Long Wharf Theatre enters into a multi-faceted partnership with SCSU for performances and more

The Long Wharf Theatre, which left its longtime home on New Haven’s Sargent Drive this year, has entered a multi-faceted new partnership with Southern Connecticut State University, the theater announced Monday.

The Long Wharf will use the school’s John Lyman Center for the Performing Art for some of its productions, provide opportunities for SCSU theater students and have access to offices and storage space at the university.

The partnership includes a new paid internship program and student discounts for all Long Wharf productions. The first announced project will be a benefit event this spring centered around Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” which was the first play ever produced by the Long Wharf.

It’s an important new base of operations, but the Long Wharf’s leaders are adamant that the SCSU partnership is one just of numerous relationships it is forging with other New Haven area institutions. “Our intention continues to be about working in different spaces in different communities,” said Long Wharf Managing Director Kit Ingui, “telling vibrant stories and offering opportunities for access to those who might not otherwise be able to go to the theater.”

“We’ve been in talks since May” about the SCSU partnership, Ingui said. Discussions began following the theater’s decision to leave the 222 Sargent Drive space it had called home since 1965, and were not a factor in the decision to move, Ingui said.

In February, when the theater revealed its plans to move, it explained in a statement on its website that the Long Wharf’s founders had intended Sargent Drive to “be a temporary space” and that current difficulties facing all regional theaters, including declining subscription revenue, made managing a large venue unfeasible. The economic realities were coupled with the “theater for everyone” vision of Jacob Padrón, who became the Long Wharf’s artistic director in 2019 and has argued that the Sargent Drive location was inaccessible to many potential theatergoers who could benefit from its productions. Padrón proposed an “itinerant” model where the Long Wharf produced shows at a number of different venues.

The SCSU partnership is one step in bringing the Long Wharf Theatre into more communities and neighborhoods.

“We will be sharing our resources,” Ingui said. “This creates something where we can easily pick up the phone and say ‘This is a project — is a space available?’ They will be giving us [the] space we need, and we will work with their students, provide them with tickets and more.

“Our equipment will be made available to them. We are available as guest lecturers, or to co-create projects with the theater department. There will be an internship program. We’ll see which elements stick for the long term. We’re all excited by the possibilities.”

She stresses that “we are in partnership with them, but this is definitively not a residency. This is one of the spaces we will use going forward. The space remains Southern’s.”

The next big announcement the Long Wharf intends to make about the theater’s first major production since leaving Sargent Drive, won’t involve SCSU, Ingui said. Events planned for Lyman Center include a benefit fundraiser, “but you’ll see us there more than once this year.”

Southern Connecticut State University has a strong theater department, currently chaired by Mike Skinner. Many SCSU graduates have gone on to start their own theater companies (including the Seven Angels Theater in Waterbury and New York City’s Godlight Theatre Company) or have long careers as actors, directors or designers. The school’s Lyman Center for the Performing Arts was built in 1968, just a few years after the Long Wharf Theatre was founded. Besides the 1,500-seat Lyman Center, the SCSU theater department has a small Drama Lab space that seats about 150.

Long Wharf Theatre and SCSU both state that the new partnership is simply a formal arrangement in a relationship between the institutions that have existed for decades. “We have often employed their students,” said Ingui of SCSU.

The university already has a longstanding relationship with another local theater company, Elm Shakespeare Company, which produces the state’s largest outdoor Shakespeare productions as well as other shows and educational programs. New Haven Symphony Orchestra is also in residence at SCSU this year.

Long Wharf’s other institutional partners include New Haven Free Public Library (where the theater has held readings and discussions, as well as offering some free tickets to library patrons) and the International Festival of Arts & Ideas (which co-produced a Long Wharf event this past summer), among others. The theater also has relationships with other theater companies, among them the New Haven-based Collective Consciousness Theatre and New York City’s National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO), commissioning and co-producing new works.

Some of the shows that were being developed through readings, virtual events or workshops at the old Long Wharf space may surface elsewhere in the future, Ingui said.

“There are a number of projects that we may develop further. There are many things we’ve talked about and laid out. But part of next year is also finding out what we haven’t talked about yet,” she said.

In addition to SCSU facilities, the Long Wharf will continue to keep the offices at 70 Audubon St., in the city’s arts district, which it moved into this past summer. “I think it’s important. Office space is not required or essential, but a lot of important interactions are missed if you don’t have it,” Ingui said. The Audubon offices will be for managerial purposes while SCSU’s facilities will be more for the production staff.

The Long Wharf is in the final days of vacating 222 Sargent Drive, which it has been leasing for its entire 57-year existence. “We have to be out by the end of this year,” Ingui confirmed. The theater has other storage facilities besides the new ones at SCSU. Among the items it is storing is hundreds of theater seats from the Sargent Drive auditorium.

Ingui said Long Wharf Theatre has maintained all its full-time staff from last year. That’s 25 full-time staff plus six part-time audience service representatives who manage the box office not just for Long Wharf but for the New Haven Symphony.

The transformation of the Long Wharf Theatre from a permanent space to one that reaches out into different communities and neighborhoods involves “a lot of starting new,” Ingui said, “but there is so much legacy that the Long Wharf Theatre has with New Haven. We’re trying to take that with us, too.”

Reach reporter Christopher Arnott at carnott@courant.com.