NEW YORK CITY: New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) has announced that Maya Choldin will succeed Jeremy Blocker as the company’s managing director, following a dedicated search led by the Tom O’Connor Consulting Group. Choldin will assume the role beginning Feb. 1.
Raised in Alberta, a graduate of Mount Allison University, Choldin joins NYTW from Theatre Calgary, where she served as executive director. Prior to Theatre Calgary, she was managing director of Pig Iron Theatre Company in Philadelphia, a position she held for six seasons. Choldin’s long arts résumé includes serving as general manager of the Pennsylvania Ballet, roles at George Mason University’s Hylton Performing Arts Center and the Kimmel Center, and management of productions and projects at Opera Philadelphia, the Mann Center, and FringeArts. Choldin has served on the boards of a variety of community organizations, with a deep commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion in the arts.
“I have long admired New York Theatre Workshop, both for the long history of groundbreaking theatre and for the deep commitment to bettering the spaces where artists hone their craft,” say Choldin in a statement. “So I could not be more thrilled to join this passionate and dedicated team, led by the inimitable Patricia McGregor. I look forward to jumping in this February and working with the many incredible artists, the staff and the audiences that call New York Theatre Workshop home, as we continue the 2025 spring season and look forward, together, to all that’s next.”
Said McGregor in a statement, “I am thrilled to welcome the extraordinary Maya Choldin to New York Theatre Workshop as our next managing director. Maya’s unflappable dexterity animating ideas and solving problems is inspiring. She has a strong history of centering the work of visionary artists while structuring practical systems to meet organizational goals…Meeting Maya, I was struck by her combination of intelligence, humor, curiosity, and strategy. Her sharp skills are an exceptional match for the workshop in this moment. I am excited to partner with Maya to build the next vital chapter at New York Theatre Workshop.”
NYTW is of course the storied Off-Broadway home of everything from such Broadway phenoms as Rent and Hadestown to works by Tony Kushner, Caryl Churchill, Jeremy O. Harris, Will Power, Kristina Wong, and Ivo Van Hove. I spoke to Choldin in her office at Theatre Calgary last week, where she has worked since 2020 alongside artistic director Stafford Arima. She wore a sweater emblazoned with two polar bears hugging, but insisted that Calgary is sunny most days of the year and it’s a “dry cold” there.
ROB WEINERT-KENDT: Congratulations! You’re coming from a theatre in Canada, but you obviously spent a lot of time in the U.S. making theatre too, so this is sort of a homecoming, right?
MAYA CHOLDIN: I was at Pig Iron in Philadelphia when the pandemic hit, and then this huge opportunity happened in Canada, where my parents still live. Theatre Calgary is one of the larger Canadian regional theatres, one of the top 10 in size, with an important role in the Canadian theatre ecosystem. I felt like it was so well suited for my ability to help them navigate through what has been for everybody around the world a really hard time. I don’t want to be presumptuous to say that we’re now on the other side of that, but we’re almost on the other side, as organizations refigure how they’re making work in ways that serve their communities. Then, when the job opened at the Workshop, I could not refuse the opportunity to back to a place so focused on making new work and celebrating new voices.
Pig Iron, where you worked previously, is a very ensemble-based company, and I know NYTW isn’t explicitly an ensemble company, à la Steppenwolf or Wooster Group, but it has a lot of resident artists and its Usual Suspects program, and as such has a lot of input from artists. It’s a got a lot of ensemble spirit, I would say.
The ensemble spirit is such a great phrase—can I steal that from you? I think it’s the idea that artists have a voice in that organization in a way that is more than cursory, more than just in name. They have a real influence on its direction. And it’s not as box office-driven as other organizations are forced to be.
I don’t know a lot about how the arts are funded in Canada, but there is more government support, correct?
We receive about 12 to 14 percent of our budget from the government, and the rest is corporate and individual fundraising. We don’t have a strong foundation culture here, that’s one difference from the U.S. In the super nerdy part of my brain, there’s a pie chart of sources revenue for Pig Iron and a pie chart for sources of revenue for Theatre Calgary, and it’s not actually an exact flip-flop, but if you took government, which was like 2 percent at Pig Iron, and foundations, which were like 20 percent, and flip that pie chart, that would be close to Theatre Calgary—foundations just aren’t a thing here.
But building relationships with people is, and Alberta is a very cosmopolitan and affluent city that is significantly growing. There are around 1.5 million people here; if you looked at Calgary 20 years ago, it was probably half that. So there’s a desire to create a community that supports great art. The great part about this transition to New York is that this is not a conversation I have to have; people understand that great cities have great art institutions, and that great cultural organizations like New York Theatre Workshop are the foundational level of building the canon of American theatre.
I know you said foundations are more of a thing in the U.S., but what I’m hearing from a lot of folks here is that the ground is shifting as funding priorities are changing.
The foundations have their own pillars of why they support things, and they’re trying to respond to where they feel like they can be the most effective. So I get why they’re shifting; everyone’s shifting. But for theatremakers, who are already in an unstable environment, this puts another wobbly leg for us to support our stool with. It makes it even more important to articulate why we’re important in ways that are actually meaningful to people who make these decisions.
The question I’m asking a lot of theatre leaders is basically, how has business been in the past few years since the Covid lockdown? Are audiences coming back? Are revenues stabilizing? What’s your sense of the state of things at Theatre Calgary and at NYTW?
I can’t speak to where New York Theatre Workshop is in relation to their audience at this point, but I can talk about Theatre Calgary all day long. What happened here is that pre-pandemic, there was already a slow loss of trust between audience and organization. Then the pandemic happened, which was coupled in Alberta with a crash in the economy for oil and gas. The result was that in the 2022-23, they didn’t they come back—there was a terrifying decline in attendance. Halfway through that season, Stafford Arima, our artistic director, and I looked at what was happening and recognized that we needed to do something remarkable, otherwise there would be no recovery. So in 2023-24 we launched Theatre for All, a three-pronged effort to rebuild our audience. It’s a reevaluation of our pricing structure, a change in our programmatic choices, and the re-establishment of our education and outreach team, which will not only enhance the audience’s experience when they’re at the theatre on a show-by-show basis, but will also build a new audience. Alberta is no different than any other place where, when people are looking for cuts, they cut arts education in schools. This was our way to ensure that we’re not going to have the same problem in 20 years, when those 13-year-olds who’ve never seen a play in their life still have never seen a play. And from the 2022-23 to the 2023-24 season, we almost doubled attendance, and we’re tracking well in this season as well.
It looks like Theatre Calgary’s budget is also close to NYTW’s, around $10 million.
In a general year the budget has been between $10 and $12 million—Canadian, obviously. Last year we had commercial enhancement, and we’ll probably have that again. So we’ve been building relationships with mostly U.S.-based, also sometimes Canadian-based, commercial producers who have plans for whatever they’re doing to take it elsewhere. That’s been a really valuable experience for me here, that I have that under my belt, because New York Theatre Workshop does it all the time.
You just brought up something I was going to ask about. NYTW seems to always be striking a balance between trying out work that will have a commercial future, and genuinely trying things—experimenting, with the real possibility of failure. When we spoke to Jim Nicola a few years ago, the “workshop” part of the theatre’s name was really a central part of what he felt he’d forged there.
This is where I feel like it’s the perfect merger of Pig Iron Theatre Company and the big regional theatre I’m at now, my most fundamental work experiences—those two things come together at New York Theatre Workshop. Pig Iron is ensemble-based theatremakers who want to push the envelope of what theatre is, what it means to even have the word theatre attached to their name. Pig Iron swings for the fences; they punch well above their weight. I am immensely proud to have spent as much time as I spent there and to have helped launch, I think it was like seven or eight world premieres during my time there. The willingness to take a risk means the willingness to fail. A place like Theatre Calgary is much more in service to their audience, out of necessity; with the infrastructure of a regional theatre, the room to fail is a much smaller margin, and that necessitates making decisions that serve the mission, which is in service to Calgarians.
Is it more challenging to be the managing director for a place where you’re creating a safety net for people to succeed or fail at wild experiments, or to help run a theatre where don’t have that room for error but there might be more stability?
The challenges are uniquely different for each style of artmaking. Supporting artists who have a vast canvas, and a frame that’s much further out, creates a unique set of challenges that is different from a place like Theatre Calgary, where it’s mostly scripted work and the majority of productions are not world premieres, though we have done quite a few. There are fewer variables, and it’s more work to find the magic. We do find it at Theatre Calgary, but I’m looking forward to a different kind of magic at New York Theatre Workshop.
Are you all set to live in New York?
I’ve got an apartment in Hamilton Heights that’s three blocks from one of my best friends; she went and toured it via FaceTime to show me with the realtor, which is hilarious. Fingers crossed that I didn’t make a big error there! I’m full-time in-person in March. I have a spouse who works in theatre also, Nick Kourtides, a sound designer, and he mostly works in New York.
But he doesn’t have a place here?
No, he’s been floating around. So this move means that life is going to be easier for him.
Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is editor-in-chief of American Theatre.
