Once upon a time the front offices of many regional theatres were staffed by people who were biding their time until an opportunity to act or direct presented itself. Arts administration was a rite of passage rather than an end in itself. As the regional theatre movement matured, however, companies recognized a greater need for dedicated professionals in these positions. Zan Sawyer-Dailey, who now holds the position of Associate Director for Actors Theatre of Louisville, has been at the forefront of this movement. Sawyer-Dailey arrived at Actors Theatre in 1985. As Assistant to the Producing Director, she made sure that then-Producing Director Jon Jory got where he was supposed to be and did what he was supposed to do. Shortly thereafter he promoted her to Artistic Manager, which meant she didn’t have to look after him quite so much, and she began her duties as primary casting agent. Over the past twenty-six years she has seen great changes within the company and has been a vital part of bringing this Louisville institution to the world stage.
SD: When did you assume your current responsibilities?
ZSD: When Marc Masterson came, I was promoted to my current position and moved into a larger sphere; I was then able to get my own assistant to tell me where I’m supposed to be and what I’m supposed to do.
SD: What is your primary job these days?
ZSD: I still do the casting, and that’s about twenty-two productions a season. I coordinate resources having to do with the Apprentice/Intern Company and I do some teaching – in our program as well as in a local acting class. I also coordinate company management and work pretty closely with every department. I would define what I do as making sure that
the left hand and the right hand know what the other is doing.
SD: The “right hand” and the “left hand” being the production and business sides of the organization?
ZSD: Artistic and administrative, right.
SD: Most of us are familiar with the artistic side of the organization but don’t really think much about the business aspects.
ZSD: They forget that this is a business. They hear “not-for-profit” and many people don’t understand what that means. They just assume we don’t have to worry about making money.
SD: Right. Not-for-profit only means there are no dividends to investors and no profit-sharing. Everything else is pretty much the same as a for-profit company.
ZSD: The residents of Kentucky are actually our investors, and whatever we get from the Commonwealth, the federal government and foundations is put back into the organization and used to build it.
SD: You also get donations, or investments, from individuals.
ZSD: Yes. But instead of a dividend, those investors get a tax deduction. That’s one of the ways not-for-profit organizations get the capital needed to operate and grow..
SD: How did you prepare yourself for this position? Did you grow up thinking, “I want to be a casting director or artistic manager”?
ZSD: Actually, when I was a youth those jobs didn’t exist. But I did grow up doing theatre because my family moved all the time and it was a way for me to find a social network. I didn’t get serious about it until I started high school.
SD: Where was that?
ZSD: I went to a big high school on the far north end of Chicago and began acting professionally through my high school acting teacher. When I was still a sophomore, I was cast in my first professional production and after that started doing a lot of work. I had my Equity card pretty early and just assumed that I would continue acting. My parents, on the other hand, saw college in my future. That hadn’t been on my radar, but I had been a very good student in high school so I received an excellent scholarship to Butler University in Indianapolis.
SD: Butler is a great school.
ZSD: Yes – I got an excellent education. While I was there, I discovered “back stage” and I suddenly realized that I really loved back stage work – designing lights and stage managing and producing. So I stopped acting for quite a while.
SD: What did you do after college?
ZSD: I went to New York thinking I was prepared and spent a year waitressing. I was in a showcase downtown – a freebie thing – and a friend of mine said there was a woman in the audience who ran a theatre in Texas who wanted to meet me.
SD: This sounds like a Broadway story.
ZSD: Yes, it turned out that the woman was Nina Vance who ran the Alley Theatre in Houston. She invited me to become a junior member of the company and I spent three years there.
SD: Good years?
ZSD: It was great. These were the very early days of the regional theatre movement; and people who worked there, like here, felt like it was their artistic home. I did a bit of everything on the artistic side. Sometimes I would be on the stage management team; sometimes I would be up in the booth running the lights; a lot of times I would be on stage. I loved it because I could do a lot of different things.
SD: What was your next stop?
ZSD: I went back to Chicago really thinking I would get out of the business. It was wreaking havoc on my personal life. I got a job as a marketing researcher. Through that, I was put onto a survey sponsored by Ford Foundation on behalf of the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA was only about ten years old. It got me thinking about a lot of things I had never thought about before. That was when the field of arts administration was just emerging.
SD: There still aren’t a lot of academic programs dedicated to it today.
ZSD: At that time there were two in the entire country: one was in Madison, Wisconsin; and the other was in Tallahassee, Florida. I chose Florida, and that’s where I met my husband, Mark, who was in a directing program there.
SD: And from there?
ZSD: We ended up doing a lot of intern-
ships around the country. No one else was doing internships in arts administration, so I could go anywhere I wanted to go. Because I was underwritten, my Fellowship allowed me to get a lot of different experiences and exposure. I took a job teaching at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. I was very honored to be given that position, and I taught there for four years. While there I learned a lot about teaching and running a program. My job was to actually run the theatre operation as well as teach undergraduate and graduate students – it was intense. Then we decided I would stop working and we adopted our first child. She had just come home from Korea when the local arts council called me in desperation. I knew nothing about arts councils, but I ran the council for two years. It was fabulous because it taught me so much about grant-writing, local artists and how you help them find a market. Through that process, I became acquainted with a number of people at the state level and they recruited me to work for the New York State Council on the Arts.
SD: What did you do for them?
ZSD: I was working in a very specific program called “Decentralization” where I was going out working with local arts councils. Then the New York state budget was swept and I was out of work and pretty frantic. We were in Brooklyn with a two-year-old and I had promised my husband that he could be an actor. Just by chance I saw an ad for a job at the Brooklyn Museum, which was just down the street. I got the job. It was an amazing job, but it was really scary because I had never worked for a fine arts institution. I was responsible for writing grants for thirty-three different curatorial departments and I had never turned on a computer! Not only did I have to execute the grants, I had to learn the collections. I could not have done it had it not been for my theatre background. It was just like getting ready for opening night: you just have no choice but to do it until it’s done.
SD: How long were you at the museum?
ZSD: I stayed there a year and had a wonderful experience. Then, out of the blue, Jon Jory called and asked me if I wanted to move to Louisville.
SD: How did he find out about you?
ZSD: A colleague from Cornell was here and she had recommended me to him. At first, we really resisted. Then he up and hired Mark into the acting company, which was a smart thing!
SD: I suppose my question is, with your experience and mobility, why have you stayed at Actors Theatre so long?
ZSD: I have had the opportunity here to just keep growing. My interests have never worn thin, because it is truly an exciting and remarkable institution. Every time I’ve started to question my desire to continue here, there has been some huge shift that opened new opportunities for me.
SD: This place has changed a lot in twenty-six years.
ZSD: It has indeed. It has gone from being a mom-and-pop operation to a
big institution. It has undergone some enormous leadership changes with barely a ripple, which I think is not only a testament to the leadership itself but a testament to the theatre and to the community.
SD: Even back in 1980, when I auditioned for the Apprentice program, Actors Theatre was one of the top regional theatres in the country. But now it has an international reputation.
ZSD: It really was the Humana Festival of New American Plays that put us on the map.
SD: Back in those days, the resident company was in full swing with Fred Major, Adale O’Brien, Mark Sawyer-Dailey, Ray Fry, V. Craig Heidenrich…
ZSD: He’s coming back.
SD: V. Craig?
ZSD: Yes, he’s going to be in our production of Barefoot in the Park. This time he’s playing the eccentric upstairs neighbor; he used to be our leading man!
SD: That phase only lasts a little while. We all spend a lot longer as the eccentric upstairs neighbor. Craig and Mark were part of a real family of actors whom Louisville audiences got a chance to see in a variety roles. Now it’s mostly actors coming in from out of town. Is there still an opportunity for locals to participate?
ZSD: There is, but everybody has to audition. We see a lot of people locally – we cast a local older man for Barefoot in the Park and a younger local man for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Obviously, we have a lot of opportunities for children. What we’re up against is that there are very few people whose schedules will permit them to rehearse during the day for over three and one-half weeks. Occasionally, we’re able to work around that.
SD: For people who might like to audition for you, what do they need to know?
ZSD: We are ferociously auditioning–mostly in the month of April. Everything is posted on our web site, actorstheatre.org. There is a lengthy section on Frequently Asked Questions to tell people why and how we do certain things.
SD: For instance?
ZSD: Many people are not aware that we operate under an Actors Equity contract and they are rigorous about how we hire and whom we can hire. Our opportunities to hire people from the community are limited by that as well as their schedules.
SD: There are a pretty good number of non-equity theatre companies in the area. Do you ever have the opportunity to recommend some of these actors to them?
ZSD: I get several phone calls a month from a director or producer in town who has lost somebody or is looking to put together a commercial project or short film. We have a database and we send information out all the time. We consider it one of our missions to cultivate and nurture the talent in Louisville.
SD: Speaking of that, tell me about your acting class.
ZSD: The class is open to anyone in the community. You don’t have to have any previous experience or training. I keep it fairly small so that I can give each student very personalized attention. When I go to the unified audition that Theatre Alliance of Louisville (TAL) holds, my name is on about three-quarters of the resumes because so many of the people who are pursuing acting in Louisville have taken my class.
SD: How many people generally audition at the TAL unified casting call?
ZSD: Last year there were about forty. It’s a great opportunity to be seen by every producer in the area, including us.
SD: Last year Actors Theatre added A Christmas Story as one of your seasonal offerings, giving children another tremendous opportunity to perform.
ZSD: We do an exhaustive search for children of all ages, but primarily between the ages of six and thirteen, who are well composed, who can take care of themselves and who are not reliant on having their mom or dad in the room. They don’t need a lot of experience or specific skills, but they need to speak clearly and loudly, have a good sense of humor and not sway back and forth too much. We want a sense of presence and personality.
SD: There are some recurring roles. Are there any particular challenges for you?
ZSD: Casting the little girl in Dracula is always one of my favorite things because they’re always so cute. I make them go all the way to the back of a huge room and scream as bloodcurdlingly as they can. That’s where you get ’em; if they can really do that, I’m like, “Okay.” The kids in A Christmas Carol need to be able to sing and dance. The kids in A Christmas Story have a lot of lines.
SD: I remember the first search for Ralphie was a pretty big deal.
ZSD: We went through all of the auditions and had still not found the quintessential Ralphie. We were really puzzling about it when Sean Daniels, the director, came up with the idea of a city-wide search at places like the Pro Bass Shop, Louisville Slugger Field, the malls, etc. It really turned out to be quite an exhilarating process, so we did it again this year. Of course, it culminates in a huge event at the state fair where we ask them to learn some of the script and deliver a monologue. We spend time with them and their families because this is a big commitment for the parents. I always tell them, “There can only be one Ralphie,” but...there is always next year.
Actors Theatre’s annual production of Dracula runs through October 31 in the Bingham Theatre. Come see Ralphie and all the kids in A Christmas Story in the Pamela Brown Auditorium November 9-28. A Christmas Carol opens in the same space December 7 and runs through December 23. For information about these shows, The Mystery of Irma Vep, the Humana Festival and everything Actors Theatre, go to actorstheatre.org. For tickets, call 502.584.1205.