After 20 years as Trinity Repertory Company’s artistic director, Curt Columbus will step down at the end of the theater season.
A legend of the Rhode Island theater scene, Columbus has directed more than 25 productions at Trinity. The Roommate, on stage until March 19, is to be the final one before he leaves his role.
Columbus spoke with Ocean State Media’s James Baumgartner about his tenure, and what he hopes comes next.
Interview Highlights
How Trinity Rep has changed in 20 years
When I arrived, we invested in the three core values: company, community and education. We’ve added our anti-racist pillar as part of our values. And so we’ve done work in all four of those areas over the last 20 years. And I’m really proud of [that]. Project Discovery [the company’s education program and free matinee performances for students] was staffed by one person when I arrived. And now the education staff does not only Project Discovery, but programs for kids on the autism spectrum, for adults, for what we call babies’ classes. There’s like five-year-old classes. So we do this full range and then there’s been a deepening in the educational work. So Trinity is more of a community space than it’s ever been.
How the Rhode Island Theater world has changed in the last 20 years
I remember one of the questions of my interview process, one of our former board members said to me, “What are you going to do about the competition with the Gamm Theatre?” And I said, “I’m going to encourage it.” And I’ve done two shows at the Gamm in my tenure. I love the theater scene here. And Trinity has made this huge investment in being the state theater of Rhode Island and supporting all of the other theaters, making sure that we’re not the 500-pound gorilla and taking things away from people, but instead building a theater community. And that’s, again, something that I’m really proud that we’ve been able to do in my tenure.
His hopes for having a ‘third act’ and not just an epilogue
If I think about it, from 21 to 41, I was in Chicago and I was building my career as an artist. From 41 to 61, as I am today, I’ve been building this institution and really committed to this place. In the third act, I want to have more freedom. That’s something that I’m juggling. How I do that and a desire to completely change the entire American theater field. Well, why would I make a small goal? I mean, if I’m going to leave, I’m going to leave to really do something to make change. And post-pandemic, a lot of places have been struggling to get people back. And I find that what most regional theaters have forgotten is that they’re first and foremost their community’s theater. I mean, Adrian Hall, lunatic genius, came here and he was first and foremost a community leader. He convinced people to invest in the wackiest stuff. I mean, artistically so bold and unlike anything that was being done in New York, he could do that here. And as a community leader, he galvanized people to go, “Yeah, we’re going to support this.” So we’ve forgotten that that’s actually the primary job of theaters is to kind of galvanize this conversation with the public.
How theaters can survive and thrive in a challenging fundraising environment
It’s a tough landscape. The funding landscape is going to change over the next decade for all of us. Corporate funding has gone away. The changes to the tax code enacted in the first Trump administration took away all of the incentives to invest in nonprofits and arts in particular, so that’s gone. And so we rely more on governmental support than we ever have. And we also, I think, need to be nimble in the way that we’re thinking about how we grow our audience in the next decade, right?
Subscription models are proving to be uninteresting to most people under the age of 85. I mean, it is an older model. And it used to be that subscription was the basis – you would build subscribers who had loyalty and they became your donors, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? Well, if the subscription model isn’t there, then we have to find what the next thing is. My feeling is that it’s actually a sense of identity that people will get from all of this other ancillary community programming, right? In other words, I want to belong there for all of the things that they do, and that is going to be how we build a kind of brand loyalty, and those are going to be the folks that are going to invest more deeply in the work that we’re doing. But as long as we’re relying on our subscribers, yeah, we’re actually going to see all of that become more problematic in the next decade.
On why he selected The Roommate as the last play he would direct as Trinity Rep’s artistic director
I actually think of the sweep of the work that I’ve done – and it has ranged from contemporary to classics, new plays, to musicals, comedies, straight plays. I have been so lucky with the range of work I’ve been able to do here. And so this play was chosen for the season that it’s in, right? I wasn’t thinking, “Oh, this is going to be my swan song,” because I don’t really think like that. I mean, I hope the next artistic director likes my work enough to invite me back. That would be fine. That would be more than fine. I’ll just say that on the record. But this play was chosen because the two plays that are in rep right now, this and A Winter’s Tale, both are about forgiveness. And how in the case of Winter’s Tale, how we forgive each other when we’ve gone horribly, horribly wrong. And in The Roommate, it’s how we forgive ourselves enough to actually move forward. And I selfishly was thinking when I chose the play, “Oh, it’s only two characters. It’ll be a light lift. I’ve been doing a lot of musicals and those are really a lot of work. Ah, just two actors.” No, no, no, no. It’s you and two actors and there ain’t nobody else. So it’s a lot of work, but it’s been joyful work. [The play’s author] Jen Silverman, they’re a queer non-binary writer. The queerness of this play is so delicious to me. It has nothing to do with sexuality. I want to be clear about that, right? One of the characters is a lesbian, but this isn’t a play about sexuality. This is a play about non-traditional relationships. This is a play about finding yourself in middle age and sort of going, “Now what the f- - - do I do?” And can I be something boldly different? And in particular, if you’ve watched my work over the last 20 years, I do a lot of work that centers women. I am fascinated by the two women in this play because they’re in their 50s, they have become invisible to the rest of the world. And goddamn it, they’re interesting. They’re fascinating. And there’s so much potential and the world is telling them that they’re kind of done. And it’s a play about that. And so that’s why I really love what we’ve been able to do with it.
On directing A Christmas Carol his first year in 2006
I directed it my first year because I thought, “I should do Christmas Carol.” What a stupid mistake. What a rookie error. I mean, because you know this, everyone in Rhode Island knows this: Christmas Carol here is unlike Christmas Carol anywhere else. And I was like, “Oh, I’m going to put choirs of children in it. " And we had 72 kids, over four separate choirs and giant puppets. I had this giant ghost of Christmas future that would move Scrooge around the stage with his hand. What an idiot. It’s so much. And we got to whether or not it was going to snow and I was like, “We don’t have time to figure this out. It’s just not going to snow.” And I still remember I was at Eastside Marketplace after the show opened and this little old lady pushed her cart up to me and I was like, “Hello, dear.” And she went, “In Christmas Carol it has to snow!” Wow.
So in 2015, I did it with my friend Steven Berenson just to have a second go at it. And so twice is a lot. It’s a lot. It’s the hardest thing that anyone ever directs. It has to be funny, but it’s also incredibly dramatic. It has to be musical, but it’s also a straight play. It’s a ghost story, but it’s a Christmas story. It’s really hard.
When I first got here, we did the Adrian Hall adaptation. We’ve since evolved it. Everyone adds a little bit. It doesn’t belong to any one person at this point because basically, it’s the Trinity Repertory Company version. There are little pieces from Steve Thorne. There are little pieces from me. And famously, Adrian, when he did it in ‘76, he and Dee Dee Cummings – who was his collaborator who’d made the music with him – he was like, “Dee Dee, get a pad and paper. We’re going to watch Christmas Carol on the movies and then we’ll make an adaptation.” So he just basically cribbed the Alastair Sims [version]. But the story is just so profound that every year you find something new and everyone who plays Scrooge finds something new, everyone in that ensemble finds something new. It’s a great story. But hard to direct. Harder than musicals.
Advice for the Trinity Rep’s next artistic director
Give yourself time. I thought I’d walk in and have it all in hand within six months. I was in year eight and a friend of mine said, “How do you feel?” And I said, “Well, I finally feel like it’s my theater.” So when you follow, particularly someone like Oscar Eustis, who is an indelible human, but anyone who’s had a long tenure leaves their mark. Look, I’m committed to this notion that artistic projects need renewal, which is why I’m leaving. I’m not leaving to go away from Trinity. I’m leaving to give myself a third act because 61, you know, tick tock. So your third act, maybe 20 years? And then also to give an opportunity for someone else to go, “This is how my garden grows.” And my advice would be, make it your own and don’t worry about what we did. And the most important piece is the audience. It’s your community. That’s really the thing that you have to attend to first and foremost.
