“The idea at the time was so grandiose: How could one imagine a town one-tenth the size of Anchorage pulling off a professional theater?” says Bruce Botelho, the mayor of Juneau and a longtime acquaintance of Smith’s. Soon enough, Botelho, then a young lawyer in town, was a believer, convinced by what he describes as her “incredible drive to make it happen and the charisma to draw people into that vision.”
Her first show at the newly christened Perseverance Theatre set the tone: “Pure Gold,” a live-performance oral history. “I went out and interviewed 35 pioneers in their 70s and 80s,” Smith remembers. “Tlingit people, Filipinos, prospectors. What I hadn’t realized was that it would have a deeper meaning to the young people. They had moved there for all the reasons these pioneers had.”
“It was tremendous,” Botelho says. “Here was art, coming to the people. We didn’t know what hit us.”
Smith stayed for two decades, and you can see the progression in how she’s led these two companies: She took her Alaskan notion of indigenous drama and expanded it at Arena into a program devoted all but exclusively to American plays. It was a narrowing in thematic orientation from her strong-minded Arena predecessors, Fichandler and Douglas C. Wager. But it was also required some reeducation. She had to learn how to cater to her audience’s tastes without seeming to pander, as she did in a 2005 production of “Damn Yankees,” when she had an audience member throw out the first ball and an actor playing a hawker of Nationals pennants.
On the more substantive side, she made it her task to build interest in Arena’s offerings among minorities, making the company a home base for black artists such as playwright-director Charles Randolph-Wright, who staged Arena’s version of the Pulitzer-winning “Ruined” and is, for the duration of a grant, one of the dramatists on staff. “There are very few places where that can happen,” says Randolph-Wright, who has worked on eight productions during Smith’s term. “It’s like a family. That’s what Arena has been to me.”
The success of “Oklahoma!” has been a legitimizing event for Arena in more than just financial terms. Produced as the inaugural show in the refurbished Fichandler, the piece was seminally American and her cast, filled with actors of all races and ethnic identities, seemed a kind of idealized mirror for the audience she envisioned for her theater. The musical, too, brought her back to the spirit of the pioneer, the image that had first sparked her theatrical imagination back in Juneau.
All that and Broadway came sniffing around, too. The transfer didn’t happen, but the attention generated by talk of a move was almost as valuable. We’re back, Arena seemed to be declaring, to the world at large.
Smith looks at the horizon from her office window, a very different view from the one she had not all that long ago, in drearier digs on this very same corner. “It’s been about climbing this huge, tremendous mountain,” she says. “So here we are, on top of the mountain — looking for the next one.”
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