Builder building theater

Marin JCC impresario finds a pearl

By Paul Haist

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Greg Phillips thinks Portland may be the epicenter of a new age in theater—he called it “a renaissance of shared experience in art.”

And he suspects that the Gerding Theater at the Armory that houses Portland Center Stage in the heart of Portland’s Pearl District is where the earth first began to move noticeably in this new awakening here and, he would argue, across America.

Weighing budget and attendance he said that PCS is one of the 25 largest theaters in America.

However, it’s more than an issue of size for Phillips.

“I think we are one of the best,” he said, adding that he believes the moment is near when PCS will be recognized as one of the greatest American theater companies. Already, the Wall Street Journal chose to review PCS’s 2006 production of “West Side Story.” The WSJ’s imprimatur suggests widespread notice of what’s going on in Portland’s old armory.

For perspective on what he means by one of the best, Phillips pointed to New York’s Roundabout Theater Co., San Francisco’s Old Globe, the La Jolla Playhouse and the Berkeley Repertory Theater—the best of the best.

It shouldn’t be surprising that Phillips thinks the way he does. He is the executive director of Portland Center Stage.

But it’s more than pride and public relations for Phillips.

He speaks with authority that comes from long experience, and he speaks in a voice that is rich with his love of theater and his part in it.

One of four children, Phillips, 57, grew up in a Reform Jewish family in Newton, Mass., near Boston. As a young man he went off to the University of Vermont where, looking back, he imagines his parents thought he would become a doctor. “I have a nice bedside manner,” he said.

Instead, he earned a music degree at Marlboro Music School, also in Vermont. He put himself through school by building houses and renovating old barns; he’s handy with tools; he’s a builder.

After college, thinking he might make his life as a performer, he came to the West Coast, settling in the Bay Area. That was 1976.

He did end up performing, in a manner of speaking. Using his knowledge of home building and renovation, by 1977 he had been selected by San Francisco’s public television station, KQED, to host their home repair show, “Grin and Repair It.”

When PBS began planning a national version of “Grin and Repair It,” the program that would become “This Old House,” Phillips was an obvious candidate to move to Boston where the show was to be hosted.

But, he said, “I didn’t want to be Harry Home-Repair for the rest of my life.” There would be no going back to Boston.

For the next few years he worked in public arts administration. He created an arts program for the San Anselmo and Fairfax, Calif., school districts and was director of youth programs for the Marin Symphony.

In 1990, a friend encouraged him look into the Jewish Community Center being built in Marin County, Calif., a few miles north of the Golden Gate in San Rafael, not far from his home in San Anselmo.

Phillips was thinking at the time that he “was done with non-profits,” but his friend persisted. It was to be no ordinary Jewish community center. It would be the first campus-concept JCC.

When Phillips elected at last to explore the opportunity, he was given a tour of the new facility. At the end of the tour he was shown an as yet undeveloped area. On viewing the vast empty space his first thought, he said, was “theater.”

He took the assignment and in 1991 founded a diverse performing arts series called Centerstage at the Osher Marin JCC.

Phillips modeled his program after New York’s 92nd Street Y, the historic Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He flew to New York where he consulted with the Y’s renowned impresario Omus Hirschbein.

“I learned from him what you do. I learned there is a way to present great art and artists that would have special significance to the Jewish community.”

For 15 seasons at the Osher Marin JCC Phillips presented more than 600 events spanning all the performing arts. He brought to the Osher the world’s foremost performers and personalities.

It wasn’t just a Jewish thing. Like the 92nd Street Y, Phillips’ Centerstage drew diverse audiences.

“To the Jewish audience they were Jewish artists. To the general community they were artists,” he said. “I created something that spoke to the whole community and the Jewish community.”

After 15 years of building and managing Centerstage, and in spite of also having built what some told him was a beautiful lifestyle, Phillips said he was ready for something new.

“I decided to become a managing director of an arts organization in San Francisco or Portland,” he said.

“I had slowly fallen in love with Portland,” he explained. He called Portland “one of the great American cities.” Even before finding a career opportunity here, Phillips and his wife Megan, an attorney, bought 10½ acres above Scappoose, west of Portland out Hwy. 30.

But, with one of his two children still in high school, it was too soon to leave the Bay Area.

Phillips accepted the executive director’s post with Broadway by the Bay, a longtime producer of musical theater in San Mateo. There he built revenue and expanded outreach and education while helping the organization commission new works and acquire property for a new performance venue.

It was a challenge. From his home in San Anselmo it was necessary to commute across Marin, across the Golden Gate and across San Francisco.

“This is not the life I want to live,” he said at the time. “Megan and I started to talk about living here.”

The couple came to Portland just to look around. Phillips recalled that Portland Center Stage had converted the armory building as a theater. When he looked at their Web site and learned the theater did not have an executive director, he left a voice mail for Artistic Director Chris Cole.

From Cole he learned that PCS had just engaged a recruiting firm for a national search. They went ahead with the search, said Phillips, “it was the prudent thing to do,” and in the end they offered him the job. He started officially on Jan. 8, but began phasing in last October.

“I am arriving here at the most exciting time for the theater and the city,” said Phillips.

Something different is happening in Portland.

While theater attendance has been trending down across America by an average of 8 percent annually, according to Phillips, “so far we’re doing the reverse.”

After the Gerding Theater opened, subscriptions grew by 31 percent over the first two seasons in the new venue and single-ticket sales increased by 57 percent, said Phillips.

Phillips speculates that the negative trend in theater attendance across the country stems significantly from public fascination with the digital revolution, especially the younger generations.

“This younger generation grew up without an understanding of the power of life,” he said, pointing to ear buds and computer monitors and all the information that is so readily available that way.

“You get very comfortable with that,” he said.

“But there comes a point in time when someone ventures out and is struck by the experience of sitting in a theater with others breathing with you, laughing with you, crying with you. They will tell others,” he said.

“Portland always seems to be at the forefront. This could be where the beginning of the next cycle takes place. The power of the experience at the Gerding Theater is what is causing people to want to come out,” Phillips speculated.

No matter its architectural merit or its green credentials (the Gerding Theater is the only building on the National Register of Historic Places that also was awarded platinum status by the U.S. Green Building Council), the theater is just an enclosed space without all who make the productions possible. Phillips credits Artistic Director Chris Cole with “brilliance.”

“I have never had a producing partner like this before,” said Phillips. “We have in common that we can envision the future and together we can make it happen.”

Pointing to PCS’s April 1 world premiere of playwright Aaron Posner’s adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel “Sometimes a Great Notion” Phillip said, “When a company starts to do great work and works with great American playwrights, it tends to lead to moving productions,” that is, theater that is repeated in other communities. “This,” he said of PCS, “could very well become one of those breeding grounds for new work.”

He likened that process to something that distinguishes great theaters, “their dedication to perpetuating the genre.”

“In every art form, that’s what you aspire to,” he said.

Phillips seems a bit amazed by where he is and what he is doing today, exactly what he said he wanted to back near the end of his tenure at the Osher Marin JCC.

“I never quite pictured this two or three years ago, but here I am in Portland as executive director of PCS.”

How does a guy who built houses end up leading a great theater?

“They are alike” he said. “Both require visioning.”