After 35 Years at Playwrights Horizons, He's Ready to Seek New Ones

The theater’s next season — its 50th — will be his last as artistic director, and at that point he will have led the organization for half of its history. He will be succeeded by his longtime deputy, the theater’s associate artistic director, Adam Greenfield.

“I started thinking about what else there is in life,” Sanford, who is 65, said in an interview. He said he would not retire but would look for new ways to be active. “I still feel like I’ve got a lot left in the tank.”

Playwrights Horizons, which stages six or seven productions a year, describes itself as a “writer’s theater,” with an emphasis on contemporary American work and relationships with many of the nation’s leading playwrights. The organization has an impressive track record, including six Pulitzer Prize-winning plays, three of which were presented during Sanford’s tenure as artistic director — “The Flick,” “Clybourne Park” and “I Am My Own Wife.”

A midsize organization with an annual budget of about $13 million and a staff of 50, Playwrights Horizons operates primarily in Hell’s Kitchen, where it has two theaters, one with 198 seats and another with 128. The company also runs an undergraduate theater school that is affiliated with New York University.

It is the rare theater that still accepts unsolicited scripts — a practice that rarely leads to productions but allows the organization to develop relationships with artists who seem to have promise. “The message it sends to that sweet and crazy community of people who write plays is profound,” Sanford said.

Playwrights Horizons frequently stages challenging work by early-career artists — its celebrated current show, Will Arbery’s “Heroes of the Fourth Turning,” gives a rich airing to conservative religious viewpoints, while its most recent musical, Michael R. Jackson’s “A Strange Loop,” is described by its protagonist as being about “one lone black gay boy I knew who chose to turn his back on the Lord.”

Over the course of his tenure, Sanford has had plenty of successes (in addition to the Pulitzer winners, there were Broadway transfers like “Grey Gardens” and breakout plays like “Circle Mirror Transformation,” by Annie Baker, and “Dance Nation,” by Clare Barron), as well as his share of bad reviews.

Sometimes, the victories and the challenges came with the same show, as with “The Flick,” a slow-paced drama about three employees of a small movie theater, also written by Baker. Sanford thought “The Flick” was “the great American play,” but so many patrons disliked it — 50 people walked out on the first Tuesday night — that he wound up attempting an outreach effort that backfired.

“I sent an email to subscribers, addressing the fact that so many of them hated it, and I felt I was giving a defense of the play, but to some outside eyes it looked like I was being defensive and apologizing,” he said. “The mistake I made was really underestimating the digital world — I learned there is no such thing as a private letter to a subscriber. My naïveté was so absolute that I hadn’t warned Annie ahead of time.”

Time has vindicated Sanford. The play got very strong reviews, won the Pulitzer, was restaged in New York and London and was named by The New York Times as among the best American plays of the last quarter century. “I wouldn’t take away the learning experience,” Sanford said. “I remember interviewing Edward Albee, and he said the advice he gave to writers was ‘make your own mistakes.’”

Sanford also presided over the demolition and rebuilding of the theater’s longtime headquarters on West 42nd Street, a $30 million project that was completed in 2003.

“He leaves an extraordinary legacy,” said Judith Rubin, the longtime chairman of the theater’s board. “His sense of excellence is uncompromising, he’s got extraordinary relationships with writers, and the soul of this place is consonant with Tim’s soul.”

Rubin said the board had opted not to conduct a search for a successor but instead to promote Greenfield, who she said was an obvious and unanimous choice. She praised Greenfield for introducing a number of important new programs and said “his aesthetic and the aesthetic of this theater are in complete sync.”

Greenfield, 44, has been with Playwrights Horizons since 2007, working alongside Sanford; both men are career theater administrators who previously served as the organization’s literary manager, evaluating script for potential production. The two men will jointly run the theater next season — Greenfield will become artistic director in July 2020, and Sanford will assume the title “outgoing artistic director” until June 2021.

“I think we’re in a really strong place, financially and artistically,” Greenfield said. And, he added, “we live in an extraordinary moment for American playwriting.”

Greenfield is married to a playwright, Jordan Harrison, several of whose works (“Marjorie Prime” and “Log Cabin,” for example) have been produced by Playwrights Horizons. Greenfield said his husband’s relationship with the theater predates his own, and “I don’t feel complicated about continuing to program his work.”

The transition takes place at a time of enormous churn at nonprofit theaters across the country, when a generation dominated by white men is being succeeded by a more diverse group of leaders.

“I know we have a lot of growth to do in terms of the diversity and equity on our stage and in our offices, and I know as a cis white gay male, I have an enormous responsibility,” Greenfield said.

Asked about challenges facing the theater, he said, “New York City is a crowded marketplace, and we live in a world that moves faster, so the argument to come spend a good chunk of change to see a play does get harder the more we have more forms of entertainment readily accessible.”

Also, he said, he wanted to focus on “the integrity of producing new, pioneering, exploratory, inquisitive work in a culture that seems to enjoy the shorthand and often pays attention to the loudest voice.”

“I worry about the pressures that are put on nonprofits by the culture of late capitalism,” he said, “to make compromises to the urgency and immediacy and purity of an artistic expression.”

This article originally appeared in

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