Go to the Mall, See a Play

From the second floor of Redmond Town Center, a theatre looks to future.

Ellen Dessler as Ma Strong in Urinetown. Photo by Amy Timachell/Tiger Mountain Photo

Susanna Wilson has energy to burn. In conversation, she seems to hum like a tuning fork. Talking about her job as the artistic director of SecondStory Repertory Theatre, she says, “I keep telling myself, ‘I don’t have to draw up those actors’ contracts! I don’t need to run out and get concessions!’ There are certain things I should leave to others.”

Her smarts, efficiency and easy bonhomie help explain her success in parallel careers as  director and actress. She’s treaded the boards at Seattle Rep, Theater Schmeater, Village Theatre, and ACT  (where she was part of the all-star Seattle cast of The Women late last year). As a director, she’s helmed shows for Wooden O, Seattle Public Theater, Seattle Shakespeare and Book-It. At SecondStory she has put on five productions since she took over this summer.

It’s a good thing that Wilson’s got that energy.  The man she replaced, Stan Gill, was a multitalented theatre dynamo — a writer/director/actor/designer who founded six theatres before 1999, when he founded SecondStory at the Redmond Town Center Mall. His Sprouts Theatre, where the actors were mostly children, featured his own adaptations of classic fairy tales.

Gill was canny enough to realize that there was an audience in Redmond that would support a theatre, but he was also willing to reach across the water to find talent in Seattle’s theatre scene, including Wilson, who was offered the chance to direct Proof in 2004.

To check out SecondStory, Wilson attended a couple of shows, including one that truly woke her up to the possibilities of the snug 121-seat venue: Fiddler on the Roof. “When I heard that they were mounting a twenty-person musical there, I thought, I have to see how they get a show that big on a stage that small!” And to her amazement, they did just fine. Midsized theatre operations like SecondStory are hard to sustain. With a combination of paid staff and volunteers, they aim to present a professional theatre experience with a fraction of the budget available to established Equity theatres like Seattle Rep or ACT. In the mid-1990s Seattle was awash in such companies, but in the space of a few years the majority of them, including the Bathhouse, Group, Alice B., and the Empty Space, folded due to various financial crises.

Wilson acknowledges that the odds against a midsized theater are daunting, and not just because SecondStory is currently in the red. (“Right now,” she says, “a lot of our regular funders are holding back to see how we do this year, which is a concern.”) Perhaps there’s not the appetite for theatre on the Eastside that there is in Seattle — a notion that led Gill to set his curtain times fifteen minutes later so that audiences across the bridges had a better chance at making the curtain.

“That’s something that we’re changing,” says Wilson. In her estimation, the majority of SecondStory’s audiences comes from the Eastside. And it’s an audience whose diversity surprises her. “There’s such a range of ethnicity and income. As a Seattleite I had an impression of Redmond being all upper-income white people, and it’s so not true. We want to make sure that we’re reaching out to populations like the Eastern European and Vietnamese immigrants who are in Redmond. I’m looking forward to the challenge of choosing some plays that reflect who’s here.”

The theatre’s location on the second floor of the Redmond Town Center Mall isn’t exactly ideal. Yet Wilson believes that there’s at least one significant benefit to the company’s home: “Teenagers. We’re near the Old Redmond Firehouse, and that’s as much of a draw for teenagers as the mall itself.” Her upcoming plans include a capital campaign to find the theatre its own freestanding venue — though she wants it to be as close to its old locale as possible.

When I suggest that a new home for SecondStory might necessitate a name change, Wilson’s amused — in the exhausted fashion that one might expect from someone who’s working a lot of ten- to twelve-hour days. “At that point, if a name change is our biggest concern, I will be whooping with joy!”