Jacob G. Padrón in his office at Long Wharf Theatre when the building was still at 222 Sargent Drive. The photo, which he keeps with his, depicts Rev. Jesse Jackson (right) kissing labor leader César Chávez on Aug. 1, 1988, as Chávez withstood his final and longest fast for the United Farm Workers (UFW) in Delano, Calif. Jackson later joined the fast, stepping in for Chávez after he was unable to continue after 36 days with only water. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
Jacob G. Padrón walked into Long Wharf Theatre with a belief that theater could and did belong to everyone, including New Haveners who had never stepped foot in the building. Six years, one global pandemic and a move to itinerancy later, he’s leaving with that belief intact—and a hope that theater can continue to sustain the city, even in the most uncertain of times.
Padrón, who since 2019 has served as artistic director at Long Wharf Theatre (LWT), will be leaving the theater at the end of the current 2025-2026 season. In the past six and a half years, his tenure has included a commitment to diverse voices, a shift to itinerancy, and an interest in collaborations with both New Haven-based partners and national producing theaters.
When asked, he did not comment on where he would be headed next. Long Wharf, which for three years had offices at 70 Audubon St., is now running its day-to-day operations out of Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU), where it has built a partnership with the theater department and Kendall Drama Lab.
“The vision was always about expanding who LWT could belong to, and my belief was that it could belong to everyone,” Padrón said by text message Wednesday night. “The stage is a place that can hold all our stories. With the challenges we faced (there were so many!), we found an opportunity to deepen our commitment to our community by bringing theatre directly to the people. Our itinerant model allows us to build on Long Wharf Theatre’s extraordinary legacy of innovation and possibility.”
Mason Alexander Park in I Am My Own Wife. T. Charles Erickson Photos
Padrón, whose tenure was announced in late 2018 and began three months later, has steered the theater through a wild and sometimes precarious six and a half years. When he started at the space in February of 2019, Long Wharf was already at an inflection point, after letting its artistic director go following allegations of sexual misconduct. Within months, the theater also named Kit Ingui as its managing director, after longtime employee Josh Borenstein stepped down from the role in July 2019.
Padrón, who came out of a world of social justice theater and efforts to highlight new work and Latine playwrights, promised to bring a new vision to the theater, and he largely delivered on it, even when it was unpopular with some of Long Wharf’s longtime members and supporters. In early 2019, one of the first steps was a community listening tour, where he dipped a toe into potential collaborations that later became reality. Around him, the season moved forward, with work that lived somewhere between the old model of producing and a new, sharp vision.
Long Wharf was changing. When the season began again in fall 2019, audiences returned to a theater that looked and felt more like the diverse and polyphonic city in which it was based, with works like Ricardo Pérez González’ On The Grounds of Belonging and Kate Hamill’s Pride & Prejudice. By that winter, the theater had branched out into new collaborations with the New Haven Pride Center, with a performance from Mason Alexander Park that remains memorable over five years later.
It seemed, indeed, like Long Wharf was building momentum, including Padrón’s first full season in the role. And then, just days after announcing a “boundary breaking” season in March 2020, Covid-19 shutdowns hit New Haven, leaving theaters across the country scrambling. At the theater, Lloyd Suh’s The Chinese Lady was cancelled just days before opening. Padrón, alongside Managing Director Kit Ingui, pivoted because the moment called for it.
LWT Artistic Director Jacob G. Padrón, now-former Board Chair Laura Pappano, and Managing Director Kit Ingui at a season launch in March 2020. The season was later reimagined due to Covid. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
It was, perhaps, not the transformation he had imagined. There were readings and plays that brought the community online and a push for federal relief funding that took over a year to come through. There were virtual projects, from performances that conjured magic in an empty theater to a take on the New Haven Play Project, itself birthed well before Padrón’s tenure, that brought it to the screen. In August of that year, it also gave way to the first Black Trans Women at the Center, a play festival that has continued to center and amplify the voices of Black trans women for six years (read about last year’s here).
The last was made possible by Joey Reyes, a former line producer at the theater, and performer Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi, who has also presented at the theater's semi-annual Artistic Congress and included her powerful work among the plays.
“If there was ever a moment to reimagine the role that theater can play and how a theater company can show up for its community, this is that moment,” Padrón said at the time, during a virtual season kickoff in September 2020.
If there was reimagining, there was also deep loss: Long Wharf ended the 2020 fiscal year with an estimated $2 million loss from the 2019-2020 season. After an initial round of layoffs in the spring of 2020, it eliminated 40 full- and part-time positions, bringing a staff of 65 to 25. Those did not include hundreds of contract workers—actors, directors, dramaturgs, educators, artistic fellows and designers—who were largely out of work at theaters through 2021.
Meanwhile, Long Wharf was also charting its way back to live performance, in a kind of holding pattern that defined many performing arts institutions through 2021. After presenting work on a summer stage outside in August 2021, the theater jumped back into an in-person season, with a performance of The Chinese Lady that had been over a year in the making. The season, in many ways, spoke to New Haven’s diversity, from Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires In The Mirror to Eliana Pipes’ Dream Hou$e.
Coteal L. Horne in Fires In The Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn And Other Stories. T. Charles Erickson Photo.
Just as Padrón had hoped, the season included several new and existing collaborations, including with the National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO), Alliance Theatre in Atlanta and Baltimore Center Stage, and True Colors Theatre Company. But in the midst of it, he and Ingui found themselves pivoting again, this time as the theater announced that it would be moving away from its longtime home on Sargent Drive and into itinerancy.
The reaction from the community was immediate, with both cautious optimism and an outpouring of “anger, fear, confusion and sadness,” Padrón remembered in a text message Wednesday. “We tried our best to hold all of that with care,” with a series of town hall meetings that were both virtual and in-person. The theater also planned a long, intentional goodbye to the space, complete with a community performance and final staged reading that closed the space.
“I think audiences couldn’t imagine a LWT without our physical home at Sargent Drive,” Padrón said. “But the history, the spirit, and ‘bones’ of that theater have always been with us and will remain with us. I think at first the new model was an abstract idea, but over the last four years we’ve been able to demonstrate that powerful, once-in-a-lifetime theatre could be made in different spaces all across our great city.”
“And what better city to innovate in than New Haven,” he continued. “I hope our work has become a ‘lighthouse’ for the larger American theatre. I hope artists and organizations across the country, and around the world, look to LWT for artistic inspiration. Maybe more theaters will produce A View From The Bridge in a boathouse overlooking the water.”
Scenes from She Loves Me at the LAB at ConnCORP last year. Curtis Brown Photography Photo.
In fact, he added, he is most proud of some of the partnerships that have come out of that move, from Collective Consciousness Theatre to Puerto Ricans United, Inc. to the LAB at ConnCORP, where Long Wharf recently transformed a gymnasium for Padrón’s adaptation of She Loves Me last year.
Since the theater first adapted to its new model, Long Wharf has produced works at the Space Ballroom, in people’s homes, at Bregamos Community Theater, at the Canal Dock Boathouse, and at Southern Connecticut State University, as well as the Yale Schwarzman Center.
Those collaborations have brought in new voices not just onstage, but also off. According to a press release sent out Thursday, “two-thirds of Long Wharf Theatre's overall audience were first-time attendees, a 44 percent increase in new patrons year over year.”
“Partnership is the way of the future!” Padrón said via text, adding that he’s tried hard to make the theater into “more of a ‘home’ for local artists” like Terrence Riggins and Cheyenne Barboza. Earlier this year, that vision came to life at the Off Broadway Theater downtown, as Riggins opened his one-man play, Unbecoming Tragedy: A Ritual Journey Towards Destiny, to a full house. Barboza, who directed that work, will return to Long Wharf this season to direct August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean in February.
Members of Long Wharf's artistic leadership and the artistic ensemble on the Claire Tow Stage at 222 Sargent Drive, during Home(Coming), a two-day, multi-site goodbye to Long Wharf Theatre building from New York-based theater director Jenny Koons and New Haven-based line producer Jes Mack. Lucy Gellman File Photo.
Padrón isn’t going anywhere immediately: he plans to finish out the current season before his formal departure. Meanwhile, other transitions at the theater are also afoot: last month, Long Wharf appointed Meredith Suttles as its next managing director, a position that Eric Gershman held down for several months after Ingui left.
Suttles, who most recently served as an associate consultant with A.D. Hamingson & Associates, praised the work Padrón has done. At A.D. Hamingson & Associates, Suttles spearheaded advancement for the Williamstown Theatre Festival and long-term planning for Mid Atlantic Arts. Before that, she also worked at organizations including the Marin Theatre Company, TheaterWorksUSA, Soho Repertory Theatre and The Public Theater.
“His ability to innovate while remaining deeply rooted in the values of collaboration and equity has been truly inspiring,” she said in a press release Thursday. “As we look ahead, I am excited to build on the strong foundation Jacob has created, ensuring that Long Wharf Theatre continues to thrive, grow and connect with audiences in bold new ways.”
A representative from Berlin Rosen, the marketing firm with which Long Wharf works, did not respond to a request for more information around the search process that will likely take place next year.
Lucy Gellman File Photo.
The current season has already begun with a production of Monet Hurst-Mendoza’s Torera, a co-production with the WP Theater, The Sol Project, and Latinx Playwrights Circle running through Oct. 19 at the WP Theater in New York. The New Haven leg of the season begins with an August Wilson Celebration kickoff party at the New Haven Museum in October and Sanaz Toossi’s English in January at Southern Connecticut State University. It continues with Gem of the Ocean in February and March.
As he prepares to leave Long Wharf, Padrón said he also thinks that the future of American theater—which has stirred up what feels like 100 thought pieces in the past three years—is bright. That is, if actors, directors and artistic leaders pivot with the times, and listen to the needs of their respective communities.
“I think the American theatre is only in a time of crisis if we’re trying to maintain the status quo, but we’re in a time of great possibility if we’re imagining a new way forward,” he said via text. “And given the state of the world, we need stories right now. We need theatre right now. I think LWT is on the right path.”