In New Bedford, An Inside-Out Makeover

Written by Pamela Reynolds

The red velvet seats have been stripped away, broken pieces of wall have been ripped out, and the theater’s grand chandelier, a crystal bowl nearly six feet wide, has been carefully lowered and carted off to be cleaned, rewired, and fitted with new LED lights.

The dusty, chaotic process of renovating New Bedford’s Zeiterion Performing Arts Center is underway.

It's an exhaustive $37 million renovation of a theater home to three different cultural organizations —Zeiterion Theatre, New Bedford Festival Theatre, and New Bedford Symphony Orchestra. For 101 years, the theater, affectionately known as “the Z” among staff and patrons, has functioned as an integral link in the chain of New Bedford’s cultural life.

But the dust and chaos of the renovation reflect an equally dramatic shift in the Z’s approach to staffing, programming, and community engagement. The Z is in the midst of a refurbishment of purpose and programming that, when completed, will radically improve its connection to New Bedford’s diverse communities. The goal is to make the Z a place of belonging for all community members.

“It’s a parallel that the building looks an awful lot like the process happening with our administration right now,” says Nicole Merusi, Vice President of Strategic Advancement at Zeiterion. “And by no means are we finished. We are not checking a whole lot of boxes yet. When I say we're in the messy middle, we are, literally!”

“It’s progress over perfection,” admits Rosemary Gill, Zeiterion President and CEO. “When I think about the work we're doing right now, it’s like from the inside out. We're not going to fulfill our obligations and commitment to the community without changing from within, and without our staff and board looking like what we want to be and who we want to serve.”

A Top to Bottom Makeover

Before work began on the Zeiterion in July 2024, its fraying seats were plastered with duct tape. Lines to the theater’s limited restroom facilities stretched down the hallway. The sound system was outdated. The concession stand was so small that patrons would likely encounter a long wait during intermission.

“We realized it was time to upgrade the patron experience,” says Merusi. “The building is more than 100 years old. The renovation of 1982 was 40 years ago. The seats and materials used in the theater were second-hand. So, back in 2018, we started thinking about improving the patron experience and started dreaming bigger.”

The Z also began to dream bigger when it came to forging a deeper bond with New Bedford’s diverse community. What if the community felt a shared ownership of the space? What if each and every patron walking through the theatre doors felt a sense of true belonging? And what if the staff, programming and outreach reflected New Bedford’s diverse mosaic of a population?

In 2019, the Z joined the Barr-Klarman Massachusetts Arts Initiative (BKMAI) which supports mid-size arts organizations looking to improve on racial equity, financial health, and adaptive capacity issues. Suddenly the makeover project conceived the year before became much more extensive than just the physical renewal of the Z’s 1923-era 33,000-square-foot building.

The question became, how to break beyond the limits of so many arts organizations? That is, the all-too-pervasive model of the white-led organization that creates art by and for white people? Leadership at the Z decided to ask the New Bedford community directly.

In 2021, it commissioned a study by WolfBrown, an arts research and planning consultancy to interview leaders of New Bedford community organizations. Some were interviewed personally, and others answered surveys. In total, WolfBrown heard from 118 community members. The questions revolved around how well the Z, which attracts about 70,000 patrons annually, serves the entire New Bedford community.

What they heard was disconcerting. “We weren't surprised by a lot of the response, but it hurt to hear a lot of it,” says Gill. Although respondents cared about the Z and wanted the space to live up to its potential, the community felt left out. Community groups felt partnerships with the Z were transactional and one-sided. Patrons felt the Z was irrelevant to the young, people of color, and those of limited means because of programming choices. The Z’s harshest critics saw the Z as perpetuating systemic racism by not having more people of color on its board and staff.

Some of it felt unfair, admits Gill. It turns out the Z was putting on programming that some community members weren’t aware of. “But that told us something, too,” she says. “That told us we weren’t doing a good job of communicating all we do.” Despite the lambasting, the Z had committed to publishing the WolfBrown report on its website, no matter how scathing.

“We shared it with all of the participants, and we've shared it with some candidates for employment beforehand so that they can see who we are,” says Gill. “We've been pretty raw about that."

Moving Forward with a Good IDEA

With the eye-opening revelations of the WolfBrown report, the Z began to understand a lot of work was needed. Its programming needed to be reimagined to respond to the needs and desires of younger, more racially and socioeconomically diverse audiences. The Z needed to foster community partnerships, hire more staff of color, and include the community in making decisions.

Merusi says the Z learned an important lesson about “the difference between impact and intention.” “We had all the intentions of being a good partner,” she says. “We had all of the intention of asking for help in ways we thought were reciprocal…but in the grand scheme of things, it was not.”

The Z took what it learned from WolfBrown and began administrative “renovation” work. It expanded its Anti-Racist Task Force, initially created in 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, into the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Action (IDEA) committee, a collaborative of staff and board members committed to transforming the feedback the Z had collected into recommendations and concrete action steps that the organization could take to make structural change.

The IDEA committee, made up of eight staff and board members, dedicated itself to embedding equity into every facet of the Z’s planning, across hiring, programming, partnerships, policies and practices, communication and more.

Maria Poulos, the Associate Director of Marketing and Communications at the Z, is co-chair of the IDEA committee and was at the Z when the WolfBrown report was first commissioned. Key to working toward a more diverse and inclusive Z has been ensuring that the entire organization, with a permanent regular staff of about two dozen, is involved in the effort, not just the eight members of the IDEA committee.

“It doesn't just live with one or two or three people,” she says. “It's organization-wide. It's built into our staff meetings. We talk about it all the time, so it's not siloed. And I'm very proud of that. And I think that's been key to making progress.”

Challenges and Opportunities at the Z

The Z is working toward seven equity goals born out of its larger strategic plan. The larger plan envisions Z as a “community living room,” in which the broad demographics of the community are reflected both in programming and in staffing. Some of the seven equity goals include increasing visibility in the community, doing a better job of spreading the word on the Z’s offerings, as well as getting more input from the community about programming opportunities, and developing long-term reciprocal partnerships with diverse community organizations.

Although the theater is still closed, and hiring is on pause until building renovations are finished, the IDEA committee has already swung into action on some of its goals.

Acting on one prominent goal to be more visible in the community, the Z has started a “Community Time” policy in which full time staff must spend 16 hours each year in the community, volunteering for, learning from, or interacting with groups underrepresented at the Z.

“The idea is that it's a way in which we are building in a structure within the workday for everyone who's part of the Z to be out in the community so that it's no longer just my job to be connecting with and learning from the community,” says Emma York, Associate Director of Education and Community. “It's possible for someone who's a box office attendant or a part-time graphic designer to do that work and do it in a way that feels meaningful to them.”

In addition, the Z produced a free community event called “Lift Us Up,” a collaboration between Zeiterion Performing Arts Center, New Bedford Symphony Orchestra, and the New Bedford Historical Society, last October.

“The afternoon was essentially three spoken word artists, rap artists from the community, two who identify as Cape Verdean, one who identifies as Hispanic/Latino, who were offering their original poetry as well as homages to famous poets like Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes,” recounts York. “And then the New Bedford Symphony Orchestra arranged music to accompany their poems. We were producing an event in collaboration with community partners and local artists and the response was really cool.”

A Refresh on Many Levels

When the refurbished Z finally opens to the public in 2025, it will be, according to Merusi, “a shiny new version of itself.” It will boast not only restored historic murals and paint colors but refreshed tapestries, new comfortable seats, a new marquee, and a new box office. Its three floors will include additional performance spaces, social spaces, and rehearsal studios. The additional space will allow the Z to partner with smaller community groups, thus spreading the organization’s reach.

Merusi and Gill hope that instead of being open a few nights a week, the new and improved Z will indeed function as a “community living room” that welcomes many different kinds of people visiting for different reasons.

Still, these are hopes, not yet reality. Questions abound: How will the Z use its new space so that it remains equitable and accessible to the community? Will the Z be able to build trust with the community? Who is the Z centering? Who is getting missed? Is it making assumptions?

Many of those questions are embedded in the Z’s equity lens, a short document that every staff and board member is encouraged to refer to when making a decision so that they can keep equity front of mind. There may be more questions than answers at this point, but that’s par for the course when you’re in the messy middle.

Leveraging Lessons Learned

As the Z remakes its lobby and retools its marquee, it is also reshaping its administrative priorities and strategies. Diversity and inclusion are front and center, and New Bedford’s pre-eminent cultural space has learned some lessons it wants to share:

- Good intentions are not enough. The Z thought it was doing all the right things to attract a diverse audience and promote diverse programming. But talks with patrons and community partners revealed otherwise.

“We had all of the intentions of asking for help in ways that we thought were reciprocal,” reflects Merusi. “But really in the grand scheme of things and the way that we followed through it was not.”

- Plan "with," not "for." The community felt that the Z was developing programming in a bubble, without consulting partners and patrons.

“What we were hearing from the community was “we do care about you, we want you to succeed, we want to be part of this,” says Merusi. “But you've let us down in all of these ways.”

To improve on this problem, the Z will redesign its programming committee to include guidance from community members.

- Tackle goals that can be accomplished right away. To show the community that it was committed to following through on what it had learned in the WolfBrown report, the Z planned efforts, like its “community time” policy and community programs like “Lift Us Up” that would be something people could see and participate in right away.

York adds that the “A” in the IDEA committee “stands for accountability and action, two major asks of our community and components in building trust.”

- Be willing to make course corrections. Gill says originally, no community members sat on the Z’s strategic planning committee. “But then we realized maybe one or two meetings in, we were like, wait a minute, we have to stop, press reset,” says Gill. “We have to bring them in now.” The strategic planning committee ended up consisting of six board members, six staff, and six community members with equal decision-making power.

- Allow for vulnerability. “We needed to allow for vulnerability so that we wouldn't protect ourselves or put up barriers that would allow us to fall back on old ways of thinking and doing things and also resist the hard stuff,” says Gill.

“We are still very much figuring this out,” adds Merusi. “We have not always course corrected. We still are making mistakes and falling back on old patterns. It is taking a lot more effort and mental capacity and physical capacity to do this work. And we have to be okay with each other saying, ‘wait, we have to slow down.’”

Published 12.09.2024