Fine actor and longtime artistic director of New Century Theatre Company, Darragh Kennan, is stepping down from his position at the company. NCTC also plans not to renew its contract with Black Box Operations, the conglomerate of theaters (including Washington Ensemble Theatre and Strawberry Theatre Workshop) that call 12th Ave. Arts their home.
Kennan told me that a number of contributing factors drove him to step down. The main one: time. After graduating from the school for arts leadership at Seattle University, he landed a full time job in development at the Seattle Rep. His contract with that theater guarantees him stagetime on two shows per year, so he can still get some acting in. Plus, he's got two kids at home.
"NCTC has been a labor love forever," he said. "I hate to give it up, but it’s becoming really difficult to run a theater company when I just don’t have the time. A lot of our founding members have stepped away. And it seems like it’s someone else’s time to create that company for the next 10 years," he said.
Kennan was a founding member of the company, which started up in 2008, when Seattle's theatrical ecosystem looked a lot different than it does today. Though there were a number of mid-level equity actors in town, the big theater companies were mostly hiring from New York City and Chicago. The Empty Space, the Tacoma Actors Theatre, and the Group Theater had all shuttered. "There was really little opportunity for a professional actor to work," he said. So, a bunch of those mid-level equity actors got together and started NCTC. This way they could have more work, more say on what that work would be, and more control over the creative process in the rehearsal room.
But now everything is different. After lots of leadership changes, the big theaters have been hiring more local talent. Plus, a number of new, smaller, nimbler theater companies have popped up during the intervening years.
That last fact might be why ticket sales have been down this season. Bright Half Life and The Realistic Joneses, both plays with smaller casts than you'd expect in a typical NCTC production, didn't sell as well as NCTC hoped. Kennan reeled off a number of questions about that: "Is it that we’re not doing stuff people want to see? Is it that people are staying home more? Is it more competition?"
Kennan and other members of the company think that ending the partnership with Black Box / 12th Ave Arts will help them answer some of those questions.
To be a resident theater at 12th Ave Arts, the deal is you have to plan out your show schedule way in advance. Kennan said some of the newer members of the company, when they were considering what kind of art they want to produce, were feeling a little confined by the pressure to fill slots. They wanted flexibility to try out different kinds of work, and the black box just doesn't offer as much flexibility as they'd like.
Scenic and costume designer Pete Rush, one of the newest members of the company, said leaving 12th Ave Arts would "free [them] up to produce works like A Clockwork Orange" next year.
"We are currently in development and workshops for an adaptation of that classic novel, which we plan to stage site-specifically," he said, adding that there have been talks among company members of doing traveling productions, productions that take the drama out of the theater and into this city's office buildings, parks, and barges, "in essence bring[ing] theatre to the masses of tech workers in this city who don’t adhere to the old-school ‘subscribe to a season and then sit in a dark theatre and applaud politely' model."
MJ Sieber, one of the last three founding members, agreed with Rush and added that the company's great attribute was "the collective brain trust in the room." The need to plan a season way in advance "didn't always allow [them] to stay as relevant as [they] would have liked, or find plays that kept [them] passionate by the time [they] were ready to produce."
"And the model of a company of actors needs to change too," he said, "So we can welcome newer voices and broader stories to be seen on our stage—wherever that may be."
