Court Theatre, the University of Chicago’s professional theater of classic plays, is set to enter a rejuvenating rebirth with its new artistic director, Avery Willis Hoffman.
Hoffman, who starts Nov. 1 as the Marilyn F. Vitale Artistic Director at the non-profit theater, calls herself a “creative doula” — a midwife for new ideas rather than a traditional director.
Her background evinces such unique inventiveness. After all, Hoffman’s late father, John R. Willis, was a pioneering Black professor at Princeton University who in 1963 became the first African American Marshall Scholar. Then Hoffman became the first child of a Marshall recipient to win the scholarship in 2000. And then Hoffman’s cousin was the late novelist and Nobel laureate in Literature Toni Morrison.
The “creative doula” distinction means:
- Hoffman will direct few, if any, plays at Court Theatre — a major change from her predecessors — and instead will focus on re-imagining the role of artistic director as someone who, as she puts it, “supports the development of new works for consideration in the canon,” as well as the trajectories of up-and-coming directors, designers and artistic leaders.
“Talent scouting is one of my strengths,” said Hoffman, who is moving to Chicago with her husband and their 12-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter. She previously served as inaugural artistic director of Brown University’s Arts Institute and professor of the practice of arts and classics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.
Hoffman inherits the Court Theatre while it maintains solid financial and community support. The University of Chicago provides the theater annual financial and institutional support, covering about 11.5 percent of its $6.5 million operating budget, said Senior Managing Producer Heidi Thompson Saunders. The support covers both financial and in-kind resources.
Hoffman said she is “super interested in the next generation of great young directors who need access, support and a space to experiment, to fail and to work on their craft.”
At Brown University, Hoffman led the opening of a performing arts center, created an arts workforce development program and incubated five residencies and 32 arts projects that students, faculty, visiting artists and student groups created.
Hoffman’s work here will expand upon Court Theatre’s engagement efforts, including the Community Reads Series — a partnership with the Chicago Public Library featuring book clubs, discussion groups, film screenings and post-play conversations about books that relate to Court’s productions.
The Court Theatre also hosts the “Spotlight Reading Series” — celebrating its 10th anniversary next year — featuring readings of plays written by little-known Black writers whose works have been historically excluded from the stage.
- While Hoffman intends to keep Court Theatre’s core commitment to the classics, she aims to experiment with the very definition of a classic, looking beyond the established Western repertoire. “What is the Chinese definition of the classics,” she said, citing one example. “The Indian classical tradition? The African? There are very different ways — indigenous for example — of sharing traditional stories. How we define ‘classics’ might evolve.”
- Even more intriguing, Hoffman sees theater as fluid.
“I am also interested in how we define ‘theater,” said Hoffman, whose extensive multidisciplinary experience informs her view of theater as “a stretchable space.”
She has worked with that very definition herself, from curating wide-ranging international arts festivals, convenings and creative projects, including for the TED Prize, the Clinton Global Initiative and the New York City Opera, to producing artistic programs at the “epic-scale” Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, to leading audience experience and content development for permanent exhibitions at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Indeed, Hoffman sees theater as, in her words, “an art form that’s meant to evolve, expand and be inclusive of a lot of different disciplines.”
“The question will be: ‘What are those boundaries? What’s the excitement for pushing those boundaries – or not?’”
Court Theatre sees Hoffman’s experience as critical to expanding its works nationally and internationally, said Executive Director Angel Ysaguirre.
“As we’re ramping up new play development work, she’s suited to take that to the next level,” Ysaguirre said.