Madame Director

Portrait by Max Whittaker

It was summer 2022—pick a day. Lyndsay Burch was just trying to get through it. 

Burch, then 30, had recently undertaken her role as the artistic director of B Street Theatre. She had joined the group in 2013 as an intern, advancing through the ranks as a director, writer and producer. She had penned everything from emails for donors to lyrics for an original musical. She had scrupulously managed B Street’s epochal move into The Sofia Tsakopoulos Center for Performing Arts—the expansive $31 million complex that opened in 2018. And during the pandemic, she had scrambled to salvage the theater’s programming while personally hosting hundreds of virtual B Street events on Zoom. After announcing his retirement in January 2022, longtime B Street leader Buck Busfield—who co-founded the theater in 1991 with his brother, actor Timothy Busfield (The West Wing  and Thirtysomething)—had enthusiastically endorsed Burch amid a national search for the company’s next artistic director.

Still, for all her accomplishments, something was off. Burch couldn’t shake her nagging self-doubt. “I’ve never fully run a theater before in my life,” Burch thought to herself. “What am I doing?”

“And now it’s been two years,” Burch recalls today, easing into a laugh. She grins beneath the brim of a ballcap embroidered with the honorific “Madame Director.” “We’ve had a lot of wonderful successes. So you have this imposter syndrome, and then you just put together enough time until you’re [saying], ‘OK, I guess this is going all right.’ ”

“All right” might be an understatement. Now embarking on her third year leading the city’s preeminent producer of new original theater, the now 32-year-old Burch will soon mount two major B Street shows in the span of three weeks: The theater’s annual New Comedies Festival will host its latest iteration from July 17-21, followed by the official world premiere of playwright Arlene Hutton’s acclaimed, hyper-topical drama Blood of the Lamb  from July 26 to Aug. 4.

The play was actually Busfield’s final commissioned piece, and work began on it near the end of 2021, about six months before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade the following June. Hutton’s story—imagining the potential real-world implications of outlawing abortion—turned out to be hauntingly prescient. Starring founding company member Elisabeth Nunziato and fellow B Streeter Dana Brooke, Blood  is set in a nondescript airport room in Texas, where Brooke’s character awakens to discover that her flight from California to New York had been diverted to the Lone Star State due to the woman’s mid-air miscarriage that rendered her unconscious. A lawyer, played by Nunziato, interrogates the woman about her pregnancy. Their conversations trigger a series of recriminations and revelations, spotlighting the tragedy of America’s moral and political schisms after the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Dana Brooke (left) and Elisabeth Nunziato perform during a dress rehearsal of B Street Theatre’s Blood of the Lamb. Directed by Burch, the play will receive its world premiere this summer. (Photo by Jason Kuykendall, courtesy of B Street Theatre)

“I think there’s real shock at how Arlene has illustrated something that is basically happening,” says Burch, who previously directed a one-night B Street engagement of Blood  in 2023 to help fund the play’s trip to the prestigious Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland last August. At the time, Burch knew they had something good. “The audience just was so moved by it,” she recalls. However, she wasn’t sure about how Blood ’s dark, dystopian torments would play overseas.

Her misgivings were quickly allayed. Blood of the Lamb  dazzled critics upon its first workshop production at Edinburgh, prompting a four-star review in The Guardian  and a five-star rave in The Telegraph  (which commended the play as “a pithy two-hander that packs the punch of a state-of-the-nation epic […] Lyndsay Burch’s production exudes a David Mamet-like tautness”). The play’s subsequent workshop production this February and March at the Adelaide Fringe Festival in Australia won the event’s Critics Circle award. In terms of international attention, Burch—who joined Nunziato, Brooke and Hutton on the trip to Adelaide—says Blood  is the most successful B Street play ever. In fact, that was all part of the plan—literally. The play’s commissioning and funding grew from B Street’s most recent strategic plan, which sought to raise the organization’s profile both at home and beyond.

But long before wowing international audiences, Burch was making an impact on theatergoers in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she made her directorial debut in middle school at age 13. It was then that she won a regional directing award for her production of Beth Henley’s cheeky The Miss Firecracker Contest. To repeat: A 13-year-old Lyndsay Burch earned an award for helming a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s Southern Gothic-tinged comedy.

She was hooked. “I think from then on, not only did I love directing, but I was also being validated by other people,” Burch says. “That was it. I wanted to direct.”

Burch graduated from Elon University in North Carolina in 2013 with a BFA degree in theater arts. She found her way to Sacramento as part of that year’s class of directing interns at B Street Theatre. After retaining Burch at the end of her internship, Busfield and B Street executive producer Jerry Montoya kept Burch busy: She directed over a dozen plays between 2014 and 2015 alone. She coordinated a company performing tour through India. Adept with scripts and spreadsheets alike, Burch soon found herself managing one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken in Sacramento theater history: B Street’s construction and move into The Sofia. She was 25.

READ MORE: The New B Hive : A behind-the-scenes look at the opening of The Sofia

Burch’s age didn’t faze Busfield, who recognized in her a grasp of both the big organizational picture and fine creative details that made her an ideal protégé. The title “artistic director” might sound glamorous, evoking creativity, collaboration and control. But Busfield knew the reality his successor would face. “When you’re the artistic director, people think you’re just sitting around reading plays and drinking red wine, you know?” Busfield quips. The role’s realities are often far less sexy, unless you find fiscal strategy sexy. Amid directing and planning shows, Burch also throws herself into all aspects of critically needed fundraising, from donor meet-and-greets to corporate sponsorships and grant funding. She also oversees B Street’s complex financial management. This included the refinancing of the construction loan for The Sofia after Covid torpedoed revenue projections in 2020 and 2021—a process Burch likened to getting an MBA. She makes the hard calls on what’s practical and what’s not within B Street’s budgetary and logistical limitations. She balances vision with discipline, practicing both the executive and dramatic arts in near-equal measure.

“Ultimately, I see my job as curating and executing a season that showcases my aesthetic and the vision of B Street to the best of our ability,” Burch says. She can read a fantastic play, but if she doesn’t think it can be produced with the resources at hand, she knows it won’t benefit her or the theater. “I’m also thinking about our acting company and our physical spaces,” she continues. “When those plays are ultimately selected and cast and rehearsed and then getting ready to be presented, it’s my job to make sure that it reflects our standard of quality.”

Busfield lauds Burch’s knack for leadership both on- and off-stage. Perhaps most notably, he says, Burch pushed for B Street to join the National New Play Network—an organization of theaters and stage professionals dedicated to reading, staging and supporting new work by American playwrights. Within six years, Burch was the group’s board president—a title she retains today, further elevating B Street’s national profile.

Then there is the directing process itself, a sort of marathon of wits and technique run on a tightrope. “She’s really great with casting, and she actually does a number of things I didn’t do well,” Busfield explains, citing Burch’s prowess at collaborating with the theater’s technical designers, those responsible for lighting, costumes, sets and sound. “They all like working with her,” Busfield says.

And then  there are the actors—a lively, thoughtful and occasionally prickly bunch with whom Burch has also built mutually trusting relationships that have thrived over the last decade. Nunziato, the co-lead in Blood of the Lamb, credits Burch’s instinct to play to actors’ individual strengths, as opposed to the predilection of some young directors to adhere to their own rigid artistic visions.

Burch’s good nature doesn’t hurt either. “Some directors have this rule: ‘I’m not going to laugh at anything you do, because that’s like a treat or a reward, and it’s going to throw us off track,’ ” Nunziato observes. Burch is different, she says: The director watches every production with the audience to see what lands and what needs fine-tuning. Hearing Burch’s laugh in the auditorium invigorates Nunziato and her castmates. “It’s just love, and it’s oxygen,” Nunziato says. “The amazing thing about that is it’s genuine. She doesn’t refrain from just sharing that incredible joy of theater.”

Burch will also have plenty of opportunities to laugh at the New Comedies Festival in July. The series originated as part of The Sofia’s inauguration in 2018—an intentional effort to address the dearth of durable new comedies in the American theater repertoire, Burch says. “We’re not the company that’s going to keep going back to the Neil Simon [plays],” she says, invoking the mid-century comedy standard of plays like Barefoot in the Park. Instead, Burch and the B Street team weed through hundreds of submissions from playwrights nationwide to select four full-length comedies for live stage readings. The playwrights attend in person, and audiences vote on the play they wish to see produced by B Street next season. (The 2023 winner, Alyssa Haddad-Chin’s culture-clash family comedy The Newlywed Game, is running at The Sofia through July 14.)

“We thought, ‘Let’s have a festival that helps us find work that we’re looking for,’ ” Burch says. “We want to find these new writers. We want to engage with them. And ultimately we want to create long-term cultivated relationships with them.” 

It’s summer 2024, and Burch has worked past those early doubts. She’s established roots in Sacramento as well, settling in midtown with her partner Tommy, a computer programmer (Busfield introduced them), and their Jack Russell-Chihuahua mix Manny. (“He’s like a little mascot,” she says. “He loves the theater.”) In keeping with her robust long-term vision, Burch has other big plans for The Sofia: She and Tommy will marry on the mainstage at the end of next year. It’s just another new production, another milestone in the making for a seasoned B Street veteran just hitting her stride.