By SHARON EBERSON
An effervescent brew of curiosity and creativity personified, Karla Boos is a risk-taker in the risky business of theater. For 35 years, the founder and artistic director of Quantum Theatre has been a driving force of originality for the region’s arts scene.
Boos will be relinquishing her role at the end of 2026, after arriving in 1990 with Pedro Paramo, an anticipated one-off project, based on the short novel by Mexican author Juan Rulfo.
Oh, the places she would go over the decades to come — and take adventurous theatergoers along for the ride.
Where others saw the crumbled shell of a former upscale restaurant, or a serene pond on a college campus, or an off-season outdoor ice skating rink, Boos could picture A Dream of Autumn, a soaring Seagull, or An Odyssey worth taking.
A world-view visionary, Boos curated the 2018 International Festival of Firsts for the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, and, in 2015, was honored with the Carol R. Brown Creative Achievement Established Artist Award.
In recent years, she has taken a step back from directing, to champion and nurture the next generation of risk-takers. Those include Adil Mansoor, who was launched, in part, through the company’s Gerri Kay New Voices Program, and Cody Spellman, who arrived from Chicago, was Quantum’s director of production for nearly two years, and directed the stunning A Moon for the Misbegotten last summer.
Boos noted that she has not directed a show since Chimerica in 2022, and has said her final directing gig will be Shakespeare’s The Tempest, next year.
“That’s a thing that I want people to hear if they are thinking, ‘Oh, I’m not going to like Quantum after Karla.’ They should know that for years, sort of in preparation, I have been giving these projects, of other people’s suggestions, to young artists, to build their own teams. And I think I’ve contributed in the sense that I had to love it. I had to absolutely love the piece. And then I’ve tried to let them not back away from their own good ideas. I’ve supported them, risk-taker than I am, when maybe they would’ve backed away.”
The timing for the changing of the guard now, is right, Boos said, because of the current team in place, including executive director Julie DeSeyn, and Alex Ungerman, the director of production.
“I always thought that I would not work till I drop, and go out on a high note, and give it over to the young, really, because that just feels right to me,” Boos said. “The things that are so marvelously enabling now [include] Julie DeSeyn, who has been with me for three years and has really changed everything for the better, I mean, the company is so solid thanks to her.”
“I’m honored that she said that, and I think that it’s true that our partnership is strong and it’s been kind of a key to our success over the past couple of years,” said DeSeyn, who met Boos a decade ago, when both were involved in a women’s leadership program through the Heinz Endowments.
Quantum has engaged The DeVos Institute of Arts and Nonprofit Management in their search for its next leader.
“We have loved working with them a little over a year now, with the Benter Foundation funding us to get some assistance, just thinking about sustainability and marketing, and how we can strengthen our model, and they also do executive searches for arts organizations. And so we thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a perfect match,’” DeSeyn said.
They are still in the process of working out a job description, which is no easy task, considering Boos’ singular vision and achievements. The plan is to have the description out some time in January, and have a choice revealed in the summer, which will give the new person in charge “some time for overlap [with Boos], so that they can just learn from each other and get the hang of things. That’s the plan,” DeSeyn said.
THE PATHS TAKEN
Boos grew up in West Virginia, attended Bethany College and the University of Pittsburgh and then graduate school at the California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita, where she was exposed to “the full breadth of what was possible in the arts.”
“I had my couple of years in Pittsburgh at Pitt, and it seemed like, ‘Oh, Pittsburgh is a city of manageable size. I never wanted to live in New York. I wanted to live in a manageable city. And I thought I’d bring something different,” Boos said of her post-academic choice.
She returned determined to create performance art, but not expecting to start a company.
“I wanted to make a work, and then I wanted to make another work,” she said of those first 1990 productions, including Sea Marks. “And then it sort of had a life. And good people said to me, ‘We can take this further. Charlie Humphrey and [Susan Harris] “Slu” Smith for sure. … So I didn’t set out to start a company. I wanted to make theater that was like the theater that was inspiring me.”
Boos didn’t just make theater. She invited her audiences on journeys into indoor and outdoor spaces that no one else might imagine as performance venues.
For instance, for The Collected Works of Billy the Kid in 2007, Quantum audiences walked through the doors of the North Side’s then notorious Garden Theater, which opened in 1915 with family-friendly fare and evolved into an multi-X-rated film house in the 1970s.
Outdoors sites have included several Mellon Park spaces (if you were there for the background lightning and thunder that attended a performance of Cymbeline, you probably have total recall) and Westinghouse Park, where, under a tent, theater audiences gathered for perhaps the first time in the post-pandemic era, to see The Current War, a world premiere musical by Fox Chapel’s Michael Mitnick.
Wherever the company lands, there are bound to be community partners, including nearby restaurants, adding to the Quantum experience that might include exposing visitors to a neighborhood or a business for the first time.
At every venue that isn’t already equipped with theater seating, the Quantum crew builds its own stands and brings its own chairs. Boos recalls vividly an opening night in 1999, at the Brake House Lofts in the Strip District, that almost took down the company.
“On opening night of Merchant of Venice, a lady put her hand on the railing and fell and broke her wrist, and had to be taken away by ambulance. … And I sat on the stairs outside and said, “This is it. It’s over.’ ”
It wasn’t over, but it was a lesson learned, one of many when you are in a new venue for each production. Being subject to the whims of nature has been part of the Quantum lore, as recently as when Hamlet was getting underway at the Carrie Furnaces site last year. As if on cue, a fence blew down, and star Treasure Treasure’s microphone went silent.
“We’ve been rewarded over the years by people who actually even remember those things fondly, like the lightning at Mellon Park. But there also was the time Lear didn’t die because [stage manager] Michelle Engelman called it, because she knew that the skies were going to open and people had to get a quarter mile to their cars,” Boos said, then added, “But for every one of those, there’s something magical.”
As she reminisced, Boos named two projects that were at the top of mind, and close to her heart: Adapting All the Names in 2015, a collaboration with the Mattress Factory’s Barbara Luderowski, and the opera Idapse in 2022, in partnership with creator Claire van Kampen and Chatham Baroque, the latter an event in the Pittsburgh Cultural District, at the Byham Theater.
Luderowski died in 2018, and Van Kempen, the wife of actor Mark Rylance, died in January of 2025.
a Quantum Theatre production adapted by Karla Boos, from the book
by Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago. (Image by Heather Mull)
“All the Names was like, my heart and soul got into it, and it expressed my deepest feelings. My life in the theater begins with fiction, truthfully, and my response to stories in books. Some of them provoke something that’s so difficult to put your finger on. But that was the very thing that made me see it in three dimensions and want to try to share it in my art form, the thing I know how to do. I wanted to share that book: All the Names by Jose Saramago. He won a Nobel Prize, but it was not a book that anyone under the sun would think to turn into theater.”
That is, anyone with the exception of Boos. She persuaded Luderowski, scenic designer Narelle Sissons and projection designer Joe Seamans that they could help her realize her goals, which flowed through three floors, with the audience moving with the actors, in the “wackadoodle space” at the original Carnegie Free Library of Allegheny, on the North Side.
“Yeah, amazing. Five rooms, sheep at the end, three floors,” said Boos. And by sheep at the end, she meant live sheep.
Other multiroom, multifloor feats of imagination, talent and timing include Tamara at Rodef Shalom synagogue and Chatterton at Trinity Cathedral.
Boos has often said that, what sets in motion the spark of creativity, is making the impossible into a work of theater, and helping others achieve similar goals. She mentions the director Jed Harris, a frequent collaborator, and actor Joseph McGranaghan (recently in Enron for Quantum) of the 2010 production of Heiner Muller’s The Task, at the former Gage Building in the Strip.
“It had Larry John Myers and that beautiful CMU actor, Larry Powell, and Joseph McGranaghan. I remember, this was the first rehearsal, Jed said to Joe — he was fresh out of Pitt — do like a tumbling run across the floor, but in slow motion. And Joe did it.”
It’s no surprise that when asked what she’ll miss the most when she takes her leave, Boos’ said, “I will certainly miss the magic of the rehearsal room, with everybody sparking on each other. That’s the best part of it. … But I feel that there’s a lot of things that I won’t need to miss. I will still enjoy theater with all my friends in Pittsburgh. I feel excited about the young people that I talk to. They seem like they’re addressing this moment for our country, and they want to meet the challenges head on.”
Quantum Theatre’s current season concludes in April, with the up-to-the-minuted 10 Out of 12 by Anne Washburn, and directed by Andrew William Smith. The title refers to the number of hours Actors’ Equity Association allows for in a day for the technical process of building a show. The play is billed as “capturing the magical chaos of a tech rehearsal … in anticipation of opening night.”
At the Mellon Institute in Oakland, audience members will wear headsets that allow them to eavesdrop on what’s happening in the booth and backstage, as well as the actors onstage, a combination that makes “for a rare insight into the rhythms, joys, and frustrations of making theater.”
THE WAYS FORWARD
To continue producing innovative, immersive theater into the future, DeSeyn said Quantum is on sound financial ground, while making plans for the future.
“A huge benefit to us, is, we’ve come out of the pandemic and are adjusting to all these new expenses and ways of doing things,” she said. “And we are about 60% of the way to raising an additional $2 million for that. So that is one of the things that we’re doing to get us to where we feel we’ll be just resilient and able to [make it through] the transition … in the strongest position.”
What Karla Boos hopes for the future of Quantum and its audiences is no different than what she has been doing for the past 35 years.
“At this time that is kind of challenging, maybe what people are thinking is to pull back, be more homogenous or commercial, or go with the tried and true,” Boos said. “But I don’t think that’s the answer. What is needed is theater that pushes boundaries, takes risks, takes you places, imaginatively, that you were not expecting. I want Pittsburgh to demand that in the future, and support it when there is something that is different, because, who knows where it will go?”
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