A Transcript of Part 2 of our Conversation with Joy Zinoman
With Hosts Elizabeth Bruce and Michael Oliver
If you would like to read a transcript of Part 2 of our conversation with Joy Zinoman, you’re in luck. Below is the opening with a link to the whole conversation here.
Joy is a master teacher and renowned theatre director and producer. She founded Studio Theater and the Studio Acting Conservatory in the 1970s and has been teaching and directing for over 50 years in the USA and abroad.
Before retiring as Artistic Director from Studio Theater, she directed 70 productions, and Studio garnered over 225 Helen Hayes Award Nominations. She has received numerous awards, including Outstanding Direction and Visionary Leadership in the Arts.
Her training was at Northwestern University, Radcliffe College, and American University.
For more information about Joy, click here and here.
Glossary
This is part two of our Theatre in Community interview with Joy Zinoman, the legendary founder of DC’s Studio Theatre and the Studio Acting Conservatory. To refresh your memory, in Part 1, Joy talked about her 14 years in Asia before returning to DC to found both the Conservatory and Studio Theatre. There, with designer Russell Metheny, she created a unique, intimate theatrical style that pushed the pure aesthetic of theatre into the forefront. In part two, Joy discusses the rise of Studio and the architectural development of the, quote, “Zinoplex” as one of DC’s most important theater institutions. We also discuss her contributions to the evolution of Washington, DC into one of the country’s foremost professional theater markets.
A quick note to listeners: On each episode’s post, we’ve included a glossary of theatre terms and names referenced in the interview.
Michael: You were the artistic director of Studio Theatre for 32 years and then you stepped down in 2010. Now, I've read that you directed about 50% of the productions, I think, something like that.
Joy: I don’t think that's exactly true. Because there were five shows a year in the regular season and I would direct two of them.
Michael: Two of them.
Joy: So it's not 50%.
Michael: So it's more like 40%.
Joy: And then when we started 2nd Stage, which was another program within the theater, developing it—and that's a very important thing, too, that happened. 2nd Stage would do three or four shows, so there were times that we did 10 or 11 shows a year. Actually, there were three different programs. There was the Season, which was a big artistic and financial driver of which I did two of the five shows, I think pretty much every year.
Michael: Sure.
Joy: Then there was 2nd Stage, which was run, first of all, by students and people in the theater that wanted an opportunity to work but could no longer work at the Studio Theatre because it had quote unquote, “gotten too big.” The actors were, we started to cast out of town, the union contracts tightened, there was a professionalism or something, I don't even want to call it that, I don’t mean that, but that meant that the people who before had been a part of it were in competition with these national forces.
Michael: And that must have been about 1990 or so when that started to happen more.
Joy: Yes. And a group of people in the theater, Kathy Redmond, who passed away, Keith Alan Baker, who also passed away, decided that they wanted—it was like, how can you generate that same spirit that was there before at the beginning? And I said, “Okay, we will give you a hundred thousand dollars a year. You don't have to make any money. Not a dime. You have to return that hundred thousand dollars and you can do whatever you want.” As a way of having people in the who were working in the theater also make theater. And that was a very important thing because they did shows and had a kind of aesthetic that was very unlike mine. So there was this diversity. Keith was interested in Jerry Springer: The Opera and all sorts of trash like that.
Michael: Yes, I remember.
Joy: I had nothing to do with that, aesthetically. He also wrote a lot of shows. So it was like this very original work about whoever, you know. So he had totally different aesthetic. And I think it is to our credit that we allowed that within the theater that had a different aesthetic.
Michael: It's almost like a special theater within a theater.
Joy: It was! That's right. It totally was. It was non-union people. Again, everybody could audition, whereas, I could no longer have open auditions, which was a cornerstone of my rigorous values before.
Michael: Okay. Your process.
Joy: So it would be 600 people who would come to audition at that point, when we had open auditions. And you couldn't do it anymore. You couldn't keep all of those old ideas right. But the 2nd Stage could. So as we became—I still don't call it commercial, but it probably was more, you might say, maybe like other theaters, then we had 2nd Stage, which continued to have open auditions, always could preserve those ideas that the theater was founded on.
And then there was a third program in the theater, which people don't remember, but which is really important, and that was, we called performance art, but it was really special events from New York in those days. Paul Zaloom, David Cale, Eve Ensler, Will Power, Lypsinka. These, my son at the New York Times goes to review. Some of those people came to the Studio and did one-person shows. At that time, a lot of the, actually, because he was seeing stuff in New York in this sort of alternative universe and would tell me about it. Now these people are mainstream, are known, but it was like, at that point, “Oh, let's get that!” So we had this program of solo pieces by people. And it was like, now, if you see Mike Daisey at Woolly Mammoth or you see a comedy special on Netflix, oh, that's a—but we did that in the ‘90s, constantly. And so it was an add-on to the subscribers. And then, eventually we even started to bring in some little productions, Rain Pan 43 from Philadelphia, The Civilians, Tarell McCraney’s The Brothers Size.
Elizabeth: Oh, yes. Amazing production.
Joy: It was amazing.
Elizabeth: Yeah, amazing.
Joy: But that came from the public in New York, in that program of bringing things here. People forget. That was a separate energy. So, special events, for what it started, what had been this pure, we're gonna do these productions and study style, and then had come to be a little bit more contemporary, issue-oriented in the primary theater. Then, artistically, had these three different parts which emerged. The Studio Theatre, which cared a lot about literature. It did. I always cared about style. Early modernism as opposed to the earlier fixation on really diverse style, so, Pinter, Beckett, Albee, in addition to realism. We also did a lot of contemporary British and Irish plays during that period, Caryl Churchill, Martin McDonagh, and I became enamored of Stoppard and did many great productions of Stoppard plays. And he came—
Elizabeth: Wow.
Joy: So, on a kind of an international level, this little crappy theater on the 14th Street, the sky was the limit. There was no stopping us in terms of what we were gonna design, what we were gonna do, who we were gonna get. But at the same time, there was this alternative New-York-centric-one-man-show-bringing-things-in aesthetic and there was the rise of 2nd Stage.
Michael: So Studio basically had shows running all the time by this point. They had all these different programs, there was always a show probably going on at some point.
Joy: More than one.
Michael: Yeah, more than one. You probably had, you were developing maybe multiple, sort of, audiences or communities.
Joy: Absolutely.
Michael: And then obviously you were hoping for some bleed off from the main repertory to the 2nd Stage, etc. I remember back in the early ‘80s, Bart Whiteman talking and that's why he opened three theaters on 14th Street so that he would always have a show going on. His philosophy was you gotta have a show going on all the time and theaters going on all the time to make people comfortable going there.
Joy: Yeah, more.
Elizabeth: More is more.
Joy: Yeah, more is more. And then, I believe architecture is destiny.
Michael: I agree with you. Could you talk about?
Joy: What drove us then was the need for more than one theater. And architecture was destiny. If we were gonna have these programs, then we needed more theaters, but we wanted more theaters to be like the theater that we had. And we renovated that theater on Church Street at least once. Maybe after the initial time, two or three times, and then across the street, this building became available on the corner of 14th and P. But that's another long story about architecture and real estate and destiny. By the time we found out about it, someone else had rented that space with a 10-year lease. But, again, not willing to be stopped, I sublet that building. First a part of it and then another floor and then the whole building and built a million-dollar theater in those days in a building that we didn’t own.
Elizabeth: Wow.
Joy: So that time, we raised money to build what's became the main theater, the Mead. You didn't know, you can't imagine what that was like. Who's gonna give you money to build a theater when you're gonna have to give it up? When you have only ten years? That was insane.
Elizabeth: I guess you wouldn’t have equity in the building. Yeah.
Joy: Exactly. You can’t keep it. So there was a promise in a way that, no, we will buy this building when the 10-year lease of the middle man is up. We endured this, paying rent to the middleman. And when that 10 years was up, we indeed did buy the building. And we subsequently bought two more buildings, so there was, like, half of the block, gutted the inside, 55,000 square feet, and built four beautiful little theaters.
Elizabeth: Which is the Zinoplex, yeah.
Joy: And I cannot tell you my pride about that. That was the genius of Russell Metheny, period. That he took those abandoned auto showrooms and designed every inch—it makes me weep, what it took to do that.
Elizabeth: Wow.
Joy: And he built beautiful theaters. I still believe that they are the gems in terms of architecture, theater architecture in the city. So, there was the main theater, which was like, how could we possibly have done that? But we did. That was all about finding an angel. Getting money. I’d been working for an angel for twenty years, but that's a whole other group of stories about how the donor community embraced the small theater movement in Washington. And it was the Meads who were very important. Now that changed. Gil went on the Arena board and did all kinds of expensive things. His wife Jaylee went on my board, that was the angel that we had worked for for 20 years.
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