Sarah Benson, Soho Rep’s Former Director, Wants Theater to Push You

Contemporary American theater would not be the same without a 65-seat theater tucked away on a quiet TriBeCa side street. Founded in 1975, Soho Rep has produced new, often boundary-pushing plays, including, in recent years, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “An Octoroon,” in 2014, and Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fairview,” in 2018.

Indeed, for the last decade and a half, the theater has been on quite a roll, presenting shows by a formidable cohort of playwrights that also includes Lucas Hnath, Anne Washburn, David Adjmi and Aleshea Harris. This golden age coincided with the tenure of Sarah Benson, who became Soho Rep’s artistic director in 2007 and departed the institution on June 30.

Benson, who grew up in Britain, moved to the United States as part of a Fulbright program and earned an M.F.A. in directing at Brooklyn College. She had run Soho Rep’s Writer Director Lab for two years before replacing Daniel Aukin at the company’s helm.

The first show Benson directed for the Rep, Sarah Kane’s bleak, gruesome “Blasted,” which starred Marin Ireland and Reed Birney, became a sensation in the fall of 2008. That show was both an outlier (“Blasted” was 13 years old then and Soho Rep would go on to focus on new work) and a harbinger of the many thought-provoking, destabilizing productions to come. Benson herself went on to direct “An Octoroon” and “Fairview,” which demolished the fourth wall and kept upending audiences’ expectations of where the plays were going.

“The first time we worked together, it became the gold standard by which I judge all collaborations,” Jacobs-Jenkins said over the phone. “She’s incredibly open and shockingly egoless. Her shows are the kind that you can go back to again and again because she’s got so much in every corner that it’s hard to take them all in one go,” he added. “I’d say she’s radical, but entertaining and visionary.”

(Benson’s résumé also includes “Skittles Commercial: The Broadway Musical,” which ranks among the most surreal Super Bowl ads ever made.)

In 2019, Soho Rep switched to a shared leadership, with Benson, Cynthia Flowers and Meropi Peponides on equal footing as directors. “Sarah has an incredible design brain and I am a much more abstract thinker,” Peponides, who also just left, said on the phone. “We were able to round out each other’s skill sets in terms of how to make a big, wild, ambitious idea happen.” One of those ideas was Project Number One, which was announced in September 2020 and provides theater artists a living wage as they develop new works for Soho Rep.

Now a free agent, Benson has several projects in the works, including César Alvarez’s “NOISE (A Musical)” at Northern Stage in Vermont later this month and Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs’s “Teeth” at Playwrights Horizons early next year. At a coffee spot near her home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, the director, 45, chatted about her vision of theater and her plans for the future. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Did you leave because you wanted to spend more time on directing and less on paperwork?

That’s part of what has led to this moment. I’m ready to be able to say yes to more projects. It’s been an incredible gift to be working at that level of artistic risk and to be surrounded by other artists working at that level of risk. It’s been life-changing, truly. And it’s a lot [laughs].

Did you have any management experience before Soho Rep?

I had experience as an artist, that was it. But as a director, you are in a position of leading and figuring stuff out. I think that the skill sets of an artist are actually very well-suited to being in leadership.

Why choose “Blasted” for your first outing as director at Soho Rep?

Marin Ireland instigated that project. I’d always absolutely loved that play, but for me it was about the Northern Irish conflict. So I read it again, and I got this jolt, like, “Oh no, this is about civil war and what is happening right now.”

Do you need a jolt to decide to do a play?

Immediately I start imagining pictures and feelings. I’m always attentive to what feelings I get because that is the best information that’s going to take me to “What’s the real material? What can I bring to this material?” I’m always trying to seek out that charge.

You have directed very different plays, but the one through line is that your stagings, besides being surprisingly entertaining, avoid the naturalism common in American theater.

To get to an honest place of having an embodied conversation about joy and pain, and how close we can look at those things together — naturalism just doesn’t get there for me. For me realism is a closed system. It’s like, “Here’s the thing, look at it.” I’m much more interested in something where there’s space for the audience to get in there and complete the event through that feedback loop of live theater. People want to see ambitious work and things they haven’t seen before. They want to be challenged.

What are your first steps when you start working on a new show?

“What’s the problem?” is always interesting to me, so I’ll often start from there. I do a lot of work on my own initially, reading and research and images, and kind of start from that place of, “Where am I feeling the heat and the energy? What am I feeling confounded by?” I’ve been lucky to have these phenomenal, deep collaborations with designers where we’ll meet early and often and really approach it like conceptual art, or whether design can really inform, in many cases, the text.

How has Soho Rep changed as an institution over the past 16 years?

With Meropi and Cynthia, we completely changed the planning horizon of what was possible. We’re commissioning to produce, so when we commission an artist, we’re going to do whatever they write. So it’s moved away from agents submitting plays. People still, of course, do that somewhat, but we don’t have a literary department — it’s much more about building relationships with artists and committing to them for the long haul.

As a director, do you think you’ll be able to pursue completely different opportunities now?

I’m getting invited to do opera. There’s a lot of big ideas and spaces that I’m now dialoguing with. I’m like, Yeah, I am interested in scale. This is what I’m very ready for. The gift of Soho Rep has been this room where you could literally cut a hole on the floor for “Blasted.” You can be very impolite with that room, get in there and have a conversation with that space, and that’s been amazing. But I know that room very well, and I’m excited to situate my practice in other kinds of spaces.

How do you think the New York theater ecosystem has changed in the past two decades?

Around 2004, 2005, I would be out seeing eight or nine shows a week sometimes. It was truly experimental in a very amazing way. I don’t have nostalgia for that time because there were a lot of issues and no one was getting paid. It was hard. But the work was oriented around a community, and that was very real. I feel like that communal north star has evaporated, and it became much more oriented toward mainstream success of some kind. But I feel like Covid broke that apart and now I feel weirdly close to that time from the aughts, where it’s up to artists to decide what we want to make and see.

That makes you one of the few optimistic people in the field right now!

Everything’s going to [expletive], it’s all falling apart. Even in the mainstream commercial spaces, the old model of tourists and all of that, it’s gone, the subscription model is gone. There’s a lot of second-guessing that doesn’t put any trust in the audience — it’s really patronizing. But audiences want to see something new. They don’t want to see what they’ve seen over and over and over again.