SPOTLIGHT ON: LARA WAGENER
PBD's Associate Managing Director
By Sheryl Flatow
When Lara Wagener went off to college at the University of Florida, her plan was to become a pediatrician. As a pre-med student she was required to study advanced chemistry, and quickly discovered that the subject didn’t interest her. Eager to work with children, she decided she would become a child psychologist instead. So, she switched her major to psychology and also elected to take an acting class. By her senior year she was fully immersed in the theatre department with acting and stage managing, and realized that she wanted to pursue a career in the theatre.

Today Wagener is the associate managing director of PBD. Aside from founders William Hayes (producing artistic director) and Sue Ellen Beryl (managing director), Wagener has worked for the company longer than any other fulltime employee, having launched her PBD career in 2005 as resident stage manager. “Bill likes to say I started here when I was 5 and worked my way up through the company,” she says. “Although I still think that child psychology is something that would have given me fulfillment, once I was bit by the theatre bug it became my passion and I knew that was what I wanted to spend my life doing.” 
Wagener is essentially third in command at PBD, and when Hayes and Beryl are traveling, she runs the day-to-day operations. She is the overall supervisor of all the front-of-house employees and also manages the master calendar. A big part of her job is problem solving/ prevention and troubleshooting, and she is the de facto HR person for the staff – which makes her psychology background a definite plus.

When she cast her lot with theatre, Wagener felt she needed further training and decided to go to grad school. But she was uncertain whether she wanted to pursue acting or stage management. Her mother was friends with Sherry Eaker, former editor-in-chief of Backstage , the entertainment industry magazine, and suggested that Lara seek out her advice. “So that’s what I did,” says Wagener. “She asked me, ‘Are you willing to starve to be on the stage?’ And I wasn’t. She said, ‘Well, there’s your answer because there are a lot of people who are.’" Wagener received an MFA in stage management from the University of Iowa.   

Upon graduation she received two job offers. One was for a stage manager position in North Carolina with a semi-professional company. The other was for a stage management internship at Florida Stage. “The internship paid a stipend, barely enough to live on,” she says. But her professors told her that working for Florida Stage was a better career choice. She took the internship and became the assistant stage manager for Suzanne Clement Jones and James Danford, who would become invaluable additions to PBD after Florida Stage folded (Danford recently retired). Ironically, Jones did not initially want to hire her.

“Suzanne said to the production manager, ‘Why would I want an intern who has an MFA in stage management? What could I possibly teach her? This position is meant for someone to learn,’” Wagener was later told. “But he asked her to interview me anyway. She asked me why I wanted the internship, and I told her, ‘Most of my experiences are in the educational theater. I don’t have many professional credits. I think it would it be a good experience for me to work alongside two seasoned professionals, just to make sure that I'm on par with you and that I understand all the choices and decisions you make and why. I want to make sure I feel ready to step into the professional world.’ She thought that was a good reason and I was hired shortly thereafter.”

When the internship was coming to an end, Nan Barnett, Florida Stage’s managing director, asked her what she was going to do. She planned to start sending out resumes, and Barnett floated the idea of creating a job for her if nothing turned up. “I left her office to run an errand, and when I came back, she was running down the hall screaming my name,” says Wagener. “‘You’re never going to believe this, but Bill Hayes from Palm Beach Dramaworks just called me and said, ‘I need a stage manager. Someone who’s young but good, and that will be willing to work for a small company and help take us to the next level.’ I met with Bill and Sue Ellen within that week and I was quickly hired.”

At that time, the company was still at the 84-seat theatre on Banyan Boulevard, and for her first five years with the company Wagener was the resident stage manager – and only stage manager. “It was a huge learning curve for me, because in school there would be a crew of three or four, plus an assistant and the head stage manager,” she says. “I got to Dramaworks and I had no assistant. I had to figure out how to manage everything by myself – do all the cues, stay on book [in case the actors needed help with their lines], and track all the props. There were many nights that [production manager] Mike Amico and I were there until very late finishing up all the small details. It was tough, but we were never willing to compromise our professionalism or the quality of the work. No one in the company was. As time went on and the demands increased, we slowly started to add staff. It grew organically out of necessity.”

Wagener describes herself as “calm and objective,” qualities that serve her well in her current position and were equally advantageous as stage manager. “When there were problems that came up, I never panicked,” she says. “And, as you can imagine, there are always things that happen in live theatre, like the night the actors jumped an entire act and couldn’t find their way back.”
The play was The Gin Game , in which a lot of the scenes are card games with very similar dialogue. At one performance near the beginning of the run, the actors jumped into a scene from the second act – while still in the first act. “I almost stopped the show, because in my judgment the audience was not going to see the show they’d paid for,” Wagener says. “I'm running the booth and trying to jump light cues, and making notes of all the script that they cut that had important information, and of which scenes in Act II they’d already done. Then one of them finally figured out how to get back to the end of the first act, and said the cue for the intermission blackout. The actors were very shaken and stressed in the dressing room. I gave them notes of the parts they’d already done and of the chunks that they had missed, and we figured out how to piece it all back together so they didn’t repeat anything and the audience still got all the information they needed for the play to make sense. They used scoring pads as props during the gin games in the play, so we wrote all the cuts and additions on their scoring pads during intermission, like cheat sheets. We also hid a couple around the set for when they were walking around. I think intermission took an extra five minutes. We went back and finished the play, and they managed to make it through all the necessary adjustments we had worked out. And the best part was that the audience never knew what happened. After the show they literally picked me up off the ground and hugged me. They couldn’t believe we pulled it off and neither could I!”
Wagener says that after stage managing for ten consecutive years, she was starting to feel a little burned out and yearned for a more traditional schedule. “I was literally running the closing week of one show at night and rehearsing the next show during the day. There was no time to decompress. We did a lot of great shows that I was proud to be a part of and had a lot of fun, but it was tiring. I had recently gotten married and wanted a schedule that would allow me to spend more time with my family.”

While she was still stage managing, Wagener began working in the box office. “We didn’t do seven or eight shows a week back then,” she says. “We did around five. If I was in rehearsal, I didn’t do box office. Then I became the box office and subscription manager. As our subscription base grew and we had peak times for renewals, it became too much for one person to do. At that point, I switched to stage managing half the shows during the non-busy box office times. And then it got to the point where Bill and Sue Ellen needed more help. I phased out of stage management and became the executive assistant. At some point after we moved into our current home, I became associate managing director.”

Wagener says that the greatest reward of her job has remained the same, regardless of the position she’s held. “It’s the moment that the show is over and the actors are taking their curtain call,” she says. “People rise to their feet, some are in tears and some are cheering. To this day, it still makes the hairs on my arms stand up and my eyes tear up. This is why we do what we do. There’s nothing else like it in the world. For a few hours, a group of strangers come together and have a collective, moving experience where they are truly affected. It gets me every single time.”