You are the first. And you know it’s never easy when you are the first / You have to work twice as hard / And be twice as good / Everyone expects you to fail. But you won’t! So stand in who you are where you are. That is enough.
—Chorus addressing Miriam Makeba in Dreaming Zenzile, which had its world premiere at The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis on September 17, 2021
I’m sitting in a dim auditorium next to Hana Sharif, the first Black woman to serve as artistic director of a major American regional theater—in her case, the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis—and the stage in front of us at the Loretto–Hilton Center for the Performing Arts on Webster University’s campus is blazing with light and sound and sweat, but Sharif is not looking at it. She’s hunched over, thumbing notes into her iPhone on how to tweak it. This is an urgent task. The musical that’s unfolding, Dreaming Zenzile, will have its world premiere the following day. It explores the life of famed South African singer/activist Miriam Makeba, who died in 2008. (“Black power!” shouts the Makeba character, played by the show’s creator, Somi Kakoma.) The notes that Sharif is typing are aimed at helping the visiting director tighten things up. While Sharif believes in her directors and tries to say “yes” to their artistic choices, the quality of the art is ultimately her responsibility. And for The Rep’s subscriber base, which skews old, white, and suburban, this kind of show is already a bit of a departure from what they’re used to.
Sharif has taken the reins of The Rep from Steven Woolf, who retired in 2019 after a 33-year tenure. (He died in July of pulmonary disease.) White males have long dominated many aspects of American theater, and for decades, The Rep was no exception. But Sharif is part of a cohort of new leaders pushing American theater to evolve. Her preferred descriptor for this group is BIPOC (or Black, Indigenous, and people of color), and they’re undoubtedly gaining a foothold at the top: Of the 115 artistic directors hired in U.S. theaters since 2015, slightly more than a third have been BIPOC, according to a public database maintained by industry professionals.
Here in St. Louis, Sharif has deepened The Rep’s diversity within her staff, on the stage, and backstage. That’s precisely what The Rep’s search committee wanted her to do, says committee chairwoman Ann Cady Scott. (Like most members of the League of Resident Theatres, or LORT, The Rep is a nonprofit governed by a board of directors; the committee included both board members and community leaders.) They also wanted her to take the art beyond Webster Groves and into other areas of town, and Sharif is doing that, too—for example, by putting on shows at COCA, just off the Delmar Loop. Scott says she wants to support Sharif in every way possible. She’s concerned, however, that the programming overall has failed to be “accessible” to longtime patrons. That’s not a coded way of saying it needs to be whiter, she explains, but rather, an observation that far fewer of Sharif’s shows are part of the familiar canon, which encompasses both white and BIPOC playwrights, such as August Wilson. “If [the shows] are going to challenge me, that’s good, but I also want to be entertained,” she says. “I don’t think every one of them should be challenging.”
Board president Gwen Middeke believes Sharif is on the right track: “Maybe not every show is appealing to every person that has been a season ticket holder, but that’s not a bad thing. If you think about what a 501c3 [nonprofit organization] is, it’s for the common good.” That implies a mission, she says, “to welcome more parts of the community to the theater than just the old guard.” And even among the old guard, Sharif has already racked up wins: Pride and Prejudice, which she directed, broke box office records.
The Rep did make less money in Sharif's début 2019–2020 season: Program service revenue fell by a quarter, to about $4 million. That figure was heavily skewed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which canceled shows and left some audience members reluctant to return indoors. But The Rep expected a dip anyway, because that’s what typically happens with a change at the helm. Sharif says that according to her research of the past three decades of regional theater, incoming artistic directors tend to lose audience and revenue in their first two years, but their sensibilities attract new audiences and revenues in years three and four that more than make up for the losses.
Ron Himes, founder of The Black Rep, says that if Sharif was recruited as a change agent, she deserves the time and space necessary to be one. “She is very smart, very talented, and very well-connected in the American theater,” Himes says, “and I think it will just be a question of her getting support from the people who brought her here to make a change.” Asked whether he thinks she will, Himes says, “I hope she does.”
The pandemic may lengthen the typical adjustment period, Sharif says, but in any case, she doesn’t make fear-based decisions: “I’m not motivated by fear, and I don’t let other people’s fear and anxiety move me either.”
At one point during Dreaming Zenzile, the four-actor chorus urges the Miriam Makeba character to lift her voice to tell the truth about apartheid in South Africa. Makeba balks, telling them “I’m a singer, I’m no activist.” But then she relents. The chorus keeps chanting the lines “Black against white / Burnings and bullets / Gas and then guns / Dogs and riots,” and the tempo of the band quickens, and soon Makeba is shouting: “We want peace! We want justice!” I look at Sharif. She’s not taking notes anymore, just grooving in her seat.
Photography by Matt Seidel
Hana Sharif
Practically every kiddo who enters the second-floor studio of COCA on August 7 to audition for The Rep’s upcoming production of A Christmas Carol steps in with big, alert eyes. They sport Crocs and show missing teeth (or braces). They gape, arms at their sides, pinching at dresses or pulling shorts out of their behinds. One 6-year-old ends his tryout by ignoring a question, turning to gaze at himself in the studio mirror, and placing his page of script atop his head.
But as they enter, they’re greeted by Sharif, who’s seated behind a table with three female colleagues and wearing her microbraids in a wrap over her head, cat-eye glasses, and a warm smile. “Hiiii, Carolyn!” she lilts to a small girl. “I love your mask! I think I want one. So, what are you going to read for me today?”
This girl is set to read for two different parts. Sharif asks kids for preferences, she later explains, not only to empower them in the auditioning process but also to gauge how they respond to curveball questions, which is an indicator of how Sharif would have to approach them as a director. If the kids are shy, she invites them to play. “Let’s take a moment. Let’s shake our wiggles out!” she says to one, twisting her arms in the air. To another who’s soft-spoken, she jokes, “Act like I’m a great-great-grandma who’s really, really hard of hearing!”
But A Christmas Carol is not quite a kids’ show. It’s the Charles Dickens story, you’ll recall, of the stingy English businessman Ebenezer Scrooge, who’s visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future and undergoes a mirthful reawakening. And on the day of these auditions at COCA, Sharif and her team still haven’t decided which actors will play several adult roles. So during a lunch break, they log onto a video call with an out-of-town male actor who is reading for the part of Young Scrooge.
The Young Scrooge character appears in a scene in which his fiancée, Belle, breaks off their engagement because he’s too focused on making money. Sharif gives the actor a prompt. “With people who were born in extreme poverty, there is something that is compulsive and obsessive about never going back to poverty ever again,” she says. She mentions a friend who plays in the NBA and keeps 10 boxes of cereal at his house, because when he was a boy, there was never enough food. Scrooge, she concludes, is “trying to fill a hole that’s bigger than logic... So that’s the context you have going into this scene with Belle. And let’s play.”
After the video call, Sharif’s associate artistic director, Amelia Acosta Powell, scribbles character names onto notebook pages, rips them out, and arranges them on the floor, matching some with headshots. The goal is to visualize the cast. She sits and ponders while stirring a cup of soup. Sharif comes over with a salad and stands over the impromptu collage. Acosta Powell says, “We don’t have a lot of body diversity.” They discuss. Sharif says she likes the idea of a woman playing a lawyer character. “Such a novel idea,” deadpans Jenny Wintzer, COCA’s artistic director of theater, at which Sharif lets out a hearty laugh. When the three ghosts come up, someone mentions Afrofuturism, an aesthetic of science and technology interpreted through the lens of the African diaspora. (The Marvel movie Black Panther is one example.) I ask Becks Redman, The Rep’s producer of new play development, what gives. She says: “Hana is thinking about having Afrofuturism be an undercurrent for the whole show.”
From 1966 to 1981, The Rep was not called “The Rep.” Its original name was the Loretto–Hilton Repertory Theatre. (“Loretto” refers to the order of nuns who built what’s now Webster University, and “Hilton” refers to hotel magnate Conrad Hilton, who donated most of the cash for the theater building.) So why the name change in 1981? According to St. Louis Post-Dispatch archives, the board wanted the institution to be more easily identifiable with the city. They first voted to change it to St. Louis Repertory Theatre, “only to learn later that a name very similar to that had already been registered.” That name, though unmentioned, was likely The St. Louis Black Repertory Company, a.k.a., The Black Rep.
Himes was a student at Wash. U. in his twenties when he and others formed the company in 1976 on a shoestring budget. They did it, he told a reporter at the time, because “Black dancers, actors, and singers had no place to work.” The Black Rep has grown a lot since then: In the last normal (pre-pandemic) fiscal year, its total revenues were about $884,000. Himes says his theater company “without a doubt” draws the most diverse audience in town, whereas The Rep’s audience of mostly white seniors is more typical of a regional theater. He points out that his company was only the third in America to stage all 10 of the plays in August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle. He prides his group on how it tackles thorny issues and hopes that Sharif’s programming will create audience cross-pollination. But he chuckles when asked whether The Rep will steal his philanthropic funding. “There’s never been any real competition,” he says. “We’ve gone many times to request funding from the philanthropic base, who tell us they’ve already funded The Rep and there’s no slice of the pie for us.”
The Rep may have a history of greater financial support, but it has known times of turmoil: In the first half of the ’80s, says managing director Mark Bernstein, there were three changes in artistic leadership and “significant decline” in audience. So the board appointed Woolf to right the ship in 1986. The board president was quoted in the press saying that Woolf knew the audience; Woolf himself told a reporter that he would continue to present shows that challenged them: “Without offering a challenge, theater serves no purpose.”
Woolf was more approachable than his predecessors, Bernstein recalls. He showed up on performance nights and chatted with patrons about his choices. His “single biggest strength” was knowing which shows would resonate with them. “I don’t want to give the impression that Steve was perfect,” says Bernstein, who himself is set to retire in January after 35 years at The Rep. “He could sometimes be disagreeable and entrenched in his position. But by and large, he was successful.” Himes echoes that assessment: “He programmed for an audience that appreciated what he was offering—they subscribed to it for almost four decades!”
As Woolf was just getting started in the 1980s, Sharif was growing up in Houston. She was a so-called “SpelHouse baby”—that is, both her parents had graduated from historically Black colleges in Atlanta: her mother, Wanda, from Spelman, and her father, Curtis, from Morehouse. They’d gotten married, joined the Nation of Islam, and adopted the surname “Sharif” in the 1970s. Although they left behind Curtis’ family name, Sprott, they stayed tight with the Sprotts themselves, a large and accomplished African-American family with roots in Beaumont, Texas. When Hana was a girl, the Sprotts convened every three years for family reunions, part of which were “snappy shows”—talent showcases for adults and kids alike to lip-sync or sing their ABCs or play the trombone. Hana wrote skits and persuaded her cousins to act in them. As a middle schooler, she read aloud original poems. “Hana always had a dramatic flair,” says Wanda. “When she came into a room, you knew she was there.”
But at age 17, she learned that her calling was not to the stage itself. She was a senior at Cypress Creek High School. It wasn’t very diverse, she recalls, and some racial slurs hurled at a homecoming parade had created tension. Sharif wrote and produced a show titled Black Butterfly about the metamorphosis people undergo when they understand who they truly are. The production consumed her. During the show, which was performed by many students of color, she sat among the mostly white audience and felt their “real empathy and sense of seeing.” After the show, conversations ensued that soon spilled into classrooms. Parents sent her notes about how meaningful it was. She began to feel “that art has the power to do something much larger than just entertain.”
Sharif went to Spelman and majored in drama, but the drama faculty was experiencing deep turnover. She and her friends converged in her apartment and, over pizza, wrote a charter for a new theater company: Nasir Productions. Dedicated to serving underrepresented communities, it was a scrappy operation, she recalls, that would beg, borrow, and “liberate” items from campus. (She once spent her rent money on stage lights, hoping to earn it back at the door; she ended up calling her dad for help.)
Even during graduate school at the University of Houston, where she was mentored by some of the best in the business—playwright Edward Albee, director Sir Peter Hall—she was still producing shows for Nasir. But while passion fueled Nasir, budgets were small. Sharif wanted to see the inner workings of a regional theater and “steal the master’s tools,” as she puts it. So she headed to Hartford Stage in Connecticut, first as an intern, then as a grantee in the Theatre Communications Group’s mentorship program. (She credits those grants as essential for creating the current cohort of BIPOC theater leaders across the country.) She ended up staying in Hartford for a decade.
Back then, she recalls, theater wasn’t suffused with an ethos of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Yet she and the white artistic director, Michael Wilson, were so simpatico that he created a job for her; she, in turn, hustled and made him look good— and rose up the ranks. She did challenge an unwritten rule: that white directors could direct anything but Black directors could only direct Black shows. This rule risked creating a gap in her résumé: A future prospective employer might say that she lacked experience directing much of the canon. For the 2011 season, Wilson at first assigned her to direct a white-authored Black show. Sharif pushed back behind closed doors and pitched alternatives. Wilson chose one of them—August Wilson’s canonical Gem of the Ocean—and assigned her to that instead. “She convinced me” says Wilson, “and I was thrilled to have that play on our stage. It was a crazy-wonderful time.”
By this point, in St. Louis, Woolf had spent four years diverting from the canon to stage edgy shows in The Rep’s Off Ramp program, anchored in the Grandel Theatre in Grand Center. He’d hoped to attract a younger audience, and, according to Post-Dispatch critic Judith Newmark, it had occasioned some of The Rep’s most exciting work from 2005 through 2008. Bernstein says, however, that even at its peak, it earned only 40 percent of its costs, and the financial crisis rendered it unsustainable.
Over the next decade, recalls Ann Cady Scott, the subscriber base shrank, and Woolf’s choices began to feel stagnant. “It was time. So I was tasked with talking him into retiring.” After Woolf announced in 2017 his intention to step down, the board hired Albert Hall & Associates, a consultancy, to find a successor. Scott, who chaired the search committee, says she was explicit about what they wanted: candidates who were young, women, and BIPOC, and who had the talent to expand both The Rep’s art and its audience. So the consultants approached a variety of professionals, including Sharif. By that time, she had gotten married, had her first daughter, and moved on from Hartford, first to ArtsEmerson in Boston, then to Baltimore Center Stage. (During the protests in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, Sharif and artistic director Kwame Kwei-Armah had led the cast of their Bob Marley–themed musical Marley into the crowd to sing songs such as “One Love.”) Sharif saw potential in St. Louis and decided to apply. The field narrowed to nine, and interviews began. “I was really clear about who I am as an artist [and] what motivates me to do this work,” Sharif says. “And I felt that there was real alignment there.” The committee’s final vote was unanimous.
The walls of Sharif’s office pop with bright orange paint. She picked that hue. Having lived through analogous changes elsewhere, she knew that her presence behind a longtime leader’s desk could feel jarring to some employees, so she wanted to start fresh. For her, orange “has energy and warmth.”
Her first season’s schedule included only one show that The Rep had staged before and two world premieres. Sharif herself directed an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Local actress Michelle Hand, who played Mrs. Bennet, recalls how on the first day of rehearsal, Sharif shared with the cast her love of Jane Austen and how dear the book had been to her as a teenager. (It had been Sharif’s mother’s favorite book, too.) In addition, Sharif’s husband and daughter stopped by for a visit, and she introduced them. “Sometimes the boundary between the world outside and the rehearsal hall is kept very rigid,” says Hand. “Steven himself wasn’t a rigid guy; he’d always invite us to dinner at his house on the first night of readthrough. It just feels like this became an everyday part of that process with Hana. I got to see her in her roles as a mom and a wife and an artist.”
Both Hand and local actor Michael James Reed, who played Mr. Bennet, recall what happened opening night, before the show: Sharif asked everyone to hold hands in a circle and reflect on the gift of being able to tell that story. “I’ve been acting for 35 years,” says Reed. “Not all experiences are like that. I can tell right away when I’m in something special.” Says Hand, “That, to me, was like a benediction, a blessing of the magic that happens when you bring us all together.” Pride and Prejudice shattered The Rep’s box-office record, grossing more than $1 million.
But it didn’t generate the most positive letters and emails of the season, Sharif says. That honor went to the show that also drew the smallest audiences, Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles. It’s Euripides’ ancient Greek tragedy told through an immigrant family. Much of the feedback from subscribers was that they hadn’t wanted to see a show about immigration but were glad they did. Sometimes, Sharif says, the biggest challenge in art is merely persuading people to give it a chance.
The season was scheduled to end with Dreaming Zenzile, but the pandemic put the kibosh on that—and everything else. By late November 2020, Sharif was convinced that The Rep needed to bring joy to cooped-up families. She settled on the idea of a drive-through glowing puppet show based on Ezra Jack Keats’ classic children’s book, The Snowy Day. Normally, Acosta Powell says, such an event would take 12–18 weeks to produce; some staffers doubted they could pull it off in only five. Sharif insisted that they could—and they did. The event drew so many cars that The Rep had to turn many away.
Redman says that on Sharif’s team, “unless you’ve exhausted all your options, ‘no’ isn’t really the answer... You’ll know she disagrees because she asks very pointed questions. She invites disagreement, though. She encourages healthy debate.” Sharif says that’s just how she grew up: having raucous debates about ideas around the dining room table. “It’s in my blood,” she says. “It’s not personal to me.”
But internal debates at The Rep have sometimes been delicate. In June 2020, during nationwide civic unrest triggered by a police officer’s killing of George Floyd, an anonymous collective of BIPOC theatermakers published an online letter referred to as “We See You, White American Theater.” The letter accused the white theater establishment of, among other things, exploiting and marginalizing BIPOC professionals while failing to challenge its own “white privilege.” It concluded: “You are all part of this house of cards built on white fragility and supremacy.” The letter carried more than 300 signatures. Sharif’s was one. “The tenets in that first letter very much resonated with what I’ve experienced,” she tells me.
A month later, the anonymous collective sent Sharif and other theater leaders across the country a 29-page letter of demands. “I don’t know who the strategic minds were behind that,” she says, “but it did what it was supposed to do, which was set the industry on fire for a moment.” She did not feel, as a BIPOC artistic director, that she had a free pass to ignore it. So she and her leadership team read the book This Book Is Anti-Racist to gain a shared vocabulary, then used the demand letter as a catalyst for weekly conversations about The Rep’s practices. This continued for months. Bernstein says that when he read the demands and thought about the past, he recognized all too much. “We as an institution have been complicit in perpetuating that power structure,” he says. The team hasn’t finished the process but has made some concrete changes that they believe will be broadly beneficial. For example, any artist with a record of sexual harassment will not be working at The Rep, no matter how brilliant they are. Second, instead of asking actors to appear at a fundraiser and schmooze with donors as a favor, The Rep will now pay them stipends. “By addressing the most marginalized people,” Sharif says, “you’re actually solving the problem for everyone.”
Earlier this year, Sharif was asked during a panel discussion whether she was running a social-justice theater. “My theater is not steeped in it,” she said, “[but] is my leadership modeling social justice? Yes.” She added, in that forum and elsewhere, that upon arrival in St. Louis, she faced a “lack of faith” and ran into “brick walls” when enacting even small changes. So I ask: How much of that is simply a reaction to a new leader and how much to her race and gender? Sometimes, she says, it’s clearly the latter, such as the rare letter saying she can’t program for white people. Sometimes, it’s a by-product of institutional change, and her challenge is more about “winning hearts and minds” (a phrase she borrows from her husband, who served in the military). Artistic leaders build trust over time, she observes, and she’s only just arrived. But at the end of the day, her work will speak for itself. “It doesn’t matter what challenge or misunderstanding or confusion or bias that I’m up against: My job is to thread the needle through it and to lead the organization through it,” she says. “And I don’t have a problem facing challenges, because I’ve been in this body my whole life.”
The industry has an expression for challenging an audience while staying solvent: “to lead without losing.” Sharif has a different outlook: to lead, inevitably lose some, then gain others. “I love my patrons,” she says. “There’s not one patron that I feel is independently disposable.” The Rep will keep doing high-quality theater, she says, only now, aimed at a broader swath of the metro area. “So people who love theater are going to show up because they love theater. And the theater audiences that are like, ‘I don’t want to sit next to somebody that doesn’t look like me; this has been my country club forever and I want it to stay that way’—I actually am OK if they decide that they’re not coming back because all of a sudden the audience is larger than they’re used to, and younger than they’re used to, and maybe a bit more queer than they’re used to, and maybe a bit more brown than they’re used to. It’s OK to let go of some if the process opens the door for many others. Because the job is to ensure the future of the theater.”
That provokes the question: If The Rep loses some of its traditional subscriber base, who will replace them as ticket buyers? It’s possible that, as Himes hopes, some of the Black Rep’s core audience will try out The Rep, and vice versa. “They’ll all realize,” Himes says, “that there’s another theater in town that’s doing this kind of work.” As for young people and folks on tight budgets, it’s not clear whether they will start filling the seats. The most economical multi-ticket pass costs $140, and a single ticket, about $30. (Of course, a visit to a cinema and its concession counter easily adds up to $30 per person, too.) Middeke says The Rep’s prices are already low relative to costs; they’d be far higher if not for the charitable contributions, gifts, and grants, which came to about $3.26 million in the 2019 fiscal year. “We could have sold-out houses for every play and we’d still not cover our expenses,” she notes. What worries her most right now, she says, is unease among patrons about gathering indoors. But as Middeke sees it, the audience will return if Sharif keeps doing top-notch theater. “There’s something for everybody, but not everything is for everyone,” she says. “And that’s different from what it was before. But I think that’s healthy.” Becks Redman sums up that logic this way: “You don’t have to like every show you see. There’s so much conversation that comes out of not liking something.”
At the preview performance of Dreaming Zenzile, both during the intermission and after the show, I chat with a half dozen audience members. The consensus: The show is big in every way. “There’s a lot of energy and a lot of talent,” says subscriber DeAnne Brown, who says she’s been coming to The Rep since the ’70s. “I’ll tell you, South Africa is foreign to me, and the singing is not St. Louis–style, but I love the little jazzy tidbits.” With her is Gordon Brown, who confesses that he’s having a bit of trouble understanding the spoken parts. (Nearly all of it is delivered in African accents and some in African languages, with occasional crosstalk that creates a dreamlike vibe.) But both were fascinated by what they read in the playbill. DeAnne is looking on The Rep’s web page about Makeba’s life. Pat Casella, who is there with the Browns, agrees: “I didn’t know much about her, but now I’m learning about her, which I love.”
