Deborah Warner stepped into the expanse of the drill hall at the Park Avenue Armory, looked around and said: “Isn’t this unbelievable? I mean, it’s a dream.”
Warner, 66, will soon be spending a lot more time there. On Tuesday, the Armory announced that it had appointed her as its next artistic director, after the death of Pierre Audi last year.
Rebecca Robertson, the Armory’s president and executive producer, said that she had interviewed “some really wonderful people” to succeed Audi, but “I think this is the right decision for us, for sure.”
Coming in with more than four decades of credits, Warner is hoping (a hope the Armory shares) that her work as a practitioner will extend to the building’s spaces during her tenure.
“I’ve always been a bit suspicious about artistic directors who are practitioners,” Warner said. “But let’s face it, that’s how it used to be if we look at Trevor Nunn, Richard Eyre, Peter Hall.” Like her, they were all eminent stage directors in Britain who directed at theaters that they ran.
“I have a certain modesty,” she added, “but I would like to do this, and certainly across the disciplines.”
As an impresario, Audi was a visionary, with a global sensibility and a taste for the monumental. He gave Warner a major break in the 1980s, when he brought a “King Lear” she directed to the Almeida Theater, which he founded in London. Warner went on to hold directing and administrative posts at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theater, frequently collaborate with the actress Fiona Shaw and become the first woman to win an Olivier Award (the English equivalent of the Tonys) for directing.
She has also had a thriving career in opera, though her most recent new production at the Metropolitan Opera, a season-opening “Eugene Onegin” in 2013, was derailed when she had to depart for a surgery. The staging was finished by Shaw, who was busy with work at the Glyndebourne in England and was barely present at the Met. The production was heavily criticized when it opened.
Still, Warner’s achievements made her a promising candidate for the Armory role, said Robertson, who has been familiar with Warner’s work since the mid-1990s, when Warner directed Shaw in a staged reading of “The Waste Land” in a Broadway theater turned porn house on 42nd Street. Robertson was also a fan of “The Angel Project,” from the early 2000s, which was a dreamy, interdisciplinary journey across vacant spaces in New York.
“She’s really covered the map,” Robertson said. “And that’s what we want.” Warner, she added, has a gift for making art in found spaces, and the Armory “is the ultimate found space.”
Warner didn’t apply for the Armory job but was invited to submit a proposal. And the further she got in the process, she said, the more she realized that the Armory was a building whose possibilities were “infinite and endless.”
“This is ravishing because it provokes and prompts the artist,” she said of the building. “It probably makes you better because it really pushes you. And then there’s another explosion for the audience when they come here because always, suddenly everything is other than they expected.”
Previous artistic leaders of the Armory, like Audi and Alex Poots, who now programs the Shed, commissioned a broad range of artists from different disciplines to make works that often contained elements of many art forms at once. Warner’s résumé, with its emphasis on theater and opera, would suggest narrower interests. But, she said, she has “secret passions” on a personal level beyond the work she is best known for, and her programming will reflect that.
In any case, Warner said, the Armory isn’t a place bound by divisions of genre or discipline. “I think that’s the great thing and the very unusual thing about here,” she said. “If you read the brochure for the year, it doesn’t go ‘Dance Section,’ ‘Visual Art, ‘Theater,’ ‘Opera.’ It doesn’t say any of that. It just says the title.”
More than anything, she said, the Armory is special for its potential. During a recent visit to New York, she sneaked in at night. A security guard had let her in to the ornately palatial 19th-century building, and because she saw that the door to the drill hall was cracked open, she went inside and stood in the middle. “This,” she said, “is when it really feels like a temple.”
“It must sit here just waiting,” Warner added. “It’s very calm, this great building, and it’s waiting for someone to come in so it can ask, ‘Now what are you going to do with me?’”
Joshua Barone is an editor for The Times covering classical music and dance. He also writes criticism about classical music and opera.
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