©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

Mt. Airy theater exec not sure ‘the show must (always) go on’
by CLARK GROOME

Mt. Airy resident James Haskins is the new managing director at Wilma Theater.

Most actors aim to eliminate the need for a day job, hoping that once their career takes off, never again will they have to even think about what they did to stay afloat early in their careers.

Not so for Mt. Airy resident James Haskins.

Haskins, the Wilma Theater’s new managing director, began his professional life as an actor and director. The Gettysburg, Pa., native attended the College of Wooster in Ohio, graduating with BAs in both theater and music. “In college I had done a good deal of acting. Then as my senior project I directed a production of Neil Simon’s The Gingerbread Lady, That was the path I was originally headed on,” Haskins said in a recent interview at a Mt. Airy coffee shop.

After graduation from college in 1985, he moved to New York as an intern at the famed Circle Repertory Company. After one year as an intern he served as the theater’s box office manager. Two years later he became the assistant company manager for the National Shakespeare Company while acting in all the national touring company’s productions.

In 1991 he enrolled in the MFA professional acting program at the University of Washington in Seattle, graduating in 1994. While pursuing his acting career he continued working in theater administration as a day job, first at Seattle’s half-price ticket booth and, from 1996 to 1998, as the business manager of the acclaimed multi-cultural Group Theatre.

In the late 1990s his career path took an unexpected turn. “The last show that I performed as an actor,” he said, “was at the Village Theatre, a professional theater in Issaquah, Wash., about 15 miles outside of Seattle.

“I was in a show called The Mask of Moriarty, a Sherlock Holmes spoof in which Moriarty was having plastic surgery to look like Sherlock Holmes. I was cast in the dual roles of Sherlock Holmes and his arch-nemesis Moriarty. It was a very silly play. I was on stage for 90 percent of the show, very text-heavy, playing both of the roles.

“When I got the job, it was in a sense a great opportunity to have a lead role at a professional theater company, working with a director I’d never worked with before and who worked everywhere in Seattle and working with actors I wanted to work with. I questioned whether or not I wanted to take the role because the script was so silly. It just didn’t have much value for me and yet it was an Equity contract and lead role. I decided to do it.

“During the course of the show, a number of things happened in my personal life. The first thing that happened was I got a nasty cold and tried to work through a show – there were no understudies – feeling lousy, not being able to speak. Finding a way to do that, which I did, is never any fun.

“Then my partner’s stepfather passed away and shortly after that, and unexpectedly, his mother passed away, all while I was doing this show. She was here in the Philadelphia area. I was not able to accompany him back here for the funeral and to help him with taking care of the house and so on.

“It was very very difficult. At that point in time I realized that what I was doing wasn’t important enough to be not participating in what I feel is important in life.

“While I respect the whole ‘the show must go on’ mentality, at that point I had a realization that for me there were other things that were more important than the show going on, particularly a show I felt had no redeeming artistic value.”

So what to do?

“I knew that I still wanted to be in theater. I’ve always been told, and discovered for myself, that you don’t pursue a career in theater unless you feel you have to. My last temp job in Seattle was with a business and litigation firm. Don’t ask me what that is. To this day I couldn’t tell you. That experience taught me that the for-profit world was not for me whatsoever.

“I’d always been very successful in the administration work I did,” Haskins said. When Mike Whistler, his partner for the past 17 years, and he returned to Philadelphia for a memorial service for Mike’s mother, they went to the Outside the Box program at People’s Light and Theatre.

“While we were, there we ran into Seth Rozin, who was Mike’s college roommate at Penn. The world is so small.” One thing led to another, and Haskins landed at Rozin’s InterAct Theatre Company as its managing director, requiring a move east that came sooner than originally expected. Both Haskins and Whistler had family nearby, so they were happy about coming to Philadelphia.

As InterAct’s managing director, Haskins turned what had been basically a mom-and-pop theater into a fully professional operation. After three years in that role, he became the executive director of the Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia, the local service organization that runs, among other things, the Barrymore Awards for Excellence in Theatre.

The organization has thrived under his leadership. He is most pleased with the Philadelphia theater community’s participation in the Free Night of Theater, an audience development and awareness campaign to promote the national non-profit theater community. Spearheaded by the national Theatre Communications Group, the program is currently active in several other cities and will be truly national in 2007, Haskins reports.

His move to the Wilma excites him. “The Wilma to me has always been an organization of incredible artistic aesthetic, great integrity, really developing a national profile as a regional theater that produces very relevant new work. When the opportunity [at the Wilma] presented itself, I couldn’t pass it up.”

Haskins, 43, and his partner moved to Mt. Airy more than two years ago, after living for many years in South Philadelphia. “Mike was working for a Web site designer in Mt. Airy, so he got to know it. He felt it was a very attractive community.

“So when we finally made the decision that, yes, we’re going to stay and, yes, we’re going to buy a house, we decided to look in South Philly and Mt. Airy. We fell in love with the neighborhood. It’s a wonderful, still very urban environment but has a very different feel from the community we were living in.

“We very much value the community that we found here, certainly the diversity and the openness. I’ve never felt that I’d lived in a community where I have neighbors that you could go knock on their door and borrow a cup of sugar. In urban environments, that’s unusual. In Mt. Airy I’m still in an urban environment. I also feel like I now have a neighborhood, that I have a community of friends.”

Jamie Haskins still has his Actor’s Equity card. He does, on occasion, miss acting, although he doesn’t miss “the audition process, the constant putting yourself out there, the rejection.”

He’s still part of the theater community, working with people he admires and likes. He is also keenly aware that when an actor is told “not to quit his day job,” it’s not meant as a compliment. For him, however, keeping his day job has clearly been the right decision.