Playhouse Names New Manager

The La Jolla Playhouse on Tuesday named Terrence Dwyer, managing director of the Circle Repertory Company in New York, as its new managing director.

Dwyer will leave his post at the highly respected Off Broadway theater to join the Playhouse staff June 1.

Despite the Playhouse’s considerable history of successes as it enters its 10th season, the company has, since 1986, been plagued by continuing struggles, which Dwyer described as “solvable.”

“The most important thing at any theater is that there is a really exciting artistic life. That had to be there, and that definitely is there in La Jolla,” Dwyer said Tuesday in a phone interview from his office at the Circle Rep.

“There have been great artistic accomplishments, and they have been quite ambitious. What often happens is that the administrative and the institutional side of things don’t keep up with the expanding vision of the artistic director. That’s what I’m there for. All the pieces of the puzzle are there.”

Dwyer replaces Alan Levey, the Playhouse’s managing director since it was revived in 1983. He resigned last November after overseeing the completion of the Mandell Weiss Forum, the second of the company’s two venues shared with UC San Diego.

The company has grown swiftly since 1983. The original three-play summer season includes eight plays this year over several months, from May to November. And, under the leadership of artistic director Des McAnuff, the Playhouse has reaped national and international attention for such shows as “Big River,” which won seven Tonys on Broadway and “A Walk in the Woods,” which McAnuff directed on Broadway and in Russia.

But the growth has not come without pain. The company has struggled with financial stability since 1986. By 1988 it had accrued a $703,000 deficit. It weathered a crisis campaign in 1990 that raised $500,000 to go on with that year’s season.

Financial stability remains a goal. And McAnuff sees Dwyer as part of the solution, because of his business expertise and because of some similarities between the Playhouse and the Circle Rep, a 23-year-old nonprofit theater.

“I would say the Circle Rep is an art-driven institution, and I would like to think the Playhouse is too,” McAnuff said. “I think he’s used to dealing with high expectations from artists, and that’s a consideration. Also the Circle Rep is an institution that has had financial challenges, and it’s my observation that the institution is more stable than when he arrived and has a more secure future.”

Dwyer was born in New Jersey and earned a master’s degree in directing from the University of Missouri before pursuing an MFA in theater administration at Yale University. Before that, he spent two years as managing director of the Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians in New York.

He met McAnuff when the latter was directing the world premiere of “A Walk in the Woods” at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1987, while Dwyer was in his last year of graduate school there.

Dwyer said he was so impressed with the quality of that production that he has “kept an eye on the Playhouse,” ever since.

Abigail Evans, who has served as interim managing director since Levey left, will leave the Playhouse at the end of April to work with the general management office of Laurel Ann Wilson on the Broadway production of August Wilson’s “Two Trains Running.”