It's looking increasingly unlikely that the FSU/Asolo Conservatory for Actor Training will remain in Sarasota.And that's a pity. Because the Conservatory has been a boon not only to aspiring actors but also to theatergoers on the West Coast of Florida generally. Thanks to the Conservatory, area theater lovers have recently seen plays of Off-Broadway caliber like Conor McPherson's The Weir, Diana Son's Stop Kiss and David Hare's The Blue Room. Thanks to the Conservatory, local audiences are able to discover impressive new talents not only in university productions (staffed by second-year-students) but in their first (third-year) mainstage work along with the professional Asolo company. And if you saw Laura Lowry in The Corn is Green or Bryan Barter in Brighton Beach Memoirs, you know that the Conservatory produces first-class performers, worthy of standing side by side with Asolo veterans.
So why is the school leaving? Well, first there's the official story, put forward in an FSU press release: that "differences in artistic direction and the escalating costs of supporting 30 FSU students in Sarasota" were behind the school's choice to move everything up to Tallahassee by 2005. And there's the glittering, distracting announcement that actress Jane Alexander has been named as the new Conservatory director.
But there's another story too, about who controls not just the school but the Asolo company itself. This story's murkier, but probably closer to the truth.
This story starts with Howard J. Millman, producing artistic director of the Asolo Theatre Festival, deciding that he didn't want to retire as scheduled after June of this year. The 71-year-old Millman, as not everyone knows, has been paid by FSU for the last eight years, and is a participant in a state-run mandatory retirement plan. There's some controversy over whether Millman — who's often praised for making the Asolo a success — at one time received assurances from FSU that he could stay on beyond his retirement date. In any case, the university eventually decided that he had to leave as scheduled; at which point Millman went to the Asolo board of directors, and arranged to have it pay his salary after June — thus making him a private employee.
FSU didn't like that at all: "FSU can't staff a theater that's operated by a private entity and supervised by somebody who's not on their payroll," says Steven Wallace, dean of the School of Theatre. So the university responded — shockingly to some — by terminating, come July 1, five Asolo staff members (and FSU employees) who report to Millman: the managing director, associate artistic director, production manager, director of costume design and marketing director. And once again, the Asolo board of directors stepped in and offered to keep paying the five staff members' salaries — on an indefinite basis.
And that's when a total break with Sarasota seems to have entered the minds of top FSU administrators. "The bottom line," says Wallace, "is if you have somebody sitting at the head of that program, saying, 'I'm not moving,' and the private entity says, 'And we support you and we will pay your salary, and we will pay the other five people's salaries as well.' FSU says, 'That's fine, that's what you're going to have to do.' And at that point, you know, the provost and I sat down and then eventually the president and said, 'Can we continue to operate this way? And why would we want to continue to operate this way?'"
The answers they came up with were "Can't" and "Wouldn't want to." A few weeks ago FSU made the announcement that the Conservatory would relocate to Tallahassee in 2005. Wallace thinks the move will have positive repercussions, especially where student diversity is concerned: "Speaking only for myself as the dean. … You know, I represent a state institution and we have a number of minority students in our program. Yet when I go to the Asolo and I see Asolo productions, I've yet to see a single minority in a production. … If the season selected is primarily a white season, it's very difficult for us to attract African-American students, to attract Hispanic students, or other minorities to come into our program." An increase in minority casting isn't the only change that Wallace foresees for the Conservatory. Jane Alexander, he says, will be asked to work "with the faculty of the School of Theatre to develop a new, hopefully a different type of MFA program" — one not defined by its connection with a professional theater.
But of course, that connection is precisely what makes the present FSU/Asolo Conservatory so special. And neither the Asolo board nor the Asolo students like the idea of severing it. Says Ron Greenbaum, president of the Asolo board of directors, "We had a wonderful partnership with FSU for … years, and we would love to continue that relationship. … I think it could all be worked out if we talked." And says third-year student Jennifer Plants: "The students are absolutely devastated by what happened. It is utterly shocking to any student of the Conservatory, company members and the community that Florida State would put an end to a program that took 30 years to build and just a month ago was listed [in The New York Times] as one of the top nine programs in the country."
Plants lived and ran a theater company in Tallahassee before coming to the conservatory and thinks that that city just can't support theater the way Sarasota does. "This is a community that loves its arts, and if you just look at what's offered in Tallahassee it's incredibly different."
There is a slim chance that the FSU/Asolo Conservatory will stay in Sarasota. State Sen. Lisa Carlton, whose district includes Sarasota (and who's chair of the Education Appropriations subcommittee), is talking with the FSU president and provost about strategies for keeping the school in its present location. But the situation doesn't look promising. For example, Plants says she was told by Dean Wallace "that it was a done deal and that there was nothing we could do."
"But we just don't really believe that that's true," she adds," Because I think the move is shortsighted."
Contact Mark E. Leib at mark.leib@weeklyplanet.com or call 813-248-8888, ext. 305.
This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2003.