BRATTLEBORO — The new New England Youth Theatre (NEYT) executive director, Hallie Flower, says she finds that her head is swimming with all the details of what “this amazing organization” is up to.
“To be frank, my exciting and challenging job is an octopus,” she says. “Executive director is a big responsibility, but it is amazing to work with people who are so passionately clear about what they are doing. And there is so much heartfelt programming at NEYT of which I was not aware.”
Flower has been on the job for less than a month and has a lot to learn, she says.
“I am excited to discover all the material from the past as we create a bridge to a new era,” she says.
Not that anyone is trying to rush her.
“This is a very special moment when I have been given the wonderful gift of transition at NEYT,” she adds.
Founded in Brattleboro in 1998 by Stephen Stearns, NEYT's mission is to educate the hearts, minds, bodies, and voices of youth of all abilities through the dramatic arts.
It offers an acting training program for young people ages 6 to 19, with a combination of classroom and performance work for beginning and advanced students, offering a variety of classes in improvisation, movement, scene work, monologue, comedy, and ensemble building. It also trains students in the arts of stage managing, scenic design, lighting, costuming, and makeup.
Stearns, Flower's predecessor, has functioned as both artistic and executive director since NEYT's inception 17 years ago. He announced his retirement from those duties two years ago but, in reality, he has never stopped working at either position.
Finding someone to fill Stearns' gigantic clown shoes has proven to be difficult.
“Initially, NEYT was looking for an artistic director,” says Stearns. “We came close to choosing someone, a former student of mine. But the board believed we should open up a national search, and by the time we were able to offer her the job, she had taken another position at Brown University.”
After a bit of retrenching with this setback, Stearns and the board began to realize that what NEYT needed, first and foremost, was not an artistic but an executive director.
NEYT had never had an official executive director before, since Stearns had been doing so many things unofficially.
“With this position, we want to make sure everyone has the right seat on the bus and not wear too many hats,” says Stearns, who says he knows the danger of taking on too much responsibility from his own experience.
“After starting NEYT, I found myself doing everything from fundraising and teaching to playwriting and directing. This included everything from practical matters like getting a water permit for the new theater, or going to endless meetings with the town officials bringing our old theater at the Latchis up to code. I did whatever was necessary to get the job done.”
However, NEYT's growth has made the jack-of-all-trades position no longer feasible.
“We now have a $700,000 annual budget servicing 500 students and so necessarily NEYT has gotten to have a cooperation feel to it,” says Stearns. “No one person can do everything.”
The executive director was designed with three major parts to the job.
First, Stearns says, she needs to put together the seasons classes and productions. Second, she works up a budget and joins the development department to raise necessary funds. She doesn't write all the grants, but she needs to be aware of all that is going on in this area. Third, she needs to manage the staff and students, which includes things like looking out for building safety for the children.
The executive director in the future will gradually begin strategic planning and consider ways to move NEYT forward.
Flower came under consideration for executive director when she was invited to direct the holiday production of The Wizard of Oz for NEYT this December.
At auditions for this show last June, Stearns and other staff were impressed with both Flower's abilities and her way of relating to the young actors. Leaders heard from students that she would be the perfect executive director.
Stearns tested the waters to see what Flower thought about becoming executive director. She told him that it would be her dream job.
“Seriously?” asked a skeptical Stearns, he says.
“Yeah!” she exclaimed, the story goes.
“What if a better job tried to lure her away?”
“What could be a better job than this?”
A well known figure in the Southern Vermont theater scene, Flower had all the qualifications to be artistic director also. In fact, she had applied for the artistic director position when it was listed two years ago. But her application arrived after the search was closed, and so her resume sat locked away in a drawer.
“I am eager to pass on the baton or torch to Hallie,” says Stearns. “I'm happy to report that there will be a new face of NEYT. Oh, this grandpa will still be around, but just doing the things I want to do, such as teaching the younger participants physical comedy and clowning, as well as working on NEYT Playbooks Bible that will include a manual, its archival history and its mission.”
But Stearns will continue many of his old duties at NEYT for a while.
“I'll be working with Hallie in cultivating major donors,” he says. “For instance, Hallie and I will be going next month to San Francisc0, where I can introduce her to some supporters of NEYT I know. Soon she will develop her own relationship with these donors, and begin forming friendships with new ones.”
Flower will teach one course a semester and direct around one show a year. She also will be shopping around for other directors for NEYT shows.
“We want to have more young, up-and-coming graduate students from area universities to work with us and bring us fresh ideas and vision,” says Stearns. “We already are using such lighting directors who work around the area.”
Flower brings to NEYT her organizational mind and her long experience in arts organization, both for-profit and nonprofit. With Karla Baldwin and Carrie Kidd, she is one of the founding directors of The Apron Theater Company, Next Stage Arts's resident theater company in Putney.
Much like the mission at NEYT, Apron is committed to exploring and producing challenging theater.
“Our goal is to cultivate a collaborative atmosphere through plays, workshops, and new work that we share with our community,” Flower writes at Next Stage website. “Apron is dedicated to creating community involvement through readings of original plays by local writers, adult workshops, and acting classes for children.”
Flower plans to continue her work with Apron.
“The focus may be different, but my approach at NEYT will be very similar to that at Apron,” explains Flower. “We give a lot of thought at Apron about growth for the ensemble. What we put on is not merely stories for the community, but about what actors can discover through theater arts. I see theater as facilitating learning opportunities, for children as well as adults.
“Kids are not all that different from adults; they're just younger human beings. At both NEYT and Apron, my central mission is mentorship.”