Cover Story: Going the distance

Susan V. Booth doesn't like to be a voice in the darkness.

During rehearsals, play directors often call out their "notes" from the theater seats to the cast onstage, invisibly booming their directives like the word of God. But Booth takes a different tack.

During a pause in rehearsals of the Pulitzer-winning Proof, the Alliance Theatre's fledgling artistic director approaches the cast. Stepping out of the darkened seats and toward the illuminated stage, Booth walks with a deliberate pace, very nearly a mosey. When she reaches Susan Pourfar, who portrays the play's protagonist, Booth speaks to her in soft, clear tones. One of those people who appears to never rush, Booth projects complete patience and complete confidence that she'll get where she needs to go.

Surprisingly, Booth's outward composure may not match her inner feelings.

"Every time I direct a play, I'm convinced I have no idea what I'm doing," she says. "Once I decided that that was not a bad thing, I felt much better."

Booth hardly comes across as someone plagued by self-doubt. Instead she exudes calm and poise, with flashes of dry wit and an ambition that you wouldn't want to get in the way of. When she talks about her work, she's unself-conscious and passionate, alternating high rhetoric with peppered bits of slang.

At first glance, it's easy to overlook, but there's a small, madcap touch in her impressive bearing. A silver clip, shaped like a person, clings to the edge of her left ear, just under her short red hair. It's a daily piece of her wardrobe, and noticing it is like looking at a classical portrait that has every detail just so, then noticing a Mad magazine cartoon in the margin.

Perhaps the Alliance requires fashion statements from its artistic directors. Her predecessor, Kenny Leon, was known for his high-top tennis shoes. "We all have our pretensions," Booth says of the ear cuff she's worn since the 1980s. It has no symbolic meaning, she says, but serves mostly as a conversation piece. Once during the preparation of a play, she noticed that two actors were looking in her direction and laughing to themselves. She called them on it, and they replied, "We think the little man tells you what to say."

The clip less resembles a whispering guardian angel than a steadfast climber, yet it must be giving her good advice. At the age of 38, she's worked her way up to a prominent place as the artistic head of Atlanta's major playhouse, having recently served as literary manager and director of new play development for Goodman Theater, Chicago's largest resident theater. An acclaimed freelance director on the national scene, Booth helmed some of the Alliance's most edgy and impeccable productions of the late 1990s, including previous Pulitzer-winners How I Learned to Drive and Spinning Into Butter.

Booth's also credited with championing vibrant new playwrights like Butter's Rebecca Gilman, but she has a life outside the theater, too. She's an ordained Presbyterian deacon (but has yet to join a church in Atlanta) and an avid triathlete. It's indicative of Booth's brand of self-motivation that, when she directs a show out of town, she says she spends all of her time not at the theater but at the gym — and she calls that "hedonism."

It's not that she's an overachiever, but Booth sure makes the rest of us look like we're not trying hard enough.

With the opening of Proof March 27, Booth directs her first show for the Alliance since taking the reins as artistic director last July. Proof offers a kind of reintroduction to Booth, as not only the play's themes but its setting express a great deal about the director's past, her current priorities and the place she's establishing for herself at the center of Atlanta's cultural community.

Booth is the point-person of a new generation of Alliance Theatre management. Leon's associate artistic director David H. Bell has been replaced by Kent Gash, late of the Alabama Shakespeare Company, while managing director Gus Stuhlreyer is expected to step down by the end of this season when a replacement has been found.

The theater also has a new general manager, Max Leventhal, with whom Booth has a particularly close relationship. In fact, they're to be married in June. That they've both been married before hasn't dampened their enthusiasm for the institution. As Booth says, quoting Samuel Johnson, "Second marriages are the triumph of love over experience."

Leventhal and Booth knew each other at Goodman, where Leventhal was a highly regarded production manager known for taking shows to Broadway and cultivating collaborations between performing organizations.

Booth explains that the "two-for-the-price-of-one" hiring was based more on the needs of the theater than the couple's convenience. "You like to think you're wildly unique, but when the Alliance search committee got down to three candidates, apparently we were all saying one thing in common, which was that the theater needed to operate far more frequently in partnerships."

Leventhal's reputation for facilitating such collaborations preceded him, independently of Booth herself. "So the theater came to me and said, 'You should know that if we make an offer to you, we're interested in exploring Max's working here as well.'" Booth stresses that Leventhal's hire was not a condition of her own, but she says it certainly made the decision to move here easier.

Sitting in the kitchen of their home on 26th Street, a cup of coffee in hand and a newly started crossword puzzle at her elbow, Booth admits that their mix of personal and professional relationship is rather unique. "We worked together at Goodman for years, but I was in New Play Land and he was a production manager, so though we would interact, it was nowhere near as daily or as constantly as we do in this situation. I think it works because we're both massively Type A. Sometimes at home we have to declare Work-Free Dinner or Theater-Free Zones, because we talk about it constantly."

You might say of the playhouse's "power couple" that Booth emphasizes "Theatre" and Leventhal works toward "Alliance." Leventhal has helped facilitate such relationships as Proof's partnership with St. Louis' Repertory Theater, which co-produced the play.

Proof provides the perfect transition for Booth, as the play happens to be set in a Hyde Park residence in Chicago. Based on references in the play, set designer Todd Rosenthal pinpointed the exact block the house would be located in, and then replicated it on stage. "There is authenticity like you would not believe in this set," Booth says.

Dealing with mathematics, mental illness and family dynamics, David Auburn's play has proved wildly successful, having run on Broadway since 2000, in addition to winning the Pulitzer, the Tony and other honors. Booth finds that the play engages the heart and the funny bone as much as the mind.

"There's an argument made that the most marvelous thing we can do is believe in something that we can't prove. And everyone wants that! It's why people get married a second time, it's why people continue having children even when you read horrible statistics, it's why artists in this city and a lot of others continue to believe passionately in what they do even when there's 50 percent empty seats. Because we all want to believe in something that we have no empirical proof of."

The play has some other touchstones that Booth seems to relish. In the play the central character, Catherine, tells her father that she wants to attend Northwestern. He responds, "Those guys don't kid around." That was certainly true for Booth, who did her postgraduate work at Northwestern. "I did my undergraduate work in performance, and was really good at playing someone exactly like me, as long as I didn't have to have an accent or sing. But at Northwestern, I started getting more interested in the bigger picture."

Describing her feelings about the power and potential of theater, she articulates ideas that she's clearly been developing for years. "I think theater can change human behavior, and I don't think much can. I think it allows an examined life. Sometimes it's a remarkably selfish profession, because it allows your own self-examination. But in the bigger picture, if I do it right, I create the room in which that can happen for other people."

Describing her duties as a director, Booth tends to be self-effacing and says her duty is to facilitate the talents of the actors, the designers and the play itself. "I always return to the text, that's something that all directors do. You can't decide something purely by arbitrary aesthetic whim, your job is to stand behind a text and push it forward into the audience's lap. If you're out there dancing, saying, 'Look at me!' try another field. Work that's not based on simple psychological truth just blows. You know it when it's not true."

Booth is a perfectionist, and that quality can keep her from sitting back and admiring her own accomplishments. "I almost never have the capacity to say, 'Look at that, that's good.' I can look at individual performances: the cast of Proof is impeccable, but the actress playing Catherine Pourfar is lit from within. Maybe that's something that happens to her in every show that she's done, but I see that and I'm incredibly proud. She's taken the whole thing in, and it animates her, it pushes her forward. I can see that and say, 'I don't have to become a plumber.'"

As the artistic head __of Atlanta's biggest theater, by definition Susan Booth is now the most prominent theater artist in the city. While her aspirations for the Alliance include developing more original plays and raising the theater's national profile, she has her eyes on more than Broadway. She's every bit as eager to foster and cultivate Atlanta's own theater community, as if she subscribes to a theatrical spin on the "All politics is local" motto of the late Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill.

Though Chicago is one of America's most vibrant theater cities, Booth has been pleasantly surprised by the quality and diversity of Atlanta. "I've found the theater community to be richer and deeper, in practice, than I expected. It's one thing to talk about it and see it on paper, but then you go to see plays like Hush, you go to see Dream of a Common Language, you go to see Amadeus, and you see the kind of range that you'd expect in a big ol' theater city. And I don't think I'd grasped truly that this was a big ol' theater city in practice."

Upon relocating here, Booth has been a frequent figure on the city's theater scene. She's even found herself on other stages, as when she was a guest on the The Lucky Yates Show at Dad's Garage. She proved a good sport at the rowdy late-night talk show, sampling the chili of an on-stage eating contest and being serenaded by a Neil Diamond tribute singer. At one point called a "Yankee" by an anonymous heckler, she answered back to the "Yankee-yeller- person" that she sees herself not as a pushy Northerner but as an even-keeled middle American, having grown up in Canton, Ohio.

Dad's Garage will be one of five theaters participating in Booth's The City Series, a cooperative venture on the Alliance's smaller Hertz stage in 2003. In Chicago she worked as co-artistic director of the Theatre of the Lake, which each year held a 10-week summer series of remounted productions by the city's various theater companies, from the venerable Steppenwolf to the antic Defiant Theatre. "I came here and looked for a parallel model to it," she says, "and then realized, 'Oh, I can build one.' We can't host the theaters of the entire city, but I can bring in five strong ones and foster the Theater Community, capital-T capital-C."

If all goes to plan, next spring Actor's Express, Dad's Garage, Horizon Theatre, 7 Stages and Theatrical Outfit will each have two weeks to either revive an audience favorite or debut a new production with the intent of subsequently launching it at their own space.

"One of the things we're trying to do is open our doors wider to the community," says Leventhal. "We want to fight that monolithic image of the Woodruff Arts Center, and make it more transparent and welcoming."

Even more than the creative cooperation of last fall's city-wide Naomi Wallace Festival, The City Series promises to have enormous symbolic and practical benefits, exposing smaller troupes to the Alliance's audience, and vice versa. It could affirm the adage that a rising tide raises all boats.

But such a tide could recede if arts funding doesn't get a needed boost. Only two days after her Lucky Yates Show appearance, Booth's cultural activism brought her to an Atlanta City Council meeting as part of a group opposed to a plan to cut arts funding. That initiative was struck down, but Booth finds that Atlanta gives less institutional support to the arts than her previous home. "Shortly after I got to Atlanta I had an opportunity to briefly meet with the governor. I made my pitch to support the arts and he listened and he nodded and then he said, 'Susan, if I'm going to spend money to build a new school or for some people to make a play, whaddaya think I'm going to do?'"

Part of the problem, Booth says, is that many Atlantans perceive attending the theater as an elite activity. "There's a certain sense among the public that theater-going is something that other people do, that wealthy people do, that snobby boojie-boojie people do. I want to get Atlanta on the wavelength of arts as a talking tool. They're not a mall destination. What we do is not diversionary, what we do is provide language, reflection and opportunity for transcendence."

On top of her directing and management duties, Booth travels frequently to check out new plays and playwrights, and is putting the finishing touches on the Alliance's 2002-2003 season, the first that's entirely her selection. "I think putting a season together is hosting the ultimate party. It's figuring out who should sit next to who — in other words, who should handle what show and what does it mean if this play follows that play, and how is that going to resonate in the subscriber's mind."

She smiles, "And secondarily, I think, 'Oh cool: I can direct that play.' But I didn't become an artistic director so I could push my career forward as a director. I really love the idea of being able to put the right people in the right place at the right time."

Virtually all of her successes she's likely to call collaborative efforts. "I don't run the theater," she says. "I work with a talented group of people, and we run the theater." Triathletes aren't traditionally team players, but Booth is quick to share credit wherever due, among her actors, her designers, her playwrights, her partner theaters and her fiance.

And maybe the little person who whispers in her ear as well.

Proof runs March 27-April 21 at the Alliance Theatre, Woodruff Arts Center, 1280 Peachtree St. Tues.-Fri. at 8 p.m. Sat. at 2:30 and 8 p.m. Sun. at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. $18-$57. 404-733-5000.??

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