For some reason, questions about the remarkable year Molly Smith is experiencing as head of the revitalized Arena Stage propels her into a far more harrowing subject. Fifteen years ago, at the age of 43, Smith found out she had breast cancer, a diagnosis that at once overwhelmed, infuriated and terrified her.
“I don’t think that it defines me, but I think that it was a huge turning point, being nose to nose with death,” she recalls of the struggle with the illness that hit her in the last phase of her artistic life in Alaska. Her family thought she should pursue homeopathic treatments, but she wanted nothing less than a nuclear assault on her disease and an oncologist who would not only prescribe aggressive chemotherapy and radiation, but also say to her — and mean it: “You are going to survive and thrive.”
“I wanted to actually burn cancer out of my system,” she says. “When someone goes through something as life-altering as cancer, usually they need to relax. For me, the need was to move past it.”
Smith, now in her late 50s, is sitting in her sleek, sunlit office with views of the harbor, inside the gleaming Arena mega-structure on Maine Avenue and Sixth Street SW that opened last fall after a $135 million renovation. Her unprompted segue into a description of a trial so personal was jarring at first. But then, of course, her acknowledgment of that ordeal illuminated something about a tenacious spirit friends and colleagues have long recognized in her. If tumors were trying to waylay her, they had to be quashed — but good. She had other missions in mind.
As Arena’s renaissance season on its Southwest Washington campus draws to a close — the final main stage production, the world premiere of John Grisham’s “A Time to Kill” in play form, opened last month — Smith is thinking a lot these days about obstacles overcome. In the 13 years since her arrival as the third artistic director in Arena’s history, she has faced other difficult struggles: competing in an ever more vigorous marketplace for theater; raising more than $100 million for the rehabilitation of Arena’s crumbling buildings; and trying to sustain an audience over the protracted construction period, during which the company performed in Crystal City and on U Street NW.
But perhaps the biggest challenge of all for Smith had been one that concerned the essence of artistic leadership. Could she revitalize an institution that had, in the minds of some of its own boosters, grown predictable, even stale, by the time she arrived at the end of the 1990s? Did she have the gumption, vision and the smarts to take Washington’s flagship theater in a vibrant new direction?
For quite a long time, it appeared that fulfilling such a lofty agenda might be beyond her capabilities. Any number of times during the 2000s, the quality of Arena’s productions fell distressingly short of the standard set by the troupe’s founder, Zelda Fichandler. Along with the occasional winner in Smith’s lineups of works by American playwrights and composers, the misfires piled up: lackluster classics, peculiar holiday events. Although her selections for Arena could be adventurous — as in her tackling of Sarah Ruhl’s difficult, 220-minute “Passion Play” in 2005 — at other times she would disastrously overindulge the editorializing, a penchant that did in her shrill 2006 treatment of “Cabaret.”
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