What I Learned From Martha Lavey About Vision and Leadership
By Al Heartley
My career in arts management started by accident. In college, I remember a teacher of mine in high school mentioning that I should try to get an internship while I studied theater. It was a good way to get experience with a professional company. So in my sophomore year, I looked around at theaters that might work as an internship and the kind of work that might interest. I was a director at the time and casting was always a huge conversation in both class and school auditions. So I decided that’s where I could learn more and work with a large organization.
I had no interest in New York and instead looked toward Chicago at both Goodman and Steppenwolf theaters. I gravitated towards Steppenwolf due to their recent success of August: Osage County and I remember Gary Sinse from Forrest Gump. There was really no reason for the casting director to hire me at the time - when I asked later why she picked me she remarked that she liked talking with me and that I came from a different area of the country.
Stepping into the offices of Steppenwolf, an old bank building with a giant banner for August on the front and a Tiffany’s jewelry below the offices, was nerve wracking. Who would I see? How would I compare to others who were in the industry. I was part of an artistic team where my fellow interns had vast amounts more experience and connections than I did at the time. I walked around an office where I could run into Austin Pendleton or Alan Wilder at any moment. It was absolutely daunting and as someone who had not met many celebrities was more than intimidating.
Each morning when I came to Steppenwolf, I usually arrived a little early before the hustle and bustle of staff. And usually I could find a thin, lanky woman putting spinach and a diet coke in the fridge. She would say, “Hello, Al, how are you?” At first, I did not know how to answer. Why was Martha Lavey, Artistic Director, talking to me as an intern? Why did she want to know my name? How was I supposed to answer her query of how I was doing? Even in the few minutes that she engaged with me, she felt warm and genuine as to the state of my existence. But I had no clue why she would care about it. She would constantly revisit conversations with me, including how my name (Alfred) sounded like an “old name,” but she liked it all the same.
What I discovered in that small interaction was that Martha cared enough about not only me, but it seemed like every person who worked at Steppenwolf. As an older manager now, I’m sure there’s some nostalgia in remembering her, but for a young and aspiring leader it was a reminder of just how important it is as a leader to care about each and every person who shows up to do this great work that we call theater and the performing arts. She asked me every time I saw her and somehow managed to remember details about my family and living situation in Chicago (I was living off of frozen meals and leftovers from donor lunches at the time). The impression that was left about me was how critical it is to care and value people to inspire them to higher goals and thinking about the organization.
This leads me to talking about the second important piece lesson from Martha about trying to answer to a higher calling through theater - the importance of values and vision.
Recently, I found a transcript of a speech online that Martha gave called the Pritzker speech. It is something that I revisited in the current crisis of faith in theaters and its survival. But what I found powerful about the speech was that it clarified a value about the way Stepnnewolf chose to operate in terms of its core values - citizenship.
As interns, we were drilled to know the values of the company (ironically, no one could ever quite recite the mission statement). They were ensemble, innovation, and citizenship. The first two values felt quite clear. Ensemble was a way of working not only as fellow artists, but also as coworkers and colleagues. The company had started as what became an ensemble tradition in Chicago. The second value, innovation, talked about how we could continue to push the boundaries of form and artistic expression. That made sense to me too. But citizenship? What in the world did that mean? How is a theater a citizen of a community? What does that mean in term of our duty to the organization and to the city? What citizenry were we serving and why? We asked Martha and leadership about it consistently and the answers were always a bit mixed.
But reading the Pritizker speech reminded me of how Martha conceived of Steppenwolf as having a reciprocal social, cultural, and political relationship with Chicago and its audience. She recognized that audiences had built Steppenwolf into the institution it had become today.
“The third, and highly instructive phase of our life is current and on-going: as we learned more about our audiences, we began to recognize not only what we owed our community but what we could learn from our community. We began to use the power of listening. We have become a part of a community that feels great ownership of Steppenwolf--audiences who have been coming to our theater for years; individuals, foundations and corporations who have consistently and generously supported us; trustees who have given their time and treasure to the theater; generations of staff members who have built the theater to its highest level of expressiveness; and audiences who have demonstrated great intelligence in their interpretive willingess and loyalty in their engagement. We have gained the confidence to open the conversation to these informed and caring partners in determining our course. What have we gained by revisioning ourselves as conversation partners to our city? Greater diversity in our artistic, staff, and trustee constituencies; a livelier conversation in our theater; a commitment to making Steppenwolf a public square, a home to life-long learners, a repository of our stories, a soul in a neighborhood. We are fortunate to live in a city that recognizes that artists, and the institutions that support their work, are essential to the quality of life in the city, and to its future. Chicago is a city that recognizes the great human need for beauty, for story, for the respite that the arts provide to engage our imagination.”
As I ventured further into the regional theater setting in my career, I realized that Martha articulated something that does feel missing when I talk to leaders of theaters - if you are born from a community, what responsibility do you owe as an institution to that community, city, and region? What are you there to provide? Who are you responsible and accountable to in a region? Martha’s speech reminded me of the greater calling that leadership and theatrical institutions can answer - we are actively part of a community as theater workers, not separated from it. She had a unique way of trying to inspire not only the staff, but the greater city and metropolitan area.
Martha combined the personal touch needed in leaders with the clarity of vision about the path forward. This is not to say that it was the right direction for Steppenwolf to take, but it was a bold way to position the theater as the fulcrum of difficult conversations in Chicago. Leaders can take a small page from Martha’s book to learn how to realize vision and values in large ways and in small ones. Both matter when it comes to leading a theatrical institution.
