Every time he starts directing a new play, Rick Dildine thinks about two people. Well — two versions of himself.

“Any time I’m making something, I’m always setting it up to delight my 8- and my 80-year-old self,” he said.

Rick Dildine will be the new artistic director of Children’s Theatre Company. Dildine, the current artistic director of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, was named as the successor to longtime CTC artistic leader Peter Brosius. (Courtesy photo by Wesley Law)

Dildine, a longtime theater producer and director, was announced earlier in January as the next artistic director of Minneapolis’s Children’s Theatre Company, one of the country’s largest and most renowned theaters for multigenerational and young audiences.

Dildine grew up in a farm family in rural Arkansas and fell in love with theater in high school, he said. He trained as an actor, but soon realized he found more fulfillment in behind-the-scenes production roles, like directing.

Over the past couple decades, he’s led theatrical companies across the lower Midwest and East Coast, including Shakespeare Festival St. Louis, and he became the artistic director of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in 2017.

At CTC, Dildine will be just the third artistic director in nearly four decades: Jon Cranney led the organization’s creative side for 12 years from the mid-1980s until 1997, when Peter Brosius took over the role. During Brosius’s decades-long tenure, he is credited with having significantly expanded the theater’s prestige, physical presence and success in commissioning new work.

Brosius announced last year that he’d be stepping down after the 2023–24 season. To find his replacement, the theater conducted an international search; Dildine was the search committee’s unanimous choice, committee chair and CTC interim managing director Steven J. Thompson said in a statement announcing Dildine’s hiring.

Dildine officially begins July 1.

Before Dildine moves from Alabama to the Twin Cities to take on the new role, we caught up with him to talk more about the current state — and the future — of theater for young audiences.

Children’s Theatre Company artistic director Peter Brosius has announced he will leave the theater at the end of its 2023-24 season. (Dan Norman / Children’s Theatre Company)

Q: To you, what makes a work of good multigenerational theater?

A: A lot of times, I find that in finding humor and joy and honesty. And I’m always trying to do the unexpected: When you do the unexpected, it allows the mind to go down places it might not normally go. It breaks binary thinking, a lot of times. Multigenerational work, for me, invites all different types of people and points of view into the room to be delighted.

Q: Broad strokes, can you share some of your goals when you take the reins at CTC?

A: What I can say now is a continued commitment to making new work; boundary-pushing, rigorous work for young people. I am going to be looking to find new ways of creating community within the theater. … I think it’s critical that we’re doing new work each year, and that we’re keeping the theater as a place where real conversations can happen.

Q: What might some of those community-building projects look like?

A: When I’m picking shows — because artistic directors’ No. 1 task is season planning — I’m always thinking about, how does it flow out of the building? What are the connections to the community?

One thing I’m particularly interested in is sports. There’s a lot of connection between sports teams and casts or groups that make theater. How do we have a conversation about what it means to be part of a team? What is teamwork? One thing I’m interested in is bringing coaches and directors into the same room and talking together about how to move people forward.

In this world that’s full of disruption and antagonism, continuing to find people and bring (them) together to talk about how we overlap. What do we have in common? What are we trying to do for our communities? That’s important to me.

Q: To that point, what do you think it takes to engage with kids not just as audience members but as part of that conversation?

A: Lately, I’ve done several shows with young people who are in positions and roles where I need their point of view. They have cracked open shows for me.

I put great value on their point of view. They’re partners, not puppets. If we want to connect with different ages, we have to value that thought process.

Whenever I engage with people, I always start with: What do you know about this? Here’s the story we’re trying to tell; what do you know? That plays out in the design, the direction, the music. That’s so important to creating authentic experiences on stage.

Q: Much of your recent work has been with Shakespeare festivals, and I think there’s perhaps a stereotype that Shakespeare feels inaccessible or high-brow whereas kids’ entertainment is sometimes written off as low-brow. How do you think that perceived gap influences the way you approach making theater for all ages?

A: I actually brought that up during the interview process — I said, I’m a Shakespeare guy, sitting here at Children’s Theatre Company!

For me, in Shakespeare, yes, the language can be complicated. But it’s all rooted in what it means to be a human. That concept, whether we’re dealing with the poetry of a king or the words of a pre-K to a teenager — what does it mean to be human? What is your specific point of view of the world?

I’ve been given the opportunity over 15 or so years to work within Shakespeare, which is heightened text, but what it really means is that these are extraordinary moments in people’s lives. That, for me, is a connection to young people very quickly and easily. We’re telling an extraordinary moment, using extraordinary tools — language, movement — to tell the story.

Like I said, every time I approach a show, I think, how would my 8-year-old self appreciate this and understand this? It’s not dumbing it down. It’s about, how can I get a young person to fall in love with theater through this piece?

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