Editor’s note: Publications are rife with lists of people who have notched impressive achievements before reaching certain milestone ages. If you miss out on 20 Under 30, you can hold out hope for 40 Under 40. After 40, though, sorry: You’re on your own. And we don’t think you should be. So, this month, we’re spotlighting local notables who are making inspiring contributions to our community — and who happen to be over the age of 70. Because precociousness is great, but so is perspective.
photograph by jamie harmon
Directing a play is not for the faint-hearted. Irene Crist has been at it for a good long while and knows about wrangling a production and its many moving parts, from grappling with egos to hammering out schedules, tending to details, and making uncounted decisions up until (and often after) opening night. There are lights, sound design, sets, and stage management — and if fortune smiles, an able crew that can shoulder those burdens. But it’s up to the director to make it all soar.
She is undaunted because she loves the art and craft of theater. Every individual play is immersive during the weeks of rehearsals and performances, but collectively they range from children’s shows to Shakespeare, farces to tragedies, intimate stories to epics.
Bring them on.
Crist has worked in all areas of the theater but rarely acts anymore, focusing instead on directing and teaching. “I’ve got to do both,” she insists. “They feed each other. I don’t enjoy directing without having students go back and try things that worked in my production. And I really don’t like teaching without directing because it is just very symbiotic to me. I need inspiration coming in before I can give it out, so that’s what I do: teach, mentor, and direct.”
“It’s easy to stay inspired. Sometimes it takes the right student and the right teacher, and when that happens, it’s the greatest joy.” — Irene Crist
She’s enjoying the best of all those worlds at the moment, directing The Best Christmas Pageant Ever at DeltaARTS in West Memphis, which will be staged in December. It’s a perennial favorite and she’s done it before, but she considers, as directors do, how to avoid the same-old, same-old. “You’d think it would be hard to keep it fresh,” she says, “but we had a reading the other night, and instead of saying Herod went after baby Jesus, everybody kept saying Harold. It was so cute! These are kids, they’re going to do things like that, and you just have to be ready to receive it.”
The most rewarding thing for Crist is watching her actors blossom, as kids and adults. “It’s easy to stay inspired,” she says. “Sometimes it takes the right student and the right teacher, and when that happens, it’s the greatest joy.”
She brings deep experience to her passion.
In 2017, Crist was presented with the Eugart Yerian Award for Lifetime Achievement at the Ostrander Awards, which honors the best in local theater. She has accumulated several Ostranders over the years, but one production stands out. Actually, two productions. She’d been approached by Jackie Nichols, then the executive producer at Playhouse on the Square, and says, “He ran into me in the stairwell and said, ‘Oh, by the way, I want you to direct Angels in America. Parts One and Two. And you’ve got six weeks to do it.’”
The simultaneous staging of Tony Kushner’s powerful dramas about AIDS was monumental. The two productions earned 15 Ostrander Awards, including Best Dramatic Production and a Best Director nod for Crist. “It was one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done,” she says. “Directing the six-hour masterpiece was an extraordinary experience.”
