Susan V. Booth, the Artistic Director of the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, has been named the next Artistic Director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago, a dominant force in that city’s vibrant theater scene and one of the most influential regional nonprofit organizations in the world. the country.
Booth, 59, who takes up the position in October, will be the first woman to lead the Goodman, which was founded in 1922. She succeeds Robert Falls, who announced last September that he would be stepping down after 35 years at the helm. the helm.
The Goodman, with an annual budget of $22 million and approximately 200 employees, won the 1992 Tony Award for excellence in regional theater. Under Falls, it hosted more than 150 world or American premieres, while also helping to transform Chicago from a theater scene best known for actors to one recognized as a breeding ground for directors with artistic visions “too massive to be included in.” a theater in the store,” as Chris Jones, the theater critic for The Chicago Tribune, wrote last year.
The move will be a sort of homecoming for Booth, who attended Northwestern University for his PhD, led to theaters in the city, and served as Goodman’s director of new plays development from 1993 to 2001. Her husband even introduced her to the catwalk on the Goodman’s main stage on her last day of work.
In a phone interview, Booth said she was looking forward to diving back into Chicago’s rich theater scene, which she described as characterized by a muscular, democratic and ‘radically diverse aesthetic’.
“It was always a very fluid ecosystem, where artists bounced between punky freshman start-ups in the back of bars to the Goodman stage,” she said. “That fluidity meant that if there was a hierarchy, it had to do with your chops. It was glorious.”
Her arrival at the Goodman comes at a time of widespread leadership churn in Chicago theater due to retirement and upheavals around diversity and inclusion. She said one of her first tasks would be to find out “where Chicago is now,” both artistically and socially, to determine how best to reach the widest possible audience.
She said she also wanted to partner with the theater’s artistic collective to continue Goodman’s tradition of “treating classics as if they were new plays” and to give prominence to challenging new works.
“I love a classic and I don’t feel like relegating that work to other theaters,” she said. “But I like the level playing field that arises when you create new work.”
Booth led the Alliance in Atlanta for 21 years, where she doubled its operating budget (currently $20 million) and endowments, leading it to a 2007 Tony Award for Regional Excellence. The theater presented more than 85 world premieres, including six musicals that later went to Broadway, including “The Prom” and “The Color Purple.”
It also worked to develop relationships with young playwrights while cultivating new voices 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.
When asked about a signature project, she quoted a staging of “Native Guard,” former American poet Natasha Trethewey’s cycle of poems, which recounts both her family history and the history of black Civil War troops, originally staged in the Alliance and later on the Atlanta History Center, amid its Civil War collections.
“The theatricalization of it was as much about how the audience interacted with the work as it was about the source story,” she said. “It was a community event.”
It was “theatre designed to ignite dialogue, to evoke action,” she added. “That really appealed to me.
The 2022-23 season of The Goodman, programmed by Falls, will feature the world premieres of Rebecca Gilman’s play “Swing State,” about a Wisconsin community divided by political polarization (one of two productions being directed by Falls), and Christina Anderson’s “The Ripple, the wave that carry me home,” about a family fighting for the integration of a swimming pool in Kansas in the 1960s. There will also be a 30-year production of ‘The Who’s Tommy’, directed by Des McAnuff.
As for her own programming, Booth said she wanted the Goodman to be part of the mature political and social debates of the moment, without losing sight of the sheer pleasure of theater.
“I don’t know of a theater community in the country that doesn’t make the strange joy bomb,” she said.