World Trade Center Arts Space Gets a Lease, and a Leader

NEW YORK — The push to build a performing arts component at the World Trade Center site has had more reversals of fortune than a Greek drama. But the project took several steps forward this week with approval of an agreement for a 99-year lease; an announcement that nearly $300 million had been raised and the naming, Friday, of its first artistic director: Bill Rauch, who leads the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Officials said that they hoped that the theater — a flexible performance space with three combinable halls that will be called the Perelman Center in recognition of a $75 million gift from billionaire businessman Ronald O. Perelman — could open as soon as the 2020-21 season, and that they plan to produce multidisciplinary works there with many partners.

“I think the vision is going to flow organically out of the space, and what the World Trade Center means to the city of New York, and what it means to the country, and what it means to the world,” Rauch said in a telephone interview. He added: “The work of the Perelman is going to be about blurring boundaries between disciplines, blurring boundaries between communities.”

In Oregon, Rauch developed a reputation for commissioning interesting work and championing diversity. At one point last year there were only two plays on Broadway by women: “Indecent” by Paula Vogel and “Sweat” by Lynn Nottage. Both were commissioned in full or in part by the festival, and both got Tony nominations. In April the festival will mount Rauch’s new production of “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!” that will feature same-sex couples in some of the leading roles. “It’s going to be a loving period production of ‘Oklahoma!’ in which several characters are part of the LBGTQ community,” he said.

Rauch said that while he would start working on plans for the Perelman Center now, he would remain with the Shakespeare festival through the summer of 2019, when he will move to New York.

His hiring was the latest indication that the project — which has appeared to be in doubt several times since the idea was included in architect Daniel Libeskind’s master plan for the site in 2003 — was moving forward. For years it was on the back burner: Potential tenants including the old New York City Opera, the Signature Theater Company and the Joyce Theater came and went, and architect Frank Gehry created a design for it that was then shelved. Rival arts spaces were proposed, including the Shed, at the Hudson Yards on the West Side, and a new park on Pier 55 near 14th Street with three outdoor performance areas underwritten by billionaire Barry Diller.

But Perelman’s $75 million donation in 2016 got the project back on track.

Officials with the center said that they had raised $295 million, or 82 percent of its expected $363 million construction price tag. And on Thursday the Port Authority’s board of commissioners ratified an agreement to enter into a 99-year lease with the Perelman Center. Once the lease is signed, the center is to pay the Port Authority $48 million from funding it will receive from the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. to cover the cost of the below-ground construction underway so that the theater, which is being designed by architecture firm REX, can be built.

Rauch is the latest in a series of artistic figures involved in the project: David Lan, who led the Young Vic theater in London, was initially its temporary artistic director before he left a couple of years ago. Rauch said that they had spoken about the job several times.

While he did not tip his hand too much about what he envisioned for the site, he did say that he hoped to create thematic programming — inviting, say, a dance company from another part of the world to create a piece there while commissioning a new play by a playwright with roots in the same area and inviting immigrants from around the city to see it. “I think our job as an arts organization,” he said, “is to bring hope by bringing people together.”