James Houghton, founder of off-Broadway theater . By Bruce Weber New
York Times . NEW YORK - James Houghton, the founder and, until
recently, the artistic director of the Signature Theater Company, one
of off-Broadway's essential nonprofit theaters and perhaps the nation's
leading safe house for playwrights, died Tuesday at his home in
Manhattan. He was 57. The cause was stomach cancer, his brother, Scott,
said. A former actor, Mr. Houghton was in his early 30s when he started
Signature in 1991 with the idea of presenting annual, season-long
programs featuring the work of just one playwright. The initial season
was devoted to Romulus Linney, a prolific and daring but largely unsung
dramatist whose play "Heathen Valley" Houghton had appeared in a few
years earlier. In an 85-seat space, Mr. Houghton produced six plays by
Linney, who died in 2011, for a total of $35,000. Over the next
quarter-century, playwrights as formidable and famous as Arthur Miller,
Sam Shepard, August Wilson, and John Guare, and others not so famous -
Lee Blessing, Adrienne Kennedy and María Irene Fornés, for example -
had the spectrum of their careers, often including new works, showcased
in multiple productions. During the 1994-95 season, devoted to Horton
Foote, Signature presented a world premiere play, "The Young Man From
Atlanta," which transferred to Broadway and won a Pulitzer Prize. As
the theater grew in artistic power, it gained in financial muscle as
well. It moved to bigger spaces, most recently to the Pershing Square
Signature Center on West 42nd Street, a three-theater,
75,000-square-foot compound designed by Frank Gehry Architects for
which the theater raised $70 million. A year ago, after learning of his
cancer, Mr. Houghton announced that he would step down at Signature
after the 2015-16 season. Paige Evans, formerly the artistic director
of LCT3, the new-play development program at Lincoln Center Theater,
succeeded him. A few weeks ago, interviewed as he was moving out of his
office, Mr. Houghton told The New York Times that working with Linney
as an actor had spurred the idea for a playwrights' theater. "I just
fell in love with this process with Romulus," he said. "There was just
something so spontaneous - anything could happen in the room. New lines
would come, a cut would come, just because of something you either
inhabited the script with, or because you asked a question. At the same
time, Romulus, at 60, was folding his own programs and hanging his own
lights, and it just felt like it wasn't right that he was still pushing
so hard, pushing a boulder up the mountain. Anyway, that planted seeds.
James Joseph Houghton was born in San Francisco in 1958, and grew up in
the Bay area. His mother, the former Joan Heaney, worked as a dental
assistant and a preschool teacher. His father, Sherrill, was a school
administrator. James fell in love with the theater at St. Ignatius
College Preparatory, a Jesuit school in San Francisco, and with friends
he started a theater company, Overeasy Productions, when he was 18. He
earned a BFA at Santa Clara University, and an MFA from the Meadows
School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. In 1986,
he won a place in the Acting Company, the touring classical-theater
troupe whose cofounder, John Houseman, became a mentor. Its other
alumni include Kevin Kline, Patti LuPone, David Ogden Stiers, Frances
Conroy, Jeffrey Wright, Harriet Harris, Hamish Linklater, and Keith
David. That same year he married Joyce O'Connor. In addition to her and
his brother, he also leaves his parents; three sisters; a son, Henry;
and a daughter, Lily.
