Reaching for the stars

Nurturing the Arts:

Dina Janis, Theater: Reaching for the stars

By Allison Teague

Dorset, in Bennington County, has nurtured performance theater since 1927, when residents staged a three-act play, “39 East,” in the Town Hall. It was received with such great enthusiasm that it spun out the Dorset Players, and a legend was born.

Two years later the community raised funds for a larger space, the Dorset Playhouse.

Let’s leap ahead, first to the 1970s, when Jill Charles and John Nassivera founded the Dorset Theatre Festival. DTF and the Dorset Players shared the playhouse, and by and by the community called for a serious upgrade, dreaming of siting a proper regional theater.

In 1999 that’s what took shape: a $3 million restoration and expansion project that was completed in 2001.

Now enter Dina Janis, Dorset Theatre Festival’s artistic director hired in 2009 to carry the work still further into the future.

“When I came on board, they had been trying to live up to the new theater. It was quite a venue with full studios and beautiful seating. But no one had really been able to take it forward. It had been a period of six or seven years before finding someone to take over. They were in trouble,” she recalls.

Janis lived in Dorset, was raising a family, and had been teaching at Bennington College’s drama department for 10 years. Her work with some of Broadway’s top writers, directors, and actors made her the DTF’s ideal candidate to elevate it into the ranks of world-class theater.

It helps that she knows Vermont audiences. It helps more that she’s cultivated such striking, and effective, professional connections: Count among them the actors Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ellen Burstyn, Cusi Cram, José Rivera, Al Pacino, and Harvey Keitel.

As a director, she’s intimately familiar with the plays of Theresa Rebeck, Sherry Kramer, Stephen Adly Guirgis, George Plimpton, and so many others.

She was courted for the post for what the DTF said at the time was her breadth and depth of fresh air, energy, and context that lived up to the promise of state-of-the-art theater in Dorset.

And she came on board familiar with the festival’s challenges — and with a big idea that would leverage her friendship with playwright Theresa Rebeck, who’d created and co-produced, with Steven Spielberg, the NBC musical-drama television series “Smash.”

“[Rebeck] is one of the most successful American woman playwrights, and she thought I could really bring [Dorset] up to the level of a Williamstown [Mass.] or Berkshire theatre festival,” Janis said.

So the two persuaded talent on Rebeck’s level to come up.

The first year, DTF mounted the world première of Pulitzer Prize finalist Rebeck’s “The Novelist.”

In 2012, DTF staged the world première of Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Christofer’s “The Whore and Mr. Moore,” starring Judd Hirsch.

With momentum ever growing, Janis is quick to credit the community as a whole for supporting the festival and the life of the arts here.

“Everyone’s excited about the prominence of people [arriving to participate]. People who grew up with the Dorset Theater are really excited to see it back,” she says.

DTF has added new programs each year since Janis came on board, and is seeing the fruits of its labors, on par with the Berkshire Theatre Group, an hour to the south.

“We are delivering high-quality theater,” Janis said.

Sheila Child agrees. A local resident and long-time DTF board member, Child has enjoyed a front row seat to these changes.

“[Janis’s] professional contacts have added to the respect in which she is held. From Year One, her credibility has continued to grow,” she says.

Count Steve Stettler, Weston Playhouse Theatre Co.’s resident producing director, as a fan as well. The two worked on 2012’s Hills Alive Festival, among other projects.

“She’s smart. She’s got terrific taste. She’s got her finger on the pulse of what is happening in new work, which is a commodity hard to find in Vermont arts institutions,” Stettler says.

p>“And with her roots and interests in the community and state, and with a foot in the professional arts and beyond, she can draw on those resources and relationships.”

Janis said she’s not the only one who appreciates that enthusiasm, or its location. She facilitates intensives where writers and actors stay in a house here working with a playwright on developing a play. After a couple of weeks, they stage the play, then get feedback from the audience.

The value is clear to the artists and writers she brings up, as they’re permitted the luxury of working in a quiet, supportive atmosphere over a few weeks each summer, and get to hear from rural as well as urban audiences.

Janis said this difference matters to the playwrights who work here.

“We hosted the sixth year of spring writers retreat with seven of the top national playwrights. They come in for a week to 10 days and write new work,” some of which, she said, moves on to Broadway.

“We have a good track record with a lot of new play development, as well as presenting our main stage fare,” she says.

Playwright Cusi Cram says of her experience working in Dorset, “It was a wonderful retreat … the audience was intelligent and thoughtful, hungry to talk about and respond to the play.”

In New York, she said, people can be so hurried. In contrast, her Vermont audience was “incredibly thoughtful and interesting.”

“A rural audience may know nothing about theater and would not know names, so might respond completely authentically. They either like it or they don’t.”

Janis agrees. “It’s a healthy thing for a playwright … a bunch of no-nonsense Vermonters.”

Janis counts among her personal heroes Joseph Papp, who established The Public Theater in what had been the Astor Library Building in downtown New York City. Papp also founded the New York Shakespeare Festival, in 1954.

“I’m inspired by him. He believed that the theatre should be like the kitchen table of a community: accessible to all people of all economic statuses, a place where they could come together to talk about diverse issues,” Janis says.

“People here aren’t necessarily going to the big-buck productions with top stars, designers, and directors of New York City, so we’re integrating that into our Vermont community and region.”

And Janis is committed to making theatre more accessible. She’s found underwriters for 28,000 free tickets for underserved groups such as the Vermont special needs community, firefighters, police officers, local farmers, EMS workers, the Vermont National Guard, veterans and their family members, and Vermont teachers.

“Our aim is to develop diverse and lively audiences by reaching out to communities that rarely get the opportunity to enjoy live theater,” she says.

“It’s good for theater and creates a diverse audience … It’s just the right thing to do.”

She’s also working to include “more relevant playwrights” to expand and enrich the cultural conversation.

This year DTF won the rights for the regional première of “Clybourne Park,” a play by Bruce Norris written in response to Lorraine Hansberry’s play “A Raisin in the Sun.” It’s been nominated for several Tony Awards, including Best Play.

Looking further ahead, Janis reinstated a conservatory program with 25 students studying for their MFAs, or who have recently graduated from college, and are in residence for the summer. She’s committed to nourishing new playwrights, both those seeking a professional career and young students from the region who seek mentors and playwriting experience.

And audiences are responding.

“I’ve been quite honored. It’s something very special for me. We’re doing something right,” Janis said. “My dream is to just really reach for the stars.”