Sarah Hunnewell Retires As Longtime Executive Director Of Hampton Theatre Company

Her actors know her as detail-oriented and demanding—a force who wants what she wants. Her theater group knows her as a workaholic, a perfectionist. And audiences know her as a director who delivers.

For these reasons, Sarah Hunnewell is the face of the Hampton Theatre Company, the woman responsible for turning a good troupe into a great one, complete with a professional edge.

But come June, the curtain will close on her longtime tenure as executive director, when she steps down at the end of the company’s 32nd season.

It is a move that needed to happen, she said.

“It’s good. It’s really good. It’s not like this was something that popped up overnight. Over time, it began to feel more and more right,” she said. “I always think about when Garrison Keillor finally gave up ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ after 40 years of doing it, and somebody said to him, ‘Do you miss it?’ He said, ‘Nope.’”

She burst out laughing. “You have to just decide it’s time to move on to different things.”

For as long as necessary, Ms. Hunnewell said she will stay on board as a consultant. Theater is in her blood, she said, and she can still vividly recall the first two shows she saw on Broadway—the original productions of “My Fair Lady” and “Camelot”—as a young girl growing up on the Upper East Side.

“I remember thinking I had died and gone to heaven,” she said. “I thought, ‘I found it. This is the best thing in the entire world.’ I think because I always liked it so much, I never considered doing it, which sounds strange. But when I was about 8, I went to professional acting school for a year. I loved it, but my mother took me out because it wasn’t convenient. It didn’t jibe with her idea of what life should be.”

For years, she led a double life in Manhattan. During the day, she worked as an architect. In her free time, she acted with The Snarks, a New York theater club, through which she met Jane Stanton, who directed almost all productions in HTC’s early days.

On one particular afternoon, as Ms. Hunnewell was sitting in her New York apartment, becoming increasingly disillusioned, her phone rang. She picked up and heard Ms. Stanton’s voice on the other end.

“Get out here, Sarah,” she barked. “We need a WASP.”

The year was 1990, and Ms. Stanton was directing A.R. Gurney’s “The Dining Room” in Quogue. Little did Ms. Hunnewell know, it would be the play that started it all. Within two years, she had a new verve for life—living on the East End, alongside HTC co-founder Jim Ewing, with a fresh passion for theater.

“It was like a complete breath of fresh air for me,” she said. “I was at a stage in my life, for various personal and other reasons, that I needed a complete change. I’m one of those people who sort of, every now and then, needs complete change. So it was a complete change—and it was fabulous.”

As quickly as her life shifted for the better, it also took a turn for the worse when Mr. Ewing’s mother, June, died unexpectedly in 1992. She was the president and “den mother” of the company, Ms. Hunnewell said, and left a huge vacuum at the top.

“She was the mascot and kept things together,” Ms. Hunnewell said. “I saw a great company that had really no management or organization or anything at all. And it just struck me as a such a great blank slate opportunity, and there was nobody doing it. So it was just a question of stepping in and playing around. It was never a job I was hired to do. It was just, ‘What would happen if we tried this?’”

Ms. Hunnewell started small: taking the names of everyone who entered the theater, compiling a mailing list, and setting up a phone line. Then, with the birth of the internet, came subscriptions, email and a website.

And as her administrative role grew, so did her theatrical one.

“Jimmy directed a lot in the early days of the company, and I started out AD-ing him. And because I’m such a bossy person, in no time, I was taking over and telling him what to do,” she said. “But that was a great deal of fun, and I learned a lot about directing from Jane Stanton. Jane inadvertently taught me the ropes just from having acted with her, really, and the rest I directed truly on instinct. I just do it because I think I know what I want to see up there, and that’s my method.”

Since 1998, Ms. Hunnewell has directed more than 30 productions. But when thinking back on her career, she always goes back to her first show, “The Rainmaker.”

“We had a bunch of school groups come, little kids, and they loved it so much. They were so wrapped,” she said. “Afterward, they wanted to come up and talk to the actors, and they were just watching them with their eyes bugging out. And it made me think of the joy people who are experiencing theater for the first time can have, and even not for the first time. But you know when you see people really enjoying something? It really makes all the hard work worthwhile, and that’s a really great thing.”

It is possible, all those years ago, that Ms. Hunnewell saw herself in those starry-eyed children, and her smile is almost palpable through the telephone as she recalls that play. Come June, general manager Terry Brennan will take over all administrative duties, while she leaves the company in capable hands, she said.

“I had to wrestle with this decision for a very long time. It was hard then, but it’s no longer hard, because you get past the place where it’s hard, you know what I mean? So I’m past the place where it’s hard,” she said. “Even though I will be there until the end of the season, and beyond, in my mind I’ve already kind of moved on.”

In the immediate future, Ms. Hunnewell will focus her time and energy on building a new home in Mexico, as well as a few projects she’s had on the back burner.

“The most mundane part of all this is I’m getting really sick of the cold winters. The fact is the Hampton Theatre Company is really a fall-to-spring organization, and I decided I really wanted to spend some of the time in the winter not here, and do some traveling and other things that I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” she said. “I figured it wasn’t fair to the company to try and do both. I figured I’d let someone else have a hand at it.”

That said, Ms. Hunnewell will be keeping a close eye, and said she hopes to see the company continue to progress.

“It is my wish that younger people will become involved because, to a great extent, the company is still run by the same people it was run by 30 years ago,” she said. “And while longevity is good, I am concerned that if younger people don’t get involved, the company does not have a future. So I hope the company opens its doors to new talent and continues to be open to new actors, new directors, new artistic visions.

“It has to grow, and grow out. Change is hard, but change is also necessary.”