The Intiman Wakes and Sings for Bart Sher

Bart Sher (Photo: Team Photogenic)

Saturday night Bart Sher had the Tom Sawyer-esque experience, he said, of attending his own funeral. The occasion was "A Bash for Bart," a gala in celebration of his decade with Intiman--the title of which he confessed to some ambivalence about, as someone who'd had his skull fractured by a baseball bat as a child. The establishment of a Bartlett Sher Artistic Fund, funded by $2,500-per-couple plates at a Tom Douglas-hosted dinner, made it an august evening indeed.

Laurence Ballard was spirited up from Savannah, Georgia, to deliver an erudite envoi to Sher's 16-play stint: Namaste Man, The Skin of Our Teeth, Uncle Vanya, Prayer for my Enemy, Richard III, Three Sisters, Singing Forest, Our Town, Nora, Homebody/Kabul, Titus Andronicus, Arms and the Man, Nickel and Dimed, Cymbeline, The Dying Gaul, and Servant of Two Masters. (Misha Berson recaps the years here.)

"Woe," pronounced Ballard, to the actor who encounters Sher unprepared. And woe of a different sort to the actor who has prepared but has made stupid choices.

Broadway's Kelli O'Hara (from Sher's Light in the Piazza and South Pacific) sang, and literally kicked off her shoes. (Who knew Harry Connick, Jr., had done an arrangement of Piazza's "Fable"?) Ida Cole--the philanthropist who saved the Paramount and its Mighty Wurlitzer Organ for us--wished the Shers well, and reminisced about her former neighbors, saying they'd become family.

It was sweet--you got the feeling Bart would not sit still for cloying--and respectful, a paying of tribute to an artistic director who, these days, cannot be hired enough in New York, whether it's for theatre (Odets at Lincoln Center), musical theatre (Broadway's South Pacific), or opera (he passed the Met audition handily with Barber of Seville).

"Somewhat eclipsed by his recent successes in New York...," says the 2008 New York Times Magazine profile, "is the fact that he remains artistic director of the Intiman Theater in Seattle, a job he has held since 2000 and has done sparklingly enough to help the Intiman earn the 2006 Tony for Outstanding Regional Theater." (Predictably, they get Intiman's full name wrong: it's Intiman Theatre.)

The provoking thing for me--and to judge from Bart's address, it weighed on his mind as well--is that Intiman's successes, in Seattle, were eclipsed by a refusal to support Intiman's financial existence. Without making invidious comparisons among local theatre companies, the fact is that there weren't many other organizations in town during the "lost decade" that were winning Tonys, birthing shows broadcast nationally on PBS, or doubling the size of their audience.

But in 2007, with Sher's star ascended, Intiman's managing director was quoted in the Seattle Times worrying about meeting payroll. Intiman had a $6 million budget at the time. (In fairness, ACT Theatre nearly went under itself in 2003, and has just posted its first budget surplus in four years.) That story closed with this line from Laura Penn: "I believe Intiman can find a way to keep Bart here for many years, if we can support his artistic vision."

In the arts in Seattle, there's always another organization that has it easier. When I worked at the Opera, Symphony life was an object of envy: a new hall, and all they have to do is put musicians on a stage. When I worked at the Symphony: the Opera--they had it nice, with the million-dollar sets and star singers.

So I felt for Bart when he recounted how Peter Donnelly alerted him to the pecking order for fundraising: Seattle Rep first, our pride and joy; then ACT, our modern jewel; and then Intiman. (Which, in fact, generally accords with the size of their budgets, respectively.) It rankles when tradition, habit, and social circles dictate philanthropy rather than the artistic endeavors themselves.

For Light in the Piazza, which would go on to receive eleven Tony nominations and six Tony awards, Sher could muster a budget of $500,000. The Intiman Piazza was a chamber musical with bigger dreams, and the critical reception was cool--it's hard to believe now the creative team of Lucas/Guettel/Sher wasn't drowning in champagne and caviar from the get-go, but Sher will set you straight on that.

He's not without a sense of humor about it--at the Bash, he recalled Laura Penn summoning him downtown early on for a meeting with WaMu bankers about critical-condition finances: "I can tell you that none of us thought, sitting there, that ten years later we would still be here, but the banks wouldn't!"

But a decade of hand-to-mouth is bruising...and of course Seattle also has its share of people for whom success outside Seattle is a kind of treason, and a "Locals Only!" contingent of actors and theatre professionals. You get it from all sides. Even indie-credible playwright Paul Mullin can't bring up Seattle as a world-class theatre town without the whiff of boiling tar and the clucking of outraged chickens.

Kate Whoriskey (Photo: Chad Batka)

But clearly there is also a complacency on the funding side, one that errs in favor of institutional track records, regardless of the works planned for next season. But I think that, of a piece with that rejection of "world-class" (by all means, let's not make works that audiences outside of Seattle might enjoy, too), there is an understandable unwillingness on the part of a major donor to invest in something that Seattle hasn't demonstrated we value. That we won't brag about. That we won't invite the world to come see.

Bart Sher's Seattle legacy does not have to be carefully burnished memories of sixteen plays--four of which I defy any company in any city to outdo--but an awakening to the artistic gifts we have around us while they are around us. Helming the Intiman after Sher will be Kate Whoriskey, a director who seems no less talented and eager to engage the city. The Boston Globe predicts she has "the dazzling potential to make theatrical history."

I guess the question is: Will she make it here?