Nicki Hunter ’05: From Rivers to the Manhattan Theatre Club, Community and Catharsis on Stage

After spending as much time as she could on stage at Rivers, Hunter studied theater and business at Lehigh University. “While my passion was performing on stage, I was keenly aware that it was supported within the comfort of an academic environment, and once you applied real-world pressures to performing, it just wasn’t for me,” Hunter says. She began thinking about how she could combine her theater and business interests, and working for Manhattan Theatre Club was her answer.

In college, when Hunter read a play, she would pay attention to where it had first been produced. “I learned about Manhattan Theatre Club because most of the new plays I read during college received their world premiere productions at MTC,” Hunter says.

She didn’t get the first two internships she applied for at MTC, but she was persistent. “I went back to MTC, and I said, ‘The internships I applied for, you didn’t give me. What other internships do you have to offer?’” Though the role they had wasn’t exactly what she’d been looking for, Hunter took it and made the most of it. 

That go-getter attitude paid off—shortly after her summer internship ended, she heard from MTC artistic director Lynne Meadow, who encouraged Hunter to apply to be her full-time assistant. “Sixteen years later, I’ve held every position there is to hold in the artistic office,” Hunter says. 

As she steps into the role of artistic director, a title Meadow held for over five decades, Hunter boils the job down to two main things: “Being an active producer for the shows that are on our stages, and simultaneously planning, developing, and programming the productions we’re doing next.” 

Hunter has always loved that at MTC, no two days are the same, and community is central to the work. In a world she describes as increasingly siloed and screen-based, one of her responsibilities is to consider how MTC’s productions can help audiences “to understand the world at large, to understand humanity,” she says. “Sometimes that means providing an escape, and sometimes that means providing a laugh, and sometimes that means providing the chance to shed a tear in community.” 

Hunter believes art can heal, and she’s just as passionate about the power of live performance now as she was as a teenage actor at Rivers. “There’s a reason why theater has sustained so many ups and downs through human civilization,” she says. “It’s one of the most cathartic, most communal, most impactful forms of art.”