The MCR Interview
Amos Glass on New Leadership and the Future of the Nashville Rep
The Nashville Repertory Theatre, the region’s largest theater company, has announced Jessica Fichter as their choice for their next artistic director. We were delighted to get to speak with Interim Executive Director Amos Glass about their upcoming new director and the future of the Nashville Rep.
Grace Krenz (GK): Jessica Fichter is going to be the new artistic director for the Nashville Rep. When will she start?
Amos Glass (AG): Jess will officially start with us in May of 2026, and we’re super excited. She is still the producing artistic director at the Trustus Theatre Company in South Carolina and she is making sure that the transition goes well over there, so she’ll be here off and on throughout the winter until her official start date.
GK: When you were looking for the next artistic director of the Nashville Rep, what were you looking for? And how did you organize that search process?
AG: We hired an outside firm to help us do the search and one of our board members, Sejal Mehta, really took charge of the committee that we created with board, staff, and artists in the community, to hire an artistic director that really fits into the needs of what Nashville Rep needs. But not just what Nash Rep means, also what the community as a whole needs. And Jessica Fichter is someone who is community focused, who really has a pulse on what theater is doing regionally, nationally, as well as what new creation and new art is, and how to make it work. Because not only is she a director, but she is also a playwright herself. She’s written a musical called Dandelion that has been produced multiple times in the regional market. She has many connections to New York, and is really going to help push Nashville Rep into a new era with more collaboration, as well as make Nashville Rep the pulse of theater in our community. The dream for Nashville Rep is to make it the regional theater company it deserves to be, that creates world-class entertainment, but also builds a thriving theater community in Nashville.
GK: How will her methods differ from what the Nashville Rep is already doing?
AG: Jess also has a degree in education, which I think will help push our education programs to be bigger and better than what they are. We are definitely in the middle of reworking some of our programming and Jess’s love and interest and desire for new plays and musicals to truly thrive in Nashville. It’s going to be a big part of pushing the company back into the national conversation, and creating new plays and musicals that will hopefully get produced regionally as well as nationally.
We have a couple programs that are small: we have the Young Voices Monologue Competition that we do with local high schools through Metro Nashville, we have a program called Building Community Through Theatre, which is one of our crowning gems. We have a program that’s called Rep InDepth, where we have student tickets to our shows and then bring in an artist that worked on the show to go and talk to the kids, before or after they see it, so they have a backstage kind of view. We also have a master class program throughout the year. But there’s so much more that we could do. Jess’s education background and love of teaching up and coming artists as well as children, is going to change the way that we see the work that the Rep can do. People could get training or learn new skills from the region’s largest theater company.
GK: Has she chosen the 26/27 season?
AG: No, she was involved in the conversation when she was hired, but most of the shows were chosen before her. So the first season that she will actually truly put together will be the 27/28 season.
GK: What excites you about her as a director?
AG: What truly excites me is that Jess has worked in different settings, both in academia, in a small regional theater company in New York, and off Broadway. The Nashville Rep has so much room to grow with our own community partners, with our local universities, with our local schools, with working with TPAC, to working with other regional companies across the country, and the sense of collaboration and the sense of being truly open to working with partners on shows is what I’m really excited about. I really think she’s going to take us into a new era of community collaboration, which is needed. The Nashville theater community is small but mighty, and everyone has a voice that needs to be heard, and I think that is also one of the skills that Jess brings to our table is the ability to listen to everyone and make sure that everyone is seen and heard and on our stages and in our community, while creating world class entertainment.
If you look at the Trustus Theatre, they’re similar to us, only smaller, but they do a mixture of big musicals and small plays. There’s a few plays that we’ve talked about, things that she wants to produce for the Rep in the future, and they were plays that I’d never even heard of, and then I read them, and I was like, this is a fantastic play that the Rep will need to do at some point in the future. I’m excited to see her build our company and help us grow as we get ready to move into the new TPAC, and move us forward to be doing more, bigger and better work as well as smaller, important work. She’s the right fit for what we need and where we’re headed.
People that know Jess truly respect and love working with her. The outpouring of support that we received on our socials, as well as her socials, about leaving and coming to the Rep was mostly the people of South Carolina and the people that she worked with, saying “We’re so sad to lose you, but Nashville Rep has got a great new addition.” And if that is not a true stamp of approval from the community that she had worked in and built, I don’t know what is.
GK: You’ve been the interim director for the past year. How have you been filling that role and aiming towards the future?
AG: Over the past year we’ve been reorganizing parts of the company. The Nashville Rep will have a two-tiered leadership system with an executive director and an artistic director. So two leaders of the company, very similar to our friends at the National Shakespeare Festival with Isabel and Jason. Over this past year, we have been making sure that the company is on its feet in a way that we can bring in a new set of eyes, a new leader to work with us to grow and be better. The search for an executive director will probably be done over our next season. Working over this past year has been a true gift. I’ve learned so much, and I truly love this company. I’ve worked at the Rep for 10 years now. I started as an intern, and here I am as the interim artistic director. The team that we currently have on staff at the Rep is absolutely a joy to work with every single day, and I am so honored that I have the privilege of working with them. The art that we have created in the past year has been fantastic, and I’m excited for the future art that we get to share with the world. The Nashville Rep is a Nashville institution and it is the best theater I’ve ever worked with in my life. The Nashville Rep has been in Nashville over 41 years, and the company grows and changes with every decade. We’re looking towards a very, very exciting future, and it’ll be a wonderful, wonderful way to bring in a new community-focused era.
The Nashville Rep’s next show Fat Ham (February 13-22) is a co-production with the Nashville Shakespeare Festival. See their website for more information about the rest of their season.
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A Nashville native and MTSU graduate, Grace Krenz is a reader, a writer, and an arts enthusiast. She lives in Nashville with her husband and two children.
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