Careers 2.0: Profiles in Career Change

Producing a Second Career: Starting a Nonprofit Theatre Troupe

By Sara Davidson

 

Sara Davidson is the best-selling author of “Loose Change” and other books. She worked for years as a journalist, novelist, TV writer and producer—but at age 57, her life fell apart. She aged out of Hollywood, her children left for college and the man she loved walked out. “I’d hit the narrows—the rough passage in the next part of life.”

When Davidson decided to write “Leap! What Will We Do with the Rest of Our Lives?” she interviewed more than 200 people who have grappled with the question: What's the next part of life about? In this excerpt, Davidson profiles Marcia Seligson, who burned out on her career as a journalist when she was 44 years old. After considering a number of options, she had launched a second career as the creator of Reprise!, a successful nonprofit musical theatre company in Los Angeles. 

 

The actors onstage are singing the love duet from Brigadoon, but Marcia Seligson can’t let herself slip into enchantment. With a week to go before opening, she has to fire an actor, replace the lead dancer who just sprained her ankle, and find a chiropractor for singer Debbie Gibson, who hurt her back and needs treatment. “Live theater is dangerous because there are no retakes,” she says, “but that also makes it thrilling. I just wish I’d started this when I was younger.”

Marcia created Reprise!, which produces three classic American musicals in Los Angeles every season, when she was fifty-seven. It was an immediate success; in 2004 Reprise! had the highest resubscription rate of any theater in Los Angeles. But Marcia, who’d been a writer who disliked writing, spent more than ten years fretting and circling before she came up with the vision for the company. On a Monday, a nonworking day for Reprise!, Marcia and I are sitting in the loft/office of her condo in Marina del Rey, looking out at the ocean. “When I’m talking to people on the phone in New York, where it’s snowing, and I look out the window and say, ‘Oh, my God! The dolphins are going by,’ you know what they say? ‘F*** you.’ ” 

We laugh. Blunt and gregarious, with blue eyes and a pleasingly zaftig figure, Marcia speaks with comic hyperbole. During a recent bout with the Atkins diet, she says, “I lost ten pounds, then I ate one piece of bread and gained it back.” Marcia and I have been on and off diets since we met in the seventies, when we were both writing for magazines. By any measure Marcia was successful: She was constantly working and had lucrative book contracts. “But I hated the isolation. I loved doing research and learning about things I didn’t know. But after writing my brains out, I never got much feedback,” she says. “What I hated most was the drudgery—day after day, month after month, sitting alone in my room.” The crisis that forced her to quit writing came after she got married at forty-four to Tom Drucker, a psychologist and management consultant.

False starts

They were offered a contract to write a book together, Good Marriage, about successful long-term marriages. “The arrogance! We’d been married a minute and a half and knew nothing,” Marcia says. “And our writing styles were different and we didn’t agree on anything.” They had a friend, a therapist who lived nearby, and they’d call him and say, “We’re having a conflict. Are you free?” Marcia says, “We spent more time on his couch than we did on the book.” They wrote 150 pages that Marcia felt “weren’t any good. Our editor left the business and nobody wanted the project. I told Tom, That’s it. I’ve gotta do something else.”

She considered going to law school and becoming an advocate for women’s rights, and also thought about “becoming a shrink. But then I realized, you’ll be back in a room alone with crazy people telling the same story over and over. I thought I might be good with groups or in a kind of therapy where I could say: Here’s what you should do. Leave your husband, get a job, get a lover, and stop kvetching!” After pausing to laugh, she says, “That’s why I love being a producer. I get to tell people what to do.”

Her husband, Tom, proposed that before going back to school, she should spend a year with him as a psychological consultant. Marcia worked with him and enjoyed it but kept being lured back to writing. An editor would call with an assignment, she’d write it and complain that she hated doing it. Tom told her to just stop. “Give yourself time to do nothing. See what happens.” Marcia says she tried that for three months but “I didn’t come up with anything.” 

She loved gardening, so she called a landscaper and said, “I’m thinking of changing my life. Could I follow you around for a couple days?”

She also toyed with starting a soup business. “I was going to be the Martha Stewart of soup.” The ideas came and went, but what she knew was: “I didn’t want to write another f***ing book.” Her doctor referred her to an executive career coach, Marta Vago, who questioned her about what she was good at, what made her feel inspired, and was there a time when she couldn’t wait to get up in the morning and start work?

The first thing that came to Marcia was the time she’d spent producing benefit concerts for the World Hunger Project. “I loved creating something out of nothing, surrounding myself with talented people, and doing work that made a difference.” She liked running from appointment to appointment and managing a staff of three hundred volunteers. Marta told her she was a natural producer, not a natural writer who wants to sit alone in a room with her thoughts. “It’s amazing you’ve stayed at it this long,” Marta said.

“What did I love?”

They began looking into what she might produce. “What did I know about? What did I love?” Marcia had grown up with music—playing piano, singing, and going to musical theater. She’d majored in music and sung in the collegiate chorale, and her family had invested in musical shows. “As we talked about it, I had this idea for Reprise!”

Marcia called friends who were actors, and they loved the idea. “If they’d said, ‘It’s dumb, it’ll never work in L.A.,’ I wouldn’t have done it,” she recalls.

“But there was never enough musical theater in L.A. There were only touring companies, and they didn’t do the great old shows.” She began inviting people out to lunch, asking for advice. “I put one foot in front of the other for six months. I had no idea how to start a theater; I didn’t even know stage left from stage right. If I’d known how complex and hard it would be, I’d never have had the balls to try it.”

People asked if Reprise! would be commercial or not-for-profit, and Marcia said, “I don’t know.” She put together a board of directors who advised her to make it not-for-profit and found a performance space—which is difficult in L.A.—the Freud (pronounced “frood”) Playhouse.

And then, she says, “two magical things happened. I decided I needed to have stars and approached Jason Alexander.” He’d become a household word playing George Costanza on Seinfeld, but Marcia knew he loved to sing and dance and had won a Tony for Jerome Robbins’ Broadway. She called him cold, told him her idea for Reprise!, and asked if she could take him to lunch. He agreed, and she said she was putting together the first show. “Is there a Broadway musical you’d like to do while you’re on hiatus from Seinfeld?”

Jason said he’d always wanted to do Promises, Promises, which had been a hit in 1968 and was the only musical Hal David and Burt Bacharach had written. Marcia secured the rights, and Jason committed. “That gave me credibility,” she says, “because nobody had heard of me.” Jason said later that he’d assumed she was a rich West Side dilettante who was going to fund the show herself. It wasn’t until they’d started rehearsals that he took her aside and said, “You haven’t done this before, have you?” 

The second “magical thing” happened when Marcia learned she needed a musical director. “I wasn’t even sure what such a person did.” A friend of hers knew Peter Matz, a legendary arranger, composer, and conductor who’d racked up Emmys and Grammys, worked in TV and film and on Broadway, and collaborated with Barbra Streisand, Marlene Dietrich, Noël Coward, and Liza Minnelli. Her friend proposed that they take Peter to lunch and ask whom he’d recommend. “I was dazzled by him,” Marcia says. “I brought a little list of people who’d been recommended, none of whom I knew.” Marcia described her vision of Reprise! with such passion that when she finished, Peter leaned across the table and said, “I hope you’re going to ask me to be your musical director.” 

Marcia started to cry. “We got other stars after that because if Jason Alexander and Peter Matz were doing this, it had to be real.”

I ask why people were eager to sign on, given that she had no track record and was paying minimal nonprofit fees. “Because they love musical theater,” she says, “and it was a short run. We had one week of rehearsal and six performances. Now we’ve expanded to two weeks of rehearsal and sixteen performances, but it’s still a one-month gig, and all the Broadway stars want to do it.” Marcia says it took her three years working full-time to get to opening night. She spent $50,000 of her own on lawyers and taking people to lunch. “And I never wrote again.” Her board of directors helped raise funds and gave personal loans. The first season they did three shows, all of which sold out. After Promises, Promises, they produced Finian’s Rainbow with Andrea Marcovicci, then Wonderful Town with Lucie Arnaz. The actors worked from books in the first two shows, but Lucie Arnaz refused. “She said, ‘I can’t act if I’m looking at a script,’ and that was the end of the books,” Marcia recalls. The next season the shows were fully costumed, staged, and choreographed, using a single set and a chorus who could both sing and dance.

“It’s thrilling to work with top actors and singers—to watch them create,” Marcia says. I ask, don’t you ever want to get up onstage with them and sing? “Always,” she says. “Always.”

Her dog, a golden retriever named Spirit, comes bounding up to the loft, followed by her assistant, who tells Marcia she has an urgent call.

When Marcia returns, wearing a black T-shirt with the white Reprise! logo, I tell her I’m in awe of the life she’s been able to conjure up. “It’s terrific fun, a lot of pressure, and all-consuming,” she says. She works seven days a week and is at the theater till midnight for a month before each show opens. She’s given up a lot, willingly. “The last ten years, I haven’t had lunch with a girlfriend or played piano, and I’ve hardly read a book. I stopped my spiritual work and haven’t been active in politics, both of which I miss.”

She says Reprise! is well established now and could run on its own, but “we’re always struggling for money. That’s the nature of not-for-profit theater. We either lose money or make a little on every show, and if we have a bad season, we could close.” Marcia says she doesn’t expect to be running the company in six or seven years. Why not?

“An appetite to do other things”

“I don’t want to work this hard. It’s still fun, but Reprise! isn’t enough to satisfy me anymore. I have an appetite to do other things.”

Such as . . . ? She stretches her legs out on the couch. “I needed to create something big and successful that challenged me, and Reprise! satisfied that. But there’s nothing else I really need to do in life.”

She wants to study conducting, to become involved with piano once more, and maybe “spend a lot of time with a chamber music group.” She’d like to learn about Buddhism and Jewish meditation, and she’s had a fantasy of renting a house on a cliff in Big Sur and spending a year reading. But her husband, she says, “is terrified of me retiring from Reprise! He thinks I’ll be okay for a week and then I’ll get depressed and nag him.”

She has friends, she says, “who do nothing but play golf and tennis, and that sounds horrible. I know I need to be out in the world, I need to be making something happen.”

I want what she's having

After spending the day with Marcia, I felt like the woman watching Meg Ryan in the deli in When Harry Met Sally. I wanted what she’s having. I wanted to be running a theater company, choosing the plays, hiring the singers and dancers and giving notes and living on the ocean watching dolphins. I decided to go to the same career coach Marcia had consulted, Marta Vago, hoping to emerge with a similarly glorious project, but that did not occur. I began to see that, unlike Marcia, I’m happiest when I’m alone in my room, writing. I’m not good at managing a staff of hundreds. A great day is when I don’t have to leave the house and the phone doesn’t ring. I also like the phase that precedes this: traveling to places I’ve never been, doing research, and conducting interviews. I thrive on alternating between going out and retreating.

The problem was that even with Marta’s coaching, I could not persuade anyone in TV, film, or publishing to hire me for the projects I wanted to create. Marta suggested, “It might be time to say, ‘I lost the battle.’ ” But could I give up writing? If it’s in your blood to tell stories, to “throw the bait of your experience into the sea of language and wait and work for the right words to attach,” as Seamus Heaney expressed it, can you pack away your gear and not feel that you’re refusing the call? I interviewed a therapist, Dennis Palumbo, who’d been a staff writer on Welcome Back, Kotter and written the movie My Favorite Year, starring Peter O’Toole. He’d quit the business, gone back to college for a Ph.D., and become a psychotherapist who specializes in working with creative people, which he finds endlessly rewarding. Marcia Seligson had also made the break from writing and not looked back, and so, I thought, must I.

Update: Seligson left Reprise! not long after Davidson interviewed her. But she stayed active as a producer, launching the annual Festival of New American Musicals in southern California.

Copyright © 2007 Random House. Republished with permission.