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Artvoice's Anthony Chase interviews Kathleen Gaffney

At the precise moment when they needed to show some courage, the Studio Arena board of trustees rose to the occasion. They made a bold choice in selecting Kathleen Gaffney as the new artistic director of the venerable institution. An unconventional candidate for the job, Gaffney is a dynamic personality who has worked as an actress, playwright, director, arts administrator, motivational speaker and educator, but who has spent the recent years of her career outside the mainstream of the theater world.

The theater’s board of trustees is gambling that Gaffney’s artistic passion and outside-the-box thinking are just the ticket to reverse the decline of the once great institution. When board President Michael S. Piemonte announced Gaffney’s appointment, he did not refer to building on a strong foundation, but to “inject[ing] a new energy.”

Gaffney officially starts the job on April 17, but she came into town for the big announcement on Monday. Sitting in an upstairs classroom of the Studio Arena Theatre School, wearing a simple black dress with a brocade scarf—“a gift from Katharine Hepburn”—the Niagara Falls native talked about her life, her career and her future at Studio Arena Theatre.

Interestingly, Gaffney’s memories hark back to the halcyon days of Studio Arena.

“I saw my very first professional theater production here at Studio Arena Theatre,” says Gaffney. “Before I went to Buffalo State, I had never been to the theater before in my life. I was in three or four shows before I saw my first one. Warren Enters was directing at Studio Arena, and he had just become a teacher at the college. He asked our class if we would like to come and see a show. Well, I was poor as a mouse. Growing up, we had no money to see anything cultural. So I went to see The Lion in Winter starring Carolyn Coates. It was life-changing.”

Gaffney recalls being riveted by Coates’ performance. Watching the production—which also featured Carrie Nye and young Austin Pendleton as Prince John—Gaffney made a decision. The idea of becoming an actress had already occurred to her. It was now her life’s goal.

“I went on to see Tiny Alice…oh, so many shows here,” Gaffney recalls. “Studio Arena was the only game in town at that point, and it was magnificent. Neal Du Brock was the artistic director, and he took lots of chances. If he was the comet, I want to follow Neal Du Brock’s light. I had left the region by the time David Frank and Gavin Cameron-Webb arrived. I wasn’t a part of that time here. When I think of Studio Arena Theatre, I think of the days of Neal Du Brock.”

The founding artistic director of Studio Arena Theatre, Neal Du Brock, was a powerhouse of ambition and creativity. His tenure, from 1963 to 1980, is universally cited as the golden age of Studio Arena.

Du Brock forged relationships with exciting artists, directors and even producers. He collaborated with the likes of the great David Merrick (who partnered on Funny Face); Jose Quintero (famed director of Eugene O’Neill’s work, who directed Colleen Dewhurst and James Daly in A Moon for the Misbegotten); Alan Schneider (famed director of Samuel Beckett’s plays, who directed Sada Thompson and Wyman Pendleton in Happy Days); Celeste Holm; Tommy Tune; David Mitchell and Theonie V. Aldridge. Pals like Betsy Palmer and Van Johnson would come to Studio Arena to stretch their artistic limits. Every season and every individual show was imbued with a sense of excitement and a reason for being there.

By comparison, recent seasons have been imbued with a sense of expediency, frugality and the formulaic. Board members admit they were thinking about the Du Brock legend when they hired Gaffney.

Founding board member Robert Swados boldly asserts, “Kathleen Gaffney is going to take us back to the days of Neal Du Brock. She’s got the talent to take us to the ranks of top theaters in the country. She can be another Joe Papp [co-founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival] or a Zelda Fitchandler [pioneer of the regional theater movement and founder of Arena Stage in Washington, DC].”

Swados acknowledges that Gaffney does not fit the traditional profile of the typical regional theater artistic director.

“No,” agrees Swados, “she is not a traditional artistic director. She is better. She has directed; she has written plays; she has lectured. She knows how to attract other people of talent. She has an all-round capacity and that is what we need at Studio Arena Theatre. We need to return to a time when we aspired to the very highest quality, to plays that resonated with literary value—not just local interest. Kathleen has friends of great quality and talent, and she can call on them. She is like Neal Du Brock, who was the artistic director exemplar, in that she is a person with tremendous resources.”

The Studio Arena board was well aware of Gaffney’s personal connections, especially because her friend and former Buffalo State classmate, television producer Tom Fontana—creator of such shows as St. Elsewhere, Homicide and OZ—is the person who first recommended her for the job.

“Tom Fontana convinced me to apply,” reveals Gaffney. “Tom came after me. He said, ‘I think you’d be great. Would you be interested?’ I thought about it and said, ‘Tom, I would not be interested, except that it is in Buffalo, and it is back to my roots, and to the core of my passion.’”

Gaffney was born in Buffalo at Deaconess Hospital and lived in Buffalo until her family moved to Niagara Falls where she attended St. Theresa’s Elementary School and Madonna High School. She then attended Buffalo State College, graduating in 1971. She still has a great deal of family in the region. In addition to Fontana, her college friends included Diane English, who went on to create television’s Murphy Brown. Gaffney embarked on a promising acting career, landing the role of Lady Macbeth directed by Tony Tanner at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut, and the role of Cleopatra in a New York production of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra directed by Estelle Parsons. In her first film she played a love scene opposite Tom Selleck, and she was regularly landing good work across the country. She took up playwriting and Variety called her first effort, Frontiers, “very nearly a masterwork.” She was on a roll.

Then, when Gaffney and her husband Roger Shea were told that their older daughter had become autistic in the aftermath of a treatment for cancer, a vaccination while in the hospital and a subsequent bout of meningitis, Gaffney’s life took a radical turn. The actress suspended her career to become involved in every education program available for autistic children. Finally, when her child responded to the strumming of an autoharp, Gaffney became intrigued by the ability of the arts to reach autistic children. She and her husband would found Artsgenesis, an organization dedicated to making the transforming power of the arts available to other children and their parents. Today, Gaffney and Shea’s daughter, a 23-year-old student at Buffalo State College, is one of only about 130 individuals in the United States to have emerged from autism. Artsgenesis serves more than 49,000 students and 3,000 teachers from 16 states.

(photo: Rose Mattrey)

“I’ve also maintained a parallel theater career,” says Gaffney, “but it has not been visible. Tom [Fontana] is aware of it. I could do things in August and September. I could do things at certain theaters. But Tom knew the full breadth of what I have done, and it was his idea that I would make a good artistic director.”

For his part, Fontana is delighted that Gaffney has been chosen. His sentiments, too, return to the theme of renewal. “I know,” said Fontana, “the search committee had several outstanding choices and so their decision was doubly difficult. Having said that, I celebrate Kathy’s appointment—because she’s a Buffalonian, because she’s the first woman artistic director at Studio Arena Theatre and, most importantly, because her heart is so large and her soul so beautiful, the theater will shine anew.”

Diane English echoes Fontana’s enthusiasm and recalls that Gaffney was always somebody special: “I can’t think of a more perfect choice to head up Studio Arena Theatre than Kathy Gaffney,” said English. “We both belonged to Casting Hall, the drama group at Buffalo State College, which gave us a priceless foundation in theater. Kathy was rather unforgettable—drop-dead gorgeous with porcelain skin and fiery red hair, a talent well beyond her years. She was the Meryl Streep of our group. Studio Arena is a jewel in Buffalo’s crown and Kathy will burnish it.”

In addition to her other qualifications, the Studio Arena board found Gaffney’s personal history gripping, explains board member Anne Moot, who, with her husband Wells, has been involved with Studio Arena since its early years. “Everything about Kathleen impressed me—the way she responded to the needs of her daughter, the way she and her husband founded Artsgenesis. I thought, ‘We could use someone with that kind of adaptability, creativity and energy.’ Even the way she walked into the room was impressive. She wanted to meet every person, to learn who we were. She has great passion. I just knew she was it.”

Like Swados, Moot was not phased by Gaffney’s relative lack of experience running a traditional theater, or as a director.

“Kathleen has been a successful administrator and a successful fundraiser. And she is an artist. Warren Enters told me that if her career had not gone in a different direction, Kathleen could have been the next Colleen Dewhurst.”

Reached at his home in Salem, New York, where he is now retired, Enters confirms Moot’s story, adding, “Kathleen was actually far more glamorous than Colleen Dewhurst. She was a wonderful actress, and I think she will be a wonderful artistic director. She will be very good at involving members of the community in the theater. A theater can hire directors, but it is rare to find someone with vision. That’s what Kathleen has.”

And vision is what Gaffney will need. She faces several notable challenges.

While Studio Arena has technical capabilities enviable even among most resident regional theaters, and a surprisingly robust subscription base, even at a time when many resident theaters have lost subscribers in huge numbers, artistically the theater has been adrift. Recent years have seen programming veer in the direction of the frivolous, the shallow and the commercial. Furthermore, the Studio Arena audience is aging and not racially diverse.

Gaffney deftly evades the 20-year question and refers only to the past two seasons when there has been no artistic director at Studio Arena.

“The theater has been adrift without someone at the artistic helm. [Managing director] Ken [Neufeld] has done a wonderful job, but he has other responsibilities, and it is not the same as having someone here for the day-to-day. 2007-2008 will be entirely my season, but in the coming season we have some wiggle room for some new ideas. Ken and I will be working closely and carefully over the next few weeks to influence those areas that I can affect. In terms of developing our audience, I think it is a matter of creating trust and a matter of when you make these choices. If people have come along with you for a certain period of time, they feel comfortable with these things. I think the theater should be dazzling, exciting, irreverent, and I plan to do that kind of theater. How soon I make those choices and how soon it rolls out is going to be strategic.”

As for her personal growth as an artist, Gaffney insists that if she acts on the Studio Arena stage (where she played Miss Forsythe in Death of a Salesman in 1976) it will not be right away. “I do plan to do some of my own plays here. One is called Surrender. It was done at the Fringe Festival in New York City to sold-out houses, standing ovations and terrific reviews. I see a wonderful actress like Sigourney Weaver or Susan Sarandon doing the role. There is not enough work for those wonderful actresses, and that’s something they could do here and then take into New York.”

For the record, Neal Du Brock also produced his own plays at Studio Arena.

“In planning a season, individual shows are very important,” says Gaffney, “but the entire season needs to be a work of art. The way one play leads into the next is so important. Formulaic seasons are not my idea of a work of art. I want everyone to look at our seasons and want to become a season ticket holder. That’s what I’ll be working toward.”

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