By SHARON EBERSON
Kinetic energy is the vibe emanating from Pittsburgh Public Theater as the Cultural District company rolls into season No. 50, kicking off with Dial M For Murder.
Every week this summer seems to have brought with it a new initiative or announcement, including three recent hires of note:
Toby Guinn as the Public’s first chief development officer, Dominique Briggs (currently in the cast of Pittsburgh Playwright Theatre Company’s Radio Golf) as senior manager of partnerships and Public Works, and Sarah Ashley Cain, as associate artistic director.
Cain, who comes to Pittsburgh from Baltimore Center Stage, describes her position as a mostly producing role, working with artistic director Marya Sea Kaminski, managing director Shaunda McDill and casting director Brian Pope.
“This theater has not had a lead producer, at least in recent memory, so a lot of the producing function was also being held by Marya, and that’s a lot to ask for an artistic director and an organizational leader. So that was the primary goal,” Cain said, adding that it is not her only goal.
“My biggest skillset is I have management training, so I bring quite a bit of structural and budget focus, but I am still an artist. And so I’m not just here to slash numbers and look at contracts,” she said.
Cain, who grew up in Virginia, earned a master of fine arts degree in theater management at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University, and was an Artistic and Management Fellow at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. She first came to Pittsburgh representing Baltimore Center Stage, for last season’s coproduction of The Importance of Being Earnest, and joined Pittsburgh Public Theater part-time in May. Her next stop was the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, before returning to become a full-time Pittsburgher.
Her first full week was somewhat tumultuous, as the Public announced a Core Company initiative described as a non-Actors Equity training program that could lead to understudy roles, which caused quite a stir on social media.
Cain, an active participant in the League of Regional Theaters (LORT), the organization that sets best practices for regional theaters, said the Public has since clarified their plan for the Core Company, and that the Public has more Equity contracts for 2024-25 than last season.
Here’s more of my conversation with Pittsburgh Public Theater’s new associate artistic director.
Question: Welcome to town. How’s Pittsburgh treating you?
Answer: It’s good. We’re doing [Core Company] auditions today, so I’m getting to meet some of the local actors, which has been really nice. Admittedly, I was only here for a couple weeks, and then I left the country for a month, and I’ve been back for less than a week, so I haven’t fully got my legs under me yet. But I’m starting to explore the city.
Q: You go to Edinburgh frequently for the Fringe festival.
A: Yes, it’s unlike anything in the world. It truly is. It’s my favorite place. One day, I’m going to end up staying over there.
Q: Did you first come to Pittsburgh for The Importance of Being Earnest, and did you feel a connection then?
A: Yes, we have to be discussing a show like that more than a year in advance. So the artistic director of Baltimore Center Stage at the time was Stephanie Ybarra, and she introduced me to Marya and the team at the Public. I was also in a lead producing position at Center Stage, and so kind of worked on the show all the way through from early conversations, and was lucky enough to get to come back and forth to Pittsburgh quite a bit. During that process, Brian Pope and I did auditions in three cities, and I got to come sit in part of tech and rehearsals. I had never been to Pittsburgh before, and my first experience was coming from the airport and that beautiful view when you first come through the tunnel. And yeah, I just really enjoyed the city. We also had the LORT conference here, so there was just a lot of reasons I was kind of coming back, and that’s how I met the team.
Q: Baltimore Center Stage has had a rough year of transitions. So was that part of the attraction in coming to Pittsburgh?
A: I will say the natural beauty that surrounds the city was big for me. I’m from a very rural part of Virginia, but I have family from West Virginia and Pennsylvania. And there was something that felt very much like home as I was driving through. … And working specifically with the Public, I love that there’s a [cultural district] that was something that was unfortunately sorely missing in Baltimore. I love Baltimore as a city, so it’s not a negative on them, but having a place where so much of the arts and culture is centered … you don’t realize how much you lose in foot traffic and conversation and connection when there’s not restaurants nearby or other arts events going on.
Q: You saw Downtown when it was hopping?
A: My first night here, I saw the Shakespeare contest that the Public does, and a show was letting out across the street [at the Benedum Center], and it was just really exciting to have that energy. And then, Marya’s incredible. I love the way that she shows up in a room, and I think we had a connection and affinity for each other that I’ve been very lucky to get to grow
“My first night here, I saw the Shakespeare contest that the Public does and a show was letting out across the street, and it was just really exciting to have that energy.” — Sarah Ashley Cain
Q: Part of the cultural vitality of the city are the colleges and conservatory programs here that feed the arts. Have you noticed that yet?
A: We have relationships with almost every school, and I think I’m still learning about the universities. I thought I knew all of them, and then another one pops up. But it’s incredible how it doesn’t feel as competitive as sometimes universities are: ‘Oh, you can work with ours, but you can’t work with the other one.’ At least in my time here, it seems that there’s just a real hunger to connect these large cultural institutions with the universities.
Q: It’s interesting you mentioned earlier that Pittsburgh is “a small city,” but I think of it as both big and small, depending on your perspective.
A: Actually, it’s huge to me. I’m from a town with more cows than people.
Q: We were talking before about issues dealing with COVID. It hit the Public’s Billy Strayhorn production hard last season, and I know Baltimore has had its challenges – theater in general is facing challenges. Did any of that figure into your move here?
A: Center Stage was going through quite a bit of a change in transition. I’ll admit I expected to be there a bit longer than I was, but I knew that this was the right change for me. Every theater is in a difficult position right now. … It’s industry-wide issues that we were experiencing before COVID, but COVID just catalyzed and sped the whole thing up.
Q: What kind of challenges do you mean?
A: Issues facing the nonprofit theater model in general, like lack of government funding and declining donor and subscriber base. But the nice thing was that both Marya and Shaunda were incredibly transparent with me about what I was walking into. And it didn’t scare me. I think all of the things we’re facing are incredibly fixable. They’re not going to be easy, and there ar not going to be immediate solutions, and I say that about the industry, not specifically about Pittsburgh Public.
Q: The Public is entering its 50th season with a lot going on. How does that affect your position, besides the producing role you discussed?
A: I’m here to think about the ways we can use our resources to best produce the work. But also, I’ll be very involved in season planning, in artist selection and care. I think that’s what they’re really excited to have me do, to be the conduit between the organization and most of our guest artists, particularly our designers and directors, and continue to build those relationships. There’s more going on, but we haven’t announced it yet.
Q: You got here as talk about the new Core Company was kind of blowing up among union performers. Can you explain it, from your point of view>
A: Absolutely. That was what we’re in auditions for. We’re publishing an updated FAQ, and everyone who came in today said it was incredibly helpful. So yes, the social media day happened to also be my first full-time day. I think the concerns were well reasoned. I think that social media always makes things more intense, but we could have been clearer about the fact that it did not impact union jobs. We have more union contracts this season than last year because of the plays that we’re doing, and no one’s trying to push anyone out or replace them. That would be bad for theater, and also, legally, we have our union agreements.
[The Core Company] really is meant to be a training-first program. It does help us to have more understudy availability, and I think of it more as emergency covers than true, full-time understudies. … They will take classes and weekly workshops taught by our artistic staff and other industry professionals. So those are classes that otherwise you pay for, and they’re getting that training for free, plus a stipend. … We’ve had a really great turnout in auditions and people have said, this is such an exciting opportunity.
Q: Do you expect this to be helpful as you move toward mounting the large-scale Public Works Twelfth Night?
A: There will be professional Equity actors in the leading roles of the show. And those auditions have happened. We’ve not announced the company yet, but we’ve got some really fine folks lined up. And right now we’re working on our partnerships. So we’ll have that to announce soon, all of the different partners that will also perform in the community ensemble.
Q: Is there a role model for this Core Company training program, or is this something new?
A: It’s still a prototype, but we’re learning more about other models that are happening as we do it here. It was kind of like a brainchild between me, Marya and Brian when I showed up. We’ve had success with understudies and not success, because more people got sick or we didn’t have enough rehearsal time … so how do we fix that? And then also, how do we give people more opportunities? So we kind of came together and pitched this idea.
Q: It seems like there are so many initiatives coming out of Pittsburgh Public Theater, that I can’t keep up.
A: I think it’s exciting. At 50 years, we’re not going stale. We’re coming up with new and exciting things. And I think it’s about thinking of programming as more than just the main stage. We still have six incredible shows that we’re doing, but our breadth of programming is growing and changing.
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