Modern American theater wouldn’t be the same without a 65-seat theater tucked away on a quiet side street in Tribeca. Founded in 1975, Soho Rep has pushed the boundaries in recent years with 2014’s Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon and the 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning Jackie Sibblies’ Drury’s Fairview. I have produced a new play.
In fact, the theater has performed extremely well over the last 15 years, with productions by a formidable cast of playwrights including Lucas Funas, Anne Washburn, David Ajumi and Alecia Harris. This golden age coincided with the tenure of Sarah Benson, who took over as Artistic Director of Soho Rep in 2007 and retired from Soho his Rep on June 30.
Raised in the UK, Benson immigrated to the US as part of the Fulbright Program and earned a master’s degree in directing from the University of Brooklyn. She succeeded Daniel Orkin in running the Writer/Director Lab at Soho Rep for two years.
Benson’s first show to direct for Congress, Sarah Kane’s dark and gruesome “Blasted,” starring Marin Ireland and Reed Barney, was a sensation in the fall of 2008. That show was both an outlier (“Blasted” was 13 at the time) and Soho Rep will continue to focus on new material) and portends a lot of thought-provoking and volatile work to come. But it was. Benson himself continued to direct Anne Octorun and Fairview, breaking down the fourth wall and subverting audience expectations about how the play would unfold.
“When we first worked together, that was the standard by which I judged all collaborations,” Jacobs-Jenkins said by phone. “She is incredibly open and amazingly egoless. It’s like you can,” he added. “She’s radical, but I think she’s funny and visionary.”
(Benson’s resume also includes “Skittles Commercial: Broadway Musical,” one of the most surreal Super Bowl ads ever produced.)
In 2019, Sohorep switched to co-leadership, with Benson, Cynthia Flowers and Meropi Peponides on equal footing on the board. “Sara has a great design brain, but I’m a more abstract thinker,” Peponides, also recently retired, said by phone. “We were able to perfect each other’s skill sets when it came to how to bring big, wild, ambitious ideas to life.” One of those ideas was Project Number One, announced in September 2020. provides a living wage to theater artists developing new works in SoHo.
Benson, now a free agent, has several projects in the works, including one for Cesar Alvarez. “Noise (musical)” Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs will perform at the Northern Stage in Vermont later this month. “teeth” It will be held at Playrights Horizons early next year. At a coffee spot near her home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, the 45-year-old director spoke about her theatrical vision and future plans. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Did you leave because you wanted to spend more time supervising than paperwork?
That’s part of what led to this moment. Ready to say yes to more projects. To work with that level of artistic risk, and to be surrounded by other artists who work with that level of risk, was an incredible gift. It really changed my life.and it’s a lot [laughs].
Did you have any management experience before joining Soho Rep?
I had experience as an artist, that was it. But as a director, you are in a position to lead and solve things. I think an artist’s skill set is actually very well suited for leadership.
What made you choose ‘Blasted’ as your first work as a director for SohoRep?
It was Marin Ireland who came up with the project. I always loved the play, but for me it was about the conflict in Northern Ireland. So when I read it again, I was like, ‘Oh, this is about the civil war and what’s going on right now.
Need a shock to decide to do a play?
Immediately begin to imagine pictures and emotions. I always pay attention to how I feel. Because that’s the best information to lead me to “what is the real material?” What can you bring to this material?” I always try to pursue that guilt.
You’ve directed very different plays, but what’s consistent is that, in addition to being amazingly entertaining, your productions avoid the naturalism that is so common in American theater.
To get to the honest place of having embodied conversations about joy and pain, and how close you can see them together, naturalism doesn’t get there for me. Realism for me is a closed system. It’s like, “Here’s the problem, see.” I’m more interested in anything that has a space where the audience can participate in it and complete the event through the live theater feedback loop. People want to see ambitious works and things they haven’t seen before. they want a challenge.
What is the first step when starting a new show?
“What’s wrong?” I’m always curious, so I often start there. At first, I often read books, research, and examine images by myself, starting from “Where do I feel the heat and energy?” What am I confused about? ” I was lucky to have such an amazing and deep collaboration with the designers. So we meet early and often and really approach it like conceptual art or whether design can really inform text in many cases.
How has Soho Rep changed as an organization in the last 16 years?
Together with Meropi and Cynthia, we have completely changed the scope of what is possible. We commission the production, so if we commission an artist, we do whatever they write. As such, we’ve moved away from agents submitting plays. Of course, people still do that to some extent, but we don’t have a literary department. Building relationships with artists and committing to them for the long term is key.
As a director, do you think you can pursue completely different opportunities now?
You are invited to the opera. There are so many great ideas and spaces that I am interacting with right now. I’m like, “Yes, I’m interested in scale.” I am very ready for this. A gift from the SoHo guys was this room where the floor was literally pierced for “Blasted”. You can go in there and have a conversation with the space, even if you do something very rude in that room, and it was amazing. But I know that room so well that I’m excited to practice in other kinds of spaces.
How do you think New York’s theater ecosystem has changed in the last 20 years?
Around 2004-2005, I used to go out to see eight or nine shows a week. It was experimental in a really surprising way. I don’t remember those days. Because there were a lot of problems and no one was getting paid. It was hard. But this piece was centered around community, and it was very real. That common North Star feels like it has evaporated and become more aspiring to some kind of mainstream success. However, I feel like that has collapsed due to the new coronavirus. And now it feels strangely close to those days in the ’00s, when it was up to the artist to decide what we wanted to make and what we wanted to see.
So you are one of the few optimists in the field right now.
everything will be [expletive], everything is crumbling. Even in the mainstream commercial space, the old model of tourists and everything else is gone, and so is the subscription model. It’s really condescending because it doesn’t trust the viewers and makes a lot of guesses after the fact. But the audience wants to see something new. They don’t want to see over and over again what they’ve seen over and over again.
