Most Influential: Lane Czaplinski

Lane Czaplinski turned On the Boards into a globally recognized and locally revered venue for avant-garde performing arts

Lane Czaplinski [ Artistic Director, On the Boards ]

When Czaplinski took the job of artistic director at OTB in 2002, he stepped into a quagmire. “We had a $400,000 deficit, ticket sales sucked, and no one was subscribing,” says the 40-year-old one-time college basketball star from Kansas City, Missouri. But working with his staff and a newly committed board, he cleaned up the books, implemented an expanded focus on local artists, and brought in artists from all over the world—in short, he turned OTB into a globally recognized and locally revered venue for avant-garde performing arts. All the hard work paid off literally this year, when OTB received a $750,000 grant from the Wallace Foundation (the only midsize arts agency in Seattle to get the honor), to go toward a groundbreaking project called OTBTV. For this unprecedented video-on-demand series, OTB will subcontract with Seattle-based ThinkLab production company to film live performances (“with good cameras,” Czaplinski emphasizes), and then offer these professional videos for sale or rent online, starting with six available in January 2010 and adding six to eight more each year. OTB will split the income 50/50 with the artists. “It’s not a substitute for seeing the performances live,” Czaplinski acknowledges, “but for many people, this will be their only chance to see this type of work.” Sounds like a slam dunk.