This month Paula Tomei packs up her desk at South Coast Repertory after more than four decades at the Southern California regional powerhouse. She started out in the subscriptions department in 1979, not long after the theatre made a momentous move to its current Costa Mesa location, and later became its first managing director. In that post she helped develop many of SCR’s signature festivals, working alongside co-founders Martin Benson and David Emmes, whose unique artistic-producing partnership helped form the theatre’s distinctive, new-play-focused brand.
Emmes (who is also Tomei’s husband) and Benson officially stepped down from day-to-day leadership in 2011 but never fully left the building, even as successive artistic directors—first Marc Masterson, now David Ivers—have joined the staff. With Tomei’s departure, and the recent hiring of the Vineyard Theatre’s Suzanne Appel as her replacement, is it finally the end of an era at South Coast Rep?
I spoke to Tomei earlier this summer about working at her hometown theatre, changing attitudes toward subscriptions, and how to keep playwrights writing for the theatre.
ROB WEINERT-KENDT: I read that your degree was in economics. So what drew you to the theatre? Were you always doing it on the side?
PAULA TOMEI: It started in high school. I had a wonderful English teacher and drama teacher who was a mentor and a friend till the end (she passed away a couple years ago now), and really she gave us the class—meaning, she was the director, but we were in charge of selling tickets, marketing the show, getting the word out, building costumes. We did it all. That’s what a great arts program allows you to do: experience everything.
I didn’t know how much of the bug I had till I went to UC Irvine as a biological sciences major, thinking I would be a dentist. Two years in organic chemistry told me I wasn’t going to be a dentist. So I segued into economics, because at the time, UCI I didn’t have a business school, so I thought, well, it’s close, and I can still spend a lot of time in the arts, which I love. So I was over on the fine arts side of the campus a lot; I took a lot of dance courses, I had lighting design, stage management, all the theatre things that I loved.
Was South Coast Rep on your radar then?
The first play I saw there was Mother Earth, I think when I was in eighth grade. In high school, I was very lucky; there were 30 subscriptions that the school bought, so we got to go see plays. Our teacher was actually a member of the company when it was down in Newport Blvd. So we saw everything; we ushered. It was a fantastic experience. In college, I became a student subscriber, and I started working here in the subscriptions department in 1979.
That was a big year for the company, right after they moved to the location they’ve been in ever since, in Costa Mesa, across from South Coast Plaza. Was the mall already there at the time?
Gosh, yeah—we grew up riding our bikes to the mall, to Sears and Macy’s and Woolworths. It’s a whole other world now, but that was a hangout spot.
The 1980s is also when South Coast pivoted its focus to new plays, which has since become what it’s best known for. What was it like in those days?
I was working in subscriptions and it was booming. They had already outgrown the spaces in this building. There were storage rooms that became offices—they underestimated the boom in subscriptions when they moved from Newport Blvd. to here. It just took off, and they couldn’t hire people fast enough to help process subscriptions. It was a great place to learn. I basically grew up watching this theatre, in many different inner iterations, creating work along the way, especially the new plays, which is what kept me here. It was too good of an opportunity to leave. To meet with living playwrights? Come on! It was the best.
What was behind the pivot to new plays?
New work was something that South Coast Repertory always did and was interested in, and it really took off here in the early 1980s. There was planning going on as an organization around new plays and how to support them and take risks, and the season planning reflected newness regularly. There were programs early on, like the Hispanic Playwrights Project, and then what ended up becoming the Pacific Playwrights Festival. All of them rolled out as a way to support the new work—and as a response, in some ways, to David and Martin wanting to get plays ahead of some other theatres that were in line. You’re in competition for some plays in Southern California, and this was a way to work around that. That was the impulse: to build out those programs to support writers and keep them writing for the theatre, not just for Hollywood. It’s more challenging now than ever, right? They get scattered away so fast with all the streaming services and everything else. It was a strategy to keep playwrights writing for the theatre.
Someone in a piece I read called you “a fierce protector of the brand” of South Coast Rep. How would you define what that brand was? And do you think it gives the theatre a competitive edge?
It’s such an interesting question to talk about now. I think the brand is similar, but the work has changed and the model is changing, in terms of how much work we’re actually doing as opposed to what we were doing pre-pandemic, for all the reasons. The brand itself was in some ways easier, because we had two distinct seasons: the larger Segerstrom Stage, the smaller Argyros Stage. Not that the classics couldn’t occur in the smaller space—they could, but predominantly they were on the Segerstrom Stage, versus new work, which might you might see more on the Argyros Stage. I would say that the brand now is the same mix of plays, but there’s a little more flow in what that might look like in terms of classics, or contemporary classics, whatever you want to call them. I do think at the core of it, what is still very strong and is a strategic advantage, is the focus on new work. We call it our artistic research and development, R&D. That has not changed.
One thing I’ve heard theatre leaders talk about since theatres reopened is that the hits are much bigger and the misses much more devastating—the extremes are more extreme. I worry about what that means for new plays and the room they need to take risks and fail. Have you seen that same trend?
Absolutely. Innovation and risk and the development of the new is critical to the future of our art form, and it’s very important to South Coast Repertory and our mission. But the idea that you can program something that people will come to—I still don’t know if that’s true or not. I mean, there are moments of serendipity where you’re thinking, “Oh, perfect timing, this play needs to come back now,” or, “This musical needs to be done right now—we’ve got the perfect group to come together and the alchemy is there, and we’re going to do it,” and you hope that will resonate. But we’ve never been able to pick plays that we knew would sell. I mean, that’s not really what we’ve been trying to do. It’s great when it happens. Right now, the challenge we talk about with the audiences we’re trying to attract is: Do they even know it’s a new play? Maybe? I mean, we tell them it’s a new play. Okay. But do they know when something isn’t new? It’s a generational thing that everybody’s trying to figure out: What does bring them in? I think that what brings people in is compelling stories that resonate in your life and the world, and are well told, well made.
I’ve heard this from other leaders—that this emphasis on the new, even just putting a radical spin on a well-worn classic, often assumes that audiences are seasoned theatregoers who have all seen the classics dozens of times and are craving newness for its own sake.
To add to that: The schools, in some cases, aren’t really in sync with us in terms of our programming versus what they’re teaching. We talk to educators and wrestle with the fact that they’re getting ready to retire, and they’re not so sure their successors are going to step up and teach the work in the way that they did. It’s a generational shift for them too. So it’s on many levels right now.
A question I always ask folks who’ve been around for a while is, what has changed the most since you started—not just at your theatre but in the theatre field in general?
You’re asking the hard ones! What’s changed? Obviously, the notion of subscribing. The generation that I grew up in, that’s what you did: You just bought a series of things, you subscribed to a paper. It was a regular occurrence. Not so much anymore. I would say that’s one of the most challenging things to wrestle with, and think about what it means as you develop audiences and connect with your community. This community has grown. It was very entrepreneurial when it started, and now it’s a grown-up community. It’s new families, new people. It also used to be a given that you had corporations in your community and you would have corporate people serving on your board. We had automatic relationships with these companies in Orange County that were attracting employees, and one of the big attractions was the arts.
The biggest shift is that everything’s available in real time online, streaming or otherwise, the entertainment options. So what does theatre become now? We used to think, “Oh, talkbacks, aren’t they great?” Audiences appreciated them as a way to engage with artists, and some still do. But there are others who want more, and we’ve got to discover what that more is and how they are going to engage with the art. This goes back to audiences again, and what’s going to draw them in and keep them coming back more than one time. Those shifts in the way we receive art are significant over the decades since I came.
Last year I talked to Alan Brown at Wolf Brown, an arts consulting firm, and he put a finer point on the competition from streaming, which is that there’s so much good drama to watch at home, so it’s a harder lift to get people to come out to sit for a play. Musicals and spectacles and immersive experiences may have an edge, because you can’t get those on Netflix. It seems like that trend would affect a new-play theatre like South Coast Rep, right?
You bring up a really good point: It’s plays. We grew up in a time when we understood what plays were. You didn’t go in and get barraged by music and lights and lasers. Some of that stuff is really good, and some of it for me just doesn’t resonate. But that’s the challenge with the generation that’s going to those events, and then coming to see a play. What is that experience? How do we cultivate them so they know what to expect, and can actually feel something when they see it? Hopefully, it’s really good theatre; it has to be a really good play. Musicals are definitely being cited as a way to get people in, but you can’t do a steady diet of musicals.
And they’re expensive. I know you recently did a new musical, Prelude to a Kiss, which SCR originally produced as a play back in 1988.
That play was one of the first things that was commissioned and produced out of the collaboration laboratory in the early ’80s, so it’s come full circle.
I also remember enjoying the play Kimberly Akimbo at South Coast Rep back in 2001. Now that’s a musical too.
Oh, what a wonderful play that was. It’s so much fun to see it come full circle, like Prelude. I see that Kimberly Akimbo is gonna go out on tour, so I’m actually gonna be able to see that across the street, when it comes here as part of the Segerstrom Center’s Broadway series.
Talk about full circle! Looking back at AT’s coverage of SCR, it looks like we never did a big sit-down interview with the artistic leaders, as we often did with the likes of Adrian Hall or Oskar Eustis. Most of our coverage of SCR has been about the plays and the writers that started there, and the new-play festivals.
That’s great of you to observe, and thank you—because it has never been about us. It is always about the work. That was instilled through David and Martin. We talk regularly about the culture of “we,” which that means all of us get the work done together. That includes the board. It’s that shared vision and excitement around new plays, and everything else we do, that lifts us, and has gotten us to where we are now, and will continue to lift us in the future.
Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is the editor-in-chief of American Theatre.
