While other theaters have been wringing their hands in financial and
existential angst, Intiman spent the past season quietly replacing its
old guard with younger, fresher faces. The new managing director, Brian
Colburn, came up from the Pasadena Playhouse. The new associate
director, Sheila Daniels, came up from Seattle’s fringe scene. The new
artistic director, Kate Whoriskey, has come out from New York.
Intiman, it seems, is ready to try new things. “When theaters
have good ideas and something to fundraise for, they’re fine,” outgoing
artistic director Bart Sher said in a joint interview with Whoriskey
last week. “The money follows the ideas.”
Whoriskey has ideas. She helped develop Ruined—based on
Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children but set in a Congolese
brothel—with her frequent collaborator Lynn Nottage. That play
won last year’s Pultizer Prize and its off-Broadway run has been
extended seven times. During the interview last week, Whoriskey talked
about adding an international cycle to Intiman’s season, developing
plays that could then travel to Iran, Uganda, or Cuba. Whoriskey also
wants Intiman to sponsor work by international art stars. “I’d like to
bring Ohad Naharin [the Israeli choreographer] to work on Brecht’s
Drums in the Night,” she said. “To see if Shirin Neshat [the
Iranian photographer and video artist] is interested in adapting The
Scarlet Letter.”
Whoriskey directed at Intiman—Ionesco’s The Chairs—during Sher’s first season in 2000, before he
directed there. She says she has returned to Seattle more because of
Sher than for the city itself and seems more interested in finding the
best artists, wherever they are, than in cultivating the local theater
ecology. “The whole world has globalized,” she said. “And it seems
the last place we believe in globalization is in theater.”
This might nettle local actors and playwrights, who have long
complained they aren’t hired often enough in Seattle’s big three
theaters. But this April, associate director Sheila Daniels
successfully transferred one of her Seattle fringe hits—a
distilled Crime and Punishment for three actors—onto
Intiman’s big stage. While Whoriskey looks abroad, Daniels might play
Seattle’s local representative.
And how does Whoriskey feel taking her first job as artistic
director while regional theaters around the country are bending and
breaking under economic stress tests? “It’s great!” she said. “Someone
made this analogy that I like: Regional theater is a new, ephemeral
idea, like a sand castle. Then the ocean came up and the sand castle
is gone and we’re all out there saying, ‘Oh God, we need to rebuild
the sand castle!'”
Maybe, she says, theaters need to turn themselves into something
new. 
“The whole world has globalized,” she said. “And it seems the last place we believe in globalization is in the theatre.”
Odd that Ms Whoriskey would make such a statement, when so much of the rest of the world is currently undergoing a complete re-evaluation of the very concept of globalization, and re-engaging with the long-neglected benefits of localism. Not that there is anything wrong with exposing local audiences and artists to the work and influence of outside artists, per se, but her attitude seems to reflect yet more of the reverse-provincialism we have become accustomed to here. Even more distressing when one contemplates that theatre, unlike other artistic media, relies so exclusively upon the patronage of local audiences, local artists, and local artisans for its growth, nourishment and survival.
If she has indeed no wish to “cultivate the local theatre ecology”, then she will no doubt express little surprise or alarm when her abject neglect results in that same ecology turning fallow and stagnant.
Unlike, say, a Greg Falls, who recognized the efficacy of good husbandry, Ms Whoriskey seems rather to envision her role as being akin to a sort of cultural Monsanto, where her only interest is in increasing the yield, while remaining heedless (or worse indifferent) to the irrevocable damage done to the environment in the process.
Sad to say, this does not bode well, either for Intiman and its long-term prospects (which are precarious at best), or for the Seattle theatre ecology as a whole.