Maryann Fernandez is the co-founder of Shaking the Tree Interactive Productions, a nonprofit content production company with a theater-based approach to enriching intergenerational conversations about wealth and purpose.
What led you to putting on these productions for family offices?
I started in commodities trading, moved to San Francisco and came back to New York; and I’m like, "I don’t know anything, I want to be in the finance industry." So I ended up working for an executive conference production company and ended up with all of their conferences around ultra-high-net-worth individuals and families and their close advisers, as well as endowments and foundations. You put a keynote on — great people — and you always get great reviews.
But like any conference, you ask, “Is there any way we can make this more lively, more vibrant?” And people are like, “Tell me more, give me more context.” There’s only so much one keynote can do, right? So, one of the chairs of the conference, from the Family Business Consulting Group, had done an experiment with three actors portraying a family business, playing six roles, and they would run over to a coat rack to change costumes.
It was engaging, but I thought we needed something a little more polished. Later, I got hired by Harris Bank in Chicago, and they said, we want you to do a play. And I’m thinking, how am I going to do this? The bank happened to be sponsoring a young theater company called Lookingglass Theatre Company who had no home base, and they had a great ensemble that came out of Northwestern University. One of the ensemble members was actually David Schwimmer from "Friends."
So, I met David Kerzner, who was the artistic director at the time, and he encouraged me to see some of their shows. And it was amazing. They were great partners because they were always open to taking theater and putting it on its ear a little bit.
How did you approach these productions?
David Kerzner actually became our managing artistic director, and he was like, "We have to do it like professional theater." And so we cast all of our stuff from the beginning like a main stage production. And what that means is we put out a casting call to find the right actors, so agents sent working actors to us that would fit the part. So we'd look through their headshots and their descriptions, and we'd interview them. This meant casting the father, the mother, the aunt, the family office executive, the lawyer. He's the one who really brought us up to this real professionalism that we were seeking.
He also insisted that we work with good writers. We also had a really extended rehearsal time. So even our new pieces, which tend to be about 30 or 45 minutes long, we would be rehearsing for two weeks.
Our pieces always ended on some explosive moment. You know, how are we going to solve this? So we would bring the actors back in character to take questions from the audience.
And what was the reaction of the audience? It must have resonated with them much better than the usual PowerPoint presentations or long-winded speeches.
At the time in Harrisburg [Pennsylvania], there were a lot more family office executives and family members than there were advisers, because those were our private conferences. So it was just fascinating to get their reactions. I think it was interesting to them because you can apply some of the stuff that you've been hearing. Especially when people get to question the actors and characters like, “I can't believe you did that to your daughter.”
We always like to create a slightly heightened sense of reality, like people in our pieces would say a little bit more than they would normally say. They would express what they're thinking, maybe a little bit more honestly than they normally say. I think that’s why it resonates with the audience. These are sometimes the conversations that are going in their head when they're talking to the lawyer or their father.
One of the nuances we like to utilize is a theater thing called right versus right, so we never have a bad guy. It’s easy to have a failed character and say, “Oh, it’s their fault.” In real life, a lot of times there really isn't a good guy or a bad guy; everybody is just trying to make this work the best they can, right?
Are there other applications for that type of performance beyond conferences, like at family offices for family retreats?
We’ve actually been invited to private family meetings to do a live production. What's also interesting is that during the pandemic, all of a sudden, you can't do this. But also live productions are expensive because we’d work in Chicago and then fly them to Colorado for the family meeting, or we would fly them to New York for the conference. And we actually had some pieces that were videotaped. So during the pandemic, we saw that people are now running Zoom meetings, and they need content. How are you going to make this interesting? So we decided to put our videos online — you put your credit card in, and then you get a certain amount of days to utilize it.
Now, those ones are not facilitated. What we want people to understand about our pieces is that you should have a facilitator shaking the tree. Our team has facilitated a lot. But we also have our board of directors, a lot of whom are very experienced and with a lot of friends who are family wealth consultants. And even people within some of these financial advisory firms are very skilled at facilitating these conversations.
What lessons can family offices draw in terms of starting difficult discussions about succession or other things?
It's hard to get those conversations going. These are loaded topics. So when we created our pieces, we wanted to create a blank slate. So it's very multilayered. Just like a family that comes in with their own priorities or comes in with their own objectives for right conversations. And they're also wrestling with lots of different things aside from a main theme. So with any one piece, you could facilitate it six different ways. I think what it gives families is the opportunity to look at a challenging situation with some distance.
Of course, it can be triggering. But you can sit there anonymously in the audience and sit there and have someone ask questions: “What assumptions do you think the matriarch made in that situation?” And the audience can answer it freely because it's not like our matriarch, right? And it could be that a matriarch in the audience could say, “Do I do that?”
So that's a way to open the door, and people can use it as a way to facilitate a conversation or to open a conversation to something bigger in a way that isn't so personal.
What are your future plans?
What’s interesting to us lately is the idea of adviser training, because advisers are coming into this arena, dealing with ultra-affluent families; and they don't get trained for the soft issues, the nontechnical issues. You're trained in investments, you're trained in law, you're trained in accounting. But you have to interact with these families many times on a personal level. And advisers sometimes don't get to hear these conversations. They get the end result of these conversations: “We're going to do the estate plan this way.” But the advisers don't hear what the conversations are behind that decision.
So with this type of training, advisers get to be like a fly on the wall to understand a little bit more of the family dynamics that take place in the decision-making within a family.