After five weeks, Guthrie's Haj sees love and challenges

Joseph Haj has been drinking from a fire hose.

"It's a ton of information coming at me, more than I could possibly absorb in the near term, but it's been great," said Haj, the new artistic director of the Guthrie Theater.

After only five weeks in his new job, Haj sat for an interview to discuss his vision for the Guthrie, the theater's mission and its role in the community. "I've put a lot of focus on how to make the walls of this extraordinary building as porous as possible," he said. "And making sure that we're putting the work that we're making in service to an idea about community."

He said he's been on a "listening tour," convening small groups of theater staff, board members and community members to hear their thoughts. He said those conversations have been "framed around two essential questions: What do you love about this place, and what are the challenges that you see?"

The answers he gets, he said, are encouraging. "The number of people who just love this organization and care deeply about its future and success is extraordinary," he said.

In describing his early priorities, Haj focused on preserving the legacy that's been entrusted to him.

"There are a couple of things that need to be maintained here," he said. "I'm following the extraordinary legacy of Joe Dowling, and indeed the line of artistic directors before Joe." In response, he said, he is trying to bring "a real focus on both the artistic excellence of what it is that we are making, and then the question of connecting that work as meaningfully as possible to the community that we are charged to serve."

Haj described a complicated balancing act: trying to do excellent work while at the same time meeting the needs of a community that may not be very interested, at first.

"If we think our job is to make excellent art, and if we think the community's job is to come in, admire it and get the hell out of the building so we can get on to the next thing, nothing good happens from that place," he said. The ideal, in his view, is to demonstrate to people that theater "something to do with their lives."

He said he's looking forward to collaborating the other directors of the major Twin Cities theaters, and ticked off the roster: Sarah Bellamy at Penumbra Theatre, Randy Reyes at Mu Performing Arts, Jack Reuler at Mixed Blood Theatre, Jeremy Cohen at the Playwrights' Center, Sarah Rasmussen at the Jungle Theater.

"How are we making this work, and how are we connecting it to our community? These are big questions," he said. "There are a thousand ways to do that, but first we have to be an organization that desires to do that. And that's where we're starting."

Other highlights from the interview:

"This idea that everybody must come to everything ... there's a balance, and I think we have to be careful about it, frankly. If the job is to get as many people as humanly possible in the building, then that's one kind of programming. ... We have 'Music Man' running now. It is so broadly appealing ... The worst-made production of 'The Music Man' will always do better than the best-made production of 'Long Day's Journey into Night.' That's just the way of the world. And we have to make sure as a cultural organization that we're not only making beautiful productions of 'The Music Man.' But that we're also making sure that we leave room, even if we know that a smaller cross-section of our community is interested in seeing a particular title, that we understand our charge is that we have to serve those people meaningfully as well."

"Any vision for the future of this organization, if it's a vision worth having, has to include the dreams and aspirations of those who are putting their lives in service to this organization, those who are supporting it, philanthropically or otherwise, our patrons who are coming and seeing this work and the residents of this region ... [It] has to be inclusive of all the people who care about this place, and reaching out to communities who don't even know to care about this place."

"Apparently, you can't go to public school in the Twin Cities and not show up at the Guthrie and see a play. It seems impossible. In fact, every ninth-grader in the seven public high schools in Minneapolis will come to a performance of the Shakespeare play, the 'Pericles,' this coming season. So the theater goes to enormous effort to invite as many as possible. Some of those young people will grow up to be season subscribers and come for many years to the Guthrie and support all the other extraordinary theaters in this area, and some will never come to a theater again."