Contemporary American theater wouldn’t be the same without a 65-seat theater tucked away on a quiet side street of TriBeCa. Founded in 1975, Soho Rep has produced new, often groundbreaking plays, including in recent years Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “An Octoroon” in 2014 and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fairview” in 2018.
Indeed, for the last decade and a half, theater has been doing quite well, with shows from a formidable cohort of playwrights, including Lucas Hnath, Anne Washburn, David Adjmi and Aleshea Harris. This golden age coincided with the tenure of Sarah Benson, who became Soho Rep’s Artistic Director in 2007 and left the institution on June 30.
Benson, who grew up in Britain, moved to the United States as part of a Fulbright program and earned an MFA in directing from Brooklyn College. She had run Soho Rep’s Writer Director Lab for two years before replacing Daniel Aukin at the company’s helm.
The first show Benson directed for the Rep, Sarah Kane’s bleak, gruesome “Blasted,” starring Marin Ireland and Reed Birney, became a sensation in the fall of 2008. That show was both an outlier (“Blasted” was then 13 years old) and Soho Rep would focus on new work) and a harbinger of many thought-provoking, destabilizing productions to come. Benson went on to direct “An Octoroon” and “Fairview” himself, breaking down the fourth wall and constantly upending audiences’ expectations of where the plays were going.
“The first time we worked together, it became the gold standard by which I judge all collaborations,” Jacobs-Jenkins said over the phone. “She is incredibly open and shockingly egoless. Her shows are the kind that you can go back to again and again because she has so much in every angle that it’s hard to watch them all in one sitting,” he added. “I’d say she’s radical, but entertaining and visionary.”
(Benson’s resume also includes “Skittles Commercial: The Broadway Musical,” which ranks among the most surreal Super Bowl ads ever made.)
In 2019, Soho Rep moved to shared leadership, with Benson, Cynthia Flowers and Meropi Peponides on an equal footing as directors. “Sarah has an incredible design mind and I’m a much more abstract thinker,” Peponides, who also just left, said on the phone. “We were able to round off each other’s skills in terms of how to make a big, wild, ambitious idea a reality.” One such idea was Project Number One, which was announced in September 2020 and offers theater artists a living wage when developing new work for Soho Rep.
Now a free agent, Benson has several projects in the works, including César Alvarez’s “NOISE (A Musical)” at Northern Stage in Vermont later this month and Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs’s “Teeth” at Playwrights Horizons early next year . At a coffee spot near her home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, the director, 45, talked about her vision for theater and her plans for the future. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Did you leave because you wanted to spend more time directing and less time on paperwork?
That’s part of what led to this moment. I’m ready to be able to say yes to more projects. It’s been an incredible gift to work at that level of artistic risk and be surrounded by other artists who work at that level of risk. It has really been life changing. And it’s a lot [laughs].
Did you have any management experience before Soho Rep?
I had experience as an artist, that was it. But as a director, you’re in a position of leading and figuring. I think that the skills of an artist are actually very suitable for leadership.
Why choose “Blasted” for your first gig as director at Soho Rep?
Marin Ireland initiated that project. I had always loved that play, but for me it was about the Northern Ireland conflict. So I read it again, and I got a shock, like, “Oh no, this is about civil war and what’s happening now.”
Need a shock to decide to do a play?
Immediately I begin to imagine images and feelings. I always pay attention to the feelings I get because that’s the best information that leads me to “What’s the real stuff? What can I add to this material?” I always try to figure out that charge.
You have directed very different plays, but the only rule is that your stagings are not only surprisingly entertaining, but also avoid the naturalism common in American theater.
To get to an honest place for an embodied conversation about joy and pain, and how closely we can look at those things together – naturalism just isn’t there for me. Realism is a closed system for me. It’s like, “Here’s the thing, look at it.” I’m much more interested in something where the audience has the space to go in and complete the event through that live theater feedback loop. People want to see ambitious work and things they haven’t seen before. They want to be challenged.
What are your first steps when you start working on a new show?
“What’s the problem?” is always interesting to me so I will often start from there. I do a lot of work on my own initially, reading and researching and images, and kind of starting from that place of, “Where do I feel the heat and the energy? What makes me feel confused? I’ve been fortunate enough to have these phenomenal, deep collaborations with designers where we’ll meet early and often and really approach it as conceptual art, or that design can really inform the text in many cases.
How has Soho Rep changed as an institution over the last 16 years?
With Meropi and Cynthia, we completely changed the planning horizon of what was possible. We commission to produce, so when we commission an artist, we are going to do what they write. So it’s been removed from agents filing plays. People still kind of do that, of course, but we don’t have a literary department — it’s much more about building relationships with artists and committing to them for the long haul.
Do you think that as a director you can now take advantage of completely different opportunities?
I am invited to do opera. There are a lot of big ideas and spaces that I’m in dialogue with right now. I’m like, yeah, I’m interested in scale. I’m ready for this. Soho Rep’s gift was this room where you could literally punch a hole in the floor for ‘Blasted’. You can be very rude with that room, go in there and have a conversation with that room, and that was great. But I know that room very well, and I’m excited to situate my practice in other types of spaces.
How do you think New York’s theater ecosystem has changed over the past two decades?
Around 2004, 2005 I was going to see eight or nine shows a week sometimes. It was really experimental in a very amazing way. I don’t feel homesick for those days because there were a lot of problems and nobody got paid. It was difficult. But the work was community oriented, and that was very real. I feel like that common pole star has evaporated and become much more focused on some mainstream success. But I feel like Covid ripped that apart and now I feel strangely close to that time from the beginning where it’s up to artists to decide what we want to make and see.
That makes you one of the few optimistic people in the field right now!
Everything goes to [expletive], it all falls apart. Even in the mainstream commercial spaces, the old model of tourists and everything, it’s gone, the subscription model is gone. There are many doubts that do not trust the public – it is really patronizing. But the audience wants to see something new. They don’t want to see what they’ve seen over and over again.