Tricks up his sleeve

When Chris Smith was in college, he read a play by Sam Shepard and noted that the production was sponsored by the Magic Theatre. Twenty years later Smith finds himself in the middle of his second year as the acclaimed artistic director of San Francisco’s renowned theater incubator.

“In school I had developed this utopian vision of the Magic as a place where writers and plays were born,” Smith says.

Utopia needs new carpeting. Although the theater’s budget has recently doubled to almost $2 million a year, the warren of offices tucked behind the Magic’s two stages (which together seat 320 playgoers) shows little evidence of any great cash infusion.

“We operate pretty close to the margin,” Smith admits, sitting on a worn chair in his office as hammering echoes from stage construction on the other side of the wall. “We don’t have an endowment. We’re subsidized by every artist who works here.”

The Magic has a storied history. Founded in 1967, the playhouse flourished in the ‘70s and early ‘80s when Shepard spent the better part of a decade as the playwright in residence. In almost four decades the Magic has premiered 200 plays.

But in recent years the theater lost some of its, well, magic: reviving old Shepard plays and staging such gimmicky offerings as the Festival of Lesbian Playwrights. In 2003, Smith was hired from New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre, where he was associate artistic director, and given six weeks to put together his first season. The resulting six world premieres had critics raving, season ticket sales jumping by a third and the box office scoring two of its biggest successes in the theater’s history with David Mamet’s “Dr. Faustus” and Edna O’Brien’s “Triptych.”

The Magic managed the trick of being both critically and commercially successful. Audiences jumped 58%, contributions were up by 67% and the theater actually made money: $3,762 to be exact. Not bad for a year when more than half of the playhouses surveyed by the Theater Communications Group reported losing money.

“The Magic has the potential to become as vibrant as it was in its heyday and then some,” Smith says, as he says most things, enthusiastically. “My only mandate was to have a vision. We’re a 38-year-old start-up. We do seven IPOs a year. We’re the Silicon Valley for new plays. Very few places in the country do all new plays. Our hands will be on the development of 40 plays this year, and the audience will see seven.”

This season, Smith’s offerings have ranged from a musical version of the dark comedy film “The Opposite of Sex” to Rebecca Gilman’s “The Sweetest Swing in Baseball,” which had its U.S. premiere at the end of last month. Gilman’s play depicts an artist who tries to commit suicide after her gallery show flops, then winds up in a mental hospital assuming the persona of bad-boy ballplayer Darryl Strawberry.

“I program plays I really like,” Smith says. “I think about it the way you’d think of a dinner party. If it’s all potatoes it’s boring; if it’s all highly spiced there’s no balance. When it works, it’s great; when it doesn’t, hopefully the artists involved can learn.”

Smith points to Gilman, a Chicago playwright who has been a Pulitzer finalist, as the kind of writer he likes to work with. Her new play is the third she’s opened at the Magic.

“For accomplished people this is a playground,” he says, “for emerging people it’s a launching pad.”

Consider 2003 Pulitzer Prize winner Nilo Cruz, whose first play, “Night Train to Bolina” was produced at the Magic in 1994. Cruz says he wanted to work at the Magic because of its rich history and reputation as an nurturing environment.

“When you do a play in New York, it’s about the product, not the process. There’s a lot of pressure and expectations when you do a play in New York. A bad review can really have an effect,” he says. “When you do a play at the Magic, you don’t have the same kind of pressure. The way we learn about our work is when you see it up on its feet; you learn an enormous amount from an audience. The Magic is all about the play.”

Smith’s recipe has been to mix celebrity writers (Mamet, O’Brien, Charles Grodin) who win the theater buzz with new voices whose work is highlighted in the Hot House series, where three new plays premiere in repertory.

“Nobody knows what a play is until it meets an audience,” he says. “We give birth: It’s labor and it’s bloody. Then it has to grow. We did some of Shepard’s best plays; we did some of Shepard’s worst plays. Not everything is gold, but he had the opportunity to stretch. We’re an artistic gymnasium.”

Every year 800 aspiring Shakespeares (or at least Shepards) submit plays to the Magic. The theater also commissions nine new works a year, although only one or two will make it to the Magic’s stage.

“To find a good play is very challenging,” Smith says. “We read everything we get. You never know. It’s great to premiere Mamet; it’s better to premiere Nilo Cruz, who goes on to win a Pulitzer. We send things out into the world.”

Smith acknowledges that some things probably should stay home. Mamet’s “Dr. Faustus,” for example, generated a great deal of attention but was generally trashed by critics. The San Jose Mercury News, for example, said: “The legendary playwright seduces us with his facility for language but never finds the beating heart of the classical myth in this unsatisfying world premiere.”

“Mamet’s play was about his challenging himself as an artist,” Smith says. “It was critically lambasted, not undeservedly so. It’s a challenging play and the production had some flaws, but it was interesting. It wasn’t to everyone’s taste, but it sold a lot of tickets.”

At 41, Smith still seems as excited about the theater as he must have been when he wandered into an audition at Washington, D.C.’s elite Sidwell Friends School and left with a part. “I was a shy, fat child who moved around a lot,” says Smith, whose father was in the foreign service. “With the theater I blossomed.”

Smith was born in Lebanon and spent time growing up in Brazil. He entered Brown University expecting to become an architect but couldn’t get rid of the theater bug. “My mom kept thinking it was a phase I’d grow out of,” he says. “But it’s a calling. You play and people come and watch. It’s almost a fantasy.”

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Becoming established

After school Smith moved to New York and spent eight years working as a legal assistant while moonlighting in off-off-Broadway productions, before becoming artistic director of Youngblood -- an arm of the Ensemble Studio Theatre that focuses on the work of young playwrights -- then moving on to EST.

“The national theater is a web, a bunch of theaters sharing. It’s very much akin to the scientific community: Good ideas get disseminated broadly. It’s not a zero-sum game; we help each other,” he says. “Half of what we do at the Magic is speaking to the rest of the country.”

Recently, Smith has been speaking to unlikely theatrical audiences, such as the BioAgenda 2004 Summit in Palm Springs, where he traveled with actors Jill Eikenberry, Michael Tucker and Kevin Rolston to read a one-act play and excerpts from three other works dealing with biotech issues.

“We went to a scientific conference and threw some theater up,” he says. “Hopefully, it stirred some thought.” The reading was part of a new program, funded by a $396,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to develop plays exploring science and technology.

“It’s about challenging stereotypes,” Smith adds. “For relatively little money you can get a lot of impact. We can help bridge the gap between the science and artistic cultures.”

Smith leans forward in his seat. Through a window, it’s a hazy winter day, palm trees etched against the fog; inside, Smith talks excitedly about the theater season, which includes his staging of John Belluso’s “The Rules of Charity” in April. He’s looking forward to the darkness.

“You can have an experience in theater like a roller coaster,” he says. “If you can feel your stomach drop and get a few laughs and be transported somewhere and if it’s a brand-new experience, hey, that’s pretty terrific. I live in anticipation of the lights going down.”