Extraordinary Theater for an Extraordinary Community

This article is part of our “Play On! – Celebrating New Leaders in Arts & Culture” series of five articles featuring interviews with new executive and managing directors at the helm of beloved arts organizations in Santa Cruz County. All the featured organizations are recipients of 2024 Community Grants. Read the full series.

Header photo: Charles Pasternak (left), Artistic Director and Lorne Dechtenberg, Managing Director of Santa Cruz Shakespeare on the stage in the Audrey Stanley Grove.

During the COVID shutdown, Lorne Dechtenberg did some research. Then the Executive and Artistic Director of the Bluegrass Opera and Music Theatre in Lexington, Kentucky, Lorne looked at data from nearly a thousand performing arts nonprofits across the country from theaters to operas, orchestras, and ballets. “The United States has a challenge with arts funding. We just aren’t very well funded by the government the way the European arts are, so we operate on the nonprofit model.”

Lorne was collecting data on contributed versus earned revenue, outreach strategies to attract new audiences, and various pandemic adaptations. In the national landscape, one company was truly exceptional on all fronts—Santa Cruz Shakespeare (SCS). “I was so impressed at how SCS came right back after the pandemic. I think it came down to a combination of there being excellent local public health, an outdoor theater, and an incredibly robust and devoted audience.”

A couple years after Lorne conducted his survey, the Managing Director position opened at SCS, and he jumped at the opportunity. A deeply experienced arts administrator, Lorne is also a composer, conductor, director, and performer. When he landed in Santa Cruz last year, everything he had learned in his research became clear. He says, “I figured out why this company was so extraordinary. It’s because the community is extraordinary.”

A Sense of Ownership

Charles Pasternak, who is in his first solo season as SCS Artistic Director after onboarding for a year with the outgoing Artistic Director Mike Ryan, says, “This community has said again and again, we don’t want to lose this theater.” He’s referring to the tremendous support of audiences during the rebirth of the festival in 2014 after it transitioned out of UC Santa Cruz and then again during the pandemic. “They’ve saved it enough times that I think the community feels a real ownership of it.”

Charles, who has had a wide-ranging career as an artistic director, actor, and director says he and Lorne are excited to build on the company’s beloved backbone of two Shakespeare plays in the summer. “Shakespeare in repertory has worked for centuries, everywhere. A lot of Shakespeare festivals in this country are suffering because they have stepped away from that model. Our vision is not to reinvent the wheel but try to expand it.”

They’ve added a fall play at the end of the summer season—this year it is The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams and a winter holiday staging of A Christmas Carol. Charles has dreams of adding a spring Shakespeare and perhaps another fall show. But he emphasizes, “Anything in addition to the Shakespeare will be thematically adjacent and in conversation with the Bard.”

Expanding, But Practically

Lorne laughs, “Charles has this vision, and it’s my job to figure out how we do it practically while keeping the books balanced, expanding our educational offerings, and deepening local partnerships.”

New partnerships and educational programming are what Lorne and Charles hope will help expand the SCS audience. Charles says, “Somebody doesn’t just show up to the theater. They get invited.”

Lorne expands, “But you can’t just invite folks, you need to be in the community with them every day, not just when it’s time to choose ticket prices or build an educational program.” In addition to burgeoning partnerships with the Homeless Garden Project and the Santa Cruz Symphony, Lorne, Charles, and their Education Programs Manager Rebecca Haley Clark, are excited to connect with arts organizations and theater companies in south county as they build programs at the intersection of social justice, education, and the performing arts.

Charles notes that over a decade ago, Mike Ryan started a gender parity initiative. “With classical theater, access to female identifying actors has been minimal. This year we are thrilled that the SCS company is 50% women and 50% people of color.”

Charles continues, “Our agenda is simple. We are putting up great works of art with a wildly diverse cast of people from all different backgrounds and all different voices who are bringing their life experience to the stage to tell these great stories.”