AMERICAN THEATRE | Soho Rep Takes a Sharp Flip Towards New Horizons

“It’s not the primary time Soho Rep has encountered the lack of Walkerspace, however it is going to possible be the final.”

—Eric Ting

After practically 30 years and numerous recollections of their malleable black field theatre at 46 Walker Road, the pioneering Soho Rep, a bastion of avant-garde theatre and fierce protector of the bizarre, will shut Walkerspace’s storied doorways. Their sights are set on new horizons—particularly, Playwrights Horizons.

Starting in January 2025, Soho Rep will embark on a two- to three-year space-sharing partnership, independently producing inside the bigger Off-Broadway establishment on forty second Road, the place they’ll produce within the 128-seat Peter Jay Sharp Theater, situated on the constructing’s fourth ground. This collaboration, within the arms of Soho Rep’s administrators Cynthia Flowers, Caleb Hammons, and Eric Ting in addition to Playwrights Horizons inventive director Adam Greenfield, affiliate inventive director Natasha Sinha, and managing director Casey York, guarantees to be transformative for each corporations.

For Soho Rep, there are sensible advantages to strolling away from Walker. On the crest of the pandemic, the constructing’s longtime landlord (and the Rep’s constant ally) died, leaving the corporate weak. The constructing was acquired by an organization actively scooping up many properties throughout New York Metropolis. Once I spoke with Flowers, she described precipitous lease will increase on this once-grubby nook of decrease Manhattan. One small venue-turned-gallery throughout the road was put available on the market in 2023 for anyplace from $30,000 to $60,000 per thirty days (based mostly on common value per sq. foot). For reference, when she began at Soho Rep greater than a decade in the past, the corporate paid about $4,000 a month in lease. In the present day it’s practically thrice that.

Flowers, together with former co-leaders Sarah Benson and Meropi Peponides, who departed the corporate in 2022, may see the writing on the sweating partitions for years. That troubled trio set the mission of securing a brand new residence in movement. The constructing’s ongoing points with plumbing and water injury, mixed with an inadequate electrical energy provide that stops operating A/C throughout some tech rehearsals and performances, make secure (and, frankly, sane) work inconceivable. “There’s no less than sooner or later each tech week the place you lose electrical energy and should cease work for 4 to 6 hours,” Flowers famous.

What’s extra, Soho Rep’s present area isn’t accessible to the disabled and lacks important in-house options like laundry, storage, and wing area. The corporate’s exemplary dedication to paying resident artists a residing wage additionally leads to rising manufacturing prices, however as Walkerspace can solely seat round 65 folks a efficiency, even for his or her most in-demand productions—the Starbucks franchises scattered throughout Tribeca’s corners may possible maintain extra. Sustainability, underneath these circumstances, is simply too slippery.

There may be greater than pragmatism to this enterprise with Playwrights Horizons, although. Followers of each corporations’ piercing and adventurous choices can absolutely clock their inventive alignments: a loyalty to modern theatremakers, the incubation of recent works, a dedication to danger.

“We’re not simply asking ourselves, what does it imply to lease part of their constructing? however truly, are there methods for the very best practices at every of our particular person organizations to affect the opposite?” stated Hammons, who with Ting assumed management roles beside Flowers in 2023, already figuring out the transfer was inevitable. “Are there methods each our organizations can be taught from one another throughout this era of partnership in order that it doesn’t really feel similar to a brief affair, however moderately a milestone?”

The solutions to these questions appear to be a powerful sure. Once I spoke to Adam Greenfield, solely pleasure in regards to the union fell from his lips.

“I need this partnership to indicate that two theatres working collectively are a lot better than the sum of their components,” he stated. “In opening ourselves as much as a real collaboration, we’re truly increasing the chances for Playwrights. Via partnership, by an actual real collaboration the place you’re opening your self as much as different methods of working and views, and in doing so making your self weak, we’re creating extra prospects for ourselves.”

That prophecy is already coming true. Each Greenfield and Sinha describe their ongoing conferences with Soho Rep’s leaders as fruitful, with continuous discoveries about methods to advance fairness and group engagement in their very own inventive residence. There’ll even be a co-production to cap each organizations’ 2024-25 seasons.

After all, the bodily lack of Walkerspace could hang-out some audiences. In New York Metropolis, shedding an area you’re keen on can gnaw like a phantom limb. The venue’s agile type and the earlier landlord’s straightforward acceptance of inner shape-shifting afforded designers and administrators an architectural playground. Performs over seasons may all look so drastically completely different: In debbie tucker inexperienced’s generations, hundreds of kilos of purple clay soil morphed the area right into a South African township kitchen; in Raja Feather Kelly’s The Fires, an prolonged railroad house stretched your complete size of the room; in Becca Blackwell and Amanda Duarte’s Snatch Adams & Tainty McCracken Current It’s That Time of the Month, a large vulva served as a door.

Smaller organizations like Soho Rep additionally play by a unique set of administrative guidelines: They’re much less prone to have particular person departments, in-house casting administrators or store leaders, and staffed crew. There was a freedom to that—however there’s a newfound freedom in partnership too. Although Horizons’ Sharp Theater could not present the identical free-form flexibility, the brand new home (and the doubled quantity of seating) will higher meet the group’s evolving wants.

Everybody, significantly Greenfield, is conscious of how bodily area can form one’s expertise of artwork. “I take a look at the Playwrights Horizons constructing and I adore it. I’m so grateful for our area,” he effuses. However he admitted that the constructing’s smooth glass doorways and ascending staircase mix to “undertaking a sort of stability that, truthfully, isn’t actual, and has by no means been actual. In theatre, we’ve at all times been rats and scavengers. If you stroll into theatre lobbies like Soho Rep, you realize what it’s that you simply’re strolling into; the constructing frames the expertise.”

Greenfield clearly sees this partnership as a chance to merge the previous’s polish with the latter’s scrappiness.

“I’m asking myself, How can I modify what it feels wish to stroll into Playwrights Horizons in order that your expectations of the sort of daring work you’re going to see there will likely be aligned with what it feels wish to be within the area? How can I proceed to provide actually risk-taking work and encourage an viewers’s generosity of coronary heart in the direction of that work in a constructing manufactured from granite and terrazzo flooring and glass?” he added with a chuckle.

This alignment of bodily area and inventive intent will likely be essential to the partnership’s success. Whereas there’s already a strong overlap of artists who’ve labored with each corporations (together with Anne Washburn, Raja Feather Kelly, Dustin Wills, and David Adjmi, to call a number of), their typical audiences differ, usually splitting alongside nebulous strains of downtown versus uptown theatre buffs. In actuality, these strains (aesthetic and geographical) are blurring an increasing number of regardless.

In contrast to Soho Rep, a number of keystone downtown corporations have needed to stop operations altogether, whereas rising prices have displaced a lot of the artist class that when crammed decrease Manhattan. The shuttering of theatres nationwide in the course of the Covid pandemic shifted theatre viewing habits altogether, germinating extra performances in parks, in properties, on our telephones. The shifts which might be happening remind one among Annalisa Dias’ 2023 essay “Decomposition As a substitute of Collapse — Pricey Theatre, Be Like Soil,” revealed in Rescripted.

“A dramaturgy of decomposition is a young invitation past loss towards re-membering our interconnected futures,” Dias muses. Stanzas of her poetic essay are laced with clues to the trade’s subsequent steps, and an apt problem to return to theatre’s unique methods: “I lengthy for a theatre that turns its gaze downward to the land, outward to the water, and upward to the sky.”

The notion of a theatre past the partitions is just not out of the query on this subsequent, nascent chapter for Soho Rep. After all, the objective of touchdown in one other constructing and reigniting the vibrancy and individuality that comes from having a house of 1’s personal continues to be there. However, Flowers identified, “Even a 99-seater requires a $20 million marketing campaign for a constructing.” So the present realities of the inventive panorama have led Soho Rep’s executives to embrace excessive flexibility, cracking them open to observe the place their group leads. The moral penalties of embarking on a capital marketing campaign presently are additionally a consideration, and the alliance with Playwrights Horizons permits its leaders extra time to think twice in regards to the prospects for the accountable course of funds. “We will truly let the artists that we’re fascinated by lead us,” stated Ting. That might imply “renting one other theatre, but it surely additionally could possibly be a group backyard. We don’t know that half but, however now we have the liberty to seek out out.”

Finally, change is on the root of nearly the whole lot we do within the theatre. Displacement can’t be one thing we meet solely with concern—hell, it’s already there in Soho Rep’s title, as theatre hasn’t been based mostly in Soho for 3 many years, nor do they produce theatre in rep. Walkerspace has confronted hurricane flooding, a pandemic, accelerating gentrification, and an emergency shutdown in 2016 for city-mandated renovations. An organization born with its eyes on the classics like Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Aristophanes is now a hotbed for a few of our most dazzling and harmful writers. (Living proof: The finale of Soho Rep’s tenure at 46 Walker Road will likely be a ribald queer collaboration marrying stage and script royalty Carmelita Tropicana and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins—an absolute feast for the experimental theatre lover). Whereas this new partnership will impression the operations of two profitable corporations, it gained’t threaten both’s will. The onus activates us—audiences, innovators, vanguards of the residing artwork—to embrace the problem forward and place our belief in the identical apply we go to the theatre to witness: transformation.

Brittani Samuel (she/her) is an arts journalist, theatre critic, and the co-editor of 3Views on Theater. Her work has appeared in American Theatre Journal, Broadway Information, and The New York Instances. She is an alum of the BIPOC Critics Lab and the Eugene O’Neill Theater Heart’s Nationwide Critics Institute, in addition to the inaugural recipient of ATCA’s Edward Medina Prize for Excellence in Cultural Criticism. 

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