BY KIT SIMPSON ’27

Erin Daley, class of 2008, recently sat down with the Newsletter to discuss her work for Primary Stages, where she serves as artistic director. Primary Stages is a theater company off-Broadway dedicated to showcasing “new American plays and playwrights.” 

When I sit down to talk to Erin over the phone, her bubbly personality and passion for Skidmore is clear – when I ask her my first question, “what’s your 30 second recap of your experience at Skidmore?” she takes a moment, laughs, and asks “God, how do I sum it up in thirty seconds?” Afterwords, Daley focuses mostly on how holistic of a training Skidmore has given her, as well as the idea that she learned how to “think like an artist” at Skidmore – “it’s there that I learned how to read text, subtext, and find how to express what I’m trying to say with the piece.” She then said that once she got out of the “Skidmore Bubble,” it became clear that the experience she had at Skidmore was unlike anyone else in her field. 

When speaking about her actual experience as an artistic director, Daley discussed the mission of Primary Stages – which is to share the art of playwriting – and to uplift new voices. “We’ve found a niche in supporting artists who’ve had productions at  regional theaters and Off-off Broadway, and uplift them to a higher level of production and audiences.” She also mentions the more education-based side of things – Primary Stages has many education  and artistic development programs meant to allow for writers to workshop their pieces. These pieces sometimes get staged at Primary Stages.  She cites, for instance, recent Primary Stages production of Chisa Hutchinson’s Amerikin, which played from March 1st – April 13th, 2025, and was originally developed in their Dorothy Strelsin New American Writers Group. The play followed a man who tries to join a white supremacist group to ensure ample opportunity for his newborn before a DNA test reveals that he is not 100% white. In discussing this piece, Daley also highlighted some of the community outreach that Primary Stages engages in, such as student matinees. 

Beyond community outreach, though, Daley highlighted some other parts of being an artistic director – “sometimes it’s curation, sometimes it’s marketing, and sometimes it’s running to get magnets and paperclips. It’s not all glamorous.” 

When asked how exactly she got into artistic directing, Daley claimed that it came from a lifelong love of theater: “I tried to do other things. I moved to LA to work on tv and film, but it just wasn’t the same. I had to do theater because it was the only thing I could do…and eventually, I realized that what I loved doing was finding people who were brilliant, and making sure more brilliant people get seen.” She then went on to elaborate that being an artistic director has taught her how to make her “own definition of success dependent on the show:” “You’re only as good as your last show, so the world really is not linear in the same way other careers are. Learning to gauge what success means based on our unique goals for each show has been very helpful.” 

When asked about what about her Skidmore training made artistic directing the right path for her, Daley commented mostly on the collaborative spirit she found at Skidmore: “we had this class when I was at Skidmore called practicum, where student directors and student actors would collaborate in class. It was ½ directors and ½ actors. That experience really taught me to collaborate. Because, even if you didn’t like somebody, you were going to have to collaborate with them.  And, of course, being on the theater admin staff, which really made students feel like we were running the whole gamut.” She also commented on the breadth of shows that Skidmore does: “Skidmore really taught me to love and appreciate all kinds of theater, even the absurd or weird, because of the wide range of shows that they do.” 

In terms of her favorite Skidmore memory, Daley cited winning the “Most Likely to Fuck Up Studio A award.” 

Many thanks from the Skidmore Theater Living Newsletter to Erin Daley for discussing her work!

Photos Provided by Erin Daley.

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Kit Simpson ’27 is the Editor-in-Chief of the Skidmore Theater Living Newsletter