New leadership, lineup make Hangar optimistic for 2021

Despite any challenges caused by the pandemic, the Hangar Theatre in Ithaca has had several reasons to celebrate in the past month, including a new managing director, a permanent artistic director and a new season lineup filled with outdoor offerings.

On Jan. 11, the Hangar hired Ithaca native R.J. Lavine as its new managing director. Lavine was selected by a Hangar search committee after a monthslong process that began in August of last year, not long after MaryBeth Bunge, the previous managing director, retired in April. Alfred Butler served as the interim managing director throughout the search, co-leading the organization with then-Interim Artistic Director Shirley Serotsky.

In another leadership change, Serotsky was recently named the artistic director after serving as the interim since last October. Serotsky and Lavine will be working together this year to ensure a successful 2021 season.

Lavine and Serotsky followed slightly different roads to the Hangar, though both have long held a passion for the arts.

Lavine grew up in Richford, New York, just outside of Ithaca, returning to Tompkins County nine years ago with her husband and children. Since then, Lavine has been involved with numerous community organizations, including the Ulysses Philomathic Library in Trumansburg, Trumansburg Joint Youth Commission, Trumansburg Nursery School and Multicultural Resource Center.

Lavine also co-founded the Affordable Housing Alliance in Trumansburg and was a counselor at Helping Hands Summer Camp in Windsor, New York, an overnight nature camp for neuroatypical adults with developmental and ambulatory disabilities. Lavine attended the camp when she was younger.

“My involvement has spanned this great period of time because I love the camp so much,” Lavine said. “And it’s like my family. … That’s just been a huge part of shaping who I am and how I see other people.”

Serotsky grew up in Greece, New York, a suburb of Rochester. Greece has strong arts and music programs in its schools, helping to spark Serotsky’s early interest in the field. She later earned her BFA in drama and directing from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and her MFA in directing and theatrical production from Catholic University, Washington, D.C. She also studied musical theater at the University of Michigan.

For two decades after college, Serotsky spent her time in Washington, D.C. directing, producing and educating. Then, in the fall of 2019, she moved to central New York with her husband and 5-year-old son to take a position at the Hangar as associate artistic director and education director.

Serotsky’s history with the Hangar started well before she was a staff member. In college, she participated as an actor in the Hangar Theatre Lab Company. As she said in a recent press release, the experience “truly opened my eyes to the kind of artistry, thought, innovation, and political and social relevance that is possible when creating theater. It shifted my path from acting, and soon, I was pursuing directing myself.”

When Serotsky joined the theater in 2019, she had a lot of work ahead of her, but that work became all the more challenging when the pandemic first hit the county early last year. The Hangar had to shift its artistic and educational programming to a virtual platform, an effort that required all staff to learn and adjust to new skill sets. Serotsky also introduced new virtual classes in the spring of 2020 to provide children at-home access to theater education.

Similar to Serotsky, Lavine has a history in local theater. In 2019, she played an FBI agent in the Hangar’s production of “You Can’t Take it With You.” And since 2018, Lavine has served as the director of development and communications for the Kitchen Theatre Company.

“I just didn’t know, as a child, that theater was a thing that you could do,” she said. “I just didn’t understand that you could have a career in theater until later in life, but I just kept coming back to it. … And so, when that opportunity came up at the Kitchen, I had to take it. I really wanted to learn about the industry. I wanted to learn about the ins and outs, how the sausage gets made. I definitely got that education at the Kitchen Theatre.”

Lavine and Serotsky shared their goals for their new roles. For Lavine, much of her focus centers around collaboration.

“I see myself as the person who needs to have a long-term vision about where we can take the organization, where we find the resources to continue to fulfill our mission,” Lavine said. “And I see myself as a support to the staff. So, not only am I into the finance side, the human resources side, marketing and communications and fundraising, I’m also supporting Shirley in her artistic vision.”

Driving both Serotsky’s and Lavine’s plans for 2021 is a desire to increase inclusiveness in the programs and shows at the Hangar, particularly with an anti-racist approach.

Serotsky has taken strives toward this effort in her time at the Hangar, helping to create an Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility Committee last summer. The Committee is comprised of staff, board and affiliate artists, with a majority people of color membership, and reflects her strong desire to expand the range of stories and voices represented on stage.

Serotsky’s new lineup for the Hangar this year also reflects this goal. The Hangar’s next season revolves around the theme of “connected by music.” In this vein, “The REALNESS: another break beat play” tells a 1990s story of characters with a passion for hip-hop, and “Queens Girl in the World” tells a coming-of-age story set in the 1960s about a young Black girl from Queens, New York, being sent to a majority-white school in Manhattan.

In addition to the lineup, Serotsky is working to expand and strengthen programming to include more demographics of the community, especially by making theater more accessible to people without a long history in the field.

“Having lived this life embedded in the theater, it can create a sense like we’re the gatekeepers, and we decide who we let in, and that’s been one of the most problematic aspects of the American theater historically,” she said. “So, we as an organization are really trying to examine the way we do things to say, ‘what can we do to make it more accessible to everyone?’”

Lavine shares Serotsky’s desire for more inclusivity.

“We are really looking at revamping programming or making incremental changes where we can in this strange year to get closer to a long-term vision that prioritizes inclusion and prioritizes equity at all levels of the organization,” she said. “It will not happen overnight, but this is also why we are so committed to engaging with our community partners to really have the Hangar be a presence in the community and really serve community need.”

Lavine said she’s confident in her and Serotsky’s ability to reach those goals together.

“We’re new leaders, and we will be doing things differently,” she said. “So, while we’re new to these roles, we’re very experienced in our own sort of career paths and our tracks, and we’re going to bring all of that to how we’re sort of reenvisioning the way that the Hangar is going to move forward over the next three to five years.”

For more information, visit the Hangar Theatre’s website at https://hangartheatre.org.