” (MacKin non is a well-regarded interpreter of Albee, having also directed world premieres and regional premieres of his plays.)

Regionally, MacKinnon has directed at Magic Theatre, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, South Coast Repertory, the Old Globe, Goodman Theatre, Geffen Playhouse and Arena Stage, among many others.

Though MacKinnon has never previously served as a theater’s artistic director, Riemer says she has analogous experience that makes the board “believe she can step in and do this role.” He points to her fundraising work as chair of the executive board at Clubbed Thumb, a New York company dedicated to new plays, as well as her role as president of the executive board of Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, a nationwide union.

A Chicago native, MacKinnon, 50, grew up in Toronto and Buffalo , N.Y., with an academic father, and she initially followed him into “the family business,” working on a doctorate in political science from UC San Diego. She dropped out to pursue theater when she realized she “wasn’t interested enough”; social science questions, which “have to be answerable,” were “getting smaller and smaller and smaller, when my brain was getting bigger and bigger and bigger.”

After a whole career of being a freelance director, MacKinnon said she is excited “to actually dig into a community, to explore what is the audience, not a generic audience.” She loves the art form for its “present-tense-ness,” “its “room-ness.” Theater is “primal. It’s at the core of who we are. Storytelling is biological. But less and less are we demanded to gather, to be in a room together.” To neglect that part of ourselves is to do ourselves “harm”; the togetherness that theater requires thus makes it all the more “vital.”

MacKinnon’s artistic collaborators emphasize her abilities as a listener. “Where others (like me) blunder ahead conversationally,” writes Bruce Norris in an email, “Pam is cagey and listens and waits for the right moment to add the perfect comment. I used to say she was like a three-point shooter in basketball — she lets others fight it out under the net and then swishes one in from halfcourt.”

Playwright Itamar Moses, who once taught at ACT’s Young Conservatory and who collaborated with MacKinnon on his “Completeness” at South Coast Rep, says, “One of my favorite things about Pam as a director is that she manages to run the rehearsal room without needing to completely fill it up or dominate it with her personality.” In working on new plays, he adds, “she’s very good at asking questions ... in a way that can mirror back to you if there’s a gap between what you were going for and what you ended up with. It’s a combination of being straightforward and gentle.”

MacKinnon was reluctant to go into detail on her plans, saying she intends to spend her first year getting to know her new community. However, she said she would uphold ACT’s commitment to the classics while also developing new works, for which she sees the Strand Theater as an obvious “entry point.”

The space, she said of the smaller Market Street theater, is so new that “it doesn’t know what it is yet.”

Putting new works and classics together is also about, “How do you program a season that isn’t random?” she said. “The shows need to be in conversation with each other.”

As one example of how that might work, she cited a run of “Clybourne Park” in repertory with “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Mark Taper Forum. (Norris’ play riffs on the Lorraine Hansberry classic.) “I could feel the audiences at ‘Clybourne Park’ ... get smarter. The laughs changed ... You could feel a collective temperature shift.

“That’s a very specific example, but what are other ways to that, to have an overarching theme you’re investigating?” It’s not that every play will be “about sports,” she jokes. Rather, she intends to draw on what she calls the “campus-ness” of ACT: “What is being discussed in the classroom, what is then showing up in a black box, what is then showing up in the Geary, in conversation?”

MacKinnon’s hire was the result of a national search, conducted with the aid of Management Consultants for the Arts, that began with more than 100 applicants. To ensure ACT considered a diverse pool, Riemer said, “We knew that one of the ways to do that was to not say, ‘This candidate needs to have 15 years of experience being an artistic director at a major theater.’ If you do that, you can just look at the number of artistic directors at major theaters, and you’re not going to find a lot of women or people of color. We thought it was important that they didn’t necessarily have to have held the position before.” Among ACT’s four finalists, he adds, two were women and two were people of color.

Part of what set MacKinnon apart, Riemer added, was that “the way she described her vision for how to take us to the next stage was really powerful. She had great ideas on how to leverage all our spaces — the Geary, the Rembe and the Rueff in the Strand, the Costume Shop.” Additionally, “she had ideas on how to incorporate our theater training programs in new and exciting ways.”

ACT was founded in 1965 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, moving to San Francisco two years later with William Ball as its first artistic director. Its first production at the Geary Theater was Moliere’s “Tartuffe,” with Rene Auberjonois. After leading the company to win a Regional Theatre Tony Award in 1979, Ball was succeeded in the top job by Edward Hastings. Perloff began her tenure in 1992, arriving to find the theater still in ruins after the Loma Prieta earthquake. Under Perloff’s guidance, ACT restored the theater and opened the smaller Strand in 2015.