Susan V. Booth, Artistic Director of the Atlanta Alliance Theater, has been appointed as the next Artistic Director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago. It is the dominant force in Chicago’s vibrant theater scene and one of the country’s most influential regional nonprofits.
The 59-year-old Booth, who will take office in October, will be the first woman to lead Goodman, founded in 1922.She succeeds Robert Falls announced last September He will take control and resign 35 years later.
With an annual budget of $ 22 million and about 200 staff, Goodman won the 1992 Tony Award for excellence in regional theaters. As a nursery for directors with an artistic vision of “too big to fit in a storefront theater” from the theater scene, known primarily for actors in Chicago, with more than 150 world or American premierees under Falls. It also helped to turn it into a perceived scene. As Chris Jones, a theater critic at the Chicago Tribune I have written last year.
The move would be like a homecoming for Booth, who attended Northwestern University’s graduate school, oversaw theaters in the city, and was the director of Goodman’s new theater development from 1993 to 2001. Her husband even suggested to her on the catwalk at Goodman’s main stage on the last day of her work.
Booth said in a telephone interview that he was looking forward to returning to Chicago for a dive. A rich theater scene that she explained is muscular, democratic and characterized by “fundamentally diverse aesthetics.”
“It’s always been a really fluid ecosystem, and artists were bouncing behind the bar from a punk first-year startup to the Goodman stage,” she said. “That liquidity meant that if there was a hierarchy, it had something to do with your chops. It was great.”
Her arrival at Goodman comes at the time of a widespread shift of leadership at the Chicago Theater due to retirement and turmoil over diversity and inclusion. One of her first jobs is to understand “where Chicago is now”, both artistically and civilally, and determine the best way to reach the widest possible audience. She said.
She is also in the theater Artist group Continuing Goodman’s tradition of “treating classics as if they were new plays” and giving the challenging new work a prominent position.
“I love classical music and I’m not interested in leaving the work to other theaters,” she said. “But I love the equal competition that you create when you create a new piece.”
Booth led the alliance in Atlanta for 21 years, where she doubled her operating budget (currently $ 20 million) and donations and won the 2007 Tony Awards for regional excellence. The theater had more than 85 world premierees, including six musicals later performed on Broadway, including “Prom” and “Color Purple.”
Also, to foster new voices and build relationships with young playwrights through programs such as the Spelman Leadership Fellowship, a partnership with Spelman College in Atlanta aimed at addressing the lack of diversity in theater leadership. I worked on it.
When asked about the signature project, she “Native guard” The poet’s cycle of former American poet laureate Natasha Trezai describes both the history of her family and the history of the Black Civil War, originally performed at the Alliance and then at the Atlanta History Center in the Civil War collection. I’m exploring.
“Theatricalization of it was about how the audience worked on the work and the story of the original,” she said. “It was a community event.”
She added that it was “a theater designed to facilitate dialogue and evoke action.” “It was very important to me.
Goodmans 2022-23 seasonWorld premiere of Rebecca Gilman’s play “Swing State” programmed by Falls, the Wisconsin community divided by political polarization (one of the two works directed by Falls), Christina Anderson’s “Ripples, Me Includes “Waves Carried” about a family who fought for pool consolidation in Kansas in the 1960s. There is also a 30th anniversary work of “The Who’s Tommy” directed by DeM McAnuff.
Regarding her own programming, Booth said Goodman wanted to be part of the ripe political and social debate of the moment without losing sight of the pure joy of theater.
“I don’t know the theater community in a country that hasn’t produced a strange joy bomb,” she said.
