Long on energy

Cliff Redd, the man orchestrating the Long Center development, has enthusiasm – and a Midas touch

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS WRITER
Friday, January 20, 2006

It was the late 1950s. As Cliff Redd's family convertible zipped past Palmer Auditorium, his father talked excitedly about how the building and its space-age dome represented Austin's future.

"It was so modern, so forward and so big," says Redd, "It epitomized everything about the optimistic, can-do, post-war Texas spirit: You dreamed it big and then you did it."

Soon after the Palmer opened, Redd's parents caught Elvis Presley in concert there. In 1969, Redd marched across Palmer's wide stage along with his graduating class from Lanier High School. Later, he was in the audience when folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary sang in the cavernous venue.

Redd's honey-smooth Texas accent softens the edges of, but doesn't slow, his rapid-fire speech as he relates these memories. His is a style that blends lightness and intensity, a quick laugh punctuating his words, his blue eyes flashing, his hands gesturing expansively even as he talks about the deeper meaning of how architecture epitomizes the era of its creators. Redd easily meshes the personal and the global, neatly fits the big picture onto the small picture.

It's a capability that enables him to see that, while the Palmer was, at first, in all its modernity and ambition, a forward-looking beacon for an emerging state capital, it is now, as the green dome gives way to sleek new forms, destined to be another kind of symbol for a city that is today vastly more sophisticated and mature: the Long Center for the Performing Arts.

Perhaps that accounts for Redd's exuberance over his current job: executive director of the Long Center.

"There's a beautiful new thing inside of an old thing," he says. "And helping it happen is exactly what I want to be doing now. Exactly."

Redd took the helm in July 2004 — a low point in a campaign that had started in the early 1990s. Redd replaced the center's first director, David Fleming, who resigned in July 2003 to become the executive director of the Weidner Center for the Performing Arts in Green Bay, Wis. Fleming's resignation came just a week after Long Center officials announced that they planned to downsize the project from the original ambitious $125 million four-venue complex and instead build the facility in phases, starting with a $77 million two-theater space.

Redd's peers in Austin say he couldn't have arrived at a better time.

"Cliff came to Austin at a time when many in the arts were plagued with a general pessimism that was the byproduct of post-2001 series of disastrous national events," says Cookie Ruiz, executive director of Ballet Austin, one of the three major arts groups, along with the Austin Lyric Opera and the Austin Symphony Orchestra, that will make the Long Center their permanent home. "Since arriving, Cliff's brought an optimism to his position that is contagious. He's reignited the vision of the project while refusing to accept anything but the successful completion of the Long Center."

Indeed, Redd's optimism has spread — and turned up green. Since his arrival, the capital campaign has netted $15.7 million or more than $800,000 every month. With construction now well under way, and opening scheduled for fall 2008, the Long Center needs to raise $9 million in endowment funds to reach its goal.

Long on inspiration

"I come from an ambitious family that set their sights high — very high," Redd explains. "Whatever you did, you made it work out no matter what. Failure didn't enter into the equation."

Not surprisingly, that ambition translated into financial success. And being raised in a family that Redd refers to as "socio-economically blessed and lucky" puts in him a position that few arts executive are: He is comfortably at home around Lone Star royalty and their largesse.

His grandfather, John Inglis, to whom Redd was particularly close, emigrated to Houston from Scotland when he was 17 and started a mad love affair with aviation. Although Inglis earned his wings as a pilot, he opted to ascend the business ladder, eventually becoming president of corporate conglomerate Gulf & Western and jettisoning the family into a higher socio-economic class. (Along the way Inglis befriended another aviation aficionado, Howard Hughes and the two remained friends for years.)

Redd's father, Reynolds B. Redd, earned doctorates in chemistry and psychology, got involved in the emerging post-war field of medical instrumentation and was an accomplished amateur pianist, playing jazz tunes by ear. His multitalented mother, Betsy Jean Inglis Redd, designed costumes for community theater, painted and, among other civic leadership positions, was president of the Junior League of Houston for a time.

Redd was born Reynolds B. Redd Jr. at Hermann Hospital in Houston on July 19, 1951, the oldest of three children. ("Cliff" is a nickname his maternal grandmother gave him). The family moved to Austin five years later and lived in a modern house in the then-new University Hills neighborhood off Cameron Road. His parents, who had themselves lived in the Austin area (his mother attended Southwestern University in Georgetown), continued "their long love affair with this city," Redd recalls. And their son began his.

However, when he was 10, thanks to his father's prospering career, the family moved to Fairfield, Conn., just a 30-minute train ride from New York City — and more importantly, Broadway. Already bitten by the theater bug ("I think we theater people just show up on the planet as theater people," he jokes), Redd saw Barbra Streisand in "Funny Girl," Carol Channing in "Hello Dolly!" and Richard Burton in "Hamlet." In summer, there was the Stratford Shakespeare Festival nearby in Connecticut. Redd considers such early exposure to theater profound, something that would forever direct his life choices, despite the fact that his family considered the arts "something you volunteered for, not made a career of," he says.

Returning with his family to Austin in the late 1960s — fundamentally as part of the first high-tech boom when corporations such as IBM and Tracor started pulling tech-savvy employees from around the country to the emerging Lone Star capital — was at first jarring for Redd. "I essentially had to reacquaint myself with Texas," he says. His father went to work for Tracor. Redd enrolled in Lanier High School, where he joined the Golden Myth Players, the school's theater troupe.

After graduating in 1969, he began what he calls his "tacky tour of Texas colleges." His stint at the University of Texas was followed by a transfer to Southwestern University, then North Texas State in Denton, all the time studying theater. College in the turbulent 1960s, he remembers, was chaos. Although the open-minded Redd rallied passionately behind the liberal causes of the era that swept across campuses, he found tranquility and professional growth came from outside the classroom.

B. Iden Payne, the famed British director and teacher who concluded his career at UT, was near retirement, Redd remembers, and the two would sit outside the drama department at the end of the day, waiting for Payne's daughter to pick him up. "We'd talk about theater, but really we would talk everything — everything," Redd says. "That's how I learned from him."

Redd left school before completing a degree and, at age 20, staked out his professional arts career by founding Theatre Arlington. "It wasn't good enough to just be a director — I had to start my own theater company," he says now, laughing at the way his inherited ambition compeled him to stake out a big claim in a town that wasn't very arts-savvy. While working a day job in the interior design department of a Sanger-Harris department store, he built a theater company despite that fact a local patron told him he had "chosen the most barren soil in Texas in which to plant the seed of art."

Within a decade, Theatre Arlington was a thriving, financially fit regional theater able to hire professional actors and stage a popular season of classics and new plays. Redd carved out a reputation for himself as a polished, even daring director. Take, for example, his 1983 production of Edward Albee's explosive drama about frustrated married couples, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Redd cast the arguing couples at the play's center as gay men. "It made sense," says Redd. "There was a whole generation of gay men at the time who were deeply unhappy."

Albee was unhappy too. Indeed, the show garnered some national buzz, and when the playwright found out about Redd's production, he sent a cease-and-desist order. While the short run of the Theatre Arlington show prevented Albee from further action, the play now comes with a rider that it must be presented as written.

By 1990, Theatre Arlington was flying high, but Redd was ready for a change. It was only after he accepted the position as executive director of the Shakespeare Festival of Dallas that he learned that nonprofit that presented free theater in the park was more than $300,000 in debt.

Nature abhors a vacuum. And Redd abhors being in the red.

"Early on, I learned that all dreams were tied to money," he says. "And to get a community to support an arts project you had to get them to have a love affair with it." Over the course of a decade, he took the organization — one of the oldest free Shakespeare festivals in the U.S. — out of the red and into the black, increasing and diversifying the audience along the way.

"He was an inseparable part of the organization," says Edith Love, former executive director of Dallas Theatre Center and a longtime friend of Redd's. "You couldn't think of the festival without thinking of Cliff. Every single performance he'd be out there making a curtain speech, letting supporters know they were appreciated, pulling them into the inner circle."

Redd remembers most fondly the way the free Shakespeare performances brought so many together. "We got to blur a lot boundaries," he says. "I loved looking out at the audience and seeing the Highland Park yuppie couple, next to the gay couple, next to the African American family. Art has that ability to bring people together who ordinarily wouldn't rub shoulders with each other."

Long on influence

Redd is far beyond just being an ordinary people person. "His love is people," says Love, who cherished many heart-to-heart talks with Redd over breakfast at Lucky's Diner in Dallas. "He's interested in all kinds of people and he has a remarkable talent for listening to them and understanding them."

Redd describes himself as an "extreme extrovert," he says. "I derive so much of my energy from the people who populate my life on all levels. That's led me to two very long-term relationships including a marriage with Charlotte Mathes, who, despite our divorce, has steadfastly remained one of my closest friends, and a same-sex partnership that spanned a great deal of my twenties and thirties and ended over two decades ago."

Indeed, spend more than a few moments with Redd and you learn that while he is deeply invested in the arts, clearly his biggest pride is his son, 22-year-old Max Mathes-Redd.

"He's my greatest contribution to the planet," Redd says.

And for his part, Mathes-Redd remembers a dedicated single father who made dinner every night no matter how late his demanding job extended the workday. "Actually, we never ate dinner alone," Mathes-Redd says. "Usually several of my friends would end up with us too. Everybody liked my dad. He listened, he always put forth the effort."

Mathes-Redd also remembers watching his father during rehearsals at Theatre Arlington coaching nuanced performances from awkward, amateur actors. "He's one of those directors who could get others to do things they never imagined they could do," he recalls. "These weren't professional actors, and yet he could sensitively bring things out in them they didn't even know they had."

Perhaps it's that directorial skill that's enabled Redd to bring something out in Austinites that didn't think they had: money.

Though the Chronicle of Philanthropy may list Austin as one of the Top 10 stingiest cities in the country and though people told him there was no more money to raise in Austin, Redd found it. Since arriving in Austin in summer 2004, Redd has not only netted millions, he's also diversified the people supporting the campaign, spearheading Long Center support groups focused on businesswomen, the African-American community and younger patrons.

For one thing, Redd saw something nobody else did in Austin: philanthropists in the raw. "Austin is a meritocracy and that's a gift, but it's also a curse," he says. "In a meritocracy you don't show off your wealth. And so we've been loath to even identify a philanthropic community and even more reticent about celebrating it. The money is here in Austin — you just have to work harder to get it." And work hard he does.

Although he is adamantly not a morning person, weekday mornings often find Redd at one 7:30 a.m. breakfast meeting or another. He can give a stump speech with a sincerity and vigor most politicians would envy, frequently referencing his own personal history with Austin and the Palmer Auditorium.

Long days in the office are capped by evening receptions, executive committee meetings or one-on-one campaigning. He often arrives home after dark. Without fail, he takes his two beloved standard poodles, Drake and Geoffrey, for a three-mile walk around his Lost Creek neighborhood each night. "My neighbors must think I'm a vampire," he jokes. "The only time they ever see me out and about is late at night."

Indeed, as social and public as his job may be, it's also solitary.

"When I decided to take this job, I didn't stop to think that 34 years in the Dallas-Fort Worth area produced an infrastructure of friends that were like my family," he says. "Leaving that support system was jarring to me. This is lonely work — people don't want to ask you over for dinner because they think you're going to hit them up for a donation.

"Admittedly, my focus right now has been on the job at hand — actualizing the Long Center dream. The entire community is counting on me as well as the board and staff to succeed in this endeavor."

Still, Redd calls himself a "hopeless romantic" who some day wants to find a partner. "I am going to trust the universe that I will recognize that right person for me when I meet them," he says.

Of course, every other weekend finds Redd and his dogs heading to his second home in Galveston; his son studies maritime history at Texas A&M-Galveston. Mathes-Redd confirms that beach time is the only time his super-energized father stops long enough to recharge: "He doesn't want to do anything but hang out with the poodles on the porch and sleep in the hammock." (In fact it was his friend Love who gave Redd the hammock as incentive to relax.)

"It's the one thing I wish I did inherit from Dad — his energy," says Mathes-Redd.

Long on ambition

That energy keeps him going, and thinking far beyond completing the current $77 million capital project.

"Finishing the building is not even the first half of the first chapter of the story of the Long Center," he says. After all, the current aim to erect the 2,300-seat Dell Foundation Hall and the 99-seat Rollins Studio Theater is only half the original plan. A rehearsal hall and an intermediate 700-seat theater need also to be phased in as planned, Redd says. Plus, there's programming to consider. "I envision the City Terrace as sort of drive-in theater without cars," he says of the circular plaza that wraps the front of the complex. He sees it as a stage for casual programs and the inside as a site for changing exhibitions. He'd like to bring in production capabilities so that performances can be broadcast or "audience members can buy a DVD of what they saw on their way out of the theater," he says. "How do we take what we have in Austin and turn a spotlight on to it? There's no reason the Long Center can't be the Kennedy Center for the state of Texas."

He even has a vision for the basement: he sees it becoming an arts incubator — a communal business center where small and medium arts groups could have affordable office space and shared access to services. "You'd be surprised at what the right surroundings and adequate services can do for arts groups," he says.

Now managing director of Portland Center Stage, Love explains that Redd's expansive, welcoming approach extends to all corner of his life. "He's the consummate host," she says. "He loves to bring people together, and there isn't a bone of insincerity in him."

She remembers planning a surprise party for Redd's 50th birthday a few years ago. "Not only could we plan to throw his surprise party at his house, but I also invited about a half-dozen of his relatives from out of town to come and stay the weekend with him — without telling him anything in advance of course," she says. "I wouldn't do that to anybody else in the world, but Cliff is so welcoming, laid-back and yet he's also so organized. His house is always in perfect order. Of course, he could handle a party for 60 or so just thrust on him in his house. And of course, he loved it."

And Love predicts that the gregarious, warm-hearted Redd will also thrive in bringing people together at the Long Center.

As Redd himself puts it: "I can't wait to make sure everybody is comfortable in that building."

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699