Eric Rosen loves the shared experiences that are the very heart of the theater, those among cast, crew and audience alike.
Rosen marked his 10th year as artistic director of the Kansas City Repertory Theatre on May 1. He was an integral part of the regional theater’s growth and increasingly lauded reputation during that decade.
But now it’s time to move on: His final official day at the KC Rep will be Aug. 31. He and his husband, Claybourne Elder, and their son, Bo Rosen-Elder, will move to New York to live closer to family on the East Coast, the theater said in a news release.
Rosen will return to the KC Rep in September to help prepare its opening production of the season, the world premiere of “Last Days of Summer,” scheduled to run Sept. 7 through Sept. 30. He also will return to help with the theater’s staging of his adaptation of “A Christmas Carol” Nov. 16 through Dec. 30, which Marissa Wolf, who is Jewish, will direct; and as director of “Indecent” Jan. 18 through Feb. 10, 2019, produced with Arena Stage and Baltimore Center Stage.
He will not co-direct “Of Mice and Men.” The KC Rep hasn’t yet chosen a director or co-director for that production.
The theater’s board of directors named Associate Artistic Director Jason Chanos as interim artistic director and is making a national search for a permanent artistic director. Chanos and Executive Director Angela Lee Gieras will jointly lead the theater in the meantime.
“The Board of Directors at Kansas City Repertory Theatre is grateful for Eric’s many contributions during his 10 years of leadership,” Board Vice Chairman Scott Hall said in the release. “His artistic mastery has been instrumental in moving KC Rep into its preeminent position as a producer of innovative classic plays and musicals and developer of new plays. We have the great fortune of harnessing Jason Chanos’ tremendous leadership abilities and passion to guide our continued momentum.”
In an interview with The Kansas City Jewish Chronicle in mid-May, Rosen called his time with the KC Rep “the most incredible adventure of my life.
“I love what this company can achieve artistically,” he said. “I believe we create some of the best-quality work in the U.S. for production values and the ability to support innovation and challenging work, and I can trust this company to take good care of my ideas.”
Rosen is 47. He was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and grew up there and in Connecticut.
He is, as he says, “so Jewish.”
He moved to Kansas City in 2008 from Chicago, where he founded and was artistic director of the About Face Theatre right after graduate school. He lives in Kansas City’s Westside neighborhood with Elder and their son.
He received a bachelor’s degree in performance studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s and doctorate in performance studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
“I love making theater work in a city and a region that looks a lot like America — meaning racial, income, urban and rural diversity,” he said. “We have the same problems most cities have. I love getting a bunch of people together who don’t have shared experiences in day-to-day life but can have it in theater.”
When Rosen started at the KC Rep, he was the youngest artistic director of any major regional theater in the country.
“Around year six or seven, I finally figured out how to do my job well,” he said. “It’s interesting to see how my ideas in my 30s have become part of the DNA of this organization now that I’m in my 40s.”
What led Rosen to take the job at the KC Rep was that “there are only 70 of these jobs in the U.S., so when you get offered one, it’s a little like winning the lottery.” He was familiar with Kansas City and the KC Rep before he took the job.
“Here’s this institution that’s as old as or older than the major theaters in the country,” Rosen said. “It was one of the pioneer theaters back in the ‘60s. Its identity was very regional and not national. I figured it was a place where I could do some good.”
People don’t tend to go into Rosen’s line of work for the glory or the credit, he said, but to make the theater company or the city better. He didn’t know when he joined the KC Rep that the Great Recession would hit “and then that Kansas City would begin riding a wave of cultural ascendancy with the opening of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, the birth of 10 more theater companies and the renovation of the KC Rep.”
“The KC Rep now has a national reputation, in the very top tier of regional theaters in terms of scope and scale, and the products we develop and send to New York and Los Angeles,” Rosen said. “That’s a big deal for our artists and our identity.”
The KC Rep has partnerships with theaters in New York, Los Angeles and other cities, he said.
“My mantra is to send stuff out more than receiving stuff in,” he said. “The KC Rep model is very different than a lot of other regional theaters our size in our commitment to actors who live here in Kansas City. That’s part of a much larger growth in theater. It’s important to be a place that partners with Broadway producers to produce new musicals and being a model in the diversity of artists who work on our stage.”
The hardest part of his job is finding audiences for newer plays “in which the hook isn’t immediately apparent with brand new plays, and the anxiety of whether the show will sell well.”
“Changing the conversation is a multiyear experience with finding new approaches to plays,” he said. “Getting pushback is healthy.”
The KC Rep was founded in 1964 by Dr. Patricia McIlrath, whose vision was to create a training program for theater students to work side by side with professional actors, designers and directors, according to the theater’s website.
A few years later, the theater became affiliated with the Actors’ Equity Association and changed its name to the Missouri Repertory Theatre. George Keathley became artistic director after McIlrath retired in 1985, and he held the job until 2000. Peter Altman joined the theater that year as producing artistic director and held the job until 2007.
In 1979, the KC Rep moved into the Helen F. Spencer Theatre in the then-new Performing Arts Center at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (now called the James C. Olson Performing Arts Center). The theater’s name was changed to the Kansas City Repertory Theatre in 2004. In 2014, theater launched a $5 million campaign to renovate its main stage.
The KC Rep is important to Kansas City and the region because, long before Rosen arrived, “it invented professional theater in Kansas City.”
“The other theaters here wouldn’t exist without it,” Rosen said. “There’s more theater going on in Kansas City than any other art form, period. We have 37 theater companies and we’re at the center of a historical ecology.
“Second, we serve the greatest number of young people who might otherwise never have had a chance to see a play before adulthood,” he said. “My board of directors believe that having a world-class theater company at the center of this theater movement makes Kansas City better the way the (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art) does. Civic leaders, philanthropists and our audiences appreciate it, including kids.”
