INTIMAN Theatre

NTIMAN Theatre, now in its 36th season, was founded with an emphasis on international dramatic literature, a focus that reflected the background of its founder and first artistic director, director and translator Margaret Booker. Booker studied theatre as a Fulbright Lecturer in Sweden, and later returned to Stockholm at the invitation of the Royal Dramatic Theatre to study with the theatre and film directors Ingmar Berman and Alf Sjöberg. She named her new company INTIMAN (which means “the intimate” in Swedish) after a small theatre in Stockholm founded by playwright August Strindberg. Like its namesake, Seattle’s INTIMAN emphasized a resident acting ensemble, fidelity to the playwright’s intentions and a close relationship between actor and audience.

INTIMAN’s 1972 debut season, in a 65-seat theatre in Kirkland, launched with Ibsen’s Rosmersholm. Strindberg’s The Creditors, Sternheim’s The Underpants and Tabori’s Brecht on Brecht all followed at the Kirkland Creative Arts League. Under the artistic and administrative leadership of Megs Booker and John Booker, INTIMAN officially incorporated as a non-profit theatre in 1973. Over the next few years, the company mounted productions at the Cornish Institute and the Second Stage Theatre in Seattle, and by 1976 it was established as “Seattle’s Classic Theatre.” Among the actors in the company’s early years were Dennis Arndt, Megan Cole, Clayton Corzatte, Ted D’Arms, John Gilbert, Patricia Healy, Patricia Hodges, Lori Larsen, Richard Riele and Jean Smart.

In 1977, INTIMAN opened year-round administrative offices in Pioneer Square and hired its first general manager, Simon Siegl. Its programming included seasons of classics and “New Plays Onstage,” a series of staged readings of contemporary plays. INTIMAN’s audience and budget continued to grow, and the Theatre was awarded institutional status by the King County and Washington State Arts Commissions and a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, after a three-year planning process, it participated in Scandinavia Today, an international exposition of Nordic culture. INTIMAN presented staged readings of five contemporary works and two classics on its main stage, Ibsen’s The Wild Duck and Strindberg’s A Dream Play, in collaboration with top Scandinavian artists.

Led by Megs Booker and Simon Siegl, INTIMAN began to prepare for a move to a new performance space after it was announced that the Second Stage, its home for nine seasons, would be demolished to make way for the Washington State Convention Center. Over the next few years the company operated in locations all over the city, including the Broadway Performance Hall, on short-term rental agreements.

In 1985, Peter Davis joined INTIMAN as its first managing director and engineered a complete restructuring of the financial and administrative areas of the company. A former scenic designer, Davis negotiated a plan for INTIMAN to operate and manage its own facility—the Seattle Center Playhouse, located in the cultural heart of Seattle. Originally built for the 1962 World’s Fair, the Playhouse was given new life with a $1.2 million renovation. For the first time, all of INTIMAN’s operations were in one location—performance, rehearsal, production, shop and administrative areas. Holding a 22-year lease from the City of Seattle, INTIMAN moved into the renovated INTIMAN Playhouse at the Seattle Center in 1987.

INTIMAN’s 15th season opened in the Playhouse with a new artistic director, Elizabeth Huddle, an award-winning actor and director from San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre who had made her INTIMAN debut in 1981 with a widely praised production of Molière’s School for Wives. During her six-year tenure as artistic director, INTIMAN’s annual operating budget grew to more than $2 million, and its number of annual performances more than doubled, from 115 to 247. Among the notable INTIMAN productions under her leadership were classic plays by Shaw, Coward and Shakespeare.

Under the leadership of Huddle and Davis, INTIMAN more than doubled its required 3-to-1 match to successfully complete an NEA Challenge Grant program. The Theatre also launched one of its most important initiatives: the Living History arts-in-education program, which was developed in 1986 by INTIMAN artists and Seattle educators, including Roosevelt High School’s Ruben Van Kempen. Today, this innovative program reaches thousands of students annually in high schools across Washington state, from Seattle to rural communities. Nationally acclaimed, it has received a Kennedy Center Award for Excellence and the Golden Apple Award from KCTS for its contributions to arts education.

In 1988, the Theatre embarked on an ambitious world premiere—a dance/theatre stage adaptation of Peter S. Beagle’s novel The Last Unicorn, written by the author and Huddle, choreographed by Kent Stowell and featuring members of his company, the Pacific Northwest Ballet. Two years later, INTIMAN once again stepped into the international arena with its presentation of the Sovremennik Theatre of Moscow’s Into the Whirlwind at the Goodwill Arts Festival. The New York Times called the company, which was making its free world debut, the “theatrical coup of the festival.” In addition, INTIMAN presented the Sovremennik’s staging of Chekhov’s Three Sisters as part of its 1990 season.

In 1991, INTIMAN produced the world premiere of The Kentucky Cycle, Robert Schenkkan’s two-part drama spanning the lives of three families during 200 years of American history. The Fund for New American Plays awarded the largest grant in its history to INTIMAN for this production, and Schenkkan went on to win the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Drama—the first time the award was given for a play not yet produced in New York. The Kentucky Cycle opened to rave reviews at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1992 and played both at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and on Broadway in 1993 and 1994.

Warner Shook, director of The Kentucky Cycle, became artistic director in 1993. Under his leadership, INTIMAN built on its national reputation for helping develop new plays, both in full productions and through the New Voices play-reading series. Leslie Ayvazian’s Nine Armenians, Jeffrey Hatcher’s Smash and Ellen McLaughlin’s Tongue of a Bird all began as New Voices readings and had their world premieres at INTIMAN; these and other plays developed through the series have been produced theatres across the country, including the Mark Taper Forum, Manhattan Theatre Club and The Public Theater. During Shook’s tenure, INTIMAN also produced plays by such bold contemporary writers as Edward Albee, Athol Fugard, Lynn Nottage, Anna Deavere Smith, Paula Vogel and Chay Yew.

In 1994, INTIMAN became the first regional theatre company in the country awarded the rights to produce Tony Kushner’s two-part epic Angels in America after it won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for Best New Play. Part One: Millennium Approaches closed the 1994 season, and Part Two: Perestroika opened the 1995 season. Directed by Shook, the complete Angels in America reached more than 63,000 patrons over its two-year run and remains one of the company’s most enduring achievements.

Also in 1994, Laura Penn succeeded Peter Davis as managing director. During a tenure that would last 14 seasons, Penn guided the company’s efforts to advocate for civic dialogue and community building in the Puget Sound region and nationally. In addition to extending INTIMAN’s educational programs and civic partnerships, she created new business models, oversaw the establishment of the Intiman Theatre Foundation and successfully completed a remodel of the public spaces at the Playhouse.

Bartlett Sher became INTIMAN’s artistic director in 2000. In recent years, he has received national and international acclaim for his visionary productions, in Seattle and elsewhere, of classical plays, world premieres and operas.

In 2001, INTIMAN audiences enjoyed two major Shakespeare productions: Peter Brook’s touring production of Hamlet at the Mercer Arts Arena (which INTIMAN co-presented with Seattle Center and Seattle Repertory Theatre, ACT and The Empty Space) and Sher’s Seattle directing debut, Cymbeline. Sher went on to direct a new production of Cymbeline, produced by Theatre for a New Audience, at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, where it was the first American production of a Shakespeare play ever to be presented, and in New York, where it had an award-winning Off-Broadway run. Also in the 2001 season, Sher directed The Dying Gaul by leading American playwright Craig Lucas, who became the INTIMAN’s associate artistic director in 2002.

Nickel and Dimed, Joan Holden’s commissioned adaptation of Barbara Ehrenreich’s non-fiction bestseller about America’s working poor, was developed at INTIMAN and had its world premiere during the 2002 season under Sher’s direction. Following its Seattle debut, it transferred to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles; new productions have since been mounted around the country, landing the play on American Theatre magazine’s annual “Top Ten” list of the most produced plays across the United States.

During the summer of 2003, nearly 20,000 people saw INTIMAN’s first musical, the world premiere of The Light in the Piazza, written by Craig Lucas and composer/lyricist Adam Guettel, based on the novel by Elizabeth Spencer. It traveled to Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, where it won three Joseph Jefferson Awards, including Best Musical. Directed by Sher, it went on to play an extended Broadway run at Lincoln Center Theater and receive six 2005 Tony Awards, more than any other production. In 2007, it returned to Seattle for a special “homecoming” engagement at the Paramount Theatre as part of its National Tour, co-presented by Broadway Across America–Seattle, INTIMAN and Seattle Theatre Group.

Singing Forest, an epic play by Craig Lucas, had its 2004 world premiere at INTIMAN in association with AT&T: OnStage, administered by Theatre Communications Group. It received the American Theatre Critics Association’s annual ATCA/Steinberg New Play Award, honoring new plays produced outside of New York City. In less than a half dozen years, the company has produced three world premieres by Lucas—most recently Prayer for My Enemy, a collaboration with Long Wharf Theatre in 2007—as well as new adaptations of Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya. The ongoing collaboration between Sher and Lucas has been heralded as one most exciting and adventurous artistic partnerships in the American theatre today.

In 2004, INTIMAN also launched its American Cycle, a five-year series of classic American stories, civic dialogue, community partnerships and educational programming for multigenerational audiences. The Cycle, which began with Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, directed by Sher and starring Tom Skerritt in the role of the Stage Manager, is an opportunity for INTIMAN and our community to explore—through the prism of artists and in a local context—how we came to be and who we might become as Americans.

Additional Cycle productions were Linda Hartzell’s iridescent staging of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, adapted by Frank Galati (2005); Kent Gash’s searing world-premiere adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son (2006); and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, adapted by Christopher Sergel and directed by Fracaswell Hyman, which became the best-selling production in INTIMAN’s history (2007). The 2008 production, scheduled to coincide with the presidential election season, is Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, adapted by Adrian Hall.

To create deep local resonances for all of the American Cycle productions, INTIMAN works with Community Committees of citizens who offer their expertise and guidance in the planning of the initiative’s public programs. American Cycle events take place on the INTIMAN stage, in its lobby and at a wide range of locations across the Puget Sound region. These annual programs include Front Porch Theater, a county-wide series of dramatic readings excerpted from the works in the Cycle followed by informal and lively conversations; two humanities forums, Writers & Artists and Open Minds/Open Dialogue; and an original performance created by Rough Eagles students from Cleveland and Roosevelt High Schools. A Core Audience also works with INTIMAN throughout our regular season to make personal connections between arts participation and community building.

The company’s achievements have been saluted nationally and locally. In 2004, it was the first Washington state company to be honored as a Leading National Theatre by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. At its 2006 Civic Awards, the Municipal League of King County named INTIMAN Organization of the Year (the first arts organization to be so honored), recognizing its outstanding contributions to the community. That year INTIMAN was honored with the Tony Award® for Outstanding Regional Theatre, the most prestigious award given in the nonprofit theatre field.

INTIMAN’s legacy is defined by the boldest vision in the production of classics and new plays. It is rich with talent and amazing people—artists who have made their homes in Seattle and nationally recognized artists, all of whom are dedicated to engaging our community in conversation, and to having an impact on our culture locally and nationally.

--- http://www.intiman.org