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Our interview with Des McAnuff

La Jolla Playhouse
San Diego, CA
Des McAnuff Interviewed by Joel Dorr

JOEL: First of all, let me tell you we went to The Alley Theatre and we met with Terry Dwyer because he was here during the turnaround…

DES: Right.

JOEL: …of the Playhouse. So I want to talk a little bit about how that happened and how financially you guys were able to turn it around. Let me read a quote from Terry.

DES: Okay.

JOEL: Here’s what he said, he said, “The artistic reputation remained very high, but we had a number of years where we had debt. We knew we needed to improve the credibility of the company in the community.” So does that bell ring true to you?

DES: Yeah. I think that’s probably a fair enough statement, but I think it’s important to understand where the problems kind of came from. The fact that the Playhouse managed to develop such a remarkable artistic reputation is kind of miraculous and had to do with I think the deep beliefs of people in the community that a progressive, artistically, forward-thinking organization could flourish here in San Diego. And I think the story of the Museum of Contemporary [Artists??] kind of accompanies that. There was a time not so long ago when, within the last half century, when contemporary art was more or less shunned and thought to be ridiculous. Now, of course, it really is the cutting edge of the museum movement. Not only that, it’s wildly popular. So the Playhouse was started with, I think, a tremendous amount of spirit and belief and dedication. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a very good financial model. We only had access to the Weiss Theatre for 90 days, and this was based on the old summer stock model that the Playhouse operated as a summer stock theatre until ’63. And I think those of us who were invited here to start the theatre were probably somewhat naïve about the challenges. I probably wouldn’t have come here if I’d really thought about it. It became very clear that we needed a full-time staff even though we could only operate 90 days. Fortunately, the University of California in San Diego was very sensitive, and it gradually became sensitive. There was a lot of tension between the Playhouse board and the University when I arrived. In fact, they weren’t speaking even though they shared the same real estate. And it took a number of years to literally claim enough space to be able to produce enough to make sense of the kind of the…kind of [finance them??]…to come up with a credible financial model. In fact, only within the last few months have, after 22 years, are we able to produce full-time.

JOEL: Right.

DES: So unlike all of our sister theatres, who control their own real estate, we always shared the space. And that was a terrible financial burden, and we consciously moved forward knowing that we had to change that model. And finally, after being in existence for seven or eight years and still being well behind the 8-ball, we opened The Forum Theatre over here which gave us some additional seating and a much more flexible schedule. We replaced an old theatre that we kind of just moved into like homesteaders, a 250-seat theatre. Again, just trying to produce enough to rationalize the kind of contributed income we needed to bring in, also earned income. People don’t give you money for administrators or for, frankly, even the salaries of managing directors. They give you money to produce plays. They want to contribute to the art or perhaps to buildings.

JOEL: So the business model now, you’re set up successfully with the new operation, you feel it kind of gives you that break and gives you the ability to pull in more revenue on it.

DES: Just to finish the story, ironically, when we completed this theatre, we literally turned the corner that summer, ’91. We opened the little theatre. Our theatres were packed. You know, you could literally see the ship turning the corner financially, there was no question about it, and God frowned down on us and had the recession hit that very year. So by the time Terry arrived, which was right around that time, the following year he arrived. You know, the Playhouse really was in a difficult situation because we had a completely flat economy, and we had some debt, and I don’t think the community fully understood what our challenges were about, and it’s hard to explain. I mean, theatre’s a complicated business as you know, and I think it’s hard to explain to people when you have a bad financial model, it’s difficult for them to understand that. I think the financial model really was more less corrected than when the second theatre came on board. I think it’s -- And basically, I think my last two seasons during that time were ’93 and ’94, and we’ve been in the black every since.

JOEL: Right.

DES: We went into the black in ’93, and we’ve remained there all these years. My advice to anybody who’s starting a theatre would be not only do you need a very strong artistic vision, but you need a strong infrastructure to support that, that vision. And it’s really important to think ahead.

JOEL: When you talk about that infrastructure, can you give me some points?

DES: For example, there needs to be a balance between the amount of work you produce and the number of people that are going to support that work. Now we’re probably producing, I don’t know, eight or nine, nine or ten projects over the course of the year. When we started we could barely produce three, and yet it doesn’t take -- You know, it takes -- You can’t sort of bring hirings on for a few months of the year if you want to do world-class theatre. I mean, you could do that if you want to do community theatre. But if you want to do professional theatre, then you really need to… It’s important to create a balance between the amount of work you can produce and the amount of money that you need to earn and get contributed.
I think now that the Playhouse has a tremendous future potentially, although there are cycles to all this, and when you complete a huge project like this, there’s bound to be a certain amount of donor fatigue…because you’ve asked people to put a great deal of capital.

JOEL: What was the biggest obstacle in generating that turnaround? Was it just the donor?

DES: You know, I think this building was kind of more or less inevitable, but I’d say the biggest challenge was whether it was going to be here on campus. And the Playhouse had an important decision to make a few years ago, which was “We’ve hitched our wagon to the star of UCSD”…and there are challenges that go with that as I’ve just mentioned, you know? You share a certain amount of space and we don’t have the complete freedom in the way we operate. Fortunately, that was worked out, and the Playhouse now has a permanent agreement with UCSD into the foreseeable future basically in perpetuity. And so I would say that was a big challenge, it was… I’d say that was one of the biggest challenges, if not the biggest challenge was just craving a sense of permanence, going from being a producing group to a permanent institution. And so that would be the challenge. And that was a psychological change. That was coming up with legal documents with the university, and it was getting our donors to really invest in that idea, invest in the idea of permanence. Hence, this building.

JOEL: Okay. I’m going to shift gears a little bit…because I have to tell you, I’ve been to the new theatre…Private Fittings.

DES: Oh, good.

JOEL: Saw the show; enjoyed it. Enjoyed the theatre. So I wanted to talk about the new Playhouse…

DES: Great. Sure.

JOEL: …because to me this is an amazing feat. I mean, that’s a big, muckin’ black box theatre. Where did that vision come from?

DES: I mean, you know, I think that one of the reasons that this building is – I’d even go so as far as to say wildly successful – is that a lot of people, important people, contributed to it. First and foremost, Michael Rotundi, the architect. You know, his was the fulfillment of a dream that went back to the ‘80’s. In fact, when I arrived here back in 2000 – I’d been away for a few years making movies – and one of the members of the staff actually pulled out a document, and it was an application to the National Endowment in, I believe, 1987. So we’d been existence about five years. And it described a three-theatre complex. Now, at the time, we only had one theatre and we were, again… There was an old scruffy old theatre called the Warren on campus that we were using a little bit, but we really only had the one theatre. So it described the proscenium Arts Theatre, the Forum, you know, the thrust stage, and a state-of-the-art black box theatre.

And the idea statically was that we would be able to serve all needs of all theatre artists. In other words, we would have suitable space for basically any kind of production really, and with a flexible space you could argue that that’s really 100 theatres. And so that was the notion behind… So that went way back to the ‘80’s, and the board and I guess the key members of the community, the supporters, never forgot that dream. And so when it came time to… When the university, the permanent agreement was made and it came time to launch…

JOEL: Did everybody remember that right off the bat and go, “Hey, we can build ou r black box…” or did… kind of go, “Weren’t we going to do a black box once?”

DES: I think it was so much a part of the fabric of the thinking of the organization that it wasn’t even a question of remembering. This has always been an issue that we needed three to make real sense of the place given that we share space if we were to stay here on campus we needed three theatres. We, in fact you could argue, need more space than some of our sister organizations because we have a very ambitious graduate program working side by side, which is one of the things that defines the theatre. So I don’t think anybody every forgot. The idea-- I think people worked-- Some people who joined the organization in the meantime were probably mildly surprised that it had gone back that far. So it was, I’m sure, Robert Blackburn and other people around. It wasn’t me alone definitely. But I was also just going to say that that was the beginning of this dream. In the meantime, people like Terry Dwyer, you know, really a lot of the people, Ellery Brown, who was our project manager, was intimately involved in every detail of this. You know, certain board members, Ivan Gaylord, Gene Jones, who was instrumental in helping us with the building, that office complex is really successful, I think. I think a lot of its success has to do with I think two things. One was Rotundi embraced this principle of openness. When I came back and got involved in the process, it was really important to me that we use a lot of glass and that we didn’t allow any of the departments to break down into little thievedoms, that there was a real sense of openness and communication. And, as you can see, Michael just absolutely [to me] took that ball and ran with it. He completely got it. And it creates this wonderful atmosphere and also, anyone who has a private office, there’s always glass, so you can’t hide. And if you have a private office, you’re looking in at the plant. But that came from creating a team, which Terry Dwyer and I were involved in doing, creating a team that was cross-departmental and that was made up of different hierarchy’s in the organization. I mean, we would have second assistants and the head of the department on the same committee. And so they actually really came up with a lot of the thinking that lead to the design. So I would say those two principles: Michael’s willingness to embrace openness and the fact that there were so many participants and the thinking behind the building I think make it a success.

JOEL: Have you run into any unforeseen problems so far in what you’ve been working on?

DES: Oh, sure. You know, the main problems, interesting enough, that I’ve run into… Problems may be too much a little bit of an exaggeration. I would say challenges more than problems. If I had to do the black box again, I would simply put more doors in it. One of the things that you discover when you get in there is that the certain configurations you’re a little bit limited in terms of where people can enter, particularly on the gallery level. And so if I had to do it over again… All theatres have idiosyncrasies and their own sort of set of limitations.

JOEL: So a recording studio. Let’s talk about that a little bit. What are your thoughts with that, and what were your hopes when you were designing it? I’m not aware of other theatres having sound studios, do they?

DES: You know, I don’t think… Most theatres do not have them. There are theatres that do, and I would say the vast majority do not. Well, we record here all the time. We record for every show, not just the music and the sound effects for the show itself, but – which was obviously…would be the main priority in having our own studio – but all the advertising is also…we have to do into the studio to do all of that. It actually -- There’s a big cost saving in not to have to go into rent a studio for $200 an hour or whatever the costs are. So that’s perhaps first and foremost. It’s also tremendously convenient to have everything on one location. So it means that a music director or the director can actually supervise a recording session without having to travel half an hour away, 45 minutes away, which can be literally impossible if your in full tack. So it definitely improves the quality of the art.

JOEL: Is there anything else that you would consider that maybe I don’t even know about cutting edge here that has been a super addition to it or…?

DES: You know, I would say I think there’s a lot of thinking in that building that’s very progressive. I mean, and a lot of it’s very practical. For example, there’s a tension grid over the space, which means that the lighting technicians can literally walk on a mesh, a wire mesh…

JOEL: Airplane wire.

DES: Exactly, airplane cable, to refocus instruments and so on. But we have that also in the Weiss theatre, that tension grid. But what’s terrific about this space is that we can remove each one of the sections and we can fly, and that is a major opportunity when you’re staging in a black box because you don’t have perhaps the… Theatre’s all about entrances and exits and transformation, so if you can actually bring actors, scenery, whatever from above,…

JOEL: Right. I saw that…

DES: …it’s a tremendous advantage.

JOEL: …in Private Fittings. It was so dramatic to see the changes, and the audience went nuts over that.

DES: I will confess that that was part of the thinking in Private Fittings that we wanted to do it without intermission because we wanted to show off some of the bells and whistles of the new theatre and, you know, the fact that we can come from below…

JOEL: Right. I was down underneath. I saw the grid they have down there for disabling and bringing the floor [up] and that’s amazing.

DES: And that’s a big advantage, too, you know. The fact is you could do a Noel Coward play in there that just had a grand staircase going all the way down to the deck. So that space was designed with the idea [inaudible] as much potential as possible for people’s imaginations.

JOEL: So I noticed -- Another thing that really impressed me when I first read about the facility being built here was the fact that you’re putting a restaurant in here. Talk to me about what you’re thoughts were for a restaurant and how you think that’s going to be an advantage.

DES: Sure. Well, partly -- There’ll be an advantage on a number of levels. First of all, it will become, with any luck, a kind of creative center for the artists who work here and also for the community. One of the saddest things to me about producing here is that at the end of the play I always like to say it’s like watching Dawn of the Dead. There’s this sea of people moving toward the parking lot, and you know that many of them really don’t want to leave or wouldn’t mind having a coffee or a drink or a glass of wine and to be able to talk about what they just saw or experienced. And so we’re not next door to a restaurant like that, and so in a sense our only choice is to really build one, to build a place where people can congregate. And we wanted to build one center which would transform over the course of the day. So it will do hospitality service in the morning and you’ll be able to get a lunch that you can take away. That’ll certainly suit the staff and those of us who probably don’t often have time to sit down and have a tablecloth lunch.

JOEL: Well, in addition I would think another source of revenue for the theatre. That’s one of thrusts of our magazine is to encourage people in theatre is to think out of box for Christ’s sake. The administration that’s in power right now isn’t exactly helping us.

DES: No, that true.

JOEL: We’ve got to find revenue.

DES: That’s right, and you just said a mouthful because that… It’s the income strain that the restaurant generates, of course, but it’s even I think deeper than that. It’s a way to really treat our donors properly, to hopefully inspire them to be more supportive. It’s a way for us to inform the people that support us about the work so that they’re more knowledgeable, which again if they’re invested with knowledge in the work, again they’re much more likely to be supportive. So, for example, our opening night dinners will happen at our own restaurant. We’ll be able to honor the people that step up with the $25,000 gift or the $50,000 gift that they can be a honored for those events. So it gives us… It won’t just affect earned income, which it certainly should because we’ll share in the profits from the restaurant, but it should have a pretty profound affect on contributed income and, in addition, I think it will help ticket sales. If you know you can come to the theatre and have dinner before the show, you’re more likely to make an evening of it. The same thing, if you know there’s going to be a great cabaret, which we plan to produce in there after the show, then it becomes a whole evening rather than just going out to see a play.

JOEL: Great idea.

DES: It becomes a whole event. And so hopefully that will translate into increased ticket sales as well.

JOEL: Where do I see the biggest Des McAnuff footprint here?

DES: You know, I think I really am… I see myself as really part of a team. So I can’t honestly say there’d be something I’d point to that I would take kind of individual credit for. I think the theatre was born and – or reborn I suppose is more accurate – in response to the needs of the American theatre at large. We started this theatre after most other theatres like the Alley were already up and running, and so we were able to approach it in a sense without any habits, good or bad, you know. We didn’t have any habits, and we were able to really look at the whole landscape and respond to it. And so I think what happened – and some of it was conscious and some of it frankly wasn’t – was that I the Playhouse really does reflect the American theatre at large and represents the place where American theatre is now born. We were not… We had no prejudice about genre. We were very comfortable with the fact that the American theatre is many, many different things. And if you look at the sort of the alumni of the playhouse over the last 20-odd years, you’ll see most of the significant genres, virtually all of them represented by leading American theatre artists. And I certainly had something to do with the architecture and programming that lead to that, but I want to stress that many, many other people had a lot to do with it, too. Many other directors, other drama [inaudible], and, you know, it is really a collaborative art form and, as you know, when you’re actually… even if you’re leading a group, the best thing that can happen is for the ideas to come from everyone but you.

JOEL: Over the years I’ve seen some incredible shows, you know. My favorite was Tommy.

DES: Oh, that’s…

JOEL: I saw it here, and I saw the touring show in Chicago…

DES: Oh, great.

JOEL: But nothing affected me like here when they did the final, you know.

DES: Yeah, that’s great.

JOEL: They stepped out and [everyone in the theatre] were having goosebumps and just…

DES: Well, it’s the intimacy of this house. This is such a great theatre because… And I had nothing to do with designing this theatre. This was completely designed before I got here, I walked onto that stage house just around the time it was finished for the first time, and they did a fantastic job. Again, I have quibbles. I wish I had more wing space back there, but, my God, it’s a 40 by 40 foot stage. I wish we had more seats, too.

JOEL: Of course you do.


DES: But the positive thing about the auditorium is that it’s so intimate. It’s just wonderfully intimate. Did you happen to see Jersey Boys? Did you get to see…?

JOEL: You know, I didn’t have a chance, I was traveling a lot then and didn’t have a chance to go see it.

DES: If you get a chance to see that in New York… If you liked Tommy, you’ll definitely like that, too. It’s --

JOEL: So what went on these days? I’m seeing musicals everywhere

DES: You know, it’s a funny thing, and nobody believes me, but it’s the God’s truth, it really is just coincidental. What happens when you do a lot of new work, which we do now more than ever. We always did a certain amount of new work, but in the last five or six years we’ve been doing… I think when we actually figured it out, I think it’s something like 60% of the plays we’ve done in the last five seasons, the five seasons since I’ve come back, are all brand new writing. And so those always take some sort of gestation period. Musicals take longer than most. And so I got a lot of musicals into development when I first came back, understandably because I’d been making movies so I wasn’t really making musicals. The one musical [I had] sort of fairly far along was Dracula, which we put up in ’01 like [for a season??] back, and maybe a little bit before its time, frankly, but just to get the project up. So since then, we’ve put a number of developments, musicals into development, and they all happened to be sort of coming to fruition in the same 18-month, twoyear period, but there’s no sort of conscious decision to say, “Okay, we’ve got to do more musicals.” Of course, if we can-- When we can find the funding for them we’re delighted to do them because…

JOEL: How do you find the funding? Is part of the process of the page to stage? Is there another way you’d finance them…?

DES: Yeah. Usually-- This is the way we finance them, almost always, a large project. There’s almost always a commercial partner that either has the rights or wants to acquire the rights and they would make an investment in the show that is not tax deductible for them. The country’s deemed what we do important enough to grant us tax-exempt status, which is a great responsibility. The commercial theatre doesn’t enjoy that sort of privilege since they’re clearly there to try to make profit for people. Rarely happens by the way. Fortunately, there are people that are crazy enough about theatre that they’re excited about getting involved and willing to take a certain amount of disposable income and invest in the theatre. So what usually happens is we put up the amount of money that we would put up traditionally for the biggest non-musical we would do. Let’s say a Tartoof or something like that, and then there’s a sum of money that we’re not able to…that’s missing from that formula. And so the production budget is enhanced by the commercial producer and they take investment and contribute it to the Playhouse. So it’s a kind of an R&D center. That’s their point of view, of course.

JOEL: Of course.

DES: And for us it’s, of course, the real McGill because that’s what we’re interested in is producing shows here. And then we would share in the future of that project, if indeed there is a project in the future, selling something like even Billy Crystal’s 700 Sundays where we basically workshop, that we do share in that future, a show that we developed from like something like Jersey Boys or Palm Beach that’s showing now. We would share reasonably handsomely in the future of that if it were to be a success.

JOEL: Well, on that same note then, what about…

DES: Well, just while you’re on that, we had accumulated a certain amount of debt by the early ‘90’s, and the debt was almost $2 million, and it’s…

JOEL: It’s 1.8.

DES: It’s interesting to note, yeah.

JOEL: That’s what they reported.

DES: But it’s interesting to note that most of that debt was reduced more than… About 67% of it that was reduced by two shows – by Tommy and by How to Succeed in Business.

JOEL: Are you kiddin’ me?

DES: By the commercial income from those shows. And so while we did accumulate that, those two shows were both produced during the difficult period. How to Succeed was produced just as we were turning the ship around. Tommy was definitely produced at the most difficult period. And so I think $1.2 million of that debt, and the rest of it was erased by rent, not because the Playhouse makes any money from that because it doesn’t, but Michael Bright who was the artistic director then managed to get his commercial producers to let him launch the national tour here at the Playhouse. So it’s really three musicals that reduced that $2 million debt. And so one of the things I’m proud about, even though it was a terrible thing watching the theatre slip into that debt, I still think it was absolutely unavoidable. If we had not done that, we would have gone out of business. If we had not been producing the art we were producing, no one would have cared.

JOEL: Right.


DES: And they would have let us die. But I’m extremely proud of the fact that we managed to with our successes dig our way back out. So that was not through contributions the fact that was reduced; we earned our way out of debt.

JOEL: Yeah, we… I’m going to ask you one question.

DES: Okay.

JOEL: If you got a young group, they’re on the verge but suffering a little bit, what would you tell them to help strengthen their program? Let’s say they got one theatre, one stage; they’re fighting; they’re struggling to make ends meet.

DES: Well, there’s a couple things I would want them not to do. I think it’s really important not to try to please people because when you try to please people you lose your own fire and passion, and ultimately you have to depend on that. You have to do work that you love and that you believe in. And I think you have to count on the fact that you’re not so strange that other people…

JOEL: Can’t relate…

DES: …you know, you can’t find other people who are passionate about the same thing. And I really think that is the key, that the second you start second guessing what an audience member might like or a critic or… I think you start losing your way. Your job really is to lead and not to follow. And so I think that’s… And to be courageous and to try to find like-minded people that will support you. My advice to young artists is always “find your people,” you know? You can’t do this alone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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