Interview: Theatre Life with Ari Roth

Today's subject is living his theatre life to the fullest. Ari Roth might be one of the most passionate and outspoken figures working in DC theatre. One thing is clear, he follows his passion and the result is always something extraordinary.

He is the Founding Artistic Director of Mosaic Theater Company, which is now in its second season at the Atlas Performing Arts Center. The company boasts a diverse season showcasing some of the area's best known and up-and-coming performers. Most recently, DC theatre regular Craig Wallace wowed audiences as Louis Armstrong in Satchmo at the Waldorf.

Most of you likely know Ari Roth from his eighteen year reign as Artistic Director of Theater J. He presented theatre that was thought-provoking and always sparked good conversation - something that theatre is supposed to do. There has been plenty written on the circumstances surrounding Ari's departure from Theater J so I have consciously chosen not to address that subject in this interview. I feel it's better to focus on the man, how he got to this point in his artistic life, and the company he has built from the ground up.

His mission for Mosaic Theater Company of diversifying theatre for its audiences is something that deserves thunderous applause. In the current fiscal environment it's not easy to take risks when producing a theatre season, but Ari Roth does. Audiences both at Theater J and now Mosaic Theater Company come to be entertained, but also educated. Return to Haifa and The Admission at Theater J had to be two of the most controversial pieces produced in the area and some companies might not have even touched them at all. It's because of Ari's passion that those two plays and a plethora of others made Theater J one of the leading theatre companies in the country. A similar trend is occurring at Mosaic - he's offering a diverse set of challenging works. As previously mentioned, Ari presented Satchmo at the Waldorf as the second season opener and next up is the Obie Award-winning comedy Milk Like Sugar.

To say that Ari Roth is an extraordinary individual would be an understatement to be sure. Here's a guy who always pushes the theatrical envelope and, in most cases, has been very successful in doing so. The fact that Mosaic Theater Company is only in its second season and is making a huge impact on the DC theatre community is in and of itself quite extraordinary. Ari Roth is a theatre visionary who never settles for second best - something all of us working in the theatre should aspire to be.

Growing up in Chicago, did you know working in theatre was going to be your life's work?

Theater (I'll spell it with an "e-r," if that's okay with you) did not figure into my youth or teenage years in any central way. Instead I loved summer camp and tried to extend it year round, but, come to think of it, I did play Toovia (that would be Tevye) in an all-Hebrew production of Kanar Al Ha-Gag (or Fiddler on The Roof) when I was 12 years old at Camp Oconomowoc. In high school, I played in the band in Godspell and sang "On the Willows." I went to see precisely one memorable play - a great outdoor production of Scapin. There were numerous visitations to the Goodman Theatre's The Tortoise and The Hare - I went for birthday after birthday.

I wanted so much more to be a singer-songwriter and worked at that. I flirted with a spiritual calling as a New Age Reform rabbi. I was deeply involved in my Chicago Federation of Temple youth movement and I loved playing on the varsity basketball team at University of Chicago Lab School. I felt very involved in the racially diverse culture of Hyde Park on the South Side and did what you might call some "community building" work through the youth group and social action committee.

Where was Chicago's vaunted theater scene during the 70s for me? Nowhere to be found, apparently, and I wasn't looking. I was riding my bike along the lake and seeking liberation in little fits and starts, but mostly I was being shaped by my family; my parents, refugees from Germany, the legacy of the Holocaust, and their penchant for remembering and persevering in the face of lots of loss. It all loomed large and I wrestled with that legacy, and still do. Theater; where were thee for me? About to be born within.

Chicago has a very vibrant and diverse theatre scene. You probably could have done very well if you started a theatre company there. What were some of the reasons why you left Chicago and came to DC?

It's very important to remember that I didn't leave Chicago for DC. I left for college, both in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and for a formative year in Jerusalem at Hebrew University. It was at Michigan, my junior year after returning from Israel, that I ran into a playwright who changed my life. His name was Milan Stitt, and through him, I met Arthur Miller who gave me my first playwriting prize. After graduating, Milan got me into the literary department at Circle Repertory Company. After the internship and a promotion to Assistant Literary Manager, Milan helped get me named as full-time Literary Manager, since the assistant position was being cut. He was my new "Rabbi" and protector. Eventually he got me my teaching gig back at the University of Michigan, flying out once a week from New York to teach the class that he vacated when he took over the playwriting program at the Yale School of Drama. After ten years of living in New York as a playwright and teacher, with a two-year stint in Cambridge and a year at Tel Aviv University, we moved to Ann Arbor for four years and from there to DC.

Chicago was long gone as place for me to identify with artistically - even though, through my experience at Circle Rep, I got to know and admire the artists of Steppenwolf. John Malkovich's year in New York acting in True West and directing Balm in Gilead with a mixed Steppenwolf / Circle Rep ensemble had a tremendous influence on my sense of what making urgent and immediate theater was all about. Along with Steppenwolf, David Mamet was another early influence and I was very proud of the fact that we grew up a block apart from each other, separated by a decade. Of course now I'm less proud of that.

My wife and I came to DC in 1997 because we both needed new full time jobs and she won the sweepstakes, landing a gig at the World Bank. I desperately wanted to move back to New York, but we couldn't afford it with two kids and New York University (NYU) offering me a salary of $4,000 a semester. I followed my wife to DC and stumbled into the Washington DC Jewish Community Center (DCJCC) offering to do research for the now defunct Ann Loeb Bronfman Gallery and its upcoming exhibit on the 50th Anniversary of the Hollywood Blacklist, a great exhibit ironically called "Banned, Censored, and Suppressed."

At about the time I started helping with the research, the JCC offered me the artistic directorship of Theater J for a salary of $26,000 a year. I tried to negotiate for more, but the CEO at the time, the wonderful and wonderfully stubborn Arna Meyer Mickelson, wouldn't budge. I took the job and kept the $8000 gig at NYU and I led a triangulated life for a time, dividing my passion between Theater J, independent playwriting, and commuting to NYU. And at a certain point, the Theater J thing began to take off. I developed a passion for producing. I let go of NYU (too taxing), and poured my playwriting ambitions into the Theater J programmatic stream, developing more plays by other writers than I was able to keep writing myself. I still managed to produce seven of my own plays out of the 129 productions I oversaw in my tenure there.

How different is the DC theatre scene today from when you first arrived here?

It's better in a great many ways, but I still rue the fact that we keep losing so many wonderful actors, either to New York or Los Angeles, or to graduate programs in psychology. I totally understand it, but it totally saddens me that we can't really maintain a citywide repertory company. It's amazing to watch young actors grow older and mature in their craft. Look at the huge success story that is Tim Getman, local boy made marvelous. Or look at Craig Wallace, who just closed out a run of Satchmo at The Waldorf with us at Mosaic. He's barely stopped working in the 30 years since he walked out of Howard University. Or Holly Twyford. The list goes on and on of huge achievements. So why did Alexander Strain have to go to graduate school, I ask you?

I don't think the city has recovered artistically. I really don't. But in all other ways, we're better. We're more diverse. We're a lot less institutionalized at the grassroots level - at least it feels that way to me. Fringe - aka the Capital Fringe Festival - has had a tremendously democratizing impact on local theater culture. A whole lot of new companies have been born because of the Fringe energy to de-institutionalize. And of course, the opening up of the city's other quadrants beyond Northwest and Southwest. There's thriving theater in Southeast and Northeast. There's a Black Theatre Festival, the Atlas Performing Arts Center, and the Anacostia Playhouse. We're a big success story, DC is. Except for the defection of Alexander Strain, who was and is irreplaceable. The maturation of theaters like Woolly Mammoth... I find their evolution tremendously inspiring. The Women's Voices Theatre Festival, a huge achievement. There are many more things to crow about and go on about. You know another thing that I think is great about DC theater now? Well, I was going to say, that it was able to give birth to and sustain the launch of Mosaic Theater Company, but I think that's a question coming down the pike here - I just checked - so I'll stop crowing.

How did you come to be the Artistic Director at Theater J?

It was founded in 1991 by Martin Blank who's still producing, writing and teaching in this town. And the second Artistic Director was Randye Hoeflich, and she also stayed three years at the helm, transitioning the company from its tiny 35-seat boardroom performance space on Jefferson Square, to the 236 seat Cecile Goldman Theater where she produced a mini season in 1997 to an average of 24 people a night. It was a $90,000 budget the first year I got there. We built the theater as a team and Arna helped maintain a trajectory of smart growth where the budget went up by about $80,000 season after season. Eventually it got to $1,700,000. I think that means we must have abandoned the smart growth trajectory at some point and just went bat-shit crazy in our budgeting - I joke because I love. We basically just seized on the successful seasons we were having and kept adding to the repertoire. There was a lot of joy in that building process that lasted throughout my tenure there.

During the eighteen years you were at Theater J you presented many politically-driven pieces of theatre, meaning plays dealing with overseas conflicts etc. Did you choose those pieces based on what you like to see when you go to the theatre, or did you feel that was the kind of theatre that you wanted your audience to see and talk about afterwards?

I programmed my passion. I programmed my convictions. I programmed what was urgent and was being advocated for by others I cared about. I programmed by seeking a consensus amongst hard-working staff and dedicated council members. The only regrets about programming were the projects we were too small to get, that the bigger companies were able to land. That's not really a regret; just a reality. You can't produce everything you love. You don't get the right to. You learn so many lessons as a producer: the importance of balancing your line-up; the imperative of making money on some shows; and the importance of losing money for other things - like new plays - that feed the soil and nurture the field in unquantifiably rich ways.

As we all know, running a theatre company is a full-time job but you also teach college students. How do you balance the two jobs?

I hire hardworking teaching assistants who do more grading than I do. The teaching isn't that hard. The students are absolutely appreciative and generous. I still get nervous before every semester trying to figure out what we're going to do and how I'm not going to reveal myself to be a fraud. Fortunately, I haven't had a teaching crisis since 1991. I had a bad one then, teaching a course at University of Michigan that I'd never taught before (Adaptation). I thought I would have a nervous breakdown the night before the class. It's the teacher's nightmare that sent me right into therapy - one of the happiest and more empowering and emboldening undertakings of my middle years, a passage I'm still enjoying.

You are now in season two of your brainchild called Mosaic Theater Company. What is the biggest lesson you learned from your first season that carried over into season two?

Walk the talk.

Don't just say you believe in Diversity. Prove it. At every stratum.

Staff. Board. Artists. Audience. Over and over.

Commit to Inclusion, Equity, and Accessibility.

Reckon with the reality that it's really hard to get everything right and please every constituent all the time, but be true to your values. Live them out fully.

Can you please tell us about the new series at Mosaic Theater Company that your current production Milk Like Sugar is a part of?

It's a clever formulation of our brilliant Marketing Director, Chase Meacham. I decided to call the season "Clamorous Encounters: Intercultural, Iconic, and Comic," but that's a whole lot of words. Chase sees the three youthful plays we're unspooling this coming month, the next, and then the next as all being part of an initiative to highlight issues affecting young urban teens and millennials. According to Chase's press release, Milk is story about young women coming of age in a time when issues of acceptance, mentorship, and materialism challenge the dreams and ambitious of so many teens. And it's followed by the DC premiere of Philip Dawkins' Chicago based LGBTQ comedy Charm, and the world premiere of Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm's play set in a Baltimore high school called Hooded: Or Being Black for Dummies.

If we don't get a younger audience for these upcoming shows than we did for our record-breaking hit, Satchmo at The Waldorf, maybe I'll shoot myself - in the toe. But I'm confident I won't have to. You program young, and young will come - more or less - some of the time. The young are unpredictable and undependable. We don't just want a younger audience. We want as diverse an audience as possible. We're not fully there, but we are getting there.

What are you most looking forward to as Mosaic Theater Company continues to grow?

Building a real critical mass.

Being part of a movement.

Getting neighborhood revitalization right.

And, I'm looking forward to writing more again.

I'm looking forward to a breakthrough in the Middle East, kind of like the emergence of a Mandela and the falling of Apartheid. I think we'd all like to see the Occupation in Israel/Palestine come to an end and have plays from the region celebrate the possibility of a new beginning. I am looking forward to lots of big dreams coming true. Some will; some won't. I hope we all find rich new resources to fuel our growth. And yes, I hope we can hire Alexander Strain for at least one encore performance. And Rick Foucheux. And Jessica Frances Dukes. And my great friend Greg Germann. There are so many people it would be amazing to work with. I hear John Malkovich and Kevin Spacey are interested in directing things in DC. (I'm making this up.) Why not us, right? Let's keep dreaming!

Special thanks to Mosaic Theater Company's Director of Marketing and Publicity T. Chase Meacham for his assistance in coordinating this interview.

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