Meet Lear deBessonet

How growing up in Baton Rouge shaped the career of the Tony-nominated director

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In true South Louisiana form, Lear deBessonet describes her attraction to directing theatrical performances as akin to presenting a shared meal. 

“The director is thinking about, from the moment that the audience walks into the space—what do they see? What do they hear? What is the energy in the room? And there's an aspect of kind of hosting to it, like hosting a great dinner party,” deBessonet said. “And that has always really interested me.” 

Since 2020, deBessonet has been the artistic director of the concert series Encores! at New York City Center, where she breathes new life into classic American musicals from the archive. With Encores!, she has directed such performances as Lionel Bart’s Oliver and Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods—for which she earned a Tony nomination for Best Direction of a Musical and the Drama League’s award for Outstanding Direction of a Musical. The Drama League also recognized deBessonet with its Founders Award for Excellence in Directing. 

Prior to her work at Encores!, deBessonet spent eight years as resident director at the historic Public Theater, directing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Odyssey, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, and others. 

Though today she is a denizen of New York City, deBessonet’s almost rapturous love of theater is both uniquely Baton Rougean while also inextricably linked to her childhood in a house filled with music and unabashed theatricality. 

“A lot of the musicals that I have directed on Broadway are things that my mother used to play on the piano when I was a little girl,” deBessonet said. “I think that she herself was so creative and really encouraged me and my sister to play. And so my earliest productions as a director were plays that my sister and I would do at our house, usually with our cocker spaniel, Spotty, playing a role and with other kids from the neighborhood.”

Even in those early years, deBessonet exhibited an insatiable desire to direct. An old family photo captures her at five years old in a kindergarten performance: she’s wearing a pink, poofy dress, bearing a wand aloft, her mouth open wide. Years later, she said, her family had a nice chuckle over the photograph. She commented to her mother that she seemed to be “really enthusiastically participating in this play.” 

Her mother countered, “Oh no…There was somebody else that was not standing where they were supposed to be, or not saying their line. And that was you, essentially redirecting the play.”

For her eighth birthday, deBessonet begged her mother for an Annie themed birthday party. She was obsessed with the musical and insisted not on an Annie cake or balloons, but on producing and directing her own version of the play. Her mother was all in. 

“I had this slumber party where the girls came over, and it was sort of like, ‘straight to wardrobe!’ As soon as they came over, we got into costumes,” deBessonet said. “We got to rehearse late into the night, and then the next morning, when people's parents came to pick them up, we had our audience, and we performed Annie.”

Her sister was also in that production, as was their dog—in the role of Sandy. Decades later, deBessonet would direct NBC’s Annie Live! for a surreal, memorable callback to her childhood dream.  

As soon as she was old enough, deBessonet launched headfirst into Baton Rouge’s theater scene, taking BREC classes and performing with local community theater companies, acting at the library, the mall, in outdoor spaces. During this time, she encountered numerous mentors who all, in their own way, shepherded her through those juvenile years as a burgeoning theater kid. deBessonet lauded former Episcopal theater director Danny Tiberghein, who died tragically her senior year, as her biggest champion and directorial influence. She also credits many others, including former arts council leader Renee Chatelain, Paige Parsons Gagliano, who has been an active presence from Episcopal theater productions to Theatre Baton Rouge, and Charlotte Nordyke, who founded Playmakers of Baton Rouge. 

Chatelain remembers first crossing paths with deBessonet in a Playmakers’ production of The Arkansaw Bear. Even then, deBessonet was a deeply serious child actor, with focus and drive. 

“She’s always been brilliant,” Chatelain said. “What I might have imagined for her has been quadrupled by what she’s actually done.” 

This “gumbo of the influences” in her early years sparked deBessonet’s interest in the power of the performative, and the spiritual surge of potential she believes manifests when people gather.  

Mardi Gras. Church. Football. These are the places deBessonet describes as the “truly magical aspects of daily life” in Baton Rouge, and throughout South Louisiana, that inspire her directorial style and appreciation for theater. “These are all things that do have an aspect of, like, just beauty and color and spectacle and music, while also being things that are very community building, very community oriented,” she said. “All of those things are intergenerational. You know, you will see babies and you will see people in their nineties at all three of those things, right? And people from all different backgrounds, all different races. And that is something that is, I think, at the very core of my sort of DNA as an artist.”

Recognizing the value of reaching diverse audiences, regardless of artistic exposure, demographics, or economic background, has come to define much of deBessonet’s artistic identity. At a TED Talk delivered in April, she explained that the pageantry of theater is vital for communities to cultivate interconnectedness through joy and imagination. This passion has led her to direct performances in far-flung locations such as shelters and prisons, and to found programs that make robust opportunities for artistic experiences more accessible for everyone.

“My work has a spirit of, ‘Come on, y’all! Everybody!’ in a way that is very Louisiana,” she said.

After she made it to New York City in the early aughts, hustling for close to five years to break into the industry, deBessonet began to actualize her vision of bringing theater to unexpected places and people. 

In 2006, she founded her first major initiative, Tickets for the People, a program that distributed thousands of tickets to non-traditional audiences, including students, seniors, immigrants, and those living in low-income housing. While deBessonet said they technically did distribute the tickets and accomplish their goal, the program was “a big disappointment.” 

“I ended up feeling like, oh, it's actually not just about essentially getting butts in seats in the audience, like it's not enough for somebody to come and see a show that they might have no connection to,” she said. “Really, theater has to be a much more holistic, relational thing, and ideally for community, it needs to involve participation. It needs to involve not just watching something but making something yourself.” 

Her vision to transform the experience of theatrical performances into an involved, communal project grew into the program Public Works, which she brought to The Public Theater in 2012. Public Works draws community members from all over New York City together for 200-person pageants, often performed at Delacorte Theater in Central Park. The program unites military veterans, children, senior citizens, formerly incarcerated people, and other unlikely company members to create productions that are by, for, and of the community.

Public Works and its unifying mission harken back to deBessonet’s earliest conceptions of theater as a space for fostering togetherness and providing nourishment for the soul.

“There was a spiritual aspect to what happens in the theater, and that when humans gather together in the theater, that it could be a place of unique healing and joy,” deBessonet said. “And, you know, I believe that God is present everywhere, and certainly I do believe that God shows up in the theater.”

More recently, deBessonet has been leading a new, innovative venture focused on bringing artistic expression to as many people as possible—even beyond New York City. As an artistic director, with Nataki Garrett and Clyde Valentin, of the national arts and health initiative One Nation/One Project, she launched the Arts for EveryBody initiative. 

Inspired by the 1936 Federal Theater Project involving eighteen municipalities presenting their own interpretations of the dystopian, anti-fascist play It Can’t Happen Here—Arts for EveryBody brought together artists, community health providers, and civil leaders as eighteen cities across the country simultaneously premiered a broad range of participatory art projects inspired by their hometowns for “an outpouring of local joy,” according to the program website. 

Arts for EveryBody operates from the thesis, backed by statistics, that arts participation can meaningfully lower the risk of depression and reduce dementia in older adults, equating it to the benefits of weekly exercise. Arts exposure can also alleviate stress and loneliness, and make it more likely that young adults will remain in school and vote. 

Baton Rouge was part of this feat, featuring various artistic exhibitions, performances, and demonstrations across the city-parish—bringing deBessonet’s artistic journey full circle. Some of those Baton Rouge-specific events included a natural land sculpture tour, a poetry reading, a photography workshop, a 3D board game, and Houma Nation basket weaving, among other activities taking place across deBessonet’s hometown.

“There are a lot of people doing really good work in the world, but Lear is just very, very impactful,” said Chatelain. “And she’s selfless but super smart about how to go about accomplishing the goals that she wants to accomplish. We need to celebrate people that come from our city, like Lear. We need to show that these people are born and develop as individuals right in this city, then they go on to impact the world in this incredible way.” 

Learn more about Public Works at publictheater.org and more about Arts For EveryBody at artsforeverybody.org.