Hear our full chat on my podcast “Beyond the Fame with Jason Fraley.”
It’s the end of an era in D.C. as Molly Smith is stepping down as artistic director of Arena Stage after 25 years.
On Tuesday night, she will receive the Beth Newburger Schwartz Award at Arena’s Annual Gala event.
“Beth Newburger actually hands out the award,” Smith told WTOP. “People like Arlene Kogod, Ambassador Melanne Verveer, Mayor Muriel Bowser, Nina Totenberg have all received it before, so I am in excellent company. It’s women who have made a real difference in the lives of Washingtonians, so I’m really thrilled to be receiving it.”
The tribute is co-directed by Parker Esse (“Catch Me If You Can”) and Charles Randolph-Wright (“American Prophet”) with music director William Yanesh (“Dave”) along with Kate Baldwin (“South Pacific”), Kurt Boehm (“Carousel”), Will Burton (“My Fair Lady”), E. Faye Butler (“Oklahoma!”), Ed Gero (“The Originalist”), Meg Gillentine (“Cabaret”), Nehal Joshi (“The Music Man”), Brad Oscar (“Damn Yankees”), Kristyn Pope (“Anything Goes”), Maria Rizzo (“Fiddler on the Roof”), Nicholas Rodriguez (“Carousel”) and Kathleen Turner (“Mother Courage”).
“These are all people that I’ve worked with over the past 25 years, so they’ve been an important part of the life of Arena and an important part of my life as a director,” Smith said. “They’re going to be doing songs from some of the great musicals I directed, so you can imagine everything from ‘Oklahoma!’ to ‘Cabaret’ to ‘Damn Yankees.’ … It’s going to be through the whole building, out on the terrace, upstairs in the café, down in the open lobby spaces.”
Born in Yakima, Washington, Smith moved to Juneau, Alaska at age 16. She initially attended the University of Alaska at Fairbanks where it dropped to 65 degrees below zero. She transferred to Catholic University in D.C. and then earned her master’s degree in theater from American University in 1978. While traveling the world, she decided to come home to Juneau and create Perseverance Theatre, which she ran from 1979 to 1998.
“I was traveling in Europe when I was 19 years old with a backpack on for three months and I just decided I don’t want to be a lawyer anymore, I’m going to follow my heart and start a theater in Alaska,” Smith said. “For the next seven years that’s what I did, I learned everything I could from lighting design to box office to creating plays, and when I was 26, we moved back to Alaska with 50 used theater seats and started the theater six months later.”
She’ll never forget getting the call from a headhunter named Greg Kandel about taking over Arena Stage.
“When I was a student in D.C. at Catholic University and American University, I had a mini-subscription to Arena and I watched everything Zelda [Fichandler] did, and [Greg] said, ‘You share the same values,'” Smith said. “I said, ‘I’m in.’ … I knew that Washington D.C. is a crossroads of America, so this would be the perfect theater to lead as artistic director. It’s been the journey of my life. I have adored this audience, which is the smartest in the country.”
When she arrived, countless friends and colleagues urged her to direct musicals, including her partner Suzanne, but she really didn’t think that it was a genre that she wanted to explore. Turns out, she was a natural.
“I hated musicals when I came to Washington D.C.,” Smith said. “The first one that I did was ‘South Pacific’ and I fell in love with it. I woke up the next morning and said, ‘I was born to direct musicals.’ [My favorites] I’d say: ‘South Pacific,’ ‘Oklahoma!,’ because we opened the theater with it, and ‘Anything Goes,’ because it had some of the best tap-dancing in town. … ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ started here at Arena and went around the world. We started it.”
As for non-musicals, her list of acclaimed plays is prolific, including her Power Plays initiative.
“[My favorite] plays: ‘How I Learned to Drive,’ which I directed in the first season and commissioned in Alaska at Perseverance by Paula Vogel and it won the Pulitzer Prize,” Smith said. “‘Sweat’ was another one by Lynn Nottage, a co-production by ourselves and Oregon Shakespeare Festival that also won a Pulitzer. … One this year is ‘Angels in America,’ a landmark production of Tony Kushner’s play. … And we’ve done nine of the 10 August Wilsons.”
Founded in 1950, Arena Stage was one of the first non-profit theaters in America. It was originally located downtown near New York Ave. before moving to an old brewery near the Kennedy Center. It moved to its current location in Southwest D.C. in 1960 and received a massive renovation into a three-theater center in 2010.
“I spent 12 years of my life on the creation of the building, the ideas with architect Bing Thom … and raising the funds,” Smith said. “This center drove all of this development in Southwest Washington. This was the forgotten quadrant. No one wanted to come here. … When we put our spade into the ground, suddenly all of the developers jumped up because they saw opportunity. Now it’s the hottest area in the city — that was driven by Arena Stage.”
After literally remaking the city in physical and ideological ways, she realized that it was time to take a bow.
“This is 25 years, there’s a beauty to that number, and I really felt like I had almost finished everything I wanted to do — and that’s powerful, because I’m a builder, that’s my personality type,” Smith said. “I was turning 70 and I just felt like, ‘OK, what else do I want to do in this one wild, beautiful life I have?’ I want to be vital and physically active, I want to travel a ton … and I’ve gone back to pottery again, which is pretty thrilling to me.”
Find more information on the gala here.
Hear our full chat on my podcast “Beyond the Fame with Jason Fraley.”
