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Tetreault says, “I had never been to Ford’s, so I came to see their production of The Grapes of Wrath. The thing I remember more than anything was that the seats were so uncomfortable! And the show was pretty mediocre. It’s already kind of a depressing play and the production just wasn’t lively or exciting. When I came back for the final interviews, I went to see A Christmas Carol, which they’d been doing for twenty-some years. I sat in the balcony, and frankly I thought that it was odd they couldn’t get me better seats, but the house was jam-packed. And again, I thought the production was mediocre. Then, at intermission, I heard the couple sitting behind me say, ‘Our production in Salt Lake is better than this,’ and that’s when it hit me how important my job at Ford’s would be. People come from all over the world to see our work, and that should be representative of what’s happening in US theatre.”

Indeed, it seemed that when Tetreault accepted the position, the theatre’s reputation was defined by the tour bus business, or what he calls “the Ford’s drive-by experience.” He says, “They’d walk in, take a picture of the booth, and walk out. They could do the whole thing in 15 minutes.” Tetreault, whose familial roots on the East Coast reveal an engaging, almost Kennedy-esque vocal drawl, says, “When I first got here, I had a meeting with Michael Kaiser at the Kennedy Center, and he said, ‘People interested in theatre in D.C. don’t even have Ford’s on their radar.’ It was crushing, but it was true. So for six years I have tried to get people who love theatre in D.C. to recognize that Ford’s is doing serious theatre as well as providing a rich, historical experience for tourists.” For as daunting as that challenge might seem, people in the theatrical business around the country who had worked with Tetreault knew it was a job he was perfectly suited for.

Tetreault, whose father was a blue-collar worker and whose mother was a housewife, was drawn to the theatre at an early age. He says, “I really got the bite when I was in sixth grade, when, kind of on a lark, I auditioned for Oliver, and I got the lead. I did plays through high school and got lots of leading roles. But I got ‘serious’ and gave it up after high school and applied for junior college in accounting. But thankfully, I started taking drama classes… oh God, if I hadn’t, my life would have been dreadful.”

There at junior college, Tetreault had a life-changing conversation, saying, “There were a lot of older people there working on second careers and starting over. I was having lunch with this guy who had been a jeweler but he wanted to be a sociologist and help people with dependency issues. His life lesson: ‘Why would you go through 20 years of wondering what if?…’ What if I’d tried to work in theatre, to have a stage career? I didn’t want to spend my life wondering, so I went to Emerson College to study theatre as a performance major. It was amazing. I changed from acting to directing, education, and then administration. When I left Emerson, I knew I had acting talent but I could do more on the arts administration side.”

He received his M.F.A. from Brooklyn College, where he interned in a variety of theatrical settings, eventually working as assistant to Martha Richards, then director of finance at Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts. Says Tetreault, “Martha didn’t just teach me about finance, she taught me how to deal with and motivate people. She used to say, ‘People who we will manage in our careers are on a continuum. At the top end there are a few people who are brilliant. These are the people you want to work with at every opportunity. On the opposite end, there are a few terrible people: not good, not smart, no scruples. Avoid working with them. The majority of people are in the middle. Your job is to get those people and push them up into the top end.’ I’ve never forgotten that.”

Tetreault moved on to management jobs at Circle Repertory Company in New York and Berkeley Repertory Theatre, where he worked with another mentor, Mitzi Sales, who served as the Repertory’s managing director for its first eighteen years. About Sales, who clearly embodies the West Coast “love of life” mentality, he says, “She loved theatre and she was my life mentor. She took me to have oysters and steak tartar; she really taught me how to live. She always said, ‘You can have a great career but you need to know how to live.’”

After his tenure at Berkeley, Tetreault was lured back to New York to become director of finance at Madison Square Garden. He says, “I was a bit naïve. I was in my late 20s and thought I’d hit the ceiling in non-profit theatre. I short-changed my career options and thought I needed to move to commercial entertainment. I was there for eight weeks when they laid off 15% of the staff, including me. This was a $300-million company, and just like that, I was gone. I was devastated. I hadn’t been without a job since I was 16.” Although he was eventually hired back and worked for the Garden around 16 months, Tetreault realized that commercial entertainment did not suit his personality, saying, “We did massive events like the Grateful Dead’s nine sold-out concerts. I met with band managers at midnight and wrote checks for a million dollars. I worked with giant acts on settlements of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and some of them would want half of it in cash. It was just not for me.”

It was during this period that Tetreault also met the man who would become his life partner, John Jeter. He says: “John and I noticed each other working out at the Equinox Club. The gym is in the basement of the building, so there are elevators. We started talking in the lobby, I got his number and was really trying to play it cool. Then I turned around, and there was one of those black signs with little white letters that can be changed out. I ran right into that stupid sign and the letters went flying everywhere! So there I was, picking up all these little letters off the floor as John got in the elevator and the doors shut. All I could think was, ‘He must think I’m a loser.’”

Their romance, however, blossomed and less than a year later Jeter moved with him to Houston where Paul had been offered the managing director position at the renowned Alley Theatre. Tetreault says, “When I heard about the Alley job, I told them I didn’t think the timing was right. I wasn’t really thinking about my career, I was thinking about John. But I told John about it and he encouraged me to take the job. He had been living in Long Island while I was in Manhattan, and he said, ‘I’d rather move to Houston than 91st Street and Broadway.’ So I called the Alley back and said I was interested.”

For the next ten years Tetreault and Artistic Director Gregory Boyd produced over 100 critically acclaimed productions, conceived and completed a state of the art on-site production center (the only one of its kind in the US), and won the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre. Tetreault also saw the company through the devastation of Tropical Storm Allison of 2001, which destroyed the theatre’s second stage (the space was renovated and re-opened in seven months) and the financial mayhem in Houston following the collapse of Enron. When he resigned from his position in 2004 to accept the job at Ford’s, he left the Alley in the strongest financial position in its 58-year history. An article in the Houston Press called Tetreault, “the man who invented fiscal stability in the arts here.”