Drama at home

Arkansas Arts Council honors Ford, Herzberg

Everybody in the Northwest Arkansas arts community says the same things about Bob Ford and Amy Herzberg and their work at TheatreSquared.

“They have educated audiences that strong performing arts in a community make a better, more well-rounded community,” says Warren Rosenaur, longtime drama instructor at Fayetteville High School.

“T2 has raised the caliber of theater entertainment in the area, has attracted theater professionals from both coasts to live in Northwest Arkansas and paved the way for other new professional theater companies in the area to succeed,” says Virginia Scheuer, one of those professionals who has returned to the area and now teaches at the Benton County School of the Arts.

“There are so many talented people right here in our ‘backyard,’ and TheatreSquared has recognized that and created professional opportunities for local artists to create and be challenged in a quality setting. That is such a blessing to our community,” adds Missy Gipson, executive director of the Young Actors Guild in Fort Smith.

And this week, the Arkansas Arts Council will weigh in, giving Ford and Herzberg the Governor’s Arts Award for Arts Community Development.

“It is unbelievably flattering that people would have thought of us,” says Herzberg, whose day job is as head of the acting program in the University of Arkansas drama department.

“We’re just doing what we love to do,” adds Ford, who is artistic director of TheatreSquared as well as director of playwriting at the UA. “It’s terrific for the theater because it really is about what TheatreSquared has accomplished. The flattering part is that we’re just a couple of people who are part of it.”

“When I read it, I thought ‘This is Amy and Bob,’” Missy Kincaid, vice president of development at the Walton Arts Center, says of the Arts Community Development Award. “They have truly created a home where professional actors can come to Northwest Arkansas and flourish professionally but also have a quality of life.

“And at the same time, they’ve helped our community come to appreciate professional theater. Thank goodness we have true community theater, too, but TheatreSquared fills a niche that helps the arts flourish.”

To nominate the duo, Kincaid solicited the help of Martin Miller, managing director for TheatreSquared, and letters of recommendation from the arts community. She also insisted on being the one to tell them they’d won.

“They were just thrilled,” she says. “They don’t do what they do for Amy and Bob. They do it because they love this community.”

THE WINNERS

Both Herzberg and Ford sort of stumbled on to Northwest Arkansas, Herzberg through Rebecca Harris, a student of hers while she was teaching at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

“She used to talk about Fayetteville like it was Shangri La - which of course I understand now it is,” Herzberg remembers with a laugh. “I had taken the teaching job as a one year position and just fell madly in love with teaching in a way I had not expected.”

Harris says Herzberg was “full of wisdom.”

“She taught me an amazing amount about acting in just that one year. There are things that I still use today. When you go in for an audition, ‘show them a piece of your soul.’ After every audition, ‘reward yourself, even if all you can afford is an ice cream sandwich.’ When you get a job, ‘first thing you do is start looking if the next job.’”

When Herzberg started looking for her next job, there was an opening at the University of Arkansas.

“When they called me and wanted me to come interview, all I could think was ‘Oh my gosh, I get to see the amazing Fayetteville and the amazing Rebecca Harris,’ who was home for the summer,” she says.

“She got the job and despite warning them she wouldn’t be there more than a year, she has been in Fayetteville ever since,” Harris says. “Several years ago we crossed the line where she had lived in Fayetteville longer than I had, and I lived there from when I was born until I left for college at 17.”

“Rebecca, I owe all happiness in my life to you,” Herzberg says with a chuckle.

Ford says his experience was similar. He heard about Fayetteville - and the Mount Sequoyah New Play Retreat - from one enthusiastic friend who attended - and then another - and then a third.

One recommendation wasn’t enough, Ford jokes.

But in 1994, he decided to “give it a shot.”

Facilitated by Roger Gross and former University of Arkansas drama chairman Kent Brown, the New Play Retreat brought in both published and aspiring writers to spend three weeks working on their scripts in the seclusion of Mount Sequoyah. But that wasn’t what changed Ford’s life.

“I met Amy and also my future teacher at the University of Texas, both at Mount Sequoyah,” Ford says.

With Herzberg, “it was love at first sight. It just took us a year to figure it out” - long distance, while Ford was working on a master of fine arts degree in play writing and screen writing in Austin. When he was finished, “I piled everything into my Nissan Stanza, announced ‘I’m moving in’ and drove up.”

At the time, Ford was working on a novel titled “The Student Conductor,” and Fayetteville was, he says, just the place to be.

“I didn’t know a soul here. I got a job at the Springdale library, then at the Fayetteville library - perfect jobs for someone with nothing on my mind but a novel.”

“The Student Conductor” was published in the fall of 2003.

And in the spring of 2006, Ford and Herzberg debuted “Bad Dates,” TheatreSquared’s first show - starring Rebecca Harris.

“On the opening night of ‘Bad Dates,’ I was sitting in the far corner of the top right seats,” Herzberg says.

“As the lights were going down, I felt ill, really ill.

What have I done? Oh God!

This is not good. Because I looked and saw this theater filled with people, and I felt this horrible weight of great responsibility. These people deserved so much, and I had no idea if I was going to deliver. In that moment, I literally thought about climbing down the scaffold in the blackout. (I was, however, in a very nice dress.) But the stakes of what we had done really hit me. I’ve never felt so afraid or humbled in my life. But it’s also when it started to hit me what we might be able to do.”

“Don’t tell Amy and Bob, but I thought it was a hare-brained, ill-conceived, provincial, pie-in-the-sky sort of notion,” Harris says.

“I thought they would do it for a few years and then they would get bored or it would be difficult and then it would fade.

“I have to say that after I did ‘Bad Dates’ and I saw how serious they were about the art that I hoped I was wrong, and then I really started to hope that it would last.

“As an actor, I have to say it fills me with a crazy amount of pride to hear New York actors talking about TheatreSquared as this great, great place to work,” Harris adds. “It is really up there with good regional theaters around the country.”

Herzberg and Ford are both adamant that TheatreSquared was intended to be more than a place they could play with friends like Harris.

Simply, Herzberg says, “a theater can be part of the soul of a town. And a place as splendid as this should have a theater.”

Ford’s first script on the TheatreSquared stage also helped build community around the company, one nomination for the Arkansas Arts Council award reads.

“By choosing early on to tell a very personal story - “My Father’s War,” Bob’s script about Amy’s father’s World War II experiences - they made T2 accessible.That experience - including visits from Amy’s dad - forged community around TheatreSquared, giving it the feel of ‘community theater’ with the quality of ‘professional theater.’ And it made audiences anticipate what would happen next.”

THE COMMUNITY

“Since then,” the letter of nomination continues, “T2 has continued to deliver that quality with the same personal touch - including library forums where audiences can meet the actors and directors who don’t live in Northwest Arkansas.

Again, that’s building community and encouraging an investment in live theater by audiences who either A) thought it was beyond them or B) thought it was beneath them (unless it came through on tour!) They’ve done it with new scripts - ‘Sundown Town’ by Kevin Cohea and ‘The Fall of the House’ by Ford himself, for example. They’ve done it with new play showcases, where scripts by regional playwrights get a chance to be seen and to grow into fully conceived reality. And they’ve done it with classics, reinvented to bring in audiences of all ages, from all walks of life.”

Ford and Herzberg agree they couldn’t have done any of it without Martin Miller, the managing director for TheatreSquared. And Miller says he wouldn’t have chosen a career in arts leadership without Ford’s influence.

“When I was in high school, Bob directed me in three plays for Arts Live Theatre,” Miller says. “I always saw him as a friend and mentor.

“Like any high school student, I didn’t even know where I wanted to go to college, let alone what I wanted to do with my life,” Miller goes on. “Bob just made theater seem vital. By that, I mean something you can be passionate about and proud of and fully invested in, and it’s worth it. If I had been paired up with someone just there to do the gig,if I didn’t see that passion and catch it a little bit, I probably would not be in theater.”

As managing director of TheatreSquared, Miller says “it’s nice to know that the quality of the art will always be uncompromising. Bob and Amy just will not let something go at less than great. I know that sounds overly ambitious, really, but it is the standard they set.

Every play, every scene, every moment, they’re perfectionists about. And they know what good looks like.

They not only strive for it, they recognize it.

“Our audience members are really passionate, and it’s really personal for them, he adds. “I haven’t seen that anywhere else.”

Barbara Shadden, professor emeritus of communication disorders at the UA, is one of T2’s avid supporters.

She says involvement in previous attempts to start a professional or semi-professional theater company in Northwest Arkansas is one of the reasons why.

“These folks took a leap of faith, did it right and stuck to their guns,” she says. “Those are very compelling reasons to anyone in the arts community.”

THE SUCCESSES

Morgan Hicks, also a founding member of TheatreSquared, says Fayetteville is the kind of community that “can support anything we’re passionate enough about,” and that has included professional theater.

“But we’re also supported statewide and nationally,” she adds. “If we were only able to support ourselves on ticket sales and donations from inside the community, we might be struggling a little bit. But we’ve kind of positioned ourselves to take advantage of regional and national opportunities.”

And TheatreSquared has received recognition on that level.

In 2011, the company was recognized by the American Theatre Wing, founder of the Tony Awards, as one of the nation’s 10 most promising emerging theaters.

“They asked us, ‘How, how, can you support theater like this in your community,’” Herzberg remembers. “We told them, ‘You don’t understand what Northwest Arkansas is. You don’t understand what is going on here.’”

But neither Ford nor Herzberg chooses that as their proudest moment with TheatreSquared.

“For me, it was ‘My Father’s War’ and the extremely personal moment of asking my father-in-law if we had gotten it right. And him saying ‘yes,’” Ford says.

“And I was really proud of ‘The Spiritualist’ and letting the audience see Amy do all that she can do.”

Herzberg says for her it’s the ongoing moments when honestly done theater touches real lives.

“When my father said to me, ‘You know, I feel better about these things. I never got to see my friend who died, but seeing that actor allowed me to have that closure.’ Or when a woman sitting in front of me at ‘Next to Normal’ left the theater and came back in to say, ‘This has affected my family very strongly. Tonight I needed to see this show more than anything else that could have happened in my life.’ Or the person who stopped me in the grocery store, and asked, ‘Can I hug you? I wasn’t ever able to say thank you to my father for what he did in the war in the way you were able to.’

“Telling the truth and opening up hearts to the truth - that is what drives us,” Herzberg concludes.

“That connection between human beings. That means everything to us.”

GO & DO

Awards Luncheon

Gov. Mike Beebe and the Arkansas Arts Council will present the Governor’s Arts Awards at a ceremony and luncheon from 10:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Friday at the Little Rock Marriott. Information: arkansasarts.org.

FAST FACTS

Previous Winners

Previous winners of the Arts Community Development Award include: Robert Ginsburg of Fayetteville in 2010 Dick Trammel of Rogers in 2007 Nancy Hendricks of Fayetteville in 2000 Source: arkansasarts.org.

BRIEFLY

Governor’s Arts Awards 2013 Recipients

Lifetime Achievement Award — Billie Seamans, McGehee Arts Community Development Award — Bob Ford and Amy Herzberg, Fayetteville Arts in Education Award — Paul Leopoulos, Thea Foundation, North Little Rock Corporate Sponsorship of the Arts Award — Mitchell, Williams, Selig, Gates & Woodyard, Little Rock Folklife Award — Paula Morell, North Little Rock Individual Artist Award — Robert Hupp, Little Rock Patron Award — Lee and Dale Ronnel, Little Rock Judges Special Recognition Award — Farrell Ford, Arkadelphia

Style, Pages 27 on 11/14/2013

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