Meet Nick Schwartz-Hall, Guild Hall's New Director of Performing Arts

For some 30 years, theatrical producer Nick Schwartz-Hall has been intricately involved in bringing productions to life on stage. Music, dance, theater, spoken word pieces and even new media are all firmly in his wheelhouse.

Now, Schwartz-Hall is bringing his extensive three decades of experience in live performance to East Hampton, where he has just been named Guild Hall’s director of performing arts.

That means Schwartz-Hall will soon be relocating to the East End from his native California, where he has been serving as senior producer at The Music Center in Los Angeles. It’s a move he’s looking forward to and in a recent phone interview from his West Coast home, he shared some insight into his background and thoughts about what he envisions for Guild Hall as it completes an extensive renovation project that will reinvent both the museum spaces and the historic John Drew Theater and bring them into the 21st century.

“It is a big move,” Schwartz-Hall conceded of his pending relocation. “It’s funny, I feel like I’m naturally very bicoastal. I grew up between San Francisco and San Jose, and at 17 I left high school for The New School in New York. I’ve been back and forth all my life. I had a long career in New York at BAM [Brooklyn Academy of Music] and other places, and I’ve been back on the West Coast in recent years. It feels a little like how the world is now.”

While Schwartz-Hall has lived and worked in New York and California throughout his long career, as well as overseas, he admits that he still has a lot to learn about the specifics of Guild Hall and life on the East End. Fortunately, it is not totally unfamiliar terrain. He has spent time in Montauk with his friend (and former head of BAM) Karen Brooks Hopkins and also at The Watermill Center, Robert Wilson’s creativity lab. But it’s at Guild Hall that Schwartz-Hall will be able to tap into his skillset to create a unique vision for East End audiences.

“I’ve never lived there, so I have a big job in learning what people are interested in and creating content the community responds to,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a secret, but part of what’s interesting for me and Guild Hall is a compatibility in terms of the history of artists they’ve worked with and the values. It’s amazing for me to have this opportunity. There are not that many places that embrace the breadth of the arts that Guild Hall does.

“Guild Hall has such a thick history and set of relationships in its community. So you can look at that as both a challenge and an opportunity,” he added. “But to me, the way I think about what we in the arts are doing, we’re helping to make the connective tissue in our communities. Our role is to bring artists and communities together. To start in a place where you already have such a long and wide investment like in Guild Hall, it’s tremendous.”

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t challenges. Schwartz-Hall notes that as arts organizations around the country emerge from the pandemic, they’re finding that, across the board, audiences are not returning to seats and galleries in the same numbers as before. When the newly renovated Guild Hall reopens to the public fully sometime next winter, the goal will be to make sure residents are fully invested and eager to return.

“Personally, I think our job is to go out into the community and say, ‘Here is what the arts do for us,’” he said. “It seems a huge leg up when everyone in East Hampton is like, ‘When is Guild Hall going to come back?’ I’m really excited about that.”

When asked what aspect of stage production most interests him in his professional life — music, theater, performance art or something else — Schwartz-Hall responded, “It sounds coy, but all of the above. I got started 30 years ago in this business in the theater. The woman who became my wife helped found InterAct Theatre Company in Philadelphia in the early ’90s creating theater and new music theater, and it was my first love and where I discovered that environment.

“I love being among creative people working in collaboration,” he added. “Eventually, I became the manager at the Public Theater in New York under George Wolfe, and that led to a lot of work in theater. I was lucky to work with Hal Prince and Complicité in London. I was also the production manager at the New York Shakespeare Festival. Then I became a freelancer, in that time I gradually worked my way up from being a production manager hired by artists to someone who more generally worked with artists to create their projects. That led in 2005 to producing director at Seattle Repertory. During those freelance years, I worked at BAM on projects and was fortunate to work overseas and on more experimental theater projects.”

Upon first stepping foot into the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall, Schwartz-Hall said he was struck by the fact that it reminded him of the Plays and Players Theatre in Philadelphia, a 300-seat jewel box space, where he first worked on new musicals at the beginning of his theater career.

“There’s no lack of ambition” he said of his vision for the John Drew. “It’s a great space for contemporary dance, I can’t wait to ask [dancer and choreographer] Caleb Teicher to come in. It’s also a great theater and will bring audiences closer to performers.”

One key component that Schwartz-Hall is hoping to nurture at Guild Hall is the art of storytelling. As inspiration, he referenced the master of the form, the late monologuist Spalding Gray, who lived in Sag Harbor and once performed on the John Drew stage.

“Spalding Gray has such a huge legacy and his monologues offer such a rich tradition in American theater. Those monologues are amazing, and showed how storytelling helps us make sense of what we experience,” said Schwartz-Hall, who would like to try to bring The Moth storytelling series to the John Drew Theater.

“There are three to four things I’m committed to. Storytelling is one, another is creativity and innovation, and another is community engagement,” he explained. “Our job is to bring artists and communities together. When you’re doing that authentically, you’re also doing things to give the community an opportunity to try to develop their own capacity for creativity and participation.”

Schwartz-Hall points to programs like those he helped create at The Music Center in Los Angeles where the community is invited to participate and explore their own creative impulses. He’s also excited about the potential of new technology and the energy brought to Guild Hall by members of its Teen Arts Council.

“There’s a really interesting opportunity to make Guild Hall, not just a physical space, but an online space, and our community can be engaged even when they’re not in the building,” he said. “We can tie digital activity into the building and live experiences. It’s an amazingly cool opportunity. A lot of artists are starting to move into that space, but not a lot of institutions are able to yet embrace that.

“There’s also the podcasting and audio world. One thing that could be intriguing is commissioning work meant for audio production like old fashioned radio theater,” he added. “It’s pretty intriguing.”

Schwartz-Hall will officially begin his new role on April 3, and as he wraps up his work in Los Angeles, he looks forward to what’s ahead for him on the East End. He notes that the goal of Guild Hall Executive Director Andrea Grover is to knit together all aspects of the institution and he notes that he’s ready and able to help make that happen.

“You’ve heard the multidisciplinary term, but what they talk about is interdisciplinary,” said Schwartz-Hall. “How does it all relate to the theater, the gallery, outside? Not every live performance has to be in the building. The conversations have all been about how do we get ourselves pulling in the same direction? There are a lot of resources I can bring to the table that might help.”