Stephanie Mulligan is an explorer at heart.

The long-time Portland-area director and stage manager ,whose career has taken her from Forest Grove to Vietnam, continues to relish embarking on new theatrical journeys.

“If we go into a creative project with so many preconceptions, we can be blocked as artists,” she said in a recent phone interview. “I think the exploration and the love of exploration is why I continue to do what I do, and I think it’s why I’m here.”

Her entire career – including more than 25 years as a director and more than 34 years of stage managing – has been fueled by such explorations. Not only has it taken her to other countries, her work has also allowed her to delve into everything from classic plays by Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams to new plays by the likes of Tracy Letts and Wilsonville’s award-winning playwright Cynthia Whitcomb.

While she plans to continue directing, Mulligan says her current job, working on Sherlock Holmes and the Precarious Position for Clackamas Repertory Theatre through July 20, will be her swan song as stage manager. “I’ve had a wonderful career, and I’m just putting that aside,” she says. “Directing is a joy in my life that I’ll keep doing as long as I keep getting gigs.”

One thing that has drawn Mulligan to both directing and stage managing is getting the opportunity to inspire the confidence actors need in order to take artistic risks. This is key, she says, whether she’s working with university students or seasoned professionals. “If actors don’t have that sense of safety and security, how are they going to give their best work? And aren’t we there as support people for the work on the stage?”

Being “a queen or a dictator in the rehearsal room” has never interested Mulligan. Her most recent directing job, The 39 Steps at Pacific University, is a good example. “I trusted the students to do more than they thought they could do, and they rose to the occasion every time,” she says. “When they’re unsure – just like working with a professional actor – it’s my responsibility to not tell them what to do but to ask them questions that help them get there. I can 100% tell them what I want them to do, but I’d like them to have that joy of exploration.” 

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As a result, she says, everyone involved has a better experience. “Oh my god, we had so much fun. It’s a really hard play to do, and we just laughed our asses off.”

One experience that shaped her approach to work was traveling to Vietnam in 2000 with Allen Nause, Artists Repertory Theatre’s first artistic director, and Lorelle Browning, a professor at Pacific University, as part of the Vietnam America Theatre Exchange. The program was founded by Browning and is described on Artist Rep’s website as “the first-ever reciprocal collaboration between the United States and Vietnam.”

Working with the Central Dramatic Theater of Vietnam in Hanoi, the group presented a bilingual version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a Vietnamese version of The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.

“Because the elements of [Williams’] story are a little on the melodramatic side, audiences responded really well to that. The storytelling has some universality,” Mulligan says. She notes that cultural differences, however, also created some tricky situations. “The actor who was playing Tom really balked at the scene where he has to talk back to his mother, because he said, ‘We would never, never do that,’ so it was offensive to him personally to have to play that. To be fair,” Mulligan says, “I wouldn’t talk back to my mother either, but it’s less culturally ingrained.”

Vietnamese audiences were already familiar with Shakespeare, but only the tragedies. “There is a rich history of fairy stories, woodsy sprites, magic, kings. So the elements were already there,” says Mulligan. As for their reaction to Midsummer, “People were hanging off balconies, laughing raucously at every turn of event. They’d never seen it before, so it was just joyous to see. It felt like what it must have been during Shakespeare’s time. This was a brand new play to them.”

“It was a turning point in my creative career,” Mulligan says. “Being immersed in another culture, I learned more patience, I learned more understanding of different ways of seeing things, and I learned to let go of striving for perfection, because it’s a false concept. As an American stage manager, that was difficult for me.”

Looking back on her early days in theater, Mulligan knows there were times when she’d been guilty of what she calls “unfiltered directness.”

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“I think I was snarkier,” she says. “I think I could get snippy with people.” When I commented that our society often expects leaders to embrace that kind of tough attitude, Mulligan paused, then said that may be true, but in her case, it might have sprung from something else.

“After I acquired some greater skills of diplomacy, I could look back … and I like this me better. That unfiltered directness may also have been a shield, because in those early years I hadn’t come out, so my personal life was really blocked.”

Mulligan came out in the ’90s and met her wife, Laura (Widener at the time, now Mulligan), right after returning from Vietnam. “I came home and was instantly dropped into culture shock because I’d been living somewhere else, but boy did I have stories to tell,” says Mulligan.

Artists Rep was staging Ain’t Misbehavin’, with Laura as stage manager. Eager to see the show, Mulligan took the MAX train to the theater on closing night, only to find there was a full house. She offered to sit anywhere, even up in the booth, so the box office manager went to check with Laura, who then came down to talk with Mulligan. “I swear our eyes locked across that crowded lobby, and that was it. I met my person, and it’s great. She’s in the backyard now, working on our garden.”

In 2007 the pair worked on Artists Rep’s simultaneous productions of House & Garden, two plays by Alan Ayckbourn. House follows the goings-on inside a British estate, while Garden takes place on the same day outside the property. “People walk out of a scene in Garden and then appear in House in real time and vice versa. I stage managed House in the downstairs theater, and Laura stage managed Garden in the upstairs theater,” Mulligan says. “The producers got more for their money because their stage managers were coming home to discuss the scenes.”

To coordinate the two productions, the couple put cameras on each other’s sets and had walkie-talkies in the booths so they could warn each other if an actor was running late. They also used flashlights in the windows of the control booths. A green light meant the actors needed to speed things up, and a red light was a warning to an actor to slow down if the other play wasn’t ready for them to walk onstage.

“We’re doing this all through tech, and finally one of the actors says, ‘Um, I think I’m colorblind,’ and he was, so he couldn’t tell if we were telling him to speed up or slow down! That’s when we changed to the flashing signal.”

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“Of course if you ask Laura which show was better – House or Garden – she’s going to say Garden, and if you ask me, I’m going to say House.”

Whether she’s revisiting a classic or exploring a new work, Mulligan says she’s drawn to plays that explore human frailties: “I still lean into a small and intimate drama.”

She was the stage manager for the very first play in ART’s downstairs space, and lobbied to stage manage the first play in their upstairs theater in 2005, when the company was producing Bug by Tracy Letts. “That was two people in deep distress in a terrible motel room, and interlopers from the outside who shake things up,” she says. “It was really powerful and twisted. This was before Tracy’s big success with August: Osage County, and we were pretty chuffed when Tracy came out to see our show.” 

In one scene, the leading man has a paranoid breakdown and covers the entire motel room in aluminum foil. Every night, the crew had to take the foil down, and one of the actors decided to roll it all into a tight foil ball. “It was so big, we used it as a chair in the green room. When Tracy came, we brought him that foil ball and had him sign it.”

Another highlight of her career thus far was directing the three-character drama The Outgoing Tide by Bruce Graham, which was at CoHo Productions in 2013. The story features a man with Alzheimer’s (Tobias Andersen) who, in his more lucid moments, makes a choice about the end of his life. The three actors all had personal experience with friends or loved ones who’d had Alzheimer’s, which made the show both emotionally taxing and deeply meaningful. At the time, Mulligan’s mother-in-law also had advanced dementia, and shortly after the play, she moved in with her and Laura. Mulligan says the play “was just a joy and a difficult thing to work on.”

With deep roots in Portland’s theatrical past, Mulligan looks forward to continuing to branch out in new creative directions. Her next project will be directing the musical A Year with Frog and Toad at Western Oregon University. “I love that musical. The first time I saw it, it had just come off its Broadway run. I saw it in Maryland and I thought, ‘Oh my god, this goes immediately to my must-direct list.’”

Based on the illustrated books by Arnold Lobel, the show features similar observations about character relationships as well as music, with a bit of a 1920s jazz vibe, along with a little Dixieland. “There’s a great 11 o’clock number with a snail who’s delivering the mail and has decided to come out of his shell. So it’s a big coming-out number for the snail.”

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In the meantime, stage managing Sherlock has also been a joy – a feeling that Mulligan has a talent for finding. As Greg Heilman of The Sound on Stage wrote about a Seattle production of the show, “It is satire, it is spoof, and it is downright funny.”

Although Mulligan was ready to move on from stage managing, she couldn’t say no when Cyndy Smith-English, Clackamas Rep’s managing director, asked her to join the show. Mulligan, who already knew the cast of four, decided, “This might be summer camp for us.” And it has been, although area theater legend David Smith-English, who originally planned to direct Sherlock, had to bow out, and Don Alder, another colleague whom Mulligan directed in in ART’s The Fox in the 1980s, took over.

As much as Mulligan continues to find her work rewarding, she firmly states that theater in general is in trouble. Besides the fact that audiences haven’t returned in their pre-pandemic numbers, finding funding continues to be a huge problem: “Where are the new philanthropists? We need more people with money to step up and take some risks. If they want live regional theater to continue, we need you.”

“That’s part of why I adore directing at universities,” Mulligan says. “I see that passion and see those theater majors who are tomorrow’s leaders. I want there to be somewhere where they can practice their art.”

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Sherlock Holmes and the Precarious Position will continue at Clackamas Repertory Theatre through July 20. Find tickets and schedules here.