“This literally is the place that Molly built,” Sharif said between bites of lunch. “And inside the house that Molly built is the house that Zelda built.” The significance was made plain for her before Smith left, during an impromptu ceremony in Arena’s kitchen. “She literally hands me the master key to the building,” Sharif recalled. “A beautiful glass key chain that says ‘Arena Stage’ on it.”
Now that Sharif has the key, the intriguing question is which way she will turn it. The artistic leadership post at Arena, a foundational company in the nation’s regional theater movement, is tantamount to a sacred trust.
That three of the four people who have held the post over the past 73 years have been women — the fourth was Douglas C. Wager, who ran Arena in the 1990s — burnishes the organization’s trailblazing reputation.
And as a younger leader and Arena’s first artistic chief executive of color, the 45-year-old Sharif has a golden opportunity to shape Arena’s values and commitments to a diverse capital city.
There is also the more pragmatic concern, one that has thrust the American theater into a crisis without parallel. The coronavirus pandemic has left it a wounded industry, with two to three theater companies closing each month, and its leaders pleading for rescue.
In September, weeks after assuming her new job, Sharif went to Capitol Hill with Lin-Manuel Miranda, Phylicia Rashad and theater executives from across the country to ask Congress for $2.5 billion over five years to support theaters reeling from drops in attendance and donor fatigue. The ask came on top of more than $15 billion in federal aid doled out to live entertainment venues in 2021.
No Washington theater has had to shutter, but none has been immune to the new realities either. Operating at a loss is now the norm for arts groups in this country, and Arena, too, is engaged in what its executive director, Edgar Dobie, calls “deficit planning.”
The company was required to scale back a bit, reducing its roster in 2023-2024 — the last season Smith programmed — from a onetime high of 10 shows to seven or eight: Among the offerings is a new musical, “Swept Away,” that is aiming for Broadway, and two shows by Step Afrika!, the D.C.-based dance troupe.
On top of that, Arena still has nearly $60 million to repay on the gleaming headquarters it opened in 2010, the $135 million Mead Center for American Theater.
The exigencies have turned a cool position into a hot seat. “Actually, being the number two is the best job, because you get to do all the fun work, without at the end of the day the success, the failures resting heavy on your shoulders,” Sharif said. “So when it’s that much pressure, in this moment when the field is in such evolution, there has to be something greater that draws you to this job.”
For Sharif, that draw is in making a difference.
“I think Hana would be the first to admit she’s really comfortable and thrives in a change environment,” Dobie said, adding that the industry is in the midst of a wholesale reevaluation of “how we unpack and rebuild this business model.” As for Sharif’s capacity to handle that much re-engineering, he said: “There’s a fierce intelligence there, I think, beyond her years.”
Sharif has the leadership gene, a radiant inheritance apparent when she talks one-on-one, or to an entire room. She’s a person who speaks with such eloquent conviction that if she asked, you would storm the barricades with her.
“The institutions that will survive and thrive in the next 10 to 15 years are the ones that are able to be adaptive, to be nimble, to reimagine, to hold on to the core while building a bridge to the future,” she said. “And I was like, ‘So that’s my work, right?’ If you think about me as a transitional leader, in this evolutionary time, it’s not just about the big ideas. I’ve got those in spades. It’s not just about relationships with artists. You know, everyone wants to work in this house.
“Our survival will depend on our ability to be multifaceted and on the way we think about who and how we serve, and to whom and how we talk about what we do.”
Sharif has been leading since her childhood in Texas. She was one of five children, with her father working in the corporate world and her mother in education. As a high school senior, she persuaded the principal to let her direct a play about the experiences of teenagers of color, and during college, she formed a theater company.
Sharif likes to tell people that at age 19, she announced that she wanted to run Arena Stage one day.
She landed jobs after graduation at highly regarded regional theaters — Hartford Stage in Connecticut, Baltimore Center Stage — before being appointed artistic director of the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis in 2019.
“The reason I went into regional theater originally was to learn what I could learn, and to get out,” she said. “The reason I stayed is because I understood the scale of the impact I could have, when you have the resources of an institution, when you’re surrounded by talented professionals who can make anything happen when we all put our energy and talents together.”
It was in St. Louis that Sharif, who is married to business consultant Marcus Jackson and has two daughters, put her energies and talents into melding change and tradition. Her first season, she staged an adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” that broke the company’s box office records. But her fonder memory is of a play that didn’t sell well.
“We did Luis Alfaro’s ‘Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles,’” she said, “and it was the show that had the smallest attendance. Lots of patrons just opted out: ‘We don’t want to see an immigration story. We don’t want to see this. We don’t want to see that. She’s got this agenda,’ or whatever. But I got more positive mail about ‘Mojada’ than any other show in the season. The number of letters I had with people going, ‘I really didn’t want to see the show. I’m so grateful that I did.’
“I love it when the small group gets loud.”
Theater has always been a vital outlet for marginalized voices, but theatergoers vote with their feet. The St. Louis Rep has fallen on hard times: In the wake of the pandemic, subscriptions fell from 8,000 to 3,000 per season, according to Danny Williams, the company’s managing director. To pay for the rest of the 2023-2024 season, Williams has created a public campaign, “Rally for the Rep,” hoping to raise $2.5 million by Dec. 31.
Dobie says Arena has set aside reserves that leave him “feeling a cautious optimism” about the company’s finances. That frees Sharif, to some degree, to dream. She is thinking both in terms of the kind of productions she wants and the ways Arena can serve the greater theater world.
One thought is for Arena to host companies from other parts of the country for year-long residences. She’s also developing ideas for the theater’s 75th-anniversary season in 2025-2026 — a time to reflect on a remarkable legacy.
“We can’t wait to see what she picks,” said Catherine Guttman-McCabe, chair of Arena’s 38-member board. “We have opportunities to really sharpen our brand.”
Sharif is sifting through the possibilities, talking to Arena’s 130-person staff, getting a feel for D.C. — listening, even, to the chatter in the edifice for which she holds the master key.
“I happened to be in the lobby when all three audiences were converging,” she recalled. “And when I tell you that energy was electric, you could feel it. I was like, ‘Oh, this is what this building was meant to be.’”
