Gigi Bolt: In the Eye of the Storm

Her specialty has been negotiating the thickets of art and politics

By Celia Wren

There's something theatrical about Washington, D.C.—the pageantry of the White House and the Mall; the persuasive sweep of the Potomac; the brooding presence of the Pentagon; the triumphant showstopper that is the Washington Monument. From the point of view of the American theatre community, a Chekhovian bittersweet quality stole into the mix last March, when the lead-up to cherry blossom season—a biological and cultural highlight of the D.C. year—coincided with Gigi Bolt's departure from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Since 1995, Bolt had presided as the director of theatre and musical theatre at the Endowment, serving under four chairpersons and helping to create, implement or reshape such initiatives as the NEA/TCG Theatre Residency Program for Playwrights; the NEA/TCG Career Development Programs for Directors and Designers; the Shakespeare in American Communities program; and the musical theatre component of the American Masterpieces program. She had managed to weather some of the Endowment's rockiest years without losing her confidence in the institution and her zeal for theatre. By the time she stepped down—for personal reasons, and to explore new professional challenges—her name had acquired some clout.

"She knows everyone and everything in the theatre," explains Arts Midwest assistant director Susan Chandler, who got a sense of Bolt's national repute when they collaborated on the Shakespeare in American Communities initiative. When recruiting panelists for the project, Chandler says, "All I had to say was that Gigi Bolt is going to be there." At that news, she explains, "people would say, 'Oh, if Gigi is going to be there, I want to be on your panel.'"

The reaction may reflect Bolt's ability to negotiate the thickets of art and politics without losing her groundedness. Sasha Anawalt, founding director of the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program, recalls the time Bolt came to observe the NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater and was confronted with 25 journalists firing off hard-hitting questions about the Endowment. "She is so direct," Anawalt says. "She was not at all defensive. She responded as a human being. And thus an incredible, enormously productive conversation came out of this encounter."

Bolt's affinity for the cultural realm stretches way back: Indeed, she might almost serve as a case study of how doses of performance, early in life, can nourish adult passion for the arts. She grew up in Kansas, and during her early years attended musicals and operettas at the Starlight Theatre in Kansas City, Mo. When she was eight, her family moved to Independence, William Inge's hometown, where her mother worked on the annual Neewollah Festival that is mentioned in Inge's Picnic. (Elizabeth Broun, Bolt's only sibling, was another beneficiary of their arts-saturated childhood—she is now the director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.) In Independence, Bolt's interest in theatre was further nourished by Margaret Goheen, head of her high-school drama program, who would go on to found the Inge Festival.

Bolt later attended the University of Kansas, where she participated in several international programs that affected her strongly. One year, she acted in a production of The Boy Friend that toured East Asia, sponsored by the USO and the Department of Defense—she can still conjure up the image of a performance improvised in Korea's de-militarized zone, under the disapproving eye of patrolling North Korean soldiers. Another year, she and her fellow students studied at national theatre academies in Eastern Europe; it was the era of Prague Spring, and Bolt says the lessons she learned about "theatre, and what it can mean in a culture or community, were pretty life-changing."

By the time she graduated from college, Bolt envisioned a career as an actor, and after a while she made her way to New York City. "I did a little of everything—a dinner theatre tour, summer stock, one small appearance on Broadway in Woody Allen's Don't Drink the Water, a little Off-Off Broadway, a little TV, the sort of things a young actor does." She also married playwright and actor Jonathan Bolt—they are now divorced—and had a daughter, Julie. In search of stability, the family moved to Cleveland, where Bolt spent five years as a member of the Cleveland Play House's resident acting company, appearing in the original cast of The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, among other shows.

That search for stability eventually led her to accept a job offer from the New York State Council on the Arts in the mid-1970s—a temporary position at first, offered through a friend. Initially, she missed performing, and expected to return to it. On the other hand, her new career track—she would spend nearly 20 years with NYSCA's Theatre Program, as an associate and later as the director—offered a wider scope than an acting life, in many ways. "It was a possibility to really engage with all kinds of issues," Bolt says today. "It is the breadth that has always appealed to me—to be able to intersect with the whole range of what is affecting the field at one point in time. I'm interested, and always have been, in all of it."

Her change in outlook may also have reflected the exhilarating artistic atmosphere that buoyed her first decade at NYSCA. "There was such a feeling of possibility," she remembers. "It was open and embracing, and the experimental theatre movement was at its zenith—a creative beacon to theatres here and around the world." She saw plays four or five nights a week. Thirty years later, she still vividly recalls catching Andrei Serban's work at La MaMa E.T.C.; seeing Ain't Misbehavin' and A Soldier's Play; sitting in Joseph Papp's office and hearing him talk about his plans; encountering the creativity of Mabou Mines, Tisa Chang, Maria Irene Fornes, August Wilson and other artists. "What was so exciting was the emergence of this range of voices," she says.

Bolt loved her New York life, so when the NEA sounded her out about an opening, in the mid-1990s, she agreed to help out in D.C.—but only for a few months. That resolve was no match, however, for "the allure and excitement of working with the national field," she allows. "I was just drawn in."

Not that it was smooth sailing at the Endowment in those days. The culture wars were in full swing, and the NEA, in Bolt's words, was "already in the thick of controversy." Its very existence was in jeopardy.

"I remember being in a hotel room on work travel in 1997 and hearing about a vote in the House—217 to 216—to eliminate the agency," she recalls. "The following year was a battleground at every level of government—with grassroots supporters around the country finally winning the day—saving the Endowment and thereby preserving a cultural voice for the country."

Those times, she says, "were really rough on everyone, financially and psychically." But the painful lessons had a payoff, both for the Endowment and for the American theatre.

Under the leadership of Jane Alexander, Bolt says, "We did reinvent the agency to more clearly convey public benefit. It was actually not such a big change internally, in terms of how we operated, but a very big change in terms of public perception, and it was accompanied by a new commitment to extend the Endowment's reach across the country."

Learning from that crisis in the early 1990s, she thinks, the American theatre has "reconceived and expanded its mission to reflect its role in the community." Perhaps as a result, "Most city or state governments today acknowledge the centrality of the role that theatres play." The deepened relationship with the community has also had a powerful effect on the art. "Challenging productions are now regularly accompanied by a multifaceted dialogue with the audience to give people a way into the work," she observes.

Not that she thinks we can all sit on our laurels. She's anxious that the theatre profession keep its sights pinned on the needs of individual artists—directors, designers, actors and so on. "Everybody knows this," Bolt emphasizes, "but it constantly has to be brought back into some visible place, because we're not there yet. It has to do with how they are rewarded financially and how they are valued—and with assuring that independent artists have both creative artistic opportunities and a voice at the table in terms of the larger field."

She also points to the challenge of diversity—"Whose stories will we tell and who will decide?" she asks—and to the issue of reaching out to fledging thespians. "How do you bring in the young generation and give them the chance to create work of their own?" Bolt wonders, "Is that going to happen within existing institutions, or will it happen in a less institutional, more entrepreneurial, project-oriented way? How will they access resources? I imagine there's no single answer."

Bolt is not retreating from such questions now that she's no longer at the NEA. Though she'll have more time to pursue her interest in travel and foreign languages, she intends to keep working in the sphere of American theatre—which, she notes, is a kind of perpetual motion machine, constantly evolving. "Society is changing," she remarks, "and the field is changing within it. The trick is always to see what's happening in time to make the right decisions."

Celia Wren reviews theatre for the Washington Post, and is a former managing editor of this magazine.