In Part 1 of our conversation with Molly Smith, who finished her 25-year tenure in 2023 as Artistic Director at Arena Stage, we discuss her early days studying theatre in Washington, DC, before then opening Perseverance Theatre in Juneau, Alaska. 18 years later, Molly returns to DC to take the reins of one of Washington and the country’s flagship nonprofit theatres, Arena Stage.
In Part 2, we deepen our discussion of the challenges and complexities of leading a major cultural institution like Arena’s Mead Center for the Performing Arts. Molly also assesses some of the current struggles taking place in American theatre.
A quick note to listeners: Our conversation with Molly Smith was originally published on June 14, 2023, as part of our inaugural Creativists in Dialogue series. We have now included a glossary of theatre terms and names referenced in the interview.
Elizabeth: [00:00:00] Welcome to Creativists in Dialogue, a podcast embracing the creative life. I’m Elizabeth Bruce.
Michael: And I’m Michael Oliver.
Elizabeth: And our guest today is the inimitable Molly Smith, a renowned theater director and visionary who is stepping down after 25 years as the artistic director of Arena Stage. Years before taking the helm at Arena, she had earned an undergraduate degree in theater from Catholic University of America, and a master’s in theater from American University, both in Washington, DC. In 1979, she returned to Juneau, Alaska, where she was raised and founded Perseverance Theatre, where she was artistic director for 19 years. As artistic director of Arena Stage, her 40 directing credits include large scale musicals, new plays, and classics. She led the reinvention of Arena Stage, focusing on the architecture and creation of the Mead Center for American Theater and [00:01:00] positioning Arena as a national center for American artists through its artistic program. During her time with the company, Arena Stage has workshopped more than a hundred productions, produced 50 world premieres, staged numerous second and third productions, and been an important part of nurturing nine projects that went on to have a life in Broadway. Molly has also directed on Broadway and off Broadway and in many major theaters in the USA and Canada. The list of Molly’s honors and achievements as a Theatre director, producer, filmmaker, and national leader is very long indeed. Welcome, Molly.
Molly: Please don’t read them.
Michael: We have a couple of questions that we start our interviews with, and the first one is this: Clearly, you express yourself creatively as a theater artist, producer, filmmaker, et cetera, but are there other aspects of your life where creativity plays significant role?
Molly: Absolutely. And what a great [00:02:00] question. About a year and a half ago, because I knew I was moving into retiring, which I’m now calling “evolving.” I’m evolving.
Michael: Good word.
Molly: I began thinking about what do I wanna do? What do I wanna do? And what popped up for me is I want to go back to doing pottery. And this is something that I’d done 50 years ago when I was undergraduate at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. And so, I began going to a pottery studio. And I sat down at the wheel and started to throw, and I realized I remembered absolutely nothing from 50 years ago. So I had to learn it all over again. But what I remembered is the joy that I felt with creating with my hands. I love being able to center the clay because it’s about centering your life as well. I love being an individual artist because [00:03:00] for…my life, for over 50 years, I’ve worked with groups as a director. And now suddenly it was about me and a craft. So I have beginner’s mind as I work on pottery. I’m a definite newcomer. And I love learning the craft because it’s very much like the craft of directing. You’re, you learn how to throw, you learn the techniques, which has to do with pulling up the walls, it has to do with fire bisque, it has to do with the way in which you trim the pots, it has to do with the way in which you engage with them, the way you glaze them, the amount of time that it takes to be in the hottest kiln, which is 2000 degrees, and you usually wait about two months before you end up with a pot. Because there are so many steps in between. Very much like directing a play.
Elizabeth: Especially the [00:04:00] hottest furnace possible.
Molly: That’s exactly right, yeah.
Elizabeth: Oh, my gosh. The second question we love to ask our interviewees deals with how you understand creativity itself. There are so many different perspectives on creativity and one of our goals, which is podcast, is to extend the definition of creativity to include a wide variety of human activity. So, how do you personally view creativity or the creative act?
Molly: I think I view creativity as something innate in all of us as human beings. Sometimes it gets crushed at an early age by teachers or parents when they see a little boy doing drawings or creating things and they say, “No, you can’t do that. You have to do sports. I’m gonna put a baseball bat in your hands.” And I think when parents continue to encourage children because they’re natural artists, then there’s a potential [00:05:00] for them to have that as a life force their entire life, whether they end up as an artist or whether they end up being a banker, or whether they end up, whatever it is that they end up in, that there is this part of their life which is creative.
There’s nothing more creative than—whether it’s creating a whole meal, whether it’s creating a dinner party, whether it is creating a program where you’re gonna travel around the world, whether—creativity is what do we imagine. What do we imagine? And then how do we make it real? That’s what creativity is to me. And it can be in all forms of your life. It doesn’t need to be in painting and music and [00:06:00] dance and everything else. It can be in all ways. We are creators of our own lives.
Elizabeth: Yeah, we have a quote that we use from Frantz, the great Frantz Fanon, “In the World through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.” Which completely resonates with what you said.
Molly: Absolutely. That’s beautiful.
Michael: So, picking up on that idea of imagining, what can you imagine? Taking yourself back to your childhood, what were some of your first experiences of creativity, either as a participant or as a witness?
Molly: As a little girl, I had a little camera. It was probably like a little Brownie camera. And so, what I would do is I would take little, tiny dolls and, like, my mother’s alabaster ashtray and little things that I would make trees out of. And at some point, I realized what I was doing is I was actually staging scenes and taking photographs of them. So I think from an early time, I was a director. I was the one who used to always gather the neighborhood kids and put a play in the backyard. I remember at one point we staged a wedding, which of [00:07:00] course was my wedding because I had to be the lead. And when I rode off into the sunset with a little boy in one of my grandma’s long nightgowns. We rode off on his tricycle. So that was an early age. That was an early age. And I was always encouraged by my mother. I was a terrible student because I was only interested in reading and history.
Elizabeth: Interesting.
Molly: Math, things like that, not interested. I just had this razor-sharp focus. And my mother, when she would come back from a student-teacher meeting, sweating to her waist, would sit down at the table with me, the kitchen table, and look at me and say, “When you find what you love, no one will stop you.”
Elizabeth: What a visionary statement.
Molly: What a great gift from my mother.
Michael: Sure.
Molly: Who was the one actually taking the heat, because, quite frankly, I didn’t care. I didn’t, not being a great student in certain areas, but I just excelled in these other areas. [00:08:00] Nobody could touch me. So I think the teachers thought I was a little off. But the truth is most artists are a little off. They’re outside—
Elizabeth: And this is in Juneau, Alaska?
Molly: No, this was in Yakima, Washington.
Elizabeth: Okay.
Molly: I grew up and was born in Yakima, Washington, and then my family moved to Alaska when I was 16. My mother was a social worker. My dad had died about five months before I was born. So she was a single mom with my sister Bridget and I. And she moved to Alaska for money and adventure and because she’d hit the glass ceiling as a social worker in Yakima, Washington and then became the head of adoptions in the whole state of Alaska.
Elizabeth: Wow. What a, it would be so amazing if there were footage of your early productions. That would be quite the cinematic, I think.
To talk a bit more about your early life, your undergraduate degree in theater was from DC’s Catholic University of America. And your MFA in [00:09:00] directing was from, is from American University, both of which are in DC. And we were talking to our old friend Ernie Joselovitz who even remembers you acting in productions at New Playwrights’ Theatre when the late Harry Bagdasian was in charge. So, can you talk a bit about how those early years in DC shaped your understanding of creativity in the theater?
Molly: Oh, absolutely. I didn’t learn very much in the university systems. American University I learned more because there were, there was the ability to work outside. And it was a young one-year master’s degree program and I wanted to work at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. And they had not had a drama therapist there for many years, so I had the pick of everybody. At that time, there were 6,000 patients there. So I was able to work with the criminally insane, I was able to work with addicts, I was able to work with chronics, people who’ve been there 30 or 40 years, and created a whole [00:10:00] huge talent show as well while I was there. See, I was always creating. And that taught me about the extremes of human nature. So there’s never anything in the rehearsal hall that surprises me. If there is, I’ll just put metaphoric mattresses on the walls and let them throw themselves against them, in and out.
So what I learned is the way in which to create my own internships. There weren’t internships at that time. I knew from the time I was 19 that I was going to start a theater in Alaska, which ended up being Perseverance Theatre. And so I was here to learn everything that I could before going back. Because I knew I would need to teach. And I also knew that as the leader of an organization, one needs to know something about every single area, because otherwise you’ll get eaten alive. [00:11:00]
So, I went to New Playwrights’ Theatre, and I said, “Please teach me how to read new plays.” And they said, “Yeah, we will, and here’s a broom and a mop, and we want you go down and clean the kitchen.” Of course, I did. But happily, they taught me how to read new plays and that’s been an obsession of mine for my entire career, from the time I was probably 22 or 23 at New Playwrights’. And then I did act in a couple productions there. I did also direct Joy Zinoman in something there.
Elizabeth: Oh, Joy was acting?
Molly: Yeah.
Elizabeth: Oh my gosh!
Molly: She’s a brilliant actor.
Elizabeth: Is that right?
Molly: She was a great actor.
Elizabeth: We’re gonna talk to her very shortly, so, yeah.
Molly: Do it. Do it.
And then I ended up at places like ASTA and wanted to understand how to run a box office, so, “Show me how to do that. I’ll do it for you.” As well as stage managing. I went to another theater and I said, “Teach me how to hang lights.” So I was creating my own internship, not realizing that’s what I was doing. But now, because we have a big internship program here, which is really [00:12:00] a fellows program called the Allen Lee Hughes Fellowship. I was doing the same thing.
Elizabeth: Interesting.
Molly: Just innately.
Elizabeth: Yeah.
Molly: So that when my former husband and I went back to Alaska with 50 used theater seats to start Perseverance Theatre, I had seven years of just focusing on everything I needed to know and understand before going back.
Elizabeth: Wow, that’s so interesting.
Michael: So let me ask you about Perseverance Theatre. You founded that in Juneau, Alaska in 1979. Your first production was entitled Pure Gold and was a compilation of stories by longtime Alaska Natives and Filipinos recalling the history of their gold rush days. Now this reminded me of a theater that I explored during my MFA days, which was Eco Theatre by a woman named Maryat Lee.
Molly: Sure.
Michael: Where she went to West Virginia and she worked with, “in the holler,” she called it.
Molly: Sure.
Michael: And I met with her. And just the whole process of working [00:13:00] in an oral culture. And I got the sense that you were working in an oral culture. So what was the experience like and how was doing theater in that oral culture, how does that affect the creative process?
Molly: Yeah, what was interesting about that is when I went back to Alaska, I figured it would probably start, take five years to start the theater. But I was with my sister in nature, which is where I always get my best ideas, in the fir trees, and we were taking a hike in the woods and I said, “I wanna do this, but I’m not sure what I wanna do first.” And she said, “Why don’t you look at something with older people in it?” And I said, “Oh, I don’t wanna do Gin Game or something like that.” And then we began talking and I was like, “Ooh. What if we do something about the pioneers of this area? And what if I go out and start interviewing people who were 70, 80, who [00:14:00] had, whose parents had been part of the gold rush, who’d come in to work in the mines?” There was a white banker that we spoke to as well. There was a prospector who was a white prospector and bear hunter. There were, it was a whole combination of people. And then the stories were so fantastic.
Susi Gregg Fowler put it together into reader’s theater piece with six people. And then I cast the six best storytellers to do it. All with reader’s theater so that they all had scripts in front of them because they were all older people. And when I rehearsed with them in a church social hall, as the weeks went on, I thought, “This is gonna be a total bomb. They are awful. They are awful.” And so we set up in another church, social hall, and the, I was sweating blood ‘cause I thought, “I’m gonna have to get on a plane and go back to DC.” [00:15:00] Set up 50 seats, because I wanted, like, always to feel like we had a packed audience. Audience came in and those actors, those seniors were on fire. And I realized what had happened. Which is they were bored with telling stories to me. Now they had an audience. They were able to tell their stories in such a way that it ignited the whole city. Next night we put up 75 chairs, 100 chairs, 150 chairs.
Elizabeth: Wow.
Molly: I think it eventually ran like 200 times.
Elizabeth: Wow.
Molly: It was made into a video. It toured around the state. We had rotating casts of senior citizens. Because at that time in Alaska, it was really a young state. It was people in their twenties and thirties. And they were hungry to know and understand why people came to Alaska, what they learned, why they stayed there, and why they should stay there. [00:16:00] And this was the show that told them that.
Elizabeth: Interesting. Wow. So, speaking of Alaska a bit more, as you mentioned, you were born in Washington state and your family then later moved to Juneau, which is the capital city, of course. And it is the only capital city, I understand, on the mainland of North America that cannot be accessed by road because of the extremely rugged terrain surrounding the city. So, I lived in Colorado for many years before moving east, and my sense is that living inside a large natural ecosystem endows a person with the measure of humility. As a warning at the gate of Colorado’s Estes Park once said, quote, “The mountains do not care.” So, what have your own observations been and your experience of these large natural ecosystems? How has that been a navigational tool for your own creativity?
Molly: I think it has in a very big way. [00:17:00] I carry mountains inside of me because my own creativity comes from nature. It comes from being out in the natural world. And in Alaska, the majority of plays, as I went through all of the seasons, were the Greeks. And I think the Greeks are all about the gods. They’re about man. They’re about the way in which one grapples with the world. And there’s no mistake that when you are in Alaska, you feel absolutely tiny, and you also can feel huge at the same time. Because you can feel strong within that world. So when I say I carry those mouths within me, I carried them here in Washington, DC. So it wasn’t as possible to knock me down. Because I had that strength and strength all the way down into the ground, just like I’m [00:18:00] sure you did in Colorado.
But it’s a giving over to nature. And it’s being able to utilize nature at the same time. My partner, Suzanne, and I have a cabin in Alaska which we built—we didn’t actually build it, other builders built it, but we did put in the Creosote logs so we did part of it—and it sits right in an area that is on the water. It is an inlet that has a 2,500-foot depth to it. So big whales could come up in it, ferry boats, anything can come. It’s surrounded by fjords. It’s got a big salmon river there and we have about 18 grizzlies in the area. And so, we’re always surrounded by nature. And I’m really looking forward to when I evolve and have left Arena Stage, we’ll spend seven weeks there. And that will be the longest time that we’ve been able to [00:19:00] be there. And so I’m curious about what do I become next?
Elizabeth: Yeah. Elaborating on this, I’m really interested in knowing if the raw, staggering power of Alaska’s natural world prepared you for the raw, staggering power of political, military, and legal worlds in the nation’s capital.
Molly: Oh, I think it absolutely did. I also think I lived in a capital city for 25 years. It was writ small. It’s an island culture there because there are no roads in or out. You have to fly in, you have to take a boat. Washington, DC is a capital city that is surrounded by a beltway, so it’s an island culture as well. It’s the same types of people that are here that were in Alaska. It’s the strivers, it’s the people who want to make their mark. It’s the people who have something to say, who are thoughtful, who are [00:20:00] driven, very much like Washington, DC. Only, there people actually can chop their own wood and make a fire, fix an engine, fix a motorcycle, which is very different from here.
Elizabeth: It would be helpful perhaps if more people knew how to fix motorcycles. Your, the Arena’s Power series somewhat speaks to that, I think, in a very profound way.
Molly: Absolutely. Yeah, it’s the Power Play cycle. And when I was here at Arena in the beginning, I kept saying to people, “I think I’m gonna start looking at political plays because this is a very political city.” And people said, “You’re crazy. Don’t do it. Nobody will come.” I said, “First of all, I think you’re wrong. Because this is our red meat. This is what we live in.” They said, “No, nobody will go.” So as soon as we started doing plays that were political in nature, boom, the audience came. They came and they came again. [00:21:00] Because this is our world, right? This is what makes Washington, DC distinctive. And I was looking for, what is that distinctive voice in Washington, DC? We’d already reframed the work that we were going to be doing, which is American plays American ideas, American artists. So we’d already done that and put it broadly over the entire United States. And then, because we were resident in our own communities, what’s the next step from that? And with Power Plays, it’s 25 plays, starting in 1770, going all the way through the 2010s, right? And it’s one play for every decade. We’ve now produced 10 of them and we have commissions with another 14 writers. So I only have one writer left. And I’ll do that before I leave.
Elizabeth: Wow. Excellent.
Michael: Now that’s a, I love that notion of that that’s your community, this political community, [00:22:00] and that’s what DC is. Now when you were at, you were at Perseverance for 18 years.
Molly: 19.
Michael: 19 years. So in many ways it’s like raising a child, right? And then you come to Arena when it’s 48 years old, and then you’re here for, what, 25 years. Now, I, you’ve spoken about the need to acknowledge the legacy of a place, and clearly when you’re founding it, you are building the legacy. Can you speak about the, how working within the weight of a legacy sort of changes or affects the creative process in the shaping of something new?
Molly: Yeah, I think it’s really important to step into that history, to understand the history, to reflect the history, and to bring it forward. So, I describe it as coming to Arena, I ended up with a big, beautiful robe that was studded with jewels. And sometimes that robe really [00:23:00] weighted me down and I had to make sure it didn’t pull me back—and Zelda and Doug wouldn’t ever want it to be pulled back—and how I could use it to propel me forward.
I think of working at Arena as riding a tiger every day. And I grab onto the nape of its neck. Sometimes it tries to knock me off, sometimes it turns around, tries to bite me. But, and when we are in the power of what Arena is, I love it for its strength, its flexibility, its elements of danger, and its ability to be able to just run really fast. So that’s one of the things that I’ve loved about Arena.
Zelda is someone that I, when I was a student, I had a many season subscription. So I used to watch everything that she did here. I was very engaged with her ideas and the creation of the not-for-profit movement, [00:24:00] which was really 75 or 80 years ago, right? Created by three intrepid women. Two in Texas and Zelda here, of course with her husband Tom, and with Ed Mangum, who was her teacher at George Washington. She was a Russian scholar. And so, I always watched what she had done here and the way in which she formed seasons and her thinking process behind it. We were different because I was not as interested in a company as she was, although I had a company for a period of time in Alaska. But I would always watch her from afar.
And then when Doug became the artistic director, I’d watch him from afar too, and looked at what he was doing with the American musical and what he was doing in terms of new plays. Because before that time, for 40 years, Arena did very few new plays. And there’s The Great White Hope, right? There, there are other new plays that they did, but it [00:25:00] was really more about the Eastern Europeans. It was really more about the big classics, like Chekhov and Ibsen, that was their métier because it was a company of actors and that was her passion. And then Doug came in and started really starting to reflect the American musical.
And so when I came in and it was all about American work, the American musical is central. It’s seminal to what we do. It’s our art form. Nobody else created it, we created it. And I knew that was gonna be something very important in the life force of the organization. But I hated the American musical. I thought it was not a serious art form. I didn’t do the American musical in Alaska, although I had other people do it. But I couldn’t deny what was happening in audiences. And people kept encouraging me to do it. My partner Suzanne did, Gilbert and Jaylee Mead, did Mark Shugoll did. And finally I [00:26:00] just thought, “Okay, I’m gonna bite the bullet.” And my first big musical was South Pacific. And I woke up after the first morning of directing and I said to Suzanne, “I was born to direct musicals.” And then nobody could stop me, and I have amassed the reinvention of a lot of great pieces of musical theater.
Because of that, because I have this reinvention mind, I’m a builder as an artistic director, I build things. I like to build things, I like to make, whether it’s big buildings like Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater, or whether it’s building a program like the Power Play series. And I think that’s one reason why I made the decision to evolve and retire is I’ve completed just about everything I wanted to complete.
Michael: So what did you discover about the American musical that made you suddenly fall in love with it?
Molly: It’s totally subversive. It’s the most [00:27:00] subversive art form that we have. You can do a song like “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught,” which is about racism, and it ticks into people’s brains and they’re tapping their fingers and they’re listening. Whereas normally if they were hearing that in a theater, their brains would be running in the other direction. They wouldn’t wanna hear. But because of the way music works on our psyches, because of the way that it works internally on our souls, we can take in a breadth of information in an entirely different way than we do on a straight play.
In London, they did a whole test where they had heart monitors on everybody in the theater and they found that midway through a production, everybody’s heartbeat was exactly the same. So you were able to do that with an audience. And audiences go out of musicals, ‘cause [00:28:00] musicals normally are ultimately about love in one way or another, and they feel differently.
And I also loved the form because it’s music, dance, and theater. And because you can invent and reinterpret the American musical in many different ways. And so that was something that I was hungry for.
Elizabeth: I wanna expand upon this discussion of theater as an art form. You have said eloquently that, quote, “Theater gets created between the actor and the audience. There’s a space in between us where the play gets created every night and it has to do with the ideas, the thoughts, the memories that come from the audience to the actor and vice versa.” I’m reminded of just such a moment, for example, at a production of Arena’s Miracle Worker years ago when we brought our then five-year-old son and our good friends the Kinlows [MM1] brought their four-year-old son Eugene. In [00:29:00] that moment in the play where Anne Sullivan helps the blind and deaf Helen Keller connect the tactile symbol for water to the water running through her hands and she says, “Wawa.” And these little boys who were just at the cusp of literacy themselves were just riveted. They were leaning forward in their seats. It was just an extraordinary moment. Just such a great example of what you’ve talked about. You have had doubtless countless moments like that when an audience is just electrified. Can you share another example with us?
Molly: Oh, sure. The first person who spoke to me about that, about this idea of what’s created between the audience and the actors is the great playwright Paula Vogel, who really observed that in things like How I Learned to Drive, which we commissioned in Alaska at Perseverance. And it’s…what’s the kind of listening that happens in an audience where an audience is completely quiet [00:30:00] and you can see that the audience is creating their own visual life for what they’re hearing, from their own lives. And we would hope that what we are doing in the theater is branding people so that when somebody wakes up in the middle of the night and they’re having an argument with their husband or their wife, one of the plays may pop into the frame. “Just like what happened here. Just like what happened here.” Because theater opens us up to having some of the hard conversations because it’s something that we have shared together. So in a sense, it’s the creation that happens in between the actor and the audience and what the audience takes out into their own lives when it’s something that has impacted them. So that’s how it spins out, I think.
Michael: Because you, you’re already talking about this intimate experience, the intimate relationship between the audience and the actors of a play. When you’re, and you’ve worked a lot with new plays, so how do you gauge [00:31:00] the potential of a new play for creating those kinds of moments? Or is there any way to gauge that?
Molly: With new work, the first thing that I look for, is this a story that hasn’t been told yet? Or is this the best of its class? And that’s how we look at season planning as well. And in reading new work, the first thing that I will look at, is this an unusual voice? Is this a voice I haven’t heard before? How does this play look on the page? What is it doing rhythmically? What are the ideas in it? Of course, what’s the core storytelling as well? But those are things that will keep me going after the first 10 or 20 pages. If that isn’t there, I let it go. I let it go.
So, we’ve commissioned some absolutely wonderful writers here. Great example is Exclusion, which is happening at Arena right now, Ken Lin, which is about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1822. [00:32:00] And he’s brought it forward into this moment in time. So it’s also about, what does Hollywood do with the individual voice? And he is done it all through satire and humor and then a gut punch as well. He’s a remarkable writer. And I got to know Ken, 22, 23, 24 years ago. He was one of the first writers that we brought in. So it’s thrilling to really watch his trajectory. So I don’t know if that answers your question, but that’s the way that I look at new work.
Michael: Sure. And then, continuing just with new work, I, you talked about like with musicals that there, the stories are somewhat, are simple enough to be almost disarming of people’s comfort zone so that they’re willing to listen to things that maybe in a more serious drama, they would just shut down, that maybe fulfill all the criteria you just talked about. That’s gonna push the audience too into discomfort, [00:33:00] or have you?
Molly: I think that theater is about discomfort.
Michael: Right, but—
Molly: I think the theater is about allowing people to be off kilter. Someone said the other day that being in a theater seat is the most dangerous place in the world. And I think that’s true in many ways. Because as artists, our job is really to push the edge and push the edge of comfort and safety, right? It’s also to bring people in, to refresh them, to entertain them, all those other things. But part of our purpose is really that. We’re doctors of the soul. And as artists, what we need to be able to do is to take in the world. That’s why when you see Mead Center for American Theater, it’s all glass walls. We’re always reminded of who we’re making theater for. And that’s why I read the newspaper all the [00:34:00] time, that’s why I listen to news shows all the time, that’s why I have conversations with people. To be able to synthesize what’s happening in the world and what will happen in the world a year or two from now, to be able to make choices on season selections. We need to be able to reflect back to the world, what’s happening, and to remind people of it and open their eyes to it in one form or another. And that’s what I think our purpose is.