First in a series of profiles of women artistic directors
It may sound like an ethnic stereotype to say Angelina Fiordellisi runs the Cherry Lane Theatre like an Italian mama, but it’s hard to resist as you listen to her talk about making a home for artists and tending to their needs. Fiordellisi, the daughter of Neapolitan immigrants who spoke Italian before she spoke English and was recently honored by the National Organization of Italian American Women, probably wouldn’t even object to the characterization.
Ethnicity aside, all that talk about nurturing and valuing the process over the product also sounds distinctly—well, to invoke another stereotype—female. On this point, Fiordellisi definitely does not demur. “Oh, my God, absolutely!” she responds when asked if her priorities as artistic director reflect a feminine way of running a business.
“It’s so male to be competitive and all about who gets the money and who gets in the paper and ba-ba-ba. I’m trying to be an island, in the middle of the island, where it’s not about pressure and competition,” she says, explaining about Cherry Lane’s play-development program: “We are bringing artists through a process, getting them to a certain point. Sometimes it’s not going to be a finished product, and sometimes it is. This is also very feminine—that we adapt the program to the specific writer’s needs.”
Fiordellisi does sense something of a boys club within the off-Broadway theater community—a club she’s been left out of because of responsibilities at home that her male counterparts either don’t have or tend to fob off on their wives. “I didn’t go to all the parties because I was raising my kids; when I wasn’t here, I’d go home to my kids,” says Fiordellisi, who suspects her lack of schmoozing may hurt when the schmoozees are ready to hand out money. “I feel that there is a bias in favor of men who run a theater. In the fall there were several announcements about these big grants, and all those who benefited were male-run theaters.”
She came up with an even more recent example of how things might transpire differently at the Cherry Lane if she were a man. The night before our interview, the theater had hosted a reading of a new Theresa Rebeck play and Rebeck had asked Fiordellisi if she could address the audience beforehand. “I let her do her thing, then we started the reading,” says Fiordellisi. “If this was a male theater, the male head of the theater would be at the front giving his spiel and then introducing Theresa, because it’s a power thing.
“I don’t have to be in front of everybody all the time,” says the former actress. “The work is what’s important to me: nurturing these artists, getting the tools that they need to develop their work. I’m running a community here. This is an artists colony—because that’s what the history is, that’s what’s inspiring here, that’s what these four walls have done throughout the last century.”
Fiordellisi purchased the Cherry Lane—NYC’s oldest continuously operating off-Broadway theater—in 1996 and has resurrected it as an incubator of talent. The original Cherry Lane Playhouse, founded in 1924 by Edna St. Vincent Millay and friends, was at the vanguard of the downtown theater movement, home to the original production of Godspell and helped popularize the theater of the absurd and foster the careers of many distinguished playwrights and actors. Today it has a Mentor Project, which pairs young writers with established playwrights for a season-long, one-on-one “apprenticeship” leading to a showcase production of the mentee’s play. Christopher Shinn, Julia Cho and Rajiv Joseph are all alums of the Mentor Project. The company received an Obie Award in recognition of its play development efforts last year.
A play developed in the program in 2007, The Secret Agenda of Trees by Colin McKenna (who was mentored by Lynn Nottage), is getting another showcase production this month at a different theater, the Wild Project on E. 3rd. And from March 19–April 25, Cherry Lane is giving Jailbait by Deirdre O’Connor (mentored by Michael Weller) an off-Broadway production at the former Bank Street Theatre, which the company has leased and renamed the Cherry Pit.
