Here’s something I learned, or rediscovered, in talking recently to two leaders at INTAR Theatre, one of New York City’s essential small companies: that hope for the embattled art form of theatre can be found in community, built on relationships, and grounded in a sense of place. That may all sound like happy-talk boilerplate. But when I think of what artistic director Lou Moreno has done in the past 15 years with this storied theatre, long best known for having once been the home of María Irene Fornés’s Hispanic Playwrights in Residence Lab (HPRL), I see a classic New York story: Moreno fought for a corner and put his crew on the map.
Specifically, he turned the theatre’s funky fourth-floor rehearsal space, in a gritty building on 52nd Street in Hell’s Kitchen, into a fully producing venue, and there he built a vibrant audience around buzzy new plays. He also started UNIT52, a summer workshop for Latine actors new to the city, which has created a multigenerational community around INTAR (which, for the record, stands for International Arts Relations). Since 2020, he’s dealt not only with the Covid lockdown but with the death of the theatre’s longtime executive director, John McCormack.
And at last he’s handing the reins to Nidia Medina, the theatre’s current producing director, who has a varied career as an administrator and producer at places like Theatre for a New Audience and the Public Theatre. I spoke to the two of them earlier this month about the leadership turnover, the need for space, and about INTAR’s place in the theatre ecosystem. On a personal note, I have to say—and hope this comes through in our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity—that I left their presence feeling more hopeful than I had in a while.
ROB WEINERT-KENDT: Lou, Nidia, I want to start by asking, was this handover a long time coming? Was there a succession plan?
LOU MORENO: It’s a complicated question. John McCormack, our executive director, and I had started talking about what a transition might look like for INTAR, and then Covid hit and John died. So it got put on hold. During Covid, Nidia really came on board as associate artistic director. She was the person on the ground while I was upstate, living my life during Covid while trying to keep INTAR afloat. John had done a good job at teeing us up for a lot of the government interventions that came during Covid; that’s how we survived financially. But the projects we were doing on the ground, Nidia was here as the associate.
NIDIA MEDINA: Covid was super weird. I was in this weird limbo where I was still working full-time at Theatre for a New Audience, but things had gotten super-dark, we weren’t performing or producing in the space; many of us had gone on partial furlough. I was like, “I have time, and I would like to work with people that I care about.” When INTAR called, I had the time and the desire to work with my own community.
Nidia, you’ve produced at a lot of different theatres in sometimes challenging circumstances—not just during Covid but also outdoors, with the Public’s Mobile Unit. Did that prepare you for this job?
NIDIA: Through my whole career I’ve always somehow been the person who was asked to produce something that was very different or very difficult or very weird. That’s like my calling card. During Covid, WP Theater were like, “Can you produce a movie? Across the country? You’re not gonna go; it’s be in San Francisco.” I get asked to do that kind of stuff.
You mentioned wanting to work with your community. Has that been a feature of your career?
NIDIA: When you work in Off-Broadway theatre and you’re not white, you don’t necessarily work with your community unless it’s a special case. So any time it did happen was kind of nice. I mean, it’s cool to work with a lot of different people. But the times that I did get to—I worked on Oedipus El Rey at the Public and I did the John Leguizamo show there. Or at TFANA, Fefu and Her Friends; it was not an all-Latina cast or company at all, but it’s María Irene Fornés, and I got to bring in Migdalia Cruz and Caridad Svich in to do conversations.
I loved that production. It should still be running.
NIDIA: I don’t disagree with you. I loved it. But any time I got to hold one of those shows as a Latina producer, it was important to me. INTAR had been a place I’d been to as a youth, just skulking around. I was a part of the community. I just wanted to do something that mattered, right? I felt like coming back to a place that held me without question was a no-brainer. That’s also why WP was a place that I returned to.
Lou, was Nidia someone that you and the board had your eye on to succeed you?
LOU: It’s always been important to me that the next leader of INTAR wasn’t somebody that looked like me: white, Latino, male, cisgender. That was one of the things I put forward to the board of directors in every conversation. As it got closer and closer to me announcing to the staff that I was going, there was a conversation with the board, like, does Nidia want to do it? I knew that she had brought in, not only producing, but really the organizational structure that I was never able to be able to do, which I really leaned on and appreciated. I always thought Nidia would be great for the job. But I don’t know if I ever asked you; I really didn’t want to ask you.
So the title is artistic director, but looking at your background, Nidia, and what Lou is saying about you, it sounds like you’ll be more a producing artistic director.
NIDIA: I’m definitely a producer-identified artist person. I do intend to still produce. I think it’s important for where we are right now in our structure that I do consider myself that type of artistic director: I care about organizational structure, I care about operations, which is sometimes not what people think of when they think of artistic director. But I think it’s all of a piece, right? Especially here, we’re so small, so the way we create art is also the way we work. Everybody’s affected by everything. We joke that the whole staff is the artistic staff. We’re all artists. So we all take that kind of collaborative approach to things.
What is your background, Nidia?
NIDIA: I’m a Puerto Rican kid from Connecticut, of all places. I went to Emerson College for acting, and Melia Bensussen of Hartford Stage was a professor of mine who taught me my senior year. We stayed friends, and she has been a wonderful, important person to me ever since; she really treated me professionally before I knew what that was as a student. I came to New York as a performer, until I kind of grew into more than that.
What initially drew you to the theatre?
NIDIA: Acting is an entry drug for most of us. I went to school for acting because when I was in middle school, I saw this high school drama club production of You Can’t Take It With You. I went to see that—what a silly play—and I was like, I can do that. I can definitely do that. I didn’t see myself in it, but I thought, I’m gonna perform. When I went to college, I read Stephen Guirgis’s plays, and I got to hang out with LAByrinth Theater Company, which originated here at INTAR years ago. And I was like, oh, there’s totally a place for me.
I don’t even know when I heard of INTAR first, but I was in my 20s, and I’d left performing by the wayside, because I felt, “I need more power than that, I don’t want to just say other people’s words.” What I now see is that I wanted to lead—I wanted to make the theatre I wanted to see. I found my way; nobody was teaching about Latino theatre when I was a youth, so I had to find it. Luckily I did.
Lou, what first brought you to INTAR?
LOU: I came here as an actor 30 years ago. I did a play by Luis Santeiro, who we just did a reading with today. I was an intern, I ran lights, I did everything. Then INTAR gave me a chance to direct my first play in New York, as INTAR does, and that’s when my directing career took off. I became the assistant artistic director under Eduardo Machado’s leadership, and from there went on to Rattlestick and the 24-Hour Play Company. I eventually came back here when Eduardo was done, which was in 2000.
I had an odd experience getting in here. It was hard for me to take the mantle, to be honest. My father’s from Spain, my mother’s Irish, and I grew up in Colombia. But I got a lot of, “Who’s the white boy?” from our community, which was tough. I took a lot on the chin. I sucked up a lot.
And it can be a pretty lonely job. We’re a very small company. When I took over, we didn’t have a home. We had this floor, but we didn’t have a theatre here. This was our rehearsal studio. I stood up here for my welcoming as the new artistic director and I told everybody, “We’re not going to produce plays for a while, we’re just gonna do development.” It was right after the financial crash, and the money was not flowing. It was a scary time. But I felt like, if we dug down roots, the tree will always stand. I don’t know where I got that phrase from, but that was my philosophy. So this gave us a good place to build the development program. My idea was, we would do very small developmental productions, a lot of them, and then partner with other theatres, and spend the little bit of money we had on renting space around the city. Then somebody said: “I think we could actually just produce here.”
NIDIA: When was that?
LOU: I have to look at the dates, but I think it was May 2011 when we opened the space for our first Equity contract, with Maggie Bofill’s Drawn and Quartered, and we got really lucky with the reviews. People would walk into this place and be like, “What is this fucking crazy building?” And then they would get up here and we had a lot of magic. It felt like INTAR finally came back. We were always challenged by space; nobody knew where to find us. But because we were able to really put roots in a single place, the audience was able to carve a path back to us. That’s so important. To have control of your own space is the most important thing, right? Yes, there are people out there that do it differently; there are obviously different business models. But for us, having a place to call home was magical, and we had it so fast. It was very, very lucky.
Nidia, when did you first intersect with INTAR?
NIDIA: Intríngulis might have been the first play I saw here, in 2011, and was like, “This is fucking great.” I just knew that I was gonna see good stuff here. It was a Latino theatre, but also I knew that the art was gonna be good. And most of the time there were people here that I knew, because the community is not very large. So as a young artist, I was coming to be in the room to see the art. And I knew that it was accessible. I was gonna see somebody I knew and I could be an artist around, right? There are a few theatres that open their doors, and you never forget them.
I know this is a Latine-focused theatre, but you’re not the only one around and there are lots of varieties of experience and cultures under that umbrella. What makes a play an INTAR play? Does the theatre have an asethetic?
LOU: It’s a fair question, but it’s a hard question to answer. I have always thought that what makes an INTAR play is that we wear our culture on our sleeves, so to speak, so we don’t have to sell it. I think we tell stories that are part of American culture and how we fit into that. We’re truly an American theatre that just tells it from our perspective. We’re part of whatever’s happening in whatever culture moment we may be in. I mean, I do make the joke that we would never produce a play with food in the title.
NIDIA: Which you held to.
LOU: I fucking did it! Your first play is going to be Rice and Beans, right? (Laughter.) But I’ve just really felt like it isn’t our job to teach people about our culture. Those plays exist in our history; we’ve done them many, many times. But I’ve always wanted, and I think Nidia would agree with me, for our playwrights to be like every other playwright. Just tell me your dreams, right? I think that’s what we see.
Lou, here’s one thing I ask outgoing leaders who’ve been around a while: What has changed most in this business and art form since you started?
LOU: I feel like INTAR has watched the African American theatrical revolution happen around it. I feel like it’s now the Latino time. I feel like it’s about to explode. I think we kind of began to feel that during Vámonos and Bees in Honey and Sancocho, those three plays at different theatres. I feel like we’re about to be there. There are Broadway names that have helped to do that, and that could probably help more. But I just feel like we’re at that tipping point where it’s really about to explode, and I’m excited to see that.
Nidia, when will you announce your first season?
NIDIA: We probably won’t announce until the end of the summer or early in the fall. What we’ve kind of transitioned to lately is that our UNIT52 production, a workshop production that’s really showcasing our emerging performers in particular, is usually the thing that starts us off in the fall—which is really nice, because it makes us feel like, Oh, this is why we do this. It rejuvenates our joy in theatremaking. And then we head into active production.
Tell me more about UNIT52.
LOU: It’s a program that we started right after I got here, based on the idea of getting non-union actors to speak and interact and train with more of the legacy artists like myself, David Anzuelo, and Maggie Bofill. We give our time to work with them one night a week for 12 weeks, and then we would do a specific developmental project, a new-works lab. The idea being that it would be their first paid gig in New York City. It’s not the first gig for all of them, but that was the idea, that we were going to put that here and actually help to build communities—to be part of ours, no doubt, but also help them to build their own communities, to give them a place to begin to foster their collaborations, their colleagues. Where else are they going to meet their friends? And it was never just for young artists; it was to for new-to-New-York artists. So there was never an age barrier.
The interesting thing about UNIT52 is that recently Josefina López, who has been around because of Real Women Have Curves on Broadway, wrote to us via snail mail to tell us she wrote that play with Irene in HPRL at INTAR when she was like 18. So she came back here and has been doing a once-a-week writing workshop with a bunch of our UNIT members, as a sort of continuing education moment, where alums were able to just book in to be a part of that and learn in a more formalized way about playwriting.
The other question I ask of folks who are leaving after a while, Lou, is what are you most proud of? Or do you have a highlight you could point to from your 15 years as the leader?
LOU: I would say UNIT52. I’m super charged by everything that they do, both at INTAR and then out in the world. I feel like they’ve done an incredible job of building the INTAR brand as big as it’s become over the last 15 years.
And I’m just proud that we exist. I took over INTAR at a point of real crisis, and I didn’t want to leave it in crisis. I feel confident that it’s well girded, and is, I think, already flying.
I’ll close with you, Nidia. What is the biggest challenge you think you’ll face in this new chapter?
NIDIA: It’s all going to be a challenge. The challenge is being a theatre in New York City in 2025, yeah? But I’m really energized by the people who come in here. Our audience is amazing. When you were talking about UNIT, Lou, it reminded that our community is very intergenerational. Our audiences skew so much younger than so many places in the city that I used to work at, which is such a gift, and so is the mix of elders and those who are emerging working on our plays together. I’m excited for our future. It’s gonna be super hard, like every theatre, but I think we’re the kind of place you come back to. I don’t like to say “home,” because that could get toxic. But we are a place that people come, grow up, and fly away.
What I like about being here is that we can give our communities, our artists, a kind of support that, quite frankly, they cannot get somewhere else. It’s a safe space, it’s a progressive space. It’s very professional, but we are also going to be able to ask you the questions about your art that maybe you’re not going to be able to get from another dramaturg somewhere else. And we are also going to teach the young ones who come here, like, this is how you deserve to be treated when you go out into the into the bigger theatres. Our doors are open, and the story is, when you land in New York, you can come to INTAR; you can walk up to our door and just talk to us, and we’ll say, “Come back to the salon. Come get to know us.” Theatres are a community center at their best; it’s more than just having a shiny lobby. It’s like, is your space permeable to the people? Is your work accessible? Is everyone actually welcome, and do they feel welcome?
I’m excited for us to continue to get our name further out there, so that the artists who work with us can go even further. I’m excited for INTAR to be here in 60 more years.
Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is editor-in-chief of American Theatre.
