Meet the Artistic Director: Jill Rafson of Classic Stage Company

Jill Rafson took the helm as Producing Artistic Director of Classic Stage Company in 2022, bringing a wealth of experience and fresh vision to the organization. Before joining CSC, Rafson was a long-time presence at Roundabout Theatre Company, where she developed acclaimed works like Bad Jews, The Humans, English, and Usual Girls.

At Roundabout, Rafson played an instrumental role in expanding the company’s impact and reach in contemporary theater while maintaining a connection to classic repertory. She’s doing the same now in the East Village, balancing innovation with respect for tradition.

In this Q&A, Rafson shares her insights on running a company rooted in the classics, her artistic vision, and how her time at Roundabout has influenced her approach to theater-making.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What was the adjustment like, going from a company like Roundabout to Classic Stage?
After being at Roundabout for pretty much my entire career, wherever I went would have been a very big change. It was going from this huge organization to something that I knew would be a lot more intimate, both in terms of the theater itself and the staff and the producing model. I liked the challenge of that because I’d never gotten to work in a smaller theater. I’ve come to realize that at CSC, we punch above our weight. In that room, we are able to do sort of magical things.

Tell me about planning your first couple of seasons?
It was easy to plan my first season. I Can Get it For You Wholesale was a long-time passion project of mine that I couldn’t get over the line at Roundabout. I had been itching to do this piece because I love this sort of category of work that I think exists in the space of “if it had been done in a slightly different moment, it would be huge.” Wholesale happened to open almost on top of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. They both had cuddly antiheroes and people liked How to Succeed a bit more. I think it got lost to time just because of that circumstance. That’s the dream: to resurface a lot of these pieces.

It’s similar for Wine in the Wilderness. Alice Childress, as a writer, has been another long passion of mine. Charles Randolph-Wright introduced me to Trouble in Mind and worked with me to make it happen there. I love that play and Childress’s work. She’ll start to become an August Wilson if we do the rest of her plays; we can’t just do the one now that we’ve found her, so to speak. She was waiting all along, and she was just done at a time when she wasn’t given the proper consideration. But the work stands on its own merit.

Does being a non-profit company influence your approach to not only the content you produce but how it’s presented?
Definitely. How do we take the kind of risks that you absolutely have to take to promote the artform, and how do you balance that with the things that feel like slightly less of a question mark so that financially, you can be slightly happier about the prospect of continuing forward? It’s hard to find that balance artistically when you’re only programming two or three shows a year.

I do think there’s an obligation as a nonprofit focused on the classics to expand the idea of what a classic can be. That doesn’t mean we’ll never do Chekhov again. We’re going to do the things people have heard of, but I want to make sure everybody’s getting variety in their theatrical diet.

I think it’s our job to both produce great work and help teach our audience how to watch it. That larger context is really important for all nonprofits, but especially when you’re dealing in the classics. We’re giving people the vocabulary that everything else is building from. You don’t get Fat Ham if nobody’s doing Hamlet, right?  We need to have both. I say this as a person who came up doing new plays: I know that the best new plays break the rules, but you have to know what those rules are.

I would love to commission a modern adaptation of a play that people don’t know, or a translation of a Yiddish play, so we’re not just doing the same thing over and over. I spend a lot of time with directors just saying, what’s the classic you desperately want to reimagine? There are so many exciting mid-career and emerging directors who have something to say about these texts. I love the idea of opening the door to the people who I think are really talented and saying “Come play.”

Has there been a noticeable change in your core audience post-pandemic?
We have to figure out how to bring in the folks who aren’t already paying attention to theater. That deficit has been more pronounced because our regulars, and I don’t just mean CSC but all of off-Broadway, have not come back full force. The people who came two or three times a week go once a week. That feels like the clearest shift. When people are being choosier, how do you become the one that they choose? I actually think audience development is going well in terms of saying you’re welcome here. We’re going to try to keep ticket prices as reasonable as we can. We’re going to make this fun.

What do you want people to know about Classic Stage Company? Why should people come to see a show?
I want people to show up and take a chance. Since the pandemic, we’re all a little more risk averse. It can be risky to decide to see a play you know nothing about or where you haven’t heard of the lead actor. But sometimes, those are the most rewarding experiences. The thing I love about our space is that the audience and actors are in it together. You can’t pretend you’re not seeing a show. Some of the things that feel most enticing in this post-pandemic time are the well-rounded experiences, with talkbacks, educational materials, access to the artists, and the why behind the show. The more we lean into that energy, the more the audience is going to realize they do need to get off their couch and it is worth coming to the East Village to see a play.