Women Who Run the Show: Sarah Benson of Soho Rep

Second in a series for Women’s History Month

In last week’s profile of Angelina Fiordellisi, the first in BWW’s series on women artistic directors, the Cherry Lane Theatre AD said there definitely was a “boys club” mentality among off-Broadway artists and backers. But when the same question was posed to Sarah Benson, artistic director of Soho Rep, she said, “I don’t experience that at all. There’s so many female playwrights and directors and designers that we work with.”

Benson specifically excluded the downtown theater community—to which both she and Fiordellisi (whose theater is in Greenwich Village) belong. “Certainly not downtown,” said Benson, then added: “Well, certainly not in my experience, I should say. I don’t know what other people’s experiences are.”

Perhaps Benson hasn’t faced the same obstacles because she took over a theater 30 years into its existence, whereas Fiordellisi helms a company that she founded. Benson is also in charge of a smaller operation: The Soho Rep theater, which is actually located in Tribeca on Walker St., seats only 74 people, and ticket prices top out at $35. Or it could be a generational difference: Benson just turned 30 last year. “I’m sure the only reason I am able to operate without encountering a lot of bias,” Benson says, “is the pioneering work of the generation that came before—my predecessors, the women who were involved in founding many of the nonprofits years ago.”

One of those women, Marlene Swartz, established Soho Rep in 1975. After she left the company in the ’90s (she went on to co-direct Blue Man Group), it was headed by Julian Webber and then Daniel Aukin, both Brits. Benson’s fall 2006 appointment as artistic director returned Soho Rep to female hands, but kept up the post-Swartz tradition of British AD’s.

A graduate of King’s College London, Benson came to the U.S. on a Fulbright scholarship in 2002. In London, she’d co-founded a theater named Arion, which specialized in site-specific productions. She was first drawn to the stage to be on it, but says, “I was a terrible, terrible actor.” While she was still in school, “someone had the good sense to tell me that I didn’t have to be in plays,” she recalls. “So from about 18 onwards, I moved into directing.”

While enrolled in Brooklyn College’s graduate directing program on the Fulbright, Benson started working at Soho Rep. By 2004, she’d ascended to associate artistic director of the company and co-chair of its Writer/Director Lab. She has also directed plays at New York Stage and Film, HERE and La MaMa, and she’s curated new-works festivals in New York and Edinburgh.

The first production staged at Soho Rep under Benson’s leadership, Adam Bock’s The Thugs, won two Obie awards. The company was also honored with an Obie for sustained excellence the year she took over as AD. Expect additional honors for Benson when awards time comes around this year, for her direction of Sarah Kane’s Blasted, one of the biggest commercial and critical hits of the season. Last fall, while show after show posted their closing notice uptown, wait-listed theatergoers lined up outside Soho Rep for the chance to subject themselves to graphic depictions of rape, cannibalism and eye-gouging in Kane’s piercing war allegory. Blasted sold out its originally scheduled one-month run before it even opened and was extended twice. Benson herself was surprised by its success, even though she’d been aiming for some time to give the 1995 play its New York premiere. “Obviously I adore the play and think that Sarah’s work is just amazing, but I was shocked that it was so popular,” she remarks.

As unique as it was, Blasted epitomized Soho Rep’s penchant for unconventional fare, which has been its mission from the start. The play also showcased the theater’s emphasis on superb, innovative design—an emphasis that many small downtown theaters simply can’t afford to bother with. In Blasted, a hotel room is literally torn apart by a simulated bombing. Sixty Miles to Silver Lake, which played at Soho Rep after Blasted, also featured a set with parts that upended.

“We’ve made the choice to put the most resources we can into each project,” Benson says. “For a company our size, we’re know for valuing design and production values very highly.” Three months after it closed, Blasted is still stirring interest: Benson will discuss the show’s design at a free public forum in Gowanus, Brooklyn, on March 16 (click here for details).

All of Soho Rep’s productions this season are directed by women—Benson herself for Blasted, Anne Kauffman (who’d also directed The Thugs) for Sixty Miles to Silver Lake, and Kelly Copper on the upcoming Rambo Solo (co-directed by Copper’s husband, Pavol Liska). In 2003-04, Soho Rep produced four consecutive works written by women: Molly’s Dream by Maria Irene Fornes, Young Jean Lee’s The Appeal, The Suitcase by Melissa James Gibson and an adaptation (by a man) of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The company has a female executive director, Tania Camargo—who succeeded Alexandra Conley in 2008—and three-quarters of its board of directors are women. But Benson says she makes no special effort to present woman-created theater. “It’s not something I look for specifically. I’m just looking for work that I respond to,” she says.

Her priority instead is “work that’s specific to a theatrical idiom, that couldn’t happen in any other form—couldn’t be a TV show or a movie,” she says, explaining: “I’m looking for something that’s designed for a live format and that’s inventive too, and work that has a specific vision.” For example, Blasted “really spoke to our times; unfortunately, it’s a play that doesn’t get any less relevant.”

Soho Rep is engaged in play development as well as producing for its mainstage. New pieces are workshopped in the Soho Rep Studio, which Benson launched in 2007, and the Writer/Director Lab gives both playwrights and directors the opportunity to develop new plays. Both programs result in performances or readings, open to the public at no charge. “We think it’s important to stand behind new artists that we feel strongly about, right at the beginning of their careers,” says Benson. Even for mainstage shows, she notes, “we really try and create how we produce around the artists at hand—and even the specific project. It’s a very sort of tailor-made process that we run.”

Yet while Cherry Lane’s Fiordellisi doesn’t hesitate to characterize such nurturing and personalized attention as qualities more typical of female managers, Benson doesn’t really see any difference in how men and women run a theater. “Different people will, obviously, run a company differently, but I don’t think it’s anything straight down the gender line,” she says.

Soho Rep’s last show, Sixty Miles to Silver Lake—which traced five years in an adolescent boy’s relationship with his divorced father through their car rides home—was done as a coproduction with Page 73, a company focused on emerging playwrights that’s co-headed by a woman, Liz Jones. Benson knew the author, Dan LeFranc, from Soho Rep’s Writer/Director Lab, where he’d developed another play. “I was struck by his uniquely theatrical and funny voice,” she says, and thus was intrigued when Asher Richelli, Jones’ co-executive director at Page 73, told Benson about Sixty Miles when they met at a brunch. But neither Soho Rep nor Page 73 was in a position to mount the show on their own. “In the current times, coproductions are certainly something we’re going to see more and more of,” says Benson. “It was a good model for us to explore this year.”

While Benson has to deal, like everyone else these days, with economic constrictions, her company is managing to thrive. It’s had two-play seasons in the past, but for 2008-09 is presenting three shows. The season ender, Rambo Solo, opens March 21—a coproduction with Nature Theater of Oklahoma, an avant-garde troupe based in NYC that presented No Dice at Soho Rep to rave reviews in 2007.

Soho Rep also recently upgraded to off-Broadway status from the off-off-Broadway contract under which it had operated since its founding. And in the past year, it’s even been able to expand its staff, hiring a development associate. Of course, as Cherry Lane’s Fiordellisi pointed out, the major off-Broadway companies (many of them run by men) may have development departments in the double digits personnel-wise. Meanwhile, both Benson’s and Fiordellisi’s companies make do with five full-timers on the entire staff.

Asked what has most surprised her about being artistic director, Benson responds: “how many hours I spend here.” She says that by the time she became AD, she already “understood the company and the culture of the organization, and the work we did, pretty well,” but was not quite prepared for the “huge amount of time” her job requires.

“For a small company, taking on these ambitious projects with a small staff is certainly a challenge,” Benson continues. So is “the economic model of running a theater that only has 74 seats,” she says. “We make a conscious effort to keep our ticket prices low, so the model is built in such a way that the biggest piece of the financial pie is not coming from ticket sales.” She certainly doesn’t depend on that since instituting 99-cent Sundays: Per an initiative launched last season, every seat for every Sunday performance at Soho Rep costs under a buck. The company also saves money by eschewing Playbill in favor of a single sheet of paper (albeit tabloid or legal size and double-sided) as a program.

One of Soho Rep’s most distinctive qualities is the age of its audience: 75 percent are under 40, according to Benson. Even better from a business viewpoint: They are repeat customers. “We’re lucky enough to build that loyal audience base that come back to see everything we do. All our shows in general sell out,” she says.  

Between the audience loyalty, low overhead and “a circle of very substantial—for a theater our size—foundation support,” Soho Rep is “in a stable situation,” its artistic director says. “As a small organization, we’re lucky to be in a very strong position in that we’re nimble. We don’t have a lot of fixed costs, we’re flexible, and we’re able to make decisions on the fly and change things and respond to what’s happening.”

Benson feels just as sanguine about theater taking place outside her company’s doors. “There’s a lot of exciting work happening right now,” she says. “There’s a real vibrant community of new writers and directors and designers and people who are creating work that isn’t reliant on big budgets and is sort of tapping into that inventive and playful quality of theater-making. I see that across the board, in small and large theaters.”

Rather than dampening the creative spirit, the economic malaise could invigorate it, says Benson. “The danger with this kind of climate is that people feel like they have to program box office hits, which can have an negative impact on how much risk-taking people can do,” she says. “I’m hopeful it’s a time that people go back to the real values of why they’re doing theater. It can still be spectacular and exuberant without being big-budget.”

Photos, from top: Sarah Benson, the fourth artistic director in Soho Rep’s history; Marin Ireland and Reed Birney in one of the gentler moments of Blasted; Zachary Oberzan in Rambo Solo, opening this month; Sixty Miles to Silver Lake, starring Dane DeHaan (left) and Joseph Adams; Will Badgett (left) and Louis Cancelmi in 2007’s Philoktetes. [Production photos, top to bottom, by Simon Kane, Simon Friedmann, Monique Carboni, Paula Court]