Berkeley Rep names next artistic director
Johanna Pfaelzer, artistic director of New York Stage and Film and a former associate artistic director at American Conservatory Theater, will succeed Tony Taccone as Berkeley Rep’s artistic director at the beginning of the company’s 2019-20 season.
Pfaelzer had a hand in developing “Hamilton,” “American Idiot” (which would go on to premiere at Berkeley Rep) and Taylor Mac’s “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music” at New York Stage and Film, which is an incubator of new work with a summer season of works in progress.
“That between dynamic new work and existing plays is really exciting to me.” Johanna Pfaelzer, artistic director
Berkeley Rep announced the news Monday, Sept. 10, after conducting a nationwide search that pooled 165 initial candidates. Taccone, who has been at Berkeley Rep in various roles for more than three decades, announced his departure last year.
The announcement comes amid a broader industry changing of the guard. Pam MacKinnon and Jennifer Bielstein have just taken the reins of ACT from Carey Perloff and Peter Pastreich. Tom Ross will step down from the Aurora at the end of next season, and Robert Kelley will depart TheatreWorks the following year.
Pfaelzer, 49, spent part of her childhood in Berkeley. In a phone interview from New York, she says some factors that drew her to Berkeley Rep are its “profound commitment to new work” and “the fact that classics always sit somewhere within their season. That dynamic between new work and existing plays is really exciting to me.” She also cites “the com-
munity of artists that already exist around it and then the ones I’m so looking forward to introducing to it.”
She describes Berkeley Rep audiences as well-read, political and intellectual, with “extraordinary appetites.” They have “a capacity for really large-scale theatrical imagination,” she said, as indicated by productions of the work of Emma Rice (“The Wild Bride”), Mary Zimmerman (“Metamorphoses” will be staged there later this year) and Tony Kushner.
These are the kinds of stories, says Pfaelzer (whose name is pronounced “Joanna Felzer”) “that can only be told in the theater.”
She admits this sentiment might be “hokey” or romantic, but says what’s special about theater is the way “a group of strangers ... make this pact with each other and with a group of artists that they’re going to experience a story in real time together. Whatever happens to them emotionally isn’t actually happening privately. Whatever active transformation takes place is communal.”
In her decade at New York Stage and Film, Pfaelzer has helped bring an impressive range of projects to fruition, including many that have succeeded or are scheduled in the Bay Area: “The Humans,” “The Wolves,” “The Invisible Hand,” “The Great Leap” and “Doubt.” She’s also developed work with Itamar Moses, who just won a Tony for “The Band’s Visit,” and Jaclyn Backhaus, whose “Men on Boats” will play at ACT’s Strand Theater beginning next month.
Unlike many regional theater artistic directors, who often direct anywhere from one to several plays each season, Pfaelzer isn’t actually a director. “I won’t somehow one day become one,” she says. “It’s not like a secret aspiration.”
That means she will be free “to give that tiny bit of objectivity to be deeply of service to those writers and those directors as they’re in process. I get to engage deeply with all of them equally. I get to work alongside them as they work through these drafts. I get to be a fresh pair of eyes on a rewrite, in the rehearsal room. I care deeply about helping them build the strongest creative team with the specific skills and vision for a particular play at a particular moment in its evolution.”
Board President Stewart Owen says that when Berkeley Rep was conducting its search, a candidate’s directing experience was “neither a plus nor a minus.” He points out that directing can be just “a small part” of an artistic director’s day-to-day duties. What set Pfaelzer apart was her management experience, her relationships with up-and-coming artists and her taste for an eclectic range of projects. Berkeley Rep, he says, needs someone who could helm “Ain’t Too Proud,” “Angels in America” and “small, experimental pieces” with equal elan.
Owen also says that Pfaelzer combines attributes “you often don’t see coming together.” There’s “a disciplined, rigorous part of her,” he says, but also “a passionate, emotional great heart.”
At Berkeley Rep, Pfaelzer will lead a much larger organization than she did at NYSAF, but Berkeley Rep Managing Director Susan Medak says the company deliberately avoided limiting the candidate pool to leaders of theaters of comparable size: “We realized if we did that we would be excluding candidates who were likely to be women or people of color.”
Medak says that Pfaelzer also stood out because “the artists with whom she’s worked speak so lovingly about how she cares about artists” and she also “has an enormous amount of respect and affection for the audience.”
Pfaelzer officially assumes her duties on Sept. 1, 2019, after NYSAF’s summer season next year. She’ll move to the Bay Area with her husband, lighting designer Russell Champa (who’s worked at Berkeley Rep), and their son, Jasper, 13.