Houghton Surname Project

James Joseph Houghton¹

M, #90601, b. 4 September 1958, d. 2 August 2016

Father*: Sherrill Francis Houghton b. 7 Mar 1928, d. 2 Jan 2021
Mother*: Joan May Heaney¹ b. 28 May 1929

Family: Joyce L. O'Conner b. c 1960

Marriage*: James Joseph Houghton married Joyce L. O'Conner on Nov 18, 1986 at Indianapolis, Marion Co., IN, USA, age 28 and 26, actor and actress.

Lily Houghton
Henry Houghton b. c 1993

Biography

Corresponded with author

A Contributor to Houghton Surname Project

Birth

Sep 4, 1958

San Francisco, San Francisco Co., CA, USA¹

Graduation

1981

Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA, USA, B.F.A.

Residence

1986

Daly City, San Mateo Co., CA, USA

Marriage

Nov 18, 1986

Indianapolis, Marion Co., IN, USA, age 28 and 26, actor and actress

Note

2013

Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA, USA, honorary PhD

Newspaper

Mar 11, 2015

Signature Theater’s Artistic Director to Depart
By Michael Paulson March 11, 2015 3:00 pm March 11, 2015 3:00 pm
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James Houghton
James HoughtonCredit Chad Batka for The New York Times

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James Houghton, one of the leading figures in the Off Broadway theater world, is resigning after a quarter-century running the Signature Theater in New York.

Mr. Houghton, 56, has learned he has stomach cancer, and will step down to focus on his health and his family, according to the theater, a nonprofit. He plans to end his tenure as artistic director at the end of the 2015-16 season, but he will continue working as the director of the drama division at the Juilliard School.

Signature is best-known for two initiatives: it has repeatedly dedicated seasons to works by a single playwright, and it has maintained an unusual focus on affordability, offering a high number of subsidized tickets. Under his leadership, Signature built and moved into a Frank Gehry-designed three-theater space on 42nd Street in 2012.

Mr. Houghton, who started his career with the Acting Company, founded Signature in 1991 and has overseen its considerable financial, physical and reputational growth. Signature was singled out for the regional theater Tony Award last year.

Signature and Mr. Houghton declined requests for an interview. In a statement, Mr. Houghton said that he was confident that “a bright future lies ahead” for Signature. The film actor Edward Norton, who has been a major champion of Signature and serves as the chairman of its board, praised Mr. Houghton in the statement, saying that “Jim has been an incredible leader with remarkable vision,” and also expressed confidence in the theater’s future.

Signature said it would begin a search for a new artistic director, and hoped to have that person in place by July 1, 2016.

Death

Aug 2, 2016

Manhattan, NY, USA

Obituary

Aug 3, 2016

New York Times, James Houghton, Founder of Signature Theater Company, Dies at 57

By BRUCE WEBERAUG. 3, 2016
James Houghton, the founder of the Signature Theater Company, in June. Credit Jesse Dittmar for The New York Times

James Houghton, the founder and, until recently, the artistic director of the Signature Theater Company, one of Off Broadway’s essential nonprofit theaters and perhaps the nation’s leading safe house for playwrights, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 57.

The cause was stomach cancer, his brother, Scott, said.

A former actor, Mr. Houghton (pronounced HOW-ton) was in his early 30s when he started Signature in 1991 with the idea of presenting annual, season-long programs featuring the work of just one playwright. The initial season was devoted to Romulus Linney, a prolific and daring but largely unsung dramatist whose play “Heathen Valley” Mr. Houghton had appeared in a few years earlier.

In an 85-seat space, Mr. Houghton produced six plays by Mr. Linney, who died in 2011, for a total of $35,000.

Over the next quarter-century, playwrights as formidable and famous as Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, August Wilson and John Guare, and others as formidable and not so famous as Lee Blessing, Adrienne Kennedy and María Irene Fornés, had the spectrum of their careers — often including new works — showcased in multiple productions.

During the 1994-95 season, devoted to Horton Foote, Signature presented a world premiere play, “The Young Man From Atlanta,” which transferred to Broadway and won a Pulitzer Prize.

As the theater grew in artistic power, it gained in financial muscle as well. It moved to bigger spaces, most recently to the Pershing Square Signature Center on West 42nd Street, a three-theater, 75,000-square-foot compound designed by Frank Gehry Architects, for which the theater raised $70 million.

Signature’s annual budget now hovers around $13 million, which underwrites an expanded mission: The company sponsors three separate programs that support the residency of 10 playwrights, including rising talents like Annie Baker and Katori Hall, midcareer artists like Kenneth Lonergan and Regina Taylor, and at least one éminence grise, Athol Fugard.

A year ago, after learning of his cancer, Mr. Houghton announced that he would step down at Signature after the 2015-16 season. Paige Evans, formerly the artistic director of LCT3, the new-play development program at Lincoln Center Theater, succeeded him.

A few weeks ago, interviewed as he was moving out of his office, Mr. Houghton told Ben Brantley of The New York Times that it was working with Mr. Linney as an actor that had spurred the idea for a playwrights’ theater.

“I just fell in love with this process with Romulus,” he said. “There was just something so spontaneous — anything could happen in the room. New lines would come, a cut would come, just because of something you either inhabited the script with, or because you asked a question. At the same time, Romulus, at 60, was folding his own programs and hanging his own lights, and it just felt like it wasn’t right that he was still pushing so hard, pushing a boulder up the mountain. Anyway, that planted seeds.”

James Joseph Houghton was born in San Francisco on Sept. 4, 1958, and grew up in the Bay Area. His mother, the former Joan Heaney, worked as a dental assistant and a preschool teacher. His father, Sherrill, was a school administrator.

James fell in love with the theater at St. Ignatius College Preparatory, a Jesuit school in San Francisco, and with friends he started a theater company, Overeasy Productions, when he was 18. He earned a B.F.A. at Santa Clara University, and an M.F.A. from the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

In 1986, he won a place in the Acting Company, the touring classical-theater troupe whose co-founder, John Houseman, became a mentor. Its other alumni include Kevin Kline, Patti LuPone, David Ogden Stiers, Frances Conroy, Jeffrey Wright, Harriet Harris, Hamish Linklater and Keith David.

That same year he married Joyce O’Connor, who survives him. In addition to her and his brother, he is survived by his parents; three sisters, Susan Devine, Lynne Houghton and Trish Line; a son, Henry; and a daughter, Lily.

From 2000 to 2003, Mr. Houghton was also the artistic director of the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., developing new plays by Kia Corthron, Gina Gionfriddo, David Lindsay-Abaire, Adam Rapp and many others.

From 2006 until his death, he was director of the drama division at the Juilliard School, which was founded in 1968, also by John Houseman. Like Professor Kingsfield, the Harvard law scholar famously played by Houseman in the 1973 film “The Paper Chase,” the drama division was long known for its emphasis on discipline and for upholding rigorous standards that kept the pressure on the small number of students who were admitted after auditions. (In 2016 there 2,000 applicants for 18 spots.)

Mr. Houghton altered the Juilliard audition process and is credited with relaxing the atmosphere of the program. During his tenure, Juilliard added a Master of Fine Arts degree program in drama for the first time and created a partnership with Signature to enable students to work in a professional theater setting.

“I don’t think there was anyone in the theater community more beloved than Jim,” the playwright Tony Kushner, whose work was featured in Signature’s 2010-11 season, wrote in an email. “He had a great soul and a grand capacity for friendship and love. He was smart and passionate. He built his singular legacy, founded on his devotion to playwrights’ work and to playwrights themselves, with a uniquely sweet, generous spirit; with unflagging optimism; and with grace.”
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