In her fourth season as artistic director of the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, Peggy McKowen is overseeing a diverse array of new play productions — from the story of a Holocaust survivor to that of an autistic teenager with synesthesia to a Black family struggling through the 1980s AIDS crisis. As the 2024 season kicked off, the West Virginia native spoke with me about the CATF’s current offerings, the evolution of the new-play festival founded at Shepherd University in 1991, her own evolution as artistic director, and the overall health of the American theater. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Deryl: You’ve got three mainstage shows this summer. They seem to explore a range of human identities and perspectives, as well as the challenges that come with them. There’s a nonbinary, autistic teenager; a Black couple living with HIV/AIDS; a lesbian couple dealing with secrets from the past; and a Holocaust survivor. Is there a theme or idea that connects them all?
Peggy: We have three plays [Tornado Tastes Like Aluminum Sting, Enough to Let the Light In, The Happiest Man on Earth] and an offering in two parts [What Will Happen to All That Beauty?]. When I was putting the season together, I didn’t consciously think “This theme goes with this or that and this is the message.” But as the season unfolded, through the process of putting it together, I recognized that with diverse voices and diverse representation on stage, there is a thread about finding your way in the world, connecting to the people you love, and about how you share that love. I think that speaks within all of the plays, and how we continue to love one another even in the face of challenging and sometimes horrific things. That to me is the essence of what connects the dots in these plays. I didn’t go looking for that, and I didn’t consciously realize that until I saw them coming to life.
Are there elements of these plays that speak directly to the cultural or political moment we are in?
I think it is the fact that we can have different experiences, and we can suffer in different ways, and still have community. That we can share concepts of kindness, respect, and love. We need to remember what it means to be in community and to have collective care for one another. It’s that essential value of how we relate to one another that these plays exemplify and that we need to reconnect with.
How do you approach the selection of plays for your season?
I receive scripts from literary agents and also from directors and playwrights recommending scripts, so I get a lot. But I’ve really worked hard to visit new-play festivals to see who’s doing new work. I really like to hear a new play. The other thing I’m interested in is building relationships with people who are making and producing new plays. I like to go and meet people doing new work and championing new plays, and I get additional scripts through those connections. I’m really trying to broaden the way in which I receive new scripts and the people from whom I receive them. Then I sit down and read and reflect, and what sticks with me gets on my short list. Then I work with the team here to see what we can produce, what goes together in terms of logistics, variety, and audience. I’m looking for work that meshes in a way that can create a total experience. We want audiences to have a total festival experience here, to see all of our plays, and have a complete immersion in the world of new plays. It’s just a different kind of theatrical experience in and of itself.
How much does geographic locality influence your choice of plays or productions?
I’m not sure that it does. The reason why is that I can’t pick a season anticipating what an audience will think or how they will respond, because I don’t know. I don’t know that I think about geography or location influencing our selection of plays. What I do think about is how is this art serving the communities in which I live — Shepherdstown, West Virginia, the Mid-Atlantic region, and the industry. I do think about it in that regard, but it doesn’t necessarily influence our topics or themes. Rather, I ask, what is the experience of them [the season of plays] all together, and how are we serving our different communities?
The Contemporary American Theater Festival [CATF] was founded 33 years ago, and you’ve been associated with it for almost two decades. Have you seen an evolution in the Festival’s mission or vision over these years?
When I came to the Festival, we were producing four plays in two theater spaces. Since then, we’ve expanded to as many as six plays in six spaces, and we’ve built buildings and theaters in partnership with the university [Shepherd University]. We’ve certainly grown and expanded our audience and the pool of artists and people we’re working with. I think about CATF as “growing up.” We started as a scrappy little theater trying to do new work and to provide space for new work, for an exciting exploration of new plays. Now, we’ve grown to a place where we want to be a home for the development of new plays and to welcome audiences and artists to be part of growing the next canon of American theater. It’s a significant evolution, both physically, and also in how we’re perceived by the industry and by artists making new plays. I also think it’s time for us to do a better job in serving [local] Appalachian artists. As one of the leading cultural institutions in this state [West Virginia], we have a responsibility to serve this state both in how we welcome artists into this community and how we represent this state to the rest of the country.
You took over as CATF’s artistic director in 2021, although you began working with the Festival as a costume designer as far back as 2006. What has your own evolution been like, moving from costume design to producing, and eventually, running the Festival?
I started by designing two shows that Ed [Herendeen, founding CATF artistic director] directed. At the time, Ed was interested in creating a different kind of leadership model, and he wanted an associate producing director to help him curate and manage the administrative parts of the Festival. There weren’t many people on staff at that time. I was then the chair of the Division of Theater and Dance at West Virginia University. I was already in an administrative position while still designing for the [university] theater, and I thought, “I’m sort of ready to try this in the professional theater.” So, I was excited for a new opportunity. That was the year [CATF] did My Name Is Rachel Corrie, which was very challenging because of the strong reactions to that play. [The play deals with an American student activist who was killed by Israeli Defense Force soldiers in the Gaza Strip in 2003.] I very quickly learned what it meant to be an administrator for an artistic organization, and also how to craft the sort of vision I wanted for the institution. Ed was very willing to give me the space to grow like that. So, my evolution has been significant. But I feel I was well-prepared to step into the position of artistic director and capable of realizing the vision I’ve had.
And what is that?
I’ve always felt that theater should be a community-centered experience, because theater is the most, and in some ways the only, truly collaborative artistic experience. You really have to have a community to do theater. So, really keeping that in the center is important. Everybody in the process is an artist, from actors to designers to administrators, etcetera. They’re all committed, and they all want to collaborate to make the work the best it can be. That’s a complete artistic team. I’ve always wanted to cultivate a team of people who think like that and work like that, who keep the focus on serving the art and not just serving individual artists. When we create a piece together, it has a life of its own, and that art is experienced by an audience in so many different ways. My vision is more about the kind of experience I want artists and audiences to have together, and the ways in which we reach out to the community through artistic experiences. One dream of mine is that CATF will have programming at every level of the local school curriculum — elementary, middle school, high school — creating art as a way of being in community together. My vision is about how we as artists serve both the art and the community.
You took over as artistic director of CATF right after the pandemic, which closed the theaters. Many never reopened. How did CATF deal with the pandemic, and how has it affected your work now?
One of the really big challenges coming out of the pandemic is that we had made a commitment to produce a season we had not been able to produce because of the pandemic. That season was big — six plays in rotation in three theaters. It was the hardest season I had ever experienced. People were rusty because they hadn’t been working, and we were all under great stress because we had to constantly be in masks. The self-awareness about how we were working together added another layer to the experience. Then, inviting the audience into an experience where they also had to be masked and self-aware. In some ways, it was detrimental to that sense of community we wanted to foster. It was hard for people to manage the stress, the workload demands of a season that large with the scope we had. But coming out of that season, I made the decision to try to figure out a different work model. We couldn’t just jump back into what we had been in. So, I worked hard to find a new calendar, a new schedule that would reduce stress and focus more on work-life balance. Some stress in the theater will never go away, of course, but that additional stress can. So I’ve really been working on how to reimagine the Festival so that it still fulfills its essential mission and core values, while giving more time for the artists to really do their work and for the audience to reflect on that work, and to create the sense of a destination experience. That’s a big shift for us.
You do hear a lot about how professional theaters are struggling. Many people never returned after the pandemic. Since you visit a lot of theaters in your job as a festival director, what is your impression of the health of professional theater in America?
For us, a couple of things are very clear. We do not have the size of audience that we had pre-pandemic. We were on a really upward trajectory before the pandemic. We had over $700,000 in ticket sales prior to the pandemic. Now, we’re in the realm of $500,000. In this particular restructuring model, we’re not offering six shows [as CATF did pre-pandemic]. Partly, it’s a response to not seeing the numbers that we saw at the height of our attendance. But last year, we had more ticket sales than the year before. So, we’re seeing an uptick. We’re moving back toward that extraordinary attendance level. I recently had a couple [of audience members] tell me they hadn’t been here for five years, and now they’re back. So, we are seeing the return of our audience. I’m encouraged that we’re also seeing new audiences and new faces. That’s both reassuring and hopeful. We seem to be reaching a broader group of people or people who hadn’t experienced the Festival prior to the pandemic and are now exploring and experimenting. I do feel that audiences can still be a bit hesitant. It used to be that CATF’s biggest weekend was our opening weekend. Now, it’s not. Some audience members may be wondering if the shows will happen, or will get postponed. There’s more impulse buying, people not planning in advance. I think we’re moving away from the trend of seeing opening weekend being our biggest weekend to other weekends being the biggest, and that’s all right.
Within the industry itself, there was a lot of talk before the pandemic as to whether the old [season-ticket] subscriber model was working. People were becoming more spontaneous in their [ticket] buying, and I think that is still very true. Theaters have been trying to figure out how to navigate from a subscription-based model to other ways [of selling tickets]. Now, you see all sorts of ticketing packages. I also think theaters are struggling because of financial pressures with the ability to reimagine themselves. It’s very risky to do something different, something new, and reconfigure yourself. It’s a tightrope walk between the ways we want to do some things differently and having the funding to do what we want to do. That’s a big challenge. I do think theaters need to embrace the big question of why we’re doing the work we are doing. That will have an impact over the next five to ten years, over what theater becomes and what the relationship with the audience becomes. We probably have to do some soul-searching about why we’re here and how we make theater and how we’re serving our audience. There’s a lot of reflection and research coming forward about the essential purposes of theater and how we communicate those things to our audiences, and how we grow in our understanding of the audiences that we serve.
I think there’s an interesting parallel with the history of regional theater. When the regional theater movement started, its intention was to provide Broadway and New York theater experiences to local communities, because many people couldn’t get to Broadway or New York or a major urban center. I think that inherent understanding has dissipated over time, but now we’re coming back to it. There’s this sense that “Maybe we’re really here to serve our community, and how do we do that?”
Is there any message you want to send out about your current season?
Very practically, for this season, I want to send out a message to the HIV/AIDS community, the neurodivergent community, the different advocacy communities, that we have [ticket] discounts for them. We want to welcome them here, so that we can get everyone together in the theater. Theater is one of the few places [in American society] where people can come together in community to have a profound experience.
The Contemporary American Theater Festival, now playing through July 28, 2004,
at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia
Tornado Tastes Like Aluminum Sting
A world premiere by Harmon dot aut
What Will Happen to All That Beauty?
By Donja R. Love
Enough to Let the Light In
By Paloma Nozicka
The Happiest Man on Earth
By Mark St. Germain
For more information and the full schedule of special events, visit catf.org.
TICKET INFORMATION
Individual tickets to the CATF 2024 July season range from $40-$70. Packages of three or five mainstage performances range from $174-$300. Tickets can be purchased online at catf.org or by calling the box office at 681-240-2283.
SEE ALSO:
‘What Will Happen to All That Beauty?’ at Contemporary American Theater Festival (review by Bob Ashby, July 8, 2024)
‘The Happiest Man on Earth’ in rep at Contemporary American Theater Festival (review by Bob Ashby, July 7, 2024)
Contemporary American Theater Festival announces 2024 season (news story, May 27, 2024)
About the Wendi Winters Memorial Series: DC Theater Arts has partnered with the Wendi Winters Memorial Foundation to honor the life and work of Wendi Winters, the DC Theater Arts writer who died in the Capital Gazette shooting in Annapolis, Maryland, on June 28, 2018. To honor Wendi’s legacy, the Wendi Winters Memorial Foundation has funded the Wendi Winters Memorial Series, monthly articles to be produced by DC Theater Arts to bring attention to theater companies and theater practitioners in our region who engage in exemplary work that makes our community a better place. The centerpiece of these articles is a series we are calling “The Companies We Keep,” articles offering an in-depth look at one local theater company each month. In these times of division and conflict, DC Theater Arts chooses to celebrate those who do good.
For more information on DC Theater Arts’ Wendi Winters Memorial Series, check out this article graciously published by our friends at District Fray Magazine.
