Theatre Horizon and The Wilma Theater tap new artistic directors

At the opening night curtain of The America Play in May, the Wilma Theater elevated Lindsay Smiling to the role of sole artistic director. Smiling—a longtime member of the Wilma’s HotHouse Acting Company—had served as co-artistic director since 2023, sharing the leadership responsibilities with Morgan Green and Yury Urnov after the departure of James Ijames. Urnov will remain on staff as the company’s resident director, with Green leaving to pursue her freelance directing career.

A few weeks later, Theatre Horizon announced that it would be led by Amina Robinson, filling a vacancy left in 2024 when Nell Bang-Jensen resigned to become CEO of FringeArts. A prolific Philadelphia director and Temple professor, Robinson’s history with the Norristown company stretches back to 2018, when she helmed their highly acclaimed production of The Color Purple (here’s my review). For that assignment, she became the first Black woman to win a Barrymore for directing—a feat she’s repeated twice since.

An instant connection

Robinson felt a connection to Theatre Horizon from that first experience. “I was still really new in my directing career when I did [The Color Purple],” she said in an interview. “I was hot off the presses as a director. Theatre Horizon made it really gentle and easy for me, easing me into the process in a very lovely way. They felt a lot like family in the level of support they provided me, especially as a newer director.”

Feeling an instant connection to the institution, Robinson previously applied to replace outgoing co-founder Erin Reilly as artistic director in 2019. She didn’t get the position then, but she intuited her time with Theatre Horizon was far from over.

“I believe all things happen in the time they’re meant to happen,” she said. “When it came back around, it became even more interesting to me.”

From the HotHouse to the director’s seat

Smiling’s introduction to the Wilma was not as auspicious. After earning his MFA in acting at Temple University, company co-founder Jiri Zizka cast him in Resurrection Blues, a late work by the legendary playwright Arthur Miller. “I had about five lines, three of which were in Spanish,” Smiling remembered with a laugh. “I didn’t quite know this would be my artistic home at that point, but I was excited to join this reputable theater and do exciting work.”

After a stint in New York, though, Smiling found his way back to the Wilma as an inaugural member of the HotHouse, a standing company founded by former artistic director Blanka Zizka that emphasizes a community ensemble and exploring a plurality of training styles. Since returning to Philadelphia, Smiling has acted and directed in more than two dozen Wilma productions.

Smiling joined the theater’s artistic administration after Ijames stepped away and Blanka Zizka transitioned to an emeritus role. He felt it made sense for the HotHouse to have a proverbial seat at the leadership table.

“When [James] stepped down, one of the things that became clear to me was that after Blanka stepped away, there was nobody who actually had the longevity with the acting company,” Smiling said. “There was a continuity that Blanka brought from a leadership position. I said, there’s got to be someone from the acting company to step up.”

Investing in the community

Smiling officially begins his tenure on August 1, with Robinson stepping into her role in November. As administrative leaders, they’ll both be tasked with the realities of running a theater company: planning seasons, assisting in casting, fundraising, and overseeing staff. But both expressed a desire to strengthen the position of their institutions as community resources, both for their audiences and for the artists they could nurture.

“It’s really important to invest in the community in Norristown,” Robinson said. “We are a Norristown theater company, so it becomes really important to think about how we best serve that community and Montgomery County. When people from Philly come to our theater, they’re experiencing the power of what that is, as opposed to us trying to become an imitation of other Philadelphia theaters.”

Robinson views Theatre Horizon as a gathering space, with the ability to nurture early career artists. “People like to say theater is a dying art,” she said. “I don’t believe theater is going anywhere, and I believe we are going to experience a huge resurgence. I want Theatre Horizon to have its finger right on the pulse of creating these new artists. I want artists to go out in the world and say, ‘I got my start at Theatre Horizon’.”

“I want art to break people open”

Smiling echoed that sentiment, with the hope that the Wilma’s unique approach to ensemble acting and community building could be broadly applied in Philadelphia. He also plans to continue the company’s standard of presenting the bold, challenging works for which they’ve become known.

“I want art to break people open, to reimagine who they think they are, and to get away from the sense that you are one single self,” Smiling said. “The more that we embrace that opening of ourselves, we can start to be more forgiving and more graceful in society. That’s rooted in our ensemble training. It is not solely that you are doing a performance. You are in connection not only with the other performers, but with the audience. We want them to engage with life and the complexity of it.”

At top: Amina Robinson, the incoming artistic director at Theatre Horizon. (Photo courtesy of Theatre Horizon.)

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