

The troupe is about to christen its long-awaited $33 million second stage at the old Strand movie theater. She remains hungry for new artistic challenges, bigger questions, braver conversations.”Īt the moment, Perloff is also overseeing one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken at the Tony-winning regional powerhouse. She challenges and invigorates and shows no sign of slowing down or getting complacent. She believes in always searching for more clarity, more precision, more beauty in the work. “Carey is one of the great thinkers about our form and our field,” said Jon Moscone, who is winding up his own 15 years as artistic director of California Shakespeare Theater. Luckily for her, the board stood by her that first disastrous season, and Perloff rewarded them by spending the next 23 years burnishing the theater’s reputation. She faced not only that challenge, but also the burden of having to grapple with a male-dominated industry. Perloff, 56, lets us peek behind the curtain as she, a young mother, takes charge of a once-glorious theater fallen on hard times. That trial by fire is just one of the engrossing tales Perloff shares in her lively new memoir, “Beautiful Chaos: A Life in the Theater” (City Lights, $17.95, 268 pages). Once they realized I didn’t, they were with me.” “I still have two black binders of hate mail from that time I keep in my office to remind me of what I learned, which is how much people love this theater and how scared they were that I wanted to destroy it. in 1992 from New York’s Classic Stage Company. “It was the most upsetting, depressing, lonely experience ever,” said the candid Perloff, a Stanford alum who came to A.C.T. Audiences were fleeing from the S&M version of “Duchess of Malfi,” and local Catholics were up in arms over “The Pope and the Witch.” The theater was drowning in red ink, subscribers were bailing out, and many were pointing fingers at Perloff. Carey Perloff’s first season running the American Conservatory Theater was very nearly her last.
