Yuvika Tolani, a theater producer who spent seven years on staff at The Public Theater in New York, will become the first permanent artistic director of Seattle’s Union Arts Center beginning May 4.
Union Arts Center, which officially formed in July following the merger of longtime local companies ACT Contemporary Theatre and Seattle Shakespeare Company, had been helmed by Elisabeth Farwell-Moreland, interim producing artistic director, since its inception.
While artistic director jobs have, in recent generations, often been the purview of theater directors, Tolani’s background in theater production and civic engagement (she holds a master’s degree in city planning from MIT) rang an exciting bell for Union Arts Center.
“Her city planning experience gives her an outlook on theater that I think is what the future of theater has to be,” said John Bradshaw, managing director at Union Arts Center. “Which is: You are part of the world around you, and you must embrace that.”
When it comes to the nonprofit theater, what does a producer do?
“I really think of it as the person who brings all of the people to a table,” Tolani said. “It’s the person that represents the artist to the rest of the institution, and represents the institution to the artists that are coming to work at it. It’s the person who has to reconcile the enormity of an artistic vision — the vision and ambition of a particular director or designer or writer — with the reality of a budget line.”
Tolani began her professional theater career at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., after graduating from Yale, where she served as president of the university’s oldest undergraduate theater organization, the Yale Dramat.
Her brief stint in fundraising at ART ended when a producing job opened up at The Public, where she rose through the ranks to become the company’s director of producing, stewarding both classics and new works, and planning each season with Artistic Director Oskar Eustis and the rest of the senior artistic staff.
“Yuvika is one of the most exciting leaders in the contemporary American theater,” Eustis said in a statement. “Her intellectual brilliance, worldly sophistication, superb artistic taste and astonishing breadth of interests make her stand out in a field that desperately needs artists of her vision and passion.”
Tolani hit a personal and professional turning point in 2021, at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, where The Public produces its beloved annual Shakespeare in the Park shows.
The company’s first in-person show after the pandemic was an adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor” by playwright Jocelyn Bioh, set in a West African immigrant community in Harlem.
“It was this incredible, celebratory, totally joyous adaptation of Shakespeare,” she remembered. But looking around the audience, which the Public strives to have reflect the vibrant demographics of a New York City street, she saw the impact of the pandemic.
The theater “was still full, but so much of the audience development progress that we had made in making theater and free Shakespeare accessible to the city had fallen behind, because the community organizations that we partnered with were totally underwater.”
So were the New York City subways. That summer, Tolani said, was an excruciatingly rainy season in New York, with a seemingly never-ending series of flooded subway stations.
“There was a spatial inequity that impacted the city,” Tolani said. “And I found myself thinking about infrastructure and about theater as part of a cultural infrastructure in a city. That became the thread that I followed into a city planning degree.”
Tolani first moved from New York to the Pacific Northwest temporarily during the COVID-19 pandemic, and landed here permanently in 2024 after her sojourn to MIT.
She initially worked for the housing organization Enterprise Community Partners (“a fabulous introduction to the city”), and when she started looking more closely at the local theater scene, her friend Chay Yew, a theater director and fellow Singaporean with whom Tolani had collaborated closely in New York (and whose recent Seattle credits include Larissa FastHorse’s “Fancy Dancer” at Seattle Rep and Lauren Yee’s “Cambodian Rock Band” at ACT Theatre) started introducing her to the community. But she already had her sights set on Union Arts Center.
“When I was moving to Seattle, I saw news of the merger, and said, ‘Oh, a contemporary theater is merging with a Shakespeare theater — this is the one I’m going to keep my eye on,’” Tolani said. “It’s a marriage that makes perfect sense to me, given where my artistic home has been in the past.”
With an operating budget of $9 million and a full-time staff of 43, Union Arts Center operates out of the company-formerly-known-as-ACT’s multitheater home at the old Eagles building at 700 Union St. in downtown Seattle. It’s an immense space with immense challenges and immense possibilities. Tolani, while deeply aware of the economic headwinds facing cultural institutions in this country, remains focused on the opportunities and responsibilities that come with running a major regional theater.
“In talking to the staff here, the love of the still-thriving arts community and the commitment to keeping that ecosystem alive is incredible,” she said. “Your city’s artists are the people that that city entrusts to keep its narrative alive, and so investing in that artistic community is critical.
“I really think of theater making and city making as the same work,” she added. “First, you reach people out there in the world, and you convince them to come into this space together, which in this day and age is already a minor miracle. Then you put something in front of them, and you ask them to believe it’s something more — you ask them to follow you in this trust exercise, and just for that moment, you’ve created a social contract. It’s so simple, and it is so radical, and it’s the very same thing that happens when you’re asking a city to think collectively about its future.”
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