We were lucky to catch up with Lillian Meredith recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Lillian, thanks for joining us today. Are you happier as a creative? Do you sometimes think about what it would be like to just have a regular job? Can you talk to us about how you think through these emotions?

I think about having a different job all the time. So much of my time is spent actually doing the administrative work that is required to ensure I have a creative a life. I don’t dislike it – in fact, I find a lot of it really interesting – but the ratio of administrative to creative work is pretty high. In some ways, I’d just love to be a freelancer, someone who is hired on a project-by-project basis, who goes and directs shows for a company and then leaves, without having to deal with any of the budgetary or marketing work. The times when I’ve been able to just focus on the creative aspects of putting up a show have been amazing. The flip side of that, however, is that I’m a person who likes to have a lot of control over my artistic life – I care very deeply about being able to make the kind of work I’m excited about and that interests me. In order to continue to have that kind of control, to be in charge of consistent artistic vision, I need to be the one making the work happen.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m the founding Artistic Director of The Motor Company NYC, a theater company dedicated to creating and producing site-responsive, free theater for public spaces around New York City. We create new plays that are intricately linked to the familiar places where they are ultimately performed. Our playwrights use gardens, parks, laundromats, bars, and street corners as the impetus for their narratives, and our directors use the architecture of these spaces to stage the plays, augmenting and disorienting the audience’s relationship to otherwise quotidian locations. The Motor Company makes free, immersive theater that is accessible and relevant to all New Yorkers by integrating these community spaces into the plays, making them a character rather than simply a backdrop.

I started The Motor Company because I have always been interested in how raw space informs narrative. Theater is a deeply collaborative art form, and the audience is a partner in the final performance, contributing their imagination to fill in the gaps and give the story meaning and life. It is magical, the way an audience can see something that isn’t there, the way actors and spectators together create a collective imaginary universe. My work as a director tends to strip away anything that might get in the way of the audience’s participation – I like minimalist sets and heightened theatrical moments, actors moving scenery, visible scene transitions – anything that makes room for a shared imaginative experience. I started directing in high school and college, and found myself drawn again and again to putting up plays in alternative, non-traditional spaces that had interesting architectural elements – a gym with a mezzanine, a classroom with a spiral staircase – and relying on these idiosyncrasies to help tell the story. When I began working in public spaces around New York City in 2011, I was interested in taking this a step further – rather than finding a space that would augment an existing story, I decided to assign spaces to playwrights first and use the resulting plays as a way to heighten our relationship to the existing space. We live in one of the most exciting, innovative, and complicated cities in the world, one in which shared public space is a way of life. These plays take audiences on a journey around places they think they know, reinvigorating their relationships to these common areas and giving them a chance to imaginatively immerse themselves in the city. I also wanted to see if making plays for public spaces – where there are no tickets, or traditional seating, or codified rules around behavior – could help fix the elitism problem of contemporary theater. Theater feels irrelevant and inaccessible to most people, something they have to save up for or already know about. The Motor Company returns theater to a more egalitarian, pre-electric model, before we all started sitting silently in the dark, one that centers a diverse audience and gives them freedom to engage with the performance on their own terms and at their own comfort levels.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

The obvious one is the pandemic. Theater completely shut down, and most of us suddenly lost all of the career momentum we had built. I realized that if I wanted to have a career in theater, I needed to focus on making my own work in the way I wanted to make it. I had already been running The Motor Company part-time for the past nine years, but I had done it on the side of freelance directing and grad school. In 2020, as the whole industry ground to a halt, and opportunities I had coming down the pipe just completely evaporated, I decided that I would refocus all of my attention on this company, and turn it into a viable artistic career. I spent the next year talking to everyone I could think of, asking for advice about how to really grow and run a small non-profit, how to get funding, what to do with that funding once I got it. I started monthly meetings with two of my now-board members, developing a mini-strategic plan. At the time, I had never paid myself for my work. I applied for the NYSCA grant and got it, and used that money to start paying myself and hired my Managing Director Caitlin Wells, who has really helped me solidify my vision and grow the company exponentially. In 2020, we were a fiscally sponsored project with a $5000 budget. By 2025, we have become a 501c3 non-profit with a nine-member board and over $40,000/year. And really, in some ways, it’s all because I saw my directing career evaporate in March 2020 and I had to figure out how I was going to keep going, if I was going to give up on theater or double down on this idea I had had a decade earlier and make it my mission and vocation.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

This isn’t just society, but also the theater industry. We all operate from the position of scarcity – there aren’t enough jobs, there isn’t enough funding, there are only so many slots in the season. At the same time, we have artistic directors at major theater organizations taking salaries of close to one million dollars, so it’s all actually totally false. There’s money, we’re just spending it wrong. There are opportunities, they’re just going to the same people over and over again. The theater plays it safe because it has such a tenuous hold over its audience, because theater has become something that only certain people go see. We need to completely break free of that. One of the ways to do that is to legitimize more forms of theater. I think of Pete Wells, formerly the Times restaurant critic. His ate everywhere and made a point of reviewing everything – from Per Se to food trucks. He also had a policy to not write a review of some small, unknown place unless it would be glowing, so that as a person with enormous power, he wouldn’t be punching down. As a result there are reviews of his of all kinds of restaurants and styles, places fancy and really dive-y. I think the Times theater section should be like that. They should be seeing everything, all over the place, regardless of whether the shows have the money to hire a press agent or whether they get free tickets. They should be going to shows at weird little black boxes in the middle of Queens, and they should only be writing reviews of unknown plays when the reviews are positive. There is so much gate-keeping that goes on in theater, from the ticket prices to the rules of behavior to the physical theaters themselves – we need to make it possible for more strange, small, alternative pieces to survive and thrive.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.themotorcompanynyc.com / www.lillianmeredith.com
• Instagram: @themotorcompanynyc

Image Credits

#1: Jaz Astwood, David Jacobs, Jonathan Dingle-El (photograph by Ben Holbrook)
#5: Louiza Collins, Emily Daly (photograph by Lee Rayment)
#6: Rebeca Fong, Gabby Sherba, Elizabeth Seldin (photograph by Lee Rayment)
#7: Rory Kulz (photograph by Lee Rayment)