SEATTLE — For his first show as Seattle Rep artistic director, and the company’s 2024-25 season-opener, Dámaso Rodríguez chose a play familiar to Portland audiences: The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder, a sprawling American classic he mounted to enthusiastic reception at Portland’s Artists Repertory Theatre eight years ago.

So, in this initial production is he just repeating himself? Going the easy route, and hoping for the same reaction?

No, according to Rodríguez, who was Artists Rep’s artistic director from 2013 to 2021. That was then, and this is now.

“When I was at Artists Rep, the spaces we used were mainly black box theaters,” he explains. “There was a positive review for that show by Bob Hicks saying something like, the place could barely contain the production – it was a ‘ten-gallon hat on a two-gallon head.’  It’s a giant play for a theater company as intimate and provocative as Artists Rep. I was still craving to do a bigger version.”

Rodriguez got his wish by assuming a Seattle post that has afforded him not one, but two substantial Rep performing spaces – the Bagley Wright mainstage, with roughly 650 seats, and the cozier but substantial Leo K., with 282 seats and a broad stage – along with a top-notch scene shop and technical operation.

 He also now works with a budget of more than $16 million — many times larger than what, even in its headiest days, he commanded at Artists Rep.

Not that Rodríguez, or many a director of a large regional theater, is sitting pretty at the moment. Upon taking the reins at the Rep, he and managing director Jeff Hermann did some painful budget-trimming and “restructuring” that meant laying off much of the full-time artistic staff in light of a budget shortfall and overall operating deficit for the previous fiscal year, which amounted  to more than $300,000. (The company will try to cover much of the artistic work of those laid off with shorter-term freelance contracts.)

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 “I think everyone in theater thought we’d be ahead by this point,” he notes. “But what wasn’t there was a post-pandemic [recovery]. When your ticket sales, institutional funding and donor contributions are down, and inflation kicks in, it’s really different than it was before.”

Still, Rodríguez is relishing his new opportunity running the flagship resident theater in a different city. “I knew coming in that the Rep had an endowment, and it is one that I think affords a worst-case scenario of years of pure survival. And the theater holds no debt.” (Seattle Rep occupies a city-owned facility in the municipal Seattle Center.}

While the Thornton Wilder play may seem like a safe choice, it actually is not – despite the cachet of Wilder’s better-known, more often produced plays, especially Our Town. With its call for cataclysmic visual effects as a “typical” American family endures 5,000 years of planetary devastation by catastrophic wars, an ice age, epic flooding, despair and family turmoil, The Skin of Our Teeth requires a generous suspension of disbelief and a willingness to plunge into Wilder’s surreal, satirical ethos and chaos.

Rodríguez not only wanted to make it jell as a three-act, multi-media spectacle, but also as a way to involve the surrounding community he is still getting to know. Noting that the Wilder script originally listed roles for 25 actors, he went much further by casting a cluster of veteran performers, and more than 200 local volunteers in a rotating ensemble handling small and non-speaking roles.

Many of the latter were part of the  Rep’s earlier, annual Public Works program of musicals based on classical works, which is now on hiatus. It featured mostly amateur performers, culled from local community organizations. It was modeled on a similar project initiated by New York’s Public Theatre.

This was the first show Rodríguez wanted to produce when he took over the company in the summer of 2023, when he had the luxury of inheriting a 2023-24 season already planned by departing director Braden Abraham (who now runs Chicago’s Writers Theatre). It gave him time to ingratiate himself and acclimate by conducting a sincere “listening tour.” He attended performances by other Seattle companies, and talked with staff, subscribers, theater artists and supporters about their perceptions of the Rep, and what they wanted it to be.

“It was meaningful, very informative and it’s ongoing,” he reports. “It’s truly when you interact with staff and with audience members that you discover a company’s identity. It took me three years at Artists Rep to have confidence in the direction my programming was going in.”

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Since arriving in Seattle, Rodríguez has made it clear that his agenda would be to add larger-scale and more populated shows to Rep seasons, and to include more classics that haven’t had big stagings in the city for a long while. He also wants to set the bar high by presenting what he calls “difficult, challenging theater.”

“I think we’ve become less and less comfortable in large theater spaces to do things that are intentionally opaque, ambitious, unsettling. That’s why I knew on some level I had to do Skin of Our Teeth first. It says that Seattle Rep is going to do complex things, alongside escapist theater or theater that’s challenging in other ways.”

The 2024-25 season exhibits a range of work reflecting his  wide-ranging interests: the suave, witty Noel Coward comedy Blithe Spirit; Pearl Cleage’s well-known Harlem Renaissance-era play Blues for an Alabama Sky; as well as the Seattle premieres of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize drama Primary Trust by Eboni Booth (a choice of many regional companies this season); Alexis Scheer’s “part telenovella and part whodunit” Laughs in Spanish; the touring Duel Reality, a physical theater piece inspired by Romeo and Juliet, by the 7 Fingers ensemble; and, in keeping with Rodríguez’s long involvement with  new plays, the world premiere of Lauren Yee’s post-Soviet Union satire, Mother Russia.

How well the box office will fare with his particular mix of programming, which both diverges from and at times parallels his predecessor’s, is an open question. As in many theaters, ticket prices are rising, and the performing arts in general is a hard sell to Seattle’s legion of tech workers and many other under-40 locals.

As for The Skin of Our Teeth, the reviews have been mixed, but in this writer’s opinion, it’s a bold, vibrantly visual and essentially noble calling card for the Rep’s new impresario – and timely too, as we collectively peer over a political and ecological abyss. As an enthusiastic Seattle Times review by arts critic Gemma Wilson aptly put it, “After several lean years in the theater, it’s a thrill to see a theater go big, in many senses of the word.”

Rodríguez says he still keeps an eye on his former Portland company, and hopes for the best as Artists Rep launches its first full production in more than a year, a seven-author world premiere titled The Event!, about a mysterious disappearance in a small Oregon town. But he notes, when asked about the long-term survival of his and other theaters, that the arts have survived over time through sheer tenacity.

“No matter what, the path forward is just to go to work, and make the work,” he says, and points to Wilder’s sentiments in The Skin of Our Teeth: “It’s not like we should spend our time kind of expecting, waiting for a moment where we arrive or we’re safe. Living is a struggle, making the work is a struggle, but it’s what we do.”

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