Ars Nova’s Brilliant Career

Ars Novas artistic director Jason Eagan and its managing director Renee Blinkwolt.
Ars Nova’s artistic director, Jason Eagan, and its managing director, Renee Blinkwolt.PHOTOGRAPH BY HANJIE CHOW

On a Monday night this winter, at a gala in a Beaux-Arts former bank downtown, the young playwright Rachel Bonds, whose luminous “Sundown, Yellow Moon” is currently onstage uptown, made a showstopper of a speech, on a night not lacking in potential showstoppers. The event was a fund-raiser for the nonprofit Off Broadway theatre and artist incubator Ars Nova. It had a Russia-in-winter theme—bear-shaped ice sculpture, stilt walkers, faux-fur hats—in honor of the company’s first Broadway transfer, Dave Malloy’s “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.” It featured songs from the show, performed by Malloy, Josh Groban, Denée Benton, and others. But when Bonds spoke people made sounds of amazement: as Ars Nova’s playwright-in-residence, she said, she was paid a salary and given benefits. Good benefits. “I actually went to the dentist,” she said, to “ooh”s. “I also had my first child.” Prenatal care, delivery, everything, was covered by her Ars Nova health insurance. “He’s eight weeks old, and it’s my first night away from him,” she said. “So that tells you how much Ars Nova means to me.” After her speech, she went out to the street and got a car home. Inside, the party raged on, with vodka and accordions.

Artists in the United States don’t tend to get paid a salary to make art. (Forget dental.) That night, Bonds had also announced the launch of Ars Nova’s Fair Pay Initiative, which, beginning January 1st, raised pay for artists and staff from a minimum to a living wage. Ars Nova is unusual—creatively, structurally, and otherwise. It’s not a traditional theatre company; it’s a finder, developer, and nurturer of unconventional artists working in hybrid forms. It produces experimental plays, like the recent “Small Mouth Sounds” and “Underground Railroad Game,” and musicals, like “Great Comet” and the forthcoming “KPOP,” opening this fall. But it also, with equal enthusiasm, runs music-theatre residencies and a workshop for up-and-coming playwrights; artists’ retreats; a festival of new comedy, theatre, and music talent; and a vaudevillian comedy and variety series, “Showgasm,” hosted, until recently, by the performer John Early. It also programs an adventurous range of short-run and one-night shows, such as cabaret-style literary humor by Isaac Oliver, whose recent show featured Trump-weary guests hollering into a scream jar.

Ars Nova’s goal is not to produce a season of plays that aspire to Broadway; it’s to support and encourage emerging artists. Many talents who honed their voices and aesthetic at Ars Nova during its early years—including Annie BakerBilly Eichner, Bridget Everett, Amy HerzogThomas Kail, Elizabeth Meriwether (“New Girl”), Lin-Manuel Miranda, Robin Lord Taylor (“Gotham”), Alex Timbers, and Beau Willimon (“House of Cards”)—have since brought innovative work to much wider audiences. Ars Nova’s artistic director, Jason Eagan, said, “It’s not that we made ‘Hamilton’—it’s that we supported Lin finding his voice when no one knew who Lin was. It’s more exciting to us that we had a step in preparing him to make something like ‘Hamilton.’ ” If artists want to write a book, create a Web series, or host an absurdist TV game show, Ars Nova helps them figure out how to get there.

I became interested in Ars Nova’s story last year, while working on a profile of Billy Eichner, whose hyper, meta live talk show “Creation Nation,” with Robin Lord Taylor, was one of Ars Nova’s early successes. As I talked to them and to members of their cohort—Willimon, Timbers, Kail—I became more and more fascinated not just by Ars Nova’s track record and aesthetic but by its surprising, moving history. I’d been there several times over the years, including to see one of the first performances of “Great Comet,” but it took me a while to understand what Ars Nova was. It’s a tiny, state-of-the-art theatre in a long, narrow building in a desolate section of the far West Fifties, and it’s strangely sophisticated for a scrappy performance space. If, a decade or so ago, you went there on a bitterly cold night to see a friend sing odd comedic songs, you might have exited through its impressive front door a bit charmed, a bit flummoxed. But you could have also seen and heard genius working itself out.

Though some of its writers, performers, and works have become household names—in cosmopolitan households, anyway—Ars Nova itself has received less attention. Some people first heard of it last year, when “Great Comet” went to Broadway and Ars Nova made headlines over a bizarre billing injustice. Alums and allies came out in force, writing impassioned testimonials in its defense and coining the hashtag #imwithars; the wrong was swiftly made right, in Ars Nova’s favor. Otherwise, Ars Nova has continued along, beloved by its community, quietly cultivating the careers of emerging artists—like Sarah DeLappe, who wrote the ingenious teen-soccer play “The Wolves”—by providing them with space, time, money, guidance, deadlines, feedback, retreats, community, and pizza.

Ars Nova was founded in 2002 by Jenny and Jon Steingart. In 1997, Jenny’s brother, Gabe Wiener, a twenty-six-year-old classical-music producer, died of a brain aneurysm. A lay musicologist (finding Gregorian chants in Hebrew; commissioning a historically accurate harpsichord) who founded his own early-music label, Pro Gloria Musicae, Wiener had bought a plot of land in a neighborhood of recording and mastering studios. He was in the process of building a studio of his own when he died. Jenny Steingart told me, “The week he died, at the end of the shiva, one of the waitresses asked if she could speak to me in the kitchen.” The young woman told her that all week, after listening to people talk about Gabe, she had been inspired to go home and paint. “She said, ‘I painted a whole new series of work.’ ” Then she took out a portfolio and showed Jenny the paintings. “I was so blown away,” Steingart said. “Gabe’s life and his death had inspired new art to happen in another medium.” It became clearer to her that though she could not live out Gabe’s specific dream, she could honor it by helping to foster new art.

The Steingarts, who had experience in comedy and theatre production, decided to view the building as a gift from Gabe, and they envisioned a “dynamic clubhouse” that would support the work of gifted music, theatre, and comedy artists in the early stages of their careers. Jenny said, “That horrible cliché ‘When life gives you lemons . . .’—I just thought, like, This is going to be the biggest fucking lemonade stand we can come up with.” They opened Ars Nova’s doors in 2002. They were introduced to Jason Eagan, a young talent at New York Theatre Workshop. “He came in and we had an amazing meeting,” she said. “We said, ‘If you were going to program the space, who would you program it with?’ ” His list had “everybody who was on our list, plus people we didn’t even know,” she said. “It was like love at first sight.”

Eagan began finding performers and booking shows. (He is now Ars Nova’s artistic director.) He told me, “Jon and Jenny wrote this beautiful mission to support early-career artists making music, theatre, and comedy, and I sort of developed that further into artists who have an interest in where those things blend or merge.” He favors “unicorns,” he said: unexpected, rare, spectacular performers who don’t conform to a genre. Jenny Steingart said, “In our first year, we had two completely separate productions that required a trapeze.”

Eagan said, “Although my first title was producer, I was really a booking person of sorts, developing my eye and learning my aesthetic by having space to constantly program in a more pop-up way. I was programming nine shows a week.” And he did it with a sense of urgency, in part because independent venues like Fez, the Luna Lounge, and the Zipper Theatre were disappearing. “That really fuelled us at the beginning,” Eagan said. “I was out there 24/7, trying to find these people and tell them about Ars Nova so we could support them.” He and the Steingarts wanted to do what they could “to make sure that New York stays a destination for this kind of work and these kinds of artists.”

In 2004, Eagan went to the basement of Elmo, a restaurant in Chelsea, and saw Taylor and Eichner do “Creation Nation.” He was astounded by its raw energy and hilarity. Taylor told me, “After the show, I was on the floor pulling up clip lights and extension cords, and Jason Eagan came up to me and said, ‘You’re never going to have to do that again.’ ” He and Eichner began performing at Ars Nova, in a showcase with artists like Bridget Everett, whom Eagan had discovered in a karaoke bar, and Freestyle Love Supreme. Ars Nova helped connect those artists to peers, new audiences, critics, managers, and producers, and has done so for dozens more since. After a while, performers and writers leave the nest—bigger stages, television, movies—but remain part of an extended family.

Steingart said, “It really has been about how do we support the artist and the artist’s process. It’s really never been about getting behind a specific project; it’s about getting behind a specific artist.” I asked Eagan how he figures out what artists need. “By listening to them, or even asking the question,” he said. With Isaac Oliver, for example, “I said, ‘What are you trying to do?’ And he said, ‘I want to write a book.’ And I’m like, ‘O.K., let’s make the path to that. I think it’s about developing an identity for you and people understanding who you are as an artist, what your voice is. How do we do that? O.K., let’s make this show that you’re the center of, and it isn’t about other people doing your writing; it’s about you.’ It’s a conversation and it’s a customized trajectory based on those conversations, to understand what they need and want.”

Ars Nova’s unusual space, too, encourages innovative thinking. Joe Iconis’s “Bloodsong of Love,” a 2010 spaghetti-Western musical, required a feeling of vastness, so they had a character walk across the plain via a treadmill. “I saw that and I was, like, That is Ars Nova,” Steingart said. “I mean, ‘Comet,’ in a million years, should never have worked in our space.”

“Great Comet” was transformative. In 2010, Eagan saw the exuberant dragons-and-electropop musical “Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage,” with songs by Dave Malloy, at the Abrons Arts Center; Malloy himself played Hrothgar. Eagan later asked him to be Ars Nova’s composer-in-residence and offered him a commission. Malloy suggested adapting a section of “War and Peace.”

Malloy told me, “Other theatres hadn’t literally laughed in my face, but they were like, ‘Ha ha, wow, maybe an opera based on “War and Peace” isn’t the best first project for us to work on!’ ” But Ars Nova had unusual faith. Malloy said, “When I very sheepishly presented the idea, they were immediately onboard—‘Let’s fucking do it!’ ” After some discussion, they agreed to let him be the sole book writer and lyricist, and to let him star. “That level of blind faith was really inspiring,” he said. “And it made me a better artist.”

In a new book about the making of “Great Comet,” Eagan writes that his faith in Malloy galvanized Ars Nova, too. “It seemed to me that by joining forces, he and Ars Nova could push each other further than either had gone before,” he writes. “Great Comet,” which required an elaborate set, a fully functional supper club, a slew of roving musicians, and a big budget, was far more ambitious than anything they’d attempted in the past. They created a magically transformed space, involving guests tunnelling through the basement and emerging into a gorgeous room that felt like a porthole to another dimension. The Broadway production re-creates that sensation, and a feeling of happy unreality.

Eagan told me that in the early days of Ars Nova, when he saw the talent in Ars Nova’s performers and the excited reactions to their work, he’d wonder why they weren’t getting their own HBO specials or TV series—“How is nobody grabbing at this? Why isn’t this happening right now?” After a while, he said, he realized that “what we’re doing here is what we’re supposed to be doing, which is finding these people at their rawest state and helping them find their voice, and find the tools.” Now, he said, “we’ve realized, Oh, your time comes.” Ars Nova’s time has come, too: this fall, it débuted a play on its own stage while it had commercial productions running Off Broadway and on Broadway. Its challenge now is to manage growth while holding on to its mom-and-pop, let’s-put-on-a-show ethos, with treadmills and trapezes.

At the end of the gala, Josh Groban took the stage to sing the night’s final song, “The Great Comet of 1812,” which ends “Great Comet.” It expresses, in calm, painfully beautiful tones, Tolstoy’s epiphany for his noble, awkward Pierre: a moment of grace, hard won and treasured, at seeing a comet streaking across the sky. Groban, who, as a boyish classical-crossover artist, sold twenty-five million records, grew a beard and learned to play the accordion for the role. After saying that he still had a memento from “Underground Railroad Game,” to cheers, he got serious. “This has truly been the greatest experience of my career,” Groban told the crowd. “This is one of my favorite songs of all time. I’m so thrilled I get to sing it eight shows a week.” Gentle piano began—a sound like earnest contemplation, difficult thinking, patience—and Groban’s voice, where Malloy’s wonderfully nasally voice had once been, began to sing. “Where to now?” Groban sang, in an expansive tenor that made you understand where all those records went. Pierre sings of having made a connection with someone he admires—and, having done so, feels inspired, not scared, when the comet appears. When the chorus joined in—“And it was clear and cold”—cast members, seated among us at tables, scattered throughout the room, stood in unison and sang, their voices floating in as if from above. It was so beautiful that you might have forgotten to breathe.