The Big Turnover

SINCE LAST AUGUST, HANA S. SHARIF HAS HAD two jobs. While finishing up her work at Baltimore Center Stage as its associate artistic director, every two weeks she flies to St. Louis to take meetings at, and plan a season for, the $8.35 million Repertory Theatre, where she will start full time as artistic director in June. “I’ve learned how to sleep effectively on an airplane,” she says with a laugh from her office at Center Stage.

Meanwhile the similarly sized Center Stage is going through a transition of its own: It also just got a new artistic director, Stephanie Ybarra, who moved into the job after seven years as a producer at the Public Theater in New York City. “We’re living the same life,” says Sharif.

The two had been friends before, but now, as both transition from supporting institutions to actually being the person at the top, they’re stopping by each other’s offices for advice (or simply to blow off steam) on a whole new level. Ybarra says she is keenly aware that she and Sharif are two of the few women of color to be leading multi-million-dollar institutions, not just in this moment but in American theatre history. And as first-time leaders in a field that till now has been dominated by white men (even though many of its founders were women), both Ybarra and Sharif admit to feeling the pressure not only to succeed but to transform the theatre field.

“My worst fear is letting people down, because the expectations are so high,” says Ybarra. “I hope that I can live up to the revolution that people want, but it seems like a lot to carry.” It helps, she says, to have company like Sharif: “I’m not carrying it alone.”

Ybarra and Sharif don’t just have high personal standards. The American theatre field is currently in the middle of a major, even epochal shift. Since 2015, 88 artistic directors of major theatres around the country, most of them