Southern Man

You can tell a lot about people by the things they post about themselves on the Internet. Are they dramatic or frivolous? Businesslike or casual? If they were an animal, what kind of animal would they be?

Jon Ferguson, if his website and Facebook page are any indication, is a lion in lamb’s clothing. He’s an ambitious but soft-spoken theater director who loves European clowning and spectacle. Now, at the age of 35, he finds himself at the crossroads of artist and administrator—a tightrope he is eager to walk. But it takes both imagination and discipline to help run an arts organization, and Ferguson has some big shoes to fill.

In July 2008, Jeff Bartlett, the venerated face and artistic leader of Minneapolis’s Southern Theater, was dismissed abruptly with no explanation after 27 years there. The local performing arts community was shocked and angered, and immediately demanded public meetings with the board of directors and the Southern’s new president/CEO, Patricia Ann Speelman. It was a shaky start for Speelman, to say the least. She needed to regain the trust of the arts community while boosting the Southern’s bottom line (the theater’s deficit is in the mid six figures) and also maintain its mission to promote local and experimental work. In an incisive, diplomatic move, the board decided to split curatorial duties by genre. Rather than one person making all the programming decisions as Bartlett did, there would be separate programming directors for dance, music, and theater, all working with Speelman to decide the Southern’s seasons. Enter Dylan Skybrook, Kate Nordstrum, and Ferguson as the dance, music, and theater programming directors, respectively. Skybrook has been a fixture in the dance community for years, and Nordstrum had been working at the Southern in the marketing department. Ferguson, on the other hand, wasn’t the most obvious choice.

Born in Britain but raised mainly in Fort Lauderdale, Florida—“the cultural and artistic mecca of America,” he jokes in his half-English, half-American accent—Ferguson was expelled from his Florida high school for the inquiring and bold qualities that would later make his career. “Making people laugh, being rambunctious and physical, questioning the purpose of what they were teaching me and the need for it . . . [my high school] was very much a one-way preparation for the holding tank [to enter into] the working world,” he explains.

At 17, at the urging of his parents (“You have to do something,” his father would say), Ferguson set out for Durham, England, and enrolled in a small college where he briefly studied graphic design. He liked it, but when it became too technical and “wasn’t fun anymore,” he decided to take a theater course instead. The woman who ran the class, Jenny Lingham, was plugged into what was happening in British experimental theater at the time. She exposed her students to artists such as Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett as well as such influential avant-garde companies as Hoipolloi and Complicite. And she introduced Ferguson to what would become his directorial signature: making collaborative, physically based theater that is thoughtful, funny, fantastical, ridiculous, visual, musical, and poignant. At school Ferguson’s propensity for blurting out 20 ideas at once had seemed pathological; in the theater world it became an asset.

Ferguson received his B.A. honors degree in acting from Middlesex University and toured England with his mentor, John Wright, teaching workshops on “physical approaches to acting, the sort of pedagogy or training of Jacques Lecoq, Pierre Byland, Philippe Gaulier,” Ferguson says. He lived in London for a time but became disenchanted with the city and how hard it was to get produced. “I realized you could make work in a barn and bring it to the people and have a good quality of life,” he says. “You don’t need to be in a big city to make work that’s on the pulse.”

In 2001 he helped make a show called Shakespeare for Breakfast and took it to the world’s premier Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was a hit, and in 2002 his troupe toured the show to North America, hitting Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Victoria, and, as fate would have it, Minneapolis. That’s where he met his future wife, Megan Odell, a performing artist who went on to cofound Live Action Set company. They now have a 1-year-old son, Thomas Mac Buster Ferguson, named after one of Ferguson’s heroes, Buster Keaton.

After the 2002 Minnesota Fringe Festival, Ferguson went back to England but kept in touch with Odell via e-mail. “Being from south Florida, I had this idea that the Midwest was very dull,” he admits. “I had been blown away by the Fringe.” Unlike in Britain, Ferguson says, Twin Citians are “very supportive and positive about new ideas.” He wanted to return to Minneapolis to make theater, but in a post-9/11 America, he had a heck of a time getting back in.

Fortunately, Ferguson had made quite an impression on Steve Barberio, then artistic director at Stages Theatre Company in Hopkins. Barberio convinced incoming Stages artistic director Sandy Boren-Barrett to sponsor Ferguson so he could obtain an O-1 visa—for “artists of extraordinary ability and superpowers,” kids Ferguson. Since then, Ferguson has become one of the most respected directors in town and has created a large body of work in a very short amount of time: Miss Nelson Is Missing! at Stages; Please Don’t Blow Up Mr. Boban with Live Action Set; Bull, a reinterpretation of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, created with high school kids from Hopkins’ Main Street School of Performing Arts; Or the White Whale, a visually stunning adaptation of Moby Dick with playwright John Heimbuch; We Are Ugly But We Have the Music (the title is a reference to a Leonard Cohen song; the show itself is about a traveling circus act that features juggling, a mermaid, original music, and murder). The list goes on, each show wildly different from the last. What they all have in common is a lightheartedness, a love for comedy and tragedy, and a faith in humanity that transcends differences and hardships. A Ferguson show is funny, sad, luminous, and wondrous, and his ability to create, direct, market, and produce them is part of the reason he was such a good choice for the Southern job.

The Southern Theater is housed in a 99-year-old building that has seen various incarnations as a cultural center, silent movie and vaudeville house, garage, gift shop, dining destination, secondary Guthrie performance space, and, finally, a home for the Twin Cities’ most innovative independent performing artists. The first time he saw it, Ferguson was enchanted by the idiosyncratic, cavernous space and dreamed about doing shows there. Now he’s helping run the place.

“I got applicants from across the spectrum of experience,” says Speelman. “Jon stood out for a number of reasons. He was familiar with the Southern. He had performed here so he understood the physical space and the magic that it provides and the limitations it has. He understood the Southern’s place in the Twin Cities performing arts community. He knew its history. He’s been in the Twin Cities long enough to understand its audiences and what they will support.” It was Ferguson’s expertise as a director combined with his understanding of how to challenge and grow the Southern audience that made him Speelman’s top choice.

Ferguson knows his own artistic aesthetic will not always be in sync with or appropriate for the needs of the Southern, nor will it be the deciding factor as he considers what to program. “I’ve already been using the cliché of wearing two hats while I’m here,” he says. “There’s Jon Ferguson, director, who is meeting with Patricia about the show I might be doing here, production details for present shows or future shows, and other times I’m wearing the other hat. I usually wear a scarf as well when I’m curating,” he deadpans. “I’m trying to think about mainly what is right for the theater, the aesthetic of the theater, traditionally what kind of work happens here, the mission of the theater. I’m into new and I’m into work that challenges the artists and the audience and excites people, provokes people, but I need to also think about what will get bums on seats.”

This pragmatic open-mindedness will serve Ferguson well at the Southern, which has a reputation for staging nontraditional performances of all kinds. Artists, he says, need to know that their home is still here, at the Southern, where they’ve always belonged—and that appealing to his sensibilities isn’t a prerequisite for performing at the Southern. “There is work that I personally don’t do in my artistic life that I’m very interested in bringing here,” says Ferguson. “Some work I’ll have a great understanding of, and some I won’t.”

Jaime Kleiman is a freelance arts journalist and actress who lives in Minneapolis. Visit jonfergusontheater.com for information about Ferguson’s upcoming shows and other projects.