Public Theater taps Eustis as new leader
Ending months of speculation, New York's prestigious Public Theater named Oskar Eustis as its new artistic director yesterday, a move that leaves Providence's Trinity Repertory Company searching for a new leader with Eustis's rare combination of talents.
In his 10 years as artistic director in Providence, Eustis placed Trinity Rep on the map artistically and on sound footing financially -- tripling its attendance and its operating budget. Eustis is a gifted director, a dramaturge who loves and develops new work, a community organizer, and a prodigious fund-raiser.
Associate artistic director Amanda Dehnert has agreed to serve as acting artistic director and to plan and produce Trinity's 2005-2006 season. The board has formed a transition committee to choose a successor, and Dehnert will be one of the candidates, said Edgar Dobie, the company's managing director.
The Public's board chose Eustis after a nine-month search to find a replacement for producer George C. Wolfe.Eustis will go from running two stages on a $9 million budget to running six on a $12 million budget at the Public, one of New York's largest theater organizations.
Eustis will begin his transition in January but won't officially leave Trinity until June 1. He said his decision wasn't easy. ''This has been the happiest decade of my life," he said. ''I have loved being in Providence and loved this theater, loved the relationship with Brown. But the opportunity came up, and I felt I couldn't turn it down. It was too dead down the middle of the plate of what I care about most in the theater. It was an opportunity to have a much more significant impact, especially on new play development, in the country than I can have here. I've felt it's where I could be of most use."
Dobie called Eustis's departure ''certainly a rite-of-passage moment for the company.
''We are in equal measures proud and delighted for Oskar and sad as an institution to lose a leader of his quality and good humor," Dobie said.
The search to replace Wolfe at the Public involved nearly 100 candidates, both inside and outside the United States, said board president Kenneth B. Lerer. Directors Doug Hughes and Jim Nicola were reported to be contenders, but Lerer denies media reports that Eustis was not the first choice.
''Oskar was the only one who was offered the job," Lerer said. ''He exhibited the most passion for theater and the most passion for the Public Theater of everybody on the list."
At Trinity, Eustis's production of ''Henry V," which is part of a three-play cycle by Shakespeare, is currently running. He's also directed the world premieres of Craig Lucas's ''God's Heart," Rinne Groff's ''The Ruby Sunrise," and Paula Vogel's ''The Long Christmas Ride Home,"as well as Tony Kushner's ''Homebody/Kabul" and ''Angels in America."
It was the first production of ''Angels," a searing portrait of AIDS in America, that launched Eustis's national career. He commissioned the play for the Eureka Theatre Company in San Francisco in the 1980s, and then directed its world premiere at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.
In getting the Public job, it helped that playwrights such as Kushner, Suzan-Lori Parks, and David Henry Hwang were strong recommenders. ''He's known as a world-class dramaturge," Lerer said, ''and I think his credentials are equally stellar in new works and the classics. In addition to all that, he has a financial background. From every perspective he kept rising to the top of the list. It was a unanimous decision."
As part of his new job, Eustis will also become a full-time professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
When he first came to Providence, Eustis recalled, he gave a magazine interview in which he said that there was only one theater he'd rather run than Trinity -- the Public.
''It's the job I always wanted," he said. ''When I first moved to New York, I lived around the corner from the Public. It was the theater that changed my life. It forged the idea of what theater was supposed to be."
Catherine Foster can be reached at foster@globe.com.
