See/Hear: A Q&A With Kirk Boyd and a Farewell to the Willamette Repertory Theatre

See/Hear
Kirk Boyd on Eugene actors, Eugene audiences and his dream theater
by Suzi Steffen

This interview kicks off a new occasional blog series for me: See/Hear: The Local Visual and Performing Arts Scene. Sadly, although the Q&A was meant to be an introduction to the artistic director of the Willamette Repertory Theatre at a moment when his final staged play of the company’s ninth season was about to open, it also serves as a kind of valedictory address: The Willamette Rep just announced that it’s closing down after the run of Wild Oats because, frankly, it couldn’t make enough money.

I interviewed Kirk Boyd a couple of weeks ago, and though at the time he seemed concerned about how hard it was for the plays to draw a consistent audience — and I’d heard from other sources how badly the WillRep’s Proof did, financially speaking — he talked about reading scripts for next year and what plays he had picked for the three May Readings in Rep. (By the way, if you already have tix for Readings in Rep, you can get refunds at the Hult Center box office. Call 682-5000 for more info.)

UPDATE: Though I was unable to attend the press conference this morning, our gracious sometimes-reviewer and calendar editor Chuck Adams did. His report and the audio of the whole thing are available here.

On the other hand, we also touched upon the difficulties of the space — Soreng Theatre might be OK for some of the Bach Festival’s Discovery Series, but it’s a terrible, ridiculous space for performing plays — and some of Boyd’s disappointments with the Eugene audience, not to mention the night that all of his scripts (including his director-marked Wild Oats script) were stolen from his car.

Kirk Boyd grew up in Eugene and left for some years to work with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. But he wanted to run his own company, and once he moved back to Eugene, he spent a couple of years getting the WillRep together before kicking off the first season. I wasn’t able to talk much with Boyd on the day he sent out the press release marking the demise of WillRep, but he did say he wasn’t leaving Eugene for greener pastures. “I’m staying right here,” he said.

We talked for over an hour on the day that we met. This transcript has been edited for clarity and because of the subsequent news. As always, Boyd spoke smoothly and with eloquence about a variety of topics, ranging from why the Hult Center should be taken apart and rebuilt to why he preferred the attempt to work with Equity actors.

I encourage readers to share memories of the Willamette Rep and your thoughts about it for Boyd, general manager Michael Peterson and everyone associated with the company in the comments section of this post.

Read more here.

Suzi Steffen: What’s the hardest thing about running the Willamette Rep?

Kirk Boyd: The hardest thing is consistently keeping the attention of an audience in a time where music is so much on the front burner. Five of the Hult’s resident companies are music, and theater has only been here in fits and starts.

Fifty percent of single ticket buyers for our shows are brand new — they’re not in the database before that show, and we can’t seem to consistently get them back into the theater. That’s good and bad. The roots we have grown are wide but not particularly deep. It doesn’t vary very much — when audiences swell, as for A Christmas Carol, the number doesn’t go up, and when audiences are small, the numbers are the same.

What about the space? Soreng doesn’t seem particularly good for plays.

The space. The space, yeah, it’s in the top five on the list of challenges, but it’s not the top. The biggest challenge of the space is the formal proscenium [style], which is too formal for a steady diet. It’s a proscenium without an actual proscenium arch, and it’s not an intimate space.

Soreng is an afterthought; it’s physically wrong. The relationship of the stage to the audience is wrong: An actor’s instrument is his voice, and he has to shut down his instrument. The audience is below you, but you want to be up. If actors get caught in profile, their voices end up in Salem. They have to cheat out, play like it’s a fully proscenium house. We pulled off [2005’s] Drawer Boy, and that’s about as delicate as we try to get in there.

Also, you want the audience to feel like they’re part of a whole, and this one is disparate. This cube is way too large. In my dream world, the space is like Richard Hay with the Bowmer Theatre [at the OSF in Ashland] — the action and the audience are in the same room. It’s a combustible space where you can feel the energy.

In a perfect world, Silva Hall would be 1,500 [seats] and Soreng should be 350. [Ed’s note: Silva seats 2,500, and Soreng seats 500.] The numbers … well, the regular theater-going audience is about one percent of the population. We’re doing 12 shows; that means we need 6,000 people. [Ed’s note: The combined population of Eugene and Springfield hovers right above 200,000. One percent of the official 2007 count would equal around 2,600 people.] So we play to 50 percent capacity because the theater’s too big. One of the main reasons I do the curtain speech before every show is so that people don’t feel alone. It’s not a small audience, but it looks small in the theater.

I think this town has a problem. There’s this stigma about the Hult Center being elitist — but our tickets start at 12 bucks! In other towns I know, liberal means progressive. Here, people want it the way it was. But the people in town who think Eugene is a city and they ought to support the arts in the city do. Still, it’s getting butts in seats.

What can be done to improve Soreng?

I think a bomb. Blow it all up, and start over.

What about the acting pool in Eugene?

It’s a unique town with so many people coming here and instead of pursuing a career, they pursue a life here. A lot of actors working here for free could work in the real world. I came here because I thought I had the skills to run my own company, and once I realized I wanted to do that, I didn’t want to give up my quality of life. I grew up here, so I thought I knew the town. My folks are here, my children are here.

The one place that’s hard with actors … we’ve not had any Shakespeare recently, which is really tough to do because there aren’t enough trained actors in town [to deal with the complexity of the language]. But the level of artistic talent in this town is unique and extraordinary.

Why all of the effort for Equity actors?

I think it’s what makes us a professional theater. I came [back] into town, and when I looked at this, each theater had created a niche, but fully professional theater was not covered. It was never my intention to have the “institutional” theater in town; if you look at the playbill, it’s been varied. We’ve done a lot of different things. But what took was To Kill a Mockingbird. There’s not a lot of market in town for new work. Even Proof didn’t do well.

What about community outreach?

It’s not called that anymore. It’s called engagement.

But in any case, through the whole Cultural Policy Review thing, there was talk about experts engaging the community in different ways. So we started this thing called Rep Readers. We provided the plays and got smart people to lead discussions before the plays, and then after the groups saw the plays, there was a place to get together and talk about them again. For the first play [Lee Blessing’s Body of Water], we had five people, then zero for the second [A Christmas Carol] and one for the third [Proof].

We also do talks during the preview process, and the post-show discussions are very popular. Most of the audience stays. And of course the educational program is huge. We’ve had kids from 13 counties — students from Halsey, Lebanon, Waldport, Bandon and more. The south coast really looks to Eugene for their theater.

What else should your audience know?

When I see theater in other places, the work we do stands out. Other places might throw more money at theater, but moment to moment with the actors, it’s a real strength here. Our production of Proof could have gone anywhere and stood up against plays there.
But it’s a challenge to get people out, especially in the winter. I keep thinking, once we get them in the door, that’s all we need to do.

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Tickets for the Willamette Rep's last production, which runs through April 20, avalable here and by calling 682-5000.