One of the longest runs in Baltimore theater history is coming to an end.
After 32 years as managing director of Center Stage, Peter W. Culman, 60, has announced his retirement. The length of his tenure was a record in the non-profit regional theater world.
Culman shepherded Center Stage through early financial troubles, a devastating fire and hundreds of productions and helped mold it into one of the leading regional theaters in the country. He will retire on June 30, 2000, at the end of his current contract. His successor will be chosen in a national search.
After three decades, Culman explained, he feels he no longer has the energy for a job that often entails 15-hour days. "I don't think it's fair to Center Stage, the art form of theater or myself to continue when you know you don't have the reserves you need," he said.
"We all grow up with parental bromides. My mother was forever saying, 'Leave at the heights of the ball,' and I would concur with her. At this point it seems to me I want to slow down the rhythm of the waltz."
Although he will be leaving Center Stage, Culman plans to remain in Baltimore. "I'm not retiring in the full sense of the word," he said. "The best analogy that I can give you is that I'm going to go to the metaphorical equivalent of a shipbuilding yard and go into dry-dock for six months and be refitted, and during that time I'll see what options come along. By Jan. 1, 2001, I will have come up with a menu of things I want to do."
Comptroller William Donald Schaefer, who was mayor when Center Stage (then on North avenue) was destroyed by fire in 1974, said, "Without him [Center Stage] wouldn't have made it. Peter was the one who was the stabilizing influence, the captain of the ship who kept them going during down times and up times. He always kept his demeanor. He always was upbeat."
Culman -- who was described yesterday by Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke as "a national treasure" -- played a major role in giving Center Stage a national profile. He served two terms as president of the League of Resident Theatres (LORT), a management association, and was a board member of Theatre Communications Group (TCG), a service organization for regional theaters.
"He is one of the most important leaders who has, through his vision and influence, been instrumental in the creation and growth of the arts movement of the not-for-profit theater," said David Hawkanson, a TCG board member and managing director of Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater. "Many in the field consider [Center Stage] their artistic home because it is clearly the best managed and most stable of arts organizations."
Michael Maso, president of LORT and managing director of Boston's Huntington Theatre Company, said, "Peter is such a remarkable person, and it seems to me that in the history of Center Stage, as I understand it, and certainly in the history of LORT, Peter holds a very unique position. He is your true philosopher-manager."
Most managing directors are behind-the-scenes figures, but Culman has become closely associated with Center Stage in the public mind as well as in artistic circles. He has served side-by-side with five artistic directors.
"He is not technically the founder of Center Stage. There is no question, however, that he is our metaphorical founding father and he is Center Stage to the community and certainly to our trustees and to the staff. This is a remarkable tenure," said Nancy K. Roche, former president of the board and head of the theater's search committee.
Culman is greatly respected as a manager for his fiscal responsibility and success as a fund-raiser. "He has a talent for raising money for Center Stage based on a passionate belief in its product," said artistic director Irene Lewis. When Culman arrived, Center Stage was struggling through its fourth season and having trouble meeting its payroll. Today the theater boasts an endowment of more than $10 million.
The annual budget has risen from about $275,000 in 1966 to its current level of $5.4 million. The theater is in its 22nd season of operating in the black. By the time Culman leaves, he will have overseen two endowment-capital campaigns that have raised $25 million in just over a decade.
"The budget process that Center Stage goes through is the most detailed process I've ever experienced," said Center Stage board president James T. Brady, Maryland's former economic development secretary. "He's clearly the one who has imbued in the staff that we have to be financially responsible. He was the ringleader of all of that."
"A lot of the stability is his. It's always scary to think of a theater as something that is like the First National Bank. At the same time, it helps when the going gets rough and it was rough when Peter appeared," said T. Edward Hambleton, a pioneer of off-Broadway theater and the Baltimorean who brought Culman to Center Stage back in 1966.
Although his attention to the bottom line might suggest training in business, Culman, a native of New York City, came to Center Stage with a theater background. A 1959 graduate of Williams College in Massachusetts, where he was president of the dramatics society, he spent a year working in commercial theater as an apprentice to a London producer before plunging into the non-profit theater world with a job at off-Broadway's legendary Phoenix Theatre, which Hambleton co-founded.
After a stint in the military as a Chinese linguist in the early 1960s, Culman went to work at the Barter Theatre in Virginia, acting, directing and eventually serving as managing director, the post he held when Hambleton recommended him to Center Stage.
Theater has not been his entire life, however. He and his wife, Anne LaFarge "Sita" Culman, vice president of the Abell Foundation, have two grown sons, Sean, a free-lance architect and educator, and Liam, a financial manager with BT Alex. Brown. Culman plans to continue his activities as an adjunct professor of homiletics (preaching) at St. Mary's Seminary and University, a trustee of the Baltimore-based Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies, and as secretary of National Arts Stabilization, an organization that helps get arts institutions on a firm financial footing.
One activity he will not be involved in is selecting Center Stage's next managing director. "I think it's a mistake for someone in my position who's been around as long as I have to pick your successor," Culman said. "It becomes too ego-centric and autobiographical."
Furthermore, he continued, "On a professional basis I don't anticipate having any involvement with Center Stage in the future. The point behind all this is that you don't want to get in the way of the person who comes afterward. You don't want to set up a comparisons game. The best way to avoid that is to give the person a clean blackboard."
Roche, head of the search committee, said she is just beginning to assemble her committee and is grateful the theater has 15 months' notice. "We certainly have the luxury of doing it in the fullest and most thorough possible way and I think it is the kind of position that will certainly be readily known on the theater horizon," she said. At the same time, she added, "I think Peter Culman will never be replaced."
Pub Date: 3/24/99