A national search for the next State Theatre executive director drew more than 60 applicants, theater board President Roy Love said this week.
But the winning candidate, as it turns out, lives just down the road in Pennsylvania Furnace.
The theater board announced Tuesday that Harry Zimbler, 59, a longtime Centre Countian and New York City native, will be the nonprofit group’s new executive director.
He began work Monday, succeeding Mike Negra. Negra, who helped establish the State Theatre organization more than a decade ago, resigned in September. He had been executive director since 2006.
In an interview Tuesday afternoon, Zimbler said he wants to help bring more local groups into the downtown State College venue.
‘I think there’s more that can be done to embrace the community and to ask the community for its help in supporting us,’ Zimbler said. ‘It’s a great asset to have a facility like this. It’s more than just a facility in my mind. It’s a community of performing arts. It adds to the quality of life in the region; it’s a quality-of-life issue.’
Zimbler said he believes that the theater has ‘a responsibility to develop the future audience’ through education, work with children and program offerings for schools.
‘It’s always amazing to me how few (young) people go to the live performances,’ Zimbler said. ‘ … It’s fewer and fewer each year. To me, that’s a shame. We want to combat that a little bit.’
A former commercial movie theater, the State Theatre, 130 W. College Ave., underwent extensive renovations before reopening as a nonprofit community arts venue in 2006. Love, who just became its board president, said the organization wanted ‘someone who (is) innately a community builder’ for its new executive director.
Zimbler illustrated that quality when, during an interview session, he told theater Search Committee members how he would handle his first 90 days as director, Love said.
Zimbler’s to-do list included ‘meeting with the community; meeting with community performing-arts groups; meeting with stakeholders of the State Theatre, people who’ve supported it and asking them what (the theater) has been doing well, what it hasn’t been doing well, what you would like to see us doing here,’ Love said.
He said Zimbler noted that he would meet with businesses and emphasize the theater’s economic and quality-of-life impacts, as well.
‘We would like to have more of the arts groups (in the area) using the theater and calling it home,’ Love said, underscoring a priority that Zimbler mentioned, too. He said the board would like the theater to have more engagement with other nonprofit groups, including — perhaps — more fundraising events at the facility.
Love said he also wants to see the elimination of the theater’s debt within three years. ‘I think that’s accomplish-able,’ he said.
Zimbler, meanwhile, called the State Theatre ‘a natural thing for me to get involved with.’ A former actor who has taught performing arts at Penn State, he holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the university. He did his undergraduate work at Hofstra University.
Most recently, Zimbler was editor of Pennsylvania Business Central, a regional business journal. But his ‘greatest learning,’ he said, came when he worked nine years as a New York City cab driver.
He was trying to be an actor back then, before he moved to State College to pursue his MFA in the 1980s, Zimbler said.
‘That’s when you really learn what’s going on in the world,’ Zimbler said of his cab-driving years.
For the past three-or-so decades, he has made the Centre Region his home. His ‘genuine love of the community,’ his lifelong involvement in the arts, and his desire to make them flourish here ‘singularly qualified him for the position’ at the State, Love said.
Love declined to identify Zimbler’s salary, but said it’s in line with executive compensation at similarly sized venues elsewhere. He said the theater Search Committee, comprising several current and former board members, interviewed 12 executive-director candidates and recommended Zimbler to the full board.
‘I think Harry is going to do a terrific job,’ Love said. ‘People are going to find him gregarious and welcoming and the kind of person we want.’
Earlier coverage
