We hear a lot—and have written a lot—about the idea of shared leadership. Surely the era of the Singular Genius Authority as the default organizational model is over, and two or three (or more) heads are better than one, right? (I should note here that Theatre Communications Group, the nonprofit that publishes American Theatre, recently joined this trend as well.)
But how does shared leadership actually work in practice? That was the question I put to the four new co-leaders of New York City’s HERE Arts Center, who took over the storied experimental theatre last year, and are now in the midst of the first season of work they’ve programmed.
As I sat in the HERE’s inviting lobby with Annalisa Dias, Lanxing Fu, Lauren Miller, and Jesse Cameron Alick, it was Fu who answered my “how does it work” query first, quipping, “We chose the path of most resistance.” Once the general laughter subsided, Fu explained further that the four HERE heads operate by consensus, and that leadership “isn’t clearly divided into, so-and-so is the managing director, so-and-so is the artistic director. We need to do it all together.” As if to illustrate the point, Dias jumped in to say, “The mind meld.”
For her part, while admitting that “everything about this model is less efficient,” Miller boiled it down to a math problem. “There’s four of us, so often, the way we’ll approach things is, two of us will go off and partner on a thing. So nobody’s left holding the bag all on their own on one particular responsibility.” She cited Dream Feed, an electro-acoustic vocal piece by the Hawtplates that runs Jan. 9-25, 2026, which she and Alick are producing as part of the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP). Meanwhile Alick and Dias are heading up the Dream Music Puppetry Puppet Parlor, which has its next showing Dec. 17-19, and Fu and Dias did the heavy lifting for Eisa Davis’s The Essentialisn’t earlier this year.
This approach has been good not only for building the shows but also for building the team. “It’s not like we arrived out of the sea, the four of us, all together,” said Miller. “We’ve had to come into relationship, and this partnering and pairing off has helped us articulate, not just how the four of us work together, but how each combination of the four of us works together.”
Added Alick, “There’s a lot of built-in redundancy, so there’s always someone else who can pick up the ball. This should be encouraging, because I think there are a lot of potential artistic leaders out there who have been unwilling to become artistic leaders because it’s a hard job. It eats your entire life and makes you unhappy.” Completing his thought—this is a recurring theme—Dias added, “In theory, people can take breaks, so there’s no one person without whom the organization can’t function.”
There’s certainly no shortage of tasks on the to-do list. With two theatre spaces running full time, the programming at HERE encompasses as many as 25 shows a year. Only a handful are directly produced by HERE—next on that slate is James Scrugg’s Off the Record: Acts of Restorative Justice, in April 2026—with most of the rest falling under the banner of “HERE Hosts,” a transformation of the venue’s former Sublet Series into something more curatorial and less transactional. Currently running in that spot: EPIC Players’ production of Dave Osmundsen’s Bum Bum (Or, This Play Has Autism) (through Dec. 14). There are also myriad special events, the annual Puppetopia festival (next February and March), and National Queer Theatre’s Criminal Queerness Festival.
Among these new leaders’ more significant collaborators is HERE’s own scrappy legacy. When they had the notion of hosting performance nights by queer artists over the summer, Miller said, “We found in the archives that this idea had a name already. We’re like, great, we’ll just use that name.”
Queer@HERE ran through Pride month and was originally supposed to culminate with a show by the iconic writer-performer Zaza, a.k.a. Diana Oh, who died by suicide before their scheduled appearance. A vigil was scheduled in its place. As Miller recalled, “The love circle around Zaza came and made a beautiful memorial in the DOT,” the Dorothy B. Williams Theatre, one of HERE’s two stages, and then it spilled out beyond HERE. “A bunch of us showed up wearing sparkles and rainbows and tutus and crazy stuff that Zaza would have loved, and we all walked over to the piers, like hundreds of people in a procession, and we just sort of keened into the river.”
In a way, this multi-pronged leadership model is a return to HERE’s origins. Founded out of the merger of two companies with four co-directors in 1993, including Kristin Marting, it eventually became Marting’s singular focus for decades. Ideally, the four-headed model can be additive in the work onstage—as Dias put it, “We all four come from very different communities of artists, so the relationships with artists that we’re able to bring in is simply wider, four times as big”—but it is also inevitably additive to the work backstage as well. Alick said that all four leaders agreed from the start that daily meetings would be necessary. They also have a four-hour weekly meeting, he added, “and then we have a text thread, a Slack thread…”
“Don’t give away all our secrets!” Dias joked.
But meetings aren’t ends in themselves. As Fu put it, “Once we’ve had the conversation and given someone the responsibility and said, ‘Go for it,’ we’re pretty good about letting each other work in our lanes and executing. We’re constantly returning to, ‘How do we do this today?’ Then we set the structure and run with it.”
Dias and Alick in particular have made informed public critiques of American theatrical dysfunction in recent years (Alick with his Emerging From the Cave project, Dias with her influential essay “Decomposition Instead of Collapse”), and all four chimed in with a piece in HowlRound about their leadership philosophy earlier this year, so I was particularly interested in how they were putting their views into practice. One way that emerged: redefining what risk means.
“Risk is smart in this day and age,” Alick said. “The risk-averse nature of the American theatre isn’t serving it. I can understand it, because it’s hard right now out there, in terms of money being taken away by the government, as well as audience behavior. I can understand the impulse to be like, ‘Let’s not do that crazy, adventurous play.’ But then you lose your creative momentum. You have to keep following the artists and trusting their impulses in order to stay on the cutting edge, to keep the audiences coming. It’s a risk worth taking. That’s how you build the future.”
Dias put it even more bluntly, “In a field where the model doesn’t work, the status quo is a risk.”
This isn’t just big talk. As Dias pointed out, two October shows—a body-sound piece from Romania by a troupe called The Mutables, and Dimension Zero, an anti-capitalist puppet musical by the Boxcutter Collective—easily sold out their runs. “So those were not financial risks for us,” she said. “There are other kinds of risk I think about: Like, how do we keep people literally safe?” She mentioned another recent show, The Passion According to Janair, produced by the New York-based Brazilian theatre company Group Dot BR, in which production meetings touched on the topic of immigration enforcement protocols in case artists might be targeted. “Those are the risks that I’m interested in—actually finding solutions for keeping people safe in a world that is less and less kind.”
Fu said she saw terms risk-taking in terms of bandwidth. “There’s something about this moment of, the world is shit and we have no money and everything is bad, that triggers a fear response in a lot of people, including us—like, how do we stay okay? For me, the actual risk lies in having some audacity around expanding instead of shrinking. What can we do that is more with what we have? The more that we do, the more we make space for. In moments of crisis, the only way out is not to shrink in the face of it.”
They all recalled something Alick said about resilience in a meeting, which has become a sort of motto for the company: “I have no wings. I have no air. Yet we must fly.”
Wild at Home
“It’s very surreal,” Ana Mari de Quesada told me yesterday. She wasn’t talking about anything onstage at the tiny but powerful Off-Off-Broadway space she’s run since 2007, wild project, but about finally reaching the end of a grueling, nearly decade-long crawl to go from renter to owner of the 89-seat space that has hosted such essential new-works incubators as Clubbed Thumb Summerworks, The Fire This Time Festival, and the Fresh Fruit Festival. Together with producing director Tom Escovar and with the backing of her board, a few weeks ago de Quesada made a $2.5 million down payment on the landlord’s asking price of $5 million, a sum they pieced together with grants from their former Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, New York State Senator Brian Kavanaugh, and, in a coup de grace that came in late spring, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who freed up $600,000 to get them over the finish line.
Though de Quesada and Escovar now face a familiar New York renter-to-owner dilemma—i.e., a formidable mortgage they’ll have to keep fundraising for—their relief is palpable. As Escovar pointed out, one benefit of ownership is not only the freedom to make improvements and remodels; many construction grants they could apply to help them in these efforts are only available to owners, not tenants.
One big priority on this front: getting their rooftop under control. “We’ve got to fix the decking that’s all warped,” said de Quesada. “Half of it is Seta mats, and the other half, to go with our name, is wild, but it needs a lot more love and maintenance from gardeners.” Their landlord—though generally sympathetic, and, crucially, patient enough to make sure this purchase deal could go through, rather than letting the lot be snapped by a condo developer—had no interest in this kind of green maintenance, they said.
The biggest advantage of owning the space, de Quesada added, is that it “allows us to plan for the future. We had no lease protections; our rent would go up anywhere from 15 to 26 percent; the building could go on sale at any moment. There was that stress we were living with for years, where I always had in the back of my mind, This could end at any moment. Now we can actually plan a proper budget.”
On another level, the purchase simply makes official the sense of ownership that de Quesada and Escovar have felt about wild project for decades. “We’ve been maintaining this building since 2007,” said de Quesada. “I know this building inside and out. Now it’s ours ours.”
Around Town
New playwriting is strong in New York City, on the evidence of my month of theatregoing. This is true even of much-talked-about plays I didn’t personally connect with, in which category I would include Anne Washburn’s The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire at the Vineyard (I appreciated the strange state of mind, a kind of confused reverie, it put me in, but I couldn’t really track it emotionally or dramaturgically) and Else Went’s sprawling Initiative at the Public (I think Sara Holdren’s ecstatic review “got” the play exactly as intended, but I resonated more with David Barbour’s observation that this was a novel in the wrong form).
I thoroughly relished two wildly different productions on West 42nd Street: Talene Monahan’s Meet the Cartozians (still running, though sold out, at Second Stage for a few more days), which uses the richness and ambiguities of Armenian American identity to shine a fresh, bracing light on our country’s fraught history with race and immigration. The ensemble cast, headed by the indispensable Andrea Martin, is stunningly good, and under director David Cromer pulls off the century-spanning double-cast trick, like a kind of insta-repertory company, à la Clybourne Park or By the Way, Meet Vera Stark. Down the street at Playwrights Horizons, Nazareth Hassan’s Practice is an impishly disturbing excavation of an indie theatre company rehearsing a piece under the calmly sociopathic gaze of a mysterious auteur, Asa Leon (Ronald Peet). I’ve seldom seen a show in which both the ending of the first act and the finale were as deliciously indeterminate and inscrutable, to say nothing of much of the rest of it. In both its structure and its substance, in other words, Hassan mindfucks audiences in much the way the cultish Leon does. (Director Keenan Tyler Oliphant also deserves a lot of credit for shaping the experience.)
I would also count Ethan Lipton’s Seat of Our Pants at the Public as an exemplar of strong playwriting, even if it was a musical adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s oddball epic The Skin of Our Teeth. Lipton is a sui generis dramatist-songwriter who seemed blessedly undaunted by the scale and strangeness of this millennia-spanning vaudeville, and he had an apt partner in director Leigh Silverman and a stunning, utterly committed cast. A slam dunk? No, but definitely the kind of big swing theatres should make more often.
I’ve saved the best for last: The most invigorating play of the year happens, miraculously, to be playing on Broadway, after a run earlier this year at Roundabout’s Laura Pels. I refer, of course, to Bess Wohl’s Liberation, which has deepened and somehow brightened in its transfer to the James Earl Jones. The almost interactive playfulness of director Whitney White’s staging belies the show’s emotional and argumentative heft. Wohl’s subjective look at the complicated legacy of second wave feminism, which I wrote about in this space a few months ago and just reviewed here, is having trouble filling its houses. It deserves a wider audience. (It is selling through Feb. 1, 2026.)
What Else Is New
World premieres around the U.S. are understandably a little lighter in the month of mistletoe and jingle bells, though I was intrigued to see a number of apparent attempts at minting new holiday perennials.
Northeast
Billed as the show “for anyone who ever wished Christmas came with a bit more glitter, leather, and tassels,” Brad Plaxen’s The Queer Without a Santa Claus bows at NYC’s Laurie Beechman Theatre, Dec. 2-19, with direction by Cassandra “Sassie LeFay” Clark.
Eric Love’s new adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan stories, Peter and Wendy, runs at White River Junction, Vermont’s Northern Stage Dec. 3-Jan. 1, 2026.
Neuroinclusive theatre company EPIC Players presents Dave Osmundsen’s Bum Bum (or, this farce has Autism) at NYC’s HERE Arts Center, Dec. 4-14. Set at a live telethon, the play follows three Autistic performers who are pressured to deliver “palatable” routines for a mainstream audience.
Oklahoma Samovar is Alice Eve Cohen’s new play, inspired by the story of the playwright’s grandparents, the only Jews in the 1889 Oklahoma Land Run. Directed by Eric Nightengale, it runs at NYC’s La MaMa Dec. 5-21.
The elves take over the North Pole in Phoebe Kreutz and Gary Adler’s new holiday musical The Nice List, which runs at Pennsylvania’s Bristol Riverside Theatre Dec. 9-28. Based on a show originally created as an online experience during the pandemic, it’s directed by Sesame Street star Alan Muraoka.
Sarah Ruhl and the band Great Big World (Ian Axel & Chad King) are the creative forces behind Wonder, a new musical adaptation of the popular R.J. Palacio book about a boy with significant facial differences, playing at Cambridge, Massachusetts’s American Repertory Theater Dec. 9-Jan 1, 2026. Taibi Magar directs.
Alex Edelman’s new comedy/solo show What Are You Going To Do technically premiered at NYC’s Carnegie Hall last month (and will play at BAM’s Gilman Opera House on Dec. 14), but it will have its theatrical premiere proper at Philadelphia’s Wilma Theatre Dec. 18-21, ahead of a national tour in 2026.
West
Nikki Massoud’s new adaptation of Dickens’s Great Expectations for The Acting Company, directed by Devin Brain, begins a 13-city tour at Ventura, California’s Rubicon Theatre, Dec. 3-21. (The tour continues through March 1, 2026.)
The Actors’ Gang debuts a new family holiday show, Children of the Winter Kingdom, at its Culver City location in Los Angeles, Dec. 4-20. Written by Adam Dugas and Mary Eileen O’Donnell and directed by Dugas, it’s billed as a “picaresque” involving orphans, an evil circus queen, a dragon, and an ice spider.
The Naughty List is a mischievous new holiday-themed cabaret led by drag queen Louvel, running at Seattle’s Intiman Theatre Dec. 20-23.
South
Scrooge MacBeth is the title of a new comedy by David MacGregor, in which a theatre troupe is forced to come up with a last-minute holiday show replacement. It’s running at Key West, Florida’s Red Barn Theatre Dec. 9-Jan. 3, 2026.
Atlanta’s Out Front Theatre debuts Blake Fountain’s irreverent new holiday show Mamma Dearest! Here We Joan Again, billed as “Mamma Mia! meets Feud meets a drug-induced Nutcracker,” Dec. 11-21.
Midwest
Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati had a hit with a 2023 show about a hippopotamus at the city’s local zoo, and now they’re back with It’s Fritz! A Sequel to Fiona: The Musical, with a book by Zina Camblin and songs by David Kisor. With direction by D. Lynn Meyers, it runs Dec. 3-31.
Amy Schwabauer’s autobiographical solo comedy, I Wear My Dead Sister’s Clothes, runs at Cleveland Public Theatre, Dec. 4-20. Ray Caspio directs.
