"When you have a kid, especially a little one, it's hard," says Allison Narver, the new artistic director of the Empty Space. "I was traveling constantly; my husband and I relied on cell phones and frequent-flier miles to keep checking in. The idea of trying to keep up that kind of career with a little baby just seemed ridiculous."

Narver, who grew up in Seattle, is describing the life of freelance directors, who are in a tough spot. In even less demand than actors, freelance directors who want some stability have to find a sideline, which usually means teaching or becoming an administrator.

But prior to taking her current job, Narver found a different solution: She became the resident director for Disney's monstrous Broadway hit The Lion King. "It entailed maintaining the show to its original standard," Narver explains. "They sent me to work with [the production's director] Julie Taymor when she was putting up the London production, so that I could see it from the ground up. I've worked in the understudies; I'd give notes to the cast; I'd give notes to the crew. I would be at the show almost ever performance, watching, taking notes. I don't even want to talk about [how many times I saw it]. I haven't been able to go back. The script is from the movie, and then there are the Elton John/Tim Rice songs...." With that memory, Narver seems to shudder. Then she brightens: "What's nice about the stage production is all the South African music, and that's beautiful; that's a big relief. [Taymor's] design work is really wonderful. And I learned a lot about how a huge play operates, because it takes 250 people every night to run that show. That's big corporate theater. But it just wasn't in me to go for it with Disney."

Seeking the same kind of stability, but with a more simpatico aesthetic, Narver took on the artistic directorship of the Empty Space, a theater she'd worked at as an intern earlier in her career. "I wanted to come back to Seattle, to work with the Seattle theater community," she reflects. "The whole issue of being a midsize theater is so critical for the health of the city. Alice B. is gone; the Group Theatre is gone; the Bathhouse is gone; New City is in a really different form; [and] so the Empty Space has a responsibility in terms of working with local artists."

A successful artistic director is a mix of aesthetic judgment, managerial skills, and a favorable cultural moment. Narver previously oversaw Annex Theatre during a peak period for fringe theater in general, when wildly creative writers, directors, and actors flocked to Seattle, and small theaters were springing up like weeds. "[At Annex] I had the luxury of working with company members that I got to know really well, with whom I developed a kind of shorthand. As a freelance director, you have to make every place you walk into a home for four or five weeks; you need to quickly develop a team with the production crew and designers. I was so used to Annex shorthand and inside jokes; people didn't get these inside jokes, so you have to make new ones."

At Annex, Narver made her biggest splash directing the inventive musicals of Chris Jeffries, including The Fatty Arbuckle Spook House Revue and I See London, I See France; other successes of her era include Brian Faker and Bliss Kolb's The Yellow Kid and Erik Ehn's The Saint Plays, all shows flush with wild spectacle. On the other hand, incestuous creative urges occasionally led to disasters like the ensemble-developed Running from Boomerangs, a festival of in-jokes and self-congratulation.

The transition from working freelance back to running an organization has had its difficulties. "The biggest hurdle was trying to choose a season while I was in rehearsal for another show at the Portland Stage, in Maine. I hadn't had time to see what was going on here, so this season is far less representative of Northwest writers than the ones to come will be." The only local writer in the upcoming season will be Chris Jeffries. "We're also doing an adaptation of Valley of the Dolls," Narver says, smiling. "But I don't think I [would] count as a Northwest writer."