Episode 3: Mary Kate Burke and Cape Fear Regional Theatre
Lacey: [00:00:00] Hello listeners welcome to While The Applause Is Paused Conversations With Regional Theater Makers,
I'm your host Lacey Tucker. Join me as I talk with artistic leaders around the country about what's challenging and constricting. or creative and exciting, or all of the above in the pandemic curtain up, on some real conversation for these
real times.
This week we welcome Mary Kate Burke, artistic director of Cape Fear Regional Theatre in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
Mary Kate Burke took the helm at CFR T four years ago as only the third artistic director in the theater's 59 year history. She came to the position after nearly 20 years as a director, dramaturg, assistant director and artistic director. Originally from Connecticut and a graduate of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas., Mary Kate got her professional start as an assistant director to film legend Arthur Penn, director of the films, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Miracle Worker. And they worked together on the two time, Tony award winning Broadway production of Fortune's Fool. She also assistant directed for Jonathan Lynn, the director of My Cousin Vinny, Clue and The Whole Nine Yards.
And they worked together on an off-Broadway production of A Mother, A Daughter, and A Gun starting Olympia Dukakis. She has also worked at Dede Harris productions, a nine time, Tony award winning commercial producing office. And served as the director of programming for the highly regarded New York Musical Theater Festival.
In that role, Mary Kate spearheaded the effort to create autism friendly performances for the festivals children's series. Mary Kate was also Producing Artistic Director for three seasons at Millbrook Playhouse in Mill Hall, Pennsylvania. In my conversation with Mary Kate, it's so readily apparent that the incredible knowledge and insight she's picked up along her journey helped her meet the leadership challenges of this moment.
I want to thank Joanne Javien for connecting me with Mary Kate. And now let's dive in.
So hello, Mary, Kate Burke. I would love to hear about your theater and your work there, how you ended up there. I know it's it was about four years ago that you arrived and your theaters mission and your community.
Mary Kate: [00:02:30] Awesome. Yeah. My name is Mary Kate Burke and I live in Fayetteville, North Carolina. I moved down here about four years ago from New York. I was looking to produce work for a community that I knew. So I wanted to make theater for people and know kind of who they were and why I was doing it and what the goals were, and really use theater as a kind of way to bring a community closer together.
A friend of mine had been a musical director down here. He had done like six or seven shows and the job opportunity was posted, I think, on like Art Search. And so I emailed my friend Andrew, and I said, do you think I would like it in Fayetteville, North Carolina, which I had never heard of before. And he said, yeah, I think you would like it there.
And I think he said, I think you'd love it. And I think you'd be really good for the theater. So I applied to run it and very swiftly moved down here and have really loved. Both the community and the theater and the support that the theater enjoys in the community.
And so Fayetteville's a really interesting city. It's got about 300,000 people in it. It is, I believe it's the 10th largest city in the state of North Carolina. And it is a majority minority community. And it is the most notably known for being the home of Fort Bragg. Fort Bragg is the largest military installation by population in the continental United States, which actually becomes all of those details are very important to articulate in a military community because, you know, details on a mission are very important. So I have learned that you can't just say it's the largest military base you have to say by population in the continental United States.
So I moved down here about four years ago and programmed, you know, three seasons and got through two. Six five seasons before, before
Lacey: [00:04:26] very precise, the military would be proud of you.
Mary Kate: [00:04:29] Thank you. Thank you. And it's been awesome. You know, our mission is to bring the community together, to think harder, laugh deeper, share experiences, and grow as a community. And that is exactly what we do. We produce six main stage shows. Usually there are three plays and three musicals, and then we also do a... for 29 years this year would have been the 30th year. We do The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, which is our community engagement show. We have three companies of up to 60 community members perform in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. And it seen by anywhere between seven and 10,000 people. So that's been happening in this community for 29 years.
This year would have been its 30th year, but we actually ended up putting it on Pause, obviously, because of COVID and we look forward to next year when we can really do it to its fullest, you know, celebration,
Lacey: [00:05:21] I'm amazed by the hundred and 80 people that you are working with for that yearly show. And I'm also so touched that people would want to see the same thing every year for 29 years. It must be a really good show.
Mary Kate: [00:05:35] Well, they also, it's really interesting cause like sometimes we have multiple generations of the same family and because it's predominantly children, but adults also, there are some adult roles in it, you know, sometimes we'll have a mom and a daughter.
One time we had three generations, we had a grandmother, a mom and a daughter all performing together. And I think that is part of the kind of joy of it is you as a kid. Oftentimes I think about 7,000 students come to see it each year. So you see it as a kid, maybe when you're younger and then you think like, Oh, I could do that.
And then you come in, you audition and then you're in it and you're in it for your classmates. And then you. You know, you age out and you become a parent yourself and then your child gets to carry on the tradition. So it is a very touching thing that we, that we do in the community. Although I do have to say, like, it's an interesting journey because there is a lot of sentiment around it in a really great way and a lot of emotions and feelings, but then there's also 29 years of it.
It's like, how do you keep it fresh after that many years? So this particular year, what we were planning to do was actually we had intended to do two shows in the holiday slot. So we were going to do The Best Christmas Pageant Ever and we were going to alternate it with Black Nativity, which is Langston Hughes play that is done a lot in North Carolina.
It has a lot of spiritual gospel music in it. It's been running in Greensboro for a similar length of time. I think it's been running in Greensboro, which is about 90 minutes away for like 25 to 30 years. So we were going to kind of alternate to create new traditions and then maybe do The Best Christmas Pageant every other year.
And people do approach me a lot of places like at the Harris Teeter, which is the grocery store down here. And they tell me if they're either for this new plan or against this new plan, but we want, what we're trying to do is keep it so that it feels special and like something that you get to do instead of just the same thing every year.
So it's the balance of keeping it fresh and keeping it running for more and more years to continue the tradition.
Lacey: [00:07:40] There is a very strong tradition at a lot of regional theaters of getting the community involved and in, you know, in ways that as new York-based based artists, we may not be aware of and how important that is and how integrated you are into the community in that way. I love what you said: think harder, laugh, deeper, grow as a community. That's what you said, that beautiful mission.
Mary Kate: [00:08:05] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we have a mission, we have a vision and we have values. And it's interesting because we are in the journey of like, starting to CFRT is in, in the beginning phases of kind of capital campaign and an imagining of what the next... we're 59 years old so we're trying to figure out what is the next kind of half a century look like for us. And our theater was purchased in the eighties and I think it was '84. Five, we got the building in '87, we paid the mortgage off. So we own our building, which is awesome. Especially in times that are so have so much turmoil economically surrounding them, particularly for our field to not have a mortgage that we have to pay is pretty incredible. As we think about what is the next half a century look like for this institutions... CFRT is very distinctive, it was founded by a small group of people, and then it was run for 50 years by one woman. Yeah, a local woman named Bo Thorpe ran the theater for 50 years as the artistic director.
Then there was a second artistic director whose name is Tom Clayton's. He's now running a theater in Virginia, and I'm only the third artistic director at this institution over almost 60 years. Bo's still here, she lives here. We just did Christmas caroling with some of the kids from the theater in like little family pods for the Salvation Army, which she's been doing for 30 years.
It is a very civically oriented community in large part, I think because of having such a strong military community, you know, it's very different. Like if people say they're going to come, they come, they show up, they do what they say they're going to do, because it has, again, there's like a kind of a training and an awareness that like, you know how your word is very important. And so I've really enjoyed that aspect of being in Fayetteville. And, and it, it can be a little different than a city that is, you know, has more bustle and hustle. And as you know, I only say this because I was in the commercial theater world, which definitely has its place. And I really enjoyed being there when I was there, but it, it is different.
It's, it's capitalistic, you know what I mean? That's the intent behind it. It's theater for a profit. And there are innovations that happen in that field because of that, but it just, the alignment of like, What I love about doing a show is I love, you know, getting 300 people in the theater and being in my office and hearing those moments where the laughter hits and knowing what line was said, because you know the community, you know what I mean?
And that, that for me is the part of, of it that keeps you going in these tough times, you know, which it is, it is a very complicated moment for this industry. As a whole. It is. Yeah.
Lacey: [00:10:51] That's perfect segue because I would love to know what happened in March when the shutdowns happened. What were you in the midst of? What did you have to close? What plans had to change and then how did you make those decisions?
Mary Kate: [00:11:06] Yeah, totally. Yeah. You know, I was up in New York, auditioning for Jelly's Last Jam. We have this magnificent director and choreographer, whose name is Brian Harlan Brooks. And he was scheduled to direct and choreograph Jelly's Last Jam and Jelly's Last Jam is one of my all time favorite musicals. It's not easy to get the rights cause you have to like go to the author. It's not represented by a licensing company. So it's not represented by like MTI or Tans widmark or anything like that. You have to contact the agents for the book writer and the lyricist and the composers, and then negotiate with them.
And so we, that was a two year journey for me to get the rights to Jelly's Last Jam. And Brian is amazing. He is based in New York and he was the associate choreographer on Motown and he was the dance captain for The Color Purple production with Fantasia. And we, you know, he and I are just, we feel a lot of the same values in regards to theater.
And so I was up in New York and I was auditioning for... we had a handful of roles. So the way that we work is we're a Letter of Agreement theater, and we usually have about two Equity contracts per production. And the rest, and it's a blend of, you know, national, regional, and then Fayetteville citizens is, is usually how it works out.
So we were auditioning because the role of Jelly is quite complicated. You have to be a singer, you have to be a tapper, you have to be a phenomenal actor to carry the show. And when I got there, there was no, it was February. And there was no hand sanitizer. You couldn't find hand sanitizer anywhere. And I guess I had lived in New York during Ebola.
I had lived in New York during 9/11, and I thought to myself, Oh, wow. This is coming for us. It's coming for us soon and it's going to come for us really hard. So I literally texted my marketing director and company manager, and I said, go to every store that you can buy all of the hand sanitizer and then talk to our, you know, supply company about installing hand sanitizers at all of the entrances. So we were one of the first theaters in the state of North Carolina to put out a kind of public response to COVID-19 right. We were in the middle of a run of Murder For Two.
Lacey: [00:13:27] I love that show. So fun.
Mary Kate: [00:13:29] Yeah. It was a great production. I mean, I think we had had two weeks of shows and most of the performances were sold out and we immediately started, we made our front of house staff who are all. They're largely we have one front of house staff. Who's a retired Colonel. There are a lot of military people who are our front of house staff, but they're also older. They're retirees.
Lacey: [00:13:51] I have to ask, do your shows always start on time
Mary Kate: [00:13:54] if he, if, if if Willie had his way, they would. Unfortunately no, not always. Usually they start about five minutes late, but I will tell you that if we don't open the house, like, especially during previews, when we're sorting a lot of stuff out during our preview process, cause the techs are kind of on the shorter side, Willie, will hover starting at seven o'clock for a 7:30 show. And he'll just stand there and he'll look at you. So he would prefer for it to but that is very funny and also true.
Yeah, we, we started, we had the front of house staff wear gloves and masks. We stopped recycling our tickets. We stopped looking at taking the tickets and we had hand sanitizer everywhere. And we sprayed down all of our chairs. Then throughout the window of March, the governor kind of put more and more limitations on gatherings as, as COVID made its way to our state. And so we complied with all of those and ultimately we canceled the last week of the run.
And what we did was we were allowed at that time up to a hundred people in a space. So we added one more performance and we called all of our season ticket holders and we invited them to join us that had booked seats for that final performance. And then we shut the show down and there was a lot of, you know, a couple of the things that were kind of interesting to look back on in terms of the decisions that we made were.
You know, nobody had, you didn't have a lot of run runway to make these decisions. You just had to do the best you could with the information you had at the time. So at the time that we shut down the CDC was not recommending masks. And we also were being told that by April, it was going to be solved and that the hot weather of which North Carolina has a tremendous amount of heat and it's humid heat, which at that time they were saying was helpful because it would kind of create a heavier droplet or whatever, those were all things that were like pros and advantages. And we were going to be, you know, back up, no problem by the summertime. And I kind of thought to myself, well, if you look to Asia where COVID has been around for longer, everybody's wearing masks. So I said, even though right now, they're saying it's not advised it will become advised soon. So we all started making masks. We gave away a thousand masks to the local hospital, and then we gave away mass to all of our season ticket holders. A lot of whom are elderly, and we gave away masks to our sponsors. And then we started selling masks. And we literally did this , we started making masks so that as soon as the CDC said, we recommend you wear masks. We had them, we had about 2000 masks ready to go. And we deployed them very quickly and that was. Strategically, you know, a way to say to the people who have stuck with us, the theater for so long that we are going to stick by you and we're going to serve you in whatever way we can, which at this moment is with our sewing skills and the fact that we have a costume shop upstairs.
So we did that. And then we moved, we also moved online and we were the first theater in the state of North Carolina to move our educational content online. In the state of North Carolina, we had a month long shutdown that really turned into a six week stay at home order. We kind of anticipated that there was a possibility that this was a longer journey than what we were being told.
And so our goal was to try to help children learn to love online learning. So we had two different programs that we offered right out of the gate. One was just a drop in class from three to four every day. It was free. So anybody could do it, if you were somebody in Minneapolis, because Fayetteville has a very high transient population because Fort Bragg is a training ground for Special Operations.
So people come here and they live here for two or three years, and then they go and get stationed somewhere else. So our turnover rate in this community is incredibly high. So we had a lot of people join us from Colorado. We had some people join us from Germany, just other places that they had moved on to.
Which was a really nice kind of homecoming and reunion for people who were very involved in our education programs just a year or two ago that suddenly could reconnect with us in the middle of this crisis, where everybody was, everybody was going through the same thing at the same time. You know, it, this wasn't just regional. It wasn't like a hurricane, which we experienced, right. Or it wasn't like9/11 which I know the nation felt, but it was so impactful in New York and DC. This was different. This was a a global phenomenon that we were all going through together. So to have those windows to find and kind of re invigorate old connections was, was it was helpful. You know, it kind of made you find some silver linings.
The other thing that we offered was it was paid by the week and it was during the school day. So it was like from 9 to 10 or 10 to 11 or 11 to 12, depending on your age group. And it was also for working parents who really found themselves suddenly at home with their kids, still having to telecommute and figure out how to do their job while their kids were there and keeping them engaged and active.
And part of the goal around that program, which was called Edutainment was to, yeah.
Lacey: [00:19:11] I love that.
Mary Kate: [00:19:12] Yeah. The goal behind it was to try, again, help kids learn to love online learning because we thought this might be a skill that they would have to engage with as the pandemic wore on. And, you know, I mean, if you're a kid who's not predisposed to like math and then suddenly you have to learn math online with a teacher in another community, you know, location, those are hard skills that even many adults I know don't have. Right. And so to ask a seven, eight, nine ten-year-old to do something of their own volition. When they could be doing something else because all of those tools exist in your computer is a challenge. So what we wanted to try to do was expose as many kids as possible to fun, creative play on zoom so that when it became time, you know, In the spring or late summer, or, you know, in the fall, as, as, as happened for kids to have to do online learning in.
Cause that's where in this state we're, unless you're at a private school we're currently, or rather in our County, because it is a County by County decision. We are, we are online learning at least through for the next, they just announced Cumberland County is going to postpone a phase B, which is part into, in real-world, you know, part in classroom and part online learning.
They're going to postpone it for a while because of the, the numbers that we're seeing in a post Thanksgiving, you know, kind of world. So anyway, that's some of the immediate stuff and reactions that we did. And we had a lot of very complicated meetings with our executive committee. It was harrowing. No, no leaders that I talked to in theatrical not-for-profits were prepared or had any, I mean, all of those decisions that we had to make were scary and hard.
And I don't think that's distinctive to theater. I mean, I think that was so many industries, you know, that were suddenly. Seeing, I mean, we were going from Shrek, which was, 10,000 people attended Shrek the musical over a five week run here. It was our second highest selling show in the history of the theater to Murder For Two, which was selling out, you know, nine of 12 performances to suddenly having no income and having no product really, except for these kind of virtual offerings, which were innovative and we were happy to do them, but the scale of them was not the same as the scale of our normal business models. And so we had to make a lot of really complicated and hard decisions.
We were very fortunate to get a PPP loan here. And what that allowed us to do. And I was just very honest with the staff. I mean, I had a staff meeting where I cried and I was like, this thing is scary. Half a million people worldwide are going to die and I, we have no control and all we can do is do the best we can. And I said, you know, if it's back, if we're back by the summertime, we'll be okay.
And if we're not, then we're... I have no idea how many people we're still going to be able to employ, you know, and I was just very honest with them. And I said, if you're a technician who can get a job in another field, if you can go get a job in construction or anything, you should go get that job now.
And, you know, there was a $600 federal stimulus at the time. So I said, look, we got a PPP loans or our jobs are secure for the next eight weeks. But if you want me to fire you, tell me, and I will, you know, because everybody had to make their own best decisions for their own families. You know? I mean, I could, I could only tell them the information I had about the theater and then everybody had to go away and think about what made the most sense for them.
So we made it through the PPP loan and at that time, we were looking at our summer camp programming and normally we have about 250 to 275 kids come through here. Each summer doing our summer shows the CDC created guidelines for in-person summer camps, which is what we ended up doing. We had, instead of having one company of like 45 to 60 kids, which is what we normally do, we'll do like Lion king with like 45 to 60 kids in a camp.
We did three productions of Lion king. They all had their own discreet director choreographer, and we didn't have musical directors. We, this year we did Frozen. We kind of like had them lip sync along two tracks because we didn't want them to be singing in the same space
Lacey: [00:23:25] That's a really innovative solution.
Mary Kate: [00:23:28] Yeah. And what we found was parents, we sent out this survey, we did a lot of surveys because in the middle of this also, you know, there are science which, which we, we follow. Right. And then there's also the question that we always asked ourselves is like, what can we do to serve the community? And then we had the mindset of, there is no risk.
There's only learning. Because we knew budgetarily what we were looking at through the end of the summer. So we said to ourselves, let's try to create new programs or let's try to kind of tweak old programs and figure out how we can serve the community in this moment. And by the summertime, kids had been at home, you know, March, April, may for three months, and parents were, we sent out a survey and we said, you know, it's your kid, it's your choice. We can either do online camps, or we can do in-person camps with, you know, 15 kids or fewer in a room, we'll check temperatures, we'll make them wear face masks. We made these little shields sewn to hats for them. We sprayed everything down multiple times a day. Each room had its own bathrooms because this was in a moment where they were starting to realize that it was like also, you know, being kind of spread through like flushing, toilets and stuff like that.
So overwhelmingly 85% of parents wanted in-person opportunities with very limited groups of students. And so that's what we did. We had throughout the course of the summer about, I think 220 kids this year come through our camps. And there was not one reported case of COVID at our institution.
Lacey: [00:25:04] Wow.
Mary Kate: [00:25:04] Yeah, it is amazing. And it was just a lot of, I mean, was like, what did, what was the silver bullet? And that's the thing is there is no silver bullet. It was just a lot of hard work and attention to details. I mean, I don't normally work with children. And this year I was directing camps. You know, I directed camps every week. This summer, our director of marketing, she also directed camps. Our managing director was kind of the check-in person. So we all took these additional roles on. It's a moment about survival, really. And it's not necessarily like where does my light shine the brightest it's about, you know, where can I help keep the lights on is kind of how we viewed it.
And we learned a lot through that. And then we were really lucky to be. One of only four theaters in the state of North Carolina to receive fundings through the NEA Cares Act. In large part, we wrote that because of our education programs and that underwrites the salary of our education director and a portion of the marketing director, who's now kind of the assistant education director in this moment. And so that's a, that was a very big benefit to us because again, for me, it was like, how many people can I keep employed for? How long?
And eventually we did like most theaters, we laid off a fair amount of our staff. I think we laid off about 50% of our staff. And then those that remained, we all took a reduction in our pay. So we all went down to 75% time and effort for quite some time. But the agreement that we made with the staff is that as time went on the staff that remained, we were like, your jobs are secure through the end of the next fiscal year, which is ends on 6/ 30, 2021.
What was hard about the journey at the beginning was everything was reactive because nobody saw this coming. So as we moved into our next fiscal year cycle, what the managing director down here, whose name is Ella Wren and she is magnificent. What she and I both said is. We have a hard time canceling things.
That's very hard for us because as artists, as people in theater, we're so aligned around the principle that the show must go on. So we adopted a paradigm where we only wanted to announce that we were doing things that we knew that we could fulfill, because we also felt like our customers. The first time around, we're going to be willing to like, let it go because we didn't, because nobody saw this coming, but you can't keep promising things that you don't deliver and expect your social capital to stay high.
And we did actually, we did produce a show. We produced Lady Day at Emerson's Bar And Grill.
Lacey: [00:27:38] Yes. I heard about this. So please, please tell.
Mary Kate: [00:27:42] We did this in the Fall. We, there was a gas station, half a block away that was for sale. And I called up the owner who loved the theater. He had been coming to the theater for 30 years and I said, you know, I want to do a show outside in the fall.
As soon as governor Cooper allows groups to congregate again, would you rent us your space? And he was so generous. He said, we'll just give you the space. I looked at the season and I said, what can I do safely? And Lady Day is a one-woman show. And there is a musical director who has a couple of lines. We had a band of three, we had piano, upright bass and drums, and they were all six feet away from each other.
And they all wore masks the whole time. And then we had a wonderful actress from Charlotte who had done the part before join us. We provided her with her own independent housing. That was like a cottage behind somebody's house that she was not involved with, you know, air conditioning of like a hotel or anything like that.
We worked with our local health department, which is phenomenal down here. We have this wonderful woman, Dr. Jennifer Green, who responds to any email. I send her, she responds to most recently, and we had a question about a camper for our Charlie Brown Christmas that had been exposed at school and we needed to know when she could come back when it would be safe for her to come back.
And I emailed her on a Sunday at like seven o'clock in the evening. And she got back to me like within two hours. I mean, we are so lucky to have such an incredible resource down here. So we created a COVID plan after reading about Equity, the CDC, you know, the stage actors unions, we read all of their kind of requirements.
And we put together this proposal, even though we weren't using in this particular production any union members, we wanted to find out what the best practice is from the different unions were. And we put together a proposal that we sent to Dr. Green. And actually, interestingly, there was one thing that we were requiring weekly testing, and she said, that's actually, if everybody's not showing symptoms, that's probably too aggressive. This was also at a time where, you know, testing wasn't super abundant. And so then we, we, so we stepped that back and we asked everyone, you know, it was a lot of conversations. We said to the woman who playing Billie, we said, do you feel, would you feel okay, equity is recommending this, we've talked to our local health commissioner and based on the numbers in this community, she's saying that's too aggressive.
So instead of every week, would you feel comfortable if it were like during the rehearsal process and then during the performance process? And she said yes. And so then we, that we communicated that. So it was kind of a constant checking in with everybody involved about what they felt comfortable with.
And we produced this show outside. People receded in groups of two or four, five and six feet away from each other. And then the first row of chairs was seven feet away from the stage. So we followed, we kind of followed all of these best practice recommendations. We did temperature checks and people were, were in the audience were required to wear their masks. If they snuck them down after they walked through, we had our house managers walked through with a sign on a Popsicle stick and they would just wave the sign in front of them that said, please put your mask back on. And it was very successful. I mean, it ran at something like 90% capacity over this three week run and people were so grateful. They would come through, you know, the drapery we had set up and they would look and they would go, Oh my God, you know, you just felt like it was a tall drink of water for their souls.
So that part of innovating was very, was very, very joyful. And we did that show for three weeks, but what was interesting also to kind of experience was as a society, we're living through a trauma. We're living through multiple traumas. We're living through that. We're living through a kind of racial trauma we're living through our industry specifically is living through a trauma because there is a death that's happening in our industry right now. And there was at the time, this was right before the elections and North Carolina is a very purple state.
And so there was so many things people were feeling. And what was interesting was like, I realized that Billie Holiday's life was also, you know, even though the production is meant to be a story of triumph, her life was hard. I mean, she lived through a lot of things and so I would watch the audience leave and, and, and it was interesting in normal times, I don't think they would have been as affected, but I watched some of the audience members and I was like, Oh, I think this might be hurting them because they're already so raw and vulnerable. And they were looking forward to something that filled up their cup. Some people left even more wounded, I think, than they were when they came through.
So as an artistic leader with a mission to bring the community together, I said, you know, I feel like I might need to read the room a little bit more and kind of change, change the programming. And we had this space and we had a permit to use this space for two more weeks. So what we did was then we went to produce a two-week cabaret of movie musical songs.
It was around Halloween. So we did, you know, stuff from Little Shop of Horrors. We did stuff from Footloose. We did stuff from Hocus Pocus. We just tried to do something that was a little more buoyant and celebratory in nature and nature. People really enjoyed that. And we're grateful for that because you know, this is a very long trauma.
I mean, this is a year and a half by the time it's probably done. Not that serious or challenging theater doesn't have its place. But what I really want to use theater for is an opportunity to bring disparate or not people who wouldn't normally realize how much they have in common. I try to bring them closer to each other.
That's what I want to do with the art that we create at the theater. And if you can get a whole bunch of people in a room who are from different different political parties who are from different backgrounds, different races, different religions. And they all laugh at the same thing. That to me is like the deepest fulfillment of the mission, because I think laughter is a particularly intimate way to communicate that you've all received something in the same way.
And so that's what I strive to do. So we did like this cabaret for two weeks and that felt, that felt good. It was what people needed in that moment in time.
Lacey: [00:34:11] Well, I actually got tears in my eyes. When you described people coming in to see Lady Day and being so astonished by the transformation that you had created there.
Because I think even if some people found it raw, you know, or, or it, it rubbed their already raw emotions, just the idea of seeing anything live seems like it would have been beautiful. Yeah. And I can also understand that idea. There are certain things that I watch on Netflix or whatever, and I start them and I'm like, nope.
Mary Kate: [00:34:42] Yep.
Lacey: [00:34:43] Too, like, Nope,
Mary Kate: [00:34:44] too much right now.
Lacey: [00:34:45] Not what I need right now.
Mary Kate: [00:34:46] It's not to say that in another year, you might not go back and love that show, but you do, we all have to protect because this is not a sprint. This thing that we're in the middle of is a marathon. So you really have to be mindful of protecting your emotions.
Lacey: [00:35:00] I had a couple of followup questions. Well, first of all, I just loved what you had to say about, you know, not wanting to keep planning things for the community and that canceling them and you, and you deciding that your, your way of moving through, this was going to be, if we know we can't deliver it, we're not going to put it out there.
And that is important to hang on to that social capital. And just, that just really struck me as an everything that you said really the thread was, was your relationship to your community. I also just thought it was really smart that you ran. What did you call it?
Mary Kate: [00:35:31] Edutainment.
Lacey: [00:35:33] That you had it paid by the week because it was a time when probably people didn't know what they might want to commit to, whether it be time or money. Yeah. So that just struck me as again, being very sensitive to the community.
I wanted to ask you just about, you talked a lot about your staff, but how has it been for, I'm sure you have local artists and, you know, repeat people coming from New York. What have you been able to do if anything, to help those people who might've been relying on you or just to keep the relationship?
Mary Kate: [00:36:03] Yeah. Yeah. I mean the, so with the first full production we canceled was Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Nighttime, which is a show that I was meant to direct. You know, we. I think we canceled it on a Wednesday. Everybody was supposed to fly down on like a Saturday or a Sunday for rehearsal to start on Tuesday.
We tried to honor people as best we could. So what we did with everybody, regardless if they were Equity or Non-equity, we paid them two weeks because we felt like that was the right thing to do. And then we brought them all together to do a reading on zoom because. The, you know, they were, they were a week away from first rehearsal.
So a lot of them had done a tremendous amount of prep and that was joyful. And we were very lucky that Robert Newman who was on Guiding Light for something like, I don't know, 29 years. And he was also the, I think the president of this, of SAG or vice president of SAG, he was to perform in our production of Curious Incident. So we also did a series of readings on Facebook of the book itself. And those were very popular for a while.
I mean, I think where we kind of netted out as a theater at the beginning is we adapted really hard to virtual programming. But then once the theaters started to like all do that, we kind of totally cut that off in large part because, you know, I feel like there is a medium that does actors on screens and that's called TV and film.
And I just believe that they do that better than I ever will. And I don't think I can take my little, not little. I mean, we're one of the bigger theaters in the community, but we're a $1.6 million annual operating budget. When you look at TV and film budgets we're very little and I just don't know that we can convert ourselves to that platform successfully.
So we have really tried to figure out whenever we do do anything online that it's engagement oriented and participatory instead of observing. And then we really also just tried to figure out how we can do things safely in person. So there is a lot of cool innovation happening, but I just don't know that that's like, what our brand is.
And so that's not where we've decided to focus our efforts, which is not to diminish anybody who, who has. It is a challenging moment, especially for those employees who are 1099 who I think are really tending to fall through a lot of cracks. Our local, arts council recently got some state funding that they gave away to individually.
So I sat on a grant panel for that. It was grants of up to a thousand dollars. And I think about 23 or 25 people received them in the past month. I think the state of North Carolina has done an incredible job in large part, thanks to our advocacy arm, which is called Arts North Carolina. In terms of the state, I think gave $9.3 million of their Cares Act funding to local arts councils to distribute to their members. So Cape Fear Regional Theatre was also a recipient of some Cares Act funding through that through our local arts council, but that money came from the state legislature. So we're so grateful to the State and the City and the County leaders who have recognized how suddenly we have been thrown into incredibly challenging circumstances in terms of how we can continue to survive.
I think smart communities and smart politicians realize that once we are able to congregate, making sure that the institutions that provide for that opportunity, your music halls your theaters. your symphonies to make sure that those institutions are ready so that, you know, cause we're going to have to start planning that stuff three, six months out to make sure that they're staffed enough to like make that on-ramp happen because once people can get out, you want to make sure that the opportunity for them to get out exists, you don't want to have that moment happen and then, you know, realize, Oh crap, we don't have, our arts organizations of all suffered and kind of faltered. And so now we need to give them some money. You want them to be in continual at least some form of, of skeletal staffing so that they can be available to meet the moment when the moment arrives, not six months or eight months after the moment arrives.
Lacey: [00:40:26] It sounds like from what you've said, that that is what's happening with you, that you are managing to stay in a state of openness and creativity, even, you know, at this time. And I'm curious what you think our reopening looks like in terms of timing and you know, what you need to put in place.
Mary Kate: [00:40:46] Yeah. So during this whole thing, like one of the, one of my personal beliefs is that time is the most valuable currency any of us have, but it is also often the least appreciated. And that comes from, you know, a deep, like, kind of personal, like when I was very young I think it was in first grade. My father had his first stroke and throughout his life, he had a series of strokes and I'll never forget watching, you know, this man who was an immigrant from Ireland and he put himself through undergraduate and he put himself through law school at Georgetown university.
W very bright ambitious man who really was the American dream, watching him have to learn to rewrite. Cause he lost his ability to write. So watching how frustrating that was. And just as a young kid, having that be like one of your first. Real memories of childhood really makes, does something to your psyche of like, Oh, like none of this is guaranteed.
No, none of us know how long we have. What we have done at the theater is really kind of think about that as like, okay, well COVID was a real surprise, but how do we not lose time? Because we have time to think about things in different ways. And we were very lucky. We were already on kind of a long conversation with a local foundation about receiving some capital support to do some renovations. Well, when we, when this all started, we were talking to them about possibly the theater does not have a lot of parking. It's a big, if, you know, if you're going to do like a SWAT analysis of this theater one of our weaknesses would genuinely be, we don't have a lot of parking spaces.
The theater itself is a converted movie theater. And so there's like a little bit of grandfathering it in and then there's a church right across the street, which, most times our need for parking is symbiotic with their need, you know, and they have a lot of parking. So as I like to joke we're like Blanche Dubois, we're always relying upon the kindness of strangers for our parking.
And so we were talking to them about that about possibly like an asking them for funding to purchase some land to turn it into a parking lot and COVID happened. And Ella and I looked at each, that's the managing director here at the theater and I looked at each other and I said, you know, we weren't really prepared for this yet, but because I think we're going to be shut down through the end of this season.
We should just figure out what it would save us to do this renovation now instead of in two or three years. And we looked at it and just shut our Mainstage down for three months, which is approximately how long we think the renovation will take. Would cost us $250,000 in earned income. So armed with that and armed with the foundation that kickstarted $250,000, we have decided to undergo a renovation of the interior of the theater from the proscenium to the back wall, which is a first phase of what we hope is a larger kind of capital campaign. So the total cost of that campaign is going to be $750,000. And we're already more than halfway there, which is, which is remarkable. Yeah. And during a pandemic.
Yeah. Yeah. And we're so grateful and in large part it's because. People really love the theater and they want to see it survive and they want to see it thrive. One of the things also that we are doing with this renovation is we are bringing our HVAC systems up to code, you know, they're just old, so they're not doing the things that newer systems would do in terms of intake air.
And that has also been a helpful thing to talk to the community about so that when we do rejoin each other, which I am anticipating will be in the fall of next year, we'll do camps in-person again, over the summer and what I'm thinking, we'll be back in person in September, if we get the appropriate vaccines available to our communities, you know?
And so I'm hoping next year looks a little more normal. And I think for regional theaters, I just read this article. I think it was in Forbes magazine talking about, you know, it's probably gonna take Broadway till 2025, because so much of the Broadway market is international. In that it may also mean some of the kind of more tourist heavy shows to close, but it did say that regional theaters are probably going to be the first wave of resurgence of theater.
And I think that is correct. And I'm also grateful that, you know, when you look at some of the like major regional theaters, they have five, $10 million annual operating budgets and they, to survive this have had to lay off a lot more staff. Because they had more staff to begin with. If you have a staff of 14, which is what we had, you're kind of scaling back up, you know, I think we're at seven or eight now or scaling back up is going to be an easier journey than if you had 70 members and you're down to 15 or 20, you know what I mean? That's just going to take you longer to get that bigger machine moving. So I really think theaters that are of our size are going to be on the first wave of figuring it out, you know, and what our best practice is and like, okay, well, you know, some half the cast or three quarters of the cast is vaccinated and the other quarter.
Isn't what are those? What are the rules? What are the operating procedures around that? There's just going to be a whole bunch of, like, one of the things you have had to do as a leader in this moment is you've had to like, kind of get your, a degree in public policy and health. I am constantly reading CDC websites in a way that I certainly, we never did before this, but it's what I have to do to keep my business running healthy and successfully, you know, so yeah.
So that's what I think will happen. I think we'll be back in the fall of next year. I am cautiously optimistic and at the worst it's late fall, but that's, that's kind of what I'm thinking. Yeah.
Lacey: [00:46:34] You'll be back in time to have your Christmas show again next year.
Mary Kate: [00:46:38] That is correct. Yeah.
Lacey: [00:46:40] What will you call it? The 30th or the 31st
Mary Kate: [00:46:43] or the 30th? It will be the 30th. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lacey: [00:46:47] It's going to be confusing forever more, however, well, I mean, it's actually been 33 years, but at 32. So just want to ask you one last question that I think we, we want to chat about a little, which is the murder of George Floyd and the discussion that that's caused in the theater community about white theater people needing to practice allyship and practice listening and to practice anti-racism.
Yeah, I wanted to ask you, how has that affected your theater? What have your internal conversations been like? Have you had external conversations with other theaters with other people in your region about any of the systemic problems that are effecting our
industry?
Mary Kate: [00:47:32] Yeah. One of the things that we work very hard for at the theater is that the inside of our building should be a reflection of the outside of our building. When you look at our season, right at the Cape fear regional theater, because we do believe that we should be a reflection of the, of the community that we serve. We do have a lot of plays that are for minority audiences, because they are not a minority here in Fayetteville.
They are the majority in our diversity statistics are very strong. We have an annually 40 to 45% of our audience is diverse, which is not an exact match of our community, but it is probably better than most theaters. So it's a complicated moment, Here is where I like to be parts of solutions. And so what CFR T has, I have heard myself say so many times, you know, our staff is predominantly white.
We are a very white staff that is not distinctive to our theater. That is a theatrical and it's also a not-for-profit kind of paradigm. It's probably an arts paradigm. I don't think theater is the only industry going through this question of how do you make job opportunities more available? And so, because we have, I've heard myself say the same thing over and over again, which is, you know, we put out applications.
And we get candidates and, you know, the hiring just has not reflected the diversity of our community. So now I'm like past hearing myself say it enough times and I'm trying to figure out, okay, Mary Kate will you've identified the problem. If I were an actor in the like play of my life, I would say, don't play the problem.
So how do you get past playing the problem to playing an action that solves it and gets it to where you want to go? Right. So if what I, what I want is a solution. Where I've stated one of our tenants, one of our values at the theater is that we should be a genuine reflection of the community that we're in.
And my staff is not that, how do I move past the problem to solving the problem? So we're currently in conversations with Fayetteville State University, which is a historically Black college and university in our community. And they are starting at their undergraduate level an arts administration track with the goal of growing it over several years into being a minor.
And so that is kind of one place that we're having some conversations about internships, but I realized that that is not really the solution that the moment is calling for, because I have done a lot of reading about it. If there is economic disparity, the opportunities for internships starts to vanish from the, the people of color community.
So what we're currently doing is we're writing some grants and we're trying to actually get a fellowship. A paid fellowship at CFR T that would be in partnership with a graduate. And we're where we're thinking right now is that it will probably be a graduate from their business major because also a lot of times people find their way into theater because they performed right.
You start out as a performer and then you plinko, your way into whatever field, but like theater could stand probably some better business practices. So why aren't we like also trying to solve that problem as well? So we're currently in a conversation about that. And it is my hope that we would be able to raise funding so that this fellowship could be paid at the same rate as our not director titles.
Right. And provide the same health plan. And we're trying to do that in partnership with Fayetteville State with the goal of writing grants this year, so that we can put it into practice next year. And then hopefully that could continue to be a pipeline and create opportunities for other either theatrical institutions in North Carolina, or also nationally who are doing a search.
And they're looking for a managing director, or they're looking for a general manager or a marketing director. Again, it's trying to formalize pathways of opportunity. And that is where I have really tried to put my focus in terms of addressing the issues. I mean, it's just such a big challenge. And so you have to look at where can I affect positive change.
Lacey: [00:51:41] Thank you. As I say, when I asked this question and I acknowledge that we are two white women having this conversation and I hope that if some of our listeners have feedback for us, that they will let us know because we don't always speak about things in the best way, we want to learn, and we want to be allies.
So. Last question really quick. What is giving you joy right now at the end of 2020?
Mary Kate: [00:52:06] I mean, honestly, I had my mind, I was able to like align my mind in my like marathon distance to getting to the end of 2020. I'm just glad we did. Do you know what I mean? And I'm glad there's a vaccine. I mean, that's giving me a lot of hope and I, and I will have to figure out, like, you know, right now we're thinking we'll do another show or two in the spring outside. We don't know what shows those will be. We don't know what venue it'll be at. So like there's a lot of work to do when we get back from the break. But to be honest, I'm looking forward to kind of like taking a week and unplugging myself from a lot of my devices and just having some time to like, you know, refuel.
Because, you know, at these leadership positions, you're not only responsible for trying to figure out your company, but you also are trying to align, like, take everyone with you, you know? And it's a scary moment. It's a scary moment for your staff. It's a scary moment for your sponsors. It's a scary moment for your community.
So it's been a lot of like, feeling like. You know, I just am looking forward to getting a week of just me, which I know sounds, sounds terrible.
Lacey: [00:53:20] Yeah. That sounds like something that will bring you joy.
Mary Kate: [00:53:25] Yup, indeed, indeed. Yeah. And you know, I've also been like, I've been re watching Netflix shows that I've already seen me
Lacey: [00:53:34] and I've heard that this is like a thing, because I thought I was like, I'm so embarrassed. I can't believe I'm rewatching all of stranger things.
Mary Kate: [00:53:41] Yup. Yup. I'm rewatching. Girl, I got you beat, I'm gonna be watching Grey's Anatomy. You know how many seasons there are Grey's Anatomy. There are so many seasons, but it's because you know, what's going to happen. So you feel like you have some modicum of control.
Lacey: [00:53:57] This is completely a phenomenon, which I had no idea it was a phenomenon.
Mary Kate: [00:54:01] Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah, no, it's comforting. It's like visiting old friends,
Lacey: [00:54:07] right? Like if someone's going to die on the show, I know they're going to die. So it will be a shock so I can handle it.
Mary Kate: [00:54:13] Yup. Indeed.
Lacey: [00:54:14] Thank you so much, Mary Kate. You are full of wisdom. Truly. I just learned so much. Thank you. .
