Sitting at the desk in her bright, windowed office, Jill Anderson laughed when describing her original career plan: a Spanish teacher at a Lutheran high school in the American Southwest.

That plan, Anderson said, went “wonderfully wrong.”

Despite a post-high school stint as the bass player for a Lutheran rock band, Anderson eventually found her true passion in the theater. The Wisconsin native was named managing director of the Syracuse Stage in July, the most recent move in a career that has taken her from the Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis to the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., and, most recently, to the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut. Now, Anderson is preparing for  “Great Expectations,” her first show at the Syracuse Stage and the theater’s first of the season, which opens Wednesday.

With the exception of an appearance as Tessie in an elementary school production of “Annie” and a few shows her sophomore year of high school, Anderson rejected the idea of being an actress or performer. Yet she loved the theater, and found herself getting involved in her college’s small theater department.

She remembers the exact moment she realized how to make a career in the theater world. The revelation came as she ran the light board at an orchestra show.

“I remember whining to the department head, saying, ‘Oh, I want to be part of this but I’m not a performer. What should I do with my life?’” she recalled. “He said, ‘You should be a stage manager.’ It was crystal clear to him.”

After a quick library search, Anderson knew the job was meant for her.

“You’re not onstage, but you’re getting to make lists and charts and keep order. This is perfect,” she said. “And it was.”

Frankie Prijatel | Senior Staff Photographer

While she enjoyed stage managing, she soon began climbing the ranks in the theater world. Since stage managers work show-to-show and are not guaranteed consistent employment, Anderson said the “stability of a 52-week-a-year job was appealing.”

So she worked as a company manager — a so-called “concierge to the stars” — at the Arena Stage in D.C. This job brought her interesting experiences, like paying cash to get a new mattress delivered for a small-time television celebrity at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday.

Her efforts at the Arena Stage caught the attention of Wendy Goldberg, a coworker, when hired as the artistic director at the O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut, invited Anderson to join her as a production manager. Anderson intended to stay at the O’Neill for a year and a half. But then she was promoted to general manager and ended up staying for 10 years.

“Jill is this incredible mix of pragmatism, artistry, humor and Midwest realness,” Goldberg said in an email. “She knows how to deal with both high brow and low brow issues with humor and grace.”

Goldberg remembered a time this past winter when a blizzard hit Connecticut during a new program for emerging directors at the O’Neill.

“There was Jill on her phone with Amtrak for hours dealing with travel delays, bundled up and delivering wine to all the people who were shoveling,” Goldberg said. “Jill is the soldier you want next to you in the field.”

Guy Bergquist, Anderson’s mentor from the Arena Stage, was able to join her for a time in this position, working as a van driver for the O’Neill one summer. He joked that Anderson is following in his footsteps 40 years behind, as he worked at the O’Neill in the 1970s.

“It was fun being there, just being a proud papa and seeing her growing and having grown,” he said. “The sanctity was fabulous.”

Anderson also learned finance in the position at the O’Neill. Despite having “an affinity for numbers, and a certain facility with them,” she likened it to learning a new language when compared to stage management. This knowledge, however, helped her secure the managing director position at Syracuse Stage.

Fran Nichols, the chair of the Syracuse Stage board of trustees, headed the search committee for the managing director. The committee looked for skills including knowledge of theater management, strong interpersonal skills, the ability to fundraise and strong financial knowledge. Anderson had all of these skills, Nichols said, and was “overwhelmingly and unanimously” the committee’s first choice.

Now three months into her time at the Stage, Anderson is exceeding expectations, Nichols said. Her days are still filled with learning the ropes, as she and the new artistic director, Robert Hupp, are often out of the building meeting local politicians and Syracuse Stage donors. Yet even when she is in the Syracuse Stage building, she is rarely in her office.

While every day is different, a recent one included a production meeting, a planning meeting for an upcoming gala, and individual meetings with the development director, the county executive and the head of the Syracuse University drama department.

“It’s everything from the grand and long term to what we’re doing tomorrow,” Anderson said. “There’s no time for food.”

Her lunch? A large cup of hot coffee with some milk in it.

When she does have free time, Anderson tries to roam the hallways and get to know everyone at the Stage in order to be “visible and available.”

“Nobody’s going to tell you anything if they’re not used to seeing you around,” she said. “It would be pretty foolish for Bob (Hupp) and Jill to be up here with their heads in the sand.’”

The end of her days, though, are set aside for family. She usually takes her 2-year-old daughter, Eva, to the library in the evenings. Eva, who Anderson describes as “perfectly 2 — slightly destructive and greatly amusing,” spends days at home with Anderson’s husband, Dave, a professional bass player who Anderson said is in “full-time dad mode.”

The couple decided to live in downtown Syracuse, and have been navigating and exploring the city with Eva since they arrived. While Anderson never visited the city until her job interview, she was not worried about liking the area.

“I have the ability to fall in love with anywhere I am,” she said. “I’m an enthusiast generally. I can get excited about being just about anywhere.”

Right now, Anderson’s days as a mother and new job have her falling asleep at night before getting even five minutes into an episode of her favorite hour-long dramas. But she is thinking toward the future, and has hopes to one day teach a class at the Stage.

What the class will be about, Anderson’s not sure. Certainly not on acting, but possibly on her career. She’s not sure her unusual career path — which included dropping out of college to join a union for stage managers and actors is one to emulate. But she’s realized it worked out for the best.

“The more I listen to my peers, I learn that hardly anybody follows an A-to-B path to these jobs,” she said. “There’s something there about being open. Everything that has made itself available to me has exceeded anything I may have laid out for myself.”

Published on October 18, 2016 at 8:44 pm

Contact: mcbuck01@syr.edu