Category: Conversations

Conversations with members of the arts community on their work, life, and identity

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A Conversation with Denny Dale Bess, Sheldon Best, Brian D. Coats, Bjorn DuPaty, Lynnette R. Freeman, and Ivan Moore

 

William Jackson Harper’s impressive debut play Travisville, though set in the 1960s, feels like a contemporary piece tackling issues of race, gentrification, and political revolution. We sat down with cast members Denny Dale Bess, Sheldon Best, Brian D. Coats, Bjorn DuPaty, Lynnette R. Freeman, and Ivan Moore over lunch to discuss the play’s impact and importance in our current political climate.

 

 

Margarita Javier: What can you tell us about the character or characters you play?
 

Brian D. Coats: I play Elder Hearst. He’s running things at the Church and the Minister’s Alliance. I think he takes things going on with black people and Civil Rights very personally. He has a protégé and is trying to get him to take his rightful place in the fight in the struggle against all the things that we’re experiencing.
 

Lynnette R. Freeman: I play Georgia Dawson who is a mother of three. She is a housekeeper and married to Orthel Dawson who is a mechanic in the district that is slated to be displaced for this Travisville project. She is an extremely forthright woman. First and foremost comes her family, so she does everything she can to make her family comfortable and living a good life.
 

Bjorn DuPaty: I play Ora Fletcher. I would say he’s stuck between the old way and the new way. Obviously things are changing in the world around this time period. I think he recognizes that, but also initially he never really wanted to get into the political side. He was more of a church man. He’s felt like he’s a man of justice doing what’s just, what’s right. And I think that mindset gets him involved in local politics. I think his whole thing was just to be a pastor of a church and to take care of the people of the church and the community. But as we all know, the church was very involved with politics during that time. I think he’s stuck between how things used to be and surviving that way and the new way, being more outspoken and standing for our rights and being more active and proactive. And by the end of the play, I think he makes a choice about which side to land on.
 

Sheldon Best: I play Zeke Phillips who is a young activist who comes from Atlanta and has come to this town in Texas. He’s working with CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, and has come to this town in order to help uplift people and to get them to move from being complacent with injustice to taking some action, because Zeke has zero tolerance for injustice and is willing to sacrifice in order to move things forward for his people.
 

Denny Dale Bess: I play two characters. The first one I play is Mayor Gillette. He’s a bit rough and gruff. He’s very blunt, but he is very caring for his community and wants equal rights for black and white citizens. The second character I play is a real estate developer named Honeycutt who is proposing the Travisville Project to the Fannin Gardens district. Honeycutt is more of a cosmopolitan individual and he is intensely a businessman.
 

Ivan Moore: I play a dual role. I play Minister Howard Mims, commonly known as Jumpy now [laughs]. And one of the townspeople, Howard Birch. Mr. Mims is part of the Alliance. I lean towards more radical side, but I’m not too radical. Howard Birch is one of the older folk that’s lived in a town for many, many years. I know how it works in terms of white black relation. I’m willing to sell my house and get up outta there if I have to. I don’t necessarily appreciate the intervention of the young men coming into town and stirring things up. I would prefer if he just went back to the land of the giants, as it were.
 

Margarita: The play is Travisville by William Jackson Harper. There’s a lot of buzz about it, a lot of great word of mouth. If you had to describe in a few words what this play is about, what would you say?
 

Ivan: Gentrification of the ‘60s with racial overtones.
 

Denny: Individuals trying to get what they need and what they want.
 

Sheldon: How we demand or seek progress in a society. Do we do it in small steps, small stages? Do we demand what we deserve and get it, and then take the consequences of those demands and use that as a vehicle to move forward? Or do we try to move more gradually?
 

Bjorn: All progress demands some type of sacrifice.
 

Travisville
 

Margarita: The play is set in the 1960s during the civil rights movement; it’s a new play. Obviously it goes without saying, but it’s something that’s still relevant to today’s society. Like you mentioned —gentrification, racism, the fight for equality. How do you think this play speaks specifically to New York City audiences?
 

Sheldon: In many respects I think it speaks to who we are in life today, not just in New York but in the world. You guys can correct me if I’m wrong, but the play takes place in a place where nothing was really happening, right? Black people and white people in this town more or less got along. There weren’t lynching, bombings, anything like that. People were comfortable. So take our world now, more or less people are comfortable. There are some extreme things, but for the most part, everybody’s eating, they have a household and they can progress. There’s opportunity. So are you going to stay comfortable or are you going to make sure that equality is really upheld, that the tenants of this country are really upheld? Or are you just going to go along with the flow because that’s what you’ve been doing the majority of your life?
 

Ivan: I think it addresses a lot of the issues that we have today. You know, we kind of feel that white folks are going to get what they want one way or the other. I think if you ask people of color, minorities in this day and age, the sentiment still runs deep that way. Gentrification is real. It’s happening as we speak. One character says “It’s not personal, it’s business,” and I think that’s justification for a lot of what you do when people are displaced. Some people, like my character, fought the fight for a long time and then you’ve got a young guy who comes along and says how it needs to be done, and that internal tug of war as they had back then, it’s still the same thing. Except we’re not hanging from trees and getting things cut off. Yet. In our current political climate, I think we’re all kind of waiting for stuff like that to happen on some level or another, but right now we just live with the tension that there’s a reality there we can talk about but are not tactile seeing it.
 

Lynnette: Here in New York specifically, you can’t just talk about gentrification and talk about economic disparity without also talking about race. Look at Brooklyn, at the Atlantic yards, the fact that people didn’t have a choice. You are going to be displaced, period. Whenever I hear Honeycutt and Zeke’s back and forth during the show when talking about Travisville, they’re talking about place that’s prone to flooding. I think it’s very interesting, particularly post Sandy when we found out how vulnerable New York actually is. All of a sudden there were all of these changes, and then people are being moved in order to live in this city farther and farther away from the center of the city, towards the ocean, which is the most susceptible place to flooding. And so you do have to look at that and see those disparities where one person may say it’s just business, but then it’s like, no, people’s lives are now on the line if another really big hurricane comes. I feel like this play puts all of those things together, especially now with Black Lives Matter and whatnot. Maybe people were being told that black and brown folk are not being targeted or racially profiled, but clearly it is happening, and often. And when people protest peacefully, when that is not heard, or when that is painted with a brush stroke that says that people are aggressive or violent, how do we make our voices heard? How do we move towards civil rights being really not only considered but actually followed through? Look at the children being detained, even in New York. I think this play is a really wonderful way to look at the past because many times people will look at the past and say “that’s then.” But a lot of it is still happening now.
 

Sheldon: One of the things that I found really relevant to New York about this play is the way that people’s latent, just under-the-surface racism comes out when housing issues are on the table. For example, there was a school in Park Slope where they were like, Oh, we’re gonna have these two schools join. And one school had mostly people of color, and the other was mostly white. And the parents at this white school went ballistic.
 

Margarita: Yeah, and that was supposedly liberal people being overtly racist.
 

Sheldon: Yeah! And that’s exactly what I think is true of this play and what’s true of New York City, and what’s true today: it’s often people who would consider themselves liberal and say like, we get along and love each other. That’s great. But my character has a line in the play that says, “You don’t have to hate someone to think you’re superior to them.” And once you have that superiority complex, that white supremacy that is right below the surface, once the issue has come forward, that means you’re going to have to confront this in some way. Either when your kids are going to school together or you are going to have to live together, or work together with people you think you deserve better than or you are better than. Those kinds of things can suddenly come out, and they come up with vitriol. It’s true in the play and it’s true in the city today in 2018.
 

Denny: Acceptance and understanding is something that always comes to mind for me because when Zeke comes to the Fannin Gardens district to disrupt this Travisville project to get people to stand up in his community, the mayor is adamant about going to the minister’s Alliance and getting Elder Hearst to keep his people in line. Because this is a big money moment for this town. We could potentially have a lot of money to get people working together. “White and Negro side by side” is what I say verbatim and that’s when they start to show some change within that old guard to the new guard. Minister Gunn has gotten Zeke to come in from Atlanta to disrupt this and then they slowly start to persuade Minister Fletcher to join their side, but he makes up his own mind later in the play because he wants to honor Elder Hearst’s vision of play ball with the mayor, play ball with city hall. This could work in all of our favor because it will bring revenue to everyone, but at the same time there’s this need to have their own voice. It’s time for things to stop, time for things to change. But I think the mayor is very adamant about swaying that idea until we can get this project past. So he is for both white and black, but at the same time, like Sheldon was saying, when it comes to money and housing, it’s thinking of ourselves first.
 


 

Margarita: Right, and the same thing is happening now. This is a broad question, but what can be done? What is the solution? Is it political activism? Peaceful protesting? Revolution?
 

Denny: I think this play is a start of the conversation.
 

Ivan: Sit down and have a conversation. Teach people how to treat you. If you sit down and just let people displace you, and you say nothing, they’ll keep doing it. There’s no reason not to, because they know you’re not gonna meet any resistance. I think the thing about this particular play is that you kind of see both sides of the resistance coming in. People who want to resist them and people don’t want to resist, and invariably there’s a price that one of our characters pays for resisting. We’re kind of used to and not used to all at the same time. It’s always different when you read something in the newspaper and then it becomes a little more different when it’s something that becomes very personal to you, you know? We’re living at a time where the issues are really not all that removed from the 1960s or what have you. The activism, the resistance, if you will, it’s still very much alive and well after all these years. They’re still fighting the same battles but just not fighting them all in the same place. So things have not changed all that much.
 

Lynnette: What I think is really funny is in general, this country was very much built with certain inherent biases already entrenched in its creation and its fabric. But then one of the big things that this country was built on was the fact that we can overthrow things and there can be messy revolution and that as Americans we should do that in order to have ourselves better representative forward democracy. Now, that has never actually been true. We say it’s true. But it’s not. And so I think that before we can even address things in full revolution or even peaceful protests, there is a necessity for everyone to speak very frankly about inherent biases, to speak very frankly about racism and sexism and misogyny and all of that. That is literally built into our institutions because it’s hard to move forward when the laws themselves are not fair or built with those same ideals in mind.
 

Ivan: I’ve always felt that. The one thing I’ve always said is that we always say the laws are not fair. But the laws are fair – for the people they’re written for. Which are not minorities, which are not women. When you want this country to do something that is fair, you have to force it, you have to have them make a law and have them enforce it, anything from not selling slaves to women voting. Up until you made a law, these were things that were all right to do.
 

Lynnette: And there were laws about that! If you look at people actually following the law, having a slave was part of the law.
 

Ivan: So when people say the laws are not fair in this country, the laws of very fair in this country to the people they were written for, and that’s not us [laughs].
 

Bjorn: I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t really see this country getting better unless there is a revolution, and that’s going to take sacrifice and maybe even bloodshed. We can say everything about laws and things like that, but there is still a power structure that is still in place. That’s why we have a guy like Kavanaugh getting in like it doesn’t matter. It does not matter. They can do the investigation for the public eye and say they did that, and it’s funny, as it’s happening, some people go, Well, it’s gonna work this time, and then some people go, That motherfuckers getting in [laughs]. Excuse the language, but you see it. And I feel like a lot of people are starting to see more of it. A few days after Trump got elected, a friend of mine who’s Jewish interviewed me for this thing he was putting together and the first question he asked was, Were you surprised? And I said, Do you want my PC answer or do you want my real answer? He’s all, I want you to be really honest. I was like, Okay, I’ll be honest with you, black people and most people like me, were not surprised at all. And it wasn’t even about trying to be different. It’s just that we’ve seen this story play out in some way or fashion. I always tell people the biggest time that I was ever surprised were two moments: when O.J Simpson got off and when Barack Obama got elected. If you look at both of them, the celebrations were exactly the same. If you really look at it. When O.J got off, people ran in the street talking about We won! We didn’t win shit. But what we did see, finally, was a man of color when all the evidence at the counter said he should be under the jail, he actually got off. That was something we’d never seen before. It was like what just happened? Because I’ve seen people go to jail for less than that. And then the opposite, Barack Obama. I was five years old. My father told me you can be anything in this world but you will never be president of the United States. Me and my friends used to go to school and joke around, half joking, half serious knowing that that was a truism of being a black person in America. And so to see that? That was also incredible because we were always told it will never happen. It would never happen in my lifetime.
 

Ivan: Black families don’t tell their children you could grow up to be president. You can go up and work for the president [laughs].
 

Bjorn: You can do a lot of things, but you will never ever rise to that position. I look at it and I go, sure we can create laws and protest, and now don’t get me wrong, those things are necessary. I think all of it’s necessary, but I think eventually if we really want to create a change that’s long lasting, it’s going to have to be by destroying the system that we currently have.
 

Lynnette: And also, the onus is not just on those who are oppressed to rise up. The onus is on those liberal white people, those who have privilege, to change their populations, to change those around them. When President Obama was elected, that was awesome, but it also kind of drove in this kind of insidious notion of Well, we’re post racial, don’t you know? And then there is this gaslighting that does happen because just because he got elected did not erase discrimination and racism at all. Whenever people would get up and say, you know, this is wrong, I’m being discriminated against, look at this video of this person being assaulted.
 

Margarita: And it took videos, because how long had black people been saying they were being targeted by police, and no one believed it?
 

Lynnette: Right, but even with video, people were like, well, what did he do? What did he do to deserve it?
 

Ivan: The thing is that nothing has really changed except technology is accessible. Now we can videotape these things. You know, black folks been getting shot by cops for years. The only difference is now we got cell phones that can record it, you know? I mean, that’s the only thing that has revolutionized over the years. Everything else is pretty much the same.
 

Travisville
 

Bjorn: I think as a country we have to finally get to the point where we say the American dream does not exist or that it does exist on the backs of oppressing people regardless, right? Anywhere in this country that there is a millionaire or billionaire, that’s on the back of taking advantage of somebody; someone’s on the bottom that is being oppressed for that one person to be a millionaire. Everybody who grows up in this country has this idea that I’m going to be that. And so therefore in the pursuit of that, it’s okay for all these people to be suffering.
 

Ivan: There’s a fallacy in this country that makes it believed that everything that they do is somehow for the greater good of the whole. You know what I mean? And that’s where, you know, it gets kinda tricky because who do we consider the whole? Is it us? Is it them? You know, who is us and who is them? It’s not just minorities, immigrants, women, gay, straight, across the spectrum. And we are separated because we live in this society where we pretend to be enlightened, anything that we do is coming from that enlightened point of view. When they were talking about moving Travisville, they said this is for the betterment of the neighborhood, but who consists of the neighborhood? We’re not talking about the people, we’re talking about the real estate, you know what I mean? And that’s where you have that tug of war.
 

Sheldon: To the question of what it’s going to take to get change, I think of when you see something in the news where they’re like, Oh, so and so is the first black woman nominated or the first black man to be a governor in x, y, z state. Usually it’s followed by “since reconstruction”. Because during reconstruction, there were all these gains that were had because you had the white power structure enforcing that these changes are going to be made across the board. These laws are going to be enforced. And that racism is not the law of the land anymore. And when reconstruction prematurely ended, you had this regression, all of the gains that were made were lost and they haven’t moved a lot of them. We haven’t seen those gains since, which is why you often hear on the news: So and so was the first black x, y, z since reconstruction. So I think in order for there to be some kind of real lasting change, first you have to upend whatever power structure is in existence right now. And that may happen through revolution. But it also could happen because people politically decide it is not the best thing for us as a whole, for us as a country, to have white supremacy be the law of the land, to have people suffer under other people so that they can become millionaires. It’s not beneficial for us as a whole. And if the powers that be decided that we are going to implement those kinds of changes, we’re going to make sure that people have equal protection under the law, and then enforced it. It could take the right government, be it by saying We’re gonna occupy these states. I mean, I don’t know if that’s gonna happen, but I think it would take something as extreme in order for people to go, Okay, these are the laws and while we may not like it, we’re going to get used to it. And then when people get used to it and realize, Oh, we are better, everything is fine, this didn’t destroy our family or our homes, our livelihood, and things like that, then people can go, oh, okay. And then at some point you can take that pressure off from the top down, and hope that people on a community level are going to be there for each other and the law from the top down will protect them. But we don’t have that right now.
 

Margarita: I’m from Puerto Rico.
 

Lynnette: Oh! Oh yea.
 

Margarita: Yeah, so I’m feeling all of this very deeply. Going back to the play, what’s it been like working with the playwright William Jackson Harper and the director Steve H. Broadnax III?
 

Ivan: They’re horrible people. It was just the worst experience in the world. [laughs] I mean, I don’t know if you could say enough great things about either one of them. Steve, I think I told him not one week or so ago. I was doing a comparison. I remember looking at a documentary once with Michael Jackson and watching him do his thing, you know what I mean? And when you looked at it, you know, put all that controversy and crap away, and just look at the man doing his work. You just knew he was born to do what he was doing. He could not do anything else. And when I watched Steve work, his mind is always going and he’s very meticulous. It’s really great to watch. He’s a great person to work with. He knows what the hell he’s doing. And Will is fun. [laughs] These guys have really creative minds. But I think I just have to say across the board, writer, director cast, I’ve been calling them all rock stars from the very beginning. There’s no weak links in the chain, none at all.
 

Lynnette: Such joy showing up to work every single day. It’s not even like work. Steve brought that to the table because he says and it’s totally true, he is of service to not only the story but also the actors inhabiting the story, and of service to whatever ancestors are working through it to make it happen. And we just had so much fun in the process of constructing and telling this story. I mean, a lot of it and being in it is not fun, because it is retelling certain things that are horrific, many of which ancestrally you felt. But showing up, it’s like family and I feel like that level of camaraderie in giving, especially doing a script that’s very well written, it’s all right there on the page and the amount of thought and consideration that is given to every line and every piece of every line. It was a true collaboration. Will was open, Steve was open, everyone else was open. And so, you know, even from our table work, it got really passionate but not so much that at the end of it you weren’t walking away smiling. It was really good.
 

Ivan: I saw that interview where you talked about table work, because it was really something to see. Someone, I can’t remember who, said we got mad but had so much fun getting mad. We were fighting about your character or your lines in the history of what was going on or whatnot. And it was like surgery, where you were watching everybody to kind of dissect, what’s going on here? Why am I doing this? And it was really something to see. And like she said, Steve was really open to letting all of that happen and whatnot.
 

Sheldon: And they worked so hard. Being that open, that takes work. Yes, it does. Oh, you could very easily say No, we’re going to do what’s on the page, learn the words, say the words, do the actions and let’s do this play, but both Steve and Will were so open to us challenging and questioning the words and the intentions and the actions. We would talk about it. We’d be in dialogue. Will, who’s a very hardworking actor, was abroad shooting a movie during some of the rehearsal process and so he came back for a week and then he had to leave again and then he came back. He was away working on another job and would stay up, you know, with the five or six hour difference, and be writing new pages for us based on the conversations and questions that we had, that Steve would be up all night talking to him about. You know, that kind of openness takes a lot of hard work and I just can’t speak enough to how hardworking these two guys have been.
 

Travisville
 

Margarita: Tell me if you disagree, but to me theater still feels very white and male, and stuck in the past. There’s so much diverse talent out there, but it still feels like a very white, male, straight landscape. Sometimes it feels like we’re making progress, and sometimes it feels like we’re taking steps back, but I’m wondering what your thoughts are and what your experience has been working in theater and what can be done to get to a point where all voices are accurately represented.
 

Ivan: I worked in the education system for over 25 years, and the arts are not something that’s pushed. It’s one of those things where if a child feels inspired by something, whether it be acting, dancing or singing, then they have to seek it out. You know what I mean? It’s not something that you are generationally teaching the children. It wouldn’t be natural for arts to just appear and I think if you talk about getting more diversity in writing, acting, dancing and all that stuff, you’ve got to start at a base level and that doesn’t start with the adults. The adults have to chart the course, but we have to go to where it begins and then start to bring them up. Teach the arts in the school or whatnot. Nowadays, they say there’s no money in it to teach it, so they take money away from the arts. So you’re not teaching the children that, or anything like that. If you want to make the arts more friendly towards whatever the group may be, you have to start at a place where the creativity begins, you know what I mean? It could be on a junior high school, high school level, but something that promotes the interest and I don’t think interests like that are promoted nowadays. Kids have to go looking for it.
 

Lynnette: Along those same lines, even if you’re looking at, say an English class. What exactly are you teaching? Which plays? The things we learn or are taught are the pinnacle of theater? We hear Shakespeare. White, dead males.
 

Ivan: Yeah, that’s exactly what happens.
 

Lynnette: There has to be an interest in looking at your curriculum to also reflect your students, to reflect your city, reflect your world and open those up and use those as teaching tools as well. And then, you know, if you’re an artistic director or on the board of a theater, if you’re looking around the room and everybody looks like you, you’re doing something wrong. If you’re looking at your entire staff and the only people of color or different sexual orientation are just the people cleaning up for maintenance, there’s a problem there. Are you actually looking at your programming, not just from what’s visible or fashionable— you know, black plays or are really in fashion right now— but what are you trying to do? Are you looking at your mission statement? Does it include everybody? Are you looking at not only what’s going on your stages with the programming you have? Are you engaging with the neighborhood that your programming is in? Who are you serving? When you’re doing audience outreach, are you going to outreach? It’s actually not that hard. Are you going to outreach with lots of other theater companies? Because there are lots of theater companies for lots of people that do programming specifically focusing on all artists. Are you aligning yourself with them? Are you going to see things? Are you looking at all of the immense talent that is in the city, or are you just towing the line and getting paid for that? And if you are, I say make that a choice. Say that you are, but don’t say that we are a theater for everybody and then turn around and just be the same old, same old. I think that it’s necessary for boards of theater and artistic staff to actually be very real about who is making those decisions and the different perspectives that they are getting in. Even your costume designers or set designers, sound designers— there are lots of people from very diverse backgrounds. There’s actually several excel sheets with lists. So if you don’t know, there are people that you can seek out. And if you say that there are none, then that means you’re actually not doing your job.
 

Sheldon: I think that the power structure has to evolve because you look at a lot of the theater institutions, and sometimes the plays are more reflective of society than it is of the administrators in the field. And while that might be good, it makes me question what are you actually seeking to do with these plays? Because on one level you’re bringing people in. Letting them feel good, like another one of those liberal pats on the back. We feel good because we produced this, because we told this story, but who is the audience seeing the story? Who was actually consuming this? Who are the people who are deciding this and why? That’s why I feel like sometimes I go to the theater and I see like torture porn for minorities. Like, I can cry for people and it makes me feel better because it made me see that I see their humanity. But do you see their humanity in your daily life? Do you see their humanity and what you’re doing? And does the theater see their humanity? I think it comes down to our blind spots and our consciousness. For example, me walking through the world as a black man, I have this double consciousness, so to speak, of what it is like to walk through the world as a black man. But I also know, because I have to navigate a world where black people are not the ones making the decisions, I have to navigate a white world. So I’m aware of how I move through the world. If I didn’t have that double consciousness, I would be blind to some of the things. I’m not a woman. So walking through the world as a man, I don’t see some of the things that women see. I have privilege, I benefit from it. I just go on the subway sometimes and I don’t think. A friend of mine, she was like Will you actually just take a cab with me? It was something I didn’t think of, I was just like, Oh yeah, we’ll just take the train together until this point. And we split. She was like, I’d rather, you know, get a cab together. And it was something I hadn’t thought of, but she thinks of daily, you know? So if you are in a position of power as a theater administrator and your blind spots aren’t being covered by either you doing your homework and your research and figuring out why it’s important to do certain works and why it’s important to have other people working alongside you, then you’re not fully doing what your job should be, and you either need to make room for someone who is going to do that or you need to make sure that the people around you are holding you accountable.
 

Ivan: I think at the end of the day, a revolutionary thing as a matter of thought and action takes us out of our comfort zone and nobody wants to be out of their comfort zone. Whether you’re white or you’re black or someone like that, the only way that you grow in anything is to come out of that. It’s a little difficult but that’s the way change works universally.
 

Bjorn: I just think that, same with this country, it needs to change from the top. We can surround ourselves with people, but at the same time, the theaters I’ve seen work well are the ones that were run by people of color or women and because they naturally tried to look at the whole. We also have to talk about, yes, stories get done, yes, but it’s always done from the white gaze anyway. So are these stories really challenging the norm? Is it really something that’s gonna push the community forward and open eyes? That’s something that always makes me think.
 

 

 

Stori Ayers (Bethany/LaVerne) is elated to make her EST debut. Acting credits include: A Raisin in the Sun (Indiana Repertory Theatre & Syracuse Stage); Foster Mom (Premiere Stages); Detroit ‘67 (Chautauqua Theater Company); Barbecue (Pennsylvania Centre Stage); Jitney (Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park); Yellowman (Anacostia Playhouse); Blood at the Root (National Black Theatre); Father Comes Home From the Wars Parts 1, 2 and 3 (Round House Theatre); Doubt; Love’s Labours Lost; In the Red and Brown Water (Pennsylvania Centre Stage). Stori will next be seen as Black Mary in Gem of the Ocean at Round House Theatre.

 

Denny Dale Bess (Gillette/Honeycutt) is honored to be a part of Travisville. Theatre: The Legend of Georgia McBride by Matthew Lopez (regional premier, Dorset Theatre Festival), Year of the Rooster by Olivia Dufault (world premier, EST), The Sluts of Sutton Drive by Joshua Conkel, Where the Children Are by Amy Fox, and Phantom Killer by Jan Buttram (world premier). Film: How He Fell in Love, The Suspect, The Umbrella Man, My First Miracle, and Darcy. TV: “Law & Order”, “Law & Order: Criminal Intent”, “Public Morals”, “Boardwalk Empire”, and “The Blacklist”. He lives in Hell’s Kitchen with his beautiful wife Abigail. Represented by Andreadis Talent Agency & Stewart Talent NYC. Member of AEA, SAG-AFTRA, & EST. Thank you to EST. WJH, you are a man of passion, perseverance, and talent. Thank you sir!

 

Sheldon Best (Zeke Phillips) Theatre Credits include: Sugar in Our Wounds (Manhattan Theatre Club), Romeo & Juliet (Public Theater, Classical Theatre of Harlem), brownsville song: b-side for tray (Lincoln Center/LCT3), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Atlantic Theater), the box: a black comedy (Foundry Theatre), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (CTH), Freed (59E59 & Penguin Rep), Six Rounds of Vengeance, Alice in Slasherland, Geek! (Vampire Cowboys); Soul Samurai (Ma-Yi Theater & Vampire Cowboys), Paradox of the Urban Cliché (LAByrinth). TV/Film – “Manifest” (NBC), “The Good Wife,” “Unforgettable,” “Person of Interest” (CBS); Ghost Light (H9 Films). www.SheldonBest.com.

 

Brian D. Coats (Elder Alden Hearst) Broadway: Jitney. Off-Broadway includes: La Ruta (Working Theater), The First Noel (Classical Theatre of Harlem/The Apollo), On the Levee (Lincoln Center), The Merry Wives of Windsor, Two Gentlemen of Verona (Public/NYSF). Regional: The Royale (Cleveland Play House), The Nest (Denver Center Theatre), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (Huntington Theater, Studio Theatre DC), Seven Guitars, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Two River Theater), Fences, A Raisin in the Sun (Geva Theater), Distant Fires (People’s Light and Theater), Clybourne Park (Caldwell Theatre), The Wedding Gift, pen/man/ship (Contemporary American Theatre Fest), Count (PlayMakers Rep). TV includes: “Law & Order”, “Law & Order: SVU”, “JAG”, “Blue Bloods”, “The Sopranos”, “Boardwalk Empire”, “Luke Cage”, and “The Blacklist”. Up next: King Hedley II.

 

Bjorn DuPaty (Min. Ora Fletcher) Off Broadway: Mlima’s Tale (Public Theater), Two Mile Hollow (Women’s Project Theater). National Tour: Julius Caesar, Comedy of Errors (The Acting Co.). Regional: Do You Feel Anger (Humana Festival), A Raisin in the Sun (Crossroads Theater), Clybourne Park (Pittsburgh Public Theater), Fairfield (Cleveland Playhouse). Film: Demolition TV: “Alpha House”, “Sleepy Hollow”, “The Blacklist”, “Person of Interest”, “Zero Hour”, “All My Children”. MFA From Rutgers’ University, Mason Gross School of the Arts. http://www.bjorndupaty. com

 

Lynnette R. Freeman (Georgia Dawson) is beyond excited to be working on this fantastic play with this fiercely talented group of artists at her EST home. Lynnette is a Jamaican-American actress, dancer, and teaching artist, raised in East Cleveland, OH. Brown/Trinity MFA. Member of EST, and the League of Professional Theatre Women. Previous EST roles: Letitia in On The Outs, Amy in Kentucky, African Woman in Waking Up. Other roles include God in An Act Of God, Ruth in A Raisin in the Sun, Reheema Abu-Salaam in In a Daughter’s Eyes, Esther Mills in Intimate Apparel. Special thanks to friends and family for always believing, encouraging, and supporting. LEAP!

 

Nathan James (Gunn) is excited to be making his debut with EST! Off-Broadway: Playing with Fire (Gene Frankel Theatre), Black Angels Over Tuskegee (St. Luke’s Theatre). NY: Maid’s Door (Billy Holiday Theatre), Growing Pains (One man show, Billy Holiday Theatre). Regional: Pennsylvania Centre Stage, Pittsburgh City Theatre. Film/TV: “Shades of Blue” (NBC), “Quantico” (ABC), “The Wire” (HBO), “Blindspot” (NBC), “VINYL” (HBO), “Person of Interest” (CBS), “The Interestings” (Amazon), “Blue Bloods” (CBS), “The Path” (Hulu), Pain Within (Sundance Film Festival), We Are Unsatisfied (opposite Billy Crystal–Post- production). BA: Pitt MFA: Penn State. www.officialnathanjames.com

 

Ivan Moore (Mims/Birch) is a Native Brooklynite, who is grateful, honored, and thrilled for the opportunity to work with Ensemble Studio Theatre. Ivan’s acting career began at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He continued his education at CCNY, where he received a BFA in Theatre and Acting and continued his studies at the William Esper Studio in New York City under Bill Esper. His recent theatre credits include The Cost with The Negro Ensemble. Recent Film and TV credits include roles in the award-winning short film Blue Diamonds and “Luke Cage” (Netflix), “Bull” (CBS), & “Gotham” (Fox).

 

Shawn Randall (Beasly/Orthel) is an actor, poet, singer-songwriter, musician, freestyle emcee, and producer, born and raised in Brooklyn. He is the founder and host of Symphonics Live, a multi- disciplined evening that showcases the finest singer-songwriters and poets in NY, currently in residence at The Bowery Poetry Club. Shawn has competed in the National Poetry Slam and performed with the Blue Man Group, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Public Theatre, the Bardavon Opera House, The Kennedy Center, INTAR Theatre, La Mama, and Brooklyn Academy of Music. http://www.iloveshawnrandall.com

 

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A Conversation with Nicole Betancourt, Zahydé Pietri, and Jerry Soto

The Waters of Friendship

 

Two women and lifelong friends are stranded together in a faraway land. That deceptively simple premise is the impetus for Argentinian playwright Arístides Vargas’ poetic, funny, and poignant Donde el viento hace buñuelos (The Waters of Friendship), which will have a world premiere English production at LaTea September 16 through the 23rd. We sat down with director Jerry Soto and cast members Nicole Betancourt and Zahydé Pietri to discuss the play, their involvement in the translation, and how current events —particularly the devastation of Hurricane Maria on their homeland of Puerto Rico — have helped shape and illuminate this piece for contemporary New York audiences.

 

 

Margarita Javier: Tell us a little about yourselves.
 

Zahydé Pietri: I’m an actress and an artist from Puerto Rico. I’ve been living in New York City for almost nine years.
 

Margarita: What brought you to here to New York?
 

Zahydé: I worked a lot as an actress in Puerto Rico, in children’s theater and things like that. I felt like it was time to transfer to New York, to find more to do. I had already achieved all I could in Puerto Rico, but I wanted more. New York afforded me the opportunity.
 

Nicole Betancourt: I’m an actress from Puerto Rico, and I’ve been in New York over 22 years. I came here to study and never left. I grew up in a film environment. I’ve been acting here for a long time. I do a lot of voiceover. I used to run a program for children to teach Spanish through theater. But I got really busy, so I had to stop.
 

Jerry Soto: I’m the director of the play. I’m an actor, and this is my directorial debut, which is great. I’ve been acting in the city of New York for about seven or eight years. That’s how I came to the city of New York, through a play. I had been acting for a long time in Puerto Rico, and was invited to join the cast of a Spanish-language production called El caballero del milagro in New York. I came here to do that, and then I stayed. I also work for television, I work for the WWE, and I’m really happy to be directing this piece.
 

Margarita: The play is The Waters of Friendship, which will be at LaTea September 16-23. It is an English translation of a play by Arístides Vargas, an esteemed Latin American playwright who’s not very well known outside of Latin America. I was wondering if you could tell our readers a little bit about him and his work.
 

Zahydé: Arístides Vargas is an Argentinian playwright who was exiled from Argentina during the dictatorship. It was political persecution, and he had to leave his home. Exile is a common theme in his plays.
 

Jerry: I’ve been surprised to learn that even in Spain many people know who Arístides Vargas is. I wasn’t expecting that at all because they’re really proud of their own writers. And they really know him, more so than in Latin America. Every Argentinian knows who he is, of course. But being an author who writes the kind of theater he writes, it’s good to know he is known outside of Latin America. I also know that in the world of academia, many English speakers know his work as well. Now with this production and other works that have been translated, it’s a great opportunity for us and the rest of the world to get to know him.
 

Margarita: Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is the first ever English translation of his plays.
 

Zahydé: Of this play. I believe Nuestra Señora de las Nubes (Our Lady of the Clouds) has been translated and performed in English before. I believe it was in a college setting. Jardín de pulpos (Octopus’s Garden) was also recently translated and performed. But this is the first time that this play is going to be performed in English. The translation was done by a professor in Puerto Rico, Aurora Lozado. She’s been working with Arístides closely on a few of his plays. I believe they have plans to publish them in the future. She was very excited that she wasn’t only translating for it to be published, but for it to be performed on stage. That is part of her project as well. She translates for theater companies to put them onstage, and then hopefully get published.
 

The Waters of Friendship
 

Margarita: How did this collaboration come across?
 

Zahydé: I approached her. This is one of the plays that she had gotten permission from Arístides himself to translate, but she hadn’t worked on it yet. This project had been a dream of mine for a while. She had translated another one of his plays, Jardín de pulpos (Octopus’s Garden) and it was presented at the Julia de Burgos Latino Cultural Center in New York. I approached her and talked to her about this project. And she said yes! She was excited to work with actors, because she said I want to hear the words actually said out loud to know if the translation works. So we initiated a conversation, and kept in touch, and were able to work together to bring this English translation to the stage.
 

Margarita: What is your relationship with this play?
 

Zahydé: It’s interesting how this play came about. Rosa Luisa Márquez is a well-known professor from the University of Puerto Rico. She’s very close friends with Charo Francés, a Spanish actress based in Ecuador, and Arístides Vargas’ wife. She and Arístides run a theater company called Malayerba. He writes and directs plays in which Charo often performs. Rosa Luisa and Charo are very good friends. So they were like Let’s work together so we can see each other more often! They improvised scenes, they had conversations, and Arístides was always there, like a fly in the wall, writing down their conversations. Their stories became the play. The two characters in the piece are based on these women. So it’s a very personal play for both of them. Rosa Luisa was my teacher when I was in college, and I play the character based on her, so this is a huge and thrilling undertaking for me.
 

Nicole: I knew it as a great piece of theater. I hadn’t seen it. I’ve actually never seen it in Spanish. Arístides has a very specific style, which is surprising because that’s what a lot of people say. Oh I love Arístides’ style! But I hadn’t read it in years and I’ve never seen it. So for me it was interesting to see this from scratch, like it was completely new, having almost zero references, besides who the people in the play are based on. Zahydé’s character, Catalina, is based on Rosa Luisa, who is so well known to us, having been students at the university where she teaches. I didn’t study with her, but I knew of her and her work. So for me she was like a faraway icon. This was about her life and it was based on her improvisations. So that was my jumping point to this piece.
 

Margarita: What could you tell us about the play itself?
 

Jerry: The simple answer to that question is: Two friends — they meet, and one of them is dying. That’s the real simple answer to that question. But then it goes to so many different places. It’s a surrealist play, mostly based on these famous surrealist films and it takes a lot from it, sometimes through blatant references. If you’ve watched the film you understand the reference and have something to take from it; if not, you just heard a name, the play keeps going, no big deal. Sometimes it imbues what’s going on stage and the character. The character Miranda in the piece actually plays a dog, named Buñuelo, which is a play on Luis Buñuel, the famous Spanish artist and filmmaker. It’s explained a little bit in the text, and the translator, Aurora Lazado, chose to make more palatable and approachable for English speaking audiences who might not know either the filmmaker or how words and names work in Spanish.
 

Margarita: I had a question about that, because the title of the play in Spanish is Donde el viento hace buñuelos, which is a play on both Luis Buñuel and a dessert called buñuelos which is popular in a lot of Hispanic countries. And that’s very hard to translate. I was wondering, as native Spanish speakers having to do this play in English, how do you work towards making some of these culturally specific, hard to translate ideas and concepts for an English speaking audience?
 

Nicole: Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t feel this is regional or that culturally specific. This play features different cultures: Argentina, Spain, Puerto Rico. They meet through the complexity, but also the simplicity of life, which is friendship, which is death, the emptiness, exile, immigration. I feel it was more of a challenge to translate because of the nature of the language as opposed to culture in itself. I think that that was probably more of a challenge. The poetry. How do you really translate poetry? It’s not easy.
 

Jerry: Translation is always difficult. You’re never satisfied, so we’ve had a lot of back and forth between ideas and what makes it more clear, what’s the best way to say it or feel it and then go through the motions. That’s why from the translator’s point of view it was great to have actors actually doing it. Even today as we’re running the whole play, sometimes I think Maybe that word is not working. Maybe it’s not the best way to communicate that idea. It is a challenge, starting with the title, which ended up being what it is. We’ve wanted to change it and at the same time it is what it is and it works really well inside the play. It’s not as good a title as the one in Spanish, but it works really well in the context of the play.
 


 

Margarita: Can you think of an example in the play where the translation actually illuminates or gives a different meaning to the text than the Spanish does?
 

Jerry: It’s funny, because I’m 100 percent sure that’s happened many times. I wish I could think of a specific example. This is a great question because there have been moments where I think Huh, this works better in English!
 

Nicole: The ending was written in a certain way, I’m not going to give it away [laughs]. But that was the beauty of Aurora, she was so open, and always going back to the Spanish, to be more honest or closer to the Spanish without changing it completely. And there are certain terms that even though they do have a translation, they don’t have the same weight. That was a challenge as well. Sometimes the whole sentence had to be almost rewritten, but to maintain the essence of what was being said or written in Spanish.
 

Zahydé: I always come back to “I don’t have a country, so what? I have a family and that’s wonderful.” That’s one of my favorite phrases in the whole play. We went back and forth on that line. The English translation is very different from the Spanish. But it didn’t work as a literal translation. What does it mean to say, “so what?” We just wanted to make sure that people understood that these two women are exiled from their countries and they found a home with each other and that’s what makes it so powerful. The friendship. Their country now is the relationship they have with each other.
 

Jerry: It’s amazing to think we’re almost playing the role of writer, or editor, whether we want to or not. And it’s complicated because you want to be faithful to the original, yet you also want to make sure the ideas come across accurately.
 

Margarita: I think that also happens not just in translation, but when you’re doing a piece from a different era and sensibilities have changed. How do we make it relevant to today’s audience while still being more or less faithful to the original?
 

Jerry: It’s also interesting, when you read the play in Spanish, one of the characters is from Spain, and the other from Puerto Rico, and you can really feel that in the text. It’s hard for someone to get rid of their own idiosyncrasies when it comes to language. So the Spanish from Spain feels from Spain, even though it’s really universal, yes, but only they talk like that, only they use certain words.
 

Zahydé: Or it comes back to specific themes. The character based on Rosa Luisa’s life talks about hurricanes a lot. This was written in the early 2000s, but it feels so relevant, not only because of what happened in Puerto Rico recently, but because it talks about immigration. It feels like it was written for today. Because of everything that’s happening in this country, we felt it was important to perform it in English because this is our side of the story. You have these debates about not letting people in, or who gets deported or not, and this is what we go through as immigrants, why we come to this country.
 

Jerry: The other character talks a lot about what a dictatorship is, and how it treats its people. And you can feel like maybe someone will hear that today and think about Venezuela, or North Korea, or any other country that’s going through that. That’s really interesting because we come back to what is really a universal theme.
 

Zahydé: In general, immigrants — at least in my case and a lot of people I know — don’t want to leave their country. I mean, many people do, but a lot of people leave because they need to. There’s a reason for it. We miss our language. We miss our homes. But there’s a reason why we’re here. And that’s also very important in the play.
 

The Waters of Friendship
 

Margarita: You mentioned Hurricane Maria, so let’s dive into that because all of us here are Puerto Rican, and this play is written by an Argentinian, but there’s a lot of Puerto Rico in it. It’s being presented for New York audiences. I feel like all of us, especially those of us who grew up on the island and still have family there, are going through this sort of collective mourning process that’s very hard to articulate to people who haven’t experienced it. I was wondering how you and your personal experiences and — I don’t want presume — your pain because of what’s happened, how that translates into the work that you’re doing with his piece.
 

Jerry: I see it in my perspective as the director, but I see it in the actors as well. It’s so there, even if we want it or not. Sometimes purposely putting, not even just the Puerto Rico story, but what’s going on with the Catholic Church, the abuse scandal. Everything that’s going on, all current events, even if you want them or not, they’re there. Sometimes we make nods at it. The Puerto Rico thing is there, because as Zahydé said, Catalina mentions hurricanes a lot. And this was written before this huge crisis, but it’s there, it’s impossible to diverge from it. It’s important, and it’s there. That’s one of the challenges that I’m making them face as actors. How do you deal with that? It’s suffering. You get mad. It’s going through all those emotions that we have in reality. How do you then do that on the stage? And that wasn’t necessarily the purpose of the text.
 

Nicole: I was recently in Puerto Rico, and I hadn’t been back since Hurricane Irma. I just got back three days ago. I had this fear of what to expect, the fear of seeing the houses that still have blue tarps instead of roofs. I still haven’t been back to my original house where my dad lives with his girlfriend, because it was so damaged. I was so scared to see all of that. And nobody in my immediate family passed away, so you have this gratefulness, which is weird, and it makes you feel selfish. Because there are so many people whose lives changed, probably forever. To see the deterioration of the island is infuriating because it’s almost like you’re losing your country. And what can you do about it, other than call for revolution which is almost fantastical? And going with what Aristides is doing in this play, he leaves his country during the time of The Dirty War and the “Desaparecidos” — the disappeared people. And then seeing what happened in Puerto Rico, the memorial with the shoes, the demand to give the victims of the hurricane a name. You don’t know what happened to some of the elderly, exactly how many people died, or where certain bodies are buried. It’s very similar to what happened in Argentina. Unfortunately, it’s almost like history is repeating itself in another way. One with a dictatorship and the other one through a natural catastrophe, but how it was managed is parallel to a dictatorship. That’s there regardless. Like Zahydé said, not having a country; that’s in the back of your mind. It’s there. I’ve been in New York 22 years, and I still say I go back home when talking about Puerto Rico. That is still home to me. I don’t think that ever goes away.
 

Zahydé: Catalina is a character that mentions hurricanes a lot. It’s been tough but also has been a way to cope with this tragedy. We’re actually going to be performing during the one year anniversary of when the hurricane hit Puerto Rico, on September 20. When it happened and there was no communication, we didn’t hear from our people for weeks at a time, because the communications were down, electricity was off. We were here, and we saw the images of the damage in Puerto Rico before they did. We knew what a disaster it was. We saw what was happening, but we couldn’t reach them to make sure they were ok. I felt like I was screaming everyday on social media. I would see someone and I couldn’t help myself, it was all I could talk about. Why aren’t we doing more? People are dying, or are going to die if there’s no electricity. People don’t have access to the oxygen or dialysis they needed, and that’s why so many died. But we’re finally getting an official death toll now, a year later. It’s a lot higher than what the government had officially told us. And we knew. Everything that we’ve been screaming about is finally being acknowledged. Even though, as Nicole said, we still don’t know the names of all the victims; they’re not all accounted for. So for me, playing this character is another way to deal with all that’s been happening for the last year. All that frustration, and sadness, and anger.
 

Margarita: Unless you are from Puerto Rico or know people from Puerto Rico that despair for those of us living outside Puerto Rico when we couldn’t reach our loved ones for days, maybe weeks, was excruciating and I don’t know if that’s something that people are aware of.
 

Zahydé: I don’t want to generalize, but my experience has been that most people in the United States don’t really understand what Puerto Rico’s relationship to the U.S. is. So they would ask, “How’s your family?” And all you want to do is scream. And having to tell them that we can’t really get any help from anyone but the U.S. because of the relationship that we have to the mainland. If the government of the Dominican Republic, which is right next door, wants to send ships with water and provisions, we can’t accept it because of laws the United States has imposed.
 

Nicole: Which actually happened. They wouldn’t let us accept help.
 

Zahydé: There’s no way for it to reach people because the U.S. is blocking every ship that isn’t from the U.S. And you would explain that, and people would say But why isn’t help reaching? What’s going on? You tell them why, and get the blank stares of Oh, oh, I didn’t know that.
 

Margarita: And also the complicated politics surrounding the reason why the infrastructure was so bad in Puerto Rico — which didn’t allow us to properly prepare — is because of our relationship with the United States, and the austerity measures that the United States have placed on Puerto Rico that are crippling our economy. It’s not just Donald Trump throwing paper towels. It’s all a result of this ongoing, very messed-up relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico that most people in this country don’t really know about or understand.
 

Nicole: When I was on my way back, I was in line at the airport, and there was a minor delay. This guy behind me was young, and he was super pissed. He turns to me, I guess he didn’t realize I was Puerto Rican, and he was like, I’ve been here for a month and I have to report to my superior. I’m just shrugging, then he starts ranting It’s a mess down here. I can’t believe it, you know, it reminds me of Detroit. And I’m like, so it reminds you of a state in the United States that cannot be compared with our political situation? And then he was suggesting that there should be martial law in Puerto Rico. All because there’s a line in the airport? Because it’s slightly inconvenient to you? And then of course I’m not going to engage in argument. He said he was from New York, Hell’s Kitchen born and raised. And he asked where I was from and I said Oh, I’m from here. And immediately he’s like Oh, no offense! And I’m like None taken. But that was the thing, you’re coming here telling me what should happen. And suggesting martial law as the solution? Do you even know what that means? All of a sudden it’s a country of complete chaos.
 

Jerry: How would you like if they imposed martial law in Hell’s Kitchen? [laughs]
 

Nicole: Exactly! Or Detroit, since you’re comparing us to Detroit.
 

Margarita: What, if any, are your expectations for audiences coming to see this who are not Hispanic or non-Spanish speakers?
 

Jerry: I’ve been telling people, if they want to have fun for awhile and think in a different way, they should come to this play. This is a mean thing to say, but I always say that this kind of theater is as smart as the person who’s watching it [laughs]. That’s the way it works. It’s not theater for everybody, I’ll say that. You have to be in the mindset to let it sink in, to just go with the flow of whatever’s happening in front of you. You go for a great time and you get a lot from it. It’s a powerful story. I did watch this play in Spanish many years ago, and to be honest, it wasn’t my cup of tea. It’s not my kind of theater. But I had a blast watching it. I loved it. I thought I would never do that, but I love it. It’s weird. I had never seen anything like it before. It’s so close to your heart. You cry and you don’t know why. It’s a thing of letting yourself go, and to me that’s priceless, because it talks about artistry. It talks about what Salvador Dalí was doing, even Picasso, or Jackson Pollock. People who think outside of the frame. That’s why they’re so good. From my director’s point of view, it’s just great. One of the things I’ve been working with them is the playfulness. We’re literally playing sometimes. And it’s amazing to see it happening because it helps a lot to the understanding of the scenes. I think it really comes across to an audience that will get a lot of ideas and a lot of specificity from what we’re doing.
 

Zahydé: Yes, it’s a very poetic play, and the structure is not linear. It jumps back and forth in time and it deals a lot with memory. But it talks about friendship, right? There’s nostalgia, there’s stories about your home and your family. It talks about many things that everybody’s familiar with. Everybody has friends, or has had a very important friend in their life that they maybe grew up with, or they have a family, maybe not a normal traditional nuclear family, but they understand what family is. So hopefully what we’ve been able to do is suck people in, with the games and the playfulness and the relationship that we have built between these two characters and then give them the heavy important things that we want to talk about. It’s a fine line. It’s a balancing act, so we’ll see. My hope is that people will be able to experience that back and forth. It gets heavy, and then it gets lighter.
 

Margarita: It’s also a very funny play. Outrageously funny at times.
 

Jerry: It really is. From the immigration point of view and all that, I think New York is interesting, because, yes there are native New Yorkers, but most people living here came from somewhere else. So even though it’s not the same as moving from a different country, you know what going back home is, you understand what it’s like to be living somewhere else. Some people pay more for a plane ticket to another state than we do to go to Puerto Rico. So there’s some empathy there to what that experience is like.
 

Margarita: Jerry, this is your directorial debut. How did this come about? Why did you decide to do this? What has that process been like?
 

Jerry: It was lucky set of circumstances that led me to direct this play, let’s put it that way. Most actors say I’ve always wanted to direct, and that’s true for me as well. Even though I never studied to be a director — I studied to be an actor — I have learned a lot through working with other directors. I have the blessing and curse to work on five to seven productions a year, which is great. So I’ve worked with a lot of different directors. That’s helped me feel like this is something I can do. I feel like I’m bragging, but I’m the kind of actor who other actors turn to for advice. So I’ve always wanted to experiment with directing, even though it’s scary. We’ll see.
 

Margarita: Everyone has to have a first one.
 

Jerry: Yeah, and this is mine. When I started acting, my first love was Henrik Ibsen. I’ve always loved realism. Chekhov, Ibsen, that’s me. And suddenly I’m directing this play, which is on the other side of the spectrum. And I love it because it’s getting to be like this amazing experiment; I can be weird and I can do unexpected stuff instead of just Move to the left, move to the right. I’m not saying there’s no value in that, of course there is, and I would love to do it one day, but it’s been an amazing experience for me to play, to actually play and to be open.
 

Zahydé: I mean, even though it’s not realism, there’s a lot of reality in this play.
 

Jerry: Yes. Also, it’s been fun to drive the actors crazy (laughs). Many times I know exactly what I want to do but I don’t tell them, and instead ask What would you propose? I think it’s worked because many times they come up with something that’s better than what I wanted to do [laughs]. So thank you.
 

Margarita: And you get to take credit for it!
 

Jerry: Yeah! [laughs] It’s like that saying that my job is not to have the best idea in the room, but to recognize the best idea. Hopefully I’ve done that [laughs]. We’re still experimenting and finding the perfect way to do things. It’s been great.
 

The Waters of Friendship
 

Margarita: Zahydé and Nicole, is there anything about your acting process both for this project and other projects that you’d like to talk about?
 

Zahydé: I feel like this is the biggest thing I’ve done, so it’s been a challenge. But It’s a very important play to me, and I want to feel that challenge of telling stories that matter to you. It’s been a lot of fun to play with Jerry and Nicole. A lot of what’s gonna be happening is a result of us being open to each other’s ideas. It has been different. Most of the time as an actor, people tell you what to do. But I’m finding myself participating in the process a lot more, which has been great.
 

Nicole: This may sound kumbaya-ish, but you do so many projects, and more so than the project itself, what matters is who you’re working with. That’s very important. I know this is more of a baby for Jerry and for Zahydé, in terms of how hard they worked to get the contacts and make all of it happen, and it sounds corny, but I feel privileged to be here, honestly. As an actor, I’m very stubborn [laughs]. Being open, recognizing that not only because of the nature of this play, it’s almost like it changes and morphs constantly. It even took Rosa Luisa and Charo two years to fully put this play together. This is a play that even if you continue doing it, it changes, which is something that is very exciting and scary to me personally. I’m dealing with personal stuff that I haven’t touched in many years, which makes it almost like a numbness. That’s also why I think when you asked what is your expectation of the audiences, I almost want to say I don’t care. I just want to be true to that presence.
 

Margarita: There’s a lot of Latino theater in New York City specifically, but it feels very isolated from mainstream. What has your experience been as Latino actors in New York city? How do you perceive the landscape? What do you think can be done to improve our level of representation in the arts?
 

Jerry: When you’re a member of a disenfranchised and oppressed group, one of the first challenges you get when you go to another country is the language. And like you said, there’s plenty of Latino theater in New York. Which is great, yet for so many reasons we don’t have a theater here that will accommodate 700 people. We just have very small houses. Which is not bad. Playing in small houses is a dream job for a lot of people. That being said, from an acting standpoint, when you come to another country, and you have to use another language, you have to master it. A lot has to do with training, and opportunity. For example, I have an agent for acting. And she said I’m asking you this because we have some rapport, what’s the difference between Argentinians and Cubans? It was like she was How do I broach this without being racist? [laughs] Because it’s tough. It’s difficult for other people to understand. And I told her, it’s like when you hear someone from Britain talking, you know they’re from Britain. If I hear someone from Cuba talking, I know they’re from Cuba. And if they’re onstage saying, “In Argentina we do this” with a Cuban accent, I get pissed because you should cast an Argentinian or get this person to talk with an Argentinian accent, or at least use a neutral one because it doesn’t make sense. It’s weird. So it’s a lot to do with that. And also, you just have to look at the numbers. Even when In the Heights was on Broadway, something like four percent of the workforce on Broadway was Latino. Only four percent.
 

Margarita: Looking at the roster of mainstream, major New York theater companies on and off Broadway, I can’t think of any major productions by Latino playwrights going on right now. Maybe there are some, but I can’t think of any.
 

Jerry: And yet we can think of many Latino playwrights. There are a lot of people writing; there’s no lack of great Latino plays.
 

Zahydé: And they’re writing about things that aren’t specific or relevant only to Latino communities. They’re writing about universal themes. There’s interesting and very good theater out there. But there’s a disconnect. And there’s a big Latino community in the US, and especially in New York City, but commercial theater doesn’t reflect this. I think it has to do with that stereotype. This is what a Latino person looks like, this is how they talk. And you go to auditions and they’re like Oh, do the accent! I’m like, What are you talking about? And they go Do a Puerto Rican accent! And I’m like But I am from Puerto Rico! [laughs] Are they talking about the accent of a Puerto Rican who grew up in New York? Because that’s a different thing. They just lack the imagination, or can’t understand that it’s bigger and more complicated than what they have been exposed to. We’re working on it.
 

Jerry: I’ve gotten Can you do it again but with a more broken English? [laughs] You sound too good. Um, okay I guess.
 

Nicole: I think that question has been asked for a really long time. Even theaters like this one, LaTea, how they fight to keep it open. There are actors who are constantly working whom you don’t necessarily know are Latino. I’m not saying it happens a lot, but when it happens it’s not always palpable. I also think that sometimes the Latino theaters are afraid of breaking the rules, and that’s why I think this play is so important. That we’re daring to do it in English; anybody can see it. Sometimes there’s some hesitation to breaking the rules within the Spanish communities. It’s a risk, and it’s understandable because you don’t want to alienate that core Latino audience. And on the other hand, I’m just tired; I’m tired of going to casting directors, and being told You don’t look Latina. I’ve been hearing that for the past 20 years. It’s starting to change, the reference is always Hamilton or In the Heights, like, come on man! We’re talking about Broadway mainstream. It’s a completely different machine of how it works compared to Latino theaters.
 

Jerry: Another challenge, maybe the challenge that many companies face, is also that they have to tell specific stories if they want to receive grants. They need to have a specific target. There are theaters that have to talk about immigration, or have to touch on certain themes because it’s the only way they can get money to produce theater. Hopefully we’re doing something by doing this play, which is a huge undertaking. Hopefully we can show the audience what we’re all about.
 

 

 

Nicole Betancourt is a versatile actress who develops characters for film, theater and web series. Most recently she can be seen as Melty Face, a co-star role for OITNB and a guest role as Officer Spanos for Start Up Season 2. Her theater credits include: The Madman and The Nun (Pregones), UBU ROI (IRT & INTAR), Storage Locker (IATI), Life Could Be A Sueño (HERE Arts Center & Teatro La Tea), The Vagina Monologues and A Taste Of Honey (under the direction of Susan Batson). Nicole is currently working on a one woman show as well as being the face and voice for various mainstream commercials on air. This performance is dedicated to those who couldn’t cheat death; Laura, Juanchi. And those who did, MC. More can be seen at NicoleBetancourt.com
 

Zahydé Pietri is a Puerto Rican actress, prop stylist and artist living in New York City. She has a BA in Drama from the University of Puerto Rico and has trained with Deborah Hunt in Puerto Rico, Juan Pablo Félix in NYC and with the prestigious theatre companies Malayerba in Quito, Ecuador and Yuyachkani in Lima, Perú. She’s been onstage in Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Perú and NYC. She’s particularly proud of the her work with the Improv Group IMPROpio in Puerto Rico, the sculpture and photography collaboration “Fresh Faces” with photographer Emily Dryden and the work she did with the Puerto Rican Children’s Theatre Group Desiderátum, where she got to collaborate with other artists in the creation and performance of larger than life masks and puppets. Favorite roles in NYC include Who in “Among Who, Whom and Ever” at LaTea, many roles for Writopia’s Worldwide Plays Festival and the title role in the upcoming short film “Adriana”.
 

Jerry Soto started his theatre career at the University of Puerto Rico and has trained with the prestigious theatre groups Malayerba (Ecuador) and Yuyachkani (Perú). Soto had his acting NY debut as Filiberto in “El caballero del milagro” (Lope de Vega) produced by Teatro Círculo. He was praised as Don Rodrigo in the critically acclaimed production of “El caballero de Olmedo” in Washington, DC produced by GALA Hispanic Theatre and Acción Sur (Spain). He has played many roles with Spanish Repertory Theatre including “En el nombre de Salomé” (ACE Award for Best Supporting Actor/HOLA Award for Best Ensemble) and his ACE Award nominated turn as Toñito in “La nena se casa”. You are about to enjoy “The Waters of Friendship”, his directorial debut! Set your mind free and engage. He is an announcer for WWE’s weekly Latin American TV Shows.
 

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A Conversation with Joniece Abbott-Pratt, Juliana Canfield, Harriett D Foy, Marie Thomas, and Michelle Wilson

The House That Will Not Stand

 

Marcus Gardley’s The House That Will Not Stand is an adaptation from Federico García Lorca´s seminal The House of Bernarda Alba inspired by real life stories of Creole women of color in New Orleans in the early 19th century who had, for a time, freedom and status allowed due to their romantic relationships with powerful white men. While covering somber topics like the evils of slavery, racism, and the patriarchy, the play is a joyous celebration of black women. It is running through August 19 at New York Theatre Workshop. We sat down with five of the talented women who make up this all female cast–Joniece Abbott-Pratt, Juliana Canfield, Harriett D Foy, Marie Thomas, and Michelle Wilson–to talk about the play and its resonance to contemporary audiences.

 

 

Margarita Javier: At the beginning of this play, Beartrice Albans, a Creole woman of color, is facing the death of her wealthy white lover, and her inheritance and what will happen to her three daughters is in question. What can you tell us about the character you play?
 

Joniece Abbott-Pratt: I play Odette. She’s the youngest of the three sisters and she is identified as the romantic, all heart. At first, life is great and things are beautiful. Even though the father just died, I think that she is able to find the beauty and joy and love in everyone around her, until her identity is questioned, which makes her question how she feels about everyone else around her. And then you get to see her transform into this other person who’s trying to, in stages, reclaim herself.
 

Marie Thomas: I play La Veuve, who is in many ways an antagonist to Beartrice. Nobody that’s hateful or a villain thinks that they are, except sometimes this character does. Quite frankly, I find her an interesting person in that she’s so very confident, except she’s not, because she’s been hurt and she’s been talked badly about by Beartrice. We learn later in the script that she did a number on Beartrice too, but she still holds some kind of vendetta and wants to see her hurt. The one quality that I admire is that she likes the girls and she doesn’t want the girls to be hurt. I’m enjoying playing this person because I just finished playing a lady who was 103 years old, and she was a lot different to this character. I have many sides to me that a lot of people have not seen because I’ve not been out here for a while. I took a leave of absence doing other things, but I’m enjoying the energy that I have to find once again to play these kinds of forthright, direct, aggressive kinds of people. The thing that interests me most at the very end is when she’s having a conversation with Beartrice. I think LaVeuve has some sympathy to what she’s going through, but I don’t have an opportunity to show that except to soften my last line to her and hope for the best. One dimensional characters don’t exist in life, you know, so I’m always trying to find the one place where she is a decent human being.
 

Juliana Canfield: I play Maude Lynn, the middle daughter. She’s the most invested in her Catholic faith. I think she uses her religious piety as a framework for her tendency to nag and to tattle and to worry. Those personal tendencies are very enmeshed with her religious fervor.
 

Michelle Wilson: I play Marie Josephine, Beartrice’s crazy sister in the attic. I think the question quickly becomes: How crazy is she? She’s passion and freedom. What do you do with a woman who doesn’t behave or follow the rules? She’s haunted. She’s haunted by her own inability to really break free. Why doesn’t she leave the house? Because it’s terrifying there. And so this cat and mouse game is a lot more satisfying when you have so much fear.
 

Margarita: Have you read The Madwoman in the Attic? It’s a feminist literary text, the title is based on Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. There’s a character who locks up his wife who was a Creole woman in the attic because she was supposedly insane, and it becomes a metaphor for men and the patriarchy trying to suppress women.
 

Michelle: It’s interesting because in this play, Beartrice does it. It’s hard at times to have empathy for her because she rules with such an iron fist. It feels like she’s just reinforcing the patriarchy when in truth, the play reveals that she’s just trying to protect everyone the only way she knows how.
 

Harriett D Foy: I play Makeda, the slave house servant to the house of Albans. She is the heartbeat of the house, she is caretaker, nurturer. She’s fighting with all her life to get her freedom; whatever she has to do, she’s going to get it. She’s a strong leader. She’s fun, she’s intense, she’s honest.
 

The House That Will Not Stand
 

Margarita: Coming into this play, I knew that it was an adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, which is a play I know very well. All your characters have a counterpart in that play, the plot is similar, there are a lot of thematic links. I’m curious about your level of knowledge of that play. Did you know it coming into this project? Have you read it?
 

Harriett: Yeah, I read it. I did a reading of another adaptation of this play a long time ago. I think this was just starting anew with hints of Lorca’s play, and we touched on it, but after that we just created this piece on its own.
 

Margarita: One of the links between the two plays is the patriarchy and the treatment of women. What I find interesting about this play is how there are all these different things that are very much of the era: there’s slavery, racism, the patriarchy. But you could set this play today and it would feel very current. I was wondering if you could talk about the way this play speaks to modern audiences and our current political discourse.
 

Juliana: One thing I love about the play is that yes, it deals with all of those troubling aspects of our history and our present. But I think Marcus has done a really incredible job of making the spirit of the play one that’s ultimately positive, and that refuses to buckle under those historical realities. I think that feels very resonant today. The whole Mahalee Congo sequence with Makeda and Marie: Josephine and Odette reminds me of this instagram trend of, you know, #blackgirlmagic, which feels like this reclaiming of all the different ways in which blackness and femininity can be beautiful and how there’s not just one way to be a black woman. I think that there’s a real resurgence of support for that multitudinous representation. That’s my favorite resonance in the play.
 

Michelle: The idea that it’s so difficult to protect your children in this society, you know? We’re watching babies be snatched from their mothers. What do black mothers have to tell their children before they go out of the house? My daughter attends Smith. She’s staying up there this summer to work in a lab and one of her fellow RAs, the police came in like What are you doing here? What is the message? That you’re a suspect in white spaces? You’re always just renting space in this world, right? I mean, the rules can change. You can be of a certain caste or class now and still, there is no safety because our thinking is so fear driven and power driven, and it’s exhausting. But I do love that there’s a sense of triumph in this play, that in spite of all of these dynamics–they’ll deal with the consequences and there will be consequences–but in spite of all that, their sparks have not been extinguished.
 

Margarita: Yeah, I agree. It felt very much like a love letter to black women and you can tell the author loves black women.
 

Michelle: That’s it, Marcus, he just loves us so fiercely in our individuality, you know? We’re not just this one type of woman. It’s really quite profound.
 

Margarita: I read in the program that many of the actors collaborated with Marcus on the development of the text. Can you elaborate?
 

Harriett: I’ve been involved since the first reading. Marcus is always open to hear how things flow in your mouth, or if you get to a certain passage and you’re having trouble getting it, he talks to you, you’ll listen, maybe fine tune it. The Mahalee Congo piece that Juliana: mentioned earlier wasn’t in the original version. We were working at New Dramatists and he said it came to him at night and he thought Makeda needed to say something else to Odette. It wasn’t so easy to wrap it up, so he brought it in and it was like five pages and I was like What is this? He said Just read it! So that’s what I did. We’ve always been in synch in terms of his language. He has a great ear. He’s very specific about his text, because it flows. You can’t adlib. It would mess it up.
 

Michelle: You can’t even change a word. You have to ride the words and there’s freedom in that.
 

Juliana: It’s like Shakespeare, can’t have one too many syllables.
 

Joniece: He’s a poet top to bottom.
 

Harriett: It’s poetry. Lush, dense, beautiful, sexy poetry.
 

Michelle: And Lileana is like, And keep it moving! [laughs] Because you’re languishing.
 

Harriett: And you have to have great breath control.
 

Joniece: That is so true. There’s moments when I’m like, Oh girl, you got to hold on to the breath, just to make it work, to make it land the way it needs to.
 

Marie: Sometimes you might mess up a line because you’re trying to breathe somewhere along the line.
 

The House That Will Not Stand
 

Margarita: You mentioned Lileana Blain-Cruz. How has it been working with her as a director?
 

Marie: I personally like it. I like her spirit, and I like the fact that she will tell you what’s good and then tell you what’s not in such a way so you don’t feel bad. An actor is a very sensitive human being. As much as we think we know things and we have great self esteem, there’s no such thing as paying your dues, or going “I got this now!”. Learning is continuous. On opening night, she was very complimentary, very kind, and we were walking up to the opening night party together, and I said I knew I had to learn the lines, but I had to learn them my way. I can’t just say words without some meaning behind them. So in the very early stages of our rehearsal, because my character opens the show, I felt uncomfortable a lot of times because I wasn’t sure where I was going. Lileana was very good at understanding and accepting that, and helping to bring it in. And then finally, you know, my organism stepped into it and then I could carry it from there. I like her spirit and I liked the fact that she will work until she gets it. And you might not like what you’re saying, you might not want to do it, but the director sees. We feel. And we have to go by what the director is doing.
 

Michelle: She’s sneaky like that though. She trusts the actor so much and she’ll almost let you wear yourself out with your idea.
 

Harriett: She creates a safe space–it’s fun, it’s open, you can try anything. She also loves music so that if we’re having a bad day, she’d put on some great music and we’ll just move about and we all come together spiritually and it’s like we’re on the same level.
 

Joniece: She has a very positive energy when she comes into the room. That’s always helpful and I appreciate it.
 

Margarita: Marcus also was inspired by stories from his family in New Orleans and the Plaçage system, which is not often spoken about. I was wondering if you could explain to our readers what that is.
 

Harriett: It was a common-law marriage between women of color and their white counterparts, who also had a household on the other side of town. It was a sort of business agreement, but yet there was love, at least in most cases. If the man had a lot of money, it was very beneficial to the woman of color. These women were pretty much money in this town, helping these men keep their businesses. But those arrangements were frowned upon by the Puritans when they started coming back. So it all was coming to a head at that night when the Louisiana Purchase was about to happen.
 

Michelle: It’s a caste system. And it’s an extra layer of caste system, because it was a contrast to the Puritans, who don’t own their sin. Do you know what I mean? They didn’t recognize their illegitimate children. They would sell them off.
 

Marie: A lot of the women from France couldn’t get to Louisiana because they were so delicate and many of them would die when they were traveling. The men would arrive, and here were these beautiful black women who were very attracted to these men. What was the thing Marcus said about the hair? White woman were very upset about the black women’s hair.
 

Michelle: It was so exotic.
 

Marie: So then they made them wear the hair wigs, they made it into a law. They even made the hair gear more exciting to look at.
 

Michelle: But everything has a cost. What I think is interesting about this and how it’s explored in the play is the question, what is freedom? If your freedom is dependent on how close you are to whiteness, is it really free? They’re free women of color, but they’re about to be stripped of their inheritance.
 

Margarita: And the play also explores internalized racism, like how the eldest daughter tells the younger sister that her darker skin is not attractive.
 

Michelle: We still have that.
 

Marie: We 100% really have that in the South. I grew up with that nonsense. My father used to say, when talking about hair “All hair is good as long as it covers the head”
 

Margarita: Luis Rafael Sánchez, a Puerto Rican author, wrote an essay about racism in Puerto Rico called Pelo malo or “bad hair” because there’s a lot of internalized racism in Puerto Rico despite our African heritage. In the essay he states that the only “bad” hair is hair that falls off.
 

Michelle: Yeah, and it’s talking about worth and how we as women are still dealing with all this worth placed on us outside of ourselves. What is valuable? What makes you valuable?
 

Harriett: I remember going to Puerto Rico because my boyfriend at the time was Puerto Rican, and we went to the museum and saw where Puerto Ricans were made from, a heritage of African and Spanish and Native. But I could see people judging us, because he was very fair, like you, and I was very brown. So we would drive down to Carolina and it was like, Oh, so this is where the brown people are. So yeah, it’s a little intense in Puerto Rico.
 

Margarita: Yeah, that idea resonated with me when I saw the play. I think it’s the evil of colonialism. Even though you’re a colonial subject, you’re still being led to believe that whiteness is the ideal.
 

Harriett: But then in the summer, why does everyone want to get tan and darken the skin?
 

Michelle: It’s a mind fuck. It’s so seeded. And they still have power.
 

Margarita: That’s why it’s so powerful when Makeda gives that speech about embracing the beauty of blackness. It’s a very empowering thing, and it’s a celebration of all black women, darker skin, lighter skin, it doesn’t matter. It’s all part of a shared heritage.
 

Harriett: Our young girls have it too. I saw a video on Facebook, it was a round table discussion with teenage girls, all around 11 or 12 years old. A brown girl was speaking, a very beautiful girl with long hair. And she was saying how she thought she was ugly because she was brown. There were kids of all colors there, and they were trying to encourage and tell her, No, you’re beautiful! I wish I had skin like that. I wish my eyes were like that. But she was hearing none of it. It was so sad to see that already built in. And where is that coming from?
 

The House That Will Not Stand
 

Joniece: That’s interesting to me because I’m dark. But I didn’t experience dark being bad until I got to graduate school, when I was good and grown. And it was a shock to me. I went to a historically black college so I knew what the Brown Paper Bag Test was and all of the issues around color, but I had never experienced it directly. I remember calling my mother and saying How did you raise me? Because I don’t understand how I was able to avoid hearing things like You’re pretty for a dark skinned girl. I never experienced that. I had to call my friends and be like Did I miss something?
 

Juliana: It’s like Odette!
 

Joniece: I was also born in the north. I was raised in Philly and like Marie said, that’s something that I imagine maybe happened more in the South. I’m just just speaking to my experience growing up in like the eighties and the nineties.
 

Michelle: I think it was some class stuff too. I mean when I was growing up there was a lot of classism.
 

Marie: That gets ridiculous after awhile. I guess for all of us who’ve experienced these kinds of caste or color issues, it depends on our families and how strongly they were teaching us that we were okay. We all probably have many different complexions in our families because of slavery, because of segregation, because of all of that. So I never even thought about it too much. I knew it existed. I hated the thought of it. I don’t like being compared. I don’t like being in a situation where I have to be like everybody else. That’s so Southern, so middle class, and that’s so bourgeois. I had to get the hell out in order to be different. I couldn’t be different because everybody else had to do the same thing that everybody else knew. That irks me, down to my core. This play is wonderful and I’m excited to be in it and to translate any kind of message that will make somebody think about what’s going on now.
 

Margarita: When I saw the play, there were a lot of black people in the audience, and there was so much palpable energy.
 

Joniece: It’s a different play when it’s a majority white audience. When there are a lot of black people, every single line or moment that has some juice in it; they get it out, you know. It seems different when it’s…I don’t even want to say a black audience, but, like the culture.
 

Margarita: The energy changes.
 

Harriett: But as actors, we can’t judge the audience. You may be tempted to push when you’re not getting that response, but sometimes you have to live in the moment. Sometimes people are crying, they’re listening. We transported them to another place.
 

Margarita: Right, people respond differently to art, there’s no right or wrong way to appreciate it.
 

Juliana: It’s fun to have a raucous show where there’s a huge response, but there’s also something really powerful about feeling an audience that’s listening and working really hard to understand and absorb something new. And to feel like we’re giving certain audiences something they’ve never seen or heard before is really special.
 

Marie: Sometimes people rise to their feet after being quiet all this time. They’ve been enjoying it in their own way. Sometimes the raucous audiences annoy me. [laughs] You have to be careful when people are so involved, and so on every joke and line. They will take over the show. I’ve seen that happen and you have to stop, breathe and allow them to finish and realize it’s not their place to continue to laugh for 20 minutes.
 

Joniece: I think ultimately it’s a shared experience no matter who the audience is. They are in it, whether they’re just sitting here and listening and observing everything or having a very visceral vocal response to it. It’s a shared energy.
 

Marie: You don’t have theater until you have an audience.
 

Margarita: I agree. What I was trying to get to is that there’s something really great about being surrounded by people who are part of your tribe, and where you feel you can express yourself. I think for a long time, theater has felt like a very white space, and it’s important for theater to make all audiences feel welcome.
 

Harriett: We have had black people come to the show in a mostly white audience, and they wanted to cry out but they felt they couldn’t do it. And then you have the opposite, where they’re sitting there looking at us wondering Do I join in?
 

Margarita: I think that it’s important when we talk about wanting to diversify theater to not just focus on what’s being presented onstage, but to also talk about the audience. There’s a perception that most of the people who go to the theater are white, but I think a lot of it has to do with how welcoming it is or isn’t to non-white audiences.
 

Harriett: Theater has to be reaching out to everyone. You can’t just do one show of color and expect that people of color to just come. You have to already be engaging that.
 

Michelle: Dominique Morisseau has those Audience Rules of Engagement that she did for Pipeline and it’s like you can laugh, you can express yourself or not. The Public did a survey where they were asking people how they feel about the theater, their concerns, etc. And do you know what the number one question people had was? What do I wear? Yeah. People do not feel like they can just come and be. They feel like there are all these rules. But who cares what you wear? Somehow that’s not getting translated, and I think that doing more plays like Sugar in Our Wounds and this one, where you bring people in to have an experience together in time and space is really important. This is subversive. Putting this up on stage. Seven women of color who are speaking their truths.
 

The House That Will Not Stand
 

Joniece: There’s something about black women telling a story about black women. We are making history and telling history at the same time.
 

Margarita: And it’s for black audiences. It invites an audience of any type, but it very much feels like this play is for black audiences in particular.
 

Joniece: And I’m excited about that.
 

Juliana: I think it’s pretty great. There are posters for the show all over the city in the subways and I feel like that’s a really groovy way to get people to come who aren’t just the old, blue haired crowd, and to make it feel like kids can come see this. It’s not just like, you know, whatever The Rock’s new movie is. It’s also Look at this other thing that’s a cultural event! And they did something really smart too, by putting all of our faces down at the bottom of the poster. At first I was like That’s kinda weird. But then I realized that if someone sees that and they take five seconds to look, they’re going to see that it’s all women of color, and that’s an invitation.
 

Marie: Vinnette Carroll was a wonderful director and she said that people like to see women on stage. Attractive women, as she kept saying. [laughs] What that meant to her, I don’t know. But I’m glad to see plays about women. Mr. Wilson was very wonderful. However, his plays had one woman, maybe two women. His plays are done all the time and it’s time for the #metoo generation or whatever you want to call it. It’s time. Wake up, ladies. It’s time to show up. Women directors, young women directors and playwrights. I had the privilege of meeting Lorraine Hansbury many years ago, and she of course was on Broadway with A Raisin in the Sun, but that was it. She said We need more writers. She said that then. And it’s happening now. I think it’s just extraordinary.
 

Margarita: And if you want to create new artists, you have to attract them in the first place.
 

Marie: And have some place for them to show their work. The National Endowment of the Arts around 20 years ago made it a rule that regional theater has to do at least one show that is African-American oriented. So then all of a sudden here they come looking for us because they knew they had to have at least one. And of course it was always done in February [laughs].
 

Joniece: One thing that’s been very exciting is seeing the reaction from my peers or colleagues, those other black actresses who see this show and they’re moved and affected and appreciate seeing us on stage, because we’re a reflection of them. It’s so rare to get this opportunity. Harriett and I made a list of all the plays that we could think of that just had black women in them. We might be working on an Anthology.
 

Juliana: How many could you think of?
 

Harriett: Was it fifteen?
 

Joniece: No, we came up with twelve. Just twelve plays with only black women in them.
 

Margarita: Do you know anything about the set designer Adam Rigg? The stage is stunning. In Lorca’s play the whiteness of the house is a big thematic element, and this design echoes that beautifully while still being very reminiscent of New Orleans.
 

Juliana: He went to the Yale School of drama with Lileana, so they’ve been collaborating for almost a decade. Lileana did Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, the Gertrude Stein play. The fact that I know this reveals the extent to which I stalked her online. [laughs] He designed her thesis many years ago and they’ve worked together since.
 

The House That Will Not Stand
 

Margarita: You have been extended through August 19th, congratulations. Why do you want people to come see this play?
 

Marie: Cause it’s good! And the acting is wonderful! [laughs] It’s got all the elements. Conflict, love and humor. Like life itself. You don’t have to sit and be scared to breathe because something tragic will happen any given moment. Then something happens to make you laugh. And then something happens to make you see the love. It’s got all the elements and it’s very well put together.
 

Michelle: Monica Williams who is a director and does some dramaturgy was saying that this is like the epitome of black theater, right? It’s got the spirituality and it’s got the lyricism. It’s dealing with literal issues and what’s oppressing us, but it’s us having this conversation, do you know what I mean? Not someone coming in and doing the oppressing. It’s got pageantry. It’s like a culmination of everything that we’ve been doing for ourselves at National Black Theater and these small theaters where we were trying to work out these themes. It’s all come together under the auspice, but with so many resources and talented women.
 

Joniece: I just had this thought. One thing I love about women, and black women in particular, is that I know that if I need nurturing and love and support and healing, that I can go to my sisters and they will cover me and take care of me. I think that audiences feel that when they come and see this. There is love and nurturing and support and they are welcome to be here.
 

Juliana: Someone said that to me at opening. She said, I’ve been going to the theater for 60 years and it’s rare to feel that quantity of love among the company, so much so that it spills out into the audience. I thought that was a very kind and beautiful observation.
 

Margarita: Yeah. Not that feminist theater has to be all women, but there is something about seeing only women on stage that’s so powerful just on its own.
 

Marie: We are powerful. Sometimes we don’t realize it. Because we live in a patriarchal society. I’ve never felt less than any man in my life, including my husband. I’ve never been anybody’s shrinking violet. I didn’t come from that kind of environment and I don’t intend to in my life, which is why I left a place where everybody had to be a shrinking violet. Can’t do it. I guess in my personal history, it’s right on for me to be able to do this play at this junction in my life and I feel very appreciative of it. I’m inspired by all of this talent around me. It’s very competitive. [laughs]
 

Michelle: But it’s ambitious as shit. There are a lot of moving parts. I feel like we’re trying to bake a cake and everybody’s got different ingredients.
 

Marie: Please understand what I mean about competitive. I’m talking about good competition. It makes you rise to the occasion. There’s not a moment when I’m like Ooh get off that stage!
 

Michelle: And that’s it. We’re all baking the same cake and we have different things to add to it. I remember when it started to come together, during previews and was like Oh shit, now that’s lovely!
 

 

 

Joniece Abbott-Pratt New York: The Good Negro (Public Theater). Regional: Sunset Baby (City Theatre), Seven Guitars (Actors Theater of Louisville), The Mountaintop (Geva Theatre), Seven Guitars (No Rules Theater Company), The House That Will Not Stand (Berkeley Repertory Theatre and Yale Repertory), Stick Fly (Arden Theatre), A Raisin in the Sun (Palm Beach Dramaworks), Slippery as Sin (Passage Theatre), Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Huntington Theatre Company), Gem of the Ocean (Hartford Stage), The Piano Lesson (Yale Rep and Delaware Theatre Company), The Good Negro (Dallas Theatre Center), Mama’s Gonna Buy You (William Inge Theatre Festival), Dirt Rich (NY Summer Stage), Stick Fly and The Overwhelming (Contemporary American Theatre Festival), False Creeds (Alliance Theatre Company), Breath, Boom (Synchronicity Performance Group) and The Doll Play’s (Actor’s Express). Television: “Instinct,” “Blindspot,” “Law & Order: SVU,” “Orange Is the New Black,” “Show Me a Hero,” “Luke Cage.” Training: Clark Atlanta University; MFA–University of Iowa.
 

Juliana Canfield: Juliana recently starred in the Theater for a New Audience production of He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box, in what the The Hollywood Reporter called an “affecting performance,” New York Magazine lauded it as “luminous,” and The New York Times hailed as “perfect.” She followed that with a performance in the Fourth Street Theater’s production of Zürich, opposite Paul Wesley, that The New Yorker called “especially good.” Juliana recently shot a recurring role on the highly-anticipated upcoming HBO series “Succession,” opposite Brian Cox and Kieran Culkin, and directed by Adam McKay. She graduated with an MFA from the Yale School of Drama.
 

Harriett D Foy Broadway: Amelie, Amazing Grace, The American Plan, Mamma Mia and Once on This Island. Off-Broadway: X or Betty Shabazz vs The Nation, Rimbaud in New York (BAM), On the Levee (AUDELCO nomination) and Crowns (AUDELCO Award). Original Cast recordings: Amelie, Amazing Grace, Inside Out, Lone Star Love and Reunion. Regional: Nina Simone: Four Women (as Nina Simone – Arena Stage); Ella: First Lady of Song (DTC); MotherFreakingHood! (NYMF – Outstanding Individual Performance Award); The House That Will Not Stand (Yale Rep, Connecticut Critics Award Nomination; Berkeley Rep, Theatre Bay Award); dance of the holy ghosts (Yale Rep); Breath and Imagination (ArtsEmerson); LMNOP (Goodspeed); Ambassador Satch (Dubai); The Women of Brewster (Helen Hayes Nomination), Polk County (Helen Hayes Nomination) and The Piano Lesson (Arena Stage); Reunion (Ford’s Theater – Helen Hayes Nomination); and Seven Guitars (Center Stage). Film: Winter’s Tale, Collateral Beauty. Television: “Welcome to the Wayne,” “Orange Is the New Black,” “Rescue Me,” “Law & Order: SVU,” and “Law & Order.” BFA in Acting – Howard University “WGATAP!”
 

Marie Thomas recently returned from the Goodman Theatre in Chicago playing Sadie Delaney in Having Our Say. She played Nina Dubois in Charles Smith’s Knock Me a Kiss in New York at the New Federal Theater, the National Black Theater Festival in Winston Salem, NC, and at Crossroads Theater in New Brunswick, NJ. She received the Audelco Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance. Also at Crossroads Theater, she was Sister Moore in the Amen Corner and Dorabelle in The Disappearance with Ruby Dee. Other Theater credits include The Summer House at The Passage Theater in Trenton, NJ; Goneril in King Lear, starring Avery Brooks, at the Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, Connecticut; Samm-Art William’s The Dance on Widow’s Row at the New Federal Theater in New York and The National Black Theater Festival. She was Pam in Richard Wesley’s, The Talented Tenth in New York and in Atlanta at the National Black Arts Festival. She received an Audelco Award for Best Actress for her performance of Pam and an Audelco nomination for her performance in An Evening with Josephine Baker Off-Broadway and at the National Black Arts Festival. She has appeared on Broadway in the musical Don’t Bother me I Can’t Cope and at Lincoln Center in The Duplex and Antigone. Television and film credits include “The Cosby Mysteries,” “L.A. Law,” “Knots Landing,” “Amen” and on the daytime dramas “The Doctors,” “One Life To Live,” “As The World Turns” and the film Hot Shots
 

Michelle Wilson is best known for her Tony-nominated performance in the Pulitzer-Prize winning play Sweat. Wilson played long-time factory worker Cynthia, a role she originated off-Broadway at the Public Theatre before the show transitioned to Broadway with incredible reviews. In 2017, Sweat received three Tony award nominations including Best Play, and Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role for Wilson. Wilson’s other notable theater credits include A Raisin in the Sun, Detroit ’67, Follow Me to Nellie’s, Fahrenheit 451, Two Trains Running, The People Before the Park and more. Wilson also had memorable turns on the small screen in “The Good Fight,” “Blue Bloods” and “E.R.,” as well as in indie films Nehemiah, Sink and The Bicycle. Wilson can be seen next in the indie film The True Adventures of Wolfboy alongside Jaeden Lieberher and John Turturro. The film is currently in production.
 

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A Conversation with Darrel Alejandro Holnes and Jonathan González

Bird of Pray

 

Darrel Alejandro Holnes’ Bird of Pray (recently featured as part of the Brick Theater’s Festival of Lies) beautifully uses spoken word, language, and dance to illuminate issues of race, sexual identity, depression, PTSD, and the high suicide rate among U.S. veterans. We sat down with Darrel and choreographer Jonathan González to discuss their collaboration and creative process.

 

 

Margarita Javier: My pronouns are she and her. Could you introduce yourselves and say your pronouns?
 

Jonathan González: My name is Jonathan González and my pronouns are he and him.
 

Darrel Alejandro Holnes: My name is Darrel Alejandro Holnes and my pronouns are he and him.
 

MJ: What can you tell us about the play, Bird of Pray?
 

DAH: Bird of Pray is about two characters who are African-American veterans and navigating the world of PTSD and mental health as one of them contemplates suicide, and the other appears with an interesting proposition: don’t kill yourself. Why don’t you share your body with me and together we can live a better life? So there are elements of magical realism in there, but it’s really based on several interviews that I’ve done with African-American veterans of the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq.
 

MJ: And what prompted your interest in having those interviews?
 

DAH: I was really inspired by conversations that I was having with veterans who are friends of mine, as well as folks that are connected to the military community through their family members. Growing up in Panama, I lived part of that life on military bases and have been a part of the military community because of that. I’ve kept in touch with a lot of those folks over the years and even contemplated enlisting myself. I think this is a part of that journey.
 

Bird Pray
 

MJ: There’s a lot of dancing and movement in this play. How did you become involved, Jonathan?
 

JG: I think Darrel first contacted me about the work in its inception. What he was realizing after the residency appearance they had together was that he had an interest for movement — to see how movement could do what I think it’s now doing in the work. It doesn’t just supplement the text. It also provides an atmosphere and an arc of the body. It really speaks for itself in many ways without speaking a word. I think we spent that time trying to figure out what that could be.
 

MJ: What was that creative process like?
 

DH: I think of it as a symbiosis. We started with the text because I had already written out a description for how I imagined the dance to be, and then I shared that with our director, Mimi Barcomi, and he added shapes as to how my vision of the dance could fit his vision of the overall play. And then that was transferred over to Jonathan who came in and worked with the actors and modeled the dance, or made the dance on the actors who were really dancers.
 

JG: Josiah Vasquez plays the vulture in the work. He’s the one body that you see not speaking, moving throughout.
 

MJ: Yeah, he’s moving in the background throughout the entire piece. It’s really interesting how your eye goes from the action, to the dialogue, to a movement and creates this beautiful relationship between all of them.
 

JG: I think we had that discussion before about trying to choreograph the vultures and understanding that they kind of functioned as a Greek chorus. Behind this veil, they reveal certain things, or they post commentary on certain things that are happening between the two.
 

DH: I was really excited by some of the ideas that Jonathan brought to the table, including having the vultures parallel some of the movement that the actors were doing on stage, and some of the tension between them. And so, in that narrative movement, we dive deeper into the metaphorical language of the play: their metaphors and the words, their metaphors and the actors, their actions and movement. There’s also a metaphor in the dance.
 

MJ: You mentioned the director Mimi Barcomi. How did you get involved with him for this project?
 

DH: I met Mimi at the Lincoln Center Directors Lab last summer and he reached out to me after seeing a reading of Starry Night, one of my plays, at the National Black Theater. Mimi was really inspired by that. He said Let’s collaborate. Let’s get something on its feet. And I was like Well, I have this play from a couple years ago. And back then the play was called Trigger. I decided to dust off the second act in Trigger and share that with Mimi and see what he thought. He was really excited about it and that started the process of turning that second act into its own play. And I’m really grateful to The Collective New York for giving us a residency, and the Arch and Bruce Brand Foundation for a production grant that helped to finance that residency. It really helped to make the play what it is today.
 

Bird Pray
 

MJ: The play deals with a lot heavy themes: mental illness, post traumatic stress disorder, suicide. How do you approach talking about these themes in a respectful way, in a way to shed light on these issues?
 

JG: I think I’m going back to what you were asking before. The way that the movement was brought into the work was that the script was presented to me with certain highlighted sections. There were a lot of buzzwords and was I willing to scaffold something? Because I don’t think the process at large was about setting anything. Nothing is actually set. There’s a lot of ideas about how to improvise around certain concepts and keywords. That brings us back to this question about PTSD and these threads in the work. What were the words inside of the texts that were activating movement and how can those become most apparent? So I offered kind of anchors of movement or ideas of inspiration for how the body can move, and kept it consistent with the character and the plot as it was developing. Where I think you might see a contrast is with Josiah, for which maybe there is a kind of essence of leaning into a modernist dance, or something that’s about form and falls between being about meaning. It’s a very formal sculptural movement. What’s happening between the actors is a deep inroads. It’s very coded — it’s coded in the colloquial. It’s like a real gesture, a real pedestrian act. It’s all about trying to speak to those threads when they present themselves. The sections that we deal with.
 

DH: And I think for me in terms of language, the play offers a series of monologues that are really closely based on the responses to questions that I asked these veterans during interviews. I have a lot of reverence for these soldiers and a lot of respect for their journeys. And so even though it is my rendering and the characters are ultimately composite characters, a lot of the stories are true. I think that’s how you navigate it, by really seeing this play as an opportunity for them to tell their own stories. I try to honor that and really make the play an opportunity for that by making sure that those stories are true.
 

MJ: You mentioned magical realism as being part of the story. Could you expand on that?
Where does the inspiration come from to use magical realism both in the text and dance?
 

DH: I don’t want to give too much away, but I will say that magical realism for me started with dance because I saw Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring at BAM. I saw Ligia Lewis’ Minor Matter in which Jonathan performed. I saw What the Day Owes to the Night by Herve Koubi and Compagnie Hervé KOUBI at the Joyce Theater. I was really fascinated by how narrative was one of the threads that tied the movement together in each of those pieces, and it got me thinking really creatively about how I could incorporate dance into this piece. I knew that it would be through magical realism because I would have to create a world where dance could naturally be part of the language of these characters, as someone who’s coming from Latin America and having a real appreciation for magical realism. That’s one of the reasons I’m also excited to collaborate with Jonathan because of his connection to Latin America as well. I’m really thrilled that we found a way to collaborate together to make this world a real one onstage.
 

JG: In dance, there’s definitely a kind of intense hybridizing, especially when you’re talking about people who are coming from the black diaspora, from the African diaspora. They really have been thinking critically about magical realism as being a way of being resilient and so dance has been doing that and I’m very inspired by those people who do that. So they’re in the room.
 

DH: I would also say that in terms of magical realism, there are dances in the piece that are part of African-American ritual or west-African ritual, or diaspora ritual. And in that way, we’re really honoring culture and honoring the ancestors. I do think that that makes room for there to be an element of magic in the play because it is a kind of lifting of the veil or an opening of a door of sorts in a respectful and reverent manner. And I was so happy. One of my favorite memories so far is when, in the early parts of our collaboration, Jonathan was teaching the Ring Shout and the Rain Dance to Cornelius Davidson who plays Shaq and has to take on the majority of the dance, at least in the first half of the play. That really felt like a moment that put me in touch with the ancestors, just by watching this happen. And it was an opportunity for us all to learn what those steps were about. Jonathan said, and you’re right here, so why should I paraphrase it? Can you talk a little bit about what a Ring Shout is in the Rain Dance?
 

JG: The historical reference of a Ring Shout is coming from the African slave trade as it resides in the Commonwealth of the United States. And the practice of stomping the feet, the circle, and the group dance is something that we can tie it back through the diaspora as a kind of ritual practice, but also as an art practice, and the stomping as a gesture, as a way to deal with the dead. It’s like the pounding of the soil, the awakening of what has passed or the coming together of what is alive. It’s like an allegiance of life and death. And so in the Ring Shout and also the Rain Dance, which is also in the work, we’re thinking about the old traditions and the practices of Yamayá. Those are also located in santería and many others as we talk about the lineage of coming from Europa. But how these operate in the work because it is within a storm, right? We hear the track of the storm, we hear this situation of a kind of conjuring, and we think about weather patterns and also the spiritual and also blackness wrapped into each other. It’s very historic site.
 

DH: When I interviewed a lot of these veterans, some of them expressed that they were searching for something to make sense of their experiences. Searching in a way that led them to spirituality, sometimes towards religion, sometimes away from religion, into an abyss or a void of unknowing. But always still searching and with these characters, I think what they’re finding is themselves and a kind of beauty, if you will, in the tragedies of war through the rituals that they’re working with on stage. So I’m really excited about being able to incorporate that in the play with Jonathan´s support and direction. And I’ve really been happy with how the actors have been able to successfully bring all of those elements to life as well.
 

MJ: At the heart of the play is this love story between two men who were both soldiers and they’re both black and it’s really beautiful to make that connection between culture and history and queerness. Can you speak a little about the history of gay soldiers in the military, or if soldiers of color in the military, and how those stories aren’t as well known and have been sort of in the shadows for a long time?
 

DH: Well, one of the reasons why I really am drawn to this community is because so many of the stories related to LGBT service in the military specifically focuses on gay, CIS, white men. And so many stories of veterans in general focus on straight, CIS, white men. With all of my work, I always think about who is left out of the history books and I take it on as a mission to write those stories into the history books by writing them into the history of the American stage. And so this is really made to honor those stories which are complex and full of contradiction and sometimes the stories are completely opposite experiences because we are diverse people, right? Some people have it great, some people have it bad, some people have up and down, some people have everything in the middle. And so I think it’s really important to show that diversity even within this specific community; to show the wide range of experiences within the military, within blackness, and within queerness as well.
 

Bird Pray
 

MJ: The current president and the administration are openly hostile to the LGBTQ community, to the black community, to immigrants. Do you as artists feel any responsibility in taking part in the political discourse?
 

JG: I think no matter what work you’re making, it’s always political. I know that some people don’t want to agree with that, but I’ve been making work before this administration and it’s always been garnered on the idea of black life and the possibility of working with people that are trying to really work against them inside of the institution. So nothing’s changed.
 

DH: I feel that my work is in a lot of ways about memory and awareness. So you could argue that that in and of itself is a political act just by sharing these stories and telling these truths. Right? I hope that my work transcends politics because it’s not about Democrat or Republican. You know, LGBT folks had been mistreated in the military regardless of who’s president. African Americans have been mistreated regardless of who’s president. Latinos have been mistreated regardless of who’s president. I hope that this transcends politics and really touches the audience where it comes to how human beings treat each other overall. Because in every community there is, an outsider, right? There’s someone who we don’t let in; someone who we’re afraid of. And it’s usually because we don’t know their story. These plays tell those stories, so I do hope that whoever sees it, when they’re out there voting or when they’re out there deciding what to support, that they remember that these soldiers are people too.
 

MJ: And this play is part of a trilogy?
 

DH: This play is part of a cycle. There are currently three but there could be more. The plays are all part of what I call The Sandstorm Cycle. Sandstorm is a line that’s in one of the other plays, Nativity because all of those service men, women and people that I’ve interviewed have served in Afghanistan. Many of them have also served in other countries and in other conflicts, but they all have that in common. And so a lot of the stories take place in the desert. A lot of those stories take place in that landscape. I think as someone who is either a millennial or on the cusp of being a millennial, I think that our experience of U.S. wars has everything to do with the Middle East and so a lot of the stories come from soldiers with those experiences specifically. All of the plays are based on interviews that I’ve done with African-American veterans, but recently it started to expand and I’ve been including other LGBT veterans, as well. I’m really excited to share these stories and to bring them to the stage. And I’m also really grateful for how they’ve been received so far. Nativity was selected for the 50PP list, and Starry Night was a finalist for the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference and Trigger, which is related to Bird of Pray, was a finalist for the Princess Grace Award. That’s helped the play; it’s gotten a lot of interest and attention from other theaters, and even possibly landed this great opportunity [at the Brick Theater]. So I’m really grateful for the theater community for being receptive to these stories and I hope that we can all continue to collaborate together bringing them to life.
 

MJ: You almost already answered my next question: what are your hopes for the next steps of your work?
 

DH: I hope to continue to collect more stories and to bring them to life on the stage and to continue to collaborate with great artists. I really hope to continue to also explore the ways that theater and dance can come together. Recently, I was in Europe doing a little short tour hopping around theater and performing arts festivals and was really inspired by how the lines between the performing arts are really blurry and some would say perhaps even don’t exist, or are only the limits of your own mind. And so here’s to hoping that more of the contemporary American theater can be like that and that collaborations like this can continue to happen. It’s really an honor to collaborate with an all queer team. And it’s also really exciting to share this play with Brooklyn during PTSD Awareness Month, during Pride and also at a time when suicide prevention is part of the national conversation because it does figure significantly in the play. I think it’s a really important conversation to have. On average, 20 veterans a day commit suicide, which is one veteran every 65 minutes. Suicide is within the top 10 causes of death in the United States. And in 2012, suicide was the number one killer among veterans or amongst soldiers from the United States. And that was the first year that it climbed higher than actual combat. This is an epidemic and with trends of suicide within the LGBT community, as well. You can imagine that even though a lot of studies are still being done right now to look at that cross section, that there’s a lot of overlap between the trends of suicide within the LGBT community and trends of suicide within the veterans community. And so that’s one of the reasons why I think telling these stories is so important because it really does affect a significant amount of people.
 

Bird Pray
 

MJ: This is a somewhat a loaded question, but what can you say about the fact that the United States, one of if not the most powerful country in the world, in large part because of its military, treats its soldiers so poorly? As you said, the suicide rate is so high amongst veterans, and so many of them live in poverty and their spouses don’t receive support.
 

JG: That’s Neo liberalism, isn’t it? You make bodies utilities, and that’s what this country is good at. But I think the disillusionment is when we all think as Americans that it hasn’t been happening and what we packaged and digested over the process of believing in the nation state of America, is that we haven’t had our hand in everything international and haven’t been using bodies in a disposable way. We’ve been doing it here for black people for centuries. So it shouldn’t be different that those who fight in the name of this country die forgotten.
 

DH: I would add that I hope that anyone reading this feels encouraged to support the vets and are encouraged to promote mental health literature and services in their community, because they call it performative empathy and it actually does make a difference when someone is considering suicide. Just having the opportunity to talk to someone about it really does help people feel heard and seen and could turn the tides. I would really encourage folks to do that. And I think also, it’s really important that we as a nation and we as human beings in this world try to solve our problems in ways that don’t involve war, right? So that we can reduce the amount of human casualties. I think everyone who cares about their family, their community, their nation, or just humanity in general should always be looking towards other means like diplomacy and just good old fashion sit down conversation as a first resort rather than as a last resort. So I really hope that that happens.
 

I would just add that there’s a lot that we still don’t understand about PTSD. So I think supporting research is going to be vital and I also think that there are a lot of good folks at the VA who are doing everything they can to work with these soldiers and they need support as well. There are a lot of things that doctors, nurses, and researchers ask for and are struggling to get. I hope that Congress and everyone in power can give these folks the supports that they need so that they can continue to provide – and hopefully provide better – services for our veterans because they certainly deserve it.
 

MJ: Can you name a few organizations to help support veterans?
 

DH: Here are some ways folks can support our veterans: Wounded Warrior Project, Semper Fi Fund, and Fisher House.
 

 

 

Jonathan González ambulates between the roles of performer, educator, and choreographer – initiating questions through the body alongside composing sound, design, and text for performance. His works have been presented among others by BAX/Helix Queer Performance Network, New York Live Arts, Center for Performance Research, La MaMa, and Danspace Project. A CUNY faculty member, artist-organizer with WoW/Works On Water, previous curator for Knockdown Center’s Sunday Service, and co-curator for Movement Research’s Fall Festival invisible material. Diebold Awardee for Distinction in Choreography & Performance; POSSE Scholar (Trinity College); Bessie Schonberg Scholar (Sarah Lawrence College/MFA). Jonathan is based in their hometown of Queens, NY.
 

Darrel Alejandro Holnes is a poet, playwright, and director from Panamá City, Panamá, and the former Panamá Canal Zone. He is a member of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, the Musical Theatre Factory’s POC Roundtable, the Stillwater Writers Workshop, and Page 73’s Interstate 73 Writers’ Group. His play BIRD OF PRAY was a recent finalist for the Princess Grace Award, and his play STARRY NIGHT was a recent finalist for the 2018 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, the Van Lier Fellowship from The Lark Play Development Center, and the 2050 Fellowship in Playwriting at NYTW. His other plays have been developed with the generous support of the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Kitchen Theater Company, National Black Theater, the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation, and the Collective NY. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Playwriting at Medgar Evers College and he teaches playwriting at New York University. darrelholnes.com
 

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A Conversation with Donna Couteau, Joe Cross, Gloria Miguel, Muriel Miguel, Soni Moreno and Sheldon Raymore

Fear of Oatmeal

 

In 1976, three sisters – Gloria Miguel, Muriel Miguel and Lisa Mayo (née Elizabeth Miguel) from Kuna and Rappahannock ancestry – formed the legendary Spiderwoman Theater, the first indigenous feminist theater group in the United States. Their plays have been produced all over the world and published in numerous anthologies. Muriel Miguel’s latest piece as writer and director, Fear of Oatmeal, is playing through June 24 at Theater for a New City. An elder Native woman (played by Muriel’s sister Gloria) sits at her colorful Brooklyn apartment as the spirits of her ancestors – ever present – materialize with stories that illuminate her past, present, and future. The play features an entirely Native cast, and is a vibrant, funny, and heartfelt tribute to heritage, memory, family, and the perseverance of culture. We sat down with Gloria and Muriel, as well as the remaining cast members – Donna Couteau, Joe Cross, Soni Moreno and Sheldon Raymore – to discuss the play and the importance of Native representation in the arts.

 

 

Margarita Javier: Could you please introduce yourselves and tell us which character you play?
 

Soni Moreno: I play the part of Nita Matariki, and I’m from Pleiades.
 

Joe Cross: The seeum that I play is Bear and it says “Knotsititi” on my shield. From the Caddo Tribe. Knotsi is bear, titi is little/small.So it means Little Bear. It also refers to Ursa Minor as a constellation.
 

Sheldon Reymore: I’m the other seeum. I play Thunder and I’m from the Pleiades as well.
 

Muriel Miguel: Could everyone please mention where they’re from?
 

Soni: I’m from California, and I’m Maya, Apache, and Yaqui. And I live in Staten Island.
 

Joe: I’m Caddo and Pottawatomie and I live in New York City.
 

Sheldon: I’m from the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe.
 

Gloria Miguel: I’m from Brooklyn, New York, and my character is Nelly.
 

Muriel: Where are you from, Gloria?
 

Gloria: My native background is Kuna Yala and Rappahanock.
 

Donna Couteau: My character is Henny. I call her Henny Penny cause every penny helps [laughs]. And I’m from the Sac and Fox Nation of Oklahoma.
 

Muriel Miguel: I’m Kuna Rappahanock. I live in Brooklyn. And I’m the writer and director.
 

Fear of Oatmeal
 

Margarita: Is there a terminology you prefer when referring to your heritage?
 

Joe: I’ll say it’s a question that’s been going on for some decades. All kinds of names have been passed around, which I don’t care to go into. One thing I liked 40 years ago was the term “indigenous.” I liked that. Now Native people and indigenous kind of has a connection with other people all around the world.
 

Soni: I like that, too.
 

Margarita: This production is from Theater for the New City in collaboration with Amerinda and Spiderwoman Theater. What can you tell us about Amerinda and Spiderwoman Theater, since we have two founders of Spiderwoman right here?
 

Gloria: Spiderwoman, we’ve been together since 1975. I think we had our first rehearsal then. We’ve performed all over the world. We got together because we were three sisters, and we were all in theater. We decided that we didn’t see ourselves represented and that if we did get together and use all our different backgrounds we would be able to do that. I think we were successful in that. We changed attitudes. I mean, we were still fighting…
 

Joe: Just with each other! [laughs]
 

Gloria: No, well, yes, with each other, but one of us passed away. We’re still fighting in our dreams, I guess. No, but fighting for certain rights.
 

Muriel: We are the oldest Native feminist theater in the world, as far as we know. That’s important. The stories that we tell are from many nations, but mostly from the spirit, which is really important to us.
 

Gloria: We were performing for a few years before the cross country to go to reservations, etc. And that was one of the reasons we wanted the young people to see that we can be on stage. We didn’t have to be just in John Wayne movies and stuff like that. Sheldon said that he saw us when he was in high school and it had an effect on him. And here he is working with us! I think it’s so exciting.
 

Margarita: Do you want to talk about when you saw them?
 

Sheldon: They’re legends in the Native Theater world. So it’s an honor to have this opportunity and to be mentored. It’s just really cool.
 

Margarita: What can you tell us about this play, Fear of Oatmeal?
 

Gloria: I feel my family when we are on the stage. I’m wearing my mother’s dress, you know. There are stories from way back there. I wasn’t always with my sister. I know the story and I know her feelings. And mine, also, all of which are connected to our house. It just occurred to me that we use the word “mound” without connecting it to the Native world. We used to have a mound, and used to put things in there and cover it up with flowers of asphalt or whatever for years and underneath our house we have a mound. So it’s like we are sitting on all this history.
 

Donna: I was just going to say that their house is also legendary. I’ve been around a very long time, but their family has been here for over a hundred years, so Native people that would come to this area would find themselves over at their home, and you could stay there. They would take care of you. And so they had these incredible stories, and it’s so wonderful to see this play and I just feel so blessed to be a part of this because when I came to New York, I was a dancer and a ballerina. I had a very brief career because I injured myself. I was so fortunate to have met them and then be able to have another career which went into theater. There are so many stories, and this is such a great one – the thing with the spirits and everything – and I really feel that we’re really encountering that every single night [laughs].
 

Fear of Oatmeal
 

Margarita: I was very struck by the set design by Dedalus Wainwright and the costumes by Gabriekke Amelia Marino. Do you have any insight about that process and did you have any input in the design of the costumes and set design?
 

Soni: We did have input and we were given the freedom to design our own space pod, or the shield.
 

Margarita: So you each designed your own shield?
 

Joe: Pretty much.
 

Soni: Yes, and they’re a part of the character. I knew I wanted this skirt [laughs]. It’s like reverting back to my childhood, but also, this is who I am, too, you know. I believe in magic and I believe in seeums. We do encounter them every day and every culture has them. And so this play in particular sings and speaks to me.
 

Muriel: I try when I’m directing to make an ensemble, that’s really the important thing, to make the ensemble. I really want to work with Native actors. So I’m very fortunate that I have five Native actors who are talented and can work. I’m also fortunate because they followed me [laughs].
 

Joe: I think confidence is something that comes out. It’s a process. It may not be something you understand in your scene or even in your monologue or dialogue at that time. You just have to feel that the changes that you’re experiencing are going to be for the best. I think everybody’s worked with Muriel before, except for Sheldon, so we have experienced that directoral comradery that comes with this. You’ve got to have a lot of giving and you’re going to go do a lot of taking.
 

Margarita: It actually shows. You’re very comfortable with each other and there’s something about it that when you’re in the audience and you’re seeing it, you can tell there’s trust, that you know each other that you understand the work in a way that’s pretty unique.
 

Muriel: We’re all pretty good friends. There’s a lot of generosity.
 

Fear of Oatmeal
 

Margarita: I’m fascinated with using theater as a tool for social change. Is there a political motivation or is there some activism into what you do as performers and as creators and artists?
 

Sheldon: Muriel says, if it’s Native theater, if it’s about us, it should be for us and by us. Right? No red face!
 

Donna: And don’t do side shows! [laughs]
 

Soni: We don’t do circus acts! [laughs]
 

Joe: Hashtag no red face.
 

Margarita: Muriel, you mentioned in your artistic statement the importance of having not just Native people on stage but also behind the scenes as, and I think it’s really great that you are doing that. I think of a lot of companies in New York City that always make the excuse whenever they don’t cast authentically and claim it’s impossible, and here you are proving that it’s possible. It can be done.
 

Suni: It’s difficult.
 

Muriel: We are many generations here. Also you have to think about what you do when you have someone over 70 working. What do you have to do to be accommodating to them?
 

Fear of Oatmeal
 

Gloria: And that’s me [laughs]. I’m going to be 92 next month, and that’s old [laughs].
 

Donna: I don’t think you’re going to find a lot of 92-year-old performers, period. And that’s why I think it’s so important to be so inclusive, to have all the generations represented. I think it’s a very rare and wonderful thing.
 

Muriel: It’s also what Native people really think of, in the families and talking about their elders. We have to keep them really close. We have to teach the other generations how to be generous and how to work. That’s really important. That goes both ways.
 

Margarita: Is there a younger generation of Native artists that you work with, thinking of the future of companies like this one?
 

Muriel: It’s all Sheldon [laughs]. I have actually. With our family, theater is a business.
 

Gloria: My daughter’s an actress, my grandson’s a performer. I don’t have great-grandkids yet, but…
 

Muriel: My daughter is a performer and writer, my granddaughter is also a singer and a dancer. I think of working other younger actors. For a long time, I worked at the Centre for Indigenous Theater, which is in Toronto. I’m going to do an intensive workshop with young people in July.
 

Gloria: Our father was a performer. He did a lot carnival work too. That’s how we met Native people since we were young.
 

Muriel: Many years ago in New York City, it was really snake oil time, and showbiz Indian time. A lot of people don’t like to admit it, but that’s what we were. And that’s how a lot of us made money for our families.
 

Julia: We found an old photograph of my father performing way back from 1936.
 

Margarita: Sheldon, I have a question for you. You are also a dancer, choreographer, right? Did you do the choreography for the show or did you have any input on it?
 

Sheldon: No, I was directed by Muriel. We worked that out together. I’m a grass dancer and Native dancer.
 

Fear of Oatmeal
 

Margarita: For those of you who are performers, what is your dream role?
 

Muriel: Sheldon wants to play Pagliacci [laughs].
 

Sheldon: Disney World! [laughs]
 

Donna: I always wanted to go on Broadway. I had always wanted to do a musical and be a triple threat. One of my very favorite performers, and I love to see her, is Chita Rivera.
 

Margarita: I am obsessed with Chita Rivera.
 

Donna: Me too! I was sitting in the front row. She had this like black and red feather boa, and a feather flew out and right in my lap.
 

Margarita: What do you hope audiences – Native and non-Native alike – take away from this play?
 

Donna: I want audiences to do their own thinking. I don’t like to say and the moral is in an Aesop’s fable-y way. I’m not like that. I guess just to know that we’re here and we continue to be here and we’re going to be here. Like Nelly says at the end of the play: “I’m still here.”
 

Soni: I kind of feel the same way, it’s up to the audience. Think a little bit.
 

Muriel: I guess I feel that way too. I had a lot in mind when I started to write. A lot of it came from dialogue and seeing if I could write dialogue. That’s how it started. And then I started to think about all the people that I knew and how they talk and, and then it just kept on going. Someone said to me Well, you know, your house is a mound and that started a whole other direction. This thing about oatmeal was something in my family since I was seven or eight years old. All of that started to come together and I really wanted to know if I could write a play rather than working on people’s bodies and working together on their stories. I wanted to tell my stories. That’s how it had its birth, with those thoughts in mind. I don’t know what I want anyone to come away with because I just write, and if I’m not writing, I’m working with people. I really don’t know how they come out of it and what they’re saying. I’m really interested in what people say. I want to know what you think.
 

Margarita: I’m curious about your thoughts on this current administration’s immigration policies.
 

Muriel: I’ve been thinking a lot about this thing with the children. What do we do about leaving children at the border? What is that? You can’t say, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” but then leave your children and put them in concentration camps, almost. It does remind me of the old regime. This is 1492 again. Now it’s 2018 and here we are doing the same thing again. And it’s brown people. What are we doing about it? What are we doing about that, that’s what I want to know. What are we doing about it? We have to do something. I’ve been thinking about this because I feel like we have to do something. And so what are you doing? You’re going to get rid of all the brown people in the United States? Anyway, that’s what I’ve been thinking of. I was thinking about it last night and I was thinking about it today. What, what are we going to do? We have to do something. We have to say something.
 

Fear of Oatmeal
 
 

 

 

Joe Cross (Caddo Nation of Oklahoma) Television: ONE LIFE TO LIVE, SNL, CBS SUNDAY MORNING, THE JURY, DAVID LETTERMAN, SPIN CITY, CHRIS ROCK, THE WHITEST KIDS I KNOW, LA LAW, ESPN. Film credits include LUCKY DOG, AFFLUENZA, AIMLESS, CREATING KARMA, THE STORYTELLER, NATIVES (NYU), SMOKE BREAK (NYU), BUZZKILL, THE WAR THAT MADE AMERICA, THE STORY OF THE PEQUOT WAR, ROYAL TANENBAUM, KINSEY, A THOUSAND ROADS (signature piece for NMAI, Smithso¬nian). Theater: MACBETH (AMERINDA), POWWOW HIGHWAY (YELLOWROBE), THE HISTORY OF ASKING THE WRONG QUESTION (NORTH FOURTH ST THEATRE), WHITE WOMAN STREET (DAELAUS), INKTOMI (Public), HARVEST CEREMONY (director, Smithsonian), EARTH, SUN & MOON (Lincoln Center), and Broadway Melody 1492 (Ohio Theater). Awards: Silvercloud Outstanding Service, Metro Caddo Cultural Club, SAG Cultural Award, Fort Monmouth Heritage Award, Bergen County Community College Historic Award, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (Wiping Away the Tears-WTC). SAG/AFTRA

 

Gloria Miguel (Kuna/Rappahannock) Gloria studied drama at Oberlin College and is a founding member of Spiderwoman Theater. She is an actor, playwright, and educator. She has toured throughout Europe, Australia, New Zealand and performed in Beijing, China at the 4th World Woman’s Conference. She received an Honorary DFA from Miami University and is a lifetime member of the Lee Strasberg Institute. Selected acting credits include Du Tu Kapsus MATERIAL WITNESS; Hanay Geiogamah GRANDMA; Tomson Highway THE REZ SISTERS; JESSICA in Edmonton, AB-nominated for a Sterling Award for Best Supporting Actress; CHOCOLATE WOMAN DREAMS THE MILKYWAY with Monique Mojica, MATERIAL WITNESS and the film CAOTIOA ANA. She was a visiting professor of drama at Brandon University in Canada and has taught drama workshops at the Navajo Nation Reservation. Her one woman show, SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW, SOME-THING BORROWED, SOMETHING BLUE, has been performed at the Weesageechak Begins to Dance Festival in Toronto.

 

Soni Moreno (Maya/Apache/Yaqui) is originally from the Bay Area in California and studied at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. She started her career in original San Francisco production of HAIR in be the role of Chrissy. Theatre Credits: HAIR (The Revival), THE LEAF PEOPLE – INNER CITY — AMERICA SMITH — THE TRAVELS OF ALADDIN, SMOKE, DAUGHTER OF THE HILLS by Martha Redbone and Aaron Whitby as part of The Public Theatre’s Under the Radar Festival 2016. She is the Co-founder of First Nations acappella woman’s trio, ULALI, The group toured with Buffy Sainte-Marie and recorded with the Indigo Girls and Robbie Robertson the Red Road Ensemble. Soundtrack credits for film and television include THE L WORD I THE NATIVE AMERICANS / SMOKE SIGNALS / FOLLOW ME HOME / HOMELAND / THE GIFT / ROCKS WITH WINGS / ONE GIANT LEAP / ALCATRAZ IN NOT AN ISLAND. She was one of the artists in the Collaborative Art Installation of THIS PATH WE TRAVEL at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City. Designer credits – Costumes / Sets / Story Quilts for MATERIAL WITNESS / Costumes for Spiderwoman Theatre Company. She is currently recording an Album with longtime writing partner and friend, Charley Buckland.

 

Shelson Raymore (Cheyenne River Sioux) is a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Nation, a Native American Storyteller, Visual Artist, Actor, Choreographer, Cultural Consultant, and an award-winning Grass Dancer. The South Dakota Native recently finished touring with Heather Henson’s AJIJAAK ON TURTLE ISLAND theatre production (2015-2018). Captivating and moving, Sheldon also starred in ABC’s Born to Explore, LEGEND OF THE DANCE with Richard Weiss, where they were the featured grass dancer at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Ever the consummate keeper of tradition, they continue to cultivate their artistry, with the utmost integrity, humility, and authenticity, letting the love for their culture shine through in all that they do.

 

Muriel Miguel (Kuna/Rappahannock) is a choreographer, director, and actor. She is a founding member and Artistic Director of Spiderwoman Theater, the longest running Indigenous feminist theater in North America. Muriel is a 2016 John S. Guggenheim Fellow; has an Honorary DFA from Miami University in Ohio; is a member of the National Theatre Conference and attended the Rauschenberg Residency in 2015. She has pioneered Spiderwoman Theater’s story weaving methodology and the development of a culturally – based Indigenous performance methodology. Choreography: THROW AWAY KIDS – Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; Director (Selected) MATERIAL WITNESS – Spiderwoman Theater; THE SCRUBBING PROJECT – Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble and EVENING IN PARIS – Raven Spirit Dance Company. Acting: Off-Broadway – Taylor Mac’s LILY’S REVENGE; Philomena Moosetail- THE REZ SISTERS; Aunt Shadie – THE UNNATURAL AND ACCIDENTAL WOMEN; One woman shows – HOT N SOFT, TRAIL.

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A Conversation with Ramiro Antonio Sandoval

Ramiro Antonio Sandoval

 

On a rainy Monday, I stopped by Teatro LaTea, located on the second floor of the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center on the Lower East Side. LaTea is hosting a residency of the international theater collective Tabula Rasa whose mission statement is, among other things, to foster dialogue on an international level through artistic expression. We were invited to sit at a run through of their latest piece, In the Eye of the Needle, a funny, inventive, and ultimately poignant look at communication in the modern age. We sat down with Ramiro Antonio Sandoval, the founder and artistic director, who in the middle of an arduous day full of rehearsal was gracious enough to share his thoughts on theater, social change, diversity, and the importance of interpersonal communication.

 

 

Margarita Javier: What can you tell us about Tabula RaSa?
 

Ramiro Antonio Sandoval: Tabula Rasa is an international theater collective, an ensemble of artists from different countries. It started with mainly Latino artists from different countries like Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Spain, Ecuador, Argentina. Our last production also included artists from The United States, Korea, and The Dominican Republic. In a broad sense, our aim is to reflect what New York is like and what we think the world is like nowadays, to visualize how being inclusive and diverse in our society can create interesting works of art. One could go out to the community and teach a bit of what we have discovered, go to other countries, bring that to other countries and exchange and build bridges of communication between the United States and other cultures.
 

We have also built within Tabula Rasa, the Theatre For Peace Project, which came from an agreement we have with Hye Ja Ju, a director from a theater company in South Korea. She is one of the very few female directors in a predominantly male dominant society, even within the arts. We knew we had in our work topics and a passion for peace, so we created the Theatre For Peace Project which brought us to Korea, where we presented our last show in a production in which half the cast was from the United States –– including people from different countries –– and the other half was Korean. The show was presented in both English and Korean in a festival as part of a month and a half residency. The idea was bringing the message of peace.
 

After that we went to Columbia, to the Women on Stage for Peace Festival, a very important theater festival in Colombia. We had a great experience going to the mountains to work with ex-combatants, ex-guerrilla people. We did some work with them, they’re very creative and they have developed great things. They shared their vision, and then they came to a university where I was teaching a workshop, and it was a great exercise of rejoining them with the society from which they had been separated for a long time. Some of them are now going to school for theater, for arts. We were very happy to be part of that process. Later they created a theater company and did a show on their own along with students from the university. That relationship is ongoing. Then we went to an even more dangerous zone in south Colombia bordering Ecuador, where recently people had been killed. It was very dangerous, but we thought that Theatre for Peace should be there where it’s needed. And we spent about three weeks doing theater with ex-combatants and people from the community, trying to bridge those relationships between these folks that had suffered from a lot of different factors during the war in Colombia. We created a show there with them, listening to their own manifestations, to their own will, and we put something together that was shown in their community. And we came back to NYC to bring our third large production, which is In the Eye of the Needle, after The Winter of April, which is about human trafficking, and Where There was Fire, which talks about the women who are left behind. They’re also victims of war who are left behind when their partners go to war for many, many years at a time. And then they reunite after they have grown and they meet up with different people. These are victims of the war as well.
 

Ramiro Antonio Sandoval
 

MJ: You mentioned In the Eye of the Needle, which is the piece you’re presenting during your residency at LaTea. Can you tell us about that?
 

RAS: We started working on In the Eye of the Needle after the experience in Colombia. Two years ago, a couple of the actresses from the company decided they wanted to do a show that talks about communication, about conflict resolution, about gender, about a lot of different things. And I was wondering, Why so many things? And they said it’s because that’s what’s happening nowadays. Everything all at once. It’s not one topic that people are concerned about, but many topics that are intertwined. How communication, the manipulation of communication and manipulation of knowledge is creating attachments or detachments within this society.
 

MJ: Right, both interpersonal and also the way the media handles communication.
 

RAS: Exactly. When there’s a big illusion about living a wonderful life when the basic needs for an individual to survive are denied. So we wanted to portray these characters as being in an in-between kind of situation. We don’t know where they’re coming from, where they’re going, or what’s happening. What we do know is that they’re being taken, that they’re missing, they’re disappearing. One of the key points along the way is let’s not talk about them because we’ll forget.
 

MJ: Was that a collaborative process?
 

RAS: Yes. We’re experimenting in different ways. I come from an experience of working 12 years with another company that I had founded here in New York working with immigrant communities, based on their experiences. And then you put together the dramaturgy and everything around it. In starting Tabula Rasa, I wanted to stay close to that process, but open it to celebrating the diversity of New York, of our world and the fact that we’re stronger when we add more, we’re putting more heads together. And also, we welcome conflict, which is something that is touched upon in this show. We welcome conflicts and we treat it as important, within a theatrical perspective. It’s key. I think I believe in that democratic way of doing theater, of collecting everybody else’s creative inspiration and putting it together, because every actor has something to say. I feel that because I grew up in that environment, maybe I’m biased that way, but I do see actors who are like, I wish this was more like this than like that. I mean, yeah, I understand where they’re coming from. It’s like a level of creativity can be expressed because you’re tied to “here’s text that someone wrote.” You become trained to execute. You’re an executioner of, more than a creative individual. One of the questions I ask my actors is: What do you want to tell the world as an artist? With that we start having lots of material to play with. There are many ways of doing it. For this piece, I adapted a few of the actresses’ stories. The story line helped weave their stories and their own expression. The experience we had with collective creation in The Window of April was different. We spent a lot more time in the research. We watched documentaries. We wanted to know, wanted to talk about social pathologies –– pathologies in the relationships nowadays, how people relate and how some pathologies get us to not relate to each other or to just put a value to those relationships. And little by little we started getting into human trafficking. We focused on sex trafficking for several reasons. We interviewed victims, police officers who have been involved in investigations. And then Ricardo Sarmiento Gaffurri, a great playwright and director who was my professor in college and part of the advisory board said Hey, this is great. Would it help if I write it? I said By all means, please. He took it over and did amazing job. He’s a very thorough and integral artist. For In Winter of April, we wanted to focus on drama, so we did a police thriller. Now we’re working in comedy. What do we laugh about? Do we laugh at the same things we used to laugh at? Why is that? We’re discovering that a lot of times we laugh about nothing new, which other very important and famous playwrights have posited. Somebody else’s tragedy becomes our biggest laugh.
 

MJ: Right. And it’s also a coping mechanism.
 

RAS: Exactly. So we took that kind of scenic route.
 

MJ: So In The Eye of the Needle is a comedy?
 

RAS: We hope so [laughs].
 

Ramiro Antonio Sandoval
 

MJ: And how did you become involved with LaTea?
 

RAS: I had come in the past, but they’re busy doing their things. This time when we came back from Korea, a close friend of one of the actresses from the company and the director Miguel Trelles connected us with LaTea. We had things to talk about and it was our fifth anniversary in September. So we said Hey, it would be great if we could get to collaborate. When we set a date to the premiere of In the Eye of the Needle, Miguel said Why don’t you guys come and not just do the premiere, but also a residency here with us –– sit in a desk and do your things here, have an exhibit, do workshops so people know what kind of techniques you use, have a Q and A afterwards? So that’s what we’re doing! We’ll be here, open to like sit down with people and talk about theater, about Theatre for Peace Project, and do interesting things like that.
 

MJ: What kind of workshops are you doing while you’re here?
 

RAS: We picked four different ones that are pillars of the kind of work we do. One that’s just a fun game and theater for people who are curious about how we get to do that. We really wanted to do that. Let’s play, let’s have fun. Let’s play some games that will allow us to create a structure about something meaningful, and then maybe turn it into a theater piece. There is another workshop called “The Body in Power,” which is based on the Feldenkrais technique of movement. It’s great for actors, for dancers, even for non-performers because it’s discovering the amazing energetic potential of a human body. How we use that, how to administer, how to manage that energy, how to be efficient with our bodies on stage, but on the day to day tasks as well. So it is great because it opens the creativity that we have in the innate captivity of the body to express ourselves through this amazing organ like this. Along the lines of the Feldenkrais work, we have another one called “The Semantic Embodiment,” which has to do with how we incorporate experiences in our life, how we get to reflect in our bodies. From a theater standpoint, characters embody conflicts, traumas, and a lot of different things in their body. It happens in our lives as well. I will also be holding a space related creativity workshop where I use the technique of a neutral mask and exercises to explore the creative potential of the empty space, the “tabula rasa.” It’s a nonverbal type of a creative work, movement work, which is not dance either. We get to see how the body can create many things that can be molded into artistic pieces. Those encompass the type of things that we do. Also, it’s not in the program, but we have a singer collaborating with us, an amazing singer, who’s also an actor. He’s offering a workshop on voice technique, techniques to warm up your voice, which is very key.
 

Ramiro Antonio Sandoval
 

MJ: I’m always fascinated by the idea of theater as a tool for social change. What is it about theater specifically as an art form that contributes to actually making a difference in the world?
 

RAS: I think that theater in that sense is above all arts. The direct contact with the audience is something that can’t be replaced, because the farther we steer from everybody, the more we appreciate when we can get together around one idea, one thought, one feeling, one sound. Through theater, and these are not my words, I’m paraphrasing Peter Brooks, who acknowledges that in society, those dynamics that break up society because we cannot see each other dismembers all of the parts, and they find in theater a place where all those members get together to become one big organ, if you will. So because of that you can go beyond ideologies, religion. You can go beyond many borders that are created by men to supposedly evolve and to solve problems, but end up separating us, isolating us from even ourselves. When we don’t even go out to see and feel what the weather’s like today, but we just ask our phones; we’re losing that level of awareness, the human touch. Theater breaks through that and sheds light on those issues that will come together, and we have something in common now that we’ve seen this and when we have something in common, then we can do things together. Ideas may generate from that.
 

MJ: Yeah, and that shared experience when you’re in the audience, even if you’re not part of the creative process, you’re just in the audience and having that collective experience of everybody laughing at the same time, sharing in this experience; it’s a very powerful thing. You don’t get that in any other art form.
 

RAS: Exactly.
 

Ramiro Antonio Sandoval
 

MJ: You talked about wanting to create theater that actually represents the diverse landscape of New York, but I feel like the theatrical landscape in New York is still very homogenous. It’s still dominated by white males. There’s a lack of diversity even in the city that has so many cultures, so many talented people. There is still a very big problem with diversity and obviously there are projects like yours and there are a lot of things that are being done, but I always like to ask artists in the theatrical community: What more needs to be done to improve the theatrical landscape in New York City to make it more diverse?
 

RAS: Yeah, exactly that, to take a big bet to be diverse. It’s my impression that we have been confusing “being diverse” with “ghettoizing” as an artist, or as a social or religious being. I once went to see a discussion about diversity in a university, and I walked out because I didn’t think it was diverse. There were 12 people from different groups, all segregated: the Latino Group, the Korean group, Indian group, African-American, etc. They were each focused on their own group. That doesn’t create diversity. I didn’t hear anyone say Hey, we would like to open up to work with anybody who wants to come and do the experience and collaborate. Bring their own creativity, learn from us, teach us things. We need to open up and stop thinking that we’re being discriminated upon in the arts landscape. Come and have dialogues with people who are looking to talk to other people. It’s like here at LaTea, where you have Puerto Rican, Latino plays and you see that people come from all over the world. That’s one of the things I like. There’s a genuine cultural exchange in this place, you know? Good things happen when we start sharing our cultures, even if we’re in the same building. We’re presenting the play in English, and we have someone from Switzerland, from Germany, Mexico, Colombia. And then we do the Spanish version. And then you hear accents. I think accents are important and they’re beautiful. They’re welcome. We need to understand what they’re saying but they are absolutely welcome and we pay tribute to that diversity with different languages. We’re in a context where we hear all of these things and so you can go off script for a bit.
 

MJ: Why do you want people to come see this play?
 

RAS: Because I think this is a good opportunity for a dialogue with artists, just by watching this kind of show which has all this creative energy from all of these artists, from people who are creating through music, the acting, the writing, the production. Everybody is contributing. They’re saying something to the world, so if you really want to have a kind of a dialogue there, it will be great to see this because it’s a relevant play.
 
 

 

 

Ramiro Antonio Sandoval has lived in New York for over two decades and he is the founder and Artistic Director of Tabula RaSa NYC Theater and Performance Lab –– an international artistic ensemble based in New York City, where he has been developing his own vision of theater and acting around the relationship actor-space (acting-design). His work has been presented in both English and Spanish in the US and abroad. He studied acting, directing, and staging at the National School for Drama in his native city Bogotá, Colombia; where he was also resident actor of one of the most important theater companies in Colombian contemporary theater. He has trained with professors from Teatro La Candelaria, the International School of Jacques Lecoq, the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, and the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski. He has also appeared in several film productions and tv series. In 2001, Ramiro co-founded ID Studio Theater where he was co-artistic director, actor, and manager of the permanent workshop for actors’ development, a space for research and education specializing in work with actors and non-actors from New York’s immigrant communities. Besides his award winning work as an actor, director, and producer for more than a decade, Ramiro was the creative director of the Medical and Scientific communications division of Ogilvy & Mather New York, where he was able to unite his research and artistic passions working with immersive technologies as well as directing and producing educational programs, live and online. He is a director of the Theatre For Peace Project, a global initiative to build cultural bridges around peace and human rights discussions. The project has brought Ramiro’s vision to Asia and South America as well as the new peace-building communities (former guerrilla communities) in Colombia building bridges of reconciliation through theater. Ramiro has been invited to be part of judging panels for important film festivals such as the Ícaro International Film Festival of Central America, the Americas International Film Festival, and the Havana Film Festival of New York. He is a board member of the Spanish Benevolent Society and member of the organization committee of the Lower East Side Festival of The Arts in New York City. He has been a guest lecturer at important schools such as the New School For Drama; the New York HB Studio; New York University; the Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia; the Universidad de los Andes post-graduate faculty of Design in Bogotá; the La Guardia Community College-City University of New York (CUNY); and recently participated at the 11th International Congress of Education Universidad 2018 in Havana, Cuba. He is an active member of the Red de Colombianos por La Paz NY and the International Agendas of Citizen’s Initiatives for Peace and collaborates with the Colombian Studies Group of Graduate Center at CUNY. In 2017, Ramiro received proclamations from the Westchester, New York County Executive and a New York State Senatorial proclamation for his outstanding work on peace and human rights through the arts.

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A Conversation with Vinie Burrows, Rob Campbell, Matthew Jeffers, Mikéah Ernest Jennings, Gregg Mozgala, and Evelyn Spahr

Light Shining in Buckinghamshire

 

We sat down with the entire cast of Light Shining in Buckinghamshire on a Saturday afternoon, now playing at the New York Theatre Workshop, to talk about interpreting a play set in 1600s England for a modern audience, stamina, and different types of accessibility in the theater.
 

 

Michelle Tse: I want to start with your first experience with a Caryl Churchill piece and when you first became familiar with this particular play.
 

Mikéah Ernest Jennings: No performance experience with Churchill’s work prior to this but definitely very familiar, generally in school, or study. But this play was new to me.
 

Matthew Jeffers: I had a similar experience. Caryl Churchill was bible in college. There was always the Top Girls scene. It’s always a staple in scene study.
 

Greggg Mozgala: I was in a production of Mad Forest in undergrad. But I was unfamiliar this play until recently.
 

Michelle: What were your impressions of this particular play when you first read it?
 

Evelyn Spar: I thought it was the perfect play for Rachel [Chavkin] to direct. Particularly because the style of her work, so often people jumping in and out of characters and she’s also not scared of doing really daring things and things that most people would seem as impossible work. So I was like oh, of course Rachel would pick this play. That was my first impression.
 

Mikéah: I like the immediacy of it. Just reading it, understanding when it was written, and what it was written about, but still really felt like the conversations and arguments and rants [in the play are similar to what we’re] currently discussing politically and personally.
 

Light Shining in Buckinghamshire
 

Michelle: I want to get into the relevancy of the play. Even though it’s set in 1600s England, and is very much rooted in religion, as you said, the arguments within it are in many ways exactly what we’re dealing with today. It is also set where a lot of the music that’s used within the show is contemporary music, so I wonder if coming into this production has in any way affected or shaped your view of current politics in any way?
 

Gregg: I think how it relates to now, not only as it current of what’s happening now in our sort of politics in this country, but it seems like this is a 350-year long conversation. Like these issues have not been fully resolved, they’re still being hashed out and argued and worked on culturally and politically. But I think the main thing for me is feeling that I could be active as a citizen of this country and of the world and that there’s so much discussion of people having agency, and I feel like there’s sort of been a resurgence of that within our political conversations these days, especially [as] it relates to the issues in this play.
 

Matthew: I feel that a really poignant aspect that has always struck me has been the fact that [the actions in the play and in the real Putney Debates] didn’t come to fruition, so we got to this point in 1600s England, where they reached a level but they weren’t able to fully make it happen. And I think it can be seen as a lesson of sometimes of what not to do when trying to create a new socio-economic landscape. You go through this whole show, and it’s draining and it’s so dense and then at the end, it’s like it didn’t fully happen and I think that’s so heartbreaking but also so hopeful to see the steps that were taken and affected.
 

Light Shining in Buckinghamshire
 

Michelle: And the way that Rachel has put this production together does have a very contemporary feel, especially on an aesthetic level. Walking in and seeing the open caption board, and it reminded me of being at the opera.
 

As you said, Matthew, the language can be very dense for someone who doesn’t come from drama school, who’s never heard of Caryl Churchill. This is a downtown theater that I think perhaps more seasoned theatergoers would visit but were there any discussions on the approach of the language to perhaps make it less alienating to a newer theatergoer?
 

Rob Campbell: Rachel’s really focused on the sounds for sure, and the softening and contemporizing and taking the sort of sound of any formality out of it, making it that much more present tense. I think part of the objective is to try to make it as if it’s from now even though it’s hard to do that just from the sound of it.
 

Gregg: It was an interesting challenge. We’re using the choice not to use British dialect throughout this piece too and syntactically this plays very English and very British, so that was a challenge too, approaching the text, just figuring out how that division of a common language is, but how to make sense of that in an American way of speaking even though it was written very- she’s an English playwright. So a lot of that work was making sense and making our brains work. It was a very rigorous approach to the text.
 

Michelle: And the show is very lengthy and physical, and there are a lot of moments where you guys are within the house and the audience. How much does an audience’s energy affect the energy of the entire show?
 

Rob: A lot.
 

Michelle: How do you get through that? I’m sure there are perhaps a matinee or-
 

Rob: Or Friday night. Yeah.
 

Light Shining in Buckinghamshire
 

Matthew: Personally for me, I find it very challenging to muster and maintain that level of athleticism, verbal and physical, when it’s quieter and less engaged. I find it very challenging.
 

As Rob mentioned, just staying focused. I’ve taken that to heart. Sometimes I’ll be up on the stage and I’ll have my mind wander and I’ll be like, today’s audience…I don’t feel like they’re 100% with us. And then I’ll think about the people on stage, and I do it for them, because everyone is so wonderful here and everyone brings the other person up. I feel I can feed off what they’re giving and that’s very fulfilling to me to know that we could have two people in the audience and if we’re on stage and something is happening, you know- and that’s partially Caryl Churchill’s words but- I think more that matters is what these guys and girls bring to the stage, and that’s at the end of the day for me how I stay focused.
 

Evelyn: Piggybacking off of that, yes it is an extreme challenge but when I remember that there are people that this play means a great deal to and they may not be the person laughing out loud. It could be someone very quiet and be having a very thoughtful moment, and this means a great deal to them. Another thing is that one of the things that Caryl spoke about concerning the structure of the play, is a feeling of universality, that there are these archetypal characters that have a universal connection, and when you get close to the characters, they’re people that you want to protect and have their story known in a way that is not usual in other shows, like you’re another character, cool. But here it’s something about them, that you care a great deal for each of them.
 

The other thing is about what Matthew said, that yeah sometimes my brain will wander off and I’ll say “no, I want to give to the team” and then I put myself back in the game. You look at someone [on stage] and they can tell that you’re playing, and then they’re playing and then you look around and everyone’s playing a higher game, so it’s always a really good reminder, especially if you love to do this, to keep playing. Someone else will want to throw the ball back at you.
 

Vinie Burrows: Good health and good nutrition and good solid mental health and good family support. Our family doesn’t have to be our blood family, those who care about us. It’s important to have them in your life. The importance of sanity in this crazy world. Life is energy, life is motion.
 

Rob: And this is a play about a movement. I think originally this play was developed with a particular ensemble, joint stock, so it was written around those particular actors and that was the root and seed of it. I think that was a very singular event but what we’ve tried really hard to develop here and what Rachel’s really- what she does, one of her strengths as a director is to work collaboratively with an ensemble. I really feel this incredible sense of ensemble with everyone here, not just the actors on stage but everyone behind the scenes, administratively. We are all in this together, the actors are here, the people on the production side are here long before us. You know, they’re the Marines, they’re the first and the last to leave.
 

Again, there really is this sense of we’re all in this together, we are all hashing this out together. This is a play about movement. This is a play about hopes and dreams and revolution and that idea of “you can.” There is a revelation in this play but you can’t always live in revelation. You can’t stay there forever, that was one thing that came up in rehearsal a lot. Another thing that came up too was that revolution is almost easy, public policy is hard. Right? That was sort of this constant refrain that was coming up throughout the course of rehearsals, and it’s something our characters are going through throughout the course of this play and we as actors are going through as we embody those characters.
 

It’s been unlike any other experience for me, professionally, to date, in both challenging and incredibly rewarding.
 

Michelle: Wonderful. I want to end by asking a more general theater question. When the Tony Award nominations came out this year, I remembered thinking that the theater art off Broadway is so different than from what is more commercial art, on Broadway. I wonder what you all wish you could see reach a larger audience? For example, would a Caryl Churchill play make it on Broadway [now]?
 

Rob: Well it has.
 

Light Shining in Buckinghamshire
 

Michelle: I should clarify, I meant in this climate, what do you wish you were able to see and bring to a more commercial audience?
 

Mikéah: I think in general, what’s missing in particular in this country that we live in, is the level of accessibility that will generate generations of interest and- what’s the word I’m looking for- grooming. Our kids being invited to the theater. Our kids going to the theater. Can their parents afford to take them to the theater? Because of the greater level of access that you have, the more risks you’re going to take. People are going to say, “I don’t know what this show is but it’s on tonight, let’s go see something live.” But if your ticket prices are so bloated that it has to be the special event, but then if it’s a special event it has to be something that someone’s like “oh I know what I’m getting, because I’m spending this much money” and that’s kind of an argument about this current season on Broadway, that it’s all of these kinds of television and movie remakes.
 

Not saying anything about the shows cause I haven’t seen any of them, and I’ve heard some of them are quite good. But that model exists because people are like “I can’t take the risk of paying $250 for a ticket unless I know it’s something that I already either like or something I understand.” The level of risk is not there. So I would just like to see a greater level of financial accessibility which I think would then promote a greater level of risk-taking in audiences.
 

Gregg: Accessibility is the sort of word I would say… It’s interesting, if you did a workshop, there are tons of off-Broadway and Broadway theaters committed to accessibility and often times people think of that only in structural access. Brick and mortar access. But one thing, I think, you mentioned the open captioning, and it’s not just a breaking device, that is an accessibility function for a particular population of deaf and hard hearing actors and what not. And even the casting of this particular ensemble embodies a level of programmatic accessibility, which I’ve never seen, been a part of, or experienced in your theater ever.
 

People don’t look at all those different facets of accessibility together and I think you’re absolutely right Mikéah, this expanding and broadening [of economic access]. When we look at the question of accessibility, you need to look at economics, look at structural, look at programming. So you’re getting at all those things and you’re making theater available to all, the entire community, because if I was a teenage kid or adolescent kid or even an adult and seeing the bodies that are inhabiting these words on [this] stage right now, I would be absolutely blown away and broken open in a way. But if I can’t get in the door, due to whatever reason, structural, economic, whatever, then a great opportunity is being lost.
 

Michelle: Thank you so much for chatting with me.
 
 

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A Conversation with Alexis Williams

Alexis Williams

 

It’s five o’clock on a Sunday, and I’m sitting at a bar on the Upper West Side, sipping whiskey and trying my best to focus. It’s very cold outside, and the city’s color has been sucked out of the windows and into the petite frame of the effervescent powerhouse sitting next to me. We might actually pass for a Billy Joel lyric if either of us could muster a life-regret. Not today though. My compatriot drinking buddy, Alexis Williams is not only a go-to, at-the-ready, fixer-of-problems but also an all-around-great Literary Agent at Bret Adams Ltd. Read on.

 

 

Timothy Huang: Let’s start here. Tell me about how you got into agenting.
 

Alexis Williams: I trained at Northwestern, studied theater, and realized early on that I was more interested in directing than acting and was able to tailor my studies accordingly. So, post graduation I freelanced in Chicago and New York, I had a year-long Directing Fellowship at the McCarter, and at the end of that I kind of realized I didn’t want to freelance forever. There are still parts of my soul that would love to put together a scene with a couple of my friends just for the joy of it, but the practicalities of that looks like in the professional world- I was fine doing it my twenties, but I wasn’t sure I’d be fine doing it forever. So I had a coffee with the producing director from McCarter to pick her brain about other opportunities out there on the other side of the business, I mentioned that I had always been curious about the land of agenting, and she told me “oh call this guy Mark Orisini at Bret Adams Ltd. He used to work at the McCarter and is now an agent. He’ll tell you all about it.” And so I did, and when I got to the city he took me out to a lovely Thai lunch and told me about the world. Within six weeks of that, there was a job opening, and I applied and got it.
 

TH: Do you find that when you’re advocating for your clients who are either people of color or women, that you have to re-contextualize their value all the time, or is that already a part of the conversation industry-wide?
 

AW: One thing I’m asking lit managers and AD’s a lot these days is “what sorts of plays are you looking for?” And often they reply that they’re looking for new exciting work by women and writers of color. So in those situations at least I don’t need to do that dance. I can just send over the plays and let the wonderful work speak for itself. Though I do get annoyed if afterward I look at a season and it’s all plays by white men and with one August Wilson in February.
 

Alexis Williams
 

TH: Let me ask a hypothetical, as an outsider: You want to advocate for a woman director for a first-class production of a comedy. But whoever gets to sign the checks says “I don’t think women are funny.” This person is dead right for this project. How often does something like this happen, and how do you handle that?
 

AW: I don’t think it often happens outright. But I wouldn’t be surprised if in some people’s brains that’s happening, and they’re just not saying it out loud. I don’t want to say everybody, I don’t even want to say most people, but… you know. So then the task becomes to pre-empt it. To say: “Check out some of her press, and this other thing she has coming up that’s so much fun!” you know? I feel like you can kind of manage it, particularly if you’re going in with somebody who has done previous work in that genre. It’s kind of harder if a producer has never seen anything they’ve done which is why whenever a director client has a production happening onstage I think it’s always essential to invite lots of producers, whether or not they’re looking to hire at that moment or not, but it becomes a way for a director’s work to be seen which down the line can lead to more opportunities.
 

TH: There is this un-attributable quote that goes “To the privileged, equality often feels like oppression.” Do you have any clients who feel oppressed in the wake of this push for equity and diversity as of late? How would you advise your clients if they felt this way?
 

AW: I do think that if you’re a new-to-the-scene white male playwright, you need to work a little harder than before to get your foot in the door these days. But no client has voiced that to me. I’d like to think that if you’re an incredible artist, as long as your work is getting out there and being sent around, you will find success. That said, there are lots of plays that are written by women and people of color that are getting stuck in development hell too. I can think of so many people where you see their names everywhere and they’re getting a lot of opportunities (workshops, reading series and the like) but they’re getting developed, not produced. That’s a whole other issue.
 

I think the only thing one can do is continue to do the work, write plays, go out and see plays and meet people, submit to the festivals, meet wonderful fellow artists with whom to collaborate.
 

Alexis Williams
 

TH: What change haven’t you seen yet that you’d like to see.
 

AW: Right now, so many theaters are on the hunt for a new AD and I’m going to be really curious about what happens when that dust settles. I think this would be a great opportunity to get in fresh blood and having more women and artists of color running things. And truly running things in positions of power. Not just the gatekeepers: the associates and lit managers who can go to the mat as much as they want about the pieces they think should be produced, but who can’t necessarily make that happen. They can’t say “I am programming your show.” I would truly love to see a more diverse landscape of leaders in the American Theater.
 

TH: Right now, we’re in a time when any one of us people of color who gets called upon to fill a place on a creative team is more than qualified. Because so many of us have studied and have been perpetually overlooked. How soon do you think it will be before we start filling those positions with less qualified people just for diversity and equity’s sake? Is this a real concern?
 

AW: It’s tough. In terms of supply and demand, it would be pretty hard to get to the point where all the qualified people are taken. But I also think you’re excluding intersectionality in that concern. Let’s say DreamWorks Asia asks you for a list of female Asian composers for a specific project, and the folks who seem like the best choices for it are all booked. Hey, what about a male Asian composer and his non-Asian female lyricist or something? I do think there are similarly creative ways around this so that very emerging composers aren’t being put forth for very high profile jobs before they’re ready, but also where producers aren’t discounting the need for diverse voices in the room. I also think it’s useful for producers to watch those very emerging artists from early on – go to the workshops, the presentations, the concerts – just to have a sense of the landscape and the folks new to the scene who won’t be emerging forever.
 

Alexis Williams
 

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A Conversation with Penny Pun

Penny Pun

 

It is always a rare treat to discover a fellow Hong Kong transplant in the New York theater community, and this time, the blessing came in the form of Penny Pun. Speaking with Penny tugged at my heartstrings and energized my spirits, and I dare anyone not to be inspired by her resilience. Read on to find out more about this indomitable soul, who has and continues to persist through every obstacle life has thrown her way.
 

 

Michelle Tse: I want to start with your experience with growing up in Hong Kong. What juts out to you in terms of being differently abled, and growing up in public housing?
 

Penny Pun: When I started primary school, my parents put me in a special education school. It was about 200 students with only 20 students who had the abilities of a mainstream curriculum, so I have always been hanging around those 20 students throughout my whole primary school education. And then once I reached secondary school, I decided that I would transfer to a mainstream school because I thought I need to get out of the “special-needs world” to “the real world” anyway, I might as well get out now.
 

So I transferred to a mainstream school and then it was a public school serving multiple public housing sectors, so the kids there were low-income and lower-middle class students. It was difficult. It was just under 2,000 students. I mean in America, it’s nothing, but in Hong Kong, [I went from] a special ed school with 200 kids in one school, and 10 kids in a class, to 40 kids in one classroom. So …
 

MT: Wait, so it went from 20 kids to 40.
 

PP: It went from 20 kids in two classes to 40 kids in one class. So it was a lot. And because I got good grades, and most secondary schools in Hong Kong have the elitist practice to put the top 40 students in one class for all courses. I always was around hanging around with those 40 people, so I got a relatively stable social circle, compared to people who got reassigned every year, so that was good. But it was getting increasingly difficult. It’s just more exhausting for me to do something, and then the Hong Kong curriculum for secondary schools get more and more insane as you advance. And my teachers were working us really hard! I mean, I go to school at 8am, and then I have extra classes til 7pm. After I go home, I still have three hours’ worth of homework and studying.
 

MT: Was this typical?
 

PP: It was very typical. I was at school, and they’re telling me you’re never getting out of this neighborhood. Only [about] 15 people go to college every year from my school, and then about 25 more go to the equivalent of community college or other diploma or certificate programs, and they were serving about 200 students per grade.
 

MT: Wow.
 

PP: So yep, you’re told you’re never getting out. And I went to this crazy conservative school, like your skirt can’t be above your knees; it had to cover your whole knee. Your bangs can’t go past your brows… stuff like that. So I wasn’t fitting in. I was exhausted. By the time I reached 8th grade, I found out that my friend from primary school died. Nobody bothered to tell me, because he died around Chinese New Year, so everybody was like, “we shouldn’t talk about this right now, we shouldn’t talk about this.”
 

Penny Pun
 

MT: Why did he pass away?
 

PP: It was muscular dystrophy. I knew that he was gonna pass away at some point during his (and my) mid-to-late teen years, I just didn’t know when it happened. [Nobody] talked about it, until I called up one of my friends, asking him, “How is he doing?” and he told me he passed away. So yeah… Everything was crashing down, and then I had a breakdown, and I didn’t go to school for four days, which is a big deal for students in Hong Kong because you need a doctor’s note, or else it counts as truancy, and could eventually result in me being kicked out of school. But I couldn’t even get out the door to get the doctor’s note.
 

MT: Right.
 

PP: Because of my disability, I have always had doctors following my situation, so my parents called my pediatric surgeon and he put me in line to see a therapist at a government-funded clinic, and then I started going to the therapist for like three months before I came back to full school days. I usually just leave early because of panic attacks and other psychosomatic symptoms. I got therapy over the course of a year. It was therapy at a government-funded clinic, so [eventually] the therapist told me that I was well enough to discontinue treatment.
 

MT: So that was eighth to ninth grade.
 

PP: Yeah. After that my parents got called up by the Make A Wish Foundation. They were like, does your child want to use it because we have “too much money,” and we have to give it away somewhere. My parents were involved in advocacy for disabled children. That’s why the foundation got their number. My parents asked me what I want to do. I knew that I wanted to be in theater by then, so I told them can I have a summer course at NYU, and they were like no, it’s not how the foundation functions, so I asked for a seven day trip to New York instead, and then [at the time] the revival of Rent was running, so I got to see that because, basically Rent is the reason I’m doing this. During those three months [when] I couldn’t even make it through a school day, Rent helped me a lot with coping with my friend’s death and being different.
 

MT: Is that how you got into theater?
 

PP: Yeah. That was when I fell love with theater and started considering doing it as a career. But at that point, all I was doing was watching theater-related videos on YouTube and reading theater blogs. The access to theater in Hong Kong was scarce, especially for a person with low-income.
 

MT: How did you find it?
 

PP: “Glee.” I was watching “Glee.” [At the time,] “Glee” was broadcasting in Hong Kong, and I discovered Rent when they did a cover of one of the songs.
 

Penny Pun
 

MT: Oh, okay. And then, since that trip, how then did you cater your public school education to a point where you were able to get into college here in the US?
 

PP: So after I came back to Hong Kong from New York—
 

MT: So this was 9th grade, or 10th grade? 10th grade?
 

PP: Yes. After my therapy. I knew I wanted to be here, so I started looking at what I can do to make it happen. On the financial side, I found the Sir Edward Youde Memorial Overseas Scholarship for Disabled Students, and applied. In regard to the curricular and academic requirements, I self-studied the SAT, on top of my regular education. I remember I bought two copies of the Princeton Review and registered at the SAT exams they have in Hong Kong. Then asked my teachers to help me generate an English translation of my transcript and write me recommendation letters, which you don’t need for university admission in Hong Kong. They were looking at me weird, but they did it, and I got all my things to Marymount online, and got accepted. A couple months later, I found out that I got the scholarship, and that made it possible for me to accept the offer from Marymount, because it was completely impossible without a scholarship.
 

MT: Right. And even with the scholarship, you had a timeframe, right?
 

PP: Yeah, the scholarship would only provide for me for three years. They are open to giving me a interest free loan for a fourth year, but a loan is a loan, not a scholarship, so I graduated college [in] three years.
 

MT: And the scholarship, was it a set amount of money or was it just, we will provide everything for three years?
 

PP: It was a set amount of money. It was I think about $32,000 a year, so it doesn’t cover everything. My parents took out a loan for the rest.
 

MT: Granted, you were here for college and you were in Hong Kong for elementary and high school, but how do you see the difference in the education systems?
 

PP: I can definitely see that where you get your education means a lot. If I’m a high school student here and I got [the] grades [that I got], I’d have more options in terms of colleges, I think. But my grades in Hong Kong meant nothing here. I got something like a 74 out of 100 GPA, which is pretty low, if you use the American standard, but in Hong Kong, I was the top of my class, and ranking was more important than score. So it’s really important where you get your education, and there is definitely a glass ceiling internationally, and it was a glass ceiling that can only be broken with money—paying for an education at private international schools. And when I was moving from elementary school to high school, my grades also meant nothing because I came from a special ed school. So I basically did not get into the best school that I could have, for my grades, so yeah, there’s definitely a parity, due to the bias that disabled children get “special and nicer treatments.”
 

American kids just have more freedom with their education. It’s not unusual for you to take a psychology class or theater class or writing class in high school if you wanted to, and discover and pursue your interests early. However, [in Hong Kong] our class schedule is decided by the faculty, because of the culture is so that you’re stuck with certain kids and classes for the next six years of your life, and don’t care if you like it or not, or if it helps you develop to be a well-rounded person.
 

MT: I left after sixth grade—but I remember my older sister actually had to take physics, biology, and chemistry together for three years, or something like that. Here it’s–for my highly ranked public high school in Silicon Valley when I was there a decade ago, anyway–physics one year, chemistry one year and then biology one year, and I think you do it in the order you wanted to. I actually think from my high school you only had to take like two of the three or something like that, and I don’t think it was even for the whole year, but a semester or two quarters. Maybe things have changed, though. I think my sister had something like thirteen subjects a year in high school in Hong Kong. That’s typical, right? More or less?
 

PP: Something like that. Twelvish.
 

MT: And here it’s like five, and seven is a lot. I remember thinking, seven classes, that’s it, really?
 

PP: And classes are quarter or semester long here. In Hong Kong you don’t really have choices, they schedule everything for you–
 

MT: The entire year.
 

PP: They schedule your teacher for you, everything is completely decided for you. Just show up.
 

Penny Pun
 

MT: What do you wish people knew about Asians or Asian-Americans—I guess Chinese Americans, and Chinese—that you wish they would stop confusing, or asking about?
 

PP: First of all, I think the biggest thing is that they have to know that not every Asian-looking person is from China. Chinese Americans and Chinese like me actually have really different experiences, and it’s dangerous for someone to generalize all of these experiences. I was just telling the writers of color in my writers’ group that if I sit in on an Asian-American writers’ group, the way I think is different from the way [American-born Chinese] think. It’s not the same thing. Chinese American, and Chinese who moved here, zero-generation, are not the same thing.
 

And, just ask. I don’t know how to describe it, but sometimes they’ll talk to you and they are really aware of the fact that they are talking to a Chinese person or Chinese American and then they’re just talking to a Chinese American about their experiences with China or other Chinese-American people you don’t even know instead of talking to a person with an array of life experiences.
 

MT: I really get that. I got rid of my accent early on and oh, the confusion. So similarly, what do you wish people knew about folks with different abilities that you wish they would stop asking about or confusing?
 

PP: To be honest, just ask. In a very scientific way, it’s a medical condition. There are so many variables in every body. I have cerebral palsy, and what I can do as a person with cerebral palsy versus another person with cerebral palsy is completely different. Our set of abilities are completely different. So if you’re confused, personally, I don’t mind that you ask. And yeah, just don’t make assumptions as to what I can or cannot do.
 

I have a friend who is having a house party in Brooklyn next Saturday and he was so nervous, he didn’t know if he should ask me or not because his house is not exactly accessible. So and I was like, just tell me if you want me to come, ask me to come and just tell me what the situation is because I’ve been living with it for 20 years and I probably know how to solve this problem or get around it. It’s just problem solving. The situation is not as awkward as you might make it.
 

MT: Can you talk about job opportunities as related to accessibility?
 

PP: I think there’s still a lot of work in terms of accessibility in the theater field, and the lack of accessibility of the offices and backstage areas of theatres directly limits my job opportunities. I think the front of house is usually accessible, not because of anyone with disabilities, but because of senior citizens and the enforcement of the ADA. But in terms of like administrative offices, I think that it’s still difficult for them to imagine a person with any kind of disability will work here alongside them as equal. So the physical inaccessibility is just one manifestation of that. I’ve been in accessible offices before, and in there I still felt like I’m not welcomed and I’m disrupting their space. So like, it’s just a matter of the industry not being able to imagine us working alongside them.
 

MT: Can you talk about the workshop you mentioned earlier? And I know you’re doing a few internships as well.
 

PP: So the workshop that I’m doing is from Rising Circle Theater Collective, called INKtank. We’re given 12 weeks to develop a full play that we’ve already sent in. It will be presented with a reading at the end of the program. We will be partnered with a professional director of color and professional actors, and it’s really awesome. I don’t know how much I can say publicly, but I think Raquel [Almazan] and Monet [Hurst-Mendoza] have really successfully made it into a people of color’s space. Every theater says that they want to “do diversity,” but like, you know it’s still a White space, where people of color are put into the position to educate and to defend, and this space is clearly a space for people of color, where we get to lead and heal from the traumas of being in certain White spaces. Because it was the first meeting, we weren’t talking about plays. We were just talking about being a person of color in the theater industry, how to deal with it, and that this program, even after we finish it, we will still have it as a map or as a resource for these kind of things. It’s like the best thing ever.
 

MT: That’s amazing. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before.
 

PP: Yeah.
 

Penny Pun
 

MT: Although, Musical Theater Factory is pretty good at that. But yeah, it’s hard to come by. Can you talk about your internships?
 

PP: At The Play Company, I’m the literary specialist and I research about the plays that come by and I provide dramaturgical support whenever they need it, because I can, as someone who can speak Chinese, to provide translation support. I’m in my first week, so I don’t have much to share yet.
 

I also have an internship at PEN America, which is awesome. They’re really interesting and intelligent people doing really important jobs. My job there is as an administrator, and I enter a lot of membership info. They have the Free Expression program, which just released a report on Chinese media censorship, so I get to help out a lot with that just because I’m a person in my office who can read Chinese. I also get to go to really cool parties for writers–a lot of networking, a lot of international work, which I really like. They’re not an organization that is constantly promoting diversity as some sort of buzzword, but the diversity is just there, because they’re looking at the world, and the world of literature internationally, and nationally. They’re looking at the whole thing.
 

MT: Can you talk about Pan-Asian Rep? I know you were selected last year.
 

PP: I was selected for the 2017 Pan-Asian Rep NuWorks Festival. My ten minute play got chosen, and it was my college thesis in a way. The assignment was, in first semester of my senior year—although I didn’t really officially have a senior year—I was to be partnered with a professor, cast Marymount students, and put on a short play in the black box theater. So I did that. Then my director submitted my play to Pan-Asian Rep NuWorks Festival, and I got in.
 

I’m really glad that I was unusually vocal about the casting process when I did my casting at Marymount. I stood strong that I would hold an equitable audition, and cast students of color only, because they usually won’t do that. On the official casting call, it’s like, “We are open to considering all actors,” you know that way of thinking? All actors?
 

MT: Oh, yes.
 

PP: Yes. We did the play and it was supposed to be the end of it. I mean, we were lucky to have a great team of people, and to be able to receive a second production in a professional setting. And those two actors [I casted] are just phenomenal, [even though] they’re sophomores. So I’m really glad that when the play got accepted, I actually got to give the opportunity to those two actors of color who are sophomores, who are constantly underappreciated, to do a professional production before any of their classmates can get out there and do something.
 

MT: That’s amazing.
 

PP: So I’m very glad that I made that happen for them. Also, I don’t know if it’s related, but the actress in my production never got cast at Marymount, ever. But the semester following that production, she got cast. So…
 

MT: That’s amazing. Thank you so much for chatting with me.
 
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A Conversation with Andrea Prestinario and Royer Bockus of Ring of Keys

Ring of Keys

 

When Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron became the first all-female writing team to win Best Score at the Tony Awards, Tesori said: “You have to see it to be it.” Andrea Prestinario and Royer Bockus are hoping their new organization, Ring of Keys, will help queer women+, trans, and gender non-conforming artists be seen a whole lot more often both on and offstage. Ring of Keys seeks to help connect non-cisheterosexual theater professionals connect both with each other and with potential employers. At a time when so many theater companies are talking the talk about commitment to diversity, Ring of Keys is challenging the industry to move beyond lip service and start doing the work.
 
I talked to Andrea and Royer recently and they told me all about how Ring of Keys got started, where they’re going, and why Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is a problem.
 

 

Kelly Wallace: Tell me about Ring of Keys. Where did the idea come from? What motivated you to start it?
 
Royer Bockus: I think the story of how we met is basically the story of how the group got started. I was going to do a workshop of an opera that our mutual friend had written the music for. He said, “Oh, Royer, there’s another woman in the cast, she’s an actress and…she’s a lesbian.” Like, he whispered it.
 
Andrea Prestinario: I had the same experience of being whispered at with, “Andrea, I really want you to meet this girl who’s going to be in this reading with us, she’s a lesbian.”
 
Royer: And obviously Andrea has a partner, so it wasn’t about setting us up. He just really wanted us to know each other. What’s crazy is we get to the opera reading and we meet each other and we’re instantly friends and I’m like, “Did the music director tell you that I was a lesbian?” And she said yes and I said, “Oh, great! Well, I guess now we’re friends.” We realized, or at least I realized, that we don’t really know any other queer, female actresses in the community. Gay men have kajillions of people who are out and open and networking with each other and they’re very visible. We had the idea that we wanted to find all of us.
 
Andrea: We needed to find each other!
 
Royer: We needed to be organized and find a way to meet one another. It meant so much to me to meet Andrea. I just felt like I was alone, in a way, in the industry and that I was invisible.
 
Andrea: It feels like we’re the butt of gay mens’ jokes still? We’re not all one team; we’re still the joke. Even though he was kidding, there’s some implication there and we thought that we needed to join and merge and make our own club.
 
Royer: And so we did! After awhile of being just friends, we decided we were going to make our idea into a reality and that’s how we got here.
 

Ring of Keys
 

Kelly: Were there other specific moments in your career where someone made a joke or said something that made you aware of the discrimination that queer women face in this industry?
 
Andrea: I remember a moment of just being in a dressing room and coming out to the other women in my dressing room and they were like, “You can’t be gay, you’re too pretty!” I am straight-presenting and I think that’s also part of the issue in terms of having to come out again and again, obviously, but it being this idea that I felt alone in that world.
 
Royer: I think most of it for me, instead of outright discrimination, I didn’t feel represented in my industry. I remember completely losing my mind the first time I heard the soundtrack to Fun Home because I couldn’t believe that it was my story and my genre. I had never realized that those things had never met before. Also, I just didn’t know anybody else, or if I did, they weren’t out or were keeping it a secret. I felt like I had two identities, in a way: I had my work identity and my personal identity. One of the things that we hope, by creating this group, is that when we all see our collective queerness, and the industry sees our collective queerness, people will want to represent those stories onstage. The stage is one of our society’s pedestals for ideas and people, and we all know how important representation is. I know that’s what Stage & Candor is all about.
 
Andrea: I would add too that Ring of Keys is a collective for queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming artists working on and offstage in musical theater. We want to encompass everything under the umbrella of the queer spectrum that is not cis-men. When we see queerness onstage, they’re primarily cis-male narratives.
 

Kelly: Intersectionality is a big goal you’ve talked about for Ring of Keys; how do you plan to make sure transwomen and nonbinary people feel welcome, especially when there is a lot of trans-exclusive rhetoric in the cis-lesbian community?
 
Royer: I mean, I think the most important thing in that situation is to listen to their concerns and adapt to them. We can say all kinds of stuff about wanting to be inclusive and that we want to make sure you feel welcome here, but we need to listen to people. I hope that anyone would tell us if there were reasons they didn’t feel welcome.
 
Andrea: We also really look forward to having diversified leadership in the future, as our organization grows. We understand that as much as we try, there’s just a perspective that we don’t have. We are absolutely anti trans-exclusive radical feminism. We are not interested in anything that excludes trans and non-binary people.
 
Royer: We’re definitely striving to make space for marginalized voices within our own queer community, and we look forward to a leadership that isn’t just three cis women.
 
Kelly: What has the reaction been so far since you’ve launched?
 
Royer: It’s mostly been overwhelmingly positive from folks who have been seeking and needing this kind of collective. Everyone who has signed up to be a member has been looking for this and their responses in their applications have said so.
 
I had a gay friend who was concerned it would be anti-guys, and I found that to be an interesting comment because we’re making space and asking to have a seat at the table. Gay men set the table. There are all kinds of other humans that are under that queer spectrum, and those narratives aren’t being told. You want those stories onstage but you also want to see queer leadership off the stage as well.
 

 

Ring of Keys
 

Kelly: Why did you decide to go with the name “Ring of Keys”?
 
Royer: “Ring of Keys” is a song from the musical Fun Home. It refers to a moment in the character Young Allison’s life when she sees a woman in a diner who is basically like old school butch lesbian, and she has this moment where she recognizes something in herself in that person. It helps her to understand her own identity and grow into it. I think most queer people who you talk to will speak to the truth of this song. It’s so affirming to see yourself in someone else, to feel like you’re not alone in the world. That’s the goal of the organization. We want to be visible so young artists can look at us and think they can do this—they can be in musical theater. It’s really hard to see yourself in musical theater sometimes.
 
Kelly: It feels like it’s almost…not for you, on some level.
 
Royer: I used to wish when I did shows that I could put some sort of asterisk or indicator in the program that I was queer because I know how much it would’ve meant to me as a kid and see there’s somebody like me.
 
Andrea: I also have a friend who’s a very butch, gay woman in her 60s, and when I told her about Ring of Keys, she was so taken by it. She told me about how she used to see shows all the time and thought about doing musical theater. She said, “But I would go see musicals and nobody looked like me.” And so she thought it wasn’t for her. That breaks my heart. You have to see it to be it. She didn’t see her story, or anyone that looked like her, and so she went in another direction.
 
Another thing was when we did a Stage & Candor interview about two years ago, you had asked me why I thought we weren’t in musical theater, and I thought, maybe because our stories aren’t being told. It seems obvious when we think about it through that lens.

 

Kelly: The offstage representation is something I think a lot about. There are so few trans, NB, queer roles available, and there are mostly cisheterosexual men and women playing those roles. You wish that wasn’t true and that more people got to play “themselves.”
 
Royer: I think that any time somebody plans to profit artistically or financially from a character who is trans, nonbinary, queer, those people should get the opportunity to play that role. Those characters are never onstage, or so rarely onstage, and now that they are starting to be, the idea that we would cast somebody else in those roles, to me, is unfortunate and wrong.
 

Ring of Keys
 

Kelly: One thing I do want to talk about is the discourse around shows like Carousel, My Fair Lady, and Kiss Me Kate, which are all returning to Broadway. Are they sexist? Is it a good idea to produce these shows right now? What’s the line? A lot of older shows don’t align with our goals of representation and equality now.
 
Royer: I don’t see the value anymore in putting museum pieces onstage. If I’m going to see an older piece of our canon, I need to see it through an intersectional feminist lens. I thought Sweet Charity at the Signature did that well. I left that production thinking there is a future for musical theater and there is a future that doesn’t just completely throw away our canon. You can perform old pieces of theater through a lens that demonstrates either how far we’ve come or how far we haven’t come, but I’m not a fan of putting up “purist” revivals that don’t really say anything about the gender politics or racial politics within them. It’ll depend on what these productions do with themselves. If they put women at the forefront of the stories, if they are produced in a way that highlights that, and doesn’t make things sugary and sweet for old school audiences, put that onstage. If it’s behind a piece of museum glass, I’m not interested anymore, personally.
 
Andrea: I had a conversation with a casting director in a casting director session and we were talking about the musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. They’re doing it in their season because their audiences demand it. I think we need put more impetus on the chokehold theaters say they’re in with their audiences. Are you sure they “demand” it? I think we’re not exposing them enough to know that. They’re smarter than that. They just can’t know what they don’t know. His comment was about how he would have a hard time with that show “in this day and age,” it’s an example of raising consciousness. He finally looked at a musical and saw women abducted and taken against their consent and saw that was not okay.
 
Kelly: It’s honestly a terrible show.
 
Royer: And if you still want to do it, you need to navigate that. Our current consciousness is not going to be okay with that. And it’s so great that we are having these conversations and saying like, yeah, this is troubling. I just want to see that continue and for all of us to constantly have this lens. I don’t want it to be that you can’t do it because of the #MeToo movement right now and you’re going to do it next summer. It’s not okay. It’s just not okay.
 
Kelly: I think that’s a valid fear that a lot of women have, that this moment is temporary and things will regress to what they were before.
 
Andrea: There’s a fear that it’s just a trend, but we’re pushing the needle. We can never go back.
 
Kelly: I think my concern with something like Carousel, the creative team is pretty much all cis white men.
 
Royer: You can put my groaning in the interview if you want. [laughter]
 
Kelly: It’s just so hard to trust the idea of these shows when the same people are in charge who have always been in charge.
 
Royer: That Sweet Charity I described was directed by Leigh Silverman, who is a queer woman. I didn’t know that when I saw it and was experiencing it, and afterwards I thought, of course. Queer women were at the table; queer women were running the ship.
 
Andrea: Consider the fact that so much of the Golden Age was written by men. Why are most women written in that time period just virgins or mothers? The female perspective and experience wasn’t there.
 
Kelly: And all of this goes back to what you’re doing with Ring of Keys.
 
Andrea: It’s the intersection of queerness and musical theater and not being a white cis man.
 
Kelly: What else do you see in the future for the organization?
 
Andrea: I think the future is unknown, in terms of what potential Ring of Keys has. We’re twofold in our mission. One is to build a community and two is for it to be a hiring resource.
 
Kelly: It’s great that beyond just having this online network, you’re also committed to having in-person events and bringing people together that way. What kind of things will you guys be doing?

Royer: Well, we started with just gathering, which I think is really important. We got to know each other and learn what we’re doing as artists and activists in our own communities. I think of Ring of Keys as a community center. I think it would be great in the future to have readings of people’s work, to go see theater together, to organize politically and artistically. Ring of Keys is the building in which to do that, both online and in-person.
 
We’re looking to produce events too that showcase our members in concert, in cabarets, and in workshops.
 
Kelly: How would you explain to someone why Ring of Keys is important if we want to make change?
 
Andrea: To me, it’s like, just think of how much it would mean to other people for you to be public about your identity in this industry.
 
Royer: This is our diversity; it’s an asset we bring to the theater world. It’s exciting to make room at the table for these stories and drive opportunities for these artists. I think that this is an opportunity to, as we put it, kick-ball-change open the closet door and reveal a vibrant, new musical theater landscape.
 
 

Ring of Keys
 
If you are a queer women+, trans, or gender non-conforming artist and would like to apply to be a key, you can find more information at www.ringofkeys.org.

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A Conversation with Purva Bedi, Sanjit De Silva, Rita Wolf, Angel Desai, Sathya Sridharan, and Andrew Hovelson

An Ordinary Muslim

 

Walking into the room that held much of the cast of An Ordinary Muslim felt like walking into a family home during Sunday dinner. Despite the seriousness of the play, the atmosphere was light and warm behind the scenes—it was a joy to be a part of it. I sat down with Sanjit De Silva (who plays Azeem, the protagonist), Purva Bedi (Saima, the wife), Rita Wolf (Malika, the mother), Angel Desai (Javeria, the sister), Sathya Sridharan (Hamza, the lover), and Andrew Hovelson (David, the token white friend, and here, the most sarcastic of the bunch) to discuss being the odd one out, in life and in the industry, the psychological mindset that changes when one is no longer the minority of the room (or vice versa), and of course, An Ordinary Muslim, playing at the New York Theatre Workshop until March 25th.
 

 

Michelle Tse: So I want to start with asking you all what the phrase “an ordinary Muslim” means to you.
 

Andrew Hovelson: Ladies?
 

Angel Desai: That’s so weird, I hadn’t thought of that!
 

Sanjit De Silva: Well, I guess, I was taught that … For me, at least, it’s what we just talked about [before we started taping], ‘normalization’, right? There’s a sense that people have a pre-judgment when you say ‘Muslim.’ They have a judgment of it being monolithic. They think of the Middle East, they think terrorism, they think ISIS, or they have these prejudged versions that seem to be super stereotypes of what ‘Muslim’ means. And the title An Ordinary Muslim means just an ordinary person. Muslim is just what another person can be. Another person can be Catholic, another person can be French, another person can be from Tennessee … somebody who’s just an ordinary Muslim; and I think it’s trying to regain that moniker, you know? Trying to make it just another thing a person can be, not necessarily this monolithic thing that has to stand for something.
 

Purva Bedi: And as it relates to this play, for me, I think of it as—yes, what Sanjit just said—and also, you see these—how many are we, seven? How many Muslims, how many…?
 

Angel: Seven Muslims.
 

Purva: Seven Muslim characters in this play and all of [them] are an ordinary Muslim. And yet, all of ISIS and terrorism and all of that is a part of [their] language and identity as the way the world is seeing [them] as well. For example, my character’s conflicting feelings about two different men in her life and all the others things that just makes [these characters] complicated, ordinary human beings. So the Muslim part has a strong color, but so does humanity, and to me, that’s an ordinary Muslim.
 

Angel: I feel like there are layers to it, because there’s hope in it, and there’s paradox in it. Hope, in the sense of—as Sanjit was saying—ordinary, like parsing what that word means, ordinary in the sense of “can we normalize this?” But also then there’s the other connotation “ordinary” like “not-special,” just sort of “meh.” So to me, there’s an irony because, as Purva was just saying, there are seven different aspects of what it means to be Muslim [just in this play alone]—especially in England, now [where the play takes place]. And so, which one is ordinary, right? Does it negate itself by the fact that there are seven different aspects to it? And yet, there’s the hope of “can we move ourselves to the place where these don’t have to be unusual stories where the struggle that Azeem goes through throughout the play isn’t something that the next generation has to face? Can we get to a place where we can do that?”And yet, the paradox is that there’s nothing ordinary about any of it, right?
 

Rita Wolf: I think it’s a very clever title. I was just thinking about this as other people were being so articulate about it. Muslim, the word “Muslim” itself now is so hot. It’s such a hot word. It’s in conversation and people, as Sanjit’s saying, have such preconceptions. But putting “ordinary” in front of it is very clever. Because it takes that heat away from the word “Muslim,” and tries to make it every day. Some friends of mine who’ve seen this play—refer to it as “the Muslim play.” No. The title of the play is An Ordinary Muslim, now think about that. So it takes the curse of that word, if you will.
 

Michelle: So how has the experience been immersing yourself into the Muslim culture? Because from my knowledge, none of you are practicing?
 

Sathya Sridharan: Right.
 

Everyone: Yes.
 

Sanjit: [points to Andrew, jokingly] He’s been converted — Hammaad [Chaudry, the playwright] has plans to do a conversion in the sequel on David.
 

Andrew: I think it’s been very helpful that there isn’t a practicing Muslim in the cast. Or Muslim period. Because we’ve all had tons of questions about the religious aspects, the words, the terminology, how people would go through their day-to-day life. And when you get hot-button topics like this, people can tend to dominate the rehearsal room—in good or bad ways, really, that’s not a judgment. It’s just that we all had a lot of the same questions which I found to be very helpful.
 

Sathya: I also think we come into this play with a lot of preconceived notions of what the Muslim experience might be for anybody. But to be able to really ask those questions, and not be precious about it, but feel like we want to do these characters justice, we want to really excavate the interiority of these characters and really find the specific nuances and the ways that they approach their relationship to their religion, I think, for me at least, it’s given me boatloads of new kinds of compassion and empathy towards what it means to Muslim, especially in the UK. It’s just a kind of experience that I didn’t realize how wrought it was and how difficult it can be. And so I’ve had many assumptions about it, but to actually read this play, work on this play, navigate this play, has gifted me that in a lot of ways.
 

Andrew: Because Islam is a religion, just as Christianity is, just as Judaism is. And there is, within all of those, a trillion different ways that people practice. And what’s very exciting about what Hammaad has written is that these characters themselves, even the blood relatives, or married relatives, all practice differently. So that’s part of the joy of being an actor, is that you get to learn some new stuff. Now if you came in and I said, “I’m Muslim, this is how I practice,” And I [told you], “you would never do that. You would never do that. You would never do that, this is the way this does,” it’s not really beneficial towards a rehearsal process or coming up with any sort of engaging drama at the end of the day.
 

Angel: And also, truthful. Because, like you said, if there are a million ways to practice, you could say, “Well, we don’t do that.” But then that person might say, “Well, we did.”
 

Andrew: Yeah. Yeah.
 

Angel: Church, temple, mosque, whatever.
 

Sanjit: And I think that the question itself is tricky, right? We’re assuming there’s one way of being, and I think that this play is actually specifically about a Pakistani Muslim family in London, and it all is specifically very South-Asian, ‘cause Islam practice in South Asia is different from China, different from the Middle East, from Africa. So there is no monolithic-Muslim ideal in any case. So when you talk about this play, I would say, “Well it’s a specific play about a Pakistani practice who are Muslim and who live in London.” Right?
 

So I think that was the most important thing. We had someone named Sahar Ullah come in, who talked about the Jamaat, the Tablighi Jamaat, which is very specific to South Asia. So learning about that was really important. I actually think I would’ve loved to have somebody who was Muslim [acting] in this play. I think we would have benefited from it a lot. And specifically South Asian Muslim, because that is very different from Middle Eastern. I think, and hopefully, in other productions, there will be, and they should be, specifically Pakistani Muslims. I’d love to see this play with all Pakistani Muslim actors. That would be incredible.
 

So for that, it was about learning the specifics of it. And of course, Hammaad is Pakistani Muslim, so having him in the room is incredible because he is the primary source. He wrote it, he lived it, he knows things. But as we found out, sometimes he would say stuff, and Sahar would be like, “Nah, that’s wrong.”
 

Angel: Jo [Bonney, the director]’s assistant [Shayok Misha Chowdhury], is…
 

Sanjit: He’s Bengali.
 

Angel: So we actually had a few Muslim people in the room…
 

Sanjit: Who all said different, yeah so, that was lovely to see too. To have Hammaad go, “actually, I don’t know,” Then Sahar go, “Actually, no, that’s wrong. It’s actually…”
 

Purva: Because Sahar would specifically help us with distinguishing South Asian Muslim pronunciation of a word versus a more Arabic pronunciation, which is going to be a little bit purer depending on where we are—where our characters are, each in our relation to our religion.
 

Angel: But beyond that too, just origins of history and gestures and so, to add to your question, has as many answers as there are people.
 

Michelle: Yes, right. So I did wanna ask you, Andrew, now, specifically…
 

Andrew: Yes! [leans in to the recorder] This question is for the Whitey McWhite Face.
 

Sanjit: [jokingly, to the recorder] Press pause!
 

An Ordinary Muslim
 

Michelle: This isn’t the first time where you’ve been in the show where you, the white man, have been the minority.
 

Andrew: No, this is not.
 

Michelle: Can you talk about that?
 

Sanjit: He’s the go-to white-actor-being-the-minority in a play.
 

Rita: He’s a friend to the brown man.
 

Andrew: I enjoy it. I’ve played a few characters like this. I grew up in a very small farm town in Minnesota, where everyone was white. We had one black kid who was a friend of ours and, that’s it! So…
 

Rita: Were his parents white?
 

Andrew: What?
 

Rita: The black kids parents, were they white?
 

Andrew: I’m not sure his parents were in the picture, to be honest.
 

Sanjit: Awkward.
 

Andrew: Not for me! It wasn’t awkward for me! It’s awkward for—I also find that when I say something and it’s awkward, it’s awkward for them, not for me.
 

[Everyone joins in with an opinion]
 

Rita: Welcome to our cast.
 

Andrew: That’s it! That’s it, there’s only one way to go about this play from my standpoint as David Adkins and it’s as a white man surrounded by brown people in a world where a lot of people, maybe that I grew up with, are afraid that Muslims are bad people. And if they’re not afraid of that, they’re just afraid of seeing people that don’t look like them. That’s it. You just see white people in rural Minnesota. So when you see something new, anywhere, you have a judgment about it, right? So in a process like this, I’m thankful enough to have lived in New York for a while, and a lot of the new plays that are being written have a lot more people with different skin colors than I have.
 

It’s an exciting thing in the rehearsal room for me to be there as the only person of my—well, the only actor, I should say—of my skin color. But it’s exciting for me because I do not have the history of any sort of oppression at all. So that works in my favor as an actor, but if I were the other way, if I were any of these people, and I was the only person of color in the play, that’s a whole different ballgame. Because there’s a history there that that sort of ratio doesn’t always work out well, you know?
 

For me, I’m happy to have a job, and I’m really happy to be able to say some stuff that pushes the envelope a bit, good or bad, it doesn’t matter, that’s fun on stage. That’s fun on stage, so then it’s fun to explore. I had two really, really bleach blonde white boys. And it’s incredibly important for them as they grow up in New York City to be able to talk about this stuff is good—and to have an opinion about it, in one way, and to have some compassion about it, even if their opinion doesn’t match with everyone else’s opinion. So maybe I try to do a little bit of that, if that’s possible in a rehearsal room.
 

Rita: That was a very gracious answer, Andrew, if I may say so.
 

Andrew: Thank you.
 

Sanjit: Except for the “these people” part.
 

[Everybody laughs]
 

Andrew: I do believe the biggest racist in the cast is [gestures toward Sanjit]…
 

[Everybody cackles]
 

Sanjit: That’s how you end an interview!
 

Rita: The reason I say I think it’s gracious is that you’re even thinking about what it might be like in that reverse situation, which, we have all been in as actors, where you are, a minority in a cast that’s predominately white.
 

Michelle: Right, and that’s actually my next question, which is for everyone else. The experience of finally not being the only one or only two in the cast, and then, to … be able to play well-rounded characters.
 

Sanjit: Three-dimensional, complex human beings? Yeah. This is the first time—and I’ve been an actor for many, many years—where I’ve been in a play where it’s a majority of South Asian people. That has never happened—
 

Angel: To him.
 

Sanjit: To me. That’s never happened to me. And so that is astounding to me, that I can go that long. And it’s like one other time when I’ve done a play with—I did a play with NAATCO. It was all Asian actors, and it was the first time [I had been in that situation, so] I didn’t realize until I was in that scenario how much pressure and angst I had in rooms where it was mostly white. Until I was in a room where I didn’t have to explain myself to anybody, I went, “Oh my god! This is what white people feel like to be just in a room with all white people! They don’t have to explain themselves!”
 

Sathya: You only have to correct one person’s pronunciation, versus like, the whole room.
 

Sanjit: And I was like, “Oh my god! This whole time I’ve been a professional actor, I haven’t had that experience.” Except when I did this play with NAATCO, and now here. And it has blown my mind and made me wanna be more and more in rooms that are more diverse, you know? And sometimes, you don’t even understand it, until you’re in a room surrounded by people. And so it’s like, I didn’t even understand it, and so it is great that you did say that there is a sense of oppression there. But I didn’t get that, understand that feeling until I was in a room where I didn’t have that, and I didn’t realize how much it weighed on the brain.
 

I think that’s one of the things that Hammaad has written so beautifully about this play is the way culture and society are white Supremacist structures, colonialist structures—they impinge on people’s brains in a way that is so subconscious. The anger and the insecurity that come, the frustration is there because of these structures that are almost invisible. But they are there on a daily basis, pushing down, you know? And so it’s, for me, it’s been a beautiful experience being surrounded by it.
 

Purva: Well that is the kind of stuff they teach you in Drama School. I didn’t go to Drama School, but I know that it is, those kinds of—the very thing that Sanjit’s talking about—that psychological freedom, or lack of freedom, is probably something that you only experience when you’re out in the working world.
 

Angel: Yeah. Because it’s a bubble in school. School doesn’t represent the professional reality in any way, shape, or form. Let alone that.
 

Andrew: I would say there’s a couple of us that have gone through NYU, through Mark Wing-Davey—who happens to be a tall, white Brit who has these conversations often.
 

Rita: Good man.
 

Andrew: And he has them unemotionally. He finds that that—in a good and bad way, right? But he finds that incredibly important to talk to the students about. About how you’re gonna talk about these things.
 

Angel: But we talked about it too before—with Zelda, I mean; he’s continuing a tradition and all that. But, you can talk about it, but I was still the only Asian person in my class. And so when discussions of race came up, and there hasn’t been an Asian student in the Grad program in the last three, four years—I’m meaning the ones now. So that’s gonna be three years without any Asian person.
 

Sanjit: Really?
 

Angel: Yep. And so, just to feel that, to have … I had a different experience professionally in that, I got to do a play about an Indian family like two years out of school. And I tended to be in mixed casts. But then I often was the token person, even in an all black—I did this mostly black musical at Playwrights Horizons, and it was so much fun, but I was still the token non-black, non-white person.
 

And also, because I’m mixed Indian and Filipina, then there’s even more of that, because it’s a struggle to get into all Indian rooms and all Filipino rooms. And so, there’s a lot of those layers, but I was conscious earlier, maybe because of Rice Boy, which was the play [I did early on], or maybe because of all the different kinds of experiences, I was conscious that—
 

Sanjit: That’s the last time you were in a room with mostly South Asians, right?
 

Angel: [No,] The Monsoon Wedding lab. But … Yeah. There was a huge gap, but again, there’s also another layer for me, because then I get excluded, and can’t get into the Indian rooms because they don’t even see me as…
 

Sanjit: Right.
 

Sathya: I will say having had a shorter professional lifespan than all these folkies here … I will say, it feels—if I can spin it positive—this feels like being home. In a very amazing way. I mean, when you can walk into a room and not have to … There are so many things that are already given circumstances, you know? There are so many things that we just don’t have to explain or … It’s amazing to come into a room where the two older gentlemen in the play are just speaking Hindi to each other in the corner and, to think, we have chaat on breaks, or Angel’s making Chai in the kitchen, we’re all coming in for chaat. Like that kind of stuff; you’re never gonna get that! Because there’s a sense of family, a sense of like, yeah, we can pick on each other, and pick away at each other, but that feels like home! Also, I mean, partially cause a lot of these folks have known each other for a while, but it feels like…
 

Rita: Isn’t that nice?
 

Sathya: And that’s been super incredible, like a lot of folks have worked with each other, and there’s already a built-in sense of family, and you add on top of that shared experience of culture or, being a first generation, or an immigrant to this country. It’s so comforting. It’s so comforting.
 

Rita: You know that there are many performers who have that?
 

Sathya: Sure! But like…
 

Rita: No, that’s what I’m saying. You’re saying that it’s that comforting and reassuring when you have that. There are people who have that every time they go through life.
 

Sanjit: Whoa! Right… that’s the norm…
 

Rita: Every project in their life. That’s going to be that. And they know it.
 

Andrew: …Wow.
 

Sathya: Except we … Not that they might, but we don’t take it for granted.
 

Rita: No, we don’t take it for granted. But what I’m saying is the thing that [Michelle is] talking about and, apropos to what Sanjit was talking about, in terms of the psychological aspects of that is huge. I think.
 

Michelle: Yes.
 

Purva: So I’d love to add on to that.
 

Michelle: Please do.
 

An Ordinary Muslim
 

Sanjit: [leans in to recorder] This is Purva Bedi, the star of “American Desi.”
 

[Everybody laughs]
 

Purva: Really?
 

Andrew: [leans in to recorder] Her next show is…
 

Sathya: Dance Nation!
 

Andrew: [sings] Dance, dance Nation! Dance, dance Nation! Dance, dance Nation! Nation!
 

Purva: Anyway … I don’t know if I can go on.
 

Michelle: Hah! Please go on!
 

Andrew: Go. Sorry.
 

Purva: I was gonna say—
 

Andrew: Sorry. Kind of.
 

Purva: Is right out of college, I started acting. And I was really scared because I did study theater and I had no idea what kind of opportunities would be out there, because looking around, I saw nothing for me. I saw nothing. I was very lucky in my first year to connect with an experimental theater company called Target Margin Theater, where their entire mandate is about diversity and inclusion and normalization. And that was what I attributed so much of my work came from that company. And then I was really blessed that early in my career, I got “American Desi,” which was the first Indian-American rom-com independent. Immediately followed by East is East, which was the other play that had a lot of South Asian people in it. In 1999!
 

Angel: Rice Boy was the same year.
 

Purva: Right. And I also was in the West Coast premiere of Rice Boy, the play that Angel was in the East Coast premiere of. So there were these little beautiful, gorgeous nuggets really early in my career and then it was sort of … not a lot. I was spoiled early, and then told: “It’s not really gonna be like that.”
 

Rita: You weren’t spoiled, you were a working actor.
 

Sanjit: What people call normal, we call spoiled.
 

Purva: Right. But you know what I mean.
 

Rita: I know what you mean.
 

Purva: There were a couple other movies like “Green Card Fever”—that was another one that was a movie made by South Asians for South Asians.
 

Sathya: Were you in it?
 

Purva: Uh-huh! I’m in it.
 

Sathya: Oh, I’m watching it now.
 

Purva: Yup. Yup.
 

Sathya: I was a big “American Desi” fan as a middle-schooler.
 

Purva: When Sathya and I first met, he went totally fangirl on me.
 

[Everybody laughs]
 

Andrew: [jokingly] Me too. But what are you gonna do?
 

Purva: But like Sathya said about coming home, those projects are the ones where I had that kind of experience of a real heart opening of like, I love my work, and I love these people that I get to work with. Not that I don’t love white people.
 

Rita: You’re married to one, girlfriend.
 

Andrew: Yeah, come on now.
 

Purva: I’m married to a white man. And we have a child together. He’s Jewish though, so, does that count?
 

Michelle: For the sake of this conversation right now, let’s say yes.
 

Andrew: Like the line in the play.
 

Purva: What did I want to say?
 

Andrew: That it was good, you said.
 

Purva: Yes and here we are, and I will say, and I’ve said this to everyone in this cast numerous times that it’s like … can I say the F-word?
 

Michelle: Fuck yes.
 

Purva: It’s a fucking joy coming in and every day walking to the theater. I feel lightness in my heart even though we’re doing such a very serious and intense play. And when I get on that stage for that first moment, it’s like … Yeah, I just feel love and light for this play and this experience with these people. And the creators, and the rehearsal room too, right?
 

Andrew: Yeah, this rehearsal room, there was only one way to go about it. And that’s how we did it, and I don’t know, I mean for me, right? I can’t explain to everyone else cause you have to … The last play that I did like this, somebody had … the writer of the play also directed, right? That wasn’t gonna happen this time, okay?
 

So it was their material, that’s wasn’t gonna happen this time, so it was a huge collaboration and there was, somehow, Jo Bonney and Hammaad, and the administrative powers that be really created a room where anything could be said, anything could be asked, you wouldn’t feel stupid about it, and any opinion could be thrown out that could be important. They said, “I don’t like that, that makes me feel…” And that was the exciting part about it, rather than the, “Oh my god, we’re getting into this again,” that was the exciting part. I mean Harsh [Nayyar], the actor who plays Imran, the Imam who comes in at the end, we had done a workshop and he knew so much about partition, and he kept bringing this up in the workshop. And it became—it’s in the play now. And it informs the play so well about the dad, Ranjit’s character. I’ve lived through … It wasn’t a good time. So I was hoping that here in London would be a better time, you know?
 

But some of those conversations, when they were brought up, were hard to have, and Jo and Hammaad let them happen. Let the actors be heard, let the actors make mistakes, and let the actors be passionate about both their characters and the subject matter. And I think that’s why we all have such an ownership over this. I’m on stage for two scenes, but I feel like they’re my scenes because Sanjit and I have talked about it enough that we were allowed to do that.
 

Sanjit: Andrew, my scenes. But yeah, but I definitely want him to feel like they’re his scenes.
 

Angel: I wondered if I had missed a question.
 

Rita: No it was a comment, it wasn’t really a question.
 

Michelle: He just had some thoughts after Purva’s comment.
 

Andrew: Remember when [Michelle] said this is more of a conversation? Good.
 

Rita: I’m still getting over the fact that Sathya used ‘interior excavation.’
 

Sathya: Come on, baby!
 

Sanjit: No, no, no, no. He used the word ‘interiority.’ It doesn’t even make … That’s not a word!
 

Sathya: That’s a thing. That’s a thing!
 

Sanjit: No it’s not!
 

Sathya: Interiority is a thing that people academics use! It is totally a word guys!
 

Sanjit: Interiority?
 

Sathya: Yes!
 

Angel: It is not!
 

Rita: Inferiority.
 

Sanjit: That’s a word. It’s a good word.
 

Andrew: Oh, he wants a washed view of the Ivy League of the Midwest.
 

An Ordinary Muslim
 

Michelle: So I want to end with, actually … The two scenes that Sanjit and Andrew were in that are “yours,” because those are the ones that we talked about the most as—
 

Angel: [jokingly] Should we leave?
 

Michelle: No! No, it’s a question for everyone.
 

Sanjit: The pub scenes we’re talking about.
 

Michelle: Yes, because…
 

Purva: The English pub scenes.
 

Sathya: Cursed.
 

Andrew: You fuckers!
 

Angel: Let her ask the question.
 

[Editor’s note: There are two scenes in the play that take place in a pub, where the protagonist and his white friend—played by Sanjit and Andrew, respectively—confront each other about race and privilege, through the protagonist’s need for a promotion at their company.]
 

Michelle: In this current climate, those scenes can translate the most closely into everyone’s real life, I think. Watching those two scenes in particular, I was energized and exhausted because I could relate to the idea of I’m so exhausted talking about this, but if I don’t talk about it, that person will, from now on, shy away from this topic, of trying to have the empathy, or the fill in the blank. Whatever it is in the context of a conversation you’d have in real life—and I’m certain we all have moments in mind—I would love to hear your thoughts on staying open without over-exhausting.
 

Sanjit: You mean, specifically, on racism? Or White Supremacy? Or Colonialism, or politics? Or all of those?
 

Michelle: Any and all of that. To me, it’s all intersected.
 

Purva: And you’re saying that you’re becoming exhausted having the conversation but…
 

Michelle: Yes, and then the worry of if I don’t exhaust myself with this conversation now, is that person then going to put up a wall about this subject from now on?
 

Rita: I’ll kick it off. I must say that those scenes, when I first read them, and when we started rehearsing them, seemed to me a little bit dialectic. They seemed a little like … Where there’s complexity … character-filled things in the rest of the play, those seemed very much like scenes about ideas and two people talking across purposes or trying to find a common ground with their ideas. And I thought, “Hmm. I wonder how that’s gonna play when we do it,” Because at the moment, are people going to sit and listen to what are basically ideas, and as you’re saying, things that they might be exhausted about hearing, in a way. But in the play of it, and in the way that people respond to those things as part of a bigger play, I really see how necessary they are. Because you can’t take for granted anything about someone who might come and see your play. Particularly a play like this. And how much they might need to hear that stuff.
 

We may not need to, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not essential. And we might, but I would listen to it and nod and feel “yes,” but other people might have their minds blown by this stuff, because they’ve actually never heard it, let alone heard it in a play before. Where you have a brown character and a white character as friends talking together.
 

Angel: To go off this way from that, what’s actually not exhausting but what I’ve noticed about certain friends who have come, is the ones who don’t talk about the politics of … In just the terms of this play, I think in general, in life, I’m feeling you because there’s a general exhaustion in that I’ve been having, and I’m like engaging with people less and less, I do it less and less, ‘cause I’m really tired.
 

But in terms of this play, the politics, what’s been really interesting is to see the people who talk only about the things that they see about the play itself. Like, actor friends who are like, “well, this part of the play structurally and this part of the play…” And I’m like, “Right, but did you hear the play?” Yes, it’s a first-time play, yes there’s first-time playwright stuff going on, for sure. But what do you think? And so for me, there’s actually a part of me that wants just get in there and be like, “So, yeah but what about, what about the play?” You heard what those people are saying, you heard what we were saying. What? The people who avoid it.
 

Sanjit: I’ve had a lot of conversations where people come and say “thank you, thank you for this play. Thank you for the pub scenes because finally, you’re saying it.” And I gotta be honest, when I first read the play, I thought, “Oh my god! I only say this in front of brown people! I’m not gonna get in front of white people or paying customers and say this to them!” And I thought, “Thank god! It’s about time!” There is stuff in this play that I’ve said in private to people who are also South Asian of color, or African-American and I’m like, “Wow, we’re gonna say this on stage.” And I think some people who are reacting like, “Oh, that’s too much,” But it’s like “No, that is exactly how much rage and frustration is actually there.” You know? And it’s amazing when people, South Asian, African-American friends would come like, “I get it. You can just transpose African-American in there because I get it.”
 

And the great thing about this pub scene is that they are complicated, and a lot of stuff that David says is also correct and both make arguments that come from a very personal place that they’re both making very good arguments. I think that’s why those work, they wouldn’t work if we tipped to one side or the other, but they work because they’re both really coming at it from their personal point of views and their both making really good points of view. Smart, articulate points of view. And I think that’s why it’s so hard to watch, cause you’re like, on one side, then the other side, and you’re just left like, “Oh my god.”
 

Andrew: Yeah. For me, more than that, I probably want to…I would’ve done this play cause I needed a job. Is that the reason that there…
 

Rita: Was it that severe?
 

Andrew: Yeah, come on! I needed a job!
 

They’re making these points because they’re friends, and they’re going after a human connection, right? So they are on the same page with a lot of stuff, but these certain things happen to be triggered in Azeem’s life that brings what David already knew [deep down] onto the surface. When David says, “Well I’ll help you out as a friend, ‘cause I don’t want you to feel this way.” Then by him helping, it makes things so much worse. And at that point, when Azeem says, “I’ve never hated myself so much,” As hard as everyone’s trying, you never want to see your friends feel bad about themselves. I will never, ever, ever have a South Asian experience because I’m white. I just won’t have that. And for someone to say “I’ve never felt this bad about myself.” And you [as a white person] have tried everything you have to just help him feel good about himself… it doesn’t go very well!
 

Those scenes work, because, at that point, there are two ways they can go. They can say, “We’re throwing up our hands. This isn’t working,” [or] I start saying, “Well, go back. Okay, go back [to beg for the job],” [and he says], “I’m not going back to a racist.” And they really fight for trying to help each other, all the way until the end. Sometimes it’s not going to work. Sometimes it’s going to work really, really well. And sometimes, that’s not enough.
 

Does that make David a racist? I don’t know. Does it make him practical? Probably. Does it mean that Azeem hasn’t been screwed out of his mind every day walking into subtle racism? That’s the thing that I think white people don’t get, is the subtle racism. We just don’t get it.
 

Angel: Or even if it’s not a joke, the thing that Sanjit was referring to early on when you asked about our professional experiences, of just even if there’s never a joke, but of just feeling alone, and feeling like there’s this thing that it’s like, “I’m the other, I’m the other thing,” And most of the time, it’s varying levels, right, of either feeling a bigger gap like this or a gap like that. And then when you get into discussions of how that translates into policy and law outside of the theater, outside of—because ultimately, we are all theater actors. Ultimately we come in, we make little homes and families and have fun where we go and do stuff, even with something as rich as this. But then to go out into the world…
 

Purva: Yeah…
 

Andrew: Because Azeem says, “Give me my dignity back.” But no one can give you your dignity. You just can’t do it. And that’s heartbreaking and so then you kinda have to get into a fight and stick up for yourself. Say, “What did I do to take your dignity? Because I’m willing to try to help you get it back,” but the line has been crossed. But we’re fighting ’til the end to do something, you know? You can’t enter into these discussions knowing where you want to go at the end.
 

An Ordinary Muslim
 

Angel: Yes, but the more you have them out in the real world, the more exhausted you get.
 

Purva: And that’s what I love about your question, right? You talk about how exhausting it is to have these conversations in the real world, and the beauty of what we get to do is we get to make it art. And we don’t, we’re saying, we’re gonna show you this possibility of a possible conversation and you get to think about it, comment on it, or, in the case of some of Angel’s friends, choose not to comment on it. Only let in as much as you can let in today. But by presenting this work of art, and the other kinds of work that we’re doing that engage in these conversations, we’re showing these dialogues happening. We’re showing what Azeem is going through. And the pain of talking to his white friend about this, and having their friendship rupture over this, over the racism in their society. So I think we’re not having the conversation, we’re doing something else, which, to me, is very exciting.
 

Rita: Yeah, yeah the exhaustion happens outside—
 

Purva: The exhaustion is at the bar after the show. Which we get to have.
 

Rita: And the anxious energy, you can feel people just … The other night? I will say, there was spontaneous applause.
 

Sanjit: Yeah when I said, “just beautiful Brown Muslim faces, this is the face of Britain now.” It was like spontaneous applause.
 

Rita: Yes!
 

Sanjit: Like, “Yeah! Yeah!”
 

Rita: We were like, “Whoa!” You feel like, sometimes people want to do it, but they just don’t. And that night, they did and we were all high as kites when they did.
 

Andrew: [jokingly] Especially because I went back and I said, “See, this white face…” [Everybody laughs] Nah, I didn’t say … I didn’t say that.
 

Angel: ‘Cause in the end, we’re still a bunch of grown-ups who come here for very little money and put on costumes and accents and tell a story.
 

Purva: To tell an important story.
 

Sanjit: For me, it’s more than that; I’m doing this story because I feel like it hits a zeitgeist in the moment. It addresses a moment in our country and our politics, and where we are, and so for me this is more than just a job and just a play and coming and putting my costume on, because it’s personal to me. When we have those arguments on stage, I’m not—
 

Angel: It’s personal to all of us though.
 

Sanjit: No I know, I’m talking specifically—I’m not saying it’s not just a costume though for me. And so…
 

Angel: It’s not just for me either. I’m saying that in the end, what [Michelle is] talking about is what happens outside of the walls.
 

Sanjit: Right. But I just wanted to say it’s not just a costume for me, and not just coming to a job. It means way more than that, and it’s even more exhausting sometimes after you go through something like this, and then you go outside the walls, and be like, “Oh wow! What I did didn’t necessarily change anything outside!” But sometimes, it does. And meeting those people who do come back in the moment who say, “I saw myself on stage. Thank you. Thank you for showing my story on stage.”
 

Angel: Do you know what was really … I’ll just go on record of saying, “Yes,” to all of that too. I’m not saying that’s all of it is.
 

Sanjit: I didn’t say it was, I just wanted to make sure that we got that point across.
 

Angel: But then, I don’t know if we didn’t talk about this in the dressing room. But then, I get exhausted because I read in the newspaper just the other day in London where the hate mail that—you probably saw this—the hate mail going to Muslims out in the community, in Bradford… Every time I say Bradford now [on stage], since I’ve read that article, all I can think of are all the Muslims in that community getting those hate letters.
 

Rita: Well, this morning, I circulated an email to everyone an article from the Guardian newspaper, [Michelle] you probably saw it? Two women in New York City—
 

Michelle: Oh, yes. Uh huh—
 

Rita: Right here, are suing the New York City Police Department for insisting that in a precinct, they take off their hijabs. Completely unnecessarily, and they’re being sued. And I thought, “Yes, this is a play that I’m in and hallelujah.” Or “Ay Allah,” whichever you prefer.
 

Angel: That’s what’s exhausting. That’s what’s exhausting.
 

Michelle: But I would say that you are putting the energy out there by doing this eight times a week, and you are … Since we’ve seen the show, I’ve been thinking about it.
 

Rita: Yeah, good.
 

Michelle: Every day.
 

Angel: Wow, cool.
 

Sanjit: And I think there are people who come … There are always people there in the lobby after the show, the people who really are moved by it, they stay, they talk to us about it. And that’s what keeps me going, on the days where I’m so exhausted, I’m like, “Oh my god. Can I get through this?” But I think about the person who’s going to be outside afterward, looking at all of us and saying, “Thank you for the story, I needed to hear this.”
 

Purva: Particularly the brown people.
 

Sanjit: Especially the people who see themselves onstage. But across the board also. It’s incredible.
 

Andrew: Their thanks have been specific. That’s the thing. Specific about a moment or two moments in the play. And that’s been really eye-opening.
 

Angel: And people of all stripes are just like, “This play is so important. Everyone needs to see this play, because of this stuff you’re talking about.” That is really gratifying. All ages.
 

Rita: And they’re diverse, I don’t know if you know, but the diversity of the audience that’s been brought to the workshop for this play, you know, on record, probably the most diverse they’ve had. If you’re serious about expanding your audience base, you gotta do something real about it, there’s no alternative.
 

Andrew: That’s why we’re flyering in the East Village during St. Patrick’s day. For tonight’s production.
 

[Everybody laughs]
 

Michelle: Alright, let’s tap out. It’s half hour.
 

Andrew: All right.
 

Sanjit: Thank you!
 

Angel: Thank you for this.
 

Purva: Thank you so much.
 

Rita: This was just what we need!
 

Michelle: This was so great, thank you all.
 
 

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A Conversation with Rajesh Bose, Mohit Gautam, Caroline Hewitt, Jack Mikesell, Sammy Pignalosa, Babak Tafti, and Avery Whitted

Against the Hillside

 

Sylvia Khoury’s Against the Hillside, currently playing through February 25 at Ensemble Studio Theater, tackles the controversial nature of drone warfare by following US drone pilots and the Pakistani families being targeted thousands of miles away. We sat down with seven of the cast members of the play: Rajesh Bose, Mohit Gautam, Caroline Hewitt, Jack Mikesell, Sammy Pignalosa, Babak Tafti, and Avery Whitted, to discuss the play, the role of theater in contributing to the national discourse, how to improve diversity in the arts, and the human cost of war.

 

 

Margarita Javier: First of all, could you each tell us a little about the character or characters you play in Against the Hillside?
 

Babak Tafti: I play Sayid, who lives in Waziristan. The village is currently being watched by drones from the US army, or Airforce for that matter.
 

Sammy Pignalosa: I play the 14-year-old Moussa, and he’s a confused, vengeful teenager who is trying to figure out how to hang with the best of them in these rough times.
 

Mohit Gautam: I play Ahmed, cousin to Sayid, son to Farid. I also live in Waziristan, and I do not like it.
 

Jack Mikesell: I play Matt, a drone pilot in Creech, Nevada doing surveillance on these people in Waziristan.
 

Rajesh Bose: I play Farid who is Ahmed’s father and Sayid’s uncle. I also play Abdul who is Sayid’s son.
 

Caroline Hewitt: I play Erin who is Matt’s wife, and who is pregnant. I also play Dr. Carter – I was going to try to do a British accent – who is British and is in the final scene examining Abdul’s ears.
 

Avery Whitted: I play Cameron Anthony, who’s a new drone pilot training with Matt Walker and who gets in a little deeper than he thought he would.
 

Margarita: The play is Against the Hillside, by Sylvia Khoury. What can you tell us about the play?
 

Babak: I think in the Waziristan part of it there’s a thematic conflict between survival and perpetuating the culture. Perpetuating home, perpetuating your customs, and how those two things can conflict, and whether you’re able to have both. That’s the big question. Do we stay? Do we go? Do we try to keep our village and our customs alive, or do we have to adapt to the current world?
 

Caroline: To me, the play is about disconnect, and the way that people want to be connected through art. Whether it’s couples or people who are having trouble communicating with each other, or trying to connect with someone who’s 3,000 or 7,000 miles away from them. And all the ways that not being able to connect to other people causes us to have a hard time connecting to ourselves.
 

Jack: For me, a big part of this play is the fact that there’s two worlds and both of these worlds are dealing with war in very different ways. For example, in Waziristan there’s a literal battleground going on. The trauma of war is there every day on a very physical level. Whereas war on Creech Nevada is all done on a psychological level, because these people are not physically at war; they are thousands and thousands of miles away, but engaged in war. The differences between being at ground zero of this war and also being connected and detached at the same time, and how that affects people in different ways. The latter end is the repercussions of those things and how years down the line, that war affects the ways we live.
 

Mohit: I think this play is about relationships, not just familiar relationships, but relationships to ourselves, what we want and how we react and live according to outside pressures. In this case, in Waziristan with the drone attacks and constant surveillance, how do we reconcile with that? How do we live our lives the way we want to live our lives yet know that we are being watched and we have pressure that’s building up? What is our breaking point? I think the same thing is true with the pilots who operate the drones. What are their pressures? What are their relationships with themselves and with their families? How does their work affect what is happening?
 

Avery: I think it’s also about the technology itself. I remember when the US government started using drones it was all about how precise they were, and how it would really mitigate the collateral damage that comes out of warfare; the pilots would be safe and bystanders would be safe and it was all about that. And as it’s gone on, and especially in this play, we have to ask what this technology does to people. What’s the human cost of this technology? What’s the human cost of technology in general? In the last scene, it’s also about how technology affects a person’s life.
 

Caroline: Yeah, and how you use technology to make your life better.
 

Rajesh: Years ago, I was having a conversation with a colleague about the drone bombings in Pakistan and lamenting how, to me, what was happening was grossly immoral. And this individual didn’t think of it with much consequence. He said, Well, they’re getting the bad guys; I don’t see the problem. And I said, They also kill innocent people, and he said, Well, it’s just a few. I was living in the West coast at the time, and I said, What if it there was a terrorist hiding in Van Nuys in the house next to yours and they used a drone bomb to get him and they missed and killed your family? Would it be ok with you then? And he was very defensive about that. These are people who are losing their lives. I think the play demonstrates that.
 

Against the Hillside
 

Margarita: And how have you been preparing for your role? Are you doing research, reading up on the history?
 

Babak: Billy had this fantastic book, Cheegha: The Call by Ghulam Qadir Khan Daur. It’s basically a wonderful account by a guy, I believe he’s from South Waziristan, who is a journalist and he goes back to his town and talks about it, he talks about the culture and his family, and they all become these wonderful characters you see, the traditions they have and the structures of their society, the patriarchal element of the town elder, and how things are worked out. There was also another wonderful study, I believe it was at the NYU Stanford Law site that Sylvia gave us, that was about the effects of the drone warfare: psychological effects, educational effects, economic effects–
 

Caroline: –but on the people who are being watched. Not on the people doing the watching.
 

Babak: Yeah, exactly.
 

Caroline: There are two branches of research. The results in Pakistan, and the collateral in Creech Nevada.
 

Babak: That was the eye-opener of the thing. The pressures of these people, specifically if you have a terrorist in your household, the Taliban specifically would pressure them. You’re gonna let me stay here. They had no choice and they end up being that collateral damage. And you couldn’t have more than five people together because the drones would think that was a meeting of some importance, and terrible things would happen. And then education dwindles severely because people were too afraid to send children to school. The literacy dropped. Endless amounts of destruction in that area.
 

Jack: Billy gave us some firsthand accounts of drone pilots. The aftermath of what it was like to leave at the end of the day and go back to real life. And the responsibility that you take on, and this idea of you take on an order and you do so regardless of consequences.
 

Caroline: I found it very hard to understand, physically, what being a drone pilot is like. So I saw an Ethan Hawke movie on Netflix that I thought was really helpful, called Good Kill. It really hit home for me just how claustrophobic and physically awkward it is doing what they do, but also how when the CIA is your client, you do not question that. You do exactly what they’re saying even if you have moral qualms with what’s going on, which I thought was really interesting because I think it’s important to remember that the people who are pressing the button are pressing the button, but it’s also coming down from somewhere else. In that way, there is damage done to them even though they’re accepting the mission.
 

Mohit: There’s also the actual physical changes we’re all going through. You know? Whether it be facial hair or cutting your hair or something like that. I mean, wearing a pregnancy belly. These things add a lot of who you are as you’re going through this journey as this character. It makes a world of difference. Cause you’re looking at yourself in the mirror and go whoa, that looks like a different person.
 

Margarita: Given the scope of these themes being explored, and how it’s not clear-cut by partisan issues–the drone programs have been instituted by both liberal and conservative administrations, it’s complex, it’s dirty–what conversations do you hope are sparked by audiences attending this play? What do you hope this play is going to add to that conversation?
 

Rajesh: I think that what struck me the most was that the consequences of any war, but the consequences of this particular kind of warfare aren’t just the immediate consequences of–obviously the horrific consequences of people being killed–but how it wipes out generations upon generations of people; its effects are far reaching across generations. I remember when I first read the play, it reminded me of an article talking about Vietnam, that children are still born with birth defects because of the Napalm, and this was how many years ago?
 

Margarita: Yeah and people are still reeling from effects from World War II.
 

Rajesh: Yeah, it’s still destroying people’s lives. What the US government has decided to do in South Asia is going to destroy people’s lives for generations to come.
 

Mohit: And going along with that, I think the main question I have for myself is what is our limit to the destruction? Right? Where do we stop? How far are we willing to go? Do we realize that if we’re willing to go to this point where ten, fifteen, twenty people die as collateral deaths, is that good? Is that bad? Is it 100 deaths? Is it 200? Is it the effects of mental issues with drone pilots? PTSD?
 

Margarita: Right, and as you said earlier, what is the limit? If there’s a terrorist living in US suburbia why don’t we bomb there, when it’s ok to do it in these other countries? What is that line?
 

Avery: I think there’s also a mentality amongst many Americans that Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and all those countries are just perpetually war zones anyway, so it almost doesn’t matter. I was born when my country was at war, and I’ve never not been at war. Especially for my generation, it’s really hard to imagine what those places would be like if there wasn’t a war going on. And I had an eye opening moment when I saw pictures of–remember when Aleppo was in the news, that it was destroyed? They would put up all these pictures of what it used to look like. All of these places used to look something like that. They didn’t just become war zones. That started, and hopefully someday it will end. But what I would want out of this play is for people to not just think of it as a really far off place made of rubble. That there are people there living lives.
 

Mohit: Exactly. This has nothing to do with drones, but the other day in Afghanistan there was a suicide bomber who killed 97 people in a market, and you open the New York Times and it’s on page 87 in the corner. It’s below the fold.
 

Avery: It’s kind of par for the course right now.
 

Mohit: It’s been almost 20 years now and our shock system is gone. We’re used to it now.
 

Caroline: I feel like for me the most I hope for in a play is that the audience will feel compassion for people who aren’t like them. One of the extraordinary things about this play is that one of the drone pilots does feel compassion for this family that he’s watching, and he does act on that. I think if people can leave feeling like they now care about something or someone that they weren’t aware of or didn’t care about before, then we will have succeeded.
 

Avery: Just for myself, I hate when plays have a super political explicit message, like Here’s the moral! Go out in the world and live like this. This play does not do that. I feel like it does a really good job of just showing you people.
 

Margarita: And on that line, what do you feel as actors is the role of arts, specifically theater? Speaking for myself, there’s something about theater, because you’re right in the room as the art is being performed, there’s a connectivity there, so what is the role of theater in contributing to a national discourse or themes that need to be addressed and aren’t often talked about?
 

Babak: We learn from stories, don’t we? That’s how cultures learn, from stories that are passed on. So in any capacity–theater, television, film, anything that’s telling a story–I think changes minds or at least opens a thought to explore a bit more. It’s always necessary. Everything we learn as a kid growing up, society, the impressions we get from television… it’s shaping how we see love, how we see hate, how we see all these things. So when you take a kid to this show or an adult comes to a show or whatever, it’s going to open them up to something they’re maybe not completely aware of, or that they didn’t know as much about.
 

Sammy: I think the thing about theater is how there are real people, it’s the human contact you get to see that humanizes things, personalizes things in a way that you don’t really get through looking at a painting. It’s so far out from your realm in the world. When it’s brought to you and shoved in your face by real people and you get emotions that you sympathize with, I think that can change your mind, just the sheer human contact and realization.
 

Caroline: I agree completely, and I feel like the thing about theater right now in a culture that’s so steeped in visual entertainment that you can control, is that you can’t control us. We are real people, and that’s a problem, right? There are real people in front of you that you have to deal with. Which I think is great, and there’s an urgency to it that doesn’t exist in a lot of other forms of entertainment right now. They can’t press pause. We are going to tell them this story, and they are going to have to come along with us.
 

Sammy: The depths of the human hearts, it’s cavernous: nobody knows how far and deep a meaning can go behind something like that. There isn’t that level of emotional, moral foundation under less personal things.
 

Rajesh: I think to that point, theater is more important than it maybe has been in a long time. I feel culturally at the moment we’re in a vast empathy gap–all of our consumption of stories is so curated to the point where we can just say, I don’t like this, I’m going to watch something else. But when confronted with something that makes you feel discomfort, to have to sit and really work through it is something that I don’t think as a culture we do anymore.
 

Avery: Yeah, you can’t escape to your phone.
 

Rajesh: Right.
 

Caroline: I mean, some will try, but you shouldn’t.
 

Margarita: And you spoke about empathy and how a play like this creates empathy. I haven’t seen it, but I can imagine that you get to spend intimate time with these families in a way that you wouldn’t in real life. It’s a private space, and you as an audience member have to witness that which creates a greater level of empathy you don’t get by just reading about it in the news. Like you said, it’s on page 87; I don’t know these faces, I don’t know these people, it makes it easier to distance yourself than when you’re confronted with these human beings. Even though they’re fictional, they’re human beings.
 

Caroline: There was an article that came out recently, I don’t remember where, about scientists who have studied audiences and realized that during plays their heartbeats start to sync up. In addition to what we’re talking about of there being real people, we’re not performing for one person and their experience. We’re performing for a community. That happens because they’re all sitting there together.
 

Avery: Yeah. Just from a performance standpoint, there are a lot of moments in this play where if you’re watching a movie, you’re watching the moments from an omniscient objective standpoint. When you’re sitting in a theater and there’s something happening, you’re all in the same moment. We’re all sitting in the same room together and we’re taking things off of them and they’re taking things off of us.
 

Margarita: Yeah, and unlike a movie, the audience contributes to the performance. In a movie, you’re all in it together, but they’re not getting anything from you, whereas when you’re in the theater, the actors are on stage.
 

Mohit: There’s no immediate transaction.
 

Against the Hillside
 

Margarita:Yeah. It’s the only art form I can think of that does that, that kind of communication between the spectator and the artist, which is why I love theater. And what has it been like working with the director William Carden?
 

Caroline: Great. Yeah, I think he’s a really generous director. He’s like the advocate for the script when we’re in the room with him, but also super open to listening to our thoughts and ideas are really good at layering things without demanding too much at any one moment.
 

Rajesh: I do remember him saying this is among the most challenging things he’s ever worked on. And it’s a beautiful script, but it requires enormous amount of exploration from everybody involved. Because the possibilities are endless. He always navigated that very artfully. Being able to find the time to explore everything that needs to be explored and still come up with what you need to at the end.
 

Margarita: I haven’t seen it, and I don’t want you to give too much away, but how are the two different spaces conveyed in these two different countries? Does it happen simultaneously on stage, or do you shift between the two?
 

Babak: I think it’s pretty simple shifting between trying to find a blend of the two. So then you can shift between both worlds easily and swiftly, which I think does a wonderful thing with how they’re connected. They’re connected through this drone. How they both affect each other. So, even the transitions, which I don’t think is going to give anything away, kind of bleed into each other. The two worlds just shift more and more.
 

Mohit: And if you think about it, in both Waziristan and Nevada the terrain is–as we have been talking about–quite similar: mountainous, desert, arid. I mean, when you see it, you’ll understand exactly–I don’t want to give it away–but there’s, there’s something on set that understand as to what is happening to create those parallels.
 

Avery: What was also interesting in rehearsal, just because of managing time with different people is we would hardly ever see each other. There was the Nevada group and there was the Waziristan group, and we were never in the same space at the same time. So when we finally came together, the first time we ran the show was really cool because it had been two or three weeks and we were seeing these scenes that were miles ahead of where they were when we did the table read. I think that also helped just make them feel like different worlds, but also the same.
 

Caroline: And then there’s the only time that two actors from those worlds interact is the final scene.
 

Babak: Do you think it’s a spoiler to say anything about the final scene? I’m worried about that.
 

Margarita: I don’t think so, that makes me really want to see it.
 

Rajesh: To watch the show and not know anything about it and have that happen, I would imagine is a pretty great surprise. I don’t think anybody’s expecting that at that moment.
 

Mohit: See, now you really want to see it!
 

Avery: There was also a choice that was made very early on where I remember when I was reading the script, I imagined that the scenes in Waziristan would be done in accents, kind of as a trope of like we understand that they are speaking a different language because they are speaking with that accent, but it was decided that everyone would have their own accents.
 

Margarita: Oh, I appreciate that so much!
 

Avery: Sometimes it works, but in this instance it was better not to.
 

Babak: It usually uses a distancing kind of thing, which is not what this is about.
 

Margarita: You have to trust that the audiences understand they’re speaking their own language, but the actors are using their voices. So I appreciate that and am happy to hear it. I always like to ask this because at Stage & Candor, we’re very much about fostering diversity in the arts. We live in a very forward thinking, very multicultural city, but it feels like there’s still a lot to be done in terms of representation: so what can be done? What do you think needs to be done to get to a point where we feel like every community is equally or authentically represented?
 

Sammy: I don’t think that’s something we can really tackle with just specific policy. I think that needs to happen over time because it’s much more societal, like the mind of society. There has to be a mental revolution in the population of the city and that’s not something that you can turn on. That takes time.
 

Babak: I will respectfully disagree, because right out of school this has been the immediate and constant question. I have dealt with shows that had been very heated with this very question. It’s all from the top, man. If you don’t have people in administrative roles, it just comes from around there and there have not been any changes like that at all since I’ve been out of school, if not longer. So it’s one of those things where it’s going to be a tricky navigation of: are we going to have this question? How are we going to actually have the people present that can actually do this change, be present in the room and bring this question out? Can we actually try to do things to where we give opportunities in the administrative offices, give opportunities in the directing and the whatever, putting whose play up, everything up there? It’s about opportunities and those opportunities aren’t going to be given unless the people who make those decisions see that. And generally, that hasn’t been the case. I think it’s something that needs to be talked about. This has been talked about. Nothing has changed for so long, and I don’t know, it’s one of those things, like, I don’t know. I mean, there have been wonderful people who’ve been talking about this, like Stephanie Ybarra at the Public Theater, wonderful sources of people who’ve been trying to push this change constantly. And I think that’s a big question. That’s been a bigger question these past two years, I think, specifically with our higher up political elements, right? Everything’s at a peak. It has to come from the top.
 

Mohit: I agree with that. Until our heads of the theaters in the country, heads of our production studios, heads of our arts centers or wherever reflect the community that they represent, that they are a part of, things won’t really change. As Babak was saying, it’s up to the hesitant to hire people to want to change themselves as well. Hire the people who reflect the stories that we want to tell, not the stories that will make the most money or the stories that will please their membership base or something like that.
 

Margarita: And also to stop thinking that there’s this certain thing that is what makes money. There are stories to be told and there are communities that are willing to spend money if it’s something that appeals to us.
 

Caroline: I think too, that many of the plays that we have in the Canon are portraying the people who were in power at that time, and I think that at this point what we need to do is we need to be doing plays of the people we wish to see in power. Otherwise, I don’t think that anything will change. And the fact is the writing is out there, the actors are out there. It’s just a matter of choosing to portray, not the White House as it is right now, but as we want to see it in 50 years. We have to be a little bit aspirational with programming, I think.
 

Sammy: I also think that when we do movies and TV shows and plays about a certain race or group of people, they’re about them, but they’re also about their situation. And I think that’s also taking away from the progress, because if we just had a regular play with that group of people and it didn’t have to be mentioned that this is their economic situation. They’re just a regular person. It doesn’t have to be stated that they’re black or they’re Latino. That doesn’t matter.
 

Avery: I had a conversation with a friend in the last play that I did where we were both saying that it’s so infuriating when people say things like It doesn’t matter what race someone is or that shouldn’t affect how they’re treated or their lives or anything, and to a certain extent that’s true. But if your race is not important to you, if that’s not part of who you are and if you don’t recognize that, then you’re missing something. That is a huge part of who everybody is. So I think it’s a mistake to try to put certain people in a certain place arbitrarily because they are a different race than is usually expected. A much better idea is to have stories that are about different people. Of course there are stories about Pakistani families. Of course there are stories about black families. Everyone needs to be represented but not represented in a clinical, statistical way.
 

Margarita: Yeah, especially because usually when people say that what they mean is that white is the standard. Because it has been. So when you say Oh, the race of this character doesn’t matter what you’re saying is the character is read as white and it doesn’t matter if it’s played by somebody else. But wouldn’t it be nice to have characters that are actually speaking to these communities?

Caroline: And more female characters.
 

Mohit: For me personally, there’s some value in saying Hey, we’re doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream with an all Asian-American cast. Right? And they’re not just saying Shakespeare’s words. They are implementing their own culture into the production. I am an Indian American. Indian American. I’m 50/50, I’m American and I’m Indian, and I hold both cultures in my heart dearly and I will bring both to the stage every single time. That is what we should value. We shouldn’t value saying, Oh no, look at that guy’s skin color. He’s white or he’s black or, or something like that. He can only understand one thing or she can only understand one thing. No, it’s not like that. You can tell the story that is so diverse. And it can be inspiring also, right? You can tell these stories if you just do it.
 

Rajesh: I think to that point of what Sammy was saying too, it’s sort of interrelated in the sense that who we are and where we come from as artists is not something to hide, it’s something to reveal. The idea is that who this person is and where they comes from is something to welcome, not to ignore in a statistical fashion, but rather there shouldn’t be, it’s not whitewashing exactly, but…
 

Babak: That white is the standard
 

Caroline: White male. White male.
 

Rajesh: And you can somehow pass. But that’s not the point. The point isn’t to pass, the point is to reveal everything.
 

Babak: Reveal what we see every day. That’s the thing, man. So many times where I’m seeing a play–like I saw Homecoming Queen at the Atlantic–it was so incredibly authentic to me. I had no idea of the culture or anything like, but it was a beautiful tale of being both from America and from a different culture, and you see how those two things clash and that’s the most immigrant American thing you can talk about. And seeing that, and seeing that story, more and more of them, because that’s more and more what I see in the streets around me. It’s amazing how much I actually thirst for that in the theater. I actually see more of that in TV and film than in the theater.
 

Margarita: Yeah, and in this city, which is so surprising.
 

Babak: It’s absolutely absurd. It just blows my mind because I think there’s a lot of good work being done in that front. Like we were talking about Stephanie Ybarra. I think Noor Theater, Lameece Issaq, Maha Chehlaoui, they are doing wonderful work, so things are being done. Things are pushing, but I think it’s one of those things you just have to keep going at it, because it’s not going to change on its own, that’s for sure.
 

Against the Hillside
 
Margarita: And what you said about behind the scenes is very important too. I spoke to Jacob Padrón recently and he mentioned that it’s not just putting people, diverse people, women and people of color on stage, but behind the scenes too. Who’s taking your tickets? Who are the ushers, who is the director, who’s a writer, who is the artistic director? Those things matter.
 

Caroline: And even where things are being advertised, like on NPR. I love NPR, but I love when I see posters shows in the subway because everyone sees them.
 

Margarita: Right, exactly. And you have to think of the audience. If you’re just putting women or people of color in a play to appease white liberal audiences, you’re not really changing the landscape and everything is going to remain the same.
 

Babak: I want to see younger people. I wish there was more of a push to appeal to younger audiences.
 

Avery: I think that a huge part of that is that theater is more often than not prohibitively expensive, but there are a lot of theaters that are trying to change that. I think the reason it is prohibitively expensive is because a large part of the people who go see the theater can afford to see it. And they’re going to see it because the stories that are up there mostly are about them. So it’s interesting. I think that that would change if there were more stories about more people.
 

Babak: Yeah, it needs to be done. And I mean, EST is wonderful in the sense that I see more youthful faces in the audience. I’m not trying to call out any theaters specifically, I’m just saying it’s nice that there are initiatives to reach out to that. There’s that common tale of theater is a dying art form, and when the older generation leaves, then what are we going to do? And that’s never been the case. Art constantly survives, but I would like to see kids come to a show that they can respond to. So first of all, they have to be interested in it because it has to speak to them. Right? That’s one side of it and the other side is to be able to have the ability to, monetarily. I don’t know, I might be unaware of certain things being done by certain theaters, so I might be completely ignorant, but I hope there is stuff out there to kind of make that the case more.
 

Margarita: I think there’s a lot of misguided efforts by a lot of big theater companies.
 

Caroline: But that’s where it starts, right?
 

Margarita: And having conversations like this.
 

Caroline: Just keep talking about it.
 

Jack: I imagine that work is out there that young people want to see, but it’s not being marketed, it’s not being accepted by larger theaters who can bring it to a bigger audience.
 

Margarita: Or the people who have money are not investing in it because they don’t believe in it. And we need to prove that, yes of course it can be both innovative and profitable. It can happen. It has happened.
 

Babak: Exactly. There are so many artists who want to put up a production of whatever it may be. And you go to a theater and it’s like all 500 bucks a day or something like that. Who has that kind of money to spend to do a full production, right? Let it be accessible to people. Let it be an open community thing, you know, an educational experience.
 

Against the Hillside
 

Margarita: Finally, why should people come see this play?
 

Jack: I think it’s important to witness other people’s experiences and they should come to see a perspective of someone else’s life.
 

Babak: There’s humor, it’s tense. There’s humor in the tension. You know what I mean?
 

Caroline: Also, I hear on the news that there was a drone strike and I didn’t actually know what that was. That’s my own ignorance, but I also think it was great to just get people aware of what we’re doing, the war crimes that our country is committing every day that Obama started, well, Bush started and Obama got really excited about. I love Obama, but…
 

Margarita: It’s easy to criticize when the President is somebody you don’t like, but when it’s somebody you like and they’re doing these evil things, it’s a lot harder to take.
 

Babak: You guys were talking about it before, the power of theater, right? That when you’re in the presence of the people, you can’t deny them. To be in the presence of the two sides of that coin, of the people who are implementing the battles, the wars and their effects on them and the doubts that come into their mind and what that does to them because they have to follow commands. Right? And the other side where you have to see people struggling to survive in their homes, just everyday life and having that confronted, death being present right there, right there in front of you. You don’t really get that a lot in theater, I don’t think.
 

Avery: And something I always love about theater is, it’s just cool. It looks cool. It sounds cool. The writing is really fast and it moves along and it’s just fucking cool.
 

Caroline: Plus, it’s only 90 minutes!
 

Jack: I look at my clock on my phone and I’m like Wow, it’s only 10:30 now?
 

Babak: I think it’s a great introduction to Sylvia. I expect great things for her are on the horizon. Seriously. I’m glad this her first production and that we all get to be a part of it.
 

Sammy: One of the reasons to see this play, like we said a little bit before, is that it calls into question the morality of humanity, because we have this technology and it’s honestly maybe a little too much for us to handle. We talked about how when you get an order from the CIA, you don’t question it, regardless any disagreements you may have with it. So it challenges you. What are some authoritative things in your life that you might not agree with? How do you act on that and how do you deal with that?
 

Caroline: Which we’re all doing every day with this current political climate.
 
 

 

 

With the constant buzz of American drones above the Pakistani countryside, a young woman fears for the safety and sanity of her family. Thousands of miles away, the drone pilot in Nevada tasked with watching her family becomes increasingly removed from his own life. Playwright Sylvia Khoury examines the cost of wars fought at distance on both the observer and the observed. Get your tickets here.

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A Conversation with Mashuq Mushtaq Deen

Mashuq Mushtaq Deen

 

Few shows feel as specific as they do inclusive, yet Mashuq Mushtaq Deen’s solo show, Draw the Circle, currently playing at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, achieves such a feat. Draw the Circle, chronicling Deen’s journey through a series of monologues as told by the characters from his life, simultaneously breaks your heart while making it swell with emotion. We sat down with the playwright and actor for a wide-ranging conversation about the show, his life, and why inclusion in the theater feels closer yet further away.
 

 

Michelle Tse: I want to start with the title of the show [Draw the Circle] and the words that were in the playbill from Edwin Markham: “He drew a circle that shut me out — Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But Love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle that took him in.” How did these words come into your life, and how, would you elaborate on how it all comes together?
 

Mashuq Mushtaq Deen: I was looking for a title for the play and I couldn’t find one, and at the time I was long distance between New York City–where I was in The Public Theater‘s emerging writers group– and DC, in Arlington, Virginia where my partner was still. So I was going back and forth. When I was in Arlington, I used to like to visit with the Unitarians on occasion—and I’m not Unitarian, but I enjoy them. I was visiting, and this Edwin Markham poem was in the program that day. There was something about it…I felt like the poem spoke to what I’m trying to do in the piece, and so to me, the performance of the piece is a drawing of the circle around the audience. I think it’s also a request that if it feels moving to the audience members, I hope they will leave and go out and draw their own circles.
 

The circle is meant to be a big circle, so you know the poem goes, “He drew a circle to shut me out — Heretic, rebel, thing to flout, but Love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle and took him in.” I just say that because I–occasionally I feel like after the performances, people might say, “Oh sometimes you need to draw just a very small circle,” and I was like, “That’s not what the play is about, though.” You can do that and certainly people need to take care of where they’re at, and themselves, but I think the idea is that if we could draw a circle big enough, that we take in the people who are even scared of us and trying to push us away. What could happen when we include them? That’s what I do in the play. I hope.
 

MT: I think it does. Does part of that include, I think the frustration may be when you do draw a bigger circle, the exhaustion that sets in when you’re constantly educating someone that might not want to understand?
 

MMD: Right. You know, I was talking to my partner about this, and you know I don’t think there’s a right and wrong. I think it depends on what you’re emotionally capable of in the moment, what you feel like doing where you are. Certainly at a party I am not likely to want to educate people in that moment, but in my art, and because I have perhaps enough distance from my own transition to have really spent time thinking about writing about the characters around me, I feel that there’s something I can understand about [the fact that] neither one of us has to be right or wrong, and we can even take right and wrong off the table. It can be about this is what it feels like, this is what I miss, love, want, and this is what it feels like for you.
 

What does that space between those two feeling states to communicate where we’re at? What if I was vulnerable to my parents? Which I probably wasn’t, when I was going through this. What if they could actually be vulnerable to me and we could sit with each other’s grief and love and loss and realize it didn’t mean that we didn’t love each other, it just meant that we were struggling with something? I just think something becomes possible, something becomes magical in that moment. I feel like I see it in audiences. I see parents talk to me in ways that I bet they’re not always talking to their kids. I can say things to them that I’ve never, or maybe can’t always say to my parents. In doing so, I’m just like a stand-in.
 

They’re saying it to the kids, and the kids are saying it to their parents and maybe, over time, that evolves to them saying it to their own parents. I don’t know. I feel like something becomes possible when we’re vulnerable. Again, I’m not saying everyone has to be, I don’t think everyone has the bandwidth for it. It’s not like it’s my job to educate. But I can do that and I’m willing to do that, and I think everyone learns somewhere and I think there’s a lot of allies, or soon to be allies, that could exist if some people have the bandwidth to take them in a little bit.
 

Mashuq Mushtaq Deen
 

MT: Right. You just spoke of your parents, and that was something I’m very curious about because the characters in the play seem incredibly personal. How was it to negotiate going through your own feelings and writing them down and realizing these characters? Did you ever get a chance to sit down with your parents and go through what you just described?
 

MMD: No, they would not have participated in the writing of this play. The only person who was helpful in that way was my partner, who gave me her journals from that time. We talked about it and there are certain pieces of her speech that are lifted from her journals. For the rest of it, as a writer, I have to get out of the way and it can’t be me trying to put across my point of view. Like through my mother, I’ve really gotta listen to the way she speaks and what it says about who she is, and what her behavior is and what does she want and need and it has to be about her. I really had to make sure I was not in the way. So a lot of things that got cut, or I had to toss were moments when I started to get in the way and wanted to, some part of me wanted to defend myself or make me look better or something, and I had to really cut that stuff out because it wasn’t good writing.
 

MT: In that sense was–who was the hardest character to actualize?
 

MMD: I don’t really know; you know, in some ways the Molly character is very hard because she’s so close to me, that for me to get enough distance to see her sometimes can be a challenge. Also, Molly’s character had to do double duty. She both had to represent herself, and her wants and needs on stage, but there were moments of my journey that only she would have access to, and so I have to find a way that she can also bring that up so that the audience can follow what my journey is through it. She has some very long, long monologues because she’s doing so much work as a character in the piece.
 

MT: I loved those monologues. Could you elaborate on the decision to draw the circle with the characters around you and not have the protagonist show up until—
 

MMD: Not even in the play.
 

MT: That last very powerful moment.
 

MMD: Yeah. There’s a few things that go into that one. I don’t like self-serving plays. I’m not a fan of defending. I just don’t think the writer should be there trying to prove a point or defend themselves to the audience. I think writers should always question themselves and their own values as much, if not more than they’re questioning everyone else in their play. So that’s part of it. Another part of it is I’d already lived through it, and to tell it from my point of view felt very redundant, and I wasn’t learning anything.
 

Telling it from other people’s points of view was a way for me to discover and learn as a writer. Then, I know that you’re getting Deen’s journey. I’m aware that even though I’ve taken my character out, I know that you’re still going to get what my journey was for me, and in some ways in a much more nuanced and complicated way than if my character got up on stage and told it to you. All of those things together were why I took myself out. There was one draft in the middle where I tried to put myself back in, and it was terrible because every time I spoke I could tell I was defending myself or trying to prove something, and it sounded horrible, and so I cut the character.
 

MT: How was it working with Chay Yew, who is also a playwright himself? Was there any collaboration in terms of writing, or was it a strictly director and writer relationship?
 

MMD: Oh it was strictly director/writer. He’s brilliant. I think he knows what I’m doing when I’m playwriting, from his own experience of writing. He’s dramaturgically brilliant, and so there was a way that it allowed me to sometimes get lost in the trees while he always had his eye on the forest. So he would keep his eye on what do audiences need to know to get them from A to B to C to D to E–so that they understand what’s happening. While I could be sort of be lost in the intricacies of each character. So he did help me shape things. He’s been very generous in that we were set up at The Public Theater for him to direct a reading. He met with me many more times than just the one day before the reading and he stayed with it for years afterwards.
 

He likes to joke around and say this is the longest piece he’s ever worked on and then he’ll roll his eyes. I know he loves me when he says that. I think the only reason he would have done it is because he believes in the piece. He doesn’t have to. So that’s meant a lot to have his support over the years. I really like working with him, I actually think there’s a way he understands when I, especially when I’m overlapping issues of either immigration or Asian ethnicity with queer issues that he intrinsically gets without me having to explain anything. That makes for a very quick frame of reference for each of us, and we can move into deeper issues. I really enjoy working with him a lot.
 

MT: And speaking of intersectionality—
 

MMD: Oh it’s such an intellectual word.
 

Mashuq Mushtaq Deen
 

MT: Hah. How are you doing in this climate? How are you handling or dealing with it? Do you step back from the news, or does it becomes such a catalyst?
 

MMD: A catalyst of?
 

MT: To be like, “Yeah, I feel that fire more than ever, let me be an even bigger activist and … ”
 

MMD: I feel like I come from an activist background, so I had taken a step back from doing that work just because it’s kind of burnout work. After the election, my partner and I and some neighbors started a civic action group and we meet once a month. I think it’s really important to get together face to face with people and share actual community and not just be online. There’s something that just feeds a helplessness online, and I think a desperation. When you’re actually in the room with people and doing it together, something’s different about it. So, I mean, post-election I think we are more engaged. I think I struggle with [whether] online engagement is true engagement? I feel the addiction of it. It is really frustrating also, and during the show I definitely take a step back from being online just for my own sanity.
 

To go to your first part of that question, which was how do you handle the cultural moment we’re in? I actually think it’s really difficult, particularly because I think with social media the conversation to me feels very—and I don’t know if this is also a factor of me getting older or what—but it feels very black and white, us or them, right or wrong. In these clearly defined ways that I find coming from the theater, or just coming from myself, I don’t find right and wrong so easily defined. I’m always very suspicious of people who do, because I just wonder if they’re also questioning their own motivations and wants. I think that it’s true that people “other” us all the time. Whether it’s because we’re minorities or because I’m trans or queer, whatever, they do do that, but I don’t think it makes it better if I then turn around and do it back.
 

If I “other” another person, I’ve just done the same thing they’ve done and I don’t know that that makes me any better. I think they do it out of fear. Probably if my community does it back, we’re also doing it out of fear. So we’re just sort of stuck in the cycle. For me I really crave a more complicated conversation where people could somehow really be there with what they’re feeling about something, and not try and win an argument, but just, could you just be like, this is what frightens me about it or, like I have only known two genders my whole life you’re really scaring the shit out of me when you say there are more, or you take it away. I can hold that. I can say, “Yeah, I can imagine that is really scary. That’s okay. Also, now let me share with you back what it is like to not fit into the gender you were assigned and how you know, that might have led me to kill myself at one point. Or might have led me to be really hurtful towards myself,” or all those things, and how I found my way through it. Now what? Now we’re all in it with our feelings, what happens? I just don’t think, we don’t have those conversations very much and I really yearn for them and I think I’m never going to get it. I’m just this idealist. I’m going to turn into that curmudgeonly old guy who’s like, “Why don’t people talk about their feelings? Why?”
 

MT: I think that’s partly because we’ve turned into a culture where you know, even watching a video, even a news clip, I feel like for a lot of people if it’s more than two minutes they’ll just shut it off. So if you can’t even stare at a screen for 120 seconds, but you’re trying to engage them in a conversation, and maybe an intellectual one at that—
 

MMD: I don’t want to engage them in an intellectual conversation. I really want to engage people in a heart conversation. I want people to get out of their heads and get in to their hearts, and so for the talkbacks after the show I’m really particular and I’m always revising them with the people who are facilitating because I don’t want it to be an intellectual conversation about politics, because there’s some retreating we do from our vulnerability, and we go to a safe little bunker where we start throwing out ideas. I really want people to be naked and vulnerable in a place together where they talk about loss and fear and love and those things. I just think something’s possible there that’s not always possible in our heads. I get it. I mean, not that those conversations aren’t important, it’s just not what I want.
 

MT: Have there been any conversations from those talk backs that have maybe affected your next performance or anything?
 

MMD: No, not like that, but I mean they are very moving to me. I feel like I’m always terrified before I go on stage and for much of the time when I am on stage. Then afterwards I feel like people will often open up to me and share with me what it’s like to be a parent. Once I had a conversation where one parent said, “You know, my kid’s growing up and they’re going to leave home soon and I’m just always so scared that I can’t protect them in this world. I see what the world is like and I know they’re going to go into it and I know I can’t, I shouldn’t stop them, and I’m really nervous that I’m not going to be able to protect them.”
 

Then across the aisle we had a young man who said, “I always wanted to come out to my dad, but I was too scared to, and then he died. Now I’ll never get to come out to my dad.” There was just something about those conversations that I think they’re talking to me, but really they’re talking to each other. If they can start to talk to each other and hear things that they’re not maybe hearing elsewhere, could they then take that back to their families and potentially have that conversation with the person they actually mean to have it with? You know, I think someone asked me about, oh god, “love” and “family” in this cultural moment. I was like, “What do I do with that?” I thought, you know I think family is where we practice love.
 

So we’re with people we didn’t choose often, and even when we do choose them, they still drive us crazy. Even though they drive us up the wall, we know so much about them that we still love them and they drive us up the wall, and we love them, like all of those things are true at the same time. So if that’s true, is it possible that I could look out into the world and see somebody I don’t know and think, “Well I don’t know the rest of them, but probably they have lovable traits and probably they drive people up the wall, and probably they’re flawed and human, and probably they do some really kind things that I’m not aware of, and probably all those things are true.” Then it just becomes a more complicated conversation because I can’t just see you as an idea, right? That’s my soapbox.
 

Mashuq Mushtaq Deen
 

MT:Yes, empathy. To switch gears a tiny bit, what are your thoughts on Asian representation in theater?
 

MMD: You mean all of it?
 

MT: All of it, any of it. I know it’s a huge umbrella question, but I think about aspects of it every day and am always curious to hear from others.
 

MMD: I think it is also a conversation that has a lot of complexity to it and I think in general I feel like we’re not having the complex conversation. I understand why, like in this greater white dominant culture that is not making a lot of space–and in fact is often making less and less space for Asian-Americans on stage–there is a very human and self-preservative way in which we get defensive. We’re trying to push for certain things and for more Asian actors on stage, more Asian writers to be produced, more Asian directors and like, that is really important. What we really need is Asian-Americans to be part of the institutions. That needs to happen. That said, I also think there is truth to the idea that it’s acting. It is theater, so how specific do we need to be, and in this globalized world, why is it okay to have a “South Asian” actor? South Asia’s huge.
 

Why didn’t I say Indian actor? India’s like a fifth of the world. Like that’s big enough. I didn’t even say South India, like what part is specific enough, authentic enough, true enough? If you’re Indian-American are you really Indian or are you Indian-American? Those are not the same thing. When I go to India, I’m American. They don’t see me as Indian. Here, I’m Indian, so what does that mean? Then I just think, how far outside of India counts? Like 50 miles, 100 miles–like at what point are drawing the line? I have somebody that’s Southeast Asian, but not Japanese; am I going for cultural knowledge of a character, or am I going for the visual effect I want my audiences to see? Am I going for the best actor who understands the heart of my character? All of those are considerations. I just think it’s complicated.
 

I have talked to some South Asian actors who have said, now that people are starting to get on board with trying to cast more Asian actors, they’re like, “Now they’re going to put in a character in the play, in the TV show, and his name is gonna be Ali and that is the only part now I can audition for. I can’t audition for all the other parts anymore because now I’m only allowed to audition for the one part.” It’s progress and also it’s a step back, and so how do we navigate that? I think it’s a really important thing to keep talking about. I think institutions need to do diversity trainings, have conversations. If their mission is to be more inclusive and more diverse they need to look at the fabric of their institutions and see if the fabric is representing that mission or not. It’s hard and it’s complicated and we need to hopefully wade into these conversations together, with some understanding that it’s hard and complicated.
 

It must be really frightening for artistic directors who have been fighting just to have theater with no money in a country that doesn’t subsidize the arts, to be in a different generation, to now, I’m sure, feel attacked on some level for not being liberal enough. They’ve been spending their whole life fighting to be a certain kind of liberal in the world that they knew, right? So how do we say, “Yeah and that’s great, and now let’s do more and I actually think you want to do more, so let me help you do more.” I think that’s possible. There’s always going to be assholes, but not everyone is.
 

MT: Recently a big institution had a round table about women in theater, and I think on a panel of five they had four white women and one black woman. It feels to me that whenever it is a larger institution that does try to say, “Okay, let’s talk about this,” and when I show up, I end up feeling like, “Oh, I think I’ve been to this talk five years ago at a smaller company,” but because they’re a smaller company they’re sort of stuck because they don’t have the finances and reach. It’s a vicious circle—
 

MMD: I think as we’re in this new era of more civic engagement, what does that look like in the theater? How do we become participating audience members who write to our theaters and say, “I really loved that show because I loved seeing more different, more diversity on your stage. It was so refreshing. I really didn’t like that show you know, and I felt like we see so much of that and it’s not representative of our culture anymore. I would really like to see you change what you do.” Do people do that? I don’t know. Do people call and say, “Hey, artistic director, I want to talk to you about this,” and maybe they won’t get a call back, but I mean what is the pressure that we can as artists, but also as audiences, put on a theater for the greater good?
 

But I think that’s also a double-edged sword because I actually think in America I’m a little disheartened that, because we have no subsidized art I feel like audiences and subscribers, the people who have money to be subscribers, lead their institutions. What I really wish, and which I see in other countries where they do have subsidized art, the theaters can really be the ground breakers leading the audiences and the audiences don’t know where the fuck they’re going but they’re happy to go. They’re happy to hate it and love it and argue with it, but they’re happy to go. I wish we could retrain our American audiences to do that.
 

MT: Every time I go to London, I’m like why are tickets so cheap? Why is the director 25 years old? I get jealous. There’s a track and you get out and you get hired by national theater.
 

MMD: Yeah. Then you know, we have a real love affair with youth in this country–
 

MT: We really do.
 

MMD: I know if you’re an older, not if you’re an older white man writer, but like there are older writers who have been working for a long time, and they’ll say, you know if you’re not the new, young thing nobody cares about you anymore. I feel like if you look at our TV shows everything is about being young and pretty and, so, how can we bring in young voices and older voices, which are not very represented stories, and minority stories, and minority older stories? What’s it like to have all of that together in one space?
 

MT: Yeah. I’ve been trying for ages to put together a series of round tables on inclusion. I, being a little selfish wanted to focus on Asian representation and within half an hour had a 15-page document. I don’t even know where to start. Maybe I should just get a bunch of people in the room and–
 

MMD: I hear the argument about writing our own stories and I think that is so important because nobody else really does the work to get it right. So we are providing nuance and complication and authenticity that most other people writing about us are not. That said, I don’t want to only have to write stories about South Asian trans people, my imagination and my political engagement in the arts is much bigger and wider than that. How do we also sort of keep that space open, and call people out when they don’t do the work? Be like, “You didn’t do your homework, we just wrote another stereotype, that’s not cool.”
 

MT: Without fearing for your own standing…
 

MMD: Yeah, you know, I wonder about that, but I find, and I have had writers tell me, “Oh don’t bring it up with so and so,” and I’ll just be like, you know, but if they, if I bring it up respectfully and I am concerned. I show that I care. If they really hate me for it and are like, “Why are you questioning me?” We’re never going to work together anyway, because our work is never going to be, you’re never going to be interested in my work. I find a lot of people actually will have the conversation with me, and maybe they haven’t changed what they’re going to produce that season, maybe it stays with them. Maybe they start to think about something in the long term. Maybe it’s like a seed that gets planted for later. So, I think it’s really important to be engaged citizens and colleagues to each other and say, “Hey, I generally love what your theater does and I’m really concerned about this show, or I’m really concerned about this season. Why did you do that?” I think if it was meant to be they’re going to respect you more for it, and if it wasn’t meant to be, it wasn’t meant to be.
 

Mashuq Mushtaq Deen
 

MT: So what would you say to a younger South Asian or an Asian artist trying to break into theater?
 

MMD: So many things. I would say work really, really hard. Pay attention to the politics of our industry, but not to the exclusion of your own work. Don’t rest on the argument that the industry is not fair—of course it’s not fair! So work harder, make things of great beauty and change the world with them. Make it because it needs to be made, not to be famous or well-thought of. Get coffee a lot, with actors, directors, literary managers, everyone. We don’t get paid enough in this industry, unless you’re very commercial. To “work with crazy;” we want to work with people who we enjoy spending time with. Get to know people—and not for their usefulness to you, but really get to know them: Why do they love the theater? What can you do to help them? Can you introduce them to writers or directors they would click with? Be generous. What goes around comes around.
 

MT: As long as you can afford to.
 

MMD: I guess if you can marry rich, it won’t hurt. Financially, this is a rough profession. But marry for love first, because putting yourself on the line is emotionally hard and sometimes eviscerating, and you will need that love to sooth your hurt. And you should always put yourself on the line in your work. Never play it safe. Safe is a waste of everyone’s time. When you put yourself on the line, you honor your collaborators, your audience, and yourself, and they will honor you back by traveling to magical places with you.
 

MT: I love that. I’d love to close with your thoughts on being an artist.
 

MMD: There is a poem by Rumi: “The way of love is not a subtle argument. The door there is devastation. Birds make great sky circles of their freedom. How do they learn it? They fall, and in falling, they’re given wings.”
 

To me, my job as an artist is to devastate with kindness. To crack the shell around your heart–and it might hurt a little bit—but that wall was keeping your heart in, and now your heart can ooze out, expand, breathe, and reform itself, and it will be bigger than it was before. And then we’ll do it again. If the walls around your heart are too thick, or you are someone who gives your head more power than your heart, then you might not like my work. And that’s okay. But for me, I am most interested in the heroic journeys of the heart. That is where Love is, where God is, where You are, and where I am. That is where I want to meet you.
 

MT: I love that. Thank you.
 
 

 

 

Mashuq Mushtaq Deen (The Betterment Society, Resident Playwright at New Dramatists), is making his New York debut in the New York premiere of Draw the Circle. The hilarious and moving story of his transition, Draw the Circle is told entirely from the point of view of Deen’s family and friends, as portrayed by Deen, bringing to life the often-ignored struggle that a family goes through when their child transitions from one gender to another.

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A Conversation with Marina Kondo

Marina Kondo

 

It’s Monday afternoon, around 1pm and I’ve completely lost my momentum. I’m twenty minutes behind and ten blocks away. The trains are predictably un-predictable and if my internal monologue wasn’t holding for the house, it would say “Cross the damn street already, your interview is waiting for you.” Murakami would call it a day where I haven’t wound my spring. But all is forgiven, because my interview is with Marina Kondo. Have you met her? She’s cool.
 

I first became aware of Ms. Kondo when a press release announced she would be going in to Jason Kim, Helen Park and Max Vernon’s rad, immersive show KPOP. I admit my motives for meeting her were selfish. Having not one but now two pieces that deal with Japan and Japanese culture, it’s always to my benefit to know artists closer to that world than I could ever be. Plus, knowing singer-actors with fluency in both Japanese and English doesn’t hurt either. I send her a quick email, we meet at Hamilton Bakery, and to make a short set-up long, I think you two would really dig each other.

 

 

Timothy Huang: Is it fair to say there was rarely a time in your life when music didn’t play a part?
 

Marina Kondo: Totally. Between my mom and dad there was always music involved. My dad is an amateur jazz pianist and my mom studied piano during college. She got her PhD in early childhood music education. I was in her dissertation.
 

TH: Was she constantly taking notes while you spent time together?
 

MK: She would take videos actually. A lot of videos. Her dissertation was entitled Hybrid Identity Through Eastern and Western Eyes Teaching Music and Space In Group Studio Piano.
 

TH: We had spoken earlier about the earthquake that struck Japan in 2011, and you had said that much of your artistic life was born from that tragedy. Can you tell me about that?
 

MK: I was born in the Netherlands, grew up in America mostly, but I’m 100% Japanese. It felt strange to me that I didn’t know how to reach out after the disaster. During that year I had the opportunity to go to Pendleton, Oregon, to perform on behalf of a sister city of theirs called Minamisoma, which is in Hiroshima. The mayor of Minamisoma asked me to sing on their behalf to pay respects and thank-yous to Pendleton for their support. That was one of the hooking points for me. It made me realize that no matter what language you speak or where you’re from, music is the one form of communication that transcends all.
 

Marina Kondo
 

TH: Tell me a little bit about Brazil, please.
 

MK: Brazil. So outside of Japan, Brazil has the largest community of Japanese people. So it’s around 100 years now in Brazil, that there’s- it’s called Nikkejin in Japanese, [which means] “Japanese diaspora” And there’s about six, seven generations now. Over there Japanese culture is a huge thing. They have this festival every year, called Festival do Japão, or, “Festival of Japan,” and they bring Tyco groups and different cultural dancing groups and stuff like that. The Nikkejin come together and recreate culture in this festival. And I get invited to sing. This past summer was my third time being there.
 

TH: So it’s a big thing.
 

MK: It’s a three day event that has about twenty five thousand people attend. The city supplies the whole festival with free public transportation. Most of the people who come are Japanese, and there are also a lot of Brazilians who love Japanese culture. And there’s fifty ken (県) in Japan.… it’s not provinces… prefectures. They have a booth for every prefecture. My mom is from Ehime, so every time I go there, I get sponsored by the Ehime booth. They serve udon because they are famous for their udon. Every ken is known for a special dish.
 

Marina Kondo
 

TH: Can you tell me a little bit about KPOP?
 

MK: I graduated college, had my showcase, signed with an agent. And then I went on this. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to do it because I had other obligations, so I let them know. A month later they said “Hey we cast this role but we need an understudy and a replacement.” At that time I was still in Michigan so they had me self-tape. My flight to officially move to New York was August 31st, I had my callback on September 1st.
 

TH: That’s crazy.
 

MK: Yeah, they didn’t freeze the script until a day before my first rehearsal. So [prior to that] I was just kind of learning, but also it’s a different language. Korean is not something that I speak and is not my culture. I had multiple panic attacks but my roommates were amazing and they got me in touch with a former Korean pop star/dancer, and she went through every one of my songs and lines with me at a bar- it was really loud- we were screaming at each other- laughing at how ‘Japanese’ I sounded, and getting specific about the nuances of the Korean language, sharing and having a good time but I recorded the entire conversation and that’s how I did my own Korean research. And by the first day of rehearsal I had everything memorized.
 

TH: Had you previously been called upon in your career to play an Asian person that was not Japanese?
 

MK: This was probably the third or fourth “Asian” thing I went in for. I’m okay with that, I’m obviously Asian, but I’m not Korean. It’s such an interesting, fine line.
 

Marina Kondo
 

TH: In our industry, we’re pretty comfortable grouping all Asians under one umbrella. The benefits to this are obvious, but sometimes it takes an invisible toll. Can you speak about that?
 

MK: I had such an identity crisis about being Japanese when I was younger. As someone who [now] feels a lot of pride being Japanese, I want to pay as much respect as I can because that’s important and it’s worth exploring. Especially when you are representing a specific culture. And KPOP is specifically about Korean pop music. For example, when you’re playing a doctor you don’t want to just “use the tools.” You do research. Maybe this tool specifically is used to cut someone’s stomach. You should know those things. I feel like that’s just as important for culture too and understanding how it is different from your own.
 

TH: Bucket list?
 

MK: Definitely skydiving. That scares me so much. I have a friend who did it once and said it was the most thrilling experience ever.
 

TH: Is there a role of a lifetime that you would like to play but haven’t?
 

MK: I’d love to play Tracy Turnblatt. Hairspray is one of my favorite musicals. But that will probably never happen.
 

TH: Never say never. What else?
 

Marina Kondo
 

MK: I paint restaurants. In Ann Arbor, I painted a restaurant called Fred’s. I’d love to do that as a side career.
 

TH: Like, murals on the restaurant wall?
 

MK: There’s a bench in front of it. People tag me when they take photos of themselves in front of it.
 

TH: What are your thoughts on frozen corn?
 

MK: I love the Trader Joe’s brand. If I’m bored I will walk past the fridge and reach down and eat it, then put it back in. It’s like that ice cream that’s haunting you from the fridge. But corn.
 

TH: You were born in the Netherlands, but raised in America. Is there anything about Japanese culture that you have discovered is different from American culture?
 

MK: I think as a performer I bring a lot of simplicity. And in Japan that is a very huge thing. Simplicity is a sign of beauty. My senior thesis was about this: if there’s a cup and there’s a crack on it, in Japan the crack is the beauty. That missing part, that emptiness represents something. And I feel like that’s a great metaphor for Japanese art and culture. In America we try as much as possible to fill every single white space with some color or design. In Japan it’s the emptiness that is mesmerizing. The missing part. The silence.
 
 

 

 

Marina Kondo is a bicultural (USA/Japan) singer, actor, dancer, and lyric translator. She is a Netherland-born, Japanese singer who is currently based in New York City. She grew up mostly in Michigan (USA) and began performing professionally at the age of 9 singing in jazz bars in Tokyo, Japan and continued to participate in many concerts, musicals, T.V programs, and recordings since. As a music ambassador of Minami Soma, Fukushima, Japan, she performs at many charity concerts and festivals in the US, Japan, and Brazil. She performed in many events for the local communities of the Metropolitan Detroit area, such as Detroit Children’s Hospital, Detroit Libraries and schools, and other charity events sponsored by GM, Nissan, Japan Business Society- Detroit, WLDTV etc.

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A Conversation with Jacob Padrón

Jacob Padrón

 

The Sol Project was launched as an ambitious initiative to raise and empower Latina/o/x voices in the arts in order to nurture and foster true diversity. We sat down with Jacob Padrón, the young, smart, and passionate founder and current Artistic Director of The Sol Project to talk about this initiative, and his hopes for the future of Latina/o/x voices in the American theatrical landscape.

 

 

Margarita Javier: I’m very excited about The Sol Project. What can you tell us about it?
 

Jacob Padrón: I grew up in Gilroy, a small town in California which is just south of San Francisco. There’s not a lot going on in a small little town, but it’s very close to a seminal theater company, El Teatro Campesino, by Luis Valdez. I grew up seeing their shows—I was in the shows when I was little— so, early on, I understood that theater could be a catalyst for social justice and social change, because that’s really what the Teatro stands for. Fast forward to 2013, I went to a convene at Emerson College in Boston, and we brought together a group of about 80 Latino theater makers to talk about the state of the American Theater relative to Latino theater, and recognizing that we weren’t necessarily having the kind of opportunities that we need or deserve. So I thought to myself Could I create an initiative that would support Latino playwrights, Latinx playwrights in New York City? At the time, I was living in Chicago and I was going to be moving to New York to work at The Public Theater as a producer, so when I landed here in New York, I started to put the pieces together; I started to have conversations with different artistic directors, inviting them to basically partner with me and a collective of artists that I had formed to promote Latinx voices. When we launched the initiative, we had six Off-Broadway theaters committed as partners; now we have nine. We’ve done three productions so far. And, really, the initiative in a nutshell is we pair a Latinx playwright with an Off-Broadway company. That company commits to producing that play. And the hope is that after all twelve writers have been produced we will have created a body of work for the new American theater. That was the hope.
 

MJ: So do you only commission new works by Latino playwrights?
 

JP: We ask each artistic director for three commitments: The first is to produce a play by a Latinx writer; it can be a brand new play, or it could be a play that’s been produced before. The second is that the theater commissions a Latinx playwright for a future production, to commission a brand new play. And the third is that you meet with as many artists of color that you maybe don’t know. Because what we’re also trying to do is build that pipeline of creative talent that a theater can draw from in putting those creative teams together. Because when you go to see theater, how often do you open a Playbill and see primarily white artists? So what we’re trying to do is create a more inclusive theater ecology.
 

MJ: Right, so not just the playwright but behind the scenes as well.
 

JP: Exactly; the director, the design team, the stage management team, etc. What The Sol Project is really trying to do is catalyze systemic change within each of the organizations that we’re working with. That’s really the hope. It’s an invitation to create a more inclusive theater organization.
 

Jacob Padrón
 

MJ: It’s starting in New York City, but is there hope for it to be a more nationwide initiative?
 

JP: Exactly, that’s exactly right. The hope is that the work starts here, and then it radiates out, which is very connected to the name of the initiative, Sol Project, that it radiates out like the sun. After the work happens in New York, the hope is to identify regional theaters who commit to the continued life of each play. Ideally each writer will get the New York production, and then a second, third, or fourth production in different parts of the country. The idea being that you have all these theaters around the country who are in conversation with each other and all these different stages that are lifting up Latino voices across the United States.
 

MJ: Right, and then if the play becomes part of the canon, then it’s done regionally.
 

JP: Yes, exactly.
 

MJ: What is the process for selection of the playwrights?
 

JP: We don’t necessarily have an open selection, although writers can submit scripts directly to me or to members of the collective. I work with six other individuals—they are called the artistic collective—and together, we are The Sol Project company. Mainly. the way it works is once we have the partner committed, The Sol Project and the parent company work together. We read scripts together, sometimes a partner will have ideas for writers they maybe want to support, and we have ideas of writers that we think would be a good fit for that company. We sort of enter a curatorial process together and that’s how we land on the writer that we’re going to do.
 

Jacob Padrón
 

MJ: Are you only looking for English language plays, is there an initiative to maybe produce Spanish language plays eventually?
 

JP: That’s a great question; it’s something that we’re thinking about a lot. I think for now, the focus has primarily been on English-based plays. That being said, so many of the plays that we’re looking at are very bilingual. The play that we’re going to do next has a ton of Spanish. I would actually say it’s 50/50.
 

MJ: With that in mind, when we talk about improving representation, I feel like sometimes the focus has been on having more people of color involved in the productions, but we don’t always talk about the makeup of the audience. I think if we want to improve the theatrical landscape—which right now I agree with you is very white—you have to create new theater lovers. And I think one of the reasons it’s perceived that people of color don’t go to the theater as much is because we want to go see theater that relates to us. I feel like a lot of theater companies focus on diversity, they do so thinking of white audiences instead of focusing how to attract audiences of color. Is that something that you have considered?
 

JP: Yes, absolutely, it’s something that we definitely think about in each of our partnerships. I think you’re absolutely right that in order for us to have a more inclusive ecosystem, we have to think about all the different facets, not just the creative team, but also the people who are coming to see the shows and supporting the work. The way that The Sol Project thinks about it, or the way I think about it as the Artistic Director, is that we have to extend the invitation, and the invitation has to continue. What I mean by that is it’s not enough for a theater to program a Latino play once and invite that community into your home and then not invite them in. Once you invite them into your home, you have to make a sustained commitment; you have to continue to program stories that reflect and honor and celebrate that community. So the hope is that with each partnership, that after The Sol Project goes away, the theater will continue to pick up the mantel and make Latino theater part of their core practice. One of the things I say to each Artistic Director is that if the only time you produce a play by a Latinx playwright it’s with The Sol Project, we will have failed in our collaboration. The hope is that we’re generating a spark within your company, and when we go away, you’re going to continue to support these artists, and you’re going to continue to cultivate that community of Latino theatergoers into your home, into your artistic home.
 

MJ: Yes, I agree, and Latinos do go to the theater. I grew up in Puerto Rico, and there was theater culture, and there’s a lot of great theater happening in Latin America.
 

JP: Yes. I think it’s a misconception that it’s not part of our cultural practice, but it definitely is. I think maybe where we fail the Latino community is that the invitation doesn’t continue. That we don’t continue to program to celebrate, lift up and tell the stories of our community.
 

MJ: I think also it sometimes feels alienating because it feels like you’re entering into these very white spaces, and it’s not very welcoming of the different reactions different audiences have. There’s an idea of what theater etiquette should be that’s not entirely open to the realities of other communities.
 

JP: Yes, exactly. When George C. Wolfe was running The Public Theater, he made a really considered effort to make sure the front of house staff, you know, the ushers who were letting audiences in, reflected the city of New York. When we think about how equity and social justice has to touch all parts of an organization. I think what you’re speaking to is exactly right: as a person of color coming into the organization, or coming to see the show, how are they welcomed? Who are the people they see in the box office? Who’s the person handing them their program? We have to be able to unpack all of it if we’re to really address systemic change.
 

MJ: You mentioned working for The Public Theater, I feel like the Public has done a great job with that recently. Were you involved with Public Works?
 

JP: I was involved with the producer, I wasn’t involved in the curation of that program. But, absolutely, it’s about reaching diverse communities and giving them an opportunity to share their artistry and to share their gifts. The animating idea behind that is that culture belongs to everybody and that we are all artists in our own right, I think it’s something very special and very needed in the city of New York.
 

MJ: You have a very impressive resume. How do you find time to do all of this? You teach at Yale, correct?
 

JP: [laughs] I teach at Yale; my class just finished up. I taught a new class, Artistic Producing, which is fantastic. My full time job is with Time Warner, where I work in cultural investments, and then The Sol Project as the Artistic Director. But you know, I think when, like I say, when your corazón is really full, and you get to do something where you feel like you’re making a difference in the world, you don’t feel fatigued. The fact that I’m able to do these things that are hopefully affecting change makes me feel very nourished by that work. The appointment to the Yale faculty happened just this year, and it was definitely hard to maneuver the trip up to New Haven. But just being with those students was completely energizing, and to be a part of their journey in graduate school—which as you know is very hard—it can be a really defining moment in your life. So to be able to be on that journey with my ten students was very rich and very fulfilling. It really fed me; it didn’t actually tire me out.
 

Jacob Padrón
 

MJ: We’ve been talking about Latino playwrights and Latino identity, and we do talk about it in a general sense, even though we all have such distinct cultural identities. I’m from Puerto Rico, and I always identify as Puerto Rican, and Puerto Rican culture is very different from Mexican culture, etc. I find that sometimes it’s hard to explain to non-Latinos the differences and idiosyncrasies in our cultures. To speak of my own experience, if, say I’m seeing a Puerto Rican character, and there’s no attention paid to the accent, or specificity of my culture, it’s jarring to me as an audience member. Because we’re somewhat lumped together as Latinos, all these idiosyncrasies are often lost. I’m wondering what your take is, or what The Sol Project does in terms of authenticity of specific cultures.
 

JP: That’s a great question. I feel like it’s something we still struggle with. I don’t know that we have an answer just yet because I think—to use your language—being lumped together means that sometimes, unfortunately, we don’t have the kinds of opportunities that other communities have. So I think sometimes what happens is there’s a bifurcation between our different communities. Like I’m Mexican, you’re Puerto Rican, and yes, while there are things that are specific to our cultural heritage, that doesn’t mean that we can’t support each other, or come together and celebrate each other.
 

MJ: Absolutely.
 

JP: And I think the more we can lock arms and say yes, we are specific but we are also the same, as we talk about the American theater, I think there might be strength in that. It’s something that we really struggle with. So for example, Oedipus El Rey is a play about Chicanos, Mexican Americans—the writer Luis Alfaro is Mexican—but in the casting of that show we had Puerto Ricans, Colombians, Dominicans, and I felt very honored and proud that those actors were part of the show and were able to inhabit and tell that story of a Latino, or a Mexican community. It’s nuanced, it’s complicated.
 

MJ: Yes, but to use a specific example: I have a friend who’s part of Repertorio Español, and he has told me that when he’s playing a Dominican character, even though he’s not Dominican, he knows he has to work on his Dominican accent, because the mostly Dominican audience is going to know. But he says it’s something he takes upon himself; it’s not necessarily a concern of the production. And I agree that the audiences notice things like that, so I’m just wondering if attention is being paid in your productions to these things behind the scenes. I’m not saying that if the characters are Chicano, they have to be played by Chicanos, but I’m just wondering about the attention given to authentic representation of specific cultures.
 

JP: Absolutely. To be totally frank, there are probably some who would disagree with me. There might be those inside our community and outside our community who would say, No, those roles should be played my Mexicanos, by Chicanos, that’s actually really important! That’s why I say we don’t necessarily have an answer for it, but I think at this point what we can do is be conscientious and try to be thoughtful about these casting decisions and how we’re representing Latino communities onstage.
 

MJ: And how do you feel about non-Latinos playing Latino roles?
 

JP: I do not support it. I just think that because as I said earlier, for Latinos opportunities are far and few between, so it’s important that we claim space and have opportunities to share our gifts and our artistry. So I don’t support that.
 

MJ: I think the thing that gets lost in these arguments is that, yeah, maybe in an ideal world any actor should be able to play any role, but we don’t live in an ideal world.
 

JP: No, we live in a racialized world, where race matters!
 

MJ: Right, and there’s lack of roles available to Latinos, so when there’s a Latino role and you give it to a non-Latino actor, you’re taking away from us.
 

JP: That’s exactly right.
 

MJ: You mentioned the three shows you’ve already done: Alligator by Hilary Bettis with New Georges, Seven Spots on the Sun by Martín Zimmerman with Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, and Oedipus El Rey by Luis Alfaro with The Public Theater. We actually spoke with Hilary Bettis when Alligator was starting, and she talked about The Sol Project. Could you tell us about these shows? How was the response? How has the experience been so far?
 

JP: It was completely gratifying to be able to give these three Latinx playwrights productions in NYC. It feels like the very active expression of what The Sol Project is trying to do, give visibility and lift up these voices. It would be interesting to hear what Martín says or what Luis and Hilary say, but I thought it was very moving to see all those Latinos sharing a stage and telling the story of these writers. And to bring in a new audience into these companies. For me, my hope is that the work continues to get richer and we continue to build that body of work for the American Theater. I also think that the thing that was really wonderful was that we were able to hopefully build lifelong relationships with these companies, the idea being that we are now in a creative relationship, and that relationship will extend beyond the one production that we’re doing together. So with New Georges, Rattlestick and now The Public Theater.
 

MJ: We’re in very precarious times. It feels like every strive we make we’re pushed back 10 steps in this country. We have a President who ran on a very anti-immigrant and anti-Latino platform. The Supreme Court just upheld the travel ban, which is currently for Muslims but could easily be extended to Latinos, and we continue to be very underrepresented in the arts; even in what some are calling a post-Hamilton landscape, it’s still a very white-supremacist landscape in New York City.
 

JP: Yes, very much so.
 

Jacob Padrón
 

MJ: Projects like yours are very encouraging, but what more can be done? For other people in the arts, what can they do, other than start their own initiative?
 

JP: I think the first thing is to educate yourself as much as you can. We’re all gatekeepers; I like to describe it as that. We can all affect change in our own circles, in our own communities. I think sometimes people think that in order to be a gatekeeper you have to be a CEO or an Artistic Director or a Managing Director. But in fact, in whatever space you occupy, you can affect change. And the way I think you do that is by asking really difficult questions. And when you see injustice, to speak out about it. As an example, the way I’m trying to do that is if I see a season that doesn’t actually reflect the kaleidoscope of our city, I try to just reach out to that Artistic Director. I try to activate conversation. In terms of educating myself, I try to read as much as I can about how to be a real ally, how to dismantle systems of oppression, and how to dismantle white supremacy. One of the things that I did recently was I organized an “Undoing Racism” training with my classmates from Yale, where we brought together 40 leaders from around NYC—cultural leaders, artistic directors, agents, actors, designers—and we came together and shared space to understand racism and the causes of racism; the idea being that now you have tools and language and knowledge to combat and dismantle white supremacy. I always encourage people that if you can—I know this sounds so specific but it’s actually very powerful—take an “Undoing Racism” training. That’s also something that you can do. Because I know that the idea that you have to start an initiative to affect change that’s not the case, it can be very overwhelming. What are the levers that you can push and pull to address systemic change?
 

MJ: Yes, and when I spoke to actor Kimberly Chatterjee for Stage & Candor she said something that resonated with me: “Don’t go to see things that you think are hurting the art that you want to see in the world. And go see things that support it.”
 

JP: That’s a huge one, right? Go see the work. That’s a huge thing, because if we’re programming this work that’s populated by people of color and you’re not going and seeing it, that’s tough. Or if we as a community say we need more representation, we need to widen that circle; we don’t make a very good case for ourselves if we’re not supporting the work, supporting those artists who are making this thing possible.
 

MJ: Can you tell us anything about your next project?
 

JP: Not yet, but it’s going to be by a female writer. It’s going to be a world premiere; it’s a play that The Sol Project has been working on since the beginning. She was actually the first writer that I reached out to when I started the initiative and said, “I really believe in your artistry, I believe in your voice. Do you have a play that you would want to work on with us?” And this is the play that we’re going to work on together. We were in graduate school together. She studied as an actor in the theater management program. I ended up producing her first play at Yale Cabaret, which is the student theater at Yale. It feels really wonderful that things are coming full circle and I’ll be working on her world premiere play.
 

MJ: What would be your advice to young up and coming Latinos who want to work in theater in some capacity?
 

JP: I’m going to steal a page from my dear mentor and friend Bill Rauch who taught me so much about how to be a thoughtful producer, and how to be an artistic leader. Bill Rauch is the Artistic Director at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He gave me my first job when I graduated from Yale in 2008. He was asked this question on a podcast and he said, “There’s no one path. To have a life in the theater, your path can be uniquely your own.” So for those who decide to go to grad school, that’s one path. If you decide that’s not for you and you want to get to work, that’s another path. But to figure out what it is that you’re passionate about and follow a path that makes sense for you. I think that’s the way I’ve done it and that’s the advice that I’d want to give to a young person looking to have a life in the theater.
 
 

 

 

Jacob G. Padrón is the Founder and Artistic Director of The Sol Project. He was most recently on the artistic staff of the Public Theater as the Senior Line Producer where he worked on new plays, new musicals, Shakespeare in the Park and Public Works. At The Public he shepherded the work of Tarell Alvin McCraney (“Head of Passes”), Universes (“Party People”), Stew & Heidi Rodewald (“The Total Bent”), Tracey Scott Wilson (“Buzzer”), Lemon Andersen (“Toast”), Richard Nelson (“The Gabriels”), Suzan-Lori Parks (“Father Comes Home From the Wars,” Parts 1, 2 and 3) and Shaina Taub & Kwame Kwei-Armah (“Twelfth Night”), among others.

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A Conversation with Kimberly Chatterjee, Kate Hamill, Amelia Pedlow, and Nance Williamson

Kimberly Chatterjee, Kate Hamill, Amelia Pedlow, and Nance Williamson

 

Something joyous is happening at the Cherry Lane Theatre. That’s the home of Kate Hamill’s uproariously funny, clever, and at times deeply moving adaptation of Jane Austen’s most famous and celebrated novel, Pride and Prejudice. The limited engagement, directed by Amanda Dehnert and led by an energetic cast with Hamill herself playing the iconic Lizzie Bennett, is being presented by Primary Stages in co-production with The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival through January 6. We caught up with Kate and the other women in the cast: Kimberly Chatterjee, Amelia Pedlow, and Nance Williamson—whose palpable energy, playfulness, and affection towards each other suggested we were spending an afternoon with the Bennetts themselves—to discuss the role of women in the arts and the ways this 200-year-old text still manages to enlighten and surprise us.

 

 

Margarita Javier: Tell us about the character or characters you play.
 

Kate Hamill: I play Lizzie Bennett, and I wrote the script as well. Lizzie is a bit of a cynic. At least for herself, she’s extremely anti-marriage minded. And she has to grapple with what happens when you meet someone who kind of turns around your beliefs about yourself. Nowadays she would be a feminist, but she was born before those terms. She’s a proto-feminist.
 

Amelia Pedlow: I play Jane Bennett, who’s the eldest Bennet sister. She’s very sweet, she means very well, she’s a big ‘ol romantic, but she’s also a big believer in following the rules and doing the right thing. In that time, part of that meant not being too forward with guys. Not that we understand that at all! [laughs] That’s her tragic flaw. I also play Anne de Bourgh, who’s the daughter of a very powerful, very wealthy lady of the time, and she is going to inherit her mother’s estate and marry the love of her life, Darcy. That’s what happens at the end of the play, spoiler! [laughs] She’s a perfect angel.
 

Kimberly Chatterjee: I play Lydia Bennett, who is the best of all the Bennett sisters. [laughs] She’s the youngest sister, and she loves her mother. She thinks her mother is the absolute perfect prototype of a woman. She loves her sisters. She thinks she’s smarter and better than them, but she idolizes them, which of course makes no sense. What I think is so interesting about her and the amazing way that Kate wrote her is that you think she isn’t paying attention or is just bopping through life, but she’s actually taking away all these nuggets of information of things that she’s learned about how to be in the world. She gets it all wrong, but she’s constantly observing and taking in the world around her. And then when she finally takes charge, it doesn’t go great. But she has some good reasons for it, which is amazing. And I also play Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who is Darcy’s aunt, the wealthiest woman in England; powerful, has no time for nonsense, but also loves to belittle and crush people for fun [laughs] just because she can. And her sweet, beautiful, perfect daughter Anne is going to marry Darcy. There’s nothing wrong with Anne. [laughs]
 

Amelia: Nothing is wrong!
 

Kimberly: Nothing is wrong! They’re been betrothed since probably before they were born, and it’s going to go great. She has not a care in the world when we meet her! [laughs]
 

Nance Williamson: I play Mrs. Bennett, who is the mother of all of these beautiful girls. My agenda is to get them married well. Because if we don’t, there are no sons in the family, there are just daughters, which means that our home will go to the next male heir, which is Mr. Collins. And if Mr. Bennett—my husband—dies, we’re out on the street. So I have made it my life’s work to prepare and prod and push and irritate my daughters into being marriage-minded. I’m the push behind them all. And I also play the servant, whom we affectionately call Lurch. [laughter]
 

Amelia: Uncredited.
 

Nance: A bubbling male, old, bitter…
 

Kate: …secret lover of Lady Catherine. [laughs]
 

Nance: Not true!
 

Kimberly: Not true at all!
 

Amelia: It’s on the record, guys. It’s going in the public record. [laughs]
 

Kimberly Chatterjee, Kate Hamill, Amelia Pedlow, Nance Williamson
 

Margarita: You just finished a very successful run at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival and you’re coming into this Primary Stages production with high expectations. They announced an extension even before the first preview happened. What has this experience been like so far, and what are your expectations now coming to play in front of New York audiences?
 

Kate: I think we’re just trying to let the play and the production teach us what it is, especially in a new space. The space is very different. During the first show, we were like Oh, we don’t have to scream! Hudson Valley is a 500-seat outdoor theater, at which Nance has done 18 seasons. So automatically that’s a big difference. Otherwise, I think this is what the preview process is for. We’re feeling it out. I think it even changes the jokes.
 

Nance: It does. And, you know, we went to people’s homes and did scenes for fundraisers, so besides performing in the tent, we were in different homes, yards—in different kinds of places. There’s a sort of playful improvisational chaos to doing it. It can be, when you’re not tired, a really fun process to see how we shift this here, how do we do this or that. And it’s a wonderful cast.
 

Kimberly: I was going to say we all, even when we’re at our most tired and sick and grumpy, we still love each other, which seems kind of impossible, but makes even the most stressful parts of this enjoyable. We have each other; we trust each other to be able to navigate the jokes and the timing. If something doesn’t go right, it’s never because someone is incompetent. I never walk away like Well. Everyone’s terrible! [laughs]
 

Kate: I also credit so much our director, Amanda Denhert, who creates a really fun, happy, safe room in which you feel really free to make stupid decisions. [laughs] And she sets that tone so much.
 

Margarita: Given how well known and beloved Pride and Prejudice is, and how often it’s been adapted, is there any pressure in trying to contribute something new and unique at the same time that you want to appease fans of the original?
 

Amelia: My sister is the one who gave me this book when I was however old and said, “Here is your bible.” And she’s very literary in general, but she knew I was going to love this and The Princess Bride—she introduced me to both. When she was coming to see the show, she was the person I was most excited to see it because I knew that anyone who loves this book will have a whole other level of love for this production, that people who don’t know the book at all—my boyfriend, for one – had an amazing time. Kate so beautifully takes characters and moments and recognizable scenes from the book and hones in on exactly what has made them so easy to fall in love with throughout the hundreds of years people have loved this book. Bingley being a dog might be one of the biggest ones. [laughs] My sister lost her mind.
 

Kate: He’s not literally a dog.
 

Kimberly: He’s dog like.
 

Amelia: Inspired by a Labrador. And that, in essence, is that character! It’s such a beautiful, slightly theatrical, irreverent thing, but ultimately a real distillation of the character in the Jane Austen novel. That type of work is throughout the piece and I know my sister was one of those people—and we had a lot of them over the summer—who began cackling from the moment something was introduced without having to get to know it over time. It really speaks to people on both of those levels, and I’m really excited for all of those people to see it.
 

Kate: The kind of theater I dislike the most, I think, is when I go in expecting something and it just meets those expectations, and I leave and nothing in me was challenged. I like stuff that’s more surprising. I think this is like that. We surprise ourselves! Sometimes we’re like What’s happening? But hopefully it’s a way to see a story that’s 200 years old and that people, including so many of us, love so much in a new, surprising way while still honoring it.
 

Margarita: What do you think Jane Austen would make of the current political climate in the UK and US?
 

Kate: There was an article about a year ago about—derp—“Alt right says Jane Austen would have liked them.” No! You know what? When you’re a racist, sexist hammer, everything looks like a racist, sexist nail. Her writing is so feminist, so subversive, and I think she would tear apart Donald Trump and all his UK counterparts and flip them the bird in every single way. Bite me.
 

Kimberly Chatterjee, Kate Hamill, Amelia Pedlow, Nance Williamson
 

Margarita: There have been a lot of sexual harassment accusations coming forward against powerful men, in the arts and politics, and people, especially women, are feeling open to share their stories in ways we haven’t felt comfortable talking about it before. I think all of this brings relevancy to texts like this one, especially the way Austen talks about marriage. So I was wondering, what do you think is your character’s contribution to this discussion? What is her #metoo story?
 

Kimberly: Poor Lydia doesn’t know anything.
 

Kate: I got a letter from one of the other productions from someone who was quite nice but was saying, “It was so upsetting to me when Mr. Collins pursues Lizzie because it seemed like that was upsettingly sexual, upsettingly a sexual-harassment thing.” And I’m like “It is. She says no, and he won’t listen to her.” My experience being in it is the more terrified I am, the funnier the audience thinks it is. I think it’s a laugh of recognition. So for Lizzie, she sees so clearly how the power dynamics in a marriage situation are set up that she doesn’t even want to play that game. We were saying the other day that the subtext of this play is love can exist in patriarchal structures, but patriarchal structures make it harder. Lizzie eventually falls in love with a man and she’s like Gah! How do you reconcile that with feminism? So that’s Lizzie.
 

Nance: Mrs. Bennet, I mean, is in some ways so who she is, so in spite of being married, she views it is a necessary—I wouldn’t call it “evil”—but she’s very much in charge of that family, or so she thinks. Her husband has kind of distanced himself from the family, he loves Lizzie especially, and the rest of them are kind of silly, cackling creatures. She’s very much driven, she’s very much in charge, but it’s chaotic, and her agenda—I wouldn’t call it a “feminist” one at all—is a realistic one given the time. It’s not like Oh, you’re going to go to college and get a degree and take care of yourself. There’s a desperate need to get the girls married because they need to. So it’s a kind of survival mode, but it’s not necessarily a model marriage that the daughters would look at and go “I’m going to have a marriage just like my parents” because it’s a little dysfunctional.
 

Kate: Traumatizing!
 

Nance: And traumatizing. It is what it is, and it’s kind of loveable and sad, chaotic and crazy.
 

Amelia: There are so many things to say, because this play deals with all of these themes on a hundred different levels. One thing I will say that’s maybe inspiring, since the boys aren’t here: The men in power in this play, the men who have power, men who have wealth and money, who are meeting these girls behave in quite a respectful manner in many ways. They recognize their own power and they have genuine feelings, and so they err on the side of caution and hesitation and move very slowly. There’s a lesson there to be taken away. This was written by a woman, and these are the good guys, and that’s how the good guys should behave, especially when they have power and money, and know it. If they wanted to just take one of these girls, they really could. But they know it’s not what the women want, and I think that’s evidence of the author and the playwright. It’s really easy to fall in love with them when they behave that way. I’ll say that.
 

Kimberly: Lydia… We don’t get to see much of her post-marriage relationship. One can imagine that it is a very unhappy one. Because Wickham has absolutely no interest in any permanent relationship with anyone, even if there was a world—not to speak for Mark’s character, but from my perspective—if there was a world where he couldn’t love someone, permanence of any kind is not on his mind.
 

Kate: Yeah, he’s a narcissist!
 

Kimberly: And she’s young and naïve and incessant and outspoken and it’s going to be miserable. It’s going to be absolutely miserable. And she’ll have a level of protection because Darcy’s a good guy. She will never be on the street. But in that time, you can beat your wife, you can do whatever you want. I imagine she has a long, dark road ahead. But she will visit her family and come back to the women in her life as much as she can. Which is great to have that in contrast with Lady Catherine, who, when we meet her in the play, she’s in charge of everything; it’s her money, it’s her power, it’s her home, it’s her daughter. She gets to plan whatever she wants to do. Her values aren’t necessarily the most understandable. She doesn’t necessarily care what other people think, which is why things don’t work out. But it’s very freeing and fun to be like I don’t have to consider anyone else! You don’t get to see any other woman in the play do that. Lydia may act that way, but that’s not the actual reality. Catherine’s reality is “I can do whatever I want” until it comes down to the men.
 

Kimberly Chatterjee, Kate Hamill, Amelia Pedlow, Nance Williamson
 

Kate: I think it’s so interesting when people are like “Well, this is a comedy.” And a lot of it is very funny and very absurd, but I think it’s so funny when people want to censor out the darkness and the desperation. Do you think women’s lives don’t still have those things? Do you think they didn’t have them then? I think the love stories that work out in this play are moving because they get past that imperfection, or they embrace that imperfection, whereas it’s so funny when people are like “Well, I was just expecting a lot of polite conversation!” [laughs] “It’s not very theatrical!”
 

Amelia: And how could you even say that if you’ve ever read or seen anything by Jane Austen ever? Every single work, even the ones that don’t jump off the page in the most exciting way, it’s all about the struggle and the incredible things they have to overcome.
 

Kate: And how does that reflect people’s relationships? Even the happiest relationships have dark times and you mess up, and you fight, and, you know.
 

Nance: You do. I’ve been married for a long time, in a happy marriage, but you have to have the bottom notes, the bottom notes give it purpose. If it was just all that, why do it? You can’t live that way.
 

Margarita: I want to talk about the fact that some actors play multiple roles. I think it’s really cool that a lot of the female roles are played by men. It was the same in Sense and Sensibility and Vanity Fair. I’m curious, is this something that happens in the writing process, or something that comes about during rehearsals or casting? Is there some sort of thematic link by having the same actors play these multiple roles?
 

Kate: I like ensemble pieces. I like everyone in the ensemble to have basically equal roles. I think that that’s more fun for actors, and, if possible, in very contrasting roles. In this play, I wrote a lot of roles to be gender neutral, so Mrs. Bennett can be played by either a man or a woman, Mr. Bennett can be played by either a man or a woman, Mary can be played by either a man or a woman. Collins is most often played by men just because I want him to be disgusting. And the most perfect, beautiful woman in the play, Miss Bingley, is played by a man. I wanted it to be gender neutral just because sometimes I think the audience listens differently. For instance, all the men playing women in this particular production are the women who enforce patriarchal structures. They’re the ones who give them roles and say, This is perfect, this is imperfect, this is what you’re supposed to do, this is what you’re not supposed to do. But then having that choice of gender neutrality allows us to cast based on the energy of who comes into the room. Nance read Mrs. Bennett at the first reading and I was basically like Well! That’s cast! Phew! [laughs]. In Vanity Fair everyone except the two women were played by men because that is about women in a patriarchy, in a world full of men. So that was a choice. This one is more gender neutral. This is what we ended up with based on who came in the room.
 

Margarita: So in other productions it could be cast completely different?
 

Kate: Oh yeah! It’s listed as completely gender neutral. In general, I feel like the right actor can switch back and forth, so this is what we landed here. And it’s so fun having women play men, and men play women. You just listen differently. When the men are saying, “This is how women are supposed to act” the audience listens differently. Including Charlotte. I love Charlotte. I think Charlotte is the most sympathetic character, but she enforces those patriarchal rules, including on herself, and she pays the price, for sure.
 

Margarita: What has it been like working with the director, Amanda Denhert?
 

Nance: She’s great. I met Amanda when she was a graduate student. She was, I think, the assistant director or musical director of A Christmas Carol that I did in the mid-90s, at Trinity Rep. I vaguely remember her—I was a flying ghost—and I remember her with singing children. She was a graduate student, but I remember her because she would really rehearse the B-team. She was very bright and very smart. And over the years, she worked a lot over at Trinity Rep, and I had worked there a number of times. So you would hear about these amazing productions that were happening by this young woman, kind of in the tradition of Adrian Hall and Eugene Lee. Then I sort of lost track of her for a time. So to meet her again 20 years later has been really fun, because I grew up in that same tradition: a creation of what the play is. It’s not all decided before you come into the room; it’s very much a piece of alchemy that is discovered right then as opposed to an idea of what something should be and having to find your little nook in what’s already decided. It’s very freeing and very playful. She really sets a fun tone, as Kate was saying.
 

Kate: Yeah, highly theatrical, totally fearless. Working with her as a playwright as well as an actor, she really illuminates the text, really wants to be very specific about what the text is and that pushes me to be a better writer. Super collaborative. It makes it such a fun, happy, and loving room. She was described to me before we met as someone who creates “feminist fairy tales.” And I think that’s very true. They’re so beautiful, there’s so much heart, but they’re totally fearless as well. Oh my God. She has no fear.
 

Amelia: No, she actually doesn’t. You’ll meet some directors who’ll say, and she actually said on the first day, “I really want us to really mess up. I really want us to do it very wrong, to fully go down the road of a wrong choice for a week and a half and then we’ll swing back around.” A lot of directors say that. But she means it. And part of the reason she’s able to mean it, I think, is as much as she’s operating on instinct and she’s a brilliant musician, her instinct absolutely pairs up with her intellect in a way that she’s able to articulate why she wants your left hand not your right hand in that moment, or why this is the operative word and not that one, or why we’re cutting the cat, which actually happened in the middle of rehearsal. Some directors will say, We’re cutting the cat because we’re cutting the cat; the cat doesn’t make sense. Amanda will say, We’re cutting the cat because the cat is a creature and you’re a creature and if we’re focusing on this creature and how it moves in a new world in a new place, we’re not meeting your creature yet and you go Of course! That makes so much sense from an audience’s perspective! And she’s able to take that seat and tell you for storytelling purposes why she wants a ridiculous choice, or to take away a ridiculous choice. And that’s a really rare thing in my experience, to even take the time to do it. It gives the actors so much respect.
 

Kate: She really is a master director. And you can tell, because she’s a master of that craft. Sometimes she says something and I’m This should be in a book! She can defend the principle of what you’re doing. It’s never arbitrary. It’s based in the principles of her convictions.
 

Nance: And I would say that because of you, Kate, the relationship between the playwright and the director is so interesting. Kate will have the playwright part of her brain listen to a scene and go “How about if we change that?” and then the actor part of her brain says something else. And so the director is talking sometimes to the playwright part of Kate’s brain, sometimes to the actor part. And Kate will sometimes come out as one part of her in response, and the other part will come out and do this. It’s like an amazing relationship that the three of you have.
 

Kimberly Chatterjee, Kate Hamill, Amelia Pedlow, Nance Williamson
 

Kimberly: Sometimes she’d be like “Can I speak to the playwright now?”
 

Nance: It’s like Sybil, only everybody knows it’s going on. [laughs] I want to talk to Zuul now. Is Zuul in there? [laughs]
 

Margarita: It almost makes me angry that a piece like this one, based on a woman author’s book, written by a woman, directed by a woman, with strong female characters is so rare, especially in New York City, in this landscape. We’re so underrepresented in the arts. So I’m wondering, as women artists, what can be done? What is your role in improving representation for women?
 

Kate: To be completely honest, I think there’s no excuse. There’s no excuse, and it starts at the undergraduate level. When I was an undergrad, what I was told was: “There are more roles for men and there’s more work for men, and that’s how it is” as if it was handed down on stone tablets. And I liked my undergrad, but that’s how it was treated. And then in the world you’re often taught that there just isn’t as much work, and it’s de facto. What I think is really encouraging now is you see members of the public really putting pressure on: Why is this season all male? Why are you having all-male directors? And that’s why things are changing. I feel like that’s pretty key. There’s no excuse, actually.
 

Amelia: There isn’t.
 

Kimberly: This is the non-romantic version of this, but money speaks. Don’t go to see things that you think are hurting the art that you want to see in the world. And go see things that support it. I remember—and this is not theater—but when the Ghostbusters movie came out, I have so many female friends who don’t care for the genre and they were like Absolutely! I’m going to go spend money and support this to show box office numbers. Because people think it’s a risk. They think people aren’t interested in it, they think people won’t spend their money. But then time and time again you have things like the all-female Henry IV at St, Ann’s Warehouse—which was amazing—and it’s like Oh, that show is selling out every single night and it’s extending? Hmmm. Maybe we can do that.
 

Kate: Sixty-eight percent of the ticket buying audience is female. They’re already coming! Like “if you build it they will come”? They’re already coming! Why are you not playing to your home base? It’s so outrageous!
 

Kimberly: And I think it’s the idea that people think that female centric stories, if it’s an all-female anything, the female centric stories will be uninteresting or unrelatable. That’s what I think the undertone is. And it’s like Kate was saying: What did you think women’s lives were and are that would be so uninteresting or shallow, that people wouldn’t want to see that? Nobody ever says that. I grew up idolizing so many male centric stories and the inverse is absolutely true.
 

Kate: When Sense and Sensibility first came Off-Off-Broadway, a producer laughed in my face that it was happening, like “Haha!” and turned and walked away from me. And it ran for a year! That’s a story about women! That’s your ticket buying audience, and there’s no excuse anymore. It’s like, pick a side American theater—I’m sorry! Donald Trump is the fucking President. Pick which side you’re on. Really. Don’t be those guys. Don’t be the people who reinforce that the female is always the “other” because the female is half of your population!
 

Kimberly: And have conversations. There are so many conversations that people don’t want to have, about gender, about race, often the two going together, or how the two don’t go together, and it’s never going to be comfortable. And when we decide to avoid uncomfortable conversations, we get to where we are today in America, which will get better, but it’s awful right now.
 

Kate: I’m so interested to hear what Nance has to say, because Nance has been in the business for a long time.
 

Kimberly Chatterjee, Kate Hamill, Amelia Pedlow, Nance Williamson
 

Nance: I was going to say that Davis McCallum, who’s the new artistic director of the Hudson Shakespeare Valley Festival, has really done a good job. He hired Kate, and did Kate’s play. He did Lauren Gunderson’s play last year, and he hires women directors. He’s in a position now of power where he’s hiring women writers in a Shakespeare festival. A Shakespeare festival. And he’s putting women in men’s roles. He’s injecting women in a much more vivid upfront way than there have been in a lot of different places. I think to support theaters like that who do that is great. I think that there’s a lot of young artistic directors, young men artistic directors who are supporting that and doing that.
 

Kate: And female artistic directors.
 

Nance: And female artistic directors, obviously. We just did a three women version of The Scottish Play, and it was from a man’s point of view, but coming from a woman’s mouth. And how does that sound to you? How does that speak to you? Do you pretend that you’re a man? Do you pretend you’re a woman? Do you pretend that you’re androgynous? And so it opens up, I think, for the actor, for the audience, all sorts of different ways of looking at text that is broadening in a way, that’s kind of exciting and thrilling.
 

Kimberly: It was absolutely brilliant, that production. I understudied the production and saw it a bunch of times and I remember talking to a male director after. He said, “Don’t you think that’s a masculine story, that it’s such a man’s perspective?” And I laughed in his face because I assumed he was joking. It was a white male director who has directed in many places. I was just like “Hmm.” To me, it was such an incredible, beautiful production—and of course, no production is ever perfect—but it was definitive for me of Women can play men in men centric stories, unequivocally. And trying to articulate that to someone who so did not hear it was very Wow, we have to talk about it over and over and get people to see it over and over again before they listen.
 

Amelia: I’m with you. I’m just with you.
 

Nance: I think the bottom line is that you do the best work possible. Because I think the work is what makes people come. You have to make those choices, but it has to be done well.
 
 

 

 

Kimberly Chatterjee (Lydia/Lady Catherine) NEW YORK: The Tempest (Classical Theatre of Harlem); The Christians (Playwrights Horizons). REGIONAL: Pride & Prejudice, The General From America, Macbeth, Measure for Measure (Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival); As You Like It (Folger Theatre). TELEVISION: “High Maintenance.” Proud graduate of NYU Tisch’s New Studio on Broadway. Kimberlychatterjee.com
 

Kate Hamill (Lizzy) is an actor / playwright. As playwright: Sense & Sensibility (in which she originated the role of Marianne), Winner, Off-Broadway Alliance Award 2016; Nominee, Drama League Award (Best Revival, 2016); 265+ performances Off-Broadway. Other plays include Vanity Fair (in which she originated the role of Becky Sharp; Nominee, Off-Broadway Alliance Award 2017), In the Mines (Sundance Lab semi-finalist), Em (Red Bull New Play finalist), Little Fellow (O’Neill semi-finalist). Additional acting credits include: The Seagull (Bedlam), All That Fall (Kaliyuga), Dreams… Marsupial Girl (PearlDamour). Her plays have been produced at the Guthrie Theatre, Pearl Theatre, Dallas Theater Center, Folger Theatre (Helen Hayes Award, best production: S&S) & others. Upcoming productions at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, A.R.T., Playmakers Rep, Seattle Rep, & more. Kate-hamill.com
 

Amelia Pedlow (Jane/Miss De Bourgh) OFF-BROADWAY: The Liar and The Heir Apparent (Classic Stage Company); ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Red Bull Theatre Company); You Never Can Tell (The Pearl). REGIONAL: Pride and Prejudice and The General from America (Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival); Red Velvet and The Metromaniacs (The Old Globe); The Metromaniacs, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Merchant of Venice (The Shakespeare Theatre DC); Ether Dome (La Jolla Playhouse, Hartford Stage, and The Huntington); The Glass Menagerie, Hamlet, and The Liar (Denver Center); Legacy of Light (Cleveland Playhouse); The Diary of Anne Frank and The Tempest (Virginia Stage Company). TV: “The Good Wife”; “Blue Bloods”; “Shades of Blue”; “The Blacklist”. EDUCATION: B.F.A. Juilliard.
 

Nance Williamson (Mrs. Bennet) is thrilled to be reprising Mrs. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. During her 33-year career as an Equity actor Nance has performed on Broadway in Broken Glass, Henry IV, Cyrano and Romeo and Juliet as well as numerous Off-Broadway and regional productions most recently Amanda in The Glass Menagerie at Pioneer Stage and premier production of Book of Will at DCTC. Nance is happily married to actor Kurt Rhoads.

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A Conversation with Christa Scott-Reed

Christa Scott-Reed

 

Shadowlands tells the touching story of the relationship between C. S. Lewis and Helen Joy Davidman. The Fellowship of Performing Arts is producing the first New York revival of this acclaimed play, which began performances at the Acorn Theater on October 17. We spoke with Christa Scott-Reed, who is making her directorial debut, about what makes the play relevant to modern audiences, and about the relationship between faith and the arts.

 

 

Margarita Javier: Could you tell us a little bit about yourself?
 

Christa Scott-Reed: I’m originally from the Pacific Northwest, from a little town called Wenatchee, Washington. It’s actually surprisingly home to a few theater artists in New York. It’s interesting because for a small town kind of in the middle of nowhere, they have a surprising love for theater. And I think it’s because it’s not geographically close to any other cities, so they sort of had to create their own cultural life.
 

MJ: So there’s a lot of theater there?
 

CSR: Yes! I mean, it’s all community theater; it’s not professional. But there’s a real love of it. For an agricultural town and one that’s relatively conservative, it’s remarkable how much they really value theater. I grew up just being immersed in it from a young age. And occasionally we’d get to go over to Seattle—and Dan Sullivan was running Seattle Rep at the time—and saw stuff there, and so that’s where I began. I went to undergrad at Whitman College in Washington, went to grad school at the Denver Center, and then found my way here.
 

MJ: Did you start as a performer?
 

CSR: I was always a performer until this particular job.
 

MJ: This is your first time directing?
 

CSR: This is my first time directing, yes.
 

MJ: How did that come about?
 

CSR: As a performer, I worked for Fellowship of the Performing Arts starting in 2013 on their production of The Great Divorce. And it started as a developmental production Off-Broadway, then we did a two-year national tour, and then we brought it back again to Off-Broadway. So it was a long stretch with them. And while I was working with them on Great Divorce, they started using me because, in my off-time as a performer, I also teach and coach other actors, so they started bringing me in, kind of as an artistic consultant, to maybe work with other actors in other productions, to direct readings, to help cast readings, to give artistic input in certain ways. And they started using me more and more for that. They sort of made it official when they realized that one thing they lacked in the company was a literary manager. And since I had been doing a lot with them in various ways, they said, “How about stepping in for this literary manager job?” I said, “I’m still a performer!” They said, “We get that; let’s call it a part time gig.” And in that role as literary manager, I directed a staged reading of Shadowlands for over a hundred donors and everybody seemed happy with that. Things started rolling and, because they had seen me handle the stage reading and because they had seen me in the room with actors, a couple of which are in the cast now, they said, “Ok you know what? We feel like we trust you. Let’s just have you do it. You’ve been a professional actor for over 20 years—you’ve been in the room. We think you can handle this.”
 

Christa Scott-Reed
 

MJ: Are you taking from directors you’ve worked with?
 

CSR: Absolutely. In fact, the other day my assistant director was noticing how I was doing my notes in the script a certain way, and he said, “Who’d you get that from?” And I said, “Rob Ruggiero” [laughs]. So, absolutely. And in fact, I’ve reached out in this process to several good friends of mine who I respect hugely as directors, and asked for their advice, their wisdom. They’ve put in good words for me. I’ve not been shy to try to humbly learn from those who know better than I do.
 

MJ: Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is the first New York City revival of Shadowlands.
 

CSR: It is.
 

MJ: So it’s a big undertaking as the first project to be directing, right?
 

CSR: It is. When you’re going to direct something for the first time, why not pick a show that’s set in the 1950s England, with 12 cast members, two of which are children, and 35 scene changes—why not? I mean, it’s an easy one. An easy one [laughs].
 

MJ: What can you tell us about the show itself, Shadowlands?
 

CSR: It’s a beautiful show. A lot of people know it because it was not only from Broadway and the West End, but because it was made into a movie with Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger. People know it from that. They go “Oh right, Shadowlands!” But it’s time for it to come back to remind themselves of it. It’s a beautiful story. It’s known as a little bit of a three-hanky piece, but it’s not just that. Working on it, I’m reminded of how moving and how thought provoking it is. Those are all clichéd words, but really true in this case. And it’s also really nice -I was telling somebody else- it’s really nice to have a show that is a love story, but a love story between people who aren’t 22, who aren’t passionately falling for each other in that first-time way. There’s room for those stories, and those stories are being done, but I like the fact that these are mature people who have lived their lives, who have pain and suffering under their belts, who have past marriages and children and all those kinds of things. Telling that story as a love story is, I think, refreshing, especially for a theater audience who’s not largely 22 year olds. I know I’m not! And then you add to it the layers of what it has to say about the meaning of suffering: Why does God allow suffering in the world? What do we give up in order to gain something? When we gain so much joy and love, what do we give up in the form of pain and suffering? How does that test our faith, our doubt? All universal subjects that really resonate. Even though C. S. Lewis was, I think, a renowned Christian, there are things that resonate for anyone regardless of faith background. It’s about human experience.
 

MJ: And because this is based on a true story, has there been a process of doing research into the lives of C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman? What has that been like?
 

CSR: Absolutely. And in fact, as somebody who probably in another life would have preferred to be a librarian—and I don’t joke when I say that—I love research. I took my dramaturgical element burden a little bit too far and spent months reading every biography I could get my hands on, and I ended up compiling it into this hefty stack of research about the characters, background about Oxford, everything I could get my hands on. And I presented it to the cast. I said, “There won’t be a test on this, but use this as a resource.” And I remember Danny, who plays C. S. Lewis, said, “Well, I do have a friend in England who had studied with or knew C. S. Lewis, and I was going to contact him. I don’t know that I need to now!” [laughs]. So I went a little crazy. It was also important for me to tell them that this isn’t a documentary. Danny doesn’t look like C. S. Lewis. These are different people—this is a play, it’s not reality. Of course it’s inspired by true events, and we want to maintain a sense of strong connection to those ideas. He may not look exactly like Lewis, but he is Lewis for this story. What are his needs, his wants, his loves?
 

Christa Scott-Reed
 

MJ: Why do you think this play is relevant to today’s audiences, specifically in New York? What do you think it’s telling us?
 

CSR: Touching on what I said before, honestly, look at what happened recently in Las Vegas. One of the first things the character of Lewis does as he walks out onstage is to hold up a newspaper and say, “This tragedy.” In this case, it was the Gillingham bus disaster in the 1950s. He says, “This just happened. How can God allow this to happen? What is the meaning of this kind of suffering?” Obviously, that’s true of any period in time, but I think this is something we’re struggling with constantly. How do we deal with pain? What is the purpose of it? I think it’s true no matter what decade you’re in. It’s always going to be relevant.
 

MJ: And you mentioned this is being produced by the Fellowship of Performing Arts, a not-for-profit company that is interested in delivering theater that has a Christian worldview. So first of all, how did you first become involved with them?
 

CSR: I auditioned like anybody else through their casting director for The Great Divorce. One thing I particularly respect about FPA is they have this mission to deliver theater from a Christian worldview that will engage a diverse audience, so they want to present a piece of art that is executed to its highest level possible. To that end, they want the best artists. They did not ask me when I auditioned what my faith background was or what my beliefs were. I’ve been at talkbacks with the artistic directors, and members of the audience ask, “Well, who in the cast, or designers, or crew—who is Christian?” And he just says, “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask them.” And I really appreciate that. What they require from an artist who works with them is somebody who is willing to do the best job they can, to make the best piece of art that they can, that speaks to that mission. But we have artists of all faith backgrounds or no faith backgrounds. Because so often—and I’m just speaking for myself now—when you hear the term “Christian theater”—and I happen to be a Christian—but even I wince a little bit. You think this is going to be some kind of eye rolling niche theater that’s just … ugh. And that’s really not their purpose. They really want to do a piece of art that’s intellectually challenging, emotionally engaging, something that audience members can come to and, regardless of faith background, be interested or fascinated by, come out of the theater laughing, thinking. They have managed to do that. When we did The Great Divorce, friends of mine came to see it when we were on tour in D.C.—and these are people who firmly have their own faith tradition which is not Christian, and they will never be interested in being Christian, nor should they—but they signed up for the newsletter because they loved the play so much. They all happen to be psychologists and they were all so engaged in the ideas. That’s the kind of thing that they’re interested in. Yes, of course FPA wants to provide theater for practicing Christians who are looking for art that speaks to them, that’s not speaking beneath them, but actually meets them at an intellectual level that’s satisfying. But at the same time, we want to bring other people in. The ideas of C. S. Lewis are interesting to people of all different types and sorts.
 

MJ: Going by what you said, I think we can agree that Christianity as a religion has been hijacked by the political right, definitely in this country, but also other parts of the world. Because of that, there tends to be a negative association with that religion for people of more liberal political leanings, especially in the theater world. What would you say to that end in terms of what this theater company is trying to achieve?
 

CSR: Certainly in our audience, there are conservative people, there are progressive people, there are people who span all parts of the political spectrum, as well as all parts of the faith spectrum. But I think we deliver stories that speak authentically to the human experience and that expand our imaginations rather than limit them. And I think a lot of progressives—and I count myself as progressive—get upset with a too-conservatively imagined Christianity; there’s this idea of limiting thought, of limiting experience of putting up barriers and saying, “This is acceptable and this is not.” And I don’t think that artists are in the business of doing that.
 

MJ: Right, and C. S. Lewis was a perfect example of that: he was very much an intellectual proponent of Christianity.
 

CSR: I know that for Max, our artistic director, his real desire is to do work that is intellectually respected. I think we can get people’s attention that way. You can walk in and be like “Let’s see what these Christians have for us” and then walk out going “That blew my mind a little bit.” We get a lot of reviews like that. Over the course of the last few years, a lot of the reviewers will start by saying, “I expected to be preached at. And that’s not what I got. I started thinking new thoughts.” We’re not in the business of alienating people; we’re not in the business of telling people what to think. We’re in the business of showing a piece of art that hopefully speaks to your body, soul, and mind.
 

Christa Scott-Reed
 

MJ: When you talk about a “Christian worldview,” what is that? What is a Christian worldview?
 

CSR: Well, certainly, it would be one that speaks to the values and the ideas behind a Christ centered life. So it would be love, compassion, what they talk about in Shadowlands. The whole concept of the title of Shadowlands is a Platonic idea—that the world we live in now is really just a shadow of the life to come, that true reality is something that lives beyond. It’s not special just to Christianity, but it’s certainly something that is an important part of Christianity: that there is another world, there is something supernatural that is beyond that. All of our shows have an element of the supernatural for that reason: that there’s something beyond, there’s something more. If we can find how we can best live in the present and be in the best relationship with other people and with God, that’s all part of becoming more real for the realness to come.
 

MJ: I’m fascinated by Joy Davidman.
 

CSR: I know, right? What an amazing character.
 

MJ: And we don’t know as much about her as we do about C. S. Lewis, so I was hoping you can talk about her, in terms of the play.
 

CSR: Yes, it’s interesting when you asked, “How does this play speak to New Yorkers?” because she’s perfect. She is such a New Yorker: from the Bronx, born into a Jewish but non-religious family, an incredible intellectual. She was absolutely C. S. Lewis’ intellectual equal. She was a genius, off the charts.
 

MJ: That’s what drew him to her initially, her intellect.
 

CSR: Oh absolutely, yeah. And she started as a passionate communist and a writer, and then discovered that communism as it was being practiced was just not for her, so she eventually moved away from that. She was always searching for something. At one point she was interested in Dianetics, before it became Scientology, but she eventually came to Christianity herself and, as a result of that, started writing to C. S. Lewis and him to her. As you said, then it was meeting of the minds—this purely intellectual relationship started via letter writing for a couple of years and then once they finally met, everything blew up from there.
 

MJ: What can you tell us about the cast?
 

CSR: Our cast is great. Daniel Gerroll plays C. S. Lewis. He’s a wonderful British and American actor that people will know from years of Broadway and Off-Broadway shows, films, and television. Robin Abramson plays Joy, and she’s a revelation. I’m really excited about showing Robin to New York audiences because she has been sort of the young leading lady of Pittsburgh, which is where she’s from. She only recently moved to New York, this is her New York stage debut. This feels like the way Joy kind of bursts into C. S. Lewis’ life, and, in a way, I feel like Robin is bursting into New York, and I can’t wait for people to see her. It’s just a wonderful group of actors. John C. Vennema, whom audiences have seen in a million wonderful things in New York, is exceptional and hilarious as C. S. Lewis’ brother Warnie. There are excellent actors across the board in this play.
 

MJ: Being a performer yourself, how does that inform your job as a director?
 

CSR: My assistant director, whom I had never worked with before, has worked with lots of directors but never with one who was also an actor, so he keeps saying, “It’s so interesting the things that you focus on that other directors don’t.” Whether it’s concern about how certain actors should carry certain things, or how difficult it will be for an actor to wear a costume, or how the dialogue is going—just little actor-centric things. He says most directors don’t think of that stuff. I think my strength going into the production was knowing how to communicate with actors, not only from teaching and coaching, but also just being in productions and having that relationship. The thing that I’ve had to learn on the job is staging in a way I never had before: blocking, seeing the entire arc of a show in a new way. I was always focused on my part as an actor. So it’s been a learn-on-the-job situation, but it’s been very satisfying.
 

MJ: Who would you say are your biggest influences both as a performer and as a director?
 

CSR: Where to begin? I will have to say Dan Sullivan’s productions on Seattle Rep stage. His productions are what made me love theater. There are so many beautiful directors working today. I saw a production recently that blew me away, Everybody by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins at Signature, directed by Lila Neugebauer. It’s a modern retelling of the medieval Everyman story, and it had this heightened, almost theological, philosophical thing, and it was not coming from a Christian worldview, but it spoke at those levels and it was so deeply affecting. Shadowlands is a little bit of a departure for FPA in the sense that it’s so traditional. They have tended to do very artistically “out there” stuff, whether it’s The Screwtape Letters or The Great Divorce. The show they have right now, Martin Luther on Trial, which is touring, tells the story of Martin Luther in the afterlife; he’s on trial and the devil is the prosecuting attorney. St. Peter is the judge and the witnesses are everyone from Hitler to Freud to Pope Francis to Martin Luther King Jr. They tend to do these highly theatrical pieces, so in a way, Shadowlands is a bit more of a traditional affair for them. But it still has magic in it.
 

Christa Scott-Reed
 

MJ: What do you feel is the relationship between faith and the arts, specifically theater?
 

CSR: It seems like such a natural connection. If you go back in history, theater first evolved from religious expression: the mask works of the Greeks, to the Medieval Churches, the Passion plays. How do you express magic? How do you express the unexpressed? Through art, right? And how does one even begin to articulate what is faith or what is ultimate joy as experienced through faith? Why do they sing in musicals? Because they have no other way of expressing emotions. I think at some point, you have to leave standard expressions and enter into an artistic realm. Even Christ spoke in stories, in parable. A lot of times, it’s difficult when we get too strict in our definitions of biblical text, because we as a society don’t have an understanding of how people thousands of years ago wrote and expressed themselves much more metaphorically. So it seems like the arts are a natural extension of that.
 

MJ: Moving forward, do you want to direct again?
 

CSR: I’m certainly open to it. It’s been a really fun, mind-blowing, and mind-expanding experience. I’ve learned so much more about theater. I thought I kinda knew it; I was like: “I got this! I know all about it!” And then you go into this meeting where they’re discussing set construction, and where and how it gets constructed, and they talk about the electrics, and the light rigging, and I realized I didn’t even begin to know. The amount of marketing material, the thousands of daily e-mails tweaking every little thing. I didn’t realize that when you pull open that wonderful Wizard of Oz curtain, behind there, it’s a mile long. I don’t want to sound too ignorant; I obviously had an idea, but there was more that I had no idea about. So it’s exciting. I’ve just seen behind the curtain. I want to get better at it. I want to learn even more. Let your readers know, though, I am not giving up acting. It is my passion. Please cast me! [laughs]
 

MJ: Is there a play that you would love to direct?
 

CSR: The minute I learned that I was directing this, I was like: “So that my mind doesn’t completely liquefy from being too overwhelmed, I’m just going to focus on this play and think about nothing but this play”. So obviously it hasn’t occurred to me. Other than the fact that as a literary manager I have other scripts for FPA that we’re talking about developing and—no pressure on FPA—but certainly every now and then it occurs to me about whether I’d like to try to convince them to let me do this again.
 

MJ: What about performing wise? Is there any role you’ve always wanted to play and haven’t yet?
 

CSR: It’s interesting how I’ve had to shift those over the course of my life. There would be parts that now I realize “I’ve aged right out of that one, haven’t I?” I did so much classical theater when I was a younger woman, and then I had children and that necessitated staying in New York, so I just started working with more new plays. So now that I’ve skipped forward into a different age range, when can I go back to playing all those classical roles that were always out of my reach? But still please cast me in modern plays and in film and TV [laughs].
 

MJ: Why should people come see this show and what do you hope people will get out of it?
 

CSR: I’ll say the obvious: it’s really good. It’s a really good play. Our sound designer, John Gromada, a wonderful Tony-nominated sound designer, said, “This is a really good play!” It sneaks up on you. You go in and think: I’m going to hear some smart ideas from the mouth of C. S. Lewis that you would expect to hear. And then all of a sudden, you’re crying and you’re not exactly sure why. It just sinks into your bones. There’s something about this play that is deeply affecting in a mature way. Not that you can’t be 22 and see this and enjoy it, but this is a play for someone like me, someone who’s had some life experience and who’s had to ask those tough life questions, deal with pain and loss and love and joy. I was just reading this amazing article about the midlife crisis for women—a subject that’s not much dealt with—and how suddenly there’s this perfect life storm of all these different life things bouncing up against each other. Coming to see a piece of art like this—where someone like me is sorting through those ideas too, but in a way that’s a thousand times more articulate than I could ever be—emotionally organizes those thoughts in a way that makes me go: “Yes. This is actually how prayer works in a way that’s not derivative or simple minded. That is really how we can think of suffering and love in a way that has real genuine, mature thought, but still grabs me by the gut at the same time.” We go see smart plays, witty plays, and we go see emotionally powerful plays that are messy. But to see those worlds meet? I think it’s rarer than we realize.
 
 

 

 

Broadway: The Pitman Painters.  National Tour: C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce. Off-Broadway: Church and State (New World Stages); The Great Divorce (world premiere, Fellowship for Performing Arts); The Talls (world premiere, Second Stage); The Freedom of the City (Irish Repertory Theatre); Celebration and The Room, The Bald Soprano and the Lesson, 10×20, 10×25 (Atlantic Theatre Company); Beasley’s Christmas Party, Pullman Car Hiawatha, Museum (Keen Company); Deathbed (world premiere, McGinn-Cazale Theatre); Marion Bridge (Urban Stages); The Voysey Inheritance (Mint Theater Company).  Film & Television: 30 Rock, The Impossibilities, Eden, Gossip Girl, 666 Park Avenue, Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, Love Life, New Amsterdam, As the World Turns. Regional Theater: Mark St. Germain’s Relativity at TheatreWorks (with Richard Dreyfuss); On Golden Pond (with Keir Dullea, Bucks County Playhouse); Argonautika, Honour (with Kathleen Chalfant, Berkeley Repertory Theatre); Restoration Comedy, The Food Chain (The Old Globe); The Little Dog Laughed (Intiman Theatre);  As You Like It, Crimes of the Heart, the world premiere of Charles L. Mee’s Limonade Tous les Jours (Actors Theatre of Louisville).  Other Regional: Papermill Playhouse, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, Pioneer Theatre, Barrington Stage, Syracuse Stage, Denver Center Theatre Company, Cleveland Playhouse, Olney Theatre Center, and many more.

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A Conversation with the Crystal Lucas Perry, Alexandra Henrikson, and Olivia Washington

Crystal Lucas Perry, Alexandra Henrikson, Olivia Washington
 

When you think of plays that empower women, The Taming of the Shrew doesn’t come to mind, but Chicago Shakespeare Theatre’s new production is trying to change that. With a cast of thirteen women and a suffragette twist, this Shrew is unlike any production you’ve ever seen before. I sat down with three of the show’s stars, Crystal Lucas Perry, Alexandra Henrikson, and Olivia Washington to talk about voting, feminism and Oregon Trail.
 

 
 

Kelly Wallace: So, you guys have started performances? You started last week, yeah? Let’s start with who you are and who you’re playing—just give me a short description of that character.
 

Crystal Lucas Perry: I’m playing Petruchio as well as Mrs. Van Dyne—Victoria Van Dyne. Mrs. Van Dyne is a suffragette during 1919, and one of the champions of the club. She prides herself on being out and physical with the movement and doing her best to do her part. Any chance she has to express her enthusiasm for the cause and the rights of women, she takes it. She encourages her other suffragettes and members to also take pride in the cause. And then Petruchio, obviously the tamer of the shrew, he’s a man going after what he wants. He will stop at nothing to obtain that.
 

Alex Henrikson: Hello, I’m eating a muffin. When I know I’m being recorded I suddenly get real weird and I apologize. I’ll stop trying to entertain. I play Kate and Mrs. Louise Harrison. What’s so fun is Mrs. Louise Harrison is a woman in 1919 and is an industrialist’s wife and is happy to be so and likes that her husband is in charge. I like to imagine him as a middle-aged Sean Connery…
 

Crystal: Wouldn’t we all like to imagine being married to a middle-aged Sean Connery?
 

Alex: Sean Connery’s where you start. No, but, she’s that woman who has learned to play the world with the set of tools that she has in 1919 to have power, which is her beauty, her being a great host, her gentle voice, and also her diva-level narcissism—which is another part of it that’s a little hard to reconcile sometimes. She doesn’t understand suffrage. She’s come here to act; she wants to be an actress. I think she’s a frustrated actress because she would’ve been a great actress in a different time. Then I get to play Kate, which is just the most fun. It feels like every time we get together is a political act, which feels great at this moment in time. In the beginning, I get to be a woman who goes from being a wildcat and not knowing how to use her words exactly but having all this passion, to a woman who figures out how to use her words by the end. Unfortunately, what she uses her words for is not what me, Alex Henrikson, would want her to stay. That’s what the play wrestles with on that journey.
 

Olivia Washington: I play Emily Ingersoll slash Ms. Ingersoll slash Bianca. Emily is a daughter of the Senator, Senator Sherman, and she’s very loving and supportive and keeps to herself. She has an awakening at the end, and meeting all these women … she’s not an initial supporter of suffrage, but she’s educated on it. She’s learned it more in a book way, not in the way of having seen what it is. So I think she wakes up to the idea of what it means to believe in something, and believe in something for the country and for herself as well. She’s able to have conversations with her mother that she wouldn’t have been able to have without that awakening. And then Bianca … she’s so much fun to play. And in a similar way, she is a loving daughter. But she kind of uses her power in a different way than Kate uses her power. She picks her times to speak and how she speaks to get what she wants, but then still goes behind her dad’s back and gets married. I like that kind of sassy, quiet, sneaky way about her.
 

Kelly: What does it feel like to do a show, which as you mentioned has this political side, right now? This is, undeniably, a very contentious moment in our country, no matter what side you’re on.
 

Crystal: Well, I think about the Women’s March that happened everywhere, I like to imagine Mrs. Van Dyne at the front lines of that march, making all the hilarious yet powerful signs. I can’t help but think of her as one of those women, and the Instagram photos she must have taken [laughter]. That was a day to gain a ton of followers. But, really, that’s the beauty of what I get to witness. I watch how these women choose to fight, seeing how the women of today choose to fight, or choose to push against the barriers we’re facing. It always seems to be the same. They use what they have to get what they want. They take the opportunities that they are able to seize and use that as a platform.
 

During the play, we have our own “votes,” um … what’s it called?
 

Alex: A democratic process? [laughter]
 

Crystal: We do the whole voice voting “ay”/”nay” thing, and that’s what’s so beautiful. This is a chance where we get to demonstrate and recognize our power. It might be something meaningless, but it means something to us. We can make change within our little house and that gives us the power to go and make change elsewhere. That’s something I like, the parallels between those two, of how we choose to fight and how we energize ourselves to make something better.
 

Alex: Yeah, what you just said made me think of how being in high school, there were lots of boys telling me like, during the Gore vote (okay, it was a little past high school, don’t worry about the time), that my vote didn’t mean anything, that it was the lesser of two evils.
 

Crystal: Where’d we hear that again?
 

Alex: Exactly. It comes up every single election, doesn’t even matter who the politicians are, there’s a mistrust of government. To me, I never saw it as a lesser of two evils. I always can see someone I admire, some quality, and only this year—and it’s taken me a long time to get here—but my vote does matter. What I think does matter. I went to the Women’s March and I saw a lot of little girls with a lot of women around them saying, No, this is important. There are more women getting involved in politics. When I was doing research for this show, I read Rebecca Traister’s book, All the Single Ladies. She tells this story of women in Wyoming, where there’s all this trash in the streets and the male politicians and the mayor couldn’t get it together, and the women were like, “Our streets are disgusting.” So they all ran for positions in the town, won, got all this shit done, and then went back to the house all like, see you later. There’s part of me that’s really excited. For me, this has been a huge awakening experience, and I think the same happens for my character, and getting to do The Taming of the Shrew for the third time (I’ve played Gremio and Bianca before) … what’s been nice about this time and this rehearsal process is when we would get to points where it just was never okay with me. You watch these versions and you’re like “…and he probably raped her,” or he’s calling her chattel. It’s dark. It’s so funny, but then it gets really, really dark. You see these two characters smash against each other and fall in love.
 

Kelly: Not the fun Beatrice and Benedick kind of thing.
 

Alex: They’re literally hitting each other.
 

Kelly: It isn’t that contentious, Shakespearean, comedic courtship…
 

Alex: It’s their way of falling in love, and I think they do fall in love, but for me as a modern woman in 2017, playing a woman in 1919, watching this play from the 1590s, I have all these out of body experiences. I’m seeing what’s not okay with me; I’m seeing where my line is. I think that now, as a woman who is 32 (and you can print that, I’m proud of it), I’m finding all these things that aren’t okay for me anymore. I can point to that and say it wasn’t okay when it happened.
 

Olivia: I agree with both of them. To put it so simply, it’s amazing how something so small can birth a bigger movement. I think that was a lovely reminder, not just in this political climate, but in the world. This story of these women, it shows your voice matters, even if people are telling you it does not matter. If you can just get involved, I think that’s what most people of our generation are saying right now. Most millennials are like, you know what, a takeaway from this whole election is that I need to pay more attention to what’s happening. We have to take back our rights, and our voice, because we can. I’m going to educate myself on things about our government that I let go by, because I let people speak for me, or because I assumed it would be okay. Growing up in that way, we have to take responsibility for our actions and our part in making a difference in the world today.
 

Crystal: And what affects one affects us all. Mrs. Van Dyne knows the passing of this, this 19th Amendment, and the right to vote, may not mean mountains are moved for her individually. A move for women is a move for her. A win for women is a win for her. Not until ’65 when the Voting Rights Act passes does she get that, so the barriers are still in the way for her character particularly. But the fact that they’ve been able to come together and be united in this is a complete reflection of what I see with women today. We have been able to set aside our differences and our viewpoints because at some level, we agree this vote is a right that belongs to us all. `
 

Olivia: For the good of the country.
 

Kelly: You’ve had a few performances—do you have any sense of how the audience has been reacting? It’s a show that everyone’s familiar with, but has a wildly different take on.
 

Olivia: I’ll speak up first since they’re onstage most of the time and we’re in the aisles watching it. It’s one of my favorite parts, watching the end of the first act. They get married, and you’re just listening to the audience respond. Everyone is so sucked in. They’re trying to figure out Petruchio like, is that a woman? I don’t know…
 

Alex: Crystal is an incredibly convincing gentleman…
 

Olivia: But really, you watch this man overpower this strong-willed woman and what is she gonna do? What are we gonna do? Can we do anything? The vocal responses coming from the audiences are chilling sometimes. So it doesn’t matter if it’s a man playing this part; it doesn’t matter if it’s a woman. If you’re good at your job, you get the message across. They do it so beautifully and you’re watching it and … it sucks. People realize it’s not that kind of comedy.
 

Alex: And that final “No,” Barbara [Gaines, Artistic Director] was like, “What do you feel in that moment?” And my answer was: “I don’t want to go with him.” So she told me to say that. And I did. And you hear the audience laugh, it’s like this almost impetuous child. Then Crystal takes that impetuous energy away and everyone is silent. I love this play, and I am a feminist, and this is the moment for me that shows why this play is so tricky.
 

Kelly: How is that for you, playing such an aggressive man? Does the gender swap change anything about your onstage interaction?
 

Alex: I feel like I’m actually stronger onstage with her than with any male counterpart because I feel like she can actually match me. Like, as an actress, I’m very tall. I’m 5’10” and I have a very large wingspan and a very big voice. Oftentimes, I felt like I had to diminish myself to make sure the guy looked strong, or at least that’s the traditional gender role. So many shows would say they couldn’t find someone to match me, which, I think, is often code for finding someone as tall as me. When I met Crystal, it was like wow, it’s on. I’m not pulling any punches, she didn’t pull any punches with me. We just kept raising up. I wish every actor could get to work with Crystal Lucas Perry and Olivia Washington at some point. Everyone says yes. No one is diminishing themselves. Now that I know how much power there is, I can see how I wasn’t raising up to that.
 

Crystal: Aside from the physical adjustments I’m trying to show that are more masculine, I honestly don’t turn off my female brain. I really think of him as a woman who thinks differently and who executes from a different place than my other counterparts. As a woman playing this role, it’s incredibly satisfying because I know every move I would make as a woman. I know every tic that would turn me off or on as a woman. So because I know those things, I get to decide if I would be turned off or on by that.
 

Kelly: You know to push those buttons.
 

Crystal: Oh, I get to push the buttons, and I recognize when buttons are being pushed of mine. It’s really lovely and working with Alex has been fun because she does not filter and she goes all in and so we’ve been able to take this scene … I mean, we could show you the wooing scene in a million different ways and keep you on your toes. That’s just been the joy. Previews are helping us figure out what story we want to tell with that. At the end of the day, it’s two people coming together and realizing they can’t just break through the other person, they can’t just go around them, they have to meet—there has to be a collision. It’s exciting. He’s a really strong woman, strong in a different way.
 

Crystal Lucas Perry, Alexandra Hendrikson

(Liz Lauren)

 

Kelly: Now, the framing of this show is the suffragette movement; you’re all playing these 20th-century suffragettes as well. You’re both people of color, as you brought up, the right to vote wasn’t a “win” at that moment, so what is that like for you as a human and as an actress? This victory, ostensibly, has happened, but not for everyone.
 

Crystal: A win for one of us is a win for all. And we talked a lot about that. We chose to acknowledge who we are in the space and celebrate that, because that’s one more beautiful thing about these women being able to come together because of their social level. They’re here, in this group, choosing to commune with this Shakespeare. Of course, all of these things happen on this day. I think that I’ll speak for Mrs. Van Dyne: she’s a woman who has a vision for the future, and she is able to see that we have to focus on right now, and right now, this is the next step. This is the opportunity. Similar to how Petruchio seizes an opportunity when it’s presented, she’s gonna seize this opportunity as it stands before her. There’s not many times we have to touch on it. It’s there. It’s a part of the play by us being onstage.
 

Kelly: It doesn’t need to be explicit.
 

Olivia: It’s underneath; the undertones are there. And we have different perspectives. You have Mrs. Van Dyne, who is such a clear cut fighter for the cause, and I think for my character, I was raised by a white Senator’s family, so I come from a place of privilege in that family and in that home. And yet, there’s this kind of … Oh, I have to start using my voice in a way outside the safety net of my home that was created for me. I am a woman of color in this world, and I want to effect change in this world, but not just from back here. So, how do I step forward? This is all undertone, of course.
 

Kelly: But that’s the kind of undertone and tension that keeps the show interesting, it draws you in even further.
 

Crystal: There’s a moment in the play where some of us rush out to join a rally and some of the women stay, and you hear some of their reasons. Some people feel they’re too old, some are too afraid, and you get a chance to see that it’s not just because they don’t want that, it’s because they have something to lose themselves. So getting to the core, stripping color, stripping social class, stripping all of those other things, it gets to the human need of wanting to be safe and wanting to make change and wanting to be a part of something great.
 

Olivia: It’s human. You see throughout history—no matter race, gender, whatever—to fight for a bigger cause, you let go of yourself, it’s for the bigger battle.
 

Crystal: And I don’t think these women are done. I feel like they’ve got a taste of change and the ability to make change.
 

Kelly: There’s an optimism in where it ends up. The “tide-turning” feeling is very present. And that one-hundred years ago … not even, really…
 

Olivia: It’s so crazy!
 

Kelly: How recently all of this was for millennials is mind-boggling. The Voting Rights Act, Roe vs. Wade, marriage equality … we feel like these are all a given. Of course, we should have those things. I think the good idea behind the Women’s March is maybe to remind younger generations how much there is to protect, and what we still have to lose.
 

Alex: I was born in the ‘80s, we had the internet, I was playing Oregon Trail on it…
 

Kelly: I’m not sure if the internet was a net positive or not yet.
 

Alex: I’m not sure either, we won’t take a side. But part of it was that I saw all this heroines in Disney movies. I wasn’t seeing Snow White anymore, I was seeing Belle. And she really liked reading. Then it turned into this competition of reading. Or She-Ra princess of power! I think the heroines and the storytelling I had growing up versus what my mother had … it affected what her expectations of me were. She told me if I got pregnant before 30 it would hurt more to give birth to the baby? Which is a lie, of course? She also told me I didn’t need to learn to cook, let’s look into writing more. I think she was doing this very active “you will not be that woman.” By ‘that woman,” she meant the idea of what she was brought up as, and what she was trying to steer me away from. By now we know every woman is every woman. I love cooking. I get turned on when I cook a meal for a man. It is hot! You know? I also get turned on when I cook a meal for all my friends, not turned on in that way. It’s just seeing all the different options that we as women have. When I look at Mrs. Van Dyne and I see her going outside and going into the fray again, I think she is black, she will get double hurt and that’s how brave she is. That’s one of the things I use for my character to move forward. She’s such a brave fucking woman, why am I being a coward over here? You can’t know something until you know it. Because I’m playing Kate, I have a very clear journey through the play of learning that there’s more. And once you know something, you can’t unknow it. I think that’s what’s so exciting about the storytelling in this. I think that our storytelling is powerful—what story we are telling, specifically.
 

Crystal: I definitely have to thank Barbara Gaines and Ron West, our writer and director, for allowing us the time to work through this process. We have a huge play to learn, we didn’t have that much time to do it. We also have two plays to learn, because of the frame of a play within a play. It’s still being developed every day. So to be able to alot for those times where we can have these conversations as we’re having now, and be very specific and clear about the weight of these situations and the way we want to play these things here—it’s a balancing act. Truly, knowing the mothers who have come before us and all of their accomplishments and their sacrifices and their triumphs … all of that is what lies beneath the foundation of this play.
 

Crystal Lucas Perry, Alexandra Hendrikson

(Liz Lauren)

 

Kelly: What do you hope the audience experiences with this show?
 

Crystal: Always, for me, I hope it starts conversation. I think there are so many things to talk about after you see this show. Whether it’s about how you had so much fun watching these women…
 

Alex: It is funny, it’s really funny!
 

Crystal: Thirteen women onstage at one time. We were just talking about how we’re pretty sure there isn’t another production with thirteen women onstage in America right now. That’s a beautiful thing. All of these characters would be men. So there’s a celebration of that! There’s a celebration over these women playing a part in the 19th Amendment! But also Alex’s character’s journey—not just as Kate, but as Mrs. Harrison—is that she goes through a change. One of her lines is “people change” and again, it’s also what Olivia says. The more we educate ourselves, the more information we have about what is happening and what we can do to be a part of that—how we’re hurting, and how we’re helping. You could say the same about the environment: ultimately, the more we know, the more we can contribute. I believe that everyone who comes to the theater wants to be a part of something.
 

Olivia: Also, I hope the audience sees how things aren’t so black and white. Growing up in our safe millennial bubble, we have to realize things can be confusing and muddy. It won’t always be all good or always bad. Coming away from this production, I’ve laughed, but there are other parts I’m not really okay with. Why is that? You have to realize the world is not so clear-cut, so where do you fit into that? How do you have a conversation about that? I think that’s what I come away looking at.
 

Crystal: You’ll meet this women and see little glimpses of who they are and their backgrounds— whether it be religious, or racial, or a stance—but no matter what, they’ve come together for this cause. No matter what they are, there is something bigger than them. For the audience to see that, to see it was happening during that time, and to have it mirror what’s happening now—to know it’s possible, it still exists, that things do matter. It’s an important reminder for people.
 

Alex: I like looking out into the ground. One night, I was doing the final monologue. I saw this woman elbow her husband at a certain point. I guess I want women to feel seen. I hope men can see their women feel seen and support women talking. It’s just an opportunity to say hi, we see you. There’s one moment where Barbara had given me the direction, to be Kate at the end and do the submission speech, but let Mrs. Harrison push against that. I almost felt like I saw ghosts last night. Because there are posters of suffragettes, but then I saw my mother, and my grandmother, and little me, and the little mess of people in the audience, and their mothers and grandmothers—and I’m wearing my grandmother’s ring in this, so it feels like these generations of women who have supported and loved each other. There’s something beautiful about women from 2017 playing women from 1919, playing men from the 1590s. You feel the ghosts. Theater is a tradition where you feel the ghosts anyway; you feel this communal, tribal vibe of coming together to tell a story at the end. There’s this moment of the campfire and our mothers and our grandmothers holding hands across millennia, and it’s beautiful.
 

 

 

Crystal Lucas-Perry makes her Chicago debut at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Off-Broadway credits include Bull in a China Shop (Lincoln Center Theater); Little Children Dream of God (Roundabout Theatre); Bastard Jones (The Cell Theatre); The Convent of Pleasure(Cherry Lane Theatre); Storm Still: A King Lear Adaptation (Brooklyn Yard Theatre); Devil Music (Ensemble Studio Theatre); and The Wedding Play (The Tank Theatre). Regional credits include A Sign of the Times (Goodspeed Musicals); Far from Heaven, A Streetcar Named Desire, Finding Robert Hutchens, and When You’re Here (Williamstown Theatre Festival). Film credits include Mimesis 2, Frank and Azalee Austin, and Roulette. Ms. Lucas-Perry is also a solo artist and continues to compose, produce, and perform her original music at venues across the country. She received her BA from Western Michigan University’s College of Fine Arts and her MFA from New York University’s Tisch Graduate Acting Program.
 

Alexandra Henrikson makes her Chicago debut at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Broadway credits include Larry David’s Fish in the Dark and The Snow Geese (Manhattan Theatre Club). Off-Broadway and her off-off Broadway credits include: We Play for the Gods (Women’s Project Theater); Bones in the Basket (The Araca Group); Hell House (St. Ann’s Warehouse); Commedia dell’Artichoke (Gene Frankel Theatre); The Maids (Impure Artists); and Much Ado About Nothing (Smith Street Stage). Her independent film works include: Towheads, Love Like Gold, and Here We Are in the Present … Again. Regional credits include: the world premiere of Steve Martin’s Meteor Shower (The Old Globe); Ironbound (Helen Hayes nomination, Round House Theatre); Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls (Suzi Bass Award – Best Ensemble, Alliance Theatre); and productions with California Shakespeare Theater and the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. Ms. Henrikson received a BFA in theater from New York University and an MFA in acting from Yale University.
 

Olivia Washington makes her Chicago debut at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. She has appeared off Broadway as Laura in The Glass Menagerie (Masterworks Theater Company) and in Caucasian Chalk Circle (Stella Adler Studio of Acting). Her regional credits include Clybourne Park (Hangar Theatre). Film and television credits include Lee Daniel’s The Butler and Mr. Robot. Ms. Washington received her BFA in drama from the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU.

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A Conversation with Orion Stephanie Johnstone

Orion Johnstone

 

Upon entering Rattlestick Theatre for my scheduled conversation, an air of freeing and loving spirit came over me as I look up to see Orion Stephanie Johnstone ready to greet me. Once in awhile, you connect with someone so inspiring, time flies by, and you forget you’ve only just met this person for the first time an hour before. I sat down with Orion, co-director of Diana Oh’s {my lingerie play} 2017: Installation #9: THE CONCERT AND CALL TO ARMS!!!!!!!!!, The Final Installation for a wide-ranging and impassioned conversation about their influences, their identity, giving power to marginalized voices, and what it means to “queer the world.”
 

 

Michelle Tse: Let’s start with your journey with Diana [Oh], and specifically with {my lingerie play}.
 

Orion Stephanie Johnstone: Well, first off, I’d like to clarify: Diana has been doing {my lingerie play} installations since 2014, and what we are talking about here is the 9th installation in 2017: the concert and call to arms!!!!!!!!!, yes, with nine exclamations points.
 

Diana is a brilliant, powerful force in the world and we have circled each other and held each other in huge mutual respect for years, but had not worked together until this project. She came to me and said, “You are the one that I need to co-direct this.” At first I was humbled, and I hesitated, and I asked a lot more questions because I’m a highly collaborative theater artist, not primarily a capital “D” director. I have loads of facilitation experience and other things and I’m very comfortable in leadership positions, but this is a different hat than I’ve ever worn. Diana said, I don’t need this experienced director; I need a spiritual leader of the room. I need someone who I trust will hold a space where we all can transcend shame together. As a sexuality educator, I am passionate about not just inviting individuals to transcend shame, but in deepening all of our understanding of how our personal shame is connected to intersecting and overlapping systems of oppression.
 

After many conversations where I was always honored to be asked but wanted to ask more questions to make sure that this was a fit, I said an enthusiastic, “Hell yes.” And I’m so grateful that I did. We’ve been working together pretty intensely since early summer.
 

Orion Johnstone

(Pedro Aijon Torres)

 

MT: I have to say that when I was here, I felt like it was the first time in a long time other than a couple things here and there, that I actually had the thought of, “This is what an inclusive space is.” It’s happened a couple times before, but never in theater, honestly. Can you talk about the vision and the preview process?
 

OSJ: The two central questions of my life are: Who and how might we be together, more bravely in light of our collective liberation? And how might I be consistently expanding who I mean when we say “we”? I keep trying to run hard and fast away from theater-making because I have so often run up against the “who and how we are together” being so secondary to hitting certain other marks, or to commodifying the soulfulness of what’s being created.
 

The invitation that Diana posed to me, essentially, is how do we live by those central questions, to embody our commitment to the idea that how we make is as important as what we make. How do we create a robust culture of courage and compassion, and care, and lead with that and trust that in every aspect of the process. There are always going to be things that are beyond our zones of awareness, but I’m done with feeling immobilized by that. I’m always so grateful when something is brought to my attention like, Oh, I haven’t actually been accountable to this person or this community in this. I think it’s easy to feel guilty and overwhelmed and shut down, but my prayer and intention for myself and for all of the work that I make is “May I embrace that we’re all on a continual learning journey about this, and to hear that feedback. Hold that with love and how might we expand, how might we do better, even knowing that nothing is going to be perfect.” I fiercely love Diana in her commitment to that, too!
 


(Jeremy Daniels)/ ({my lingerie play} 2014: Installation #5: 30 PEOPLE; Emma Pratte)/ (Jeremy Daniels)

 

MT: Feeding off of that and what we were talking about in an earlier conversation, you have the community choir for queer and trans folks, the dating app for kinky people, your sex and relationships coaching practice, and—
 

OSJ: —The alternative divinity school.
 

MT: Exactly, so a lot of your work centers around giving power to marginalized voices and people, so when you do come across someone that is maybe a straight white folk who considers themselves liberal and progressive, but maybe keeps asking the wrong questions. They want to learn, but you just keep hitting that same roadblock. Do you keep going back to them like, “Hey, that’s not cool, you got to do x, y, and z,” and at what point do you say, “Okay, I need to just maybe walk away from this situation,” focus on marginalized folks, then beam up that space as opposed to the education of that larger “we” that you were talking about?
 

OSJ: Thank you so much for that question and the many, many layers in it.
 

MT: I could’ve been a little more concise, but that’s what keeps me up.
 

OSJ: I share this question so much! First off, I think that I couldn’t get up in the morning if I didn’t believe that every human is capable of transformation. And also, I’m very exhausted. I’m very very angry. I’ve been learning about how to not shy away from expressing my anger and instead to deepen in learning how I might express my anger with love in a way that hopefully doesn’t diminish anybody else’s humanity, and also doesn’t diminish the very real violence and erasure that people I’m in community with and/or myself are experiencing.
 

Capitalism would have us believe the lie that there’s scarcity in terms of who can be liberated. Like, If we’re having racial justice we can’t be focused on trans justice right now. Bullshit. If we’re focused on trans justice, then we can’t be talking about disability rights, and so on and so on. That’s absolutely bullshit.
 

MT: The linear versus intersectionality, basically, right?
 

OSJ: Yeah, and if I truly believe that our liberation is collective, that absolutely must include cis white straight people, too. And also, I keep learning more about how and where I channel my energy day to day. At least right now, my energy is most channeled toward amplifying and co-liberating with marginalized folks, or rather, people who carry power that is not necessarily the most dominantly celebrated kind of power. More and more these days, I get honest about my capacity for conversations that are primarily educational, and I honor that that labor does not always have to be mine to do. I try to see where I can show up to do labor for other folks who can’t, knowing that my liberation is intimately bound with theirs. And I believe that, as a white person, I have a responsibility to have tough conversations with other white people. I realize that my answer is all over the map here. The big answer to your question is, it’s really fucking hard as I know you know, and it’s a continual navigation day to day.
 

MT: For some reason it reminds me of Maya Angelou, who talked about why she doesn’t hate her rapist. That she feels that we all have that within us. That we all have Hitler and Gandhi, basically within us, right?
 

OSJ: Yeah, yeah.
 

MT: It’s just a matter of how your life journey has made you access different nodes of those feelings and those wires within your head. When it’s so violent everyday you can’t help but be like, “Oh.”
 

OSJ: Can I … I want to respond just a little bit more to that other question.
 

MT: Please do.
 

Jeremy Daniel

(Jeremy Daniels)

 

OSJ: I’m 34 now. Until I was 22, I was a fundamentalist Evangelical Christian. Though I was always acting from a place that I understood to be compassion and care, I perpetuated Christian Supremacy and its ties to patriarchy and homophobia and transphobia and white supremacy. I mean, I still inevitably perpetuate oppression in a way that none of us are separate from. But having had a worldview and paradigm that is so extremely different from what I have now, I now have so much compassion for people’s journeys. At the same time, it’s not easy to hold to that compassion when people I know and love are experiencing such violence on a daily basis and there’s so much to be heavy-hearted about.
 

MT: I now have to take every other day off from watching even Vice news, because the saturation and violence and abuse is so rampant.
 

OSJ: Can I ask how you’re holding that question these days?
 

MT: I’ve now had a few white friends tell me, “Please just send them my way because I’m frustrated just hearing about what you had to deal with.” But lot of these moments come up when you’re not expecting it or when you’re the only person at the table who can answer the question. It’s quite painful to constantly be teaching empathy and essentially telling folks, “Hey, I matter as much as you.” I often come up against the moment of do I just shut up and order a drink, or do I just get up and scream, “Are you seriously only able to relate it back to yourself only?” It’s especially painful when you’re halfway into a conversation and they’ve agreed that, for example, white feminism is a problem, and that they’ve been doing the reading they need to, so you have an expectation. Then later on, they’ll say or mention something that is so exclusionary that my heart will just sink to my feet. Somedays I have to just be okay with, Okay, this is as much as I can affect today, here and now.
 

OSJ: That’s so real. Thank you for sharing that. I think of the times when I’ve been called in around the privileges that I carry as a white person. There have been times when folks have been really patient with me and asked me questions and stuck with me even at the expense of their spirit energy, and I have grown from that. And then there have been times when folks have been really, really angry at me, and me having to sit with that discomfort has also invited some necessary growth and transformation.
 

MT: I think for me, though, I always know that if I show emotion, especially anger and frustration, that other person would shut down completely. I’m exhausted, I can’t deal sometimes, but I can’t be shutting down and angry and not dealing with it because if I tell them to go away, they might never engage with that particular issue again. And that becomes another weight, especially when it comes to racism. That in itself is frustrating. There’s no one else around me that can take this mic right now and … It’s like, “Well, crap, what do I do?”
 

OSJ: Yes, yes. I hear and honor that and I wish that I had a simple answer and response. I think the only thing that I know to be true is how—well, I guess I hope to be true is—I hope that even when you or I, or anyone feels very alone and like they’re the only person that could have this conversation, that actually, that isn’t the case. That we do all hold it together. Whenever any of us can have capacity, that’s a good thing, and none of us has to have capacity all the time.
 

MT: Right, exactly.
 

OSJ: And by us, I mean: folks who have experienced the marginalization, folks who have feared for their literal safety while walking down the street, though that’s not a clear cut binary of those who have and those who haven’t. I feel like this is tricky territory.
 

MT: Those invisible marginalizations.
 

OSJ: It’s just wild.
 

MT: I have friends on a spectrum of disability or differently abled from you can’t see it at all, to being in a motorized scooter. And it’s painfully obvious that this city doesn’t cater to that well what so ever.
 

OSJ: New York City sucks in terms of access.
 

MT: All anyone has to do is spend a couple hours with someone differently abled. It’s bananas.
 

Jeremy Daniel

(Jeremy Daniels)

 

OSJ: Can I give a shout out?
 

MT: Yes, please do.
 

OSJ: My friend Bri just started a podcast called Power Not Pity—conversations with people about access and disabilities. I think it’s fabulous.
 

MT: Amazing. I’ll have to check that out.
 

OSJ: I have a lot to learn.
 

MT: Yeah, I’m definitely learning too. I don’t see the point in living if we don’t keep learning and challenging ourselves. For inclusion and representation though, my thought is that for a lot of folks, they see progression in the linear format, and our intersectional brains have an easier time seeing the interconnectedness.
 

OSJ: I love the thing that Lilla Watson said, you probably know it already: “If you have come to help me, you’re wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound with mine, then let us work together.” Thinking in terms of collective liberation doesn’t slow us down or cost us anything, actually it means that we’re on the only possible track to cultural transformation, I believe.
 

MT: There’s that media norm though, the progressions. In my head, the only way I can try to relate, is to try to see it from that other perspective of there’s white feminism, then there’s current day feminism—that’s a little bit intersectional—and then there’s what you’re talking about, which is what I subscribe to, trans-inclusive feminism.
 

OSJ: Or even trans-centered feminism.
 

MT: Oh, that’s even better, yes. Thank you. So I wondered if you could speak about that and the dangers of not being trans-centered, and for it to be happening alongside intersectional conversations, about race, gender and sexuality, about economics … On and on.
 

OSJ: Thank you, and I could go on for days. This is where my major point of exhaustion lies. First and foremost, it’s no secret that our transfeminine sisters and siblings of color face, by far, the highest risk of violence and discrimination out of anybody. And yet, even in so many wonderful, progressive spaces that I move in, there is often not only a learning curve that needs to happen, but an unwillingness to honor the identities of trans folks.
 

It’s so fucking sad and enraging to me when women, or anybody, feels like including transfeminine people in their feminism is taking something away from them. Again, that goes back to the lie of scarcity that capitalism would have us believe. That by including all women, trans and cis, that inclusion doesn’t mean we’re brushing under the rug that different women have different experiences. Women of different backgrounds and identities of all kinds—race, class privilege, ability—have very, very different experiences. And people are dying! It’s so sad to me when folks feel like that’s taking something away to be inclusive there.
 

It also breaks my heart that so much that the world has so very very very far to go in terms of even welcoming and fighting for the basic rights of binary trans men and women. So that in terms of non-binary trans folk across the gender spectrum—as I think you know, I am non-binary—we just brush that conversation under the rug or we just can’t even go there yet.
 

MT: It’s the progression of others versus the self.
 

OSJ: I also don’t believe that that’s linear.
 

MT: It’s not.
 

OSJ: And I truly believe that everyone, trans and cis, binary and non-binary, is more liberated when we hold this more expansive understanding of gender and gender complexity.
Jeremy Daniel

(Jeremy Daniels)

 

MT: Bringing you back to the show, as related to that point: there’s a phrase you and Diana use that I love so much—
 

OSJ: —Queer The World.
 

MT: Queer The World.
 

OSJ: I love Diana’s specific phrasing in the show. She says something like: “What ‘Queer the World’ means, to me, is not that everyone should be gay. Queer The World is direct confrontation, an unapologetic disruption of the lies that capitalist patriarchal cis heteronormative society would tell us.” That’s from Diana. I was like, “Hell yes!!”
 

MT: Oh, I’m so happy. I was so happy when that moment in the show manifested.
 

OSJ: Queer, to me, contains both ultimate celebratory welcome and wonder, like welcoming all of who you are, and also it simultaneously contains this bold fuck you, this unapologetic disruption. The word “queer” originally meant something that was askew of what is straight or capital “N” normative, and so “queering” is necessarily, by definition, questioning the norm, inviting discomfort. It takes courage to be together in this discomfort, in these big questions which unapologetically disrupt these lies and the pressure of the dominant stories of normativity. And of course then, queer is so much more than just who you are attracted to, queer is who you are accountable to.
 
MT: I do want to get back to something that keeps coming up, capitalism. You mentioned earlier stepping away a little bit from theater arts.
 

OSJ: Stepping away a lot from theater arts.
 

MT: I come from an industry that I saw to be even more oppressive than the theater environment. I was like, “What?” When I first started, I was like, at least this is somewhat fixable. But again, finances play a big role. Do you think that folks aren’t able to work in the theater and become theater artists unless they had some sort of external financial support system? I would guess economics would be—
 

OSJ: —By work in the theater, just to clarify, we’re talking about contemporary North American commercial and non-profit theater.
 

MT: Yeah, exactly. Even off Broadway.
 

Orion Johnstone

(Emma Pratte)

 

OSJ: I was in a great discussion today with the alternative divinity school that I co-created, and we were naming how we want to celebrate and lift up unpaid labor, the emotional labor that folks are doing on the team. We want to lift that up. And also, we want to acknowledge: Who has the privilege to have space and time do that unpaid labor? Like it’s no secret that so many unpaid internships in the arts are filled by folks who carry the privilege to be able to take that financial risk because of their external support system, and that that then carries over into who moves up beyond intern roles in the art world.
 

What you’ve asked is big and hard and important, and I’m inspired by so many models of community art making and how much I believe that culture and art making is a basic human right. Anything we’re making in this society is going to be navigating the systems that are broken in different ways to greater or lesser degrees. That’s why I’ve been running from theater. Not because I don’t believe in its transformative power, because I really do. I don’t believe that art is a luxury, I believe that art is a human right.
 

Personally, I try to orient by these three questions inspired by this Quaker philosopher, Parker Palmer: “To what extent am I honoring my gifts and capacities and limitations? To what extent am I honoring the needs and hungers in the world, and to what extent am I honoring the intersections between those things?” When I most deeply answer to that question, the answer for me lately is very rarely art making. The answer to me is usually soulful organizing, facilitation, and long term movement building. I love the thing that Grace Lee Boggs said … What a hero she was. One of the many powerful things she said was that we must do more than struggle against existing institutions, we need a philosophical spiritual transformation toward being more human human beings. All of the organizing work I do is leading with that and asking the big questions about what is the widespread cultural healing that needs to go instep in order for widespread systems to change towards more justice that needs to happen. I’ve been running from theater because can’t stomach making art unless the culture of the process honors all of what I’ve articulated here, and I’ve been so lucky lately to be asked to make a few things that do honor all of that, like Primer For a Failed Superpower with the TEAM and this show with Diana.
 

Jeremy Daniel

(Jeremy Daniel)

 

MT: Which is another huge hurdle, because I often say to people that I didn’t realize how the other half lived until Obama came along and by the fifth or sixth year, I was noticing that my friends of color and I were walking a little taller, talking a little louder, dreaming a little bigger. I remember when Fresh Off the Boat premiered, and after it was over, I thought to myself, “Holy shit, this is how white people watch TV?” It was a different form of soul crushing for me on November 9th and 10th, I think, than a lot of folks. I often say I’m not mad at what happened, I’m mad at how folks were reacting to it because I couldn’t believe they had no idea where they exist. Then it becomes every single day like, “Oh, you didn’t hear this that I said for how many years?” Every time a white friend was disappointed, it was a reminder that nothing I said came through. That’s been every day, I feel like, since November, and I sink a little lower each time.
 

And so with what Grace said, knowing that we need the spirituality but also knowing that for someone like me to know my history, my people’s history, whatever it is, is so hard to find. There’s so much erasure. Especially in the Asian community, where we’re already so different and diverse, yet lumped together. So even when there is representation, it’s not proper representation.
 

OSJ: Yes.
 

MT: So when you’re doing work on how to be spiritually transforming, how do you spiritually identify or go beyond the existing infrastructure, how do you even then discover … Are you actively defining in the moment or how much of it are you trying go back in history and try to reference something and try to … My point is, you’re always going to be referencing something whether you know it or want to or not.
 

OSJ: I bow to that question. I’m thinking of it in terms of what we’re building upon and who are we accountable to from the past as we’re building. We talk about that at the alternative divinity school, what is the intersection between the ancient and the emergent, the old and the new? And I think so much about how there are so many layers to the violence that White Supremacy does to all of us. Including so much violence toward folks who are not white, and also robbing white folks of their humanity and connection to breath and body. I think of my Polish ancestors, and how many Slavic, earth-based traditions were covered over by Catholicism. A lot of my work is listening for what violence White Supremacy has done to all people, and how can we reclaim and support the spirit there. There’s obviously so much, but I think about queer and trans ancestry so much. Like Marsha P. Johnson, may she rest in power.
 

MT: Oh, yes. I love her and the power she brought forth.
 

OSJ: Marsha P — This hat says, “pay it no mind,” and that’s what the P in Marsha P. Johnson, it stands for “pay it no mind.” “Pay it no mind” is what she purportedly said to a judge when the judge asked her about her gender. She’s one of the people I’m proud to call chosen ancestor. She and Silvia Rivera were supporting and holding space for homeless trans youth, even while they were both homeless themselves! I think it is absolutely essential to think about what lineages we are personally coming from and building upon and also in movement sense. And I love geeking out about what we’re building on.
 

MT: I want to do a quick aside here and talk about Alt*Div, since it keeps coming up. Can you tell our readers about it?
 

OSJ: Oh yes, absolutely! Alt*Div is an alternative divinity school for soulful community builders, rooted in anti-oppression and collective liberation. We believe our world is in spiritual and moral crisis, that we are more alone and less connected to what matters, and to each other, than ever before. Because of that, we urgently need communities, and community leaders, which foster, as Grace Lee Boggs says “more human human beings,” in order to meet the urgent crises of our time and be a part of widespread cultural healing and systems shift toward a more just world. In practical terms, it’s a self-directed, de-centralized learning community for folks who are interested in those things. We’re now in our second year, and we’ve got participants from many places around the world. Thanks for asking!
 

Pedro Aijon Torres

L to Right (Back to Front): Rocky Vega, Orion Stephanie Johnstone, Diana Oh, Justin Johnson, Jhanae Bonnick, Matt Park, Ryan McCurdy, Mei Ann Teo, and Corey Ruzicano. (Pedro Aijon Torres)

 

MT: I am so glad I asked. That’s so inspiring. Now, why should people come see your show? I know, that’s another hour but, maybe a sentence answer.
 

OSJ: For spiritual nourishment! And to catch the contagious aphrodisiac of courage.
 

MT: I love that. I love that so much.
 

OSJ: Aphrodisiac of courage is the primary spell that Diana intends us to cast with this piece. Diana is fucking extraordinary and courageous, and her perspectives are incredibly important … I just want everyone to hear her voice and her story, and see her incredible work. And to leave drenched in glitter and soul sweat!
 

MT: Me too. Thank you.
 

OSJ: Thank you, Michelle.
 
 

 

 

{my lingerie play} 2017: Installation #9, THE CONCERT AND CALL TO ARMS!!!!!!!!!, The Final Installation is a play, a protest, a concert, and an installation all at once. Through this concert-play, Diana and her band explore mainstream culture’s relationship to the body and the deep and complex dynamics that exist regarding sex and gender politics. This culminates in a genre-bending soulful rock and R&B concert-play and final installation of {my lingerie play} 2017: 10 underground performance installations in lingerie staged in an effort to provide a saner, safer, more courageous world for women, trans, queer, and non-binary humans to live in.
 

Orion Stephanie Johnstone is a theatermaker/organizer/sexuality educator/community minister/composer with a fierce commitment to our collective liberation. Their original music has been at venues including Joe’s Pub, the Bushwick Starr, HERE, 3LD, and CSC. They were the assoc. MD of War Horse (1st nat’l tour), and they are music supervisor for the TEAM’s Primer for a Failed Superpower, alongside director Rachel Chavkin. They co-host the podcast Sex For Smart People, they are the chief director of content for KinkedIn: a new dating app for kinky people, they recently co-created a new alternative divinity school for soulful community builders, and they studied justice ministries at Auburn Seminary. www.orionjohnstone.com

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A Conversation with Duane Boutté, Michael Laurence and Thom Sesma

Duane Boutté, Michael Laurence, Thom Sesma

 

Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, and Count Leo Tolstoy are trapped together in a room. That’s the basic premise for Scott Carter’s play, The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord, which recently opened at the Cherry Lane Theater as part of Primary Stage’s season. I recently sat down for an engaging conversation with the three talented, charming, and intelligent actors who bring Jefferson, Dickens, and Tolstoy to life.

 

 

Margarita Javier: I love the title of the play: The Gospel According to Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens and Count Leo Tolstoy: Discord. What can you tell us about it?
 

Duane Boutté: Where to begin?
 

Thom Sesma: How much do you know about it, firstly?
 

Margarita: I know the playwright, Scott Carter, found out that these different people had written their versions of the gospels, so he wrote an imagined meeting between the three of them in the afterlife. And then they get into a philosophical discussion, all their ideals clashing.
 

Thom: Thanks for explaining it; now it’s all so much clearer to me! [laughs]
 

Margarita: But how would you describe it?
 

Michael Laurence: That’s a pretty good summary. They’re trapped in a limbo, sort of No Exit style.
 

Duane: And they’re all on a quest to find out why the three of them are together, and that ends up being very, I think, powerful, when they finally do figure it out.
 

Thom: They’re three very cerebral, self-sufficient individuals, and this meeting of the minds is between three very self-sufficient, powerful egos who can’t help but result in conflict, without effort.
 

Michael: And it’s a conflict that’s sort of ignited by the discovery—and I don’t think this is a spoiler because it happens pretty early on, the title kind of sums it up anyway—but it turns out that they all edited a version of the New Testament. And so that sends them hurdling into a clash of ideas around theology.
 

Thom: That’s the premise. But essentially, to reduce it to the most basic idea, it’s about three guys trapped in a room who aren’t getting along.
 

Duane: It’s about an afterlife, it’s about salvation, it’s about Christianity.
 

Thom: It’s about doubt, skepticism, and faith. Faith at work even when you don’t realize it.
 

Duane Boutté, Michael Laurence, Thom Sesma
 

Margarita: How much did you already know about the characters you’re playing—Jefferson, Tolstoy, or Dickens—before you embarked on this project?
 

Duane: I think we all knew a little about these people, as much as anyone else. I think we’re all pretty well-read as individuals. We know about Jefferson from history, we know about Tolstoy because we all saw a miniseries of War and Peace at some point in our life, we’ve all read Christmas Carol or seen Oliver! the Musical. But Scott Carter, the author, in addition to being incredibly read and well-informed and deep into the research for this play, is also the most generous playwright I think I’ve ever worked with in sharing his research. So about three months before we started working, we all started getting packages in the mail.
 

Michael: A tome every week. Giant biographies.
 

Duane: More reading than you could ever do in a lifetime.
 

Margarita: And did you actually read all of it?
 

Duane: We did our best. [laughs]
 

Margarita: Have you read the gospels that they each wrote?
 

All three: Yes.
 

Duane: That was the easy part.
 

Thom: Those are relatively short.
 

Michael: He sent me, I think, six biographies of Jefferson, and each one of them is a doorstopper, a 900-page tome.
 

Thom: I got two biographies of Tolstoy, a stack of essays, several videos, a documentary on Tolstoy’s life, a video adaptation of War and Peace, a new translation of War and Peace, a new translation of Anna Karenina, and a number of other translations of his fiction.
 

Duane: I got about the same. I got two biographies, I got his notes on Dickens’ American tour, I got three novels, short stories, and videos. We just sort of take it from where you are, and pull what to use as your research for that week.
 

Michael: I think he told me in a note after the third or fourth package arrived, he said, “I’m helping you to build the Jefferson pavilion in the Scott Carter wing of the Laurence library.” Just a giant shelf of books and videos. [laughs]
 

Margarita: Is accuracy important to this play in terms of being true to these people or are there liberties taken?
 

Duane: It’s important for a way in, and then the play is the play. Things are taken at face value of the play, but also knowing that people are coming into the experience with maybe some knowledge of perhaps one more than the other two. So there is a responsibility, but when it comes down to it, the play tells you what you need to know.
 

Duane Boutté, Michael Laurence, Thom Sesma
 

Margarita: How has it been working with the director, Kimberly Senior?
 

Thom: Kimberly’s terrific. It’s a great room to be in. First of all, to be with a couple of incredibly generous actors, guys who are fun to spend time with. Kimberly’s the same way. She makes the room a very safe place to do your work. I’ve heard it said that 75% of a director’s job is getting people on the same page and then getting out of the way. And she has done that since day one. She’s just tremendous.
 

Duane: She gives us a lot of room for exploration.
 

Thom: And she challenges us, too, to not take the easy way out.
 

Margarita: You’re currently in previews. How has the audience response been so far?
 

Duane: It’s been good. They’re laughing with us a lot, which is I think part of the hopes for the play: that people are drawn by the characters, and their humor, and then they’re more inclined to follow the more philosophical aspects of the play.
 

Margarita: I’m interested in talking about the casting. I know the casting notice specified that it was open to all ethnicities. Even though these were historically white men, the casting doesn’t necessarily correspond to that. Is this something that Scott has always intended? Was it just for this production? Is it something that makes any difference in the way it’s performed, or does it not matter?
 

Michael: I’m the “necessarily” in that sentence [laughs]. There have been a few other productions of this play, and I think this is the first production that is not three white actors playing three white dead men. And I think that was purposeful; I think that was in line with Kimberly’s vision of the play in New York, in a post-Hamilton theatrical landscape.
 

Duane: Kimberly has expressed that she’s grown tired of seeing and working on plays that don’t reflect the world that she lives in. And along with that, she’s wanted to find opportunities in things that she’s now working on. So this is not just this play, this is something that’s important to her going forward in her work. She wants to find ways for the plays to reflect the people she knows. So she came into this with the desire to have a cast of mixed races and really had to hold out for that. It didn’t turn out for her in the initial casting. She had to really be patient. And she was, and I’m grateful that she was.
 

Thom: You know what’s been really lovely? It’s that we’ve been performing now for a full week, right? A full week of performances. We have an African American playing Dickens, we have an Asian American playing Tolstoy, and a white guy playing Jefferson. I haven’t heard one single comment by anyone about the diverse landscape that’s onstage right now. Which is great, which means it doesn’t matter.
 

Margarita: It doesn’t. And I imagine it’s a more sophisticated audience going to this show. Because there have been comments about that kind of thing in other productions, even Hamilton had a bit of backlash.
 

Duane: I think in Hamilton, and also in this play, it adds relevance for me, because we all have these ideas of Thomas Jefferson now, who in our company is the one role played by a white actor. And he’s now running in relation to actors of a different background, which I feel from the inside, I carry who I am in everything I do. So I think it informs Dicken’s reaction to Jefferson, Dicken’s reaction to America. Dickens did visit America, twice, and had strong opinions about slavery and class. I think that for me as an African American male, it’s easy for me to adopt his perceptions, because I agree with them.
 

Michael: At least one of the themes of the play, one of the major themes, is race relations. I think, in a way, it brings another layer into the room and the experience for the audience watching this play, because the legacy of race relations, the legacy of slavery is threaded into the biography of Jefferson and Dickens, and in a more indirect way Tolstoy as well, because there’s a sort of analog there with Russian serfs and Tolstoy’s relationship to people “who are owned,” as Dickens says in the play. So I think that, whether it’s pointed to or not, there’s an added layer there of some kind.
 

Duane Boutté, Michael Laurence, Thom Sesma
 

Margarita: Why is it okay for a person of color to play a historically white person, but it’s not ok for a white actor to play a historical person of color?
 

Duane: If you look at the canon of American plays, and you’re going to give a ratio of how many roles there are in produced theater that call for white characters, compared to the roles and opportunities available for black characters, or Asian characters, who are more underrepresented, etc., and how many people in this country whose stories aren’t being told. So for that reason, it’s just not time. We’re not there yet. When will we be there? I can’t say. But it’s not time yet.
 

Thom: To put it another way, to use this as a point of departure: To see a white person playing, for instance, the King of Siam, indicates white ownership of that character. Of that role. In other words, it’s an extension of a kind of slavery, if you will, to put it very crudely. That somehow it’s still ok to be colonial. When in fact it’s not. Why is it correct in the other way? Because it’s the only way we can give the public greater exposure. It’s interesting also, the thing about Hamilton, I just have to point this out, in terms of people’s backlash towards Hamilton: Hamilton is about people of color telling the story of the white person. “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story.” That’s what that’s about, so that’s why the backlash of show is missing the point.
 

Margarita: I agree and I feel the same way because I’m Latina and historically a lot of famous Latino roles have been played by white actors and like you say it’s kind of ownership of your role, but it’s also misrepresentation because then it’s portrayed in a way that’s not accurate to our real experience and that furthers the divide and people’s misconceptions about our cultures.
 

Thom: It’s not just ownership of the role; that minimizes what I’m trying to say. It’s ownership of the race. Ownership of the culture. And that’s what perpetuates more than anything else. You know, there’s a huge controversy right now over the casting of a production of Evita. Which is interesting because ethnically, Eva Perón didn’t have any Latina blood in her. She was Basque and French, right? Or Italian. And yet they never even saw Latina women for the role simply on the basis of their talent; they were excluded because they were Latina.
 

Margarita: What do you think this play is telling us, why is it relevant to us now in this moment of time?
 

Michael: For some of the reasons we were just talking about, in terms of how America is haunted by its own past.
 

Duane: Kimberly came into our dressing room a few nights ago, and said that a friend of hers thanked her for this play because it’s about things that we don’t get to see and discuss in the theater. Religion. Christianity. God. Atheism. And for that reason I find it unique, important. It’s a thing that we avoid because it’s a very tender topic for a lot of people. And it’s potentially divisive.
 

Michael: I also think it’s enormously relevant in the sense that America, our country is in the throes of an existential crisis right now. An identity crisis, the culture wars of the ‘80s have reared their heads again. The political divide is deeper than it’s been since the 1960s. More savage, more violent. People are more deeply entrenched and tribal in their thinking and their politics. Not to talk about it only from the Jefferson side of things, but I feel that responsibility every night, of walking out onstage and playing one of the great Presidents in our country’s history who, for all of his flaws, which are unmasked appropriately in this play, bring those questions, even just in terms of separation of Church and state which, again, is something that is also tearing questions around that issue. And here we’re reminded that the origins, the founding of our nation, that there was an experiment there, a new experiment in the world, about separating those things and why that was and how that came about. That’s important to see.
 

Thom: The fact that Christianity has been hijacked by the radical right, has been turned into a truncheon that they can beat anyone with, is frightening. Because it’s not just the origins of our country, it’s the origins of Christianity itself, which is based on charity, which is rooted in thought and kindness and suffering. It goes back to what Duane was saying, what Kimberly told us about her friend. Generally, there are people in the theater who tend to be progressive; left-leaning people don’t want to talk about those things. Don’t want to talk about faith. Don’t want to talk about belief. They will talk about skepticism. And I think that most of those people, like these characters, are more spiritually oriented than they actually realize.
 

Duane: And it’s not a play just for Christians. It really isn’t, you know?
 

Michael: It’s relevant too to how essential it is to see three cerebral, great figures who shaped history, each of them in their prominent ways, discussing religion and politics and being nuanced and thoughtful in ways beyond 140 characters.
 

Thom: And revealing themselves not as icons, but as humans. Deeply flawed, fallible, passionate humans.
 

Duane Boutté, Michael Laurence, Thom Sesma
 

Margarita: What are your personal artistic influences? Anything that moves you or any particular work or artist that has really motivated you throughout your career?
 

Duane: Tough question.
 

Michael: For me there’s almost too many influences to name here, but I will say, something that is very moving to me personally is I have always been steeped in the lore of Off-Broadway. When I was a teenager, I was meeting Beckett and Albee. And the Cherry Lane, which is ground zero for a lot of those early Off-Broadway experiments of the ‘60s and ‘70s, for me, it’s such a joy to be performing there.
 

Thom: I’m so glad to hear you say that because I feel exactly the same way. I was telling someone else about that. You can have a career, for 35, almost 40 years, on Broadway and TV and film, but man, I feel like I’ve arrived. At this extraordinary, legendary place. To “trod these boards,” as they say, where Beckett had his American premiere.
 

Michael: You walk into the stage door and there’s a giant poster of Beckett looming on the wall. And Sam Shepherd and Irene Fornés. Albee.
 

Thom: We just let the ghosts take care of us. [laughs]
 

Margarita: Since you mentioned Beckett, Michael, I wanted to tell you I saw Krapp 39.
 

Michael: You did? Oh my God, wow!
 

Margarita: Yeah, I studied Beckett in grad school.
 

Michael: Did you really?
 

Margarita: Yeah! I saw your play and I loved it.
 

Michael: Oh thank you!
 

Margarita: Are you still writing?
 

Michael: My last play was called Hamlet in Bed, it was at Rattlesnake. And then last summer I took both pieces, Krapp 39 and Hamlet in Bed to the Edinburgh festival, so that was a dream come true. And I’m working on a new play now. Writing—I don’t want to say I love it more than acting, but…
 

Margarita: Does writing inform your acting? Or does your performing inform your writing?
 

Michael: I’m sure it does in many ways I’m not great at articulating. But I’m sure it does.
 

Margarita: And Duane, you’re a composer and a director. What’s it like for you, as a director, when you’re performing for someone else?
 

Duane: I have to turn it off. Absolutely turn it off. One of the things that I always tell myself is “your director is very smart,” no matter who I’m working with. The other person is sitting on the outside looking at things that I’m not. It’s not my job to look at. So listen to your director. Always say yes, and maybe eventually you’ll figure out why you’ve been asked to do what you’ve been asked to do. It’s nice to just focus on one character and that character’s track and journey, and let someone else be responsible for all the rest of it.
 

Duane Boutté, Michael Laurence, Thom Sesma
 

Margarita: What, if anything, is your dream role?
 

Duane: One of my favorite playwrights is August Wilson. I’ve only been in one of his plays.
 

Margarita: Which one?
 

Duane: Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. That was in Denver during graduate school. It was a company production, but I was a student. So I would love to do some of his plays. They, for me, are right up there with O’Neill and the other greats. And I’ve had a good time with Shakespeare; there are certainly a lot of those roles that I hope I don’t outage.
 

Margarita: Which one? Name one.
 

Duane: Hamlet. I’d love to play Hamlet.
 

Margarita: You can still play Hamlet!
 

Thom: You know, I’ve gotten to play a lot of my dream roles. I’ve been very blessed in that way. And I know it sounds like such a cliché, but my dream role is invariably the one I’m working on. It really is. Because it has invariably all the same chewiness—you still have to be truthful, you still have to be naked, eager to work what teaches you. Willing to follow where it leads.
 

Michael: I’ve been lucky to play many dream roles, and there are many more that I’m a little long in the tooth to play as well. I have always wanted to play Jerry in The Zoo Story. I actually auditioned for Albee for a production of that, and I didn’t get it because I think I was trying too hard. But we ended up having a nice long conversation about Beckett. More than anything these days, what I love doing is working on new plays. So my dream role maybe hasn’t been written yet. I can tell you there are so many playwrights that I would love to work with. A couple of years ago in one season I worked with both Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Sam Hunter, who are two of the most brilliant playwrights I know. So I would eagerly jump into anything, any worlds that they create. Annie Baker, I would love to be in an Annie Baker play. We’re lucky to be living in an era of so many extraordinarily gifted American playwrights. And you know, if none of that works out, I’ll go and write a dream role for myself.
 

Margarita: Discord is currently running through October 22. Why should people come see this play?
 

Duane: Because it’s good. And it has heart.
 

Michael: And funny. It’s very funny.
 

Thom: Because there’s nothing better than a good night at the theater. What are the six most beautiful words in the English language? “We are going to the theater.”
 
 

 

 

Duane Boutté (Charles Dickens) played Harlem Renaissance artist “Bruce Nugent, young” in Rodney Evans’ film Brother to Brother, and “Bostonia” in Nigel Finch’s Stonewall (’96). Boutté appeared on Broadway in Parade and Carousel (Lincoln Center), and Off-Broadway in The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin and as “Louis Chauvin” in The Heliotrope Bouquet by Scott Joplin and Louis Chauvin (Playwrights Horizons).

Michael Laurence (Thomas Jefferson) previously appeared at Primary Stages in Opus and The Morini Strad. Also: Talk Radio (Broadway), Hamlet in Bed (playwright/performer,Rattlestick), Appropriate (Signature), The Few (Rattlestick), Genet’s Splendid’s (La Colline, Paris), Poison (Origin), Krapp 39 (playwright/performer, DramaDesk nomination), “John Proctor” in The Crucible (Hartford), Starbuck in The Rainmaker (Arena). TV: “Shades of Blue” (recurring), “Damages,” “The Good Wife,” “Elementary,” others.

Thom Sesma (Count Leo Tolstoy) has appeared in leading roles on and Off-Broadway, and at some of the nation’s leading regional theaters, including The Old Globe, Yale Rep, Cincinnati Playhouse, Arena Stage, McCarter, and Baltimore Centre Stage. Most recent credit: John Doyle’s acclaimed revival of Pacific Overtures (Classic Stage Company.) Television: “Madam Secretary,” “Jessica Jones,” “Gotham,” “The Good Wife,” “Person Of Interest,” “Over/Under,” “Single Ladies,” and more. Proud member AEA and SAG-AFTRA.

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A Conversation with Joe Breen

Joe Breen

 

On a breezy evening in Hell’s Kitchen, I met up with my tall, well-spoken and charming friend Joe Breen, a NYC based playwright whose latest play, All My Love, Kate, is being presented as part of this year’s ESPA Drills at Primary Stages. It tells the love story of two men whose relationship is challenged when one of them enlists to fight in World War II. I attended an early reading of the play last year, and found it to be deeply moving, surprisingly funny, politically relevant, and full of sharp, witty dialogues. I sat down with Joe over wine and hummus for a long and engaging conversation about his play, the things they don’t teach you about World War II, the LGBT community, authentic representation in the arts, and our mutual obsession for musical theater.

 

 

Margarita Javier: Tell us a little about yourself, your background, and where you come from.
 

Joe Breen: I grew up in Western Massachusetts, in the Berkshires. I was exposed to a lot of great theater out there. I moved to New York City in 2002 as an actor, singer, and dancer in the musical-theater world. Somewhere along the line, I started writing.
 

MJ: Why do you write?
 

JB: It was something that I never really put much thought into; it was something that I always just did. A lot of times, it would be something you could do at 3 o’clock in the morning, or in between acting jobs. It was something I did for fun, but I never thought much about doing anything with. And then, within the past few years, I really started taking it very seriously and looking at what I was doing. And here I am.
 

MJ: Why did you suddenly start taking it seriously?
 

JB: Once I made the decision to stop performing, I decided to go back to school. While I was in school, the academic part of my brain was being stimulated in a way that it never had before. I didn’t go right to college after high school. The artistic side of myself was not being fed at all. So I found myself writing to fulfill that, and the more I wrote, the more I actually started believing in it and wanting to do something with it.
 

MJ: What kind of stuff were you writing? Was it always theater or did you write anything else?
 

JB: I used to write a lot of short plays. I wrote some screenplays in my early 20s. I wrote a novel—an unpublished novel. And then a play that I had started over 10 years ago, which I had worked on on and off, I really started focusing on getting that finished and getting it where I wanted it to be. I felt the drive to create something. I started to realize that I got much more fulfillment out of writing something and creating something, and creating a world, than I did in actually performing. That was a big sort of “Aha!” moment to me.
 

MJ: You mentioned a play that you had been working on for 10 years. What was that?
 

JB: It’s called The Hands that Hold Us. It was a finalist for the Princess Grace Playwriting Fellowship last year. And then it was selected as part of Capital Repertory Theatre’s NEXT ACT! New Play Summit. There were four plays chosen to get staged readings, which took place last October.
 

MJ: It’s amazing that you just decided to do this seriously and already you’re a finalist for awards and getting staged readings.
 

JB: It was. And I have to give a lot of credit to a company called The Bechdel Project which produced the first table read. I sent the play to a friend of mine, Maria Maloney, who’s one of the founders of the company. And she said, “Let’s hear this out loud!”
 

MJ: Why theater specifically? What draws you to theater as an art form?
 

JB: As far as writing for theater, I think it’s because theater is where I’m the most comfortable.
 

MJ: Why?
 

JB: Because I know it. It’s something I’ve always done. As a kid, I was in productions of The Music Man and Mame—you know, community theater.
 

MJ: So you fell in love with it as a young kid.
 

JB: Yeah. And as I evolved and became a professional actor, writing theater seemed like the natural next step.
 

MJ: Who and what would you say are your artistic influences? Who are your favorite writers, favorite playwrights, and favorite pieces of theater?
 

JB: I’m not gonna lie; I’m a big musical-theater dork. So when I’m asked, “What are your favorite productions?” I sit there and name a bunch of classic musicals.
 

MJ: Like what?
 

JB: Man of La Mancha, A Little Night Music … I love Sunday in the Park with George. Most recently, Bandstand. I have to plug Bandstand, one of the greatest things I’ve seen in a long time. I also loved The Visit.
 

MJ: An underrated masterpiece!
 

JB: Yes. That’s where my heart is.
 

MJ: But you mostly write straight theater.
 

JB: Yes, I only write straight theater. When it comes to playwrights, I love Tennessee Williams. I love Eugene O’Neill. Sort of the big classic Americana plays.
 

MJ: I’m also a big theater lover, and I sometimes go see a piece of theater that makes me go, “Yes! This is why I want to work in theater!” Have you had moments like that? What’s the earliest experience you had where you were like, “This is what I want to do”?
 

JB: I grew up watching a lot of old musical films. Also, growing up in the Berkshires, we had Williamstown Theatre Festival, Berkshire Theatre Festival, and Barrington Stage Company. In the summer, there would be summer stock—The Mac-Haydn Theatre which is a small summer-stock theater that only does musicals. Because that was my big love, my uncle, who also loved musicals, had season subscriptions, and brought me all summer long to Mac-Haydn Theatre. When you see a production of The King and I on a tiny, round stage and Anna’s in a hoop skirt, there’s no room for anyone else. And in my head as a kid, not being able to separate or see the difference between that and Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr in the film—there’s something magical about that.
 

Joe Breen
 

MJ: Tell us about Primary Stages and ESPA. How did you become involved with them?
 

JB: Kimberly Faith Hickman, one of the founding members of the Bechdel Project, was an assistant director at MTC for Of Good Stock, written by Melissa Ross. Kimberly had said that The Hands That Hold Us reminded her a lot of Ross’s style, so she connected us through email. Ross and I had a little back and forth over email; I was asking for advice because, like I said, I was very new to this. I’d had some short plays produced over the years, but never a full length play. I was very much out to sea. With the short plays, you can enter them to random festivals here and there. But when suddenly you have a large two-hour-plus play, it’s different. So Melissa, who actually teaches at ESPA, suggested I take a class there. She said they have a lot of amazing instructors, so I signed up for a first draft class with Bess Wohl who wrote Small Mouth Sounds, and that’s where I really started working on All My Love, Kate.
 

MJ: And All My Love, Kate is being featured as part of this year’s ESPA Drills. How did that come about?
 

JB: The ESPA Drills happen every year, and the rules are, in order to submit, it has to be a full-length finished play that has been developed in some way at Primary Stages. Over the span of a year, I had taken four classes there and had worked on All My Love, Kate. So I submitted it—it’s a blind submission process—and they got back to me and said I was a semi-finalist, then a finalist, and then I was one of the four plays chosen.
 

MJ: So yours is one of only four plays chosen. Do you know anything about the other playwrights in the series: Liz Appel, Jacqueline Bircher, and Daniel Loeser?
 

JB: Yes. Primary Stages ESPA sent us to a house in the Catskills on a retreat and I was very nervous because you know there’s always one person—especially when you get a group of artists together—there’s always going to be that one person that makes you want to bash your head against the wall. But there was not. Other than the four of us, there was Sarah Matteucci, the Associate Director of Education of ESPA, and playwright Crystal Skillman, who was our faculty advisor. The four of us connected so quickly. We’re very different people, very different writers, with very different processes, very different styles. The four plays are very different, but we’re all very supportive of each other. I know that sounds ridiculous, people say that all the time, but it really is true. We keep saying we were shocked at how well we jelled, being as different as we all are.
 

MJ: So, All My Love, Kate. What is it about? What was the inspiration? How did you come up with it?

JB: At the core, it is a love story. It takes place in the 1940s right before and during World War II. It’s about two men—they live together, they have a life together, they’re in a committed relationship. Then the war happens and one of them joins the Air Corps in a station in the Philippines. That’s the basic plot. It’s about two men who want to be together, but can’t. But on a larger scale, what I hope that I’m doing is examining the idea of what it means to be an American, what it means to be a patriot, and whether or not you can be those things if you don’t fit into the definition that has been set up by the government, by the country, by society.
 

MJ: Right, how do people who don’t conform to heteronormative standards fit into the narrative of American history?
 

JB: In the ‘40s it was a different mindset when talking about war. Nowadays, many of us look at war in a very cynical light. In the ‘40s, when America went to war, if you were a man, you joined up. You didn’t question it. You just did. And to be an American hero—a male American hero—you went to war, you fought for your country, you put your life on the line. And as for women—gender roles blurred a little bit in the ‘40s for women. Because suddenly they were allowed to go to the workforce to replace the men who were fighting. Various branches of the military had all-female divisions. The women, they had secretarial jobs, they worked the radios, they did things that were not combative, but the women were fighting for the country all the same. It all leads to the inspiration of my play—and it’s the women who were at home, who didn’t join the ranks, who didn’t necessarily go to the factories—they had their own part to play, too. To be an American hero as a woman meant to sacrifice your husband, your brother, your son. And if they died, then you suddenly became part of a group that was called the Gold Star Wives. And they were held up almost with reverence, almost like the Virgin Mary, because of all they had sacrificed. There’s actually a song in Bandstand (to bring it back), “Who I Was,” that Laura Osnes sings about what her life was like before she became a Gold Star widow. And so that whole idea of these women in a way being glorified for sacrificing the men in their lives, I started to wonder how many Gold Star men and women there were who went unacknowledged, because at that time men and women who were gay in the military service could not admit to having those loves at home, could not tell you, they couldn’t even admit who was waiting for them at home.
 

MJ: Why was that important for you to explore?
 

JB: In many ways, I think we as an LGBT community take for granted—I mean, this is such an old, gay man way of like, “Oh if the kids only knew!”—but we take for granted, especially in this city, the freedoms and the rights that we have. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell has been overturned; that’s amazing. But now we’re in the process of our President saying that Trans soldiers are not allowed to fight, cannot be a part of the military, cannot voluntarily fight and die for their country. I started writing this play before that happened, but it’s taken on a very interesting timeliness, which surprised me, because my writing tends to be a throwback when it comes to “queer theater”—and I hate that term.
 

MJ: Why do you hate that term?
 

JB: I find it reductive. Because as soon as a play—not even a play, but a film, a novel, anything—if the voice that is highlighted is a gay character, a black character, an Asian character, or a Latino character, it suddenly becomes “a gay play,” “a black play,” etc. And there’s this weight and this extra expectation that is placed on them. And I think as gay writers, as far as theater goes, what we write has tended to be very timely. It talks about a specific experience in a point in time. You look at Tennessee Williams, he was writing gay men. They were self-hating closeted Southern gay men. But at the time, that was a very true experience for the average gay man. Now we look at Tennessee Williams’ plays as period pieces. We then moved on to Angels in America and Torch Song Trilogy, or Torch Song as it’s called now, which I cannot wait for. And those plays were very specific to the gay experience of those times. Very of the time—what the gay community was dealing with in that moment. Although, if you look at Torch Song, a character in that wants to get married and have children, which was very forward-thinking. We weren’t, I don’t think, actively fighting for marriage equality when that play was written.
 

MJ: I think the LGBT community was, but it wasn’t at the forefront of the narrative.
 

JB: Right, there were other battles to fight. But now when those plays are done, they’re looked at as period pieces. Now we have plays like Dada Woof Papa Hot, by Peter Parnell, which explored the idea of Ok, we can get married and have kids and a house; we can be out and proud. But then what? What happens to the community that we built and the community that kept us safe for so many years? What does it evolve us into?
 

MJ: Funny you mention that, because I was going to ask you about the changing landscape of theater that deals with LGBT issues. There was a piece in the New York Times when Dada Woof Papa Hot came out about the changing landscape of LGBT theater.
 

JB: I remember that!
 

MJ: It was about that play as well as Steve by Mark Gerrard, at Signature, and it was about how now that we have marriage equality, what are these new-wave LGBT plays talking about? They interviewed Craig Lucas, and he actually said that he wouldn’t bet on “a whole bunch of plays celebrating our achievements only because we don’t know how long those achievements are going to last.” This was in 2015. Now, after the 2016 election, we’re realizing that Lucas was right; all of these things that we were celebrating may not be as secure as we thought they were. Suddenly, we realize we’re not past these issues yet. I was thinking about how supposedly we’re past talking about the AIDS crisis in theater, and just recently Michael Friedman died of AIDS complications. So these things that we had supposedly moved past from, we haven’t. You mentioned revivals of Torch Song and Angels in America, which is coming to Broadway next year, and suddenly we’re realizing, yes they’re period pieces, but they’re still incredibly relevant.
 

JB: Much to our surprise.
 

MJ: So I wonder: As a gay writer, are you consciously writing as part of this history and do you have anything to contribute to the new wave of LGBT plays?
 

JB: It’s interesting because one of the questions I always hate as a writer is when someone asks “Why are you writing this? What do you want the audience to take away from this? What are you saying?”
 

Joe Breen
 

MJ: By the way, why are you writing this? What do you want the audience to take away from this? What are you saying?
 

JB: [laughs] Well that’s a three-part question. When I started writing this play, I just started writing a story that happens to take place in the 1940s, a very interesting point in history. And the play just happens to be about two men. Well no, I guess I can’t say that it “just happens” to be that way, because I made the decision to write it about two men because of the whole question of how many Gold Star widows were men. See, I am in awe of writers who can look at something, one of the great topics and say, “I’m going to write a play about that. I’m going to write of today and now,” and have something to say about that. Because if I tried to do that, I’d be afraid it would come across as too heavy-handed.
 

MJ: I know what you mean, but I’ve spoken to a lot of writers and I feel like most come at it from a very personal standpoint; I don’t think it’s always wanting to make a political statement. I think for most writers, it’s a very personal experience and then you can extrapolate any kind of political message from that.
 

JB: I guess that’s what I was trying to get to. When someone says, “What do you want people to take away from this?” I never know; I don’t know what I want people to take away from this. My last play, The Hands That Hold Us, is about Alice, a 25-year-old woman who, during her third bout of cancer, chooses to forego treatment, much to the chagrin of her family. Now, while writing and working on that, a lot of people asked me, “Are you saying that people should have the right to kill themselves? Don’t they have a responsibility to their family to fight?” And I never knew what to say to that. Because when it comes to the character of Alice, I still don’t know if I agree that what she did is right. I don’t know if I would do that. So I guess what I’m saying is it’s up to the audiences, to people like you, to go see the play and walk away and draw your own meaning and conclusions. Because one person could go to this play and say “Oh, he’s showing us why gays should be open in the military” but then someone else could say “My God, he’s showing us why gays shouldn’t be open in the military.” It’s subjective; all art is such a subjective thing.
 

MJ: Your play is fiction, but it does take place during World War II. During the process of writing, did you do any research? Was historical accuracy important? Did you come across any real life stories that may have inspired your characters?
 

JB: When I first started going down this road, I knew that gay people were out there in the world during this period; although, what’s interesting is that even during readings, I’ve had people in the room who are gay and have asked me, “Well, were people living together as actual couples then?” Well, it didn’t just suddenly happen after 1981! But there aren’t a lot of examples of that. It wasn’t in the media; it’s not in films. But a very important book that I came across is called Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II by Allan Bérubé. And it’s focused on men and women who joined the US military. There’s also a documentary which is wonderful. The documentary came out as a response to Don’t Ask Don’t Tell being put into effect. And they talk firsthand to the gays and lesbians who were there. And amazingly, a lot of them in the documentary wouldn’t go on camera, even though they were lending their voices. They were shown in shadows. Even then, it would’ve been the ‘90s, these are World War II vets that lived—if not openly—lived as gay and lesbian women with partners. And they still had that fear of letting that be known. I also did a lot of reading into various battles, trying to get a general sense of the things we didn’t learn in history class. I was doing reading on the fall of Bataan and the Bataan Death March. I was very intrigued by this group of soldiers because within seven hours of Pearl Harbor being hit, the Philippines was hit. We weren’t at war yet, officially. The military people in the Philippines, both American and Filipino, hadn’t even heard about Pearl Harbor yet. So within seven hours, the Japanese Imperial army bombed Manila, which became the Battle of Bataan. Ultimately, Japan won the battle and in what was a truly horrific war crime, this group of soldiers was marched over I think six days, 60-plus miles, no water, no food, and something like 70,000 American and Filipino POWs. What fascinated me about this group of people that was involved in the Bataan Death March, is that they were among the first soldiers to be captured during World War II and one of the last to be released. They were shuttled from a few different countries, shuttled from different camps; so much so, that the military and the government lost track of them. Many of their families were told that they were presumed dead. And then suddenly, World War II ends and all these soldiers are coming back saying, “I’m not dead.” So I was very fascinated by that. Which actually leads me to one of the biggest struggles I’ve had in writing this play. It’s a Japanese character named Toshio, who is a soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army. And the reason I’ve struggled so much with him is because, from the very beginning, I have been hyper-aware of being a white man writing a person of color, who, historically in this moment of time, was considered and will be considered the “villain.”
 

MJ: Right because at the time Japan was the enemy of the United States.
 

JB: Right. And the worst thing you can say to a liberal white person is that they’re racist, you know? We’re terrified of that! [laughs] So, I have this Japanese character, who, in my efforts to want to make him three-dimensional, I was afraid to commit to the parts of him that would be perceived by audiences as being offensive. I had a reading this spring and, historically in the ‘40s, Americans called Japanese people “Japs.” It wasn’t even in their minds that it was a derogatory term, if they wanted to be derogatory they would use something else. This was just what they were. So I have a character in the play that represents very much the heteronormative, white-America good ol’ boy. And that is how he refers to Japanese people. After the reading, during the feedback session, another playwright in the room, a white liberal man, said he was very offended by the use of the word “Jap.” And he thought it was too much, and it really took him out of it. And so, of course, my white liberal Spidey senses started tingling, thinking, “Oh God, what have I done?” But in the room were two Asian actors—one Filipino, one Cambodian. And both of them stood up and said, “Oh no, that’s not offensive at all; it’s very valid. It rings true to me.”
 

MJ: Because it’s being said by a racist character.
 

JB: Exactly. So that was interesting. Flash forward a year later, just recently, I’m still struggling with this character. And one night before a reading, I made a very bold choice, and had him do something that I was very uncomfortable with. The next day, when that part came up in the play, there was an audible gasp. And during the feedback session, those white liberals of us in the room were like, “Oh that was so shocking! We’re afraid of what that’s going to make Toshio look like.” But the Japanese actor in the room said, “No, he’s a trained soldier. That is exactly what he would have done in that scenario.” So it’s a very hard thing to write an “other” to myself, because we handle those characters with kid gloves, and risk making them, for lack of a better term, an “Uncle Tom” character.
 

MJ: It’s interesting because I think a problem not just in theater, but in any kind of artistic representation—when it specifically comes to white people writing people of color, especially white liberals writing people of color—there’s a tendency to idealize.
 

JB: So that we can say, “See? They weren’t all bad!”
 

MJ: Right. And in this overt effort to not be offensive, it creates a stereotype in itself. It’s interesting that you’re so hyper-aware of that.
 

JB: I’m very fortunate that I have very outspoken people of color in my life that will call me out on things like that. And they make me aware of my white guilt. [laughs]
 

MJ: So when writing for Toshio, have you done any research? How do you approach being authentic to a Japanese character, apart from your liberal guilt?
 

JB: Something I feel very strongly about, and it’s something that’s unfortunately not feasible for the reading, is I want all of Toshio’s dialogue to be in Japanese. I don’t speak Japanese, I’m writing all of his dialogue in English with the intention of it being translated. For the purposes of a staged reading, there’s not going to be projections of his lines.
 

MJ: But your intent is for the character to only speak Japanese.
 

JB: Right.
 

MJ: Do you want it translated for the audience?
 

JB: I’ve gone back and forth. Initially, I wanted the English speaking audience to be as clueless to what he’s saying as the American characters in the play. But I think feasibly down the road, when it came to a full production, I would want to do the tried and true projections of the translations. But for the purposes of this reading, Toshio will be reading his lines in English, just so everyone in the theater can understand what is happening. But that is something I feel very strongly about. I want him to speak Japanese. I’ve also done research into the treatment of homosexuality both in Japan and in the Japanese military. Which surprisingly, within the world of the military, was much more accepting because in the American military, if you were outed as gay, or you outed yourself, it was an automatic dismissal—dishonorable discharge. There were no rules about that in the Japanese military at the time because it almost wasn’t acknowledged that it was a thing. But openly, the male soldiers were having sex with each other, but it was almost seen as a necessary evil. But it wasn’t thought about as anything more than that. It’s hard to find testimonies and documentation of gay Japanese people from the ‘40s because it wasn’t acknowledged. But, of course, there were! So I’ve tried to piece together as many things as I could find, and then of course, at a certain point, you have to let that go and write for the story you’re creating.
 

MJ: One of my earliest memories as a theatergoer was going to see A Chorus Line as a little girl with my parents and sister. I’m from Puerto Rico, and we were on a trip to New York. This was in the ‘80s, I’m aging myself, but I was young. And, like yourself, I’ve been an avid theatergoer all my life. And I have this vivid memory of seeing this Puerto Rican woman character in this play on Broadway.
 

JB: Diana Morales!
 

MJ: Diana Morales! And she was talking about being from San Juan, and I had this immense feeling of recognition and just wanting to root for her that was very foreign to me. I wasn’t used to seeing myself represented in that way. Anyone who is in some way outside the norm, it’s very rare to see ourselves represented in the media. Especially represented accurately. And this was very authentic and true to my real experience.
 

JB: Because that came from the testimony of a real Puerto Rican.
 

Joe Breen
 

MJ: Right, Priscilla Lopez. It was actually her real story and it was vivid. And I had never seen that on a Broadway stage. I’m wondering if you’ve ever had that experience. Of seeing yourself as a gay man recognized?
 

JB: Growing up in the ‘90s, I was still trying to figure out what it was that made me different. I came out to my parents on my 16th birthday, but prior to that, I didn’t know what it was that was different about me. But the first one that I can remember—and what’s interesting is I couldn’t even identify it at the time—where I was like, “Oh! That’s me!” was Rickie in My So-Called Life. I was just like, Wow, he’s hanging out with Claire Danes and combing her hair; hanging out in the girls’ bathroom—all the things that I wanted to do.
 

MJ: And the character doesn’t even acknowledge he’s gay until one of the very last episodes.
 

JB: Right. I didn’t have the self-awareness to realize, “That is it. That is who I am.” But I remember being fascinated by him. To parallel your musical theater story, one of the first gay characters I remember in a musical is Molina from Kiss of the Spider Woman. I remember being in my room singing along with Chita Rivera and Brent Carver, but again, not understanding that what I was seeing in Molina was myself. And that my reverence for Chita Rivera was the same as his reverence for Aurora. I didn’t have that. But I was still doing it.
 

MJ: You still felt that connection, even if you couldn’t identify it.
 

JB: I imagine for you it’s a very visual thing; you’re like, “Oh! There I am.”
 

MJ: Yes, it’s very visual.
 

JB: For me it was an emotional connection without understanding what that was.
 

MJ: There are some writers and artists in the LGBT community who talk about the dangers of what they call “queer assimilation” as a way of finding acceptance in a heteronormative society. Even the idea of marriage as a way of normalizing these relationships, letting straight people know, “We’re just like you” in order to gain acceptance. But some artists believe it’s at the cost of losing this culture that was always in the fringes, this otherness that they’re very proud of. That’s a complicated issue and has many sides, but I was just wondering how do you personally feel about that?
 

JB: I am a gay man who has always wanted to get married. I’ve had other gay men look at me and say, “That’s just because you grew up wanting to be straight, wanting to be Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally.” Is that valid? Perhaps. But for whatever reason, I’m someone who very much believes in the institution of marriage, not in a religious or even political or financial way, but to me there’s something very powerful about being able to say, “You are the one for me; I am committing to you.” At the expense of not being able to go to a bar and hook up with anyone I see. To me, there’s something very special about that. Now, that’s not to say that I think that marriages last forever and that there’s one person for everyone. I’m not saying that. But for me personally, I’m someone who finds that to be a very special thing. There’s a play Off-Broadway right now, Afterglow, I have not seen it but my understanding is that it’s about a committed, married, same-sex couple who’s exploring the idea of polygamy, or at least an open marriage. ‘Cause it’s saying, We have this connection, but do we have to play by “heteronormative rules”? So when it comes to the question of gay marriage as falling into queer assimilation, I would say it doesn’t have to be, because you can make up your own rules. And it’s not just for gay people, straight people, too. No one’s saying what the rules of your marriage have to be. I feel like if there is a couple who has committed to having a life together and raising a family together but they choose to have an open marriage, it’s certainly not my place and I should never tell them they’re doing it wrong. But on that same token, if I choose to have a monogamous relationship, I think it’s dangerous for someone to turn around and say I’m doing it wrong because I’m trying to assimilate.
 

MJ: Of course, I mean there have been monogamous same sex relationships throughout history.
 

JB: Right, and I get how people are equating —I also don’t like the term “gay marriage.” Marriage equality— equating marriage equality to assimilation, I get it. But fighting against that is, I think, dangerous because to be gay does not necessarily mean to be a polyamorous person. A lot of people rope that into part of our culture, but I don’t see that as a cultural choice, I think that’s just a sexual choice.
 

MJ: Authentic representation in the arts has become a hot-button issue lately. Mostly when it comes up, we’re talking about people of color, but it’s been used to included the Trans community—Trans characters should be played by Trans actors—and we’re starting to see greater representation of disabled actors playing disabled roles that had traditionally been portrayed by able-bodied actors.
 

JB: Like the autistic actor who’s doing The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
 

MJ: Right, or the Deaf West Theatre production of Spring Awakening, or The Cost of Living, for which the playwright Martyna Majok has specified that the disabled characters must be played by disabled actors. There’s a push for more authentic representation in the sense not just of how it’s written, but how it’s portrayed. It’s partly for authenticity, but also partly to give participation to performers who are in some way marginalized. But this discussion doesn’t usually extend to the gay, lesbian, and bisexual communities. We have a lot of prominent gay roles being portrayed by straight actors; straight playwrights write gay themes. I don’t know if there’s a right or wrong answer to that, but I was just wondering if you personally have an opinion on it.
 

JB: My view on that has evolved. But it’s a double edged sword because there remain a lot of actors who are in the closet. There are actors who will not come out for fear of losing their career. There are actors who have come out and lost their career. On the other hand, there are actors who have come out and have an amazing career: Michael Urie, for example. In one respect, if I say that gay characters should be played by gay actors, that lends credence to people saying, “Gay actors can’t play straight characters.” But with all of that said, for the past year, I’ve had a lot of readings of this play. And I had an actor, who throughout the entire process was reading the role of Danny, the character who stays in the States while his partner is overseas. And he’s a fantastic actor, but he’s straight. Now that’s something that in the earlier readings never occurred to me, until we did a reading and I wanted to mix up the voices. And I had a bunch of actors who had never read any of the roles, and I had a gay actor play that role. And suddenly something clicked in me. And it’s not that what he was doing was better than what the initial actor was doing. But it was still something that I thought, “Oh! This is right.” So moving forward, do I want to pull an Edward Albee and say, “No! Only gay actors can play my characters!”? No, I’m not going to say that. If Colin Firth wants to play one of my gay characters, please, by all means! [laughs] But I will say there is something when I’m sitting in that room—and not to take away from that straight actor who had been reading Danny so beautifully for a year—but there is something emotional for me to be watching a gay man read my words. Truth is a hard thing to get at.
 

Joe Breen
 

MJ: Going back to the discussion we had about the character of Toshio, in terms of authentic representation, how was that approached in the casting?
 

JB: Toshio was the last one to be cast in the reading, because Sara Matteucci felt very strongly that he not just be an Asian actor. She wanted a Japanese actor. During the table reads, I’ve had a Cambodian actor, at one point Sara read it herself, but for the reading itself she wanted a Japanese actor. And I get it. And I’ll be honest, I didn’t think about that until she brought it up, and then as soon as she said it I thought, “Oh, absolutely.”
 

MJ: When is the reading?
 

JB: Tuesday October 3rd at 6:30 PM at the Cherry Lane Theater. It’s free!
 

MJ: What are your future hopes for this play?
 

JB: Broadway!
 

MJ: No, honestly. I don’t think Broadway is the end goal for everybody.
 

JB: For me, Broadway will always be the end goal. [laughs] I just want it to have a life, whatever that means, because I’ve fallen in love with all of these characters. I have had fights with these characters and hated them all at different points like a crazy person, but ultimately I love these characters and I love the story that I’m telling. I want people to meet my characters.
 

MJ: Are you working on something new?
 

JB: [laughs] “That is not like you George!” Well played. Now that you ask me, I have a very rough draft of a first act of another play that is about a female painter during the expressionist movement and a woman’s place in the art world.
 

MJ: Assuming you make it, Joe Breen plays being performed all over the country and studied in classrooms—what do you think they would say is the unifying thread of your work? What will your work be remembered for?
 

JB: Oy. [laughs] Aside from there being a gay character in all of them, I think the common thread in my plays is—this sounds so corny—but relationships between people, whether it be romantic, siblings, or friendship. They’re all about love. Oh god, that’s awful! I sound like the end of Love Actually. “Love is all around.” But yes, truthfully, all my plays are about love. The primary passion in your life, whatever it is that makes you tick, be it romantic, or artistic, or familial.
 

MJ: And what is the primary passion in your life?
 

JB: My ultimate goal is to be able to relax. To be able to breathe. [laughs]
 
 

 

 

Joe Breen is a New York-based playwright, whose work has been seen at The Bechdel Project, Theatre in Asylum, The Boston Center For The Arts, and as part of the Primary Stages ESPA Detention Series. His play, The Hands That Hold Us, was a 2016 finalist for The Princess Grace Awards Playwriting Fellowship through New Dramatists, and winner of the 2016 NEXT ACT! New Play Summit at Capital Repertory Theatre in Albany, NY. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America, and resides in Manhattan with his boyfriend and two geriatric Brussels Griffons.

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A Conversation with Michelle Lauto

Michelle Lauto

 

Since moving to Chicago, to say Michelle Lauto has been busy is an understatement. She’s played the iconic Liza Minnelli (The Boy from Oz), the big-city-dreaming Vanessa from In the Heights, and she just finished up a run in a second Lin-Manuel Miranda-related starring role, in Spamilton. Before she jumps into her latest triumph, NYU student-flower-child Sheila in The Mercury Theatre’s Hair, she sat down with us to talk theater, identity, and using Coinstar to get Rent tickets.
 

 

Kelly Wallace: How did you come to be in Spamilton?
 

Michelle Lauto: It was kind of crazy. I had just signed with the agency I’m with now, Stewart Talent, that morning. They told me they wanted to represent me…that night I got an email saying they had an audition for me tomorrow. I left almost in tears and called my dad, like, I need a job; I can’t keep doing this. I was really hoping for a break. I got a callback and they had me come dance, they had me sing and do more material and a few days later I got a call from my agent and he told me I was going to be in Spamilton. They offered me an Equity contract, because I’d been EMC, which meant that I could turn and get my card. It was the fastest thing in the world. It went from me crying under the train tracks saying, Something has got to give; I can’t do this to, My whole life is changing!
 

I’m doing insane quick changes, going from full Hamilton to 55-year-old Liza Minnelli in 25 seconds. I’m having so much fun. It’s opened a lot of other doors and introduced me to a lot of cool people. It’s insane. I’m having a great time.
 

KW: Did you go to school for musical theater?
 

ML: I am a college dropout!
 

Michelle Lauto
 

KW: What made you decide to come out here and leave college?
 

ML: I think anyone’s path is the right path for them. Studying musical theater in a BFA program was not my path. I didn’t feel like I belonged in a program like that. My friends who went to Pace loved it and that’s awesome for them, but I had this urge to be auditioning. So I did. I was also, at that time, getting a bunch of callbacks for things. So, I felt like, “You have Dramatics 101 and this text, or you have a callback for the national tour of Rock of Ages,” so I would go to the callback. After awhile, it started to feel counterintuitive to spend $45,000 a year to do what I was already doing. Again, I’m not dismissing the value of education in theater; it’s just not for everyone.
 

I thought I was just going to work in the city, live in the city, and audition. But, as you know, living in New York City costs a lot of money. So, when you’re 18-19 years old and bartending until 3 o’clock in the morning, you don’t want to wake up at 6AM to get your name on a list and maybe get seen at 5:30pm. Maybe they’ll let you sing eight bars. It started to feel really taxing. I was craving something else: I always wanted to do comedy; I always loved writing. Living somewhere else started to feel really appealing to me, having grown up in New Jersey and then living in New York…that was all I knew. The only city I knew was New York. To me, there was no other city. You just call it, “the City.” You say, “I’m going to the City” and everyone knows what you mean.
 

KW: Which I said for months after moving to Chicago, and people would be so confused.
 

ML: They’re like, “Which city are you referring to? Be specific.” So the plan was to go to Chicago for a year, study and go through the initial program at Second City, and then I was going to leave. I met amazing friends. I also started to vibe with Chicago, I really liked it here, but I still had my plan to move back to New York. I auditioned for conservatory at Second City and got in. I told myself that if I got in, it was a sign that I should stay for a while more. I sort of walked away from musical theater for a while. I had to go back and start auditioning for things. I went to an audition here for a non-equity production of Murder Ballad and it was the very first thing I auditioned for and I got offered the swing track, to cover both women in the show. From there, it was steps and making connections and auditioning and working my tush off.
 

KW: What do you feel like is the biggest difference between New York and Chicago?
 

ML: I love my home and I love New York. My dream has not changed since I was five years old. I want to be on Broadway one day. As far as the acting scene goes, Chicago is a city of workers. It’s about the work, not about the ego. I think if you’re not in it to do the work, you won’t last long. That spreads really fast. If you start to garnish a reputation as someone who doesn’t do it for the work or doesn’t do it for the right reasons, that spreads like wildfire.
 

KW: This city seems to talk more about things. I think that Chicago is having more conversations about the content and direction of theater than New York does.
 

ML: Absolutely. I was a part of In the Heights at Porchlight, and there was a ton of controversy around it. I don’t regret it at all. I’m very grateful for the conversation it ignited within the theater community. But it’s very interesting to watch the buzz and attention it got, and the huge controversy it caused, and then I see the national tour of something like Aladdin and, great, but is there a single Middle Eastern person in the Broadway production or on the tour? Probably not. Or, if there are, they’re very underrepresented. There’s a tendency to say, “There’s diversity!” in a way that makes people of color interchangeable. Latinos are very different from Middle Eastern people and black people are very different from Latinos. That’s not interchangeable.
 

Michelle Lauto
 

KW: How do you think we can go from tossing blame around to actually, constructively working on developing more inclusive talent?
 

ML: My boyfriend, Nick, and I were talking about this the other day in a broader sense of the political landscape. We’re in – I don’t love this term, but I see it so much – “woke culture.” It’s like, “How woke are you?” Competitive wokeness. While I love that as someone who has been a social justice warrior since I was 10…when we play the blame game too much, it poses risk to alienate people from your cause or your movement. There’s a way of saying, “Hey, that’s not acceptable, we have to do better than that” without coming out with a pitchfork.
 

Unfortunately, what wound up happening was that our cast was comprised of 15 or 16 people of color who were black or Latino, and we all felt really alienated from our community. Our show was a sold-out run for four-and-a-half months. That doesn’t happen in Chicago and it certainly doesn’t happen for shows full of brown people.
 

KW: The audience and the ticket sales say something, in terms of the wider reaction.
 

ML: Absolutely. And I got to have conversations with students who came in from primarily Latino neighborhoods to see our show, we had talkbacks with them…I don’t regret a minute of that process. It was taxing, and that’s part of what comes with it. I say that from a place of privilege. If that’s the most taxing thing in my life, then I’m a very fortunate person. I love the accountability of Chicago theater, I think we need to hold each other accountable. What upset me the most was when I see casting announcements day after day for non-race-specific shows, for revues even, with all white people. No one is saying anything about that. Misrepresentation onstage is a problem and shouldn’t be accepted or dismissed, but why is it only exclusive to our stories? Why can’t representation mean this cool new piece that doesn’t have anything to base itself on, casting wise? Can’t we agree that it would be cool to have those opportunities too?
 

KW: As an actor, what do you think your responsibility is to be engaged politically or as an activist, both in the industry and in the broader world? A lot of people would say, “Oh, well, you’re an entertainer, stick to entertaining. We don’t need your political opinion.”
 

ML: Ugh! When people tell actors to stick to acting, I want to tell them that art has never just been about entertainment, ever. Plays and musicals and films and books have all come from a place of people writing what they know or making social commentary. You can’t separate the two almost ever, in my opinion. How can you possibly embody the essence of someone else if you’re not putting yourself in other people’s shoes? That means doing your research about all different cultures. It means advocating. Don’t just slide into someone’s skin and use it. What can you do to advocate on the part of communities you’re representing? I think it’s really important to put your money where your mouth is.
 

KW: When did you become interested in musical theater?
 

ML: I think I was interested in musical theater before I really knew what it was. My mom likes to say I was singing before I could speak. I always loved singing and performing. The moment that I felt like, This is going down, this is what I have to do for the rest of my life — and it’s so corny and so clichéd – but I was a freshman in high school and my choir’s class trip was to see Wicked and I was just in tears the whole time. My best friend from high school was sitting next to me and clutching my arm. Elphaba and Glinda came out to take their bows and did a kind of princess wave and I was up in the mezzanine, but I was waving back to them. I thought they were doing this for me. And then I saw Rent. It was really special. I grew up listening to pop and rock, so I didn’t have a traditional musical theater voice at that age. I thought I should just belt everything, which at 14 is just screaming. But Rent was the first rock musical I ever saw, so it changed my world. The women were unconventionally pretty, they sounded unconventional, and that really spoke to me. It made me feel like I could be on Broadway.
 

The first professional Broadway show I auditioned for was Spiderman, for Mary Jane. And this was at least four years before it even wound up opening. It’s hilarious to think that at 16 I thought I could sing “Come to Your Senses” and surely if I just scream through this Jonathan Larson song, I’ll be in the Spiderman musical. But actually from that I wound up getting a callback for Next to Normal on Broadway, for Natalie. I remember being really excited. That was kind of the start of everything. Ultimately, it’s my favorite thing. I have a love/hate relationship with it sometimes, but I think that’s any person/actor’s relationship with it.
 

Michelle Lauto
 

KW: You’ve talked about this before — you’re Puerto Rican; you feel you white-pass sometimes.
 

ML: Definitely. I’m mixed, my dad is Italian and stuff, and I have fair skin. So I’m afforded privileges. That’s just obvious. I think I’ve found a good balance in the last year or so.
 

KW: Was that confusing for you? To figure out where you fit on the spectrum?
 

ML: Definitely, big time. Even auditioning for In the Heights, there was a part of me that was tentative to audition because of the way I look. But I’ve gotta say, somebody who kept coming back into my mind was Krysta Rodriguez. When I saw her in In the Heights, I saw her go on as Vanessa, and it made me think I could play that part. Mandy Gonzalez is half-Jewish. Those experiences really changed me, in terms of how I saw myself. I needed to just be Michelle. I’m very lucky in that I got to play an iconic Italian woman, Liza Minelli.That’s something I’m very grateful for. It’s also been exciting to embrace different sides of myself. Ethnicity, even voice type. I’ve stopped saying, I’m not this enough, I’m not an ingenue enough, I’m not Latino enough, I’m not white enough. I think one of the reasons I’ve always felt like I don’t belong in certain situations is that I can’t tell you how many times in the audition room people ask what I am or say I’m ambiguous looking. I’m a human being. Yes, I know what you’re saying, but it makes me feel kind of weird about myself. It makes me think about what people perceive me as and I wonder what people see me as and what I’m allowed to own. Even when I signed with my agency, my one friend was like, “Make sure they don’t just send you in for Latino roles, show them that you want everything”.
 

KW: You’ve been working here for awhile, but I imagine you’d consider In the Heights to be one of the bigger shows you’ve done in terms of publicity and visibility.
 

ML: Definitely. It was my first time leading an Equity show. I’ve been in some great shows in Chicago, but I loved doing In the Heights more than anything in this whole world. I’m spoiled in a way, and I don’t take it for granted that I had this opportunity, but it’s a whole other thing to literally not be able to get a ticket to an Equity storefront theater in Chicago. It was wild. In any show, you wonder how the house is going to be. That’s the nature of the game.
 

KW: Right, and it doesn’t inherently say anything about the quality of the show or you personally or anything like that.
 

ML: And hey, I’ll give 20 people the same show as I would give 500 people. You paid money to be here; we entered into a contract when you walked into this building. You’re here to be entertained and I’m here to entertain you and move you. But to just walk out every night and it was a sold out crowd that was losing their shit every night for us…wow.
 

You go from, “Please come see my show in Wicker Park, this is a beautiful piece of art,” and unfortunately, a beautiful piece of art doesn’t always sell tickets. I wish it did. I really wish it did. But to go from that to this school bus of 16-year-old girls whose class trip was to see our show, messaging me on Instagram…it’s a pinch me moment.
 

KW: Is that something you care a lot about? Being a role model for young people who come see your shows, engaging with young people?
 

ML: Yes! I love teaching too. In New York I worked at The Broadway Workshop which offers professional theatrical experiences to young kids. I was a teacher last summer for Emerald City. I’ll be teaching at Porchlight this summer. I think that’s something that I still hang onto – I was a nanny for so long. I love kids. And I love watching kids get so excited over musicals, because I was the 14 year old seeing Wicked and waving to Elphaba and Glinda.
 

KW: Who are some of the people you looked up to who inspired you to get into this business?
 

ML: I think, like any young girl, I saw Idina Menzel for the first time and was like, “Woah.” I remember taking the kids I watched to see Frozen and being so emotional to hear her voice as a Disney princess. It felt like everything came full circle. Alice Ripley. I’m thinking about people who mesmerized me. Watching Alice Ripley…that’s how you act. There were also shows that expanded my mind. The Drowsy Chaperone really got me. I think it was the Man in Chair’s monologue at the end. I just remember thinking, Oh, there’s a piece of my soul. Karen Olivo is another one. When I’m feeling down, I watch her Tonys’ speech. For one, I love that she was not a dancer and won a Tony playing Anita in West Side Story. She became a dancer for that show, but the point being that she worked her ass off and made the impossible possible.
 

KW: Well, she didn’t say, “I’m not going to audition for this; I’m not a dancer.”
 

ML: Exactly. That’s something I need to learn how to do. Just also the career Karen has had is so inspiring to me, and taking space when you need space. I know how that works.
 

Michelle Lauto
 

KW: It’s a tough business. Especially right now. Where do you want to see theater go in the next five or ten years? Taking into account, even, the political environment we’re in, the way the world is changing, where do you feel like we need to go to continue to be relevant?
 

ML: That’s been my comforting thought since November, that maybe, just maybe, some really incredible art will be made. It will happen. I don’t know if it makes the medicine go down that much better, because we don’t have that art right now. Let’s not limit ourselves to who can be the protagonist in a story. That’s where I think we still have a lot of room to grow even with more “diverse” shows and stuff. We lack in certain ways within that. Porchlight is doing Marry Me a Little and we get to see Bethany Thomas in that, who’s amazing. She’s unbelievable. We get to see a tall black woman leading a Sondheim show. And guess what? No one blinks an eye at that. Because whatever construct people have made in their head about who can play certain parts…it’s just a construct. It’s made up.
 

I think we can do more. I think we have a construct of what a leading man looks like. It doesn’t have to be like that. I want to see all different bodies and voices being represented. More than anything, writing. I was just saying this at lunch, they announced the Carousel revival, and that’s cool. I personally don’t think Carousel should be done in 2017. I don’t think it has any place being done in 2017. It has beautiful music. I love some of the actors who were announced. Do I think it’s problematic that they’re putting a white woman onstage and having her beaten by a black man? Yes. I think it’s problematic as hell. I don’t feel good about it. It makes me feel icky.
 

KW: It’s one thing to say we want diversity, we want “color blind” casting, but we need to look at which roles we’re casting and why.
 

ML: It matters what stories we’re giving people. “Oh, we’re doing a diverse production of this…” Okay, is it still a traditionally white story that in no way relates to the community? The beauty of In the Heights is a story about a group of people we don’t hear stories about. Hamilton, despite it being about the American Revolution, they related to a place that’s about what it means to scrappy and an immigrant. To me, that means we need to be behind the table writing. We need to be casting. We need to be in every aspect of this, behind the scenes. I think we have to continue on a quest to make inclusivity a priority. That means people with different body types, people of different races, people with different abilities, people with different gender identities. The list goes on and on. I think we’re getting there. I feel it, I feel us and the community as a whole wanting more. That’s what I want to see.
 
 

 

 
Michelle Lauto is a Chicago based actor, singer, writer, and improviser. Michelle grew up in the Jersey suburbs of New York. She began acting in and around the city at the age of 16. At 21 she moved to Chicago to study her other love: comedy. Michelle is a 2014 graduate of The Second City Training Center’s Conservatory program. She loves crafting, watching true crime shows, and talking about pizza.

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A Conversation with Morgan Green & Johnson Henshaw

Morgan Green Johnson Henshaw

 

To hear some people tell it, New York is the only incubator for the most exciting young artists. But as the Sharon Playhouse proves, creating work outside of the Broadway and Off-Broadway sphere isn’t just a way to pay the rent — it’s a way to make the art you really want to make.
 

We took a break from the city and met with Johnson Henshaw, Artistic Director of Sharon Playhouse, and director-in-residence Morgan Green after their first run-through of The Music Man — their third collaboration this summer — to talk about the inventive restructuring of the Playhouse’s season, the importance of trust, the goal to foster emerging theater artists, and their thoughts on the future of this art form.
 

 

Michelle Tse: How was the first run-through?
 

Morgan Green: It was good. I have a headache [laughs] but it was really good.
 

Michelle: Should we get you some water?
 

Morgan: I’m good. I just had some; I’ll be okay. [laughs] No, but it was very exciting to see everything together. Johnson was there, and we had the smallest little audience so I feel like there was a lot of pressure in a good way, so that the actors were really focusing.
 

Michelle: That’s good. That’s exciting! So I wanted to start with asking about why you, Johnson, chose to do a director-driven season, particularly with an emerging female director.
 

Johnson Henshaw: I’m a director myself, and in my 20’s all of my playwright friends had so many opportunities for fellowships and mentorships and all sorts of ways that theaters in New York were trying to connect with them — they were trying to foster and incubate them. There’s not a lot of that for directors. Then I did this fellowship with the Old Vic in London. I went over to London, and visited many of the major theaters there — the National Theatre, the Donmar. Those theaters have these incredible incubators where they take young directors who have just gotten out of drama school or university and they start giving them space and time and money — they’re fully salaried! — and they start prepping them so that they are ready to do mainstage productions at the National Theatre when they’re like 26 years old. So then those directors are being seen by commercial producers and other artistic directors. Their work is getting seen much earlier and their careers are so much more dynamic and fruitful because of it.
 

Directors in New York have to tie themselves to playwrights. They have to really fight for those relationships. [Morgan and I] talked about this a little bit. The playwrights you get, that’s how your boat floats or sinks. It’s so often that the director’s work takes a back seat. When I had this opportunity, I was like, This should be a place that’s a theater for directors. Where they get to come up and do work that they’re excited about, as opposed to an artistic director being excited about [a certain] play, and finds a director to do that work.
 

I wasn’t sure originally that it was going to be all one director for the whole season but I had reached out to people at Playwrights Horizons, the Public Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, and New Georges, and I said, Who are young directors you’re interested in? There was a bunch of names on each of those lists, and some people were on two lists, but maybe not all of them, and there was only one name that was on every single list, and that was Morgan’s. I actually didn’t know her work. I didn’t know her. [laughs] This was all happening around late December, and Minor Character the show that Morgan did with [her theater company], New Saloon, had been asked to be in the Under the Radar Festival as part of the Incoming lineup.The show was sold out, but I got a friend of mine to write Morgan to say, Hey, this is my friend Johnson, he just got this job, he wants to come see your show, can you get him in? And she said yes, of course.
 

I thought I would go see Minor Character, and if I liked it, I’d be like, Why don’t you direct a show this summer? What show do you want to do? And I was so blown away by it, it was so incredible, and one of the best things I’ve seen in the theater ever, I couldn’t believe it. And the ways in which it was great felt like the work of a really great director. It was so smart and so stylish and moving. So I met with Morgan, we had breakfast, and I sort of was like, Will you come and direct all the plays? Because first of all, I wanted to bring Minor Character here, but I didn’t want that to be the only show that Morgan directed this summer. Selfishly, the best part about this job, is I get to program work that I want to see. It’s the best part of being artistic director.
 

Because this audience is an older audience, the work that has typically been done here at the Playhouse is very traditional and I was trying to figure out what were the programming choices that would be great for a director to tackle but for this audience would feel welcoming. So my guidelines were a classic American musical, a classic American play, and a new work, and that was Minor Character.
 

Morgan Green Johnson Henshaw
 

Michelle: So Minor Character kicked off the season for obvious reasons that Johnson just touched on, and tonight we’re seeing Far Away. Why Far Away?
 

Morgan: Like Johnson was saying, there are all these opportunities to direct new plays and to ‘pitch’ yourself to playwrights as a director. I have been doing that, and I have relationships with playwrights that I like, but it’s really rare for an opportunity like this to come, for someone to ask me, the director, What do you want to do? So for the play, Johnson originally proposed it be a great American play, so I was thinking about Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, but I really wanted to fill that slot with a work by a female playwright. I love Caryl Churchill, and I’ve always loved her, and I feel like she’s not done enough in New York or America in general — she’s not as well known here, she’s in England. And she’s one of the greatest living playwrights. So it felt like a really special opportunity to do a Churchill play, whereas that would not happen in the city, and nobody would let me do it, unless I self-produced it. So I jumped at the opportunity, and Far Away is a play that I’ve wanted to direct since the first time I read it. I had visualized it when I was reading it, which is a good sign. I didn’t direct it when I first encountered it because I didn’t understand the ending. As I came back to it for this as an option for the middle slot, I still didn’t really understand the ending, but I was kind of excited by that challenge. I was also excited by its relevance, how it feels like the whole world is going to war, struggling with the responsibilities as an artist, and the distance between art and politics. Caryl’s is being self-aware and critical about artists, and I was excited to engage with that.
 

I was also really excited by the contrast between Minor Character which is Chekhov — but it’s also extra Chekhov, because we do 6 different translations on top of each other — with The Music Man, a musical with 27 people and huge, with this really spare, really poetic dynamite little play in the middle that is 45 minutes long, but has three distinct time periods and worlds within it, with this crazy hat parade spectacle. I got to have that theatrical event happening that is physical and design-based, which feels like an essential part of theater to me. I’m not that excited about plays that are just people talking to each other. It basically has all the things I like about theater in 45 minutes. [laughs]
 

Michelle: Well, that’s perfect then! You just mentioned being able to very quickly visualize Far Away. Is that how your process comes about most times? How do you negotiate between visual and literary cues?
 

Morgan: Yeah, I was thinking that [about Far Away because it can be seen] in terms of something that’s unusual. But to me it’s still not actually that radical because everything I’m doing this summer is text-based.
 

A lot of my work is text-based. The text is almost always the first thing versus a visual or an idea. So for me it does start with the text, and sitting alone and visualizing the text, and it feels right if I can get a picture [in my head]. It’s very instinctual, and it’s also about choosing the right material for the setting. I have maybe a bucket list of plays or projects that I want to do, but it doesn’t feel real till I’ve seen the space, see what would work in the space, what would be good for the audience at this time; it’s like this perfect storm of things that have to click into place.
 

Michelle: So how did the choice of The Music Man come about?
 

Johnson: I had two musicals in mind that I didn’t say anything about, but Morgan immediately said, I really want to doThe Music Man, and that was the show I wanted her to do. The story of a con man who comes to middle America is … so real.
 

Michelle: Absolutely. We just saw Death of a Salesman last night.
 

Johnson: Oh! Theater Mitu’s? What did you think?
 

Michelle: We loved it. We sat in the front row, so it was incredibly immersive. We very much interpreted it as empathizing with a Trump voting family. I also hadn’t seen that play in so long that I forgot about how agitated I get sitting through Willy’s monologues. It was very much like… dude, get a grip. We ran into a large group of friends and many of them didn’t make that connection, though.
 

Morgan: Oh, wow.
 

Johnson: That’s wild.
 

Michelle: They were either thinking about their own fathers, or family or friends, or whatever it was. Anyway, it just seems like it’s something that’s popping up everywhere, and folks are making connections whether the directors meant for it or not.
 

Johnson: Well, [Willy] is so emblematic of the worst parts of our culture. So as we look at these stories of patriarchy, and whiteness, and oppression, he’s in all of those.
 

Morgan: One of the things I was trying to deal with after Trump was elected — there was all this criticism about him, obviously, leading up to the election, every horrible thing he did, every lie, and everything that was revealed that was like, Is this the thing that’ll take him down? No, that’s not it. There was nothing that happened that was so bad that would prevent him from succeeding, so I was thinking about the public that elected him, and that there was more of those people in New York, around me, than I realized. So I was really connecting to The Music Man in that it’s a story about townspeople in middle America who accept a fantasy and enjoy it, because it sounds good and it feels good. They just buy into it, even when they find out that it’s a fantasy and they’ve been lied to and cheated. They kind of forgive this white guy. So I was interested in looking at myself and people who enjoy the feeling of believing in a fantasy. That’s so much a part of the American dream and the American psyche, and advertising, and Twitter — I mean, we’re just fed pieces of information and we consume them, digest them, and take them for truth. We don’t stop to think or criticize. And if we do, and something is revealed to be a lie, we’re still okay with it, because it felt better. It feels better, and is more satisfying to just buy the fantasy. And I experience that too in myself, so it was not so much getting to Trump voters specifically, but at American people who buy the fantasy.
 

Michelle: I definitely looked up the exit polls for this town when I was preparing for this interview. [laughs]
 

Morgan: You did?
 

Michelle: It went…
 

Johnson: For Hillary.
 

Morgan Green Johnson Henshaw
 

Michelle: Yeah, well, 800-something to 500-something. So it’s interesting to me. I also looked up the demographics, which says it’s about 98% white. This summer season you’ve put on and are putting on work that is perhaps challenging to the audience, but I wonder, at a place like the Sharon Playhouse, is there any fear of touching on subjects like racial disparity, gender disparity, or any marginalized issue, without basically pissing off most of your subscriber base?
 

Johnson: This pocket of Connecticut, Litchfield County, is in many ways a weekend community. So many of the people up here are city people, who come up here on the weekends. So it’s a sophisticated bunch.
 

Morgan: In Minor Character, men play women, and women play men, and actors of all races play the different characters. It’s really fluid, and one person who came to a dress rehearsal that the only good part of the show was when the women were kissing each other. So I feel like there is also that contingency of an audience here. There’s also people who totally loved it and embraced it. I think New Saloon, my company that I made Minor Character with, I don’t think we’re trying to make a bold statement about racial politics in our piece, but we are making a statement about identity and its fluidity and how we all hold many identities inside of us. I think that the intentionally diverse casting is trying to crack open some stereotypes. The diversity in the casting of that piece is essential to the project. We couldn’t do Minor Character with an all white cast. That felt important to get to do here.
 

Michelle: In that sense, what do you think of color conscious casting, which is what I’d call what you just described in Minor Character’s concept, versus a director and casting director trying to check off boxes in trying to satisfy diversity in a way?
 

Morgan: I try not to do those kinds of plays, or if I do, I play against it. In The Music Man, the Paroo family is written as an Irish family, which had more social stigma when it was first originally written, but no longer does. So I’ve cast the Paroo family as an African American family. The storyline is about how Marian is treated in this town in Iowa, so I think it heightened the urgency, especially because of the whole plotline about her younger brother and his safety and success in the world. So there’s a young Black boy running around in a town that is stirred up by this white guy and it becomes sort of an angry mob. That’s really scary right now.
 

Johnson: In the run-through today, I was so struck by the line about Winthrop’s father being killed, about being dead, which is usually, like, whatever. But when you have this young Black boy, upset, and his mother trying to explain things to him, it just made me think of Philando Castile, and so many others…. All the black bodies that are being killed every day, and those children that are left behind…
 

Michelle: Absolutely. I’m very interested in coming back and seeing it done in this way. I want to now zoom out a little and go back to a great point that was brought up, about the disparity between fellowships and mentorship for playwrights versus directors. I would argue there are even less for designers. Though all this seems very doable to me.
 

Johnson: Yeah.
 

Michelle: So, how has the experience been, what are the lessons learned, and what can others take away from this type of programming? How would you encourage other artistic directors or administrative folks to be inclusive in their guidance of emerging theater artists?
 

Johnson: It’s a leap of faith. You have to trust the artist. I’ve only seen Morgan do one show.
 

Morgan: He was very trusting. I couldn’t believe it.
 

Johnson: Well, I don’t think great work happens without great risk. There are so many theaters in this country. There are so many theaters in New York that are picking the trusted directors, the old steady hand, with the way that it has been done before. It feels to me, if I’m going to be a young artistic director, I should do something different. I should make a different choice. I should think about who’s going to make the next great theater, and give a platform. I’m really proud of Morgan’s work, and now she’s had three big productions in a row. I won’t speak for whatever she’s learned, but there have been insane learning moments. No artistic director can ever tell her she’s not ready to do a musical. No artistic director can tell her she doesn’t know how to do a stylized Caryl Churchill play, you know, and that’s so exciting to me. To give her that experience…
 

Morgan: Yeah, it’s a ton of experience right in a row. It forces this kind of feverish creativity.
 

Michelle: It must be all overwhelming.
 

Morgan: Very overwhelming. But it’s pushed me to be really collaborative with the designers and the actors and trust them in the way that Johnson’s trusting me. I think [Johnson] told me I brought about 80 people here, all in all.
 

Johnson: 70 people contracted.
 

Morgan: Right. So I brought my entire New York network with me. So it’s not like I actually did this by myself, you know? There’s a lot of other people involved. The pressure I find useful, but that’s just the kind of person I am. I like the pressure, but it is and was overwhelming.
 

Michelle: Right. Because other than the Lincoln Center Theater Lab—
 

Morgan: Right, which is not practicing, it’s a lab.
 

Michelle: Exactly. Other than that, I don’t think I’ve heard much else for directing.
 

Morgan: There are a lot of residencies and apprenticeships that are centered around assistant directing, and I’ve done a lot of those, and it’s a good way to learn, and met a lot of people I learned a lot from. In terms of getting our hands dirty, and making work, there’s not a lot of opportunity for that. There is in London, for example, so it feels like there’s a real dirth for directors in that.
 

Michelle: In Europe, to my knowledge, it’s mostly government subsidies that allow that to happen though, right? We are on a different system.
 

Morgan: Yes, it’s a completely different structure.
 

Johnson: Yes, but it used to exist in New York. New York Theatre Workshop, throughout the ‘80s, that’s where Michael Greif started, in the New Directors Project, where they would throw up these plays that were hugely foundational for a lot of the directors who are now directors on Broadway. The Public Theater, you look at what Joseph Papp was doing, he was finding young directors and just giving them rooms and giving them actors and paying those people, and saying, What happens in this room?
 

Michelle: That doesn’t quite happen anymore.
 

Johnson: It doesn’t quite happen anymore like that. I wish that all those Shakespeare plays in the park weren’t directed by Daniel Sullivan. I wish they were directed by young directors. We just keep seeing the same plays directed by the same people. It’s so boring.
 

Morgan Green Johnson Henshaw
 

Michelle: I agree. And so both of you are relatively young for being in the positions that you are in. What would you say is the steepest part of the learning curve so far?
 

Johnson: This summer has been a lot just in terms of getting 70 people up here to Sharon, Connecticut, and getting them all to the theater, making sure they’re housed. The logistics of producing here are tough. But in terms of the experience of being an artistic director…As a director, I’m always so nervous about sharing my own work, you know? And I have this sense of modesty, or I’m embarrassed to tell someone that I think what I’ve done is good. The great thing about being artistic director is that I get to scream from the rooftops about how special [Morgan] is, and that feels awesome.
 

Morgan: It also feels awesome to me. [laughs]
 

Johnson: But with the learning curve, I don’t know. Morgan and I haven’t agreed on every choice this summer. There have been some moments of disagreement. I think figuring out how to negotiate those disagreements has been a learning event.
 

Morgan: Right. And for me, it’d be how to take notes from an artistic director. I haven’t had that experience before, figuring out what things I can really negotiate on and what I need to fight for. Another thing that I think I’ve been getting better at out of necessity is articulating my ideas and my vision so that it is clear to people that are not inside my head, or don’t have the same relationship to theater as I do. To be clear about what I want to do, I have to change the way in which I’m describing it, based on who I’m talking to. I feel like being forced to do that so many times, with so many different kind of people this summer, I’ve gotten a lot better at it.
 

Michelle: Communication bootcamp!
 

Morgan: Seriously, yeah. I can’t assume somebody knows what something looks like in my head. I have to break it down.
 

Michelle: So as a theater and as directors, what do you hope the future of theater would look like? What do you want to see more of, or less of?
 

Morgan: I want to see more work that is breaking out of traditional theater conventions. I feel like I see a lot of theater that I’m sort of expecting. I feel excited to see work that is breaking the mold, so that in order for that to happen, people need to be given opportunities that aren’t necessarily given to them. So what Johnson’s doing here feels like that, but also for women, for queer artists, and people of color, having more opportunities to make their work — with support, because it’s so hard to do it on your own.
 

Johnson: I just want to see less of the straight white male gaze. I feel like so many of my theatrical experiences come through the viewpoint of a straight man, and we’ve seen that. I want to see so many more people’s work than I’ve gotten to see.
 

The funny thing is, in these Far Away talkbacks [which happens after every performance], there are people who love it, and people who are angry that the play makes them think. They’re angry because they’ve been challenged and not simply entertained It has emboldened me hearing that to only want to present work that challenges people, that challenges their perception of what should happen in a theatrical space. I want to make work and present work that people are still talking about later, that they’re still responding to. I’ve learned that so many people go to the theater and really want it to happen in there, and end in there, and to never engage with it again. I hope that nothing we do this summer ends in that space. I sort of hope that of all work.
 

The Wassaic Project, [an artist-in-residency program 20 minutes away in Upstate New York,] some of their residents came over, saw Minor Character, and loved it. They went back and told the rest of them, You have to come see this. They’re visual art people who don’t think that summer theater is going to be cool. They all came and lost their minds. I’ve now had so many conversations with people who have stopped working in theater because the rules of it, and the system of it, is so oppressive about the type of work that had to be made. So many of them have seen Minor Character and have been so inspired and thought, Oh right, theater can feel like this. It can feel dangerous and totally new while exploring something really old. I hope to keep being a part of work like that.
 

Michelle: Absolutely. Morgan, you mentioned quickly opportunity for women. I wonder if you can expand on your thoughts on opportunities for women and directors, perhaps particularly for musicals. I’ve been thinking a lot about not just what we touched on earlier about the lack of a support system, but even in terms of someone like me going to ‘diversity’ panels, and feeling like I’ve been going to the same one for five years in a row. It’s so circular. I wonder what a young 20-something just out of school can do beyond somewhat following the system that already exists.
 

Morgan: I can talk about my own experience with it, which is that I just made work. It was small, and dinky, and scrappy and self-produced, and I’d invite everybody I could to come see it. Most of them didn’t come until the third or fourth thing that I invited them to. I just kept going. A lot of the things I knew they wouldn’t come, but I’d invite them anyways, just so that by the sixth time – I guess I was pretty annoying… But it’s a dangerous line to walk because you can’t force yourself to receive recognition or gain support. It’s a delicate balance I think. But that’s what I’ve started to tell younger artists who ask me about it. Make work, and invite people to see it, as opposed to sitting and waiting. Instead of asking for opportunities, make them. I guess that’s pretty generic sounding.
 

Michelle: Yes, and it’s also hard to make it or make work as young theater artists if you don’t have some sort of financial support. So once again it becomes a very circular movement, where everyone who is able to make it in this industry is at least middle, upper-middle class.
 

Johnson: Totally.
 

Michelle: Yet theater is suppose to be a form of art empathy, and yet the spectrum of voices needed is impossible to achieve with this current model. It’s frustrating.
 

Morgan: That is really frustrating, and I think that without financial support, what I have noticed is that it just takes a lot longer. If you have that cushion, you can just do your work all the time and nothing else. If you’re working to support yourself, it’s a much slower slog. It takes a long time to get anywhere.
 

Johnson: That’s the worst. That sucks. It sucks that the big institutional theaters aren’t doing more.
 

Morgan: This is the first year that I am freelance directing and not doing five other jobs. So I tutored, did admin work, waited tables, did all the things. I actually have no idea if I’ll be able to sustain this. It’s very up in the air, so we’ll see.
 

Morgan Green Johnson Henshaw
 

Michelle: I think and hope that you will. Lastly, any other advice, and what’s next for both of you, after The Music Man?
 

Morgan: What I said before, I think: Make work. Sometimes you do have to be silent for a really long time and listen and learn. I was so frustrated by doing that for so long, but now I’m feeling grateful for putting in that time. Also, going to see stuff and learning from other people.
 

What’s next for me, is I’m directing a play by Milo Cramer, who is in New Saloon, called Cute Activist, at the Bushwick Starr in January. We just did a reading here this summer actually, very casually. Johnson read in it [laughs] and it was amazing.
 

Johnson: I would agree, make work, find artists you love and write to them and tell them you love their work and ask how you can help them make their work.
 

Morgan: That’s so good.
 

Johnson: Because the most important way to get people to come see your work is to be a part of a community. I think singlehandedly that is the key to success. It’s such a small world, and people want to help their friends.
 

Morgan: That’s true.
 

Johnson: And be nice to people. Don’t be a jerk.
 

I don’t know what happens next! This has sort of been a big, grand experiment. I think at the end of the summer we will take stock, and see what’s right for the playhouse moving forward. And I’m going to try to make some work. Morgan has very much inspired me to.
 

Michelle: Amazing. That’s the best type of collaboration.
 

Johnson: And I made a friend!
 

Morgan: Yes you did!
 

[Everybody laughs]
 

Johnson: It’s the best part of it all.
 

Michelle: Wonderful. Thank you so much for sitting down with me!
 

Morgan and Johnson: Thank you so much!
 
 

 

 

Morgan Green is a theater director and co-founder of New Saloon. She is thrilled to have the opportunity to direct three shows at the Sharon Playhouse this summer. Recent credits include Minor Character: Six Translations of Uncle Vanya at the Same Time (The Public Theater), I’m Miserable But Chance Scares Me by Milo Cramer (The Brick), Parabola by Sarah DeLappe (JACK), and William Shakspeare’s Mom by Milo Cramer (Ars Nova). Morgan is a New Georges Affiliated Artist, part of the 2012 Williamstown Theater Festival Directing Core, the 2013 Lincoln Center Director’s Lab, and a 2014-2015 Bob Moss Directing Resident at Playwrights Hoirzons. She was the Associate Director for Pam Mackinnon on Amelie, A New Musical on Broadway. Upcoming works include Cute Activist by Milo Cramer (The Bushwick Starr) and the West Coast Premier of The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe (Marin Theatre Company).
 

Johnson Henshaw is a film and theater maker. He has developed theatrical work with New Georges, New York Theater Workshop, PS122, Dixon Place, the Public, and the Goodman Theater in Chicago. While at the Public Theater he assisted the writers Tony Kushner, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins play An Octoroon whose production would be cited by the MacArthur Foundation when they awarded Mr. Jacobs-Jenkins one of their ‘Genius Grants’. For nearly 3 years Mr. Henshaw produced a monthly performance review in Brooklyn called Pillow Talk which featured performers such as Erin Markey, John Early, Kate Berlant, and Sasheer Zamata. Because of Pillow Talk, Johnson was approached by the Meredith Corporation to create and produce a comedy web-series for their new coporate channel DIGS as part of the Youtube 100 Channel Initiative. Johnson and co-creator Kim Rosen created Craft & Burn which the New York Times called, “raucous, and darkly funny.” In 2013 Johnson was selected by the Film Society of Lincoln Center to take part in their first Artist Academy, a laboratory for emerging filmmakers. He is a co-founder of Nobody Cares Productions with Kim Rosen. Their first television pilot “Entrepeneur” was bought last year and ultimately lost on the shelves of development. Johnson splits his time between Sharon and Greenwich Village with his partner Michael and their poodle, Henry.

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A Conversation with Zurin Villanueva & Darnell Abraham

Zurin Villanueva Darnell Abraham

 

Theater has a sneaky way of recycling itself. It’s relevant. Then time passes. And then it’s just like new again.
Ragtime at Barrington Stage arrives at a time where the issues from the musical set in 1900s America are eerily timely. Racism, xenophobia, immigration rights… it feels like the characters could have lived as easily in today’s America as they do in Roosevelt’s. We chatted with the production’s Zurin Villanueva and Darnell Abraham to talk about the source material, the process of breathing new life into the much-beloved show, and where we go from here as artists and Americans.
 

 

Michelle Tse: How would you say you identify most and least with Sarah and Coalhouse, respectively?
 

Zurin Villanueva: Sarah is a simple but very decisive woman. When there is a problem she immediately goes into solution mode. I definitely relate to that impulse. Also, the heartbreaks in my life have helped me tap into the grief Sarah is feeling in “Your Daddy’s Son” and “New Music.” It was not hard to know what it felt like to be left by the love of her life.
 

Darnell Abraham: I grew up in a rough part of town and had to learn how to survive in two different worlds: the ‘hood,’ with its unique challenges, while going to schools in predominately white neighborhoods with their own unique challenges as well. So I had to learn how to exist in two different worlds without compromising who I really am, all the while believing that if I work hard enough, I’ll be recognized and awarded for my hard work and championing the fact that Black men are as equally intellectual, talented – and contribute as positively – to society. We see the exact same thing in Coalhouse. He learned how to exist in two different worlds and did his best to rise above a system that was designed to work against him. He rose above it until a couple traumatic experiences turn him.
 

Michelle: Wonderful. What do you think of the ending of the show and what do you think will become of the baby?
 

Zurin: The ending of the show is something we spoke about in length during the staging of this production. It’s hard because once the show has ended we have delved head first into the harsh reality of racial prejudice, immigration, big business, and even a woman’s role in society and then we kind of end the story with not much idea of what the solution to all those things are. I love the fact that Joe Calarco decided to have the last image of the children. Saying that they are our only solution, which I wholeheartedly believe is true. Coalhouse Junior would have probably lived a good life, very different from other boys his color – and that would be a good thing in some respects, but hard for him when feeling different than his peers. When this happens in real life, this makes the child feel like he can’t be himself but only a representation of what his white peers expect him to be. He’d be like many Black children who have been brought up in privilege, surrounded by people that may not look like them. Hopefully, it leads them to a greater understanding of both worlds and our society as a whole.
 

Zurin Villanueva Darnell Abraham
 

Darnell: Zurin answered this question perfectly. I agree.
 

Michelle: Leading off that, Ragtime revolves around not just the identity of the characters, but also about the changing identity of America as a country. Does our current sociopolitical situation make that story more poignant and important to tell right now?
 

Zurin: Of course it does. I think it’s obvious in the midst of Black Lives Matter movement, immigration laws changing against new refugees, and even abortion coming back into the forefront how sensitive we all are now as a country. The sad truth is, not much has changed, especially when speaking of how African Americans are treated in this country by law enforcement. It’s very scary and we are all aware of it. I do believe as long as we stay vigilant and keep pushing for policy change, fighting for what’s fair and right, we will succeed. As a country, we have become complacent in exercising our rights as citizens to make sure our rights stay intact. And seeing the play now reminds us of that fact and hopefully inspires us to action.
 

Darnell: I think Ragtime has always been poignant but I must say it is even more so now than before in modern history. When it comes to our sociopolitical landscape and the overall changing identity of America, I have learned that people will see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear, but when you put a mirror in front them, they can’t deny what’s in front of them. That’s what Ragtime is and what it does — it’s a mirror that forces us to reckon with our inner demons and brokenness. There has never been a more crucial time for this in our country.
 

Michelle: So how has it been performing this piece in a place like Pittsfield, where the demographic is 85-95% white?
 

Darnell: As an actor, I am focused on sharing my truth regardless of the demographic of the audience. However, I hope that by doing so, it will enlighten the audience.
 

Zurin: Unfortunately, it’s not much different than all of the other regional theaters I’ve performed at with the exception of Crossroads Theatre in New Jersey. All the other great regional theaters I’ve performed at have been 90% white as well. I’m glad there have been some school groups that have come that have children of all ethnicities, that is always the most important thing to me. As long as young people see actors that look like them doing this, they know that more is possible than what they may have been taught. That is something I would definitely like to see more of.
 

Zurin Villanueva Darnell Abraham
 

Michelle: What does Ragtime say about the role of Blackness in America and how does that connect to the present real world? Do you think it is interpreted differently now vs. its conception in 1996?
 

Darnell: I believe ‘Blackness’ is the result of ‘Whiteness.’ It’s merely cause and effect. I believe in context of the show, Blackness in America is an acknowledgement of racial disparity. Ragtime makes this clear by reminding us of what American society looked like at the turn of the 20th century. Sadly, not much has changed since. There is a natural evolution to everything but I think the principal themes found in the show are timeless and timely. How we interpret them today will vary depending on individual experiences.
 

Zurin: Well, I would like to say that random citizens can no longer stop a vehicle or harm another person without getting arrested the way it happened in 1906 when things like lynching were common. However, [as Darnell pointed out], the only difference now is at least now they are arrested and tried before they are often acquitted such as Trayvon Martin’s killer who was not a cop. We have to think about what that says about our society, what that says about what we believe. If a Black child can be killed beyond a shadow of a doubt and the killer is not punished, what does that say to our youth about what’s important? I think while doing this play we all realize how little has changed. Then we are forced to ask ourselves how is that possible? It shouldn’t be and we have to face that reality.
 

Michelle: So would you both agree with Coalhouse regarding the conclusion that words can best actions, in terms of spurring radical change?
 

Darnell: I think Coalhouse finds middle ground. He exhorts his followers to resist violence but to continue the fight for justice with word and action. I like to think of it as embracing the fundamental ideas of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois.
 

Zurin: No, I do not think only words can spur change. I don’t agree that violence does it either. I do believe that having conversations across color lines do help. We have to talk to each other, that is the only way we can start to heal ourselves. In terms of results, I think the only action that really gets a response in this capitalist society is money. The only thing that can truly stop the policy that is against our best interest is attacking the businesses that uphold those policies.
 

Michelle: I am also curious about both your thoughts on the role of race in the industry, and specifically the idea of playing roles written by folks outside of the culture.
 

Zurin: Race in this industry is just starting to shift. It shifts in that roles that would previously be given to white actors are now up for grabs by other races. The roles in Great Comet on Broadway right now is a great example. I’m sure this is a result of Hamilton. Hamilton’s success using a cast of color entirely to play real-known people that were most certainly white and having that show be a huge success proves that color will not stop folks from buying tickets. That has been the myth used for centuries. That somehow more roles of color in Broadway shows, TV, and movies would hurt ticket sales. That has always been a myth and now we know for sure. With regards to people of other cultures writing stories of other people, I think we will always have a bit of that and as long as their research is done that is fine. I think it’s a matter of range. I only take issue if the ONLY stories being produced about my people are written by other races. That means the variety of storytelling is off and that should never be. In a perfect world, of course.
 

Darnell: I agree with Zurin on this. The tide is changing and I hope that our industry leaders will continue to embrace art that is reflective of our diverse society. I applaud writers like Terrence McNally that seemingly take careful approach in developing characters of color such as Coalhouse. In addition, to see more inclusive casting in the industry coupled with more roles written for artists of color is encouraging. Audiences are also beginning to hold our leaders accountable because they want entertainment — whether on the screen or the stage — that reflects our real world.
 

Zurin Villanueva Darnell Abraham
 

Michelle: A slight change in topic — Darnell, you list a handful of charitable organizations you’ve worked with on your website, from sending Liberian kids caught up in the war to school, to empowering the poor in Harlem, to providing safe drinking water, and ending sex trafficking of young girls. How do you choose which organization to work with? What would you like to say to folks who are new to activism, most likely since and because of the current climate?
 

Darnell: My wife and I aim to support local and global communities however we can. We look for organizations whose mission align with topics that we are passionate about: education, feeding the poor, human rights, women rights, and the right to live a healthy and fulfilling life. We’ve come in contact with some of these organizations by way of own network and research. My advice for anyone new to activism, especially in the midst of our current sociopolitical climate is this: It’s a big beautiful world and we all must do our part to make sure that it is protected for generations to come. Humble yourself. Challenge yourself by interacting with people who don’t share your faith, political views, or social ideologies. We can all learn something from someone whether it be good or bad. Protect the widows and the orphans and love your neighbor, but you must learn how to truly love yourself first before you can extend love healthily.
 

Michelle: Finally, any advice for aspiring theater artists? What has been the steepest part of the learning curve for you?
 

Zurin: I would say what has helped me the most was my awareness of my skill. Knowing where I was in development, checking every three months on what I was missing, what I needed to improve upon, and what teacher or lesson could help me fix it. The key is to stay aware and know that no matter where you went to school, your training is never over. You are constantly changing as a person. That means your skill will change and you must keep abreast. You can also learn on the job. A job can get you to the next level but only if you know how to get through the audition. The audition is in many ways the most difficult thing in this business. You have to learn how to love the audition any way you can. If you are freaked out by dance auditions, go until you don’t care. Know how long you need to practice before you start over analyzing or how short if you’re under prepared. Love the audition at all costs.
 

Darnell: Keep going! Surround yourself with people that will be honest and supportive. Be hungry to grow and learn. Stay humble but be persistent. Don’t let anyone dictate your truth. No one.
 

Michelle: Thank you both for such a lovely conversation!
 
 

 

 

Zurin Villanueva. Broadway: Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed. National Tour: The Book of Mormon. New York: Witness Uganda (lab). Regional: Ruined (Everyman Theatre), Ain’t Misbehavin’ (Crossroads Theatre), Josephine Tonight! (MetroStage), and Crowns (Arena Stage).
 

Darnell Abraham has been seen on many stages around the world and continues to prove himself a versatile artist by slipping into character for traditional or contemporary musical theater. In the studio and concert stage, he has collaborated with some of Broadway’s top performers as well as Grammy and Emmy award-winning artists. Darnell received critical acclaim for his recent performance as Jake in Media Theatre’s Broadway Series production of Side Show. Darnell has been featured as a principal performer in Disney’s Festival of The Lion King and can be heard on the video game soundtrack Tekken 7 by Bandai Namco Entertainment. He has also been an invited guest solo artist for several high profile events around the United States as well as a global think tank in Cape Town, South Africa where he performed for world leaders representing over 44 countries. Darnell is a proud member of the Actor’s Equity Association and resides in Manhattan. He will continue in the role of Coalhouse at Ogunquit Playhouse in their production of Ragtime from Aug. 2-26. Learn more here.

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A Conversation with Rubén Polendo

Rubén Polendo

 

Last week, I had the opportunity to speak to Rubén Polendo, the Founding Artistic Director of Theater Mitu to talk about reinventing the classic American play by Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, and making theater in a time of change. A look inside his company’s process is a look inside one of the most innovative and creative minds in today’s American theater.

 

 

Darrel Alejandro Holnes: Why Death of a Salesman? Why now?
 

Rubén Polendo: I’ll tell you a bit about the arrival of the project, and then connect it to the now. When we first started exploring the piece, it came into the company’s conversation in a really particular way. We had been, as we often are on a yearly basis, in a conversation about what the next works we’ll be doing are. And I realized that as a company, we had fallen into a bit of a rut of saying, oh we don’t like that, oh we don’t do that. So there was an instinct in me to really unpack that. So I told the company — these are members who have been with the company for eight, six, or seven years, so there’s a fluency flowing through the dialogue — to make a list of all the things that we hated, that Theater Mitu “doesn’t do.” From making the list — and Arthur Miller ended up on that list — and it was oh, Arthur Miller. Who cares! It’s boring! It’s old-timey! All these things. After making that list, I told the company that I believe that this must be our next three years of work. If we’re asking audiences to open their hearts, their minds, their conversations, then there’s a kind of arrogance in the artist in then saying we only do that which is comfortable to us. I challenged the company away from saying Theater Mitu doesn’t do, be it Arthur Miller, Shakespeare, or musicals, into how does Theater Mitu wrestle with, or do, or engage with. It was such a wonderful space. So that was step one.
 

That summer, we had one of our training intensives, when we were in Thailand. I had packed my Arthur Miller plays and was reading them. I was gravitating towards The Crucible, just because the thematics I had some interest in and so forth, but I had several of his other plays with me. It happened to be that that moment landed during a company retreat, and in the timeline of the founding and original members, that while we were in Thailand, we started a whole other conversation, which was about really reaching that adult moment in your life as an artist and really coming to terms with who you are as an artist. The way that for me, in my early 20’s, so much was driven by what I was going to be and do, like it was a really conscious shaping of the future. Something really happened on the outset of reaching my late 30’s, which is that kind of realization of so this is who we are, and this is what the company has become, and it was really a celebration and admission to what it is. In some cases, it has become a letting go of what didn’t happen, or what did take shape, and so forth. And so in taking part in this part joyful, part sad conversation, and realize how much external pressure there was for us to be what we thought we were going to be, and do what we thought we were going to do, and so it became a very personal dialogue about aspirations that one has when young, and the realizations of where those land when you are truly an adult. I remember that night I went back to the place where we were staying at in Thailand, picked up Death of a Salesman, and then all of a sudden saw this incredible spectrum around that exact conversation, of Biff, saying, I am who I am, I am proud of it, let go of everything else, right up to Willy saying no, no, no, I am what I was supposed to be, I’m going to keep fighting for it. So there was a kind of entrapment to that, and within it are contradictions and nuances and so forth. I became incredibly moved by the piece. When I was rereading it, the four central characters became very clear to me quite instinctively, and their aloneness became very clear to me. And everybody else in the world of that Miller play felt so pre-recorded somehow, in the way that when you’re in some kind of crisis and you come to somebody and expect them to listen, that person always says, It’s going to be okay! Cheer up! – these kind of pre-recorded clichés. So that propelled a further instinct that all of the other characters would actually be pre-recorded, and the void of the humanity turns into these objects. That’s what started the process.
 

As we developed the piece and continued into the present time, it continues to reveal itself. One of the big revelations was, of course, being in this political moment — we’re in such a, I mean, the most benevolent framing would be to call it a moment of transition — there’s a way in which one of the biggest threads is this constant attempt to rewrite what is to be American. To actually see how literal it is to write people out of what is means to be American. To look back at Miller’s piece and realize he was dealing with the same things, which was revealing with this creature, Willy Loman, whose entire identity is tethered to his function, yet his function is being written out, by nature of industrialization, by nature of his age, and the nature of all of this change that is happening into the 50’s. The world is moving forward to this idea that it’s progress, it’s a new way of thinking, and people are being written out; Willy Loman is being written out. So to me that takes on a kind of Greek Tragedy quality to it, which really sets everything sail to where it is headed. I feel like it becomes a cautionary tale and a reminder of the moment and echoes the words of the play, which is that if we don’t pay attention, this is where it ends, just so everybody knows. The piece reveals itself so vibrantly. Manifesting it now really became important to us as a company.
 

Rubén Polendo
 

DAH: Can you talk about the theatrical approach to Death of a Salesman, and how you’re using the theatrical elements to answer the question of “What happens when you’re written out of the American Dream”?
 

RP: This goes back to that initial instinct. We as a company not only make work together, but we train together as well. One of the big goals is really to lean in and trust the artistic instinct, and to know that following that instinct will actually reveal the reason for that instinct. Often in making theatrical work, the artists have an instinct, and immediately that instinct is interrogated. So as an artist, you see the color blue, and someone says why is that? Why is that in the script? And you think, I don’t know! That was an instinct! We as a company actually feel that the rationale for all of our instincts we usually don’t see or truly understand until the work is complete because you’re being impacted by the text and your own ideas in the moment.
 

The instinct for me as a director became to manifest these four central characters and to really place them in a complete austere aloneness. That already had a kind of aesthetic implication which sort of implied an incredibly bare space, dry and absent of humanity. Once we did the pre-recorded voices, once that started, my instinct was to follow that and make [the supporting characters] these objects. There was also obviously a gravitation towards the time period so they became these objects of the time and they really became about manifesting the metaphorical language one uses for people. So if someone says, “that young man is so bright,” it literally manifests as a bright light that no one can even look at because it’s so bright. It was about taking the poetics of everyday language and manifesting them on stage. There’s something about that clarity that is so fantastic and exciting.
 

The equation that is then created is this world that has somehow stopped paying attention to the changes happening, but in fact, is just very blindly becoming another object or cog or piece in the machinery. We use this emotional focus on the family that is actually trying to stay human and ask questions and explore. The result is this very asphyxiating experience with, say Willy, as he’s sitting surrounded by these other characters that have now become objects, and truly saying, help me, please help me. And the objects are completely inhuman, and out of the recording comes, It’ll get better tomorrow! Willy, what’s going on next Thursday? And they keep ignoring him. It’s really frustrating to watch, because the objects just go about themselves, and it really becomes this cautionary tale of what happens when you ignore.
 

DAH: Thank you for sharing that; I just learned a lot. It makes me really curious about your work with your design team, and how they’ve all come together to create this very unique Theater Mitu aesthetic.
 

RP: One of the things that’s really important to us is to really promote a unified process, which is to move away from creating a kind of space that separates between director, designer, and actor. This makes for a longer process for us in terms of how it long it takes to develop work, but we do this because designer and actor and myself and all the other collaborators go from day one together. We actually don’t have pre-production meetings, we don’t have design meetings, we’re always all together. So what starts happening is that the aesthetic is really shaped in a unified way and links directly to the style. There’s never an aesthetic or design choice that is made and then revealed to one of the actors. It’s really about artists sitting together, having equal voice around this text, and really have it come from a central space; it becomes quite democratic. My job becomes much more curatorial, actually curating those ideas into unison.
 

I think of it as these three moments: First, it’s a really unified collaborative moment around the tables, the other is the moment is which everyone begins to bring out their skillsets, then the last – which is probably the most divided moment – is when we really separate to designer and actor on stage. In many ways that’s the least interesting moment as a director, but obviously is the one that gets us to the result.
 

Rubén Polendo
 

DAH: Can you talk a bit about how music works in this piece? I know you have the fortune of working with Ellen Reid and Ada Westfall.
 

RP: Yeah. So Ellen and Ada are incredible. They were very much in that first moment of sitting around tables. We were still trying to understand the piece and the instincts of it. For me, music played a really key role because it manifests a kind of emotional landscape to the piece. The entire piece is scored beginning to end. It’s a score that’s looking at a lot of source material that at first glance have nothing to do with Arthur Miller, so we did tons of research into funerary chants and songs from different parts of the world. Then of course we did a ton of research into 1930’s and 1940’s jazz, particularly into the 50’s and really begin to transliterate and play in that. Ada and Ellen are and have been in every moment of the piece. Every rehearsal they are there, creating along with the actors. So the score interestingly is really attached to the piece. I don’t know that I’ve even heard many of the scenes without music; I don’t know what that would sound like. What happens is that the rhythm, the emotional space, and the pitching of the actor’s language are really linked to the music. The music is music, but the music is soundscape, in a lot of ways.
 

The other pieces are from Willy’s long monologues. There are about four per act. Well, they’re more soliloquies, not monologues. And I hate them. I think they’re so incredibly boring. [Laughs] I always like it when the company kind of gives in to them. At the beginning we decided that we would not touch the text. So we sat there with this instinct of working around it, and then we started playing with song. With orchestrating and pitching and adding chromality to those moments, they kind of become these song-speak moments. And then I loved them. And then we all loved them.
 

When the character goes into these song-speak moments, it’s like madness. It creates these beautiful moments of madness that’s quite stunning. So the music is not only a score, but is integral to each Willy Loman scene. I can’t imagine it any other way. A couple years ago, I saw another production of Death of a Salesman and it was so confusing to me! [Laughs] He doesn’t sing? What does this mean?! [Laughs] I say that because the instinct I have for it was actually such a clumsy one, where it was not born out of this rigorous dramaturgical map. It was born out of an artist saying, When I hear this monologue, I, the director, disconnect. It’s uninteresting to me. So the music heightens it in many ways. Ultimately there’s a full score, and [Willy] is the only one who sings in this way, because of his state of mind.
 

DAH: The theme of the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab this year, which I am a part of, is “Theater in a Time of Change.” What your play is asking is very timely: What happens when you are written out of the American Dream? Can you expand on what it means to make theater in a time of change, responding to the current political climate? I’m thinking also about increasing diverse representation in theater.
 

RP: Absolutely. The theme behind the lab this year I think is terrific for obvious reasons. As a whole, I actually think oftentimes where there is dialogue or conversations around change, it either vilifies it, or somehow triumphs it too much. I think one of the big things that’s missed is that there is a great amount of responsibility in change in that change is often deeper than the aesthetics of change, but the big change is actually a change in the belief system. I feel that artists are essential in assuring that the process is a healthy and productive one for the great societal space. I feel very deeply that the kind of language we use in our company around the subject of mythology — and I don’t mean mythology as in ancient or western idea of myths, but more of the anthropological definition of mythology, which are the set of stories one tells to make sense of the world around them — I think that as artists, we create the mythology. In creating that mythology, we have this incredible opportunity to celebrate the belief that we have at the moment. So I feel the space of change, and the conversations around change — capital C Change in terms of belief systems — really can be impacted by artists. That’s what makes our work political and spiritual and social.
 

This piece is certainly key in that. But more than that in many ways, Theater Mitu in many ways is constantly looking at this notion of change and how we make art, and how that changes. How do we innovate, collaborate, have ideas of inclusion — how do we truly truly do that, knowing we can lead the conversation in terms of how beliefs develop and change. So that to me I feel is the work at the roots as artists. To me, that becomes an important part of our responsibility, regardless of the piece. I take it on very directly as a company who is interested in that. Forgive me for being a bit esoteric, but when we hear the word “change,” it’s very easy to get caught up in the cosmetics in terms of a change, but I believe it’s key to look at change in terms of belief systems and values. What in that is changing, when is it changing, and do we want it to? If we don’t, we get a chance to speak to it. But that also means we have to look at how we make work, and how we organize, and who we give voice to.
 

Rubén Polendo
 

DAH: That’s incredible. What is next for Theater Mitu? What is next for Rubén Polendo?
 

RP: [Laughs] For Theater Mitu, after we premier Death of a Salesman [at BAM], we begin it’s tour by going to Chile, and that will begin its trajectory in the next year. We’re developing a new piece called Remnant. And Remnant is a piece that’s made up of interviews with soldiers that have gone to combat all over the world — Middle East, Southeast Asia, the United States, Latin America — and interjecting that with sacred text concerning the subject of death. It’s quite an ambitious project. It’s at its very early phase. And then we have another project which will be premiering next year, which is a huge investigation into Hamlet. So it’s not a version of Hamlet, but more a dissecting of Hamlet. Those are our two development projects, but for now Salesman is our focus.
 

For me, I was appointed in September as chair of Tisch Drama, so I will continue doing that and building and shaping and continue to serve the department of drama at Tisch, and really bring a lot of the conversation you and I are having here more into the blood of the department. In many ways it’s already there, but it’s about activating and using innovative ideas of change. So that takes up my time just a little bit.
 

DAH: That’s wonderful. And congratulations on that position. I remember when it was announced.
 

RP: Thanks! It’s been really fun. Everyone keeps asking me, but I’m having a really good time, because I’m approaching it as a director and I love coming together with people and making things. Students have been really key in that. Colleagues have been really key in that. It’s a really great moment to do exactly what you were talking about which is what is the role of the artist in the time of change? It’s key to look at everything in terms of diversity and innovation and sustainability of the artists, so it’s been really cool.
 

Rubén Polendo
 

DAH: Do you have any advice for an artist making theater in a time of change? I’m specifically thinking about a theater director entering this current landscape. How do we make innovative theater today that challenges our audiences but also sells tickets?
 

RP: Again, the root of that kind of goes back to the previous questions. For me, it goes a little bit back to the making of the work. I think that the mindset becomes very important. Something we really believe in in the company and something I’m really trying to espouse at Tisch, is to move away from thinking of theater as an industry, and to begin to look at theater as a field. In a very small part of that field, is the industry, and the rest is this incredibly artistic field. So the job of the artist is to actually navigate that field versus to look at it as an industry space. What that means in the year 2017 is that the artist has agency. We can navigate, propel, make, communicate, on digital spaces, on a range of ideations and create new collaborative models. There’s some of us that are stuck in this 1920’s model that the phone is going to ring, and someone is going to go, I’m going to make you a star! I honestly believe that that is so debilitating to the artist, and absolutely goes against sustainability. I say this because I feel like that 1920’s model is so placed in me in grad school, that even though I kind of knew better, I still was kind of waiting for it. And that waiting is deadly. Waiting won’t create innovation, and in fact will limit you in the shaping of the artist to try to fit into an industry. So it should be the field that changes the industry. I feel like an artist should be doing, say, a large scale project within the industry, and then a global collaboration, and then should be publishing something, and then should be writing a column, and then should be teaching, and then should be doing an experimental piece in Mongolia, and then come back to New York and do something. So this navigation, all of a sudden, impacts the artist, maintains their sustainability, and frees them from this waiting model, which to me is so crazy. And I think we’re inspiring as artists, but also insecure as artists, in that when that phone rings… I mean, you literally feel like Willy Loman, right? They’re not calling him anymore! We make this crazy equation! I always tell my students that things happen in the artistic life, we really have to move away from making things a metaphor, so it doesn’t really mean anything. I say that because, for example, all the folks who are now graduating from Tisch drama, some of them applied to graduate school and didn’t get in. So their first response is, that must mean that I am fill in the blank. So I feel like, stop making your life a metaphor! It doesn’t mean anything! You didn’t get into grad school. So the next question should be, what’s next? You have agency. You’re not in a place where if you don’t get into grad school, forget it. We love making our lives a metaphor, whether it’s grad school, or any opportunity, or an audition. We keep beating ourselves up in that way. I’ve seen too many students who became colleagues who got lost in that. I see them 10, 15 years later, and they’ve left the field, because they believed it was only an industry and they couldn’t find a way to fit into that. It’s a little idealistic, but it’s also the idea behind Theater Mitu.
 

DAH: Wow, that’s incredible and so generous. Thank you for a wonderful conversation. Is there anything else you want to add that you didn’t get a chance to?
 

RP: No, your questions have been great. Thank you so much. It’s really a joy to chat with you.
 
 

 

 

Rubén Polendo is the founding artistic director of the permanent group of collaborators, Theater Mitu. He and his company work towards expanding the definition of theater through rigorous experimentation with its form. Polendo and his company research and investigate global performance as a source for their training, work, and methodologies. This is all driven by what he calls, “Whole Theater,” a theatrical experience that is rigorously visual, aural, emotional, intellectual and spiritual all in the same moment. His practice investigates trans-global performance; interdisciplinary collaborative models; the performativity of non-violence; the geopolitics of objects; contemporary mythology; artist training and education; investigations of the ritual and the sacred. In addition to his scholarly work, Polendo produces theatrical productions that bring these ideas to life. He has directed, curated and/or written a great many of Theater Mitu’s work, which has premiered in theaters Internationally and in the United States. Internationally, these include: The Cairo Opera House (Cairo, Egypt), Teatro DUOC (Santiago, Chile), Od Nowa (Torun, Poland), Mansion (Beirut, Lebanon), Centro Cultural Paso Del Norte (Mexico), Black Box (Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia), Visthar (Bangalore, India), Patravadi Arts Center (Bangkok, Thailand), Manarat al Saadiyat (UAE) and The NYUAD Arts Center (UAE). In the United States, these include: Mass MoCA (North Adams, MA), Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans, LA), Los Angeles Theater Center (Los Angeles, CA), Ignite Arts/CaraMia (Dallas, TX), and Z Space (San Francisco, CA). Additionally in the United States, Polendo’s work as been seen at Baruch Performing Arts Center, New York Theater Workshop, CSV, The Public, INTAR, Blue Light, Lincoln Center, A.C.T., McCarter, The Perseverance, NAATCO, Mark Taper, Alliance, ETC and South Coast Rep. His Awards and recognitions include the prestigious MAP Fund Grant, the CEC Arts Link Grant, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, NY Cultural Development Fund, National Endowment for the Arts, NEFA’s National Theater Project award, the Rolex Protégé Arts Initiative, Company Residencies at NYUAD Arts Center and at New York Theater Workshop, New York State council for the Arts Grant, The Rosenberg Foundation Grant, Alpert Award, Greenwald Foundation Grant and The Mental Insight Foundation Grant, The Watermill Center Resident Artist, and a Sundance Theater Lab resident artist. Polendo has an MFA in directing from the UCLA School of Theater, an M.A. in non-Western theater from Lancaster University in the U.K., and a B.S. in Biochemistry from Trinity University in Texas. Currently he is Chair of Undergraduate Drama at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Based in New York City, he continues to create, develop and present work in the US and Internationally.

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A Conversation with Ariel Stess, Alex Borinsky, and Heidi Schreck

Ariel Stess, Alex Borinsky, Heidi Schrek

 

It was a pleasure to sit down with Ariel Stess, Alex Borinsky, and Heidi Schreck, the playwrights of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks Series, to talk about plays, passion, and politics. In our current climate, I find myself most hopeful in conversations like these, with artists actively engaged in reflection, questioning and the desire to learn.
 

 
Corey Ruzicano: I’d love to begin by hearing about each of your pieces and talking about entry-points — what excites you about a story; what’s your way in?
 

Ariel Stess: I often start with an image as I’m starting, or a memory.
 

Heidi Schreck: Mine is different each time. This particular piece I’ve been working on for over a decade on and off, which is funny because it’s so unfinished, still. I grew up doing these Constitution Contests to store up scholarship money which is how I paid for college. I wanted to do a piece kind of inspired by this writer, W. David Hancock, called Race of the Ark Tattoo, which was a rummage sale and the audience could pick an item and the actor would tell a story about the objects and the stories would weave together and even though the story was different every night it formed the same sort of whole every night. For some reason when I saw that, I had this idea — which I’m not doing — to take out the amendments of the Constitution and talk about them and tell a personal story about each one. It’s actually evolved into something very different exploring the history of the women on my mom’s side.
 

Alex Borinsky: It’s different for me too, for each piece, but it tends to be a little swatch of texture or language. Or just a sense of the machine of the play or how it moves. For this one, I was really responding to the Clubbed Thumb biennial commission prompt so I was reading a lot of [María Irene] Fornés’ plays and her voice is very clear and she’s very suspicious of style, I think. There are all these people that speak very directly but in a very human way, so that texture was part of it. And then I wanted to use a shape where things kept getting split off from each other.
 

Corey: Those sound great — Ariel, I don’t know if you wanted to talk a little bit about your piece and maybe the memory or the image that sparked it?
 

Ariel: For this piece, I was reading a lot about the criminal justice system, reading a lot about who was getting stopped and frisked, so that’s the first image that I came to, the idea of white people being stopped and frisked and wondering what that would be like. We don’t see that, so I wanted to put that on stage and that’s where the play came from. I was trying to explore different systems that are not broken but engineered to oppress people,: incarceration, school, and criminal justice.
 

Ariel Stess, Alex Borinsky, Heidi Schrek
 

Corey: Absolutely, and I’m definitely interested in hearing about what everyone’s relationship is to creating in this political climate. Maybe it doesn’t feel different at all than it did a year ago, and I’d like to hear about that too.
 

Heidi: It’s funny because I’ve been working on this constitution piece for over a decade and someone said, I think you have to do it now, even though it’s not finished. And I agreed. Although I do think it’s interesting — I was working on a TV show when the election happened where suddenly the content changed dramatically and then I started working on this…it’s tricky for me to figure out how to tune your work in response to what’s going on because I’ve found for me that it’s easy to fall into a very crude, very heavy handed response and for the work to become polemical. I think the problems of responding to it as an artist are the same as responding to it as a person, which is, What is my duty now, what is my obligation? And also recognizing our complicity. That for many of us, being passive has contributed to this. The recognition that this is a symptom of things that have been here all along and complicity and being really passive about them before is maybe what’s led to this. I guess I’m finding all the confusion I have as a person confronting it is translating to my work.
 

Alex: Confusion sounds right. I feel like it’s just brought into focus some things that have been in the background for awhile. There’s a project that I’ve been obsessed with since I was a part of it and that was part of the inspiration for this play. A few years ago I met someone who said he was going to Vermont for a month to work on a musical in a field and asked if I wanted to come. I did and there were about 50 of us living in a field in tents, pooping in buckets, and rehearsing under a circus tent for a month. There are so many things I could say about this, but it was 50 people living in a field, many of whom were politically oriented or engaged and were taking a break from that work. We’re all cooking and living and working together on this project; we only have three copies of the score so we have to share those – you’d write down your lines, and there was an actor who had been an opera singer who would lead us in vocal warm-ups and teach us how to sing the parts. There was some conflict, some romances…it was a whole little society in and of itself. One person built a revolving stage on roller blade wheels and we took it on tour. I remember that before the show in Philly — we would do these shows and it would be swelteringly hot with like three-hundred people gathering to watch this very, very large show— the assistant director said, we’re performing this play– but we’re also performing ourselves, the relationships and the process of it. I just keep thinking about that, how with any play, the process is woven deeply into what the piece becomes. So that experience is part of what inspired this play for Clubbed Thumb, but especially since the election I’ve been thinking about process and theater-making — how important it is to be thoughtful about process. I don’t want to be too grand and say it’s a political act… but just awareness and attending to how we exist with one another. What we’re making is not just a product, it’s a set of relationships.
 

Ariel: I would agree. What I’ve been thinking about mostly is: how does the model for creating relate to the product you make? It felt like previously it was okay not to think too much about power structures or dynamics or resource distribution and then have a product that is political or stirs up a political question, but now I’m reflecting more on the steps and all of the collaborations that go into making something and making something political and how to be sensitive to that. The steps and the way we make things are the thing we make, but for some reason, ever since the election, I’ve been even more focused on that.
 

Heidi: That’s true for me too. I worked on a show called I Love Dick and we began to examine the way that structure works. We had many writers of color on staff, for example, but they’d hired upper-level writers who were all white. We took an anti-racism workshop and an anti-oppression workshop to see how the way we were making the show was still enacting an oppressive power structure.
 

Michelle Tse: Heidi, I know you a little bit, so I just have to ask: I know you were a journalist in Russia. I would love to hear about that.
 

Heidi: You want to know my take on the situation?
 

Michelle: It’s fascinating that you were there. For me, being an immigrant, yes, this is all overwhelming, but not shocking. So I wonder if for you, as an American who lived there, not necessarily covering politics but working as a journalist —
 

Heidi: I don’t have any secret information.
 

Michelle: I wonder what your reaction was when things started happening here — did you have any perspective on what you thought might happen?
 

Heidi: Maybe it feels less surprising to me than to some people. Because I was in Russia when the groundwork was being laid for Putin, I saw how easily it can happen. And I never assumed it couldn’t happen here.
 

Ariel Stess, Alex Borinsky, Heidi Schrek
 

Corey: I’ve also been asking most of the people I speak with what change you’re looking to see in the field — you can be as specific and granular or as expansive as you want with that, but I’m interested in how people articulate that vision. If you were going to make a change in the field or within your reach, what might that look like?
 

Heidi: For me, one granular thing that is connected to an expansive idea, is understanding that I am not some kind of “neutral” voice because I am white. And if I don’t examine how whiteness affects my process, my working relationships, the way I think about story, I’m likely perpetuating oppression. I’ve been the only woman in a writers room before, so I’ve seen how well-intentioned men have blind spots when it comes to their own complicity in misogyny. I have to confront that in terms of racism.
 

Alex: One thing I’ve been thinking about is that it’s very easy to start thinking — and I’m talking about playwriting specifically but you could say this about art-making in general — about what makes it possible to do your work is in relationship to institutions. The ways that they do and do not provide resources to support your work. I think in a weird way that becomes sort of a focus for what makes it possible to live in New York and make art – what this or that institution supports. But I feel like for most people, what makes it possible to live in New York or any place is stuff like, is housing affordable, is food affordable, do you have access to healthcare and education and childcare. It’s very easy for artists to start thinking of ourselves as living in a different city than everyone else, in that artists are fighting for resources in the context of arts institutions—as opposed to fighting for affordable housing or childcare, which are other ways of making art-making possible. How do we avoid getting siloed within the arts-ecosystems that make our artist-lives possible, instead of living in the same city as the rest of the people who live here, and see that we need to fight for the same things as everyone else to make this place livable, and to make art-making possible?
 

Ariel: Yeah, the only thing I can think of right now is, and it’s really small, but I’ve been thinking about lack of information and how withholding information can be a form of power. I’m thinking about ways that the process of making and supporting art can be more transparent — all of the people in the making of art being in on the goals, like appealing to a certain audience, or being aware of the things you have to do, as part of an institution, to appeal to that certain audience. I’d like to see more basic information-sharing, I’ve just been feeling recently that there’s a lot of information withheld depending on your role in the process of making a play and it’s just expected that some people get this kind of information and [other] people get that kind of information and that feels like a sort of oppression as well. That’s the way we know how to work in a collaborative art like theater, and I’m not sure what that shift would look like because we keep information from each other to protect egos and protect the creative process.
 

Corey: Because it’s so complicatedly personal. I wonder, in that vein, what ingredients make a successful collaborator? What makes you excited to work with someone?
 

Heidi: It really varies. I think for me, it’s a sense of openness and a willingness to be okay with not knowing or deciding too quickly. I’ve been working with Oliver Butler on this piece and what has been very exciting for me that we’re both willing to sit in the place of we don’t know yet, we don’t have to decide yet. That’s very exciting for me and allows me to push the kind of work that I normally feel able to do because I’m just getting a little more comfortable in the mystery of it all.
 

Ariel: Probably a willingness to make decisions and then switch them, to be able to say, I was wrong. I’m working with Kip Fagan and being able to go back and change things has been really important for us and being able to talk about a lot of things that may be uncomfortable or even if you’re talking about it badly, you talk and then find out how to do it better through talking.
 

Alex: The only thing to add to that is trust. I’m working with [director]Jeremy [Bloom]. I trust him, and that’s so important.
 

Corey: We are talking a little bit about language, but I’d love to hear about the development of each of your voices as a writer and what influences have stuck with you throughout that developmental process. Was there a new language you had to learn to be able to write this piece?
 

Ariel: I think when I was working on this piece, I was thinking about words that seem neutral but have a violence to them or have an oppression within them, so I guess that’s what I’ve been working on. I wrote the play knowing I would highlight certain words or phrases that sound neutral but aren’t, but then when we were working on the piece, there was text that I wrote and when I wrote it I thought it was neutral, which turned out to have a violence to it or cruelty as well. I was italicizing words and phrases in the script that I deemed questionable initially — words we use all the time — and then as we went through the script with the actors I found more and more words that I had written but hadn’t realized their violence, so it’s been a process of examining language and how it’s oppressive and violent and at times unexpectedly discovering that oppression and violence in words I’m still using. Once you start to scrutinize language, you see a lot of cruelty in commonplace expressions.
 

Heidi: I’m dealing with the language of the Constitution and it’s very strange. I’ve been meeting with a lot of constitutional scholars about it and one of the most fascinating things has been how different words’ meanings can be in legal language [versus] in human language. The word ‘person’, for example, as a legal term means something very different than what we think it does — the idea of corporate personhood is problematic in so many ways, but it actually doesn’t mean ‘person’ in the way that we think of it. It’s fascinating and I’d like to explain more but I’m not sure that I have fully grasped it myself. And that’s been so interesting to see how the language of this document that’s shaped so many things about our lives has its own very confusing rules and is its own foreign language in a sense. I find it quite overwhelming.
 

Alex: For me, it feels like Fornés and her suspicion of style, so it’s been a lot of trying not to do too much. It’s also just trying to give myself permission to be a little stupid. Which is not necessarily Fornes, but. I’ve been trying to give all of my stupid, cheesy impulses some space.
 

Heidi: I started writing because of Fornés. I found her in high school and that was the first time I thought I might want to be a playwright; she’s been very influential for me.
 

Alex: Which did you read?
 

Heidi: I read Springtime and then Fefu.
 

Ariel: I know, I remember thinking, You can do that with a play?
 

Heidi: I got to be in Springtime when I was 20. I still feel this, for most of my 20s, a lot of my early plays are just complete rip-offs, but I had to write those plays.
 

Ariel Stess, Alex Borinsky, Heidi Schrek
 

Corey: I keep thinking about what you said about thinking about yourself as a white writer more than you ever have and I wanted to see if that resonates with anyone else or what that shift in consciousness has looked like for you either in action or impression.
 

Heidi: I honestly don’t know yet. I feel much more aware that I can’t position myself as some neutral default person and I don’t yet know exactly what that will mean but it seems like something I understood intellectually, that I understand viscerally now. I think it’s a good thing.
 

Alex: Yeah. It needs examining.
 

Heidi: I will say it has come up in my piece a little bit because I’m telling stories that I learned at 15 that now many, many years later, I have to reframe. Here’s a very simple example: I grew up learning that where I come from, Washington state, the male to female ratio when my grandmother came over from Germany, who was a mail order bride, was nine to one – nine men to every woman – and that’s why they were shipping all these women in. But, of course, now I know that that’s a totally false statistic. It leaves out the Native American women — the women of the Salish Tribes. As I go back and reframe the stories I was taught and see how inaccurate it was, I feel like it just sort of speaks to how seldom we’re looking at the whole story.
 

Ariel: I agree. I think understanding yourself as a white person and a white woman, understanding myself as those things and how that should affect your work and your writing…I think there’s a lot more work to be done. We’re all moving in certain circles and I want them all to expand and I’m not sure how. That’s what I’m working on, trying to expand those bubbles of social groups because that’s where you’re stalled if you’re only in touch with one type of person.
 

Corey: Absolutely. To close I would just like to hear something you’re excited about — whether that’s in this piece or something you’re working on next or what you’re going to have for lunch.
 

Ariel: Well, my play is running right now, so I’m excited to see it tonight. The actors are incredible and the designers are amazing and the direction…I’m excited to watch them again.
 

Heidi: I’m going to see Indecent and I haven’t seen it yet and I cannot wait.
 

Alex: I’m excited to spend some time outside this summer.
 

Corey: Where outside?
 

Alex: I think the beach a little. Maybe in Vermont.
 

Corey: Back to the field!
 

Alex: Back to the field.
 
 

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A Conversation with Mimi Lien

Mimi Lien

 

It’s hard to believe that Mimi Lien only just made her Broadway debut this past season with Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812. Although Mimi cultivated her craft over the years in various off-Broadway and regional productions and at her performance venue, JACK, this MacArthur Fellow seems to be just getting started. I had the honor of sitting down with Mimi within the environment she created at the Imperial Theater, to discuss her most ambitiously-scaled project to date, her journey from architecture to scenic design, and her experience with being Chinese-American.
 

 

Michelle Tse: I must say first that as a designer who recently left architecture, I shed a tear when I walked through those double doors onto the set and into this house. Thank you for the inspiration. And do call me out if the questions get too nerdy.
 

Mimi Lien: [laughs] Thank you! And that’s quite alright — I, too, am nerdy!
 

MT: Perfect. For our readers who may not be completely familiar, what for you is the big concept idea of this design?
 

ML: The main thing about the design for me was that it functions as a delivery system: to deliver the actors to the audience. I say this — and I do feel this way, but others may disagree — that it’s not the usual spectacle, but it’s about creating the environment, creating the container, and orchestrating the way that people share space together within that.
 

MT: What is it like staying with a show through so many iterations and getting to scale up each time? Did the difference in the container of the show force you to make design choices that you wouldn’t have done and maybe then ended up getting incorporated?
 

ML: It has been heartbreak and ecstasy, because of the effort to maintain the essential DNA of the show and of the design. I feel really fortunate, and we as a team have been fortunate — and I don’t know that we would’ve known this from the outset — because we’ve had to design it in so many different places and tried to adapt that basic concept to a lot of different physical scenarios, we’ve gotten to prove to ourselves that somehow we got it right the first time.
 

The reason there’s red curtains everywhere is to create one envelope that everyone is in. It’s not just the stage is over there, and the audience goes over here. It’s enveloping the audience too. All of these same elements have been here since the beginning: the curtains, the paintings… so on the one hand, it’s a design that very much responses to each environment, but the thing that we’re trying to deploy is remarkably consistent.
 

I think there were moments of anxiety about when we first went from a black box to a proscenium. When we went from the tent to A.R.T. was probably the biggest moment of fear for me. We were very worried that we’d lose something that was essential to the show. I was pleasantly proven wrong.
 

MT: Was the proscenium covered in red curtain, like it is here?
 

ML: At A.R.T. we were actually able to remove the proscenium. That was a theater that was built in the ‘60s, so it was sort of modular, and they didn’t have the ornate frame like we do here, where we’ve covered the proscenium on all sides. At A.R.T. there wasn’t a real proscenium, per say, and there were these portals that we kind of were able to just remove.
 

Mimi Lien
 

MT: Well that’s nice! So now, making your Broadway debut… I mean, you got to revamp a Broadway theater! What’s that like? Was it another point of anxiety, or after all those iterations, it was more, “Nah, I got this!”
 

ML: [laughs] Well definitely I think the most anxiety came when we went to A.R.T.. Because that was completely redesigning it to fit a completely different space. The audience-actor relationship was going to be very different, dictated by the space. Once we did that, I knew it was going to work here. The one big difference here is there’s a mezzanine, a second level. We didn’t have that at A.R.T. — everyone was in the same room, everyone can see the same thing all the time. Here, there are things that happen down [in the orchestra] that people can’t see up [in the mezzanine], and vice versa. But I knew that it was doable.
 

I feel very fortunate to have the backing of producers who recognized the importance of the environment to the show, and supported that. It’s something that I think many producers would say no to. It’s too expensive. It’s too involved. For example, putting up the red curtains: it’s just a simple gesture that fulfills the concept of putting everyone in the same space, but there’s nothing to hang it on! There’s no drawings that existed of this space. Everything had to be measured. Now there’s a whole system of pipe structure behind the curtains that were really hard to put up.
 

MT: Did you work with a registered architect, then? Or was it all on the structural engineer?
 

ML: The shop that built it has a number of engineers on staff, so I worked with them. But also we got a permit of assembly, because we have to comply with building code, and be approved because the audience is occupying the same space as the actors. The entire set has to be code-worthy, so we did work with an architect because we needed all drawings stamped and submitted to the Department of Buildings. There was also a code consultant and expeditor. So, leaving architecture… [chuckles] I somehow found my way back through this show.
 

MT: Great, that’s exactly what I was about to get to! You’ve spoken before about buildings as “a series of theatrical events.” So how important was it, aesthetically and phenomenally, to design the choreography from 45th street, to the lobby bunker, to the interstitial threshold, then finally into the house, knowing it might not be registering in a theater patron’s mind what is happening?
 

ML: The path that the audience takes has been really important to me design-wise, and also dramaturgically to the show. We really wanted to draw the distinction between the outside and the inside. I mean, “There’s a war going on. Out there somewhere.” So although some people might not recognize what they’re going through when they’re coming into the show, I do think that by the time intermission comes around, they can wander back out and go, Ohh, right! I saw Andre going to war and walked out here into the hallway in which I entered, and that was a military bunker! So for me that was very important for the audience to walk through that “war outside”, before arriving “inside.” Certainly from a design and spatial standpoint, creating and extending this portion of the journey in order to make that moment of entry really be high contrast is something we’ve done since Ars Nova. We didn’t have any money to construct anything, but we took the audience through the basement, to the dressing rooms, where we turned off all the lights, and we had a boombox and sodium vapor on the floor, which was effective. The point is to disorient the audience spatially and by doing that, it triggers this questioning of where you are. I feel like when you walk into a normal theater lobby, it’s I know where I am, I’ll pick up my ticket and go to my seat. There’s no being thrusted into an unknown circumstance, and so by doing it physically, you’re essentially switching on the senses of the audience member, and I think that’s a great way to prime someone for this experience of watching the show.
 

MT: Then on top of that, having to negotiate between the audience’s path to their stage seating versus the rest of the house… what did that resolution look like?
 

ML: Originally I would’ve loved to have created that bunker hallway for all of [the audience], and there was talk of making the back [of the house] an aisle that I was going to encase like a tunnel, out of corrugated metal, so that you’d still walk through a hallway into these doors that would open into the aisles for the seats. But it was maybe the only thing they said no to. [laughs] We were even going to do the mezzanine lobby as a bunker. So there was a point where we just ran out of time, you know?
 

MT: Ah, yes. But this is nice, too.
 

ML: Yes, this is nice, too!
 

Mimi Lien
 

MT: I know the general idea is this is a supper club, cabaret room. Was there a particular way in which you decided what type of chairs went where in terms of the location of the stage seats? Did that change at all throughout the production?
 

ML: No, that was from the beginning, setting out to design a supper club at Ars Nova. When I thought of what kinds of chairs people sat on in supper clubs, it was, Well, there’s the banquets in the booths, there’s bar stools at the bars, and sometimes there are loose tables and chairs. It was just a matter of variegated… Akin to a family of seating.
 

MT: And I also imagine for this show, you maybe collaborated with the other designers more than any other production. Was there one designer you worked with more closely than another? We sat down with Paloma [Young, costume designer] recently, who said your set informed her designs a lot.
 

ML: Really?!
 

MT: Yes! And I noticed when I was at the show that when the actors are spinning around on the constructed aisles that the circumference of their dresses were literally the exact width of your aisles.
 

[Everybody laughs]
 

ML: I know! I don’t know whether it’s possible that Paloma went and calculated that, but I noticed that, too! Everytime I watch the hem of their skirts I worry that it was going to knock over something. [laughs] I mean, if Paloma has calculated that, she hasn’t told me, but I worship her. I feel like for me, a lot of the bunker is actually in response to the punk flavor of some of the ensemble costumes. We certainly talked about it in the beginning, about this being an anachronistic vision of Russia. We’re not being period specific. This is not what 19th-century Russia looks like, you know? This is maybe if you went to a nightclub in Moscow in the late ‘90s and their theme was Imperial Russia. Maybe that’s it. So that has a lot to do with the techno music that Dave [Malloy, creator and composer] composed. So it’s kind of a mashup of things.
 

For me also, growing up in the ‘80s, Russia was this very bifurcated thing. There’s the Cold War era Russia, and then there’s this imperial, lush, czarist era, and those are the two different versions of Russia that immediately come to mind.
 

MT: Right. So in terms of the collaboration —
 

ML: Right. So I think Paloma and I kind of collaborated in that way, where we sort of provided little inspiration launchpads for each other. Bradley King, the lighting designer and I had a more literal collaboration with the chandeliers. They are an object that both departments are completely responsible for. I literally had to draw the drawing of the chandelier, decide how many light bulbs looked good, send it to him, then he would tell me whether there was enough power to circuit that many lightbulbs. So there was this back and forth in that way, with the layout of the lightbulbs and how they’re hung. It was a complete hand in glove kind of [collaboration].
 

Mimi Lien
 

MT: And the sound? Cause I noticed the vents on the stairs as well — those are speakers, correct?
 

ML: Yep! Those are speakers! Because of the way the show works with it’s 360 degree experience, we needed the sound to come from everywhere. Because the performers go everywhere, the sound needs to follow. When they’re singing, it needs to sound like the sound itself is coming from that particular spot in the theater.
 

There are also surround speakers — some of the paintings are printed on a scrim, so that sound can penetrate. Again, I drew my painting elevation, and then I sent it to him, and he’d put a layer of speakers on. Sometimes it wouldn’t land behind a painting, so I’d have to ask if I can move it, and if it’d be okay.
 

MT: Phenomenal. So let’s move on a bit to your personal journey. I’m incredibly interested in knowing how supportive your parents were about you going into the arts. I know you started in architecture.
 

ML: They’ve definitely been supportive. They never said no. I actually knew I wanted to be an architect since I was 8 or 9. I had a brief foray into science and biology, which coincided with when I was applying for college, after my 10th grade biology class. I was like, I’m going to be a genetic engineer! So I actually applied to college as a biology major, which I think they were happy about. But after my first semester of college, I was like, this is not for me. So I immediately went back to architecture.
 

I think during my time in college, it was a gradual becoming or recognizing that I wanted to be an artist. So I don’t feel like there was a moment where I felt like I was making a big decision. I was taking more and more art classes as I was going through college, just through my mindset — or maybe I wasn’t even aware of it. My memory is that it was kind of this gradual journey. But I guess there was a moment when I graduated from college where I thought I was going to grad school for architecture. But then I was like, you know what? That’s a long road. You know — three years of grad school and then working [to fulfill NCARB requirements]. I had just taken my first painting class my senior year of college, and I’d been having this artistic awakening, I guess, so I said, I’m going to take a year and do something for myself before I go to grad school. So that fateful year I was in Italy and it was while I was there that this teacher suggested, Have you ever thought about set design? I guess that out of everything was the moment of Oh, maybe I’m going to do this instead. Then I actually applied to a graduate program in set design in London. Then I ended up not going to London because I thought I needed to figure out what this thing is and to work for a little bit first, so then I ended up moving to New York and started trying to look for a job doing set design. But they were very supportive.
 

MT: That’s amazing. Are they first generation?
 

ML: Yeah. They came to the US in the mid ‘60s for graduate school, so they were in their early 20s. My mom studied computer science and my dad studied linguistics. I always say that I feel like my mom has this soul of an artist. There are some people in my dad’s family, like a couple of my cousins [are artistic]. One of them is a musician, a pianist, and another one is an architect actually, and another is a fashion designer.
 

MT: Oh wow. Amazing.
 

ML: Yeah! So his side of the family… though no one was an artist out right, I feel like there’s an appreciation. My uncle, my dad’s brother, became a graphic designer. So I feel like there’s some, but there’s definitely a cultural bias where it was a luxury, you know?
 

MT: Absolutely.
 

ML: Like it was indulgent. But they never really brought that up or made a case about that…. Yeah, it is amazing. I don’t think I appreciated it at the time. I guess also in my undergrad architecture class of 20, 10 were female, 10 were male—
 

MT: What!
 

ML: Yeah I know. So of the males, one of them was Asian, and of the females, nine were Asian and one was white. [laughs] It was very weird.
 

MT: Okay we need to do some sort of analysis about that.
 

ML: [laughs] So a lot of those classmates, I feel like our parents probably had similar journeys, and so somehow architecture was okay, because it was still a well respected profession. So maybe that’s the way I inadvertently ended up easing [my parents] into it. [laughs]
 

Mimi Lien
 

MT: So do you think your varied background aided in your varied lenses of work now? Specifically with your installation work —
 

ML: Yeah, most designers — at least the ones I know — do work in ballets and operas and dance pieces [like me]. But yes, installations. I have always felt that because I didn’t have an undergraduate theater education, I’ve always somehow found it to be helpful. On the one hand there’s a lot of things that I don’t know, and I was never really taught the cannon, but I think that it maybe has been helpful in some way because I don’t think that there’s only one way you’re suppose to do things. By the same token, coming from that background, I still feel very inspired by architecture and the dialogue within that community. So I kind of try to keep up with that. I feel like it feeds me as an artist in general, to not just be having a dialogue in one community. I do feel the more you can be exposed to different things and different kinds of people, it’s just going to lead to a more complex and diverse understanding and way of working. So the short answer is yes.
 

MT: Jumping a little bit here, but I’m curious about your process for designing Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s The World of Extreme Happiness. How did you research that? I’m originally from Hong Kong so I assume I know that area a tiny bit more than a Chinese-American would, and your design was so authentic and familiar to me, from what I’ve experienced myself when I go north of the border.
 

ML: Oh good, I’m glad to hear that. I think a lot of it started with the playwright. I do feel like when I read that play for the first time, I did feel a sense of shock. Because the language that was used was so Oh! I don’t normally see Chinese people being portrayed this way, swear, saying “fuck”…
 

MT: And people gasping at the just born baby girl being thrown into the trash in the opening scene—
 

ML: But that wasn’t as shocking to me.
 

MT: Right. We know.
 

ML: I feel like the stereotype of Chinese people and the way they feel about girls, I knew about. So, I do speak Chinese, but I don’t actually read Chinese. I did at one point when I was younger, but then I just lost it. But I do speak to my relatives [in Chinese] and I do have a basic vocabulary. My accent is pretty good so I pass pretty well, but I don’t know any swear words in Chinese! My chinese is limited to how I communicate with my grandparents, so maybe it was shocking to me to hear these Chinese people swearing, and then it was transposed to English, my primary language, but then the whole thing is this culture that I feel like I know very well, but I also haven’t spent any time there because I was born here, so…
 

MT: …have you been since?
 

ML: I have. I have visited China twice. I’ve been to Hong Kong three times. But all those were brief visits. And I definitely absorbed that and I think a lot of that I drew upon for that design. It was just a feeling. When I look at a photo [for reference], I knew what felt right. I recognized as being true.
 

Mimi Lien
 

MT: Epigenetics, maybe. Finally, a question we love to ask everyone: any advice for up and coming artist in your field?
 

ML: I’ve definitely felt that a certain amount of tenacity is necessary. On the one hand theater is a place where you can do anything. The stage is your laboratory and it doesn’t have to be like life — which is why I initially made the shift from architecture. I don’t have to adhere to building code — of course now I do, but — or gravity, or permanence. On the other hand, theater can oddly be low-tech when compared to architecture. I can’t even tell you how many times people have told me I can’t span unsupported a distance of 20 feet.
 

MT: But yes you can! Just a way more expensive I-beam.
 

ML: Exactly. They say it as if it is impossible. Look at the Barclays Center! There’s a giant cantilever! So I think it’s just the economics and time. In theater, often those aspects are taken as unchangeable things. Literally people have said, You can’t do that. And then I have had to be like Well actually, yes you can. There are other ways to do that. So I do feel like I’m always having that conversation. But then when people get excited about something it’s really helpful, because then everyone wants to make it happen and you put your heads together and figure it out.
 

So I feel like that tenacity to be able to want to try new things and get these new ideas accomplished is one thing. And it is exhausting a little bit the lifestyle and the schedule — 10 projects a year — compared to architecture, it’s like one building might take two years—
 

MT: Seven.
 

ML: Or seven! The turnover is so fast; it’s a lot of adrenaline. So sticking with it is the advice I have.
 

MT: Wonderful. Thank you so much for sitting down with me.
 
 

 

 

Mimi Lien is a designer of sets/environments for theater, dance, and opera.  Arriving at set design from a background in architecture, her work often focuses on the interaction between audience/environment and object/performer.  She hails from New Haven, CT and is based in Brooklyn, NY.
 

She was recently named a 2015 MacArthur Fellow, and is the first set designer ever to achieve this distinction.  Selected work includes Natasha, Pierre, & The Great Comet of 1812 (Broadway, Lortel Award, 2013 Hewes Design Award), John (Signature Theatre, 2016 Hewes Design Award), Appropriate (Mark Taper Forum, LA Drama Critics Circle Award), Preludes, The Oldest Boy (Lincoln Center), An Octoroon (Soho Rep/TFANA, Drama Desk and Lortel nominations), Black Mountain Songs (BAM Next Wave). Her stage designs have been exhibited in the Prague Quadrennial in 2011 and 2015, and her sculptures were featured in the exhibition, LANDSCAPES OF QUARANTINE, at the Storefront for Art and Architecture.
 

Her designs for theater, dance, and opera have been seen around the U.S. at such venues as Lincoln Center Theater, Signature Theatre, Playwright’s Horizons, the Public Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, The Joyce Theater, Goodman Theatre, Soho Rep, and internationally at Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre (Russia), Intradans (Netherlands), National Theatre (Taiwan), among many others.  Mimi Lien received a B.A. in Architecture from Yale University (1997) and an M.F.A. in Stage Design from New York University (2003).
 

She is a company member of Pig Iron Theatre Company and co-founder of the performance space JACK.

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A Conversation with Martyna Majok

Martyna Majok

 

Every time the name Martyna Majok comes up in a conversation, it is always followed by the same knee-jerk reaction: a look of awe, a hand on the heart, a great big beaming smile. In ink and in action, Martyna is an exceptional human. She speaks and writes with fierce compassion; she listens without agenda; she crafts stories with unflinching integrity and wholehearted grace. I am reminded joyfully and often how lucky I am to be one of Martyna’s many admirers and wish everyone that luck in the theater, at the bar, and beyond.
 

 

Corey Ruzicano: Just as a jumping off point, let’s talk a little bit about what you’re working on, what you’re excited about coming up.
 

Martyna Majok: I’m working on a play about two generations of immigrant women from various places whose lives at some point intersect in the same apartment in Queens. It’s set in the year 2001 and 2017.
 

CR: Scary.
 

MM: Yeah. The second act is just one long scene with all the women in December 2001. I was living right over the water in North Jersey when 9/11 happened – we watched the towers fall from our school windows – and the sense of national mourning and worry in certain communities feels eerily similar. Playwrights are now having to specify whether their plays are pre- or post-Trump. Similarly with 9/11. I began writing queens in April 2016. I chose to write about the present in relation to 2001 and where we’ve arrived at since through the lens of various female immigrant experiences. And then November happened. I didn’t really need to change much about the play, besides just stating the dates. A lot of it’s set in a basement apartment where these women had lived while they were in transition. I have two of the three acts written. It feels epic and exciting and daunting. It’s a challenge. The past two plays were 90 minutes and had four people in them. This one has seven women and is probably gonna run three hours.
 

CR: It’s so exciting.
 

MM: And scary.
 

CR: It’s big! And the other thing is Cost of Living, which you already know I love.
 

MM: Yeah. We did it at Williamstown and now we’re doing it at Manhattan Theatre Club.
 

Martyna Majok
 

CR: I can’t wait. It’s funny, I was going to say – a lot of the shock right now in this new political climate is a reaction to a lot of things that aren’t really that new, and yet it does feel like a really different world than the last time you and I were sitting down to have a conversation. I have the words “pre- and post- Trump” written in my notes even, and I’m sure there are different answers now. I wonder how you’re making active decisions in your work to address the climate right now.
 

MM: Yeah. He’s definitely in queens. Not as a character and his name is never spoken – because we don’t need to see or hear any more of him – but he’s there. Unless I can get Alec Baldwin. If I can get Alec Baldwin, maybe I’ll toss in a monologue.
 

CR: Might be worth it to break the all-women rule you’ve set, if Alec wants to play.
 

MM: Totally. I wonder if it would have been different if I had started writing it now – if today had been my starting point. But nothing about the events of the play has really changed. It was always set in the present. I just made the months and year specific. I recently saw a play that a playwright had written in 2014 or 2015 but who then decided to move it to present day, post-election. And sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t. In certain plays, the political can feel like it’s added on. It’s gonna feel like an afterthought if it wasn’t something you were concerned with before you first started writing. That concern is often woven into the DNA of a play whether you say it’s post-election or not. It’s tricky. I’m writing queens as we go. We see June in the play, so we’ll see if what I fear happens.
 

CR: The Prophet Martyna.
 

MM: Scary. Actually speaking of prophets, I was re-reading “Homebody/Kabul” by Tony Kushner, who was writing this giant play about Afghanistan, and it started rehearsals in September of 2001.
 

CR: He does seem to be able to uncover us before we uncover ourselves.
 

MM: Exactly. Genius. There’s a foreword or an afterword where he said that after 9/11 happened, the Times pretty immediately asked him to write something in response. He writes about how he didn’t feel quite comfortable doing that. And he talked about the Jewish period of mourning, the ritual, I’m not sure what it’s called—
 

CR: Shiva.
 

MM: Yes, and it’s a week, right? You mourn the person for a week.
 

CR: And there are sort of rules you have to follow.
 

MM: Exactly. He said it was too early to write something. That there was a process of mourning he had to go through – that the country had to go through – in order to process that day and so he decided not to write anything. There’s something similar about plays about this present moment. It would be good to sit with this for a little bit. I would like to sit with this too. I was bursting into tears at random moments for the first three or four days after the election. I would walk out of my apartment and crumble. I think that in making art about this moment, there are parallels to be made with the past. We could start with yesterday in trying to understand today. Of course some things are unprecedented. But I think a lot of the answers are in history – in the psychology surrounding power. I’m primarily focused on the lives of these women in queens. And the laws governing immigration are a factor in their lives. And many of these laws have been in place a while. The destruction some of these rules – and their recent, higher stringency – have waged on the lives of certain people is now coming into sharper focus. People are talking about it.
 

CR: I’m sure, and I wonder, if we shift back a little, if you could talk a little bit about your journey – how you got to where you are now and if the practice of telling your story has informed how you tell the stories of others.
 

MM: You mean like when I’m talking to other people?
 

CR: Yeah, just in how you’ve developed your biography, even solely for yourself.
 

MM: Whenever I have tried to write a version myself, it always comes out terrible. I hold back too much in my writing. So instead I write about things that I have gone through, or that I am going through, for characters that are different from me but who have a certain experience in common with me. Externally we may seem different, but internally we’re incredibly similar. They’re often composites of people I know too – so the characters themselves don’t feel like total strangers. You have to write what you know, but if you know too much there’s no reason to go through the writing. I need that distance to be able to get close to the truth. You have to write what you know to understand what you don’t about the world. I can only understand myself or talk about myself when I’m wearing a mask. I’m not even sure I answered your question.
 

Martyna Majok
 

CR: No that was even better than the question that I asked. I’m always interested, and this is maybe a hot button issue right now, but I’m always interested in this ownership of story and how you navigate the politics of that?
 

MM: Yeah, it’s tricky. No one’s saying you can’t write a certain story. A writer can write what a writer wants. That’s the beauty of what we’re afforded here. But I think that there’s a responsibility for knowing what the stereotypes and tropes are of the people that you’re writing about because you are always in cultural conversations with those things. People are human – flaws aplenty. But in the limited space of a 90 or so minute story, you need to make sure you are not reinforcing something damaging or dishonest about any one identity or experience. That’s also just a recipe for making a good character: no one is entirely noble or villainous. Everyone is complicated. But I get the authenticity question. With queens, I feel comfortable to write about Eastern European women. I was born in Poland. I am an Eastern European female immigrant. And I witnessed enough varieties on that experience growing up – being an immigrant in America – through people in my life who come from a mix of countries to feel like I can connect. There’s not one version of an immigrant story. Other writer’s versions of the experience will be different from my own, my family’s, and those families I’ve known.
 

I will say this though: people coming in to see a play that is representing something about them and their culture are gonna smell a rat instantly if it isn’t truthful. That’s how I feel about certain plays about the low-income experience. I’m particularly sensitive to those stories because there’s a psychology to that experience. There’s a way of moving through the world, and what kind of humor you have, and the specificity of certain circumstances and experiences you have gone through. They become shorthand for those who have experienced them. So yes, you can write whatever you want. You can tell whatever story you want to tell. but the folks who have gone through it will know.
 

CR: Yeah, absolutely, that representation of shorthand is such a tricky thing. In your writing and in your speaking, you employ language in such a beautiful way and I was wondering if you would tell me a little bit about the development of your voice. You started writing in high school?
 

MM: Pretty late. I didn’t see a play until I was eighteen. My first encounter with playwriting though…I used to work for this adult literacy program that would help immigrant parents and their preschool aged children learn English together. I would write these skits of what they might need to say if they, say, needed to go to the bank or grocery shopping, things like that. They weren’t really plays. They were little scenes. Circumstances. The point was to give the students “ready language” – like muscle memory. Practical English. Then my skits started to get a little too elaborate. There was a murder heist in one. An affair at the grocery store. But I didn’t know that that was playwriting. For a long time I thought a play was a movie you couldn’t afford to make. And about language: I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood where a lot of adults were learning English at the same time as they were teaching their own children to walk and talk. Or the parents would come over with their kids and their kids would learn English at school and the parents were learning from them or from doing whatever job they were doing. I became sensitive to language. It communicates so much about a person – the rhythm of how they speak, their sentence structures, whether they interrupt themselves. I get really nervous whenever I do interviews where I’m recorded because it’s this really vulnerable thing. It reveals so much and I can’t edit. In my own playwriting, more so than writing a character biography, listening to someone talk tells me so much about them.
 

CR: Absolutely, and as someone who has known people from these many places and who has gotten to travel to different parts of this country and a little bit outside, I wonder how that perspective has affected your work. Have their been lessons from your travels that have influenced your writing or are there lessons that you think New York could learn from other parts of the world about how to make or take in work?
 

MM: I’ve been to two places that I’ve seen theater outside of this country – I think just two? I’ve been to Poland and to Russia. I went to Russia with a program in grad school that was similar to one of the Lark programs where they translate your play into Russian and they stage it. I speak Polish; I don’t speak Russian, but I know enough cognates to have an idea of what’s going on. It’s funny – they flew me out to Moscow, translated my play and then when I got there they were like, What are you doing here? Get out! Playwrights, we don’t want you here! The director that was trying to get me out of the room said he didn’t speak English very well so I’d have to go but it turned out the two main actresses were from Poland. They said they’d translate for me but the director was not having it. For that particular experience though, I was totally fine to be out of the room. I mean, Isherwood wasn’t about to show up to Moscow to like, make or break this production. I was happy to go out and grab a drink and walk around Moscow and, you know, See you at opening!
 

CR: Wow, so it’s a really director-centric culture there?
 

MM: Oh yeah, it seems like they’re the auteurs there. I was on a panel with some Russian playwrights who became really emotional talking about how they felt like their words were disrespected. In their experiences, the directors would cut or insert or do whatever they want with their text. It seems if you want to have the more authorial voice in Russia, you become a director. But that was just my one experience. It seems similar in Poland. In this Russian production of my play, I was more watching someone’s response to my work versus my work. It was interesting to me as an experiment. And in Poland, from what I understand, it’s similarly director-driven, where often groups work for a long time devising a piece of theater that’s written together. Or they work from a text that they choose from freely. And it’s very politically engaged. I went out this past December for the Festiwal Boska Komedia in Kraków – my first time seeing Polish theater in Poland – and these shows were not shy about attacking the direction of the current government. I’d love to be able to work on a text for a really long time. Or to devise with a group – like Joint Stock, where people meet around an idea, talk and explore, and then the writer goes off with those thoughts and creates something for an ensemble. I’ve only gotten to do that once and I loved it.
 

CR: When you get stuck, do you have a trick or a system for how to keep going?
 

MM: Good question. Someone puts a gun to my head, essentially. My agent or an artistic director will be like, Where are the pages? and then I’ll have a nervous breakdown and write them. There’s certain plays that I’ve written in a week, but most take a much longer time. I get stuck whenever I feel like I’m not heading in an honest direction. I stop being able to write. And then I have to take a break. I think when you get stuck, it’s because you forget when you were in a position like the one the character’s in, that you’ve separated yourself from who you’re writing and the situation you’re writing about. It means there’s something hiding from you in that moment. You haven’t been allowing yourself to see the true depths of this thing you’re dealing with. Because it can be difficult. For me, I have to go back to the times when that thing happened, or something like that thing. It’s not necessarily the same situation you’re writing about, but recalling that last time you felt grief or betrayal helps to find your way back into the life of your character and what they might feel they have to do next. And also, drinking. Drinking helps when I’m stuck.
 

Martyna Majok
 

CR: I was gonna say, wine’s gotta be an answer here. So I keep saying this but I’ll say it again, I love queens, and I wonder what the process has been like working with all women—
 

MM: Highly recommend.
 

CR: Amazing. Tell me more, are there stark differences or—
 

MM: It’s been great. There’s always a moment, each time I’ve developed it with actors, where someone realizes somewhere midway through the process that we’re all women in the room. And then—this is what happened to me when I first noticed—then the conversation moves very quickly to shorthand. We talk about certain things without having to give context or much explanation. We feel united in an experience, which lets us celebrate and listen to our differences within that experience. There was one process where I realized everyone in the room was either an immigrant or first generation. Which was very exciting. I realized that I could talk about certain things that I might have to give context for in other rehearsal rooms. You don’t have to explain—
 

CR: There’s a fluency.
 

MM: Exactly, there’s a fluency. We make this work because we’re trying to unearth the things that are hard to express or articulate. And part of that is being in a supportive place to be able to talk about all these things. As a playwright, I’m hoping to make something that feels universal while being very specific. And being in rooms with this play with all women–with all of our differences, we share so many common experiences. We can get right to the difficult thing.
 

CR: Totally, less codes to switch through.
 

MM: Yeah. I’m realizing right now I’ve mostly worked with female directors. It wasn’t a conscious choice.
 

CR: Yeah, what are some of the things you’ve learned from your collaborators? Could you talk about some of the lessons you’ve learned about how to work successfully with collaborators?
 

MM: I think it’s how to have a conversation in pursuit of clarity and truth. The process of making theater – once you’re in rehearsal – can feel fast. Sometimes you get lost or you feel you have to make decisions quickly. And as long as you trust the person you’re working with, and you want them to succeed and they want you to succeed, you respect one another. All the directors I’ve really connected with, we’ve both been able to say, I don’t understand that, let’s investigate that, let’s talk and drink.
 

CR: Always drink. This one’s a big question: I wonder if you have thoughts about what essential changes you think need to be made in the field right now.
 

MM: Oh man. You know, I see the changes happening slowly, in terms of diversity of stories. I’ll be curious to see what [The Dramatists Guild and The Lilly Awards’s] The Count is this year. But I guess here’s something…and how to say this without insulting people…I feel like I’ve been seeing a lot of plays lately that are actively about nothing. Like that’s the point. The ennui of comfort and being dissatisfied with that.
 

CR: With comfort?
 

MM: Yeah, and lots of what is the meaning of life plays that just sort of…
 

CR: Can’t help but betray privilege?
 

MM: Maybe it’s just not for me. Because there is a way to raise the what does it all mean question that can be outside of privilege or outside of comfort or is more inclusive of other experiences that are not just that, that isn’t just everyone else has this thing, why don’t I have this thing. I get that people are often writing from their experience and you can’t fault them for that. But anytime you get to stage a play, you are given a platform to address a lot of people and there is an immense privilege in that. I think we have to be more responsible about what we make that conversation about. Just to recognize that not everyone has the opportunity to hear their story, let alone their words on that kind of platform. I think playwrights should use it well. With great power comes great responsibility.
 

CR: Yep, we’ve all gotta learn from Spider Man.
 

MM: Who doesn’t?! I feel like there’s sometimes this classism – this idea that because one character is a lawyer or a king or “established,” that they’re stronger, more valid characters than characters from lower classes. You have to treat your characters with integrity no matter their background.
 

CR: Well, also it would be pretty historically inaccurate to say that all of leaders are “strong characters” just because they’ve been given a place in history.
 

MM: Exactly.
 

Martyna Majok
 

CR: The last question I want to ask you is if there’s a question in your life or in your work right now that you’re grappling with?
 

MM: Yeah, I’m actively dealing with what’s the right balance of shorthand and explanation of experience. I understand that, at least at the moment, your typical audience is going to be comprised mostly of theater people and people with disposable income. So I think about an audience’s relationship to an experience onstage they may not have had in life. How much of that do I have to explain versus how much of it can I just show?
 

CR: Yes, I’ve been thinking about that exact thing a lot lately, what the responsibility of the playwright and director, the text and the choices made with it to the audience when the majority of them will not have gone through what they’re watching onstage. Where is the line of when you’re doing that story a disservice by over-explaining or by under-explaining? How do you include everyone and not assume a baseline understanding without pandering—
 

MM: It’s hard to know what an audience is getting sometimes.
 

CR: Exactly, how do you meet people where they’re at when it’s a stretch for them to go where you’re trying to take them?
 

MM: Yeah, I’m wondering with queens how much of the immigration process I need to explain. What does overstaying a visa actually mean, what rights are kept from you, things like that. I’m trying to balance that, how much is too much.
 

CR: Totally – what moments will benefit from a really clear, practical or intellectual understanding and what moments just don’t need it?
 

MM: Exactly. Which is why it’s like, four hours long right now. I’m shooting for three.
 

CR: A tight three hours.
 

MM: Yeah, man!
 

CR: It’s an epic.
 

MM: I keep thinking like, I could have just had three plays! I should have stretched this out and had three productions!
 

CR: I know but that’s part of what’s so cool about it, defying that pressure for the 90 minute four-hander!
 

MM: It was never the plan! But every time I turned a corner, there was just more there, more story. So I just figured I have to do this.
 
 

 

 

Martyna Majok was born in Bytom, Poland, and aged in Jersey and Chicago. Her plays have been performed and developed at The O’Neill Theater Center, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Manhattan Theatre Club, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater/Women’s Project Theatre, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Round House Theatre, LAByrinth Theatre Company, The John F. Kennedy Center, Dorset Theatre Festival, Marin Theatre Company, and New York Stage & Film, among others. Awards include The Dramatists Guild’s Lanford Wilson Award, The Lilly Awards’ Stacey Mindich Prize, Helen Merrill Emerging Playwright Award, Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding Original New Play or Musical (Helen Hayes Awards), The Ashland New Plays Festival Women’s Invitational Prize, The Kennedy Center’s Jean Kennedy Smith Award, Marin Theatre’s David Calicchio Emerging American Playwright Prize, New York Theatre Workshop’s 2050 Fellowship, Aurora Theatre’s Global Age Project Prize, National New Play Network’s Smith Prize for Political Playwriting, Jane Chambers Student Feminist Playwriting Prize, and The Merage Foundation Fellowship for the American Dream. Commissions from Lincoln Center, The Bush Theatre in London, The Geffen Playhouse, La Jolla Playhouse, South Coast Rep, Manhattan Theatre Club, Marin Theatre Company, and The Foundry Theatre. Publications by Dramatists Play Service, Samuel French, TCG, and Smith & Kraus. Residencies at SPACE on Ryder Farm, Fuller Road, Marble House Project, and Ragdale. BA: University of Chicago; MFA: Yale School of Drama, The Juilliard School. She has taught playwriting at Williams College, Wesleyan University, SUNY Purchase, Primary Stages ESPA, NJRep, and as an assistant to Paula Vogel at Yale. Alumna of EST’s Youngblood and Women’s Project Lab. Martyna is a Core Writer at Playwrights Center and a member of The Dramatists Guild, The Writers Guild of America East, and New York Theatre Workshop’s Usual Suspects. Martyna was a 2012-2013 NNPN playwright-in-residence and the 2015-2016 PoNY Fellow at the Lark Play Development Center.

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A Conversation with Paloma Young

Paloma Young

 

In this first few moments of speaking with Paloma Young it is clear she is as eloquent and intentional as her work is eye-catching and boundary-defying. Our conversation reminded me of a deep and often left unsaid truth in the theater, about how immediately and sometimes ubiquitously designers hold the keys to our understanding of a story. The world she has created through the costumes of Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 is staggering in all its brightness and her talent as a storyteller is every bit as brilliant.
 

 

Corey Ruzicano: What was so fun about watching Great Comet was getting to see all of these different source materials and mediums put together. I wonder if you could talk about what you’ve learned from the dialogue of all those different things, and what you’ve learned from the dialogue of working with your collaborators.
 

Paloma Young: What’s really unique about Great Comet is that I’ve gotten to work on it over a long period of time. Especially when we transferred to Broadway and we really expanded both the size of the ensemble but also what they were doing and how they were helping to tell this sort of crazy mash-up that Dave [Malloy] had created – I was able to take the things I had used before but really layer on a lot more texture and incorporate things about the performers’ personalities. Something that Sam [Pinkleton] the choreographer does, is he really embraces the individual weirdness in the way that we’re creating a world of individuals, so even though our ensemble’s not exactly human – sometimes they fill a space like they’re a band of gypsies or they’re people at the opera, but they’re also sort of a Greek Chorus that tells the characters what they’re going through. I look for ways that they could live in a half-human, half-magical world, and then also really capture the spirit of the really eclectic music of the score. What I do is I a lot of thrifting and in addition we have a lot of folk pieces, but not just Russian folk and Ukrainian folk or things that are one step removed from Russian peasant wear, but also maybe a second step removed. We sort of spread the world all the way out, I would say, we hit Europe, we hit South Asia…if something were sort of Mexican I would nix it, anything that really felt like it was the other side of the world. But it really is a way that I think the spirit of the show itself is telling the story about 19th-century Russia. Tolstoy wasn’t even telling the story contemporaneously, he was telling it many decades after the war and so it’s definitely a 21st-century telling and so it’s like, how do our audiences think about Russian peasants? How do they think about opulent people at an opera or at a ball? And the way that those ideas get translated, if you think of the opera for instance, as this kind of Lower East Side “we’re gonna go to this crazy Russian opera party,” and so conceptually you take that artistic idea and throw together these couple of disparate elements that feel like A) a little fancy, B) maybe a little Russian, color-wise, you know, a lot of embroidery and maybe some kind of jewels – but the spirit of it is really is youth and fun and free and a little bit trashy.
 

CR: What more could you want.
 

PY: Exactly, so there’s all of that, and a lot of that’s collaged – the ensemble, I’m not building from scratch as I would for a character like Natasha, where I do the drawing, I research for certain things that I want the draper to look at when they make the dress, and then pick the fabric. It’s a couture garment; it’s handmade from scratch. That’s one form of storytelling. And I’m definitely influenced by the performer and that particular actor’s look, but when you move into the ensemble, I’ve got a closet of things that I’ve gotten and then I just spend some time in a room with them, we have a fitting, we try things on, and sometimes we won’t use anything from a first fitting but I get this great sense of who they are as a character. I mean the personality of the character, how they move – I ask them to move around the room in the clothes – and then we do further shopping and treasure hunting and really get to put together larger themes: what are the shapes that this person wears on their body? What pants do they wear – do they wear skinny pants that are really stretchy, are we accentuating their legs? Are we accentuating their arms? Do we want a really columnular shape to accentuate what Leah Loukas, the hair designer, is doing with their hair? And we also throw in a lot of easter eggs. With Great Comet, you’re so close to the actors, and most of the time you want to be focused on the core part of the story and the key players, but we also want the audience to feel like they’re living in this world, and a lot of this world is about Natasha and Pierre, in different ways, being overwhelmed by the saturation of stimuli that Moscow throws at them and so I just packed in a lot of stimuli, so if the audience, for one second are like, Natasha’s run off to get her hair piece put on for the ball, they look over and there’s all sorts of crazy textures and colors, and so hopefully they feel a little bit part of the world in that way.
 

Paloma Young
 

CR: Absolutely, and I think that speaks a little bit to that idea that you and Mimi had said in a previous interview, about creating an environment rather than a representation of something. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what that means to you. Is there an image that you started with for this piece or if there’s something that’s stuck with you that this piece has taught you that you’ll carry with you into the next project?
 

PY: In a lot of ways, I was really inspired by Mimi’s set. When I came onto the project, she had already been working for several months; she had been involved with the workshop before we did it at Ars Nova, so I was lucky in that I got a sense of what the atmosphere was going to be before I really had to have any sort of visual thoughts about what the people would be wearing in the space. I usually start from pure research – place, dresses from 1812, portraits, things in museums, paintings of the time for color pallette – and then I expand from there, this information plus the tenor of the way the story’s being told, that much more energetic, youthful speed to things, and I just start bringing my own personal experience. You have research, plus the story and the score coming together and it’s going to be in this beautiful red velvet box and you have these archetypal characters like the Innocent Girl and her Best Friend who is also her cousin, which in a way really matches up with that space because a lot of women in 1812 were wearing that white empire waisted dresses. She’s going to be like an albino moth, and everyone is going to come at her, you can’t take your eyes off her, she’s so full of light, so to set her in a white dress in the center of this overwhelming opulent gold and red space, so in that sense it was really the environment plus that information and then as we expanded it was the playfulness of the score and that I know that the colors of the Russian military are green but I don’t like that green. Not so much that I don’t like it, there’s a place for it, but the green of the Imperial Army is what we now would think of as Christmas green, Nutcracker green, with red accents. If I use that green – because of where we are culturally, where our audience is culturally – it’s going to look like Christmas. There was a much sexier and sinister story to tell, so I took that green and pushed it into a more acidic, beetle-y place, so even though the war is going on outside of our space, the way that the war and the violence and the potential danger creeps into the space is through color.
 

CR: Oh that’s so interesting, it’s such an act of translation of what the research says and knowing what will read with an audience today–
 

PY: Yes, and I jumped around a lot but that’s a really good example of creating an environment and not just trying to recreate research because you have to think about who your audience is and the context of where their brains are in 2016, 2017. It’s changed even over time, I started working on the show in 2012 and so there were certain things that if they still wanted to have sort of an edgy feel, the sense of what was edgy in 2012 is different than what’s edgy in 2017, so every time we have a new costume track put in the show, it changes a little bit. It’ll be interesting to watch the show evolve over time.
 

Paloma Young
 

CR: Totally, and I keep thinking about something else you said in another previous interview, the idea that seeing a character through the lens of when they actually lived gives us the permission to forgive them and that was such a good articulation for me of how much power you have as a designer. We’re such an image-based culture, how do you harness that power and focus it toward storytelling?
 

PY: The biggest thing I do is listen to my collaborators. I’m one brain and I come to the table with my own cultural biases and my own visual biases and I like to think that I am very self critical that I am always on the lookout for how people are interacting around me and how people dress, and that I am doing my best to understand as much of the cultural context as possible at all times, but really knowing that the more input I can have, the better. And learning to be open to that and not defensive is how I sort of hopefully get to the best place of storytelling. There will always be two people in the audience that read the same dress two radically different ways because we’re all different human beings, but my goal is to get at least most of the people engaged in the story and engaged in a way that is not distancing. Even if they’re reading it differently, they’re reading it with interest and so they might take away a different story, but they’re still engaging. One of the things I try to get away from is the idea of, let’s make a costume that’s simple and beautiful and pleasing to everybody, or is absolutely an archetype or a play off of archetypes. I like to have a variation in there because even though it’s a costume, it should still feel like clothing that the character is wearing, unless it’s a big Busby Berkeley number and there are sunflower headdresses, there’s not really a human behind that, that’s just fun and magic and color.
 

CR: Well, that sounds good too. When you get stuck, how do you keep going? Where do you go for inspiration? It sounds like talk to you collaborators a lot, but is there also a creative process that you’re able to stick to?
 

PY: I like to go to museums, because I’m very bad about going on a regular basis, which, living in New York, makes me feel like the worst person in the world, but when I am feeling stuck I’ve surrounded myself with the story, the music, the research, the collaborators, I’ve brought them into my headspace, so it doesn’t really help to keep pinging things off of them, so I need to go to a place that’s visually a completely different space, that did not ask to be in conversation with the work that I’m in. I just come in, not necessarily looking for inspiration but just to give myself some distance, and then a lot of times I will find something either in the museum or someone sitting reading a book at that museum…there’s just something about stepping out of that headspace and not answering emails or thinking about budget, being able to step out and jump into a completely different visual world whether it’s sculpture or an atmospheric piece or an installation or just painting…I think that that’s very helpful.
 

Paloma Young
 

CR: And I think particularly with this piece, but probably in all pieces, the audience is sort of the last scene partner, but in this one particularly you all have to capitalize on the audience – how do you prepare for that and how do you create the space between the performers and the spectators?
 

PY: In Great Comet, the audience is part of the show. In live theater, every audience is part of the show – they’re laughing, they’re crying, they’re bored – they’re filling the space with an energy, with sound, they make the space warmer, they can make the space noisier…they’re always part of a performance, but in this case they are always seen. There’s something in our brains visually where we’ve gotten so used to viewing movies and theater in a proscenium that we can actually make most of the audience disappear when we’re in that format, even when we first sat down we could see the people in front of us, we had peripheral vision, we’re conditioned to do that. In Great Comet, every time we are looking at a character we are also looking at a new section of the audience because as that character moves through the space we are also seeing new people in the audience, so you cannot ignore them as part of the visual space. For the most part, you don’t want people to focus on the audience but you do want them feel like they’re part of the party; we don’t want to completely isolate them because that’s part of the energy of the space and this particular story and that this is happening in the context of this fancy club. It should feel intimate and I think it enhances our experience as an audience when the audience interacts with the performers and the performers with the audience. That can sometimes feel a little bit jarring but if you see someone across the way having a similar experience, it normalizes it. So one of the things that I wanted to do was to make the ensemble both pop from the audience and the crowd so if you’re looking at them all you can distinguish them but not distance them so much that there wasn’t a link between the two, which was one of the big reasons for using real clothes. Our eyes, as an audience, are very savvy about things that feel false in any way, especially about clothes because we wear them. It’s always my biggest challenge as a designer–everyone has opinions about clothes because we all put them on in the morning. With grandiose architecture or lighting design or sound design, there’s this little bit of magic to it, where I’m dealing with something that’s much more intimate and visceral – not just to the actor that has to wear it – but to the people that are watching them wear it and thinking about how it feels to the actor on their body and how it makes them feel and how they would feel wearing it… I just saw La La Land and there were actually a lot of things I really liked about the design of the movie but a lot of Emma Stone’s dresses, you could tell that they had been made for her and that they’d been made out of silk which was the right kind of fabric for the movement that they wanted but the wrong kind of fabric for the character. You know, where did she buy that dress? I have a lot of context and experience articulating why that felt false to me but I’ve met a lot of people who said, it just felt weird. We don’t always know why, the audience doesn’t always know why, but they can tell when something is just a costume and what we wanted to do with Great Comet was really break down that. Is this a costume? Is this not a costume? And some people hate the costumes and think they look like they cost us five dollars, but that’s what’s so wonderful about it, to have all these different perceptions. But it’s very intentional for them to feel like a bridge between us and our sort of couture costumes in the center of the story where everything is made from scratch and feels period even though we tweaked all sorts of elements about it, but they are built from scratch just like a dress in 1812 would have been – it would not have been made in a factory, it would have been made by hand, pattern out on a table. So in that sense it’s just as true as the crazy punk rock gypsy girl that’s in H&M mixed with something from Beacon’s Closet, something that I got from some antique sale in Romania, they’re all just thrown together and they feel like, not like a person you would necessarily see every day, but a character that exists in our world.
 

CR: Definitely, and it feels related to that theme of ”There’s a war going on. Out there somewhere,” and we pass through the bunker and we get to get lost in the red drape of the art, but there is a war going on in our world today. What stories are you looking to see in the world? What are you hoping to say with your work?
 

PY: I think the most important thing I can do as a designer is to not attempt to tell all the story or all the feeling with the costumes because I’m there to support a much larger, collaborative creation. I feel that way about Great Comet and I can certainly put my own personal commentary that comes from an emotional place in a way, of what I feel it’s like to be a modern teenage girl and the heartbreaking impact of bullying…but I’m making those design choices based on what makes me the saddest. I was like, this makes me sad, and I want the audience to feel as sad as I do and I want them to feel it as not a distant emotion but that the characters that they’ve been watching and following actually remind them of things that they feel sad or happy about in a much more contemporary way. There’s a lot of steps. I picked this cotton and I picked this shape because it makes me think of sexting scandals. None of that – there’s no direct line. It’s that part of your brain where it starts this plus this, and then it just sort of jumps over and expands in a way that you can share your emotions with somebody without using words or something that is fully articulated. It’s important to bring my emotion to the table when there are things that resonate with me in the story. I definitely connect with the sense of anarchy and that sort of morphed into this form of resistance, there’s a lot of punk-rock imagery and there are some pussy riot references that are hidden in there. I really wanted someone to dance in a full balaclava but she just couldn’t breathe.
 

CR: Wow, weak.
 

PY: I know! She’s got it rolled up into a beanie, so I know and she knows. We know together. So yeah, staying out of the way but also being emotionally present in my design is the best I can hope for in terms of resisting or being politically or emotionally woke in my sense of art.
 

Paloma Young
 

CR: My final question is if you have any questions that you’re grappling with right now in your life or work right now?
 

PY: I feel like your last question kind of bleeds into that. For me, it’s not been the greatest year civically, politically, culturally. And I struggle sometimes with, how is my work relevant? If my work isn’t actively a form of resistance or a form of progress… The most progressive, the craziest thing I could do right now would be to move to Detroit and vote or maybe run for school board, but not do theater, not do design. That’s the gnawing emotion but it’s also that this is the way that I have a voice. I think if you give up and you don’t make art of all kinds, you let the terrorists win. Then you really have contributed to creating a world that is without joy, without nuance, without refuge for different ways of thinking. With Great Comet what has been so special is the way that the choreography works and the way that the directing works, the energy and the emotions that are written into the book as it were, it’s all very gender-fluid. Even though we have this very heteronormative love triangle in the center of our story, when you’re watching it, there’s a lot more nuance in the way that these characters relate to each other and the way that Anatole has a lot of feminine characteristics, in the way that Bowie is rock and roll and the way that Adam Ant is sexy but also not hyper-masculine and that that’s an acceptable form of sexiness. And when you get into the ensemble that just explodes, even when I was doing the racks for the show, my intern had come in and made a great closet of here’s the men’s shirts, here’s the women’s shirts, here’s the men’s pants, here’s the women’s pants, and I just said, there’s no binary. All the pants together by waist size, all the shirts together. There’s a lot of women wearing men’s clothes, a lot of men in women’s clothes. One of our male swings has a sarong-loincloth that he wears – there are male-male couples in the ball, female-female…as a world, it’s very progressive and representative of the world I live in now and the world that I want a larger demographic to accept as normal. I get to be part of that and I get to be a part of making that seem enticing but also normal. It’s not just, oh look at those crazy S&M people over there, there’s something beautiful and sweet and real about them when they’re crying together at the end of the show. If a Josh Groban fan from Iowa comes out to see this show a lot of that is gonna be like, whoa New York is crazy, but through the design if I can be a part of something that expands their world even just a couple of inches, then I do feel like I have a little bit of purpose.
 
 

 

 

Paloma H. Young. NY: Brooklyn Babylon (BAM Next Wave), Peter and the Starcatcher (NYTW, Drama Desk nom.), Wildflower (Second Stage). Regional: You, Nero (Berkeley Rep); Current Nobody, Hoover Comes Alive! (La Jolla Playhouse); Titus Andronicus (California Shakespeare Theatre); A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Old Globe); Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte’s Web (South Coast Rep); 1001 (Mixed Blood); Dos Pueblos (Miracle Theatre). Graduate of UCSD.

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A Conversation with Mfoniso Udofia & Ed Sylvanus Iskandar

Mfoniso Udofia & Ed Sylvanus Iskandar

 

Mfoniso Udofia and Ed Sylvanus Iskandar are the latest dynamite duo to take over New York Theater Workshop, and this time with two plays, Sojourners and Her Portmanteau, two plays in a nine-play cycle Udofia is writing. We sat down with these dynamic, emerging, and important voices in contemporary American theater to talk about time, family, immigration, and history – all essential themes to the play and their overall work.

 

 

Darrel Alejandro Holnes: Thank you for sitting down with me.
 

Ed Sylvanus Iskandar: Oh, thank you!
 

DAH: And thank you for having me sit in on your rehearsal today. That was a really great opportunity and privilege. A lot of my first questions are in response to what I saw here in this brief scene that was rehearsed for the last hour. And my first questions is – both of you feel free to jump in – family is essential to the play, so what role does your family play in your process: inspiration, support, obstacle, all of the above?
 

[Ed and Mfoniso laugh]
 

ESI: I think because I left home when I was seven to go to boarding school I have been on a fairly consistent life-long journey in terms of defining and redefining for myself what “family” actually means. And family is…not special for me anymore. I still say I go home to Indonesia because my parents are still there, the home I grew up in is still standing, but I think when I say “family” now it feels like it’s about a community of people that I have been lucky enough to be accepted by. And that includes my biological family, but that seems to define for me not only a space emotionally in my life, but also the way I like to work and the kind of work I like to do with an audience watching. Which is really, I think, more than anything driven by the ability to further social connections – real ones. It’s how I conduct my rehearsal process. It’s how I like to let my companies and my car spawn – I’m constantly cooking. I can’t help it. It’s my nervous tick. It’s not a nervous tick. It’s a thing I like to do in order to keep myself grounded. This is actually kind of amazing here because I love working at New York Theater Workshop. There’s a little kitchen that just feels like a home. I really can settle into the rehearsal process in the way that you normally can’t in self-rented or borrowed rehearsal space. What the general managers do, which is really so amazing, is they literally give you the third floor. And you can figure out a way to make it work. And I do think with a play like that and a process like this – two plays together – that my job is to make family out of the people that are most regularly in the room, and to incorporate the designers who will now start to come in and join us in tech. And you know, I’ve come to the realization that once the play opens my job is actually over. And my real job is about making sure that whatever we’ve built together has a foundation to continue.
 

DAH: Like a family?
 

ESI: Yes.
 

Mfoniso Udofia & Ed Sylvanus Iskandar
 

DAH: Beautiful! And you, Mfoniso?
 

Mfoniso Udofia: I write about immigrants, also I’m the child of immigrants. My family’s been instrumental, at least for me, for the creation of these plays. In that my mother has become my biggest champion. When you talk about the child of immigrants and what trajectory is, there’s so many hopes and dreams. My mother looked at me and she was like, You are going to be a lawyer! Propah! You go do that. And so it was a huge thing when all of a sudden I was like, Mommy I’m an artist, and she’s like, No you’re not. At all. And so to turn around because family for me – it’s not as if I have much spread, you know, it’s quite localized. What my mom thinks, what my father thinks, what my brother, my sister – they’re my people here. So there are not many other people. So when my mother turned around and said, “Aye, daughter you’re an artist” it’s like breathing. And so it makes creating these plays…I mean creation in general is plot. So to have that family support, especially when I was wondering for the longest time if I would get it, is incredible for me. And then yes to what Ed said, you’re also building family. But I’m so lucky to have biological family to go, Oh yes, this is a good thing. as I’m building family and being in relation to some incredible artists, some geniuses in their own right. You know? I also have the core support that I find I need in order to write plays about families.
 

DAH: Sure, sure. And that’s a beautiful thing. Also beautiful, yet just as complicated, is how, in the scene that I observed, love seems to be defined as “mountains of desire, bitter river of burden.” Can you explain what this line means and how that works through the play?
 

MU: “Mountains of desire and a bitter, bitter river.”
 

DAH: Yes, that’s quite a line. Care to elaborate?
 

MU: I’m not sure, and this is where I get … Am I gonna say this? Yea. Sometimes I think American Western love is illogical [laughs]. It’s extraordinarily romantic, and this kind of straight thing. Maybe I’ve watched too many romantic comedies. I probably did and then I went, Ooo this is what love is. And then I was in the middle of it going, This is not love! I don’t know what that thing was. I think love is complicated – is an action, actually. It’s not this thing that just falls on you. And if it does, it doesn’t stay a thing that just falls on you. So, there is, there can be love and burden. I don’t know that it is necessarily a terrible thing. It doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t also have to be a thing that you…You know, you can look at that kind of love, you can go, I choose this. I want it. I walk into it. Or you can look at that and you can be like, I don’t. I can’t do that for now. Because the love I have of myself or my own desire won’t let me carry the burden of the love that I might have for you – it’s complicated. That line of love is complicated and purposefully convoluted. And love and desire, duty and birth date, they went through all my plays and they live side-by-side, because I don’t know if I…I think as an artist myself I’m trying to figure out exactly what the natures of love are. And at any given point, even in my relationship with Ed and relationship with the actors and my relationship with any production company, love is always changing. You know what I mean? So I’m not into the purest feeling of it. And so depending on where you are I think you will hear that line differently.
 

DAH: Interesting. And Ed, in your vision, of this play and of both plays, how do you see the characters negotiating desire and burden. How do you see those themes working throughout the play?
 

ESI: They’re not separate. It’s two flipped sides of the same coin, which is also how I think of both plays. I don’t think of them as two separate plays at all because I think the expression of love causes burden. And I think if love is going to be worth anything, it’s going to require that amount of work. I think that…Yes, I think I can say the experience of working on both plays and getting to know Mfoniso as a collaborator, it’s an amazing thing because I find myself challenging my own definition of what love means from the assumption of what I think I’ve given, and continue to find more that I’ve assumed – that I then need to ingest and choose to give more of, in order to actually continue deepening and building. And I can say that that’s probably the most full love I have given an experience. Because the journey of it has been so full and it’s been so expansive.
 

DAH: I love that word that you used, “journey.” Can you tell us a little about the journey of all nine plays?
 

MU: [laughing] How much time do we have?
 

Mfoniso Udofia & Ed Sylvanus Iskandar
 

DAH: Can you discuss how what people will see in these two plays are paintings that are part of a larger picture?
 

MU: So when I started writing, the first play I ever wrote was The Grove – it’s the youngest play and I was writing about the eldest daughter, some immigrants…And she was in the middle of figuring out what identity and duty and love, you know, where those things shred up against each other. Then I realized that in order to understand Mac you have to actually understand from whence she came. And so then from there came, what is now known as Sojourners, which was first called Towards because I knew I going towards something, but I didn’t know what,so that was the title of it. The Grove, then Towards, and then to understand the parents I had to understand the revolution in country and that’s where you get something like runboyrun – which goes back and forth between the Nigerian homeland and now the American resettlement place that they are in. Then from there came my number of nine, which will be five interior plays that follow Abasiama and Disciple Uffat, and the last four are gonna be love plays which follow their children as first generation youth in America or discovering what blackness is without a certain kind of historicity attached to it. Technically these could go on forever, they’re not. I’m gonna end it at nine. A promise that I’ve given to myself that it has to end at nine, but as I’m writing I’m discovering how concerned I am with lineage and I do think that that is something of a very immigrant mentality too. Like now that I’m here, what does “forward” actually mean on soil that is not my historical soil. So I don’t know if that explains the question, but that is at least the scope of the project.
 

DAH: Yeah. And I think that’s definitely what people need. I’m also an immigrant. So I absolutely understand what you’re saying about lineage. And in thinking about that I recall how the character played by Chinasa has a line about the baby’s name and time. Time must certainly play an important role in this play and in any sort of nine-part series, as you just explained,, that follows this family over generations. Why write about time? And let’s broaden that and also say, why write about lineage? Why bring that to the contemporary American stage?
 

MU: It was particularly important for me to write about West African, Nigerian, Ibibio, migration here and what lineage is. In my culture you actually count where you’re from, you hold it. You come from compound culture. You know your grandparents, you know the history of your great-grandparents, and your great-great – which is very, very, very different somehow, than what I find happening here, and I think we might be in the middle of a change. It’s like more 32-year-olds are staying at home with mom, you know. There’s a shift starting to happen. However, we don’t build community and lineage that way here. I see my people from home being able to count their history. Lineage is important for me, because when you come from that culture and you come into this culture, what do you retain and how? It’s as simple as, in one of the plays, Abasiama and Upem, you know, they’re fighting to figure out how to make fufu here. And they’re going to get products that are not yam in order to do it. So it’s fighting to figure out: How do I make lineage here now that it’s different than the way it was back home and I’m not going back home?
 

DAH: Are those some of the struggles you’ve faced?
 

MU: It’s some of the struggles that I’ve watched my people face. And yes, I can implicate myself here and I am interested in this because I have heard the stories of grandmothers and great-grands and my great-great who is this Big Man. And I wanna be able to pass some of that to my children as well, so I want to answer the question, what is that new tradition that I need to make here, in a different space, for me to carry on that culture?
 

Mfoniso Udofia & Ed Sylvanus Iskandar
 

DAH: And is that something that resonates with you Ed, as to why you were drawn to these projects? Is it also something that you can relate to personally?
 

ESI: What specifically?
 

DAH: This idea of time, lineage, and how it’s negotiated between the characters – what we carry maybe, from one generation to the next.
 

ESI: Yes and no. Because my relationship to time and lineage is very different for all the reasons we chose to work together. I am an incredibly linear person and everything about how I negotiate achievement, finishing, and construction is linear and very logical. And one of the very first things Mfoniso said – I’m paraphrasing – to me in one of our earlier conversations, before we committed to this play together, is the notion that for her time is a spiral and time is relative and your experience of time is completely insular and about how it is you understanding how to listen to yourself and how to contextualize yourself within the definitions of time of those around you. And I can relate to that very deeply. Although it still is interesting because it’s not necessarily natural in my thinking process. But I came to the scene in New York and created many long-form pieces, which is something I’m very interested in. The average run time with a show I’ve done in New York is typically six-plus hours. And I learned over the process of making those plays that an audience’s experience of six hours does not mean the same thing as an actual experience of six hours depending, of course, on your choice of activity within those. To be even more simplistic in that particular analogy, I have sat and watched plays that are sixty minutes that felt much longer and ones that are six hours that can speed by. So that is, I think, where we connect. And it’s also where we differ because my natural instincts normally take me to a place where I want to move forward when Mfoniso is still in a place of thought. And I think that is both our strength and our challenge. And we’re guilty of it in this relationship together.
 

DAH: Considering what we’ve just discussed, what do you hope the audience walks away with after seeing these plays? And I’m sure the list of things is endless, but specifically thinking about time, lineage, maybe time as a spiral, as linear – what are you hoping they walk away with at the end of the day?
 

MU: Multitiered. These plays aren’t just about time and lineage. The subject is something a bit more political. I hope that the audience walks away with a more nuanced imagination regarding the lives immigrant bodies lead on American soil. I also hope that people walk away a little shaken by how quick they are to potentially judge and assess someone’s motivation when they are within that struggle. Like the pairing of Sojourners and Her Portmanteau. Some of the weeping I’ve seen people do about what Abasiama does at the end of that play without understanding what Abasiama is going through to then maybe come back in Her Portmanteau and get even more information. Perhaps we can nuance-out what bodies of color do in moments of struggle. I hope that people will actually get up and go out and read some books. Because people don’t read books.
 

DAH: A couple titles?
 

Mfoniso Udofia & Ed Sylvanus Iskandar
 

MU: Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, Chinua Achebe’s There Was A Country and Things Fall Apart, Helen Oyeyemi’s Icarus Girl and the way in which she’s constructing fairy tale stories from other mythologies, which is part of what’s happening here as well. And then even just researching: exactly where is Nigeria? Where are the Ibibio people? Do I know these people? And why haven’t I even thought to think and ask about who and what and where they were? So, those are some of my hopes.
 

[Everyone laughs]
 

DAH: So, Chinese-Indonesian director with American training, Nigerian-American playwright, is the global perspective an American perspective? This should be a prompt for you to discuss trends in contemporary American theater, perspectives in a contemporary American theater, and what it means to have creators – playwright and director – with these different backgrounds in that space.
 

MU: Do you want to go first before I go? This is a complicated one.
 

ESI: I could try. I might be better able to answer this question by posing a response to the previous one. I’ve been thinking, a lot in the past two weeks especially, about the gift of being able to work on Sojourners a second time. It’s something that I have not had a great deal of experience in doing – having an opportunity to revisit and build upon and advance from and learn through. And what’s most interesting to me is in this second attempt at turning the story of Sojourners, is I find myself continuously letting go everything I imposed upon the play. And I find myself reaffirming the nuance in the text and the nuance in the stage direction.
 

That I was not able to fully comprehend the last time. Which also reveals a level of re-commitment and reveals an actual trust in what’s on the page that I feel I did not have the first time. Because my response to the play initially was, Surely this is a Nigerian A Doll’s House [by Henrik Ibsen], because my cultural framing is Western. And I feel the conversation I had with the play initially, even though I fully believed that I had advanced beyond the conversation that I actually did have was about trying to figure out how it fit within a Western construction. I honored it’s variation, I honored it’s uniqueness, but I do think my basic map in my head, or through my gut, was in comparison to linearity and a Western dramaturgy I have become used to, not just because of training, but because of the way a play looks on the page.
 

And what I feel the gain of this experience has been for me is, a further understanding of A) the basic truth that when we need to write something that it’s all intentional – which is something I fully love so much. And there I think she is similar to Ibsen. You ignore a stage direction and a word or a punctuation mark at your peril. And B) I also then fully understand that the play can only fully do its work and and fully realize its impact if it’s staged from the perspective of that trust.
 

It’s not that I didn’t believe I trusted the play last time. I would never sign on to a play that I don’t trust, or a voice that I don’t trust or a person I don’t trust. But it’s a higher level of trust that I’ve developed in the interim. And it is linked to what I now understand I can be more intentional about on the stage. And I find everything is stripped down in a gorgeous way. There’s just less of everything. There’s less space. I think I’m trying to make, in between scenes, to try and foreground story that is always useful, but may not be necessary because I was afraid that the story that’s in the text, wasn’t enough. And I find myself doing less in the scenes themselves – in a fairly radical way.
 

The scene that you experienced watching in rehearsal, previously does not look a thing like that. It has changed from a scene about a woman moving within her home and negotiating how it is to leave the door, to a scene in which this woman has no inkling to the choice that would take her to the door at all. And so has become a scene in which it’s two people on a couch. And that is also I think the right way to frame what I now believe fundamentally is my job, which is to construct every scene in such a way that the audience can listen.
 

The text is so rich it is outrageous how much work I have to do before rehearsing to actually get fully on top of it. And I suddenly realize that is also the level of attention I’m asking for from an audience. So if I’m not allowing them to tune into the auditory context of the physical picture, I’ve not done my job. I’ve created, successfully, distractions rather than amplifications, which was my original intention. So I do believe my intentions have always been sincere, but I do know how much I have learned.
 

Mfoniso Udofia & Ed Sylvanus Iskandar
 

DAH: Mfoniso, sometimes people say that the United States is a nation of immigrants. This play, and also our conversation so far has also discussed the idea of immigration and what that means and what those stories are. So my question to you now is, is the immigrant story inherently an American story? And is the American story essentially an immigrant story? Are Sojourners and Her Portmanteau inherently American stories?
 

MU: Am I gonna say some of these stigmas out loud? Yes. America has some work to do. And I do think yes, America is a country chocked full of immigrants that after maybe the third or fourth generation develop the worst case of amnesia and forget. And then we’re somehow cycling from an immigrant nation to a violently xenophobic one within the same – it’s a vicious spiral that is almost nonsensical. What kind of peculiar American amnesia is this? And so it’s like we have to constantly teach ourselves to remember, which is part of the plays, what it is to remember to not forget. Because we are a country of immigrants and that makes us special.
 

Ed’s sight is different than my sight; it’s different than your sight; and the way I look at the story is different than the way Ed will, or the way somebody else will. And as a nation of immigrants, we also have to be a nation of plural ideology. And that’s what I feel like America doesn’t do very well. There’s something else that happens as amnesia trips us up and then we become set in this weird non-porose American way. And so we should be. We are a nation of immigrants.
 

And it becomes a real issue for me when I don’t understand why I’m not seeing more plural stories on the American stage. Why me and Ed together – myself creating this play, and Ed setting it up from page to stage is just this radical, amazing thing. When actually that’s the thing. And why haven’t we been taught earlier how we shred up against each other? That our gazes are different? Why is this learning happening in what feels like a very singular narrow way? Why isn’t this the American theater normative, if we are a nation of immigrants and if theater is a representational art form – which we claim theater to be – because what Ed is talking about is true and is particularly salient in our case. There are two different gazes; we have read two different cannons; we have two different histories, none of them – I don’t know that we should be ascribing value to one over the other, but my sight is critically different than Ed’s sight. So the way in which we work together, that is the American theater. But by God, we’re taking photos of it and putting it in an exhibit and going, Look at this beautiful wonderful thing, when it should be the thing!
 

DAH: When it should be the norm.
 

MU: Right.
 

DAH: Right. Last question. I teach dramatic writing at NYU and I always end interviews by asking theater-makers what advice they have for young theater-makers: so student directors, student playwrights, you know. And not just students formally enrolled in the university, but anyone who’s just starting out and in this field and in this industry. Any tips? What do you wish someone had told you ten years ago?
 

ESI: I would say don’t do it unless you must because the theater is far too important a space to be met by anything less than a total commitment of your life. To squander even a single person’s gamble that night, on purchasing a ticket, only to be met by incompetence is the only real crime I can imagine an artist can commit.
 

MU: I second that. I tell some of my students to rigorously pursue their inherent, innate, illogical – the way I write plays, the way I construct plays, makes some people discomforted, some people…There’s a range of emotions when people first meet my play. But I had to. It’s been seven years now. The rigor that’s involved in the playwriting, and then the trying it out and teaching people and then knowing that it works, and then the rigor it’s advocating against a new – I shouldn’t say “new” because then it makes me like, like I was birthed now and there are other people who write like me. The rigor of the education and the teaching into and then the standing behind your work when people might not be able to see through it is a real skillset. And I say “rigor” because there are some students who are like, I did this new thing. It’s great. But they haven’t practiced it and gone through the steps to go, No, does it really work? How do I stand by it? I’m not saying just pursue your illogical passions – it’s like, do so rigorously. And perhaps it’s not illogical, pursue whatever is inherent in you. And I think the keyword is “rigor.” I don’t know that I’d be anywhere without it and I don’t know many artists who are. With the artists that I love, I think about their longevity, the span of their careers. There is rigor attached to it.
 

DAH: Excellent. So previews begin April 22nd and the play opens May 7th. I will be there. Thank you so much!
 

MU & ESI: Thank you!
 
 

 

 

Mfoniso Udofia, a first generation Nigerian-American storyteller and educator, attended Wellesley College and obtained her MFA from ACT. She co-pioneered the youth initiative, The Nia Project, providing artistic outlets for youth residing in Bayview/Huntspoint. Mfoniso’s Ufot Family Cycle plays, Sojourners and Her Portmanteau, will be produced this coming Spring 2017 as part of New York Theatre Workshop’s season. She is also Playwrights Realm’s 2015-16 Page One Playwright and in Winter 2016 they produced the World Premiere of Sojourners. In Spring 2016, The Magic Theater in San Francisco produced the West Coast Premiere of Sojourners and the World Premiere of the third installation in the Ufot Family Cycle, runboyrun. Mfoniso is currently working on Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! commission translating Shakespeare’s, Othello. She’s also the Artistic Director of the NOW AFRICA: Playwrights Festival and a proud member of New Dramatists class of 2023. Mfoniso’s plays have been developed, presented and/or produced by Playwrights Realm, The Magic Theatre, Dr. Barbara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre, Hedgebrook, Sundance Theatre Lab, Space on Ryder Farm, NNPN and New Play Showcase, Makehouse, Soul Productions, terraNOVA, I73, The New Black Fest, Rising Circle’s INKTank, At Hand Theatre Company, The Standard Collective, American Slavery Project, Liberation Theatre Company and more. Mfoniso was a finalist for the 2015 PoNY Prize, the Eugene O’Neill NPC, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, Many Voices Fellowship, Page73 Development Programs, Jerome Fellowship, NYTW’s 2050 Fellowship and Lark Playwrights’ Week.
 

Ed Sylvanus Iskandar has directed over 150 productions globally. NEW YORK: The Mysteries, Restoration Comedy, and These Seven Sicknesses (all NYT Critics’ Picks, The Flea Theater); The Red Umbrella (Drama League); The Golden Dragon (The Play Company at the New Ohio Theatre). REGIONAL: Head Over Heels (Oregon Shakespeare Festival), Don Juan, Translations, and The Collection (Stanford Repertory Theatre); Homemade Fusion (Pittsburgh CLO); Don Carlos, Brand and Miss Julie (CMU); The Dumb Waiter, No Exit, Death and the Maiden and Sexual Perversity in Chicago (Edinburgh Fringe Festival). INTERNATIONAL: Venus in Fur (Singapore); Memphis (Japan) OTHER: As Founding Artistic Director of invite-only NYC collective Exit, Pursued By a Bear (EPBB), Ed has served over 12,000 free home-cooked meals and shared 150 priceless nights of theater over the course of staging 8 Labs and 40 Salons, including NY or world premieres of The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler, Arok of Java, and the musical Dani Girl, alongside new versions of Don Carlos, The Master Builder, and King Lear. Restoration Comedy and These Seven Sicknesses both began their NYC lives as EPBB Labs, later transferring to critical acclaim as productions at The Flea. EPBB fulfills a vision of theater that deepens the audience’s ability to engage by creating empathy for the human effort behind the art. Ed’s body of work with EPBB was honored with the 2013 National Theatre Conference Emerging Professional Award, conferred by Bill Rauch (Artistic Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival).

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A Conversation with Lauren Yee

 

When you see King of the Yees, the latest work by playwright Lauren Yee, you’ll either feel like Larry Yee is your father, or you’ll wish he was. Now having its world premiere at The Goodman Theatre in Chicago, the play is a two-hour journey through Lauren’s changing relationship with her dad, imbued with sharp emotional insight and unrelenting joy. It’s hard not to be swept up in the exuberant warmth as we follow Lauren Yee (the character) through San Francisco’s Chinatown, searching for a deeper relationship with her father…and good, cheap liquor.
 

We sat down after the show’s third preview to talk about representation, the future of Chinatown, and being a character in your own play.
 

 

Kelly Wallace: This is the first full production of King of the Yees. What’s it like to see that after it being in development for years?
 

Lauren Yee: I feel like it’s been such a joy and privilege to have seen this piece through from the very beginning with The Goodman Theatre and do it all the way up until the world premiere. How often does that happen? We started it when it was just an idea and then they commissioned it…we had a reading, then a workshop. I would say this play has been through the process rather quickly, but at the same time, I think it’s been like three and a half years since I started thinking about it. It’s a reminder of how theater is sometimes not nimble. I feel like theater having the ability to respond to the world it lives in is a great characteristic for theaters to have.
 

KW: When you first started brainstorming this, what was your process like taking this from an idea to a script?
 

LY: I knew I always wanted to write a play about my father. I always thought he deserved to have his own piece. And then when I started writing it, I didn’t really know what the “why now” of it was or what shape it was going to take. Then, coincidentally, some of the real life events that happened in the play happened, just as I was starting to sit down and say, “why now.” My father has been dedicated to this community and these political causes for years and years, what is the “why now”? It’s almost like you sit down to write the play and then the universe rolls out the answer in like a wonderful way.
 

KW: When did you show the script to your father?
 

LY: Late in the process. I think my father first saw it when we did the New Stages workshop production, which is fairly late in the play’s evolution. It had been around for awhile, and I think at first I told him it was a play about Yees. I said it was about the Yee Family Association. And when he heard that, he was like I know how I will help you and put me in touch with all the different Yee branches across the country. I got to meet these very similar men at very similar organizations around the country who were very much like my father but not quite. Like, I got to see the bizarro versions of him. Doing the play was actually my strange way of getting to know my father, in a very roundabout sort of sense. I didn’t say to him, I want to write a play about you and know you better. But I said, I want to write a play about other people named Yee. There was a point at which I told him and that I was writing this play and it’s about him. And I remember his reaction to it. We’re a very non-confrontational family, and I think we were driving in the car, and I was like, Oh, this play is about you, and he said, Oh…okay, and kept on driving. I think, luckily, it’s a portrayal that’s filled with a lot of affection.
 

KW: You can definitely tell it comes from a place of extreme warmth.
 

LY: Yeah, so I felt more comfortable about that. Also, Act II is all of my father’s favorite things in one play. That also feels like a gift I’m giving to him, and hopefully to other people.
 

KW: There’s a frustrating tendency for people to say this is a Chinese show, this is a Black show, this is a gay show…whereas we’re supposed to accept the universality of every play about straight white characters unquestioningly.
 

LY: This play is very definitely set in a very specific world with a very specific aesthetic and in that kind of very specific story…it’s still all of us. This play is a play for anyone who has been through that relationship with their parents where they’re coming of age, have a great relationship with their family, but at the same time, there’s this awkward transition from your parent parenting you to you going out into the world on your own and saying this is who I am, let’s meet each other as adults. I feel like that’s something everyone goes through. What’s also interesting is that this play very clearly refracts Lauren’s, and my, experiences growing up as an American in San Francisco with many different references. The play touches on everything from Sesame Street to Greek mythology to “Thriller” to kung fu movies…it’s kind of a hodgepodge of all the interests I had growing up as a child.
 

KW: Was it hard to write yourself as a character?
 

LY: I think it was kind of fun. The interesting thing is that when I first started I thought that in order to write the play, I needed to make it very dramatic. My first draft was making the relationship between father and daughter much more tense and dysfunctional and I thought I was writing my own August: Osage County where they hate each other and they don’t know one another. I think that the story I’m capable of telling is the story of a father and a daughter who love each other a lot, who have a great relationship, but have never been able to connect in the way that Lauren wants to. I feel like that is so much more reflective of a lot more people.
 

KW: Is it harder to cut and edit things from this as opposed to some of your other work?
 

LY: Yeah, I think so. I think the play always continues to delight me, just because it’s a lot of things that I love and have a very strong relationship to, obviously. But at the same time, it’s been a lot easier for me to separate myself from the story than a lot of people would expect. When actors embody these roles, they worry I’m going to be offended or that they’re doing it wrong, and I feel like we’ve assembled such a lovely, open-hearted group of actors, that I never worried about that. I always believe that they understand what the play is.
 

KW: What was it like to try and cast someone to play your father?
 

LY: We got lucky very early on. One of the first workshops I did of this piece was with Francis Jue, whose background is very similar to mine. His parents were born and raised in San Francisco, they lived in Chinatown, he grew up outside of Chinatown, he’s a Chinese-American kid from San Francisco. In addition to being a really transcendent performer, he also just inherently gets the world that the play is set in because that’s what he experienced growing up. I don’t think that’s necessary to do the part, but I think it gives it this wonderful texture.
 

KW: Have you been to Chinatown here, since you got to Chicago?
 

LY: I have! I went to visit the Chicago Yee Association. It was great, it was the same struggles my father goes through. It’s like…no one wants to join, I didn’t want to join, but they guilted me into it. But once you have the right connection, there’s this incredible generosity that happens. They take you out, you’re like family. I think that’s kind of the two sides of this. Chinatowns are like any other ethnic or specific closed community. To an outsider, it can seem kind of unwelcoming, but as soon as you have the right way in, the world opens up. I find those organizations throughout the United States to be super interesting.
 

KW: Do you still struggle with balancing holding on to the traditional parts of your community while not standing in the way of forward motion?
 

LY: Yeah, I think it’s something I struggle with all the time. Every single human being related to me lives in San Francisco. My brothers, my cousins, my parents, all their siblings. We’ve been in San Francisco for like a hundred or a hundred and fifty years. So, for me, there always is that struggle of living outside of that community and not giving my children the same experience that I grew up with. You couldn’t go into a restaurant without somebody knowing someone else. My father walks through San Francisco and people recognize him on the street. I can’t give them that.
 

KW: Was the play always a “show-within-a-show”?
 

LY: Yeah.
 

KW: What made you decide that was the right way to structure the story?
 

LY: I think the play, thematically, always seemed to be about representation and how to tell a story and how to represent something specific and idiosyncratic and complicated onstage in a nuanced way. It felt like in order to tell the story of Chinatown, viewing it through the lens of wondering how do we tell this story seemed very important.
 

KW: There’s a joke in the show where your dad answers the question about who the show is for with “the Jews”! Who do you think the show is for?
 

LY: I think there’s always joy in seeing audience members who are Asian-American or from San Francisco or have a very specific firsthand knowledge of what’s going on in the play. There’s a joy in that they’ll just get some of it in a way that other audience members don’t. But I am really interested in sharing this story with all different kinds of people. It’s a play for anyone who dearly loves their parent and finds them so totally frustrating. If someone could see the show and think, that’s my father, or at the end of the play, if they leave and want to call their parents and start asking these questions…that would make me happy.
 

KW: The line where the father says “if you don’t vote, you never know what could happen”…was that always in the show? I would imagine it gets a very different reaction now.
 

LY: It didn’t mean anything before!
 

KW: The whole audience had this sort of mournful laugh.
 

LY: Before you didn’t get a reaction to it at all. It was like, oh yeah, of course. But I think that particular joke plays differently. It’s always been a part of who my father is and what he believes in. Whoever we are, we need to represent and exist in the world. If you don’t demand that, you don’t get to exist.
 

KW: Where did you, real Lauren Yee, land on the question of whether or not Chinatown is still something that needs to exist?
 

LY: It’s complicated. I think Chinatown, over the next ten, twenty, thirty years will always be shifting. I’m not one of those people who thinks we have to hang onto something because it has existed before. Theaters die, organizations die, because nobody needs them anymore. But I feel like what we can do, in positive ways, is figure out how to open up those communities and get people whose interests might intersect with it in there. For example, it’s very hard to join the Yee Fong Toy Family Association. I wish that process were more open, it’s just very hard. I feel like the more that we share these stories and the more we’re talking, the more information gets passed down. As far as Chinatowns in particular, you do have more mainland Chinese folks coming in and being part of Chinatown. And then you have new, specific enclaves. Here in Chicago, a lot of the suburbs have a lot of Chinese immigrants moving in. I think Asian-American identity in the United States will continue to evolve and I think it’s just a reality that you have to adjust with it. In ten or twenty years, there’s going to be an even larger mixed-race population. I think it would make me sad if that wasn’t considered a part of what Chinatown and what Chinese identity is.
 

KW: What do you really want to see from plays and playwrights in the future?
 

LY: I want to see plays do what only plays can do. There’s so much good TV and film going on right now, amazing stuff, and I think we could do what they do, but we’re not going to do it as well. That’s not what theater does best. Theater is best when it celebrates the act of live performance and sharing it with this live audience who is assembled here tonight and sharing the space with you. The more we can invest in events or experiences that can only happen in person, the better.
 
 

 

 
Lauren Yee returns to Goodman Theatre, where her play King of the Yees appeared in the 2015 New Stages Festival. Her plays include Ching Chong Chinaman (Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, Mu Performing Arts, SIS Productions and Impact Theatre), The Hatmaker’s Wife (Playwrights Realm, The Hub, Moxie and AlterTheater), Hookman (Encore Theatre and Company One), in a word (rolling world premiere at San Francisco Playhouse, Cleveland Public Theatre and Strawdog Theatre Company), Samsara (Victory Gardens Theater, Chance Theatre, Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center’s National Playwright Conference and Bay Area Playwrights Festival) and The Tiger Among Us (MAP Fund and Mu Performing Arts). She was born and raised in San Francisco and currently lives in New York.

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A Conversation with Ethan Lipton

Ethan Lipton

 

Watching The Outer Space is a little like looking in a telescope and a microscope at the same time, where the mundane is epic and the expansive is accessible. Mad scientist musician-playwright Ethan Lipton and his collaborators have mixed together science fiction, cabaret, twang, heart, humor, and humanity and created a piece that falls into a category all its own, reminding us that the small things in life are often what take up the most space.
 

 

Corey Ruzicano: I love the language that you use, I was really drawn to the way you’re telling a story about something so big and fantastic and so small and human at the same time – what has the development of your voice been like? What influences have been part of that journey?
 

Ethan Lipton: I like metaphor and I think one of the reasons why I’m drawn to it a lot of the time is because a lot of what I like to talk about is often quite small, so when you find the right metaphor for an experience, and for me it’s often about how something feels, then it gives you an opportunity to say those things that are the every day and explore them with a sense of awe and wonder. It also helps put everybody in the room on the same footing. When it’s nobody’s actual life, it’s everybody’s life. It opens up an imaginative space that I like. As an audience member, work that I respond to is the work that makes me lean in a little bit and do a little bit of work myself. For me, I guess that’s my expression of that same sort of thing where I’m trying to create a specific image or tell a specific story but one that will call attention to the negative space around it so that they imagine their own world and life. That’s the the best experience for me, when people are deeply engaged with their own life during one of our things.
 

CR: Absolutely, I read one of your other interviews with American Theater and you were talking about this idea of not wanting to let real-life truth get in the way of what feels truest in the telling of the story – how do you create a metric system for that; how you shape or gauge what’s going to be most truthful?
 

EL: I don’t know exactly what that is; I think it’s just a lot of trial and error. Some descriptions of things make it seem smaller – some truth, some details distract and other details or truths invite in or open up, and that’s just a kind of trial and error. Sometimes there’s a way to perform something that leans against what you’ve written a little and that can open it up, sometimes you have to really sell the thing that’s been written directly, and sometimes you have to rewrite. I’m not ever that interested in telling people things about myself or my own life – I do use my own life as material a lot because it comes from a sort of imaginative space mostly but it’s that thing of really wanting people to see a story about themselves, and so there’s some invisible line or where that detail can be positioned where people can get in, and you can kind of feel that. I also feel like theater is a public experience – obviously we’re at the Public Theater which was made to serve the public, but when there’s a sense of service in the words, particularly in a show where there aren’t multiple people talking, it’s really just one person. So if there’s some awareness of the audience’s experience – which is not the same as pandering or giving them what they want, but making sure that you’re communicating to people in a way that they are able to receive it – that’s a sort of compass, I guess.
 

Ethan Lipton
 

CR: Yes, definitely. This is a story about a couple weathering a transition together and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about change – what endures in the story or in art in general and how have you learned to navigate change over the course of your career?
 

EL: Certainly for me, I started off as a playwright and I had a couple of plays produced and was writing plays really from my early 20s, but when I moved to New York I didn’t really know how to access that community. Theater is always local in some way and New York is no different even though it’s the biggest scene of them all. That was really when I started performing, singing songs, which I always just done for my own pleasure and the occasional mildly-stoned friend, but singing publicly for me was initially just for me to have a little bit of a creative outlet while I was trying to be a playwright and find opportunities. Then music became a kind of saving grace for me in some ways, it really was a relief from playwriting, the gestation period of songs is so much shorter, and I started playing with a band and for a long time I kept those things separate – the playwriting and the music – and then at some point it seemed like a danger idea, because I liked them separate, but also a good challenge to combine them. But there wasn’t really…whatever this form is, isn’t really a well-branded form. It’s not like everybody understands exactly what it is, and as a playwright I already come up against this thing all the time where I’m trying to explain my work in ways that people can understand and it’s hard to understand so this was a new thing that people wouldn’t necessarily understand…but it turned out to be a great experience and something that has ended up giving a lot back and in some ways has been––there was a time when having two separate artistic pursuits might be confusing for people or might make people think, Oh is he serious about anything? But now, I feel like the whole world does so many different things. When I started, that was not such an obviously good idea and now it feels like it’s been a very good idea. It’s been fine for the separate careers but it’s also helped create this other world of opportunity, and creatively I feel like songwriting has been good for my playwriting and playwriting is clearly a part of my songwriting. So that has changed, my outlook, however I self identify as a creative person has changed. I also had some fantasy of being some kind of weird hybridy-artist without really knowing what that was, but then it took a long time to actually do that.
 

CR: Yeah, in the program Oskar Eustis says you’ve created your own genre, and I’m sure that’s the kind of observation you can only make looking back, rather than while you’re in the process, but I wonder if you have advice for young people who have similar separated or disconnected creative interests.
 

EL: I have to say, for me it was the only way I could have done it. I really recommend it, again I think it was good for the work itself – it loosened things up, it was more rewarding. I think there is probably a certain period where getting the work recognized is important and you’re building a career there’s a fear that doing many things will confuse people, but I wouldn’t give a shit. I just wouldn’t worry. People in the fine arts do it all the time where you’re working in different mediums. It just seems like you have to be doing work that’s giving you something back, so if that can be just one thing, that’s great, but if you’re a person that has wider interests, you should pursue them. And if you’re a younger person, then you already know that you’re going to have to do a million things in the course of your lifetime because there’s no such thing as single career track anymore. I think it’s awesome and people should double-down.
 

Ethan Lipton
 

CR: I’ll make sure my dad reads this interview.
 

EL: Oh, sure, is he like, what are you doing as a journalist and a director?
 

CR: Well he went to college and then went to med school and now he’s a psychiatrist. He picked his path and then he had the answer, so it’s hard for him to understand that it doesn’t really exist in the same way.
 

EL: Right, well and to some degree in the arts I think it’s kind of always been this way. There’s always been a lot of overlap – Shakespeare was also an actor and Patti Smith was doing theater in the 70s.
 

CR: And you have to know about life to make something about life.
 

EL: Exactly, you have to have broader experiences. And even if you’re only doing one thing, career paths are never linear, especially in our field. So there’s no way to create cause and effect; you can make gestures and best practices and try to push things ahead, but you’re never totally in charge of what’s happening, so you have to do other things.
 

CR: Of course. I don’t know how the program was put together, but in it is that famous Milan Kundera quote that “happiness is the longing for repetition,” and I thought that this piece really spoke to that ache for familiarity we all sort of orbit around and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that and it’s affect on making work.
 

EL: Yeah, I feel like your well-being in the world is always one of those fluid elements you’re trying to manage. There’s your job, there’s where you live, there’s your relationships – I feel like the piece kind of looks at all your different relationships, like your relationship with your job, with your self, with your career and all these other things. And that relationship with yourself and whether or not you’re feeling fundamentally aligned with yourself or misaligned, that affects all of those other relationships and so for me, as someone who fundamentally – and I don’t know if anybody really likes change, I guess we all like the change that we’re in charge of…but No Place to Go, the previous play, dealt with this in a different way too.I’m not always the most elegant person at going through change and I think that that need to be kind of right with yourself is something that…if you’re okay with yourself, all that other stuff seems a lot easier. If you aren’t, it all seems harder. I like repetition. Even though I don’t live close to the city any more, I don’t come here very often outside of doing this show, but I always have these fantasies about New York, how I could eat so many different things and I basically go to the same two or three places every time I come back because what I really want is this feeling, and repetition lets you access that in a certain way.
 

Ethan Lipton
 

CR: Yeah, and I’d love to hear about how you’ve come to find and create relationships with your collaborators and what you’ve learned from them.
 

EL: That also would have been so hard to predict when I was starting out. The guys in my band I’ve played with for twelve years. When I started, I had a rotating group of people I worked with and I’d play these two- or three-song sets in downtown variety shows and I remember my guiding principle with the musicians I worked with was that I didn’t want drama and I didn’t want to lose a lot of money. I was fine breaking even or losing a little bit of money, but I was not going to gamble my entire whatever part-time job I had at the time on some music thing. And so there was a kind of lightness that I approached that with and the guys I’ve ended up working with for so long had a similar something there, in addition to us having a shared sensibility, we’re all kind of silly but willing to take it seriously. I think they all got the joy, like a lot of my songs even outside of the show have a veneer of sincerity. I mean they are sincere, but they’re also silly or absurd or undercut that in ways, and they all knew how to own that. I think we just enjoy playing together. We never have had the pressure or opportunity to make it like a full-time career and in some ways that has been easier because it has meant that when we do get an opportunity, we’re into it; everybody’s excited and has been able to make time for it over the years which is fairly amazing cause they all have other lives too. And then on the theater side, Leigh [Silverman] saw the band play years and years ago and I met her afterward and she was super sweet and kind and funny, and I knew she was a director and I had just gotten into the emerging writers group at the Public, that was the first year of that, and I was like, I would love to work with you some day, can I send you something? And she said, totally, and I couldn’t believe, I still can’t believe I get to work with her. She is such a great collaborator in all of the ways that a good director is: she’s smart, she’s thoughtful, she’s really hardworking, she’s organized, she’s a fierce advocate, will fight for things that are important, is a good ally, has her own take on the thing, but doesn’t ever make it about that so you really feel like you’re talking to someone who has your best interest. And then beyond that, I do end up working with the same actors as a playwright, ‘cause I like that familiarity and also because there’s a certain approach to the tone that people need to be able to access, so if I find people who can do that, then I tend to go with those people. My fantasy for my band and my theater career is to be able to continue to work with the same people, not exclusively – it is always great to have new people come around a be a part of that mix – but to just have a creative family that you can go back to over and over again. And that includes designers; this is the third time that David Zinn has done something of mine which is crazy that he makes time for us, and Ben Stanton and even our production crew is fantastic – Shelley and Caroline and Hillary, they’re all great, and Dean, who’s our dresser who puts up with us, they’re all great.
 

CR: Yes, that definitely sounds like the dream. Certainly there are always a lot of reasons to move away from the arts – how do you keep sticking with it?
 

EL: At some point, when I was younger, there was a question about discipline, like how do you keep working at it, how do you actually keep putting in the work, and then how do you hang out long enough for stuff to happen – because that’s definitely part of it, just hanging on long enough for opportunities to arise. I was fairly disciplined, but I think I was compelled and I think pretty early on it has to be a compulsion in some way, where it doesn’t really feel like an option not to do it, where you don’t feel good or okay if you’re not in some way making stuff, and if that’s the case, if you’re compelled, you’ll find a way to make it. If you’re not getting the career opportunities, you’ll pivot and make different stuff, or you’ll find different ways to get your voice heard. Because I think if it is a choice, like for me, going to the gym is always a choice, and so I usually choose not to do it. For some people, it’s a compulsion, they have to do it, and I think if anything stays a choice for too long, then eventually I think you’ll choose not to and that’s totally okay. There have definitely been moments in my career where I was at a crossroads, where I was like, do I want to keep doing this enough, or do I have to do it, because maybe having to do it is too hurtful or too frustrating, but somehow you push through those moments and keep going. I do sometimes joke that in my next life I would like to something that didn’t require so much of one’s self, but that’ll have to be the next life because I’m enjoying this life.
 

Ethan Lipton
 

CR: I’m happy to hear that. Later on in the story, there’s sort of a decision to become politically active in the community of the characters, and there’s an introduction of a reference to the Dark Lord, and I just wanted to talk a little bit about that and about making art in our current political climate.
 

EL: Yeah, well most of the piece had been written before the election and that event of a new administration seemed to change just everything in the world, and I thought about different ways to integrate that in the periphery of the piece and what I realized, why it was worthwhile to try to put it in for me, was that the character, the main character that’s being discussed, before then is really a prisoner of his own self-interest, he can’t get out of his own head, his own way. He is situationally or otherwise, despairing and it seemed like by the end of the piece he is less stuck and he’s more aware of the world, so it seemed to fit in that he could be impacted by that event. I feel like if that event had happened earlier in the piece, it wouldn’t have taken, because he’s not really able to be impacted by anything. One of the nice things about doing the show, I feel like everyone I know in a small, understandable, self-centered way, has had this question of: what are we doing right now, how is any of this art relevant and what should we be doing and how does the work I’ve already been doing, look in this light, all these questions. It’s been great to do this show and to experience people needing to feel things, particularly things that are not directly related to the chaos of the world. That is something that art is supposed to do – to make us feel empathy and go on journeys and expand us, and I know that there is going to be a lot of pointed, political, angry, really useful art in the months and years to come and that will be really important, but my experience of doing the show is a reminder that we also need to keep looking at our humanity and accessing that and that’s important. If you’re making stuff that doesn’t feel directly political, that’s going to feel like a risk every time and you won’t ever know until you get it in front of an audience whether it’s something people can use. But that’s sort of always true, you never really know. Theater has such a long gestation period that there’s always that kind of panic when you’re doing something that gets planned 18-24 months ahead that you’ve maybe been working on for five years, the moment always informs it. I feel like if you are true to the project, then you just don’t know when what you’re doing will be something people will really need at that moment. The next project I have is something very outward looking, it’s about the privatization of public education and I’m excited about that because it feels timely in a different way, and this piece was much more inner looking, so it’ll be nice to have that change; but doing this thing has reminded me, or at least made me aware in a certain way, that people still need to feel things, they still need to access their humanity.
 

CR: Yes, absolutely. My final question is about your questions – if you have any that you’re grappling with in your life or in your art these days?
 

EL: Yes. Lots of them. I mean I think that question of how to move forward, where to direct one’s energy. I think there’s always a lot of concern about… you have to have a lot of projects in the hopper once you get a seat at the table. I feel like I have a seat at the table in a way that is satisfying and I feel proud of, but you really have to keep going, so I never know how that’s going to unfold. Whatever sense there is of getting to a place in your career where you feel like you know how it’s going to go from here on end, I just don’t think that ever happens or it hasn’t happened yet, so I am full of questions. I guess that is as it’s always been.
 
 

 

 

Ethan Lipton’s plays include Tumacho; Red-Handed Otter; Luther; Goodbye April, Hello May; and Meat. His musical No Place to Go (Obie Award) was a New York Voices commission and produced by The Public in Joe’s Pub and has toured widely in the U.S. and Europe. Lipton is an alum of The Public’s Emerging Writers Group, a Clubbed Thumb associate artist, and a Playwrights Realm Page One fellow. Ethan Lipton & his Orchestra (featuring Vito Dieterle, Eben Levy and Ian Riggs) has been a band since 2005 and has released four studio albums.

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A Conversation with Kimberly Senior

Kimberly Senior

In Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel, Station Eleven, she imagines a world where a theatrical troupe called The Travelling Symphony travels the country, performing Shakespeare after a plague turned the United States into an abandoned dystopia. Should we ever find ourselves in that reality, Kimberly Senior is ready to roll her sleeves up and get on the road. With a firm belief in the enduring power of art and the absolute necessity of stories, she creates art that stimulates and inspires. Her latest project, directing Theresa Rebeck’s The Scene at Writers Theatre, opened on March 2nd. Much like some of her previous work, it asks the audience to grapple with a lot of tough questions about conscience, moral relativism, and the complexities of human relationships.
 

We sat down the night before opening to talk about the show, her commitment to parity, and what role art and artists will play in the current political climate.
 

Kelly Wallace: So let’s start with this show, The Scene. How are rehearsals and previews going?
 

Kimberly Senior: Good, it’s been such a great experience from top to bottom. The play, which was written ten years ago, is even more resonant today. It really deals with the idea of what happens if we live in a world without consequences – where meaninglessness is key, not giving a shit about anybody means you’re awesome, and selfishness is the top value. It’s harrowing. Then last week the playwright, Theresa Rebeck, came to town.We’ve known each other for a while. It’s our first time being in a room together. She has this amazing light and pushed us to work even more towards the things we were already doing. We’ve had five previews, so we’ve had five different audiences now. I was sitting behind these two women and at intermission one turns to the other and goes, “Oh my god, I love it!” And the other one goes, “Oh my god, I hate it.” And then they started talking away about that and I was like, Yes, yes, yes! Everyone identifies with a different character. It just feels really resonant. I wish I could stay in previews forever because I love working during the day, seeing the play manifest at night, changing things, being a fly on the wall.
 

KW: Most of the creative team for this show is female…
 

KS: It’s at least 60% women working on this show. And it’s a huge value of this theater. Not just gender parity, but racial parity. I want to start using the word parity more, because I believe it’s more about equality than about diversifying. It’s about how are we addressing these things and reflecting the world that we live in. Our world now looks like that optimistic Benetton commercial from the 80s. So, how are we putting that on our stages in our theaters? This theater is incredibly supportive of that mission and has also really made it their own mission. I think we all feel enriched by that.
 

KW: You’re the resident director here; you’ve directed here quite a bit. What do you like about Writers Theatre?
 

KS: My values and ethics are represented throughout the organization, and I love the audience here. They are brilliant. The people are passionate, and intelligent, and hungry to have intellectual conversations. They’re supportive of the work and the artists. Very few theaters give the opportunity for the artists to interact so much with the audience and I feel – maybe because it’s a small community – I get to know them. I recognize people here. I love the depth of experience that you get. I also feel like Writers is one of the places where their mission is the artist and the word, and that is true. I do some of my best work here.
 

KW: Talking about the Benetton commercial sort of world, I was thinking about that because your show has a cast that is…I believe there’s one white man in the cast?
 

Kimberly Senior
 

KS: There’s no majority; we have four different races onstage.
 

KW: It doesn’t seem like any of the characters within the text are race-specific. My question is…one of the things that is frustrating is that the default in casting seems to be “cisgender, white” unless it’s specified otherwise. What do you think about how we can get out of that narrative? Whether it be race, gender identity, disability, etc.
 

KS: It’s interesting. I think it starts with our playwrights when they’re doing those casting breakdowns in the front of the script – make it so there isn’t a default. It can say “Kimberly, white female.” Starting to specify “white” could be one interesting way. I think that’s part of it, to make sure those things aren’t just givens. And when is it a necessity that a character be a certain race, gender, etc.? Of course, there are times that’s essential to the telling of the story. And then there are times where it really doesn’t matter. I remember a lot of the conversation five/six years ago was about how great it was that we had all these “gay” plays, which are plays about being gay. But, as it turns out, gay people also have parents and go to work and eat food…why is every single play with gay characters talking about the experience of being gay or about coming out?
 

KW: Yes, exactly! Literature is the same way. The story is always inherently about sexuality or coming out of the closet.
 

KS: As opposed to a story with someone who just happens to be gay, right. I think within the LGBT world things are starting to get better, and now we’re moving into this landscape of queer, gender non-conforming, and trans…how do we tell those stories? I think that we’re attempting to keep pace with how those stories are being told in the public eye as well. Though, obviously, it’s been in the private world since the beginning of time.
 

KW: I think of something like Moonlight. It’s not about being gay. It’s not a coming out story. It’s not about sexuality. It’s just about a life, where he happens to be gay.
 

KS: It was amazing. And we’re also talking about identity and how do we all walk around and claim our identity? I don’t want to be removed from being called female. I lead from that place, I am that place. But it isn’t all I am. I have days where I’m like, “Am I the worst because I’m this cisgendered straight woman? Does that make me terrible?” And the answer is, I’m not the enemy. But for the former majority, the former default, they need to name their identity as well. I don’t have to always say who I am, but I should. I think that’s helpful. Playwrights writing stories about what it means to be in the world as a person is helpful. I don’t wake up every day and think, “Wow, what is it like to be a half-Arab/Jewish woman, mother, freelance theater director living in the world?” We don’t wake up with those questions, so our stories shouldn’t always have to be about them.
 

KW: Right, well, that’s what you are. It’s your lived experience, you don’t necessarily spend every day thinking about it. One thing that I think we struggle with is including all of it, the intersectionality, and how all of it fits together…
 

KS: I love that idea of lived experience. We have to acknowledge that this is the only skin I’ve ever been in. To be able to be candid about saying, I don’t know what your experience is. You’re a whole different person taking up a whole different space in the world than I am. So I need to open myself up to hear from you, to not make assumptions about you. We need to be open and ready to listen to somebody else’s lived experience and be ready to claim terrific, wonderful ownership of our own lived experience. I hope that’s where we’re going; it’s become an imperative now because some people are being denied their voice.
 

Kimberly Senior
 

KW: Do you feel like being an artist is different now, in this political climate? Do you feel a different responsibility?
 

KS: Yes. When you go back through history, one of the first targeted groups in totalitarian regimes are the artists. I guess we’re a threat. I think with being something that could be dangerous, with being something that could be weaponized, understanding that it’s a privilege – it’s a responsibility. I guess we are now speaking on behalf of everyone. I think it’s important to think about the stories we’re telling. A friend of mine, who is a fantastic writer, has written a beautiful play that’s about two different couples and the decision to have a baby. Which is a totally real experience that a lot of people go through. It’s so well-written, it’s funny, it’s heartbreaking. It draws from experience I’ve had in my life. I’m very connected to it and it means something to me, so I said to him, “There’s just only twelve months in the year. And I can only do so many projects. So I can’t work on this right now, because there are some other stories that I think I have to push to the front of my queue that are speaking more to this specific moment. Your play is every moment.”
 

I’m also very interested right now in a generational conversation that I’m finding myself feeling challenged to have. I’m gonna be 44 soon and I’m just acknowledging that I’m not part of the same generation that 20 year olds are in. I grew up in a different way. I have different vocabulary. I have different levels of understanding. I think talking about “non-binary,” “gender nonconforming” – that’s language I want to understand.
 

KW: I think a lot of people feel that way. That they want to be an ally, they want to be there to help…
 

KS: But they don’t know how. To be an ally, you have to have vocabulary to be able to engage. And I’m terrified of saying the wrong thing. That’s just an example of a way that I feel like I need to catch up. So I’m interested in stories that are accessing the generational divide of mutually well-intentioned people and where those conversations go wrong. I think it’s really interesting, explosive theater. And then what happens to us going forward. I think it could open up a vein to help people to start talking. A mother could say to her daughter, I don’t get it. It’s not because I’m a jerk, or your enemy. Help me.
 

KW: When you think about what we were saying about artists being targeted, funding for arts programs potentially going away…how would you explain to someone why they should invest in the arts?
 

KS: Well, it’s the opposite end of the threat thing. If we’re a threat, we must have a power to have a voice. In a culture where the media isn’t invited into the White House…we have to rely on our artists to get the story out. Theater began as a news source. Artists would travel from town to town and put on shows about what was happening in these different towns. That’s important – that we are a way to keep different perspectives alive. We’re a way to create representation. And we have to do better. I know a lot of artists who grew up in red states. And after the election, I knew a lot of artists who would say, I grew up in Alabama. I have to go back there and make theater with those people. They have things to say, they have voices. How do we support greater representation on our stages, how do we support all these voices in our country? The arts are a great way to do that. You’re angry? Let’s send some theater to your town and help your story be told. That’s what I would say. It is an amazing opportunity to create community and create dialogue. In theater, there’s a shared experience of going to the theater together. When communities are dying, when we’re all on our devices, it’s one of the few places left where you can come together in a non-partisan way and be with people who are different than you. When you go to a church, there’s a shared system of belief, a religious organization. When you come to the theater, you don’t know who you’re gonna be sitting next to.
 

KW: The power of art or culture is empathy — seeing other human beings, even if they’re fictional characters, for some reason, does something for people.
 

KS: Because it’s just a step away enough. If you’re talking, it becomes personal. I think sometimes people feel a little attacked when they don’t understand something. The great news is if you take away our funding, we don’t need much. We have all these historical stories about theater companies and plays that existed in the ghettos during the Holocaust and we have wonderful stories that grow out of marginalized communities. What more evidence do we need that theater has to exist? When people are in their last, most desperate moments and everything is taken away from them, the power of stories is the thing that has survived again and again and again. All of our religious texts are stories of survival. There’s not one religious text that isn’t about a marginalized people. They’re all coming from this place of forces working against them. What do you do? You create stories, you write them down, you pass them on. You can take away our funding but you can’t take that away. You can’t kill us.
 

KW: Thinking about your work on Disgraced…I think the quote was that it was a “powder keg of identity politics.” Now we hear that phrase a lot in the mainstream political world…
 

KS: The experience of working on that play over five years has been really interesting. The world caught up to the play. Ayad [Akhtar, the playwright] and I talked about this the last time we worked on it together. Lines resonate in a different way. A lot of Amir’s hostility in his rants are things that when he said in 2011-2012, people hadn’t heard that language before around Islam. Now…Trump is saying that stuff, so the audience would laugh at it now, whereas in 2012 they were horrified by it. But now they recognize and know what it is. It’s kind of amazing.
 

Kimberly Senior
 

KW: If you had to describe Chicago theater to a New Yorker, what would you say?
 

KS: There are short and long answers to that. A lot of it is about economics. Everything is so expensive in New York, as you know, so that means that to be able to live as an artist there is more complicated. To be able to produce is more complicated. Here, there’s just a lot more space, a lot more time, and in a way there’s more money because the cost of living is so much less. So there’s a lot of freedom. There’s a lot of risk-taking that happens because it can. I love the New York community in very different way. There’s a great standard of excellence, there’s an ambition and a drive and a pace…my metabolism makes sense there. It’s also easier to have a community here in Chicago. Everybody drives and hangs out at each other’s houses because people have houses you can hang out in.It just changes the conversation. My friends who I make plays with, we’ve grown up together here in a way. There’s a great sense of community here. There’s no anonymity here. And there definitely is anonymity in New York. There’s pros and cons.
 

In some places it feels like non-equity equals non-professional. Like, union status equals a certain level of professionalism. Which isn’t wrong, but here in Chicago there is a huge, thriving non-equity community. Which goes back to economics. You can work for free and have your daytime job and still make theater. I was able to cut my teeth on dozens of productions. I think I’ve directed something like 140 productions professionally. I couldn’t have done that living in New York. I was able to do that here because there are a breadth of companies that are producing on a low budget.
 

KW: There’s just so much here in terms of smaller theater companies…
 

KS: I can make a play above a Mexican restaurant and increase my skill set and put in my Malcolm Gladwell “10,000 hours” and experiment. The crossover between highly experienced artists working alongside novices happens a lot in this community and there’s a lot of mentorship, both accidental and intentional. I think that’s really special. It’s a result of the fact that there are so many artists making so much work at so many different levels. Then there’s the other thing, which is…in L.A., there’s always the chance that you might get film or TV. In New York, there’s always that chance the show is going to go to Broadway. Here…I mean, those chances exist, but not in the same way.
 

KW: As a director, you did not go the “traditional” path with getting an MFA…
 

KS: I didn’t get a grad degree, I didn’t assist anybody.
 

KW: I know it’s hard to say if it was better or not…
 

KS: I don’t know any other way. Everybody has a different path. My path isn’t at all what I thought it was going to be. I thought I was going to assist a bunch of people and do fellowships and go to grad school. I was planning on all those things; I think those things are great. I ended up being in this town and one thing lead to another and suddenly I was like, Well, I can’t go to grad school next year because I already have four shows that I’m doing. I also worked in the administrative offices at Steppenwolf Theatre for a very long time. I think what was cool for me was my day job was at Steppenwolf, so I got to work at this big, high-functioning professional institution. I learned, just by being around, about writing grants and marketing and being around those conversations while I was making my own art with spit and duct tape at night. Getting to have that balance was a tremendous kind of grad school for me. And as it turns out, I’m a really big nerd who reads all the time anyway. I start director’s groups and we all get together and exchange books…it’s like I’m still in grad school! It’s a very long degree.
 

I think one of the challenging things for people in the arts is that we always have to be beginning. It doesn’t matter how many plays I’ve directed because the next time I walk into a room for the first rehearsal, it will be the first rehearsal of that play with those actors at that theater…you have to start over every time. It has to be okay for you to feel terrified constantly.
 

KW: As you said, you teach too, what’s that like?
 

KS: All I want is to be in the classroom. It’s the best. Part of it is, like we were talking about earlier with the generational conversation, I have to be around people who have new ideas. It’s the future of the American theater that I’m teaching, I want to hear from them. What stories do they want to tell? What are they excited about? What are their conversations? I remember trying to teach my kids how to tie their shoes. It was so hard for me to explain how to do it because you do it without thinking. A lot of the things we do in our work, whatever your job is, you do without thinking. Teaching makes you rewind and pull apart your process and your thinking. I think that is really important. I’m constantly reinventing the way that I approach work and I think it’s because I’m constantly getting new feedback and a lot of that is from students There’s a kind of think-tank approach. I mean, I’m not teaching math. There’s not a finite answer.
 

KW: It’s not definite in the way math is.
 

KS: Right, that’s why I’m like, You can’t do anything wrong in this class except be a jerk, not show up, not get your work done, or be unkind to people. But you can’t be wrong.
 

KW: You have this mentor role as an educator, and you’re a parent…what do you feel is important to be teaching kids and students right now?
 

KS: We’ve touched on a lot of the things, but I think it’s guided by a passionate curiosity about others and the world around you. A very big thing is about agency and ownership and breaking down a lot of our coded behavior that we have. Something I’m personally working on is speaking in declarative sentences. Removing the word “just” and “sorry” and “kind of”…
 

KW: “Just” is such a big one.
 

KS: And the word does nothing. Removing “I guess,” “sort of” – removing that language from my speech, from my emails. “Would it be possible if…?” “Does that make sense…?”
 

KW: “If that’s okay with you…”
 

Kimberly Senior
 

KS: There’s a sense of ownership that I’m trying to teach. You have a point of view and it’s yours and it comes from your lived experience and from your perspective and it is of equal value as the person next to you. I’m trying to do that for myself and help others do that. I think there’s something about finding our own power, coupled with passionate curiosity. I’m really trying to remove anger or victim mentality. Not, “you can’t,” but “I can.” I’m trying to change that language.
 

KW: Where do you feel like theater is going? Where do you want it to go in the next five to ten years? Where do you want to see us?
 

KS: I would like theater to keep pace with the world around us. It’s exciting and terrifying that we don’t know what’s to come. I would hope that our theater is brave enough to ask the hard questions and stand up for itself and the stories that need to be told. Theater should be a safe space to explore. The things we shouldn’t say and do in real life, we should do in the theater, so then we can talk about them. I don’t think all of our theater should be nice and rosy and all of us holding hands and hugging and kissing. That’s not what the world looks like. And I know it’s hard for somebody to have to play Hitler or a serial killer, but those things exist and I think if we put them onstage and we’re not afraid of showing those things and we talk about them, we can go and heal outside in the world. We can heal ourselves. I believe every act of theater is a political act by being a publicly witnessed event. How do we stay with our politics, how do we keep pace with the important stories being told? Have plays about what it means to be seen in the world. How are we activating the issues around us through tremendous humanity and empathy and passionate curiosity?
 

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A Conversation with Ellie Heyman

Ellie Heyman

 

Meeting Ellie Heyman amongst the hymnals and lighting instruments of a church balcony felt both appropriate and thrilling. In telling this story of a long-ago Siberia, she has employed an indie rock Russian folk band, the power of a charismatic leader, and the truth she believes can only be found in the body. She explores our connection to the sacred and profane and reminds me that the best way to great art is through collaboration and curiosity.
 

 

Corey Ruzicano: Let’s start by talking a little bit about this project, Beardo, and what the Russian historical tradition and Rasputin as a historical icon has to teach us about today?
 

Ellie Heyman: Jason started researching Rasputin, both Jason [Craig, book and lyrics] and Dave [Malloy, music] read the same book about him and one of the things they found is that there’s no definitive history that says, “This is the story of Rasputin”; there’s actually conflicting narrative after conflicting narrative after conflicting narrative. I think Jason was very taken by the power of this charismatic personality to go from a poor peasant dude in Siberia to gaining tremendous power within the palace. Ultimately his dealings were largely influential to the fall of the Russian empire. So it’s like, how did this guy take power? What was that? This story that we’re telling isn’t about Rasputin, it’s definitely Beardo.
 

CR: So tell me who that is.
 

EH: There’s a song lyric: “He’s a weirdo with a beardo, misbehavin’ and unshaven.”
 

CR: There you go, that says it all.
 

EH: Exactly. All you need to know. There’s a mysteriousness to it all. In our world, Beardo starts as this man who has put his hand in a hole and he’s been there for an indefinite amount of time and a man finds him, a man who lives in a shack, hence his name is Shackman, and Shackman says, “Hey, dude, your hand’s in a hole, why don’t you take it out?” And, through some coaxing, he gets his hand out of that hole, and while his hand was in it, something has come into his brain and maybe it is God, maybe it is just hallucinations, maybe he has just honed his talents as a sociopathic storyteller who can read people in this sort of otherworldly way, but he suddenly has this thing that is leading him on and what that thing is, is deeply ambiguous on purpose. This is not a piece about religion, but this is a piece about someone who is able to charm and take power and maybe we love him for that and maybe we hate him for it, which is sort of interesting in today’s world, and is maybe a little different than the world was nine months ago. The piece was done in California a couple years ago, and we developed it further, and a bunch of stuff has gotten rewritten, so in the last many months where we’ve been really trying to figure out how it wants to grow and what this is, the world did feel different than it does now. I really appreciate that it’s not a direct one to one of our current political climate, but yet everything around the power of the charismatic leader and those that love him and those that hate him—the way that it polarizes people and how we all want someone to be a savior and the way in which that can destroy us—all of that is there within it. It is an interesting moment for this piece to be happening.
 

CR: Totally, and more and more it feels more clear that everything is story. Even in the last week: everything is a story.
 

EH: And everything is just your story.
 

CR: Your version of it, right. And how interesting it is that the spark of this piece is this man whose story isn’t really clear.
 

EH: Absolutely, who has so many conflicting versions out there. I’m listening to this book on tape that’s this sort of new and epic biography of Rasputin, and it’s 33 hours long. I think I’m into hour 20 of it right now, so I feel pretty good about myself. Basically it tells you something and then tells you that these other people believe something different and then it tells you something else—it conflicts with itself, so far for 20 hours.
 

CR: It’s funny, in some ways I guess, that isn’t that different than any other historical figure, we just tend to assume a pretty linear narrative about a lot of things.
 

EH: Absolutely.
 

Ellie Heyman
 

CR: So how does indie rock music play a part in uncovering or informing this narrative?
 

EH: Jason and Dave are just really incredible together. Jason has written this language that is so evocative to me, it really feels like poetry. It has tinges of Beckett in it, it has tinges of Sam Shepard in it, it’s also just 100 percent pure Jason—the words are weird in the best possible way. And then Dave has such a deep knowledge of so many types of musical traditions that he pulls from whatever he needs in order to express the story. There’s definitely traditionally and classically Russian music, classical music, Russian folk music, folk music that Dave likes, electro-pop…it really is this huge hodgepodge of styles. There’s a song on the uke that feels a little Hawaiian to me. Dave is really pulling on whatever influence he needs to help tell the story that he wants or evoke the feeling that he wants. It’s interesting because Jason is so provocative with the language and Dave is so freely expressive with the music that it’s amazing that, when the two come together, the piece feels as whole and complete as it does, because there’s so much variation within it. It doesn’t really operate on a purely analytical logic, there’s more of an intuitive logic to the piece that, by the end, really drops in. All of these various disparate things come together to make a whole.
 

CR: That’s interesting because I think that in and of itself is an interesting tool to get at how to bridge the gap between the different historical perspectives.
 

EH: Definitely, and Jason always says, “This is our way of looking at it.” We’re definitely not saying it’s Rasputin—anyone who comes to this looking for a historical fiction piece will be sad.
 

CR: Or maybe they’ll be enlightened! I like what you said about intuitive logic, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about the use of fiction or storytelling in today’s world, using intuitive logic rather than a more linear, fact-based narrative.
 

EH: Sure, I think of something that Jason does that I also really lean into as a director: There’s a lot of space in between things in certain ways; we can show you something and it can be good, but if we can get you to imagine it, what you imagine will always be better and will always be more personal to you. So how can we evoke your imagination to be part of this whole experience? We can show you a scene of these two people in this moment and everyone has that narrative structure in their brain, we don’t actually have to show you the very next scene, we can show you a scene you didn’t expect, way more fast-forwarded, and in that moment you’re both with this scene and cataloging everything you think got you to that point. It’s this very charged experience because you’re partnering in your imagination and piecing together and you’re imbuing it with all the things we might have left out but that you have to bring in, in order for it to click for you.
 

Ellie Heyman
 

CR: Yes, from looking at your portfolio, it seems like imagination is an intrinsic tentpole in your body of work, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, about fostering imagination and what values you think it has in your work and life?
 

EH: Yeah, as a kid I spent a lot of time alone. I think that imagination was how I figured out how to orient myself in the word. When I wasn’t safe or didn’t feel okay, it was a place for me to go, and I think that imagination has always sort of been my best friend and sanctuary. I think that when people watch something in a passive way, you only kind of care about it but when you’re partnering with it, when you use your imagination to enter into the story and participate with us, it’s not just our story but it’s also your story—there’s a much deeper bond between the audience and the story. I’m thinking so much about the role of art in our crazy world right now, and yes, it’s always been important, but the feeling of immediacy is stronger now than ever before in my life. People need to remember their own humanity and they need to be finding it in each other, and I think our brains can lie to us, they can justify anything inside of our minds, where our bodies are not very good at lying to us. When something feels wrong, it feels wrong. We might store it up for a long time, but it’s never gonna take something that feels wrong and make it feel right. By creating theater that is deeply grounded in our humanity and is deeply visceral, we’re going to get audiences to feel their own bodies and to start breathing, and once you start feeling and once you start breathing, there’s a whole chain of events that can start to happen about extending to others and feeling like you’re a part of the community that you’re in, and maybe starting to think about your choices a little bit differently. I’m always as interested in what Jason puts in as I am in what he leaves out. There’s something about both making the audience engage and participate imaginatively and to be feeling it in their bodies. The reason that we have this scaffolding here is because I kept saying to our amazing set designer Carolyn Mraz, I just need them to be able to climb on things. I need people’s bodies to be able to feel at risk because I think that, that will awaken the audience’s bodies in a new way. To me those things—imaginative, visceral and often athletic engagement—are the tools that allow it to be emotional in a way that matters.
 

CR: And I’m sure doing it in a space like this lends itself to that.
 

EH: Yeah, the piece is so much about what is the sacred and what is the profane and what happens when they get confused. I feel like our culture has lost any kind of sense of what the sacred is, I feel like we could walk outside to go get a coffee and there could literally be two people having sex in the middle of the street and I don’t even think I’d remember it by 7 p.m. We’ve totally lost what’s proper, what it is to cross thresholds, especially around sex, so there was something about putting it in a church. When we started looking at different churches, I felt my whole body think, “Oh, I need to behave. Am I talking too loudly? Am I wearing enough clothing?” You remember your morals, or the morals you were raised with, and I think raising those inhibitions is really useful in exploring this story because then we have somewhere to go.
 

CR: I would love to hear more too about what you’ve learned from your collaborators?
 

EH: We have the best team. I love them. Caroline Mraz is our set designer and Mary Ellen Stebbins is our lighting designer. Mary Ellen is the lighting designer that I work with on everything I possibly can. We went to grad school at Boston University together. I don’t even think we talk during tech, occasionally I’ll just look at her and she’ll say, “I know.” Even when the three of us looked at the space together, Mary Ellen is very kinesthetic based, as am I, so the two of us didn’t have to have any larger conversation because we both already knew that for us, it’s about the bodies and the angles and is as much about what you don’t see as what you do see. With Carolyn, there’s already a bunch of choices that are made for us because we’ve chosen this space, and so the question was, how do we actually wake this space up? It’s really important to me to think about lights and sets as a whole, because if this is the space, scenically it’s as central to decide what we do see as it is to decide what we don’t see. There’s Katja Andreiev, who’s our costume designer who is Russian, she speaks Russian, and she’s been our expert. We’ve been thinking about what it means to do this place that should feel like the beginning of the play is in Siberia and in Brooklyn at the same time. It shouldn’t feel like these characters are people who are so different and so foreign from us, they are in this story, but they are also of us, and so she has found this really interesting way of exploring the costumes to bring out the characters and to tell the story of these people in Russia while bringing it more into contemporary dress where she’s treading lines with the kind of ambiguity that we really want. Our band is dressed like contemporary Russian hooligans, it’s a Russian folk band accompanied by only strings and our lead, Damon Daunno, plays the guitar so, so well and adds to all that. Dan Moses Schreier is our sound designer and he comes from the Broadway world and that’s fantastic because the acoustics in a church are such a challenge that we have very fancy guns dealing with our sound department. We have to get everyone to speak a little bit more quietly because it’s so echo-y. My favorite thing Dan says to me is “the space gets over excited.” I love that. The way in which the acoustics work, the actors can speak quite quietly and there’s subtlety in their voice that is fuller, where if they speak loudly it just echoes and goes everywhere. We have an eclectic crew of designers and the cast just breaks my heart. They’re so good and so brave and they’re eight of the weirdest, most different people I’ve ever met and they are greater than the sum of their parts when they’re together, but they all have wildly different energies and backgrounds and training, and when they come together at first it’s like, what am I looking at? I would describe them as very effervescent.
 

Ellie Heyman
 

CR: That sounds great, in steering that kind of ship, what tools have you employed to keep all those different pieces together?
 

EH: I feel like most of what I do is go around screaming, “Good job, keep going, more, go further!” Because the more I can encourage them to turn up the volume on their impulses, the wildness that ensues is where I think the gold is.
 

CR: And I’m sure there’s so much to be learned from all those different backgrounds coming together. We’ve already talked about this, but why this story now?
 

EH: I think the power of the charismatic personality is really big right now. I think that one of the things that Rasputin/Beardo do is to help free people from themselves. At the beginning of the play he sort of sets people off to be less afraid of what they’re most afraid of, and often that thing is God. So what if God isn’t the voice that’s damning you and telling you that you’re bad, but that pleasure could also live in God, and connection could live in God, and that ecstasy could be sacred? The relationship of sensuality and sacredness is really interesting and an unexpected turn in a story about this wild, rowdy, chaotic, dirty guy who accidentally takes all this power. I also think there’s something about what drives to people to follow.
 

CR: I do think what you said about the desire we have for someone to be a savior is so interesting and I find it to be so true. Even just within interpersonal relationships, the need for someone to know the answers feels, probably always relevant, but particularly relevant right now. Looking at all of your beautiful photos online, it feels like you consistently employ a really evocative visual language onstage and I wonder if you could talk about how you develop that language and how you specifically apply it to this story?
 

EH: I think that aesthetic beauty is really important to me. If I go see a play and it’s ugly and the people are mean, I just don’t care. I think that we, as makers, have to earn your attention and your buy in. I also am just so struck by the human body and the beauty of bodies and bodies in relationships I find really emotionally compelling. So I’m always looking for where is the beauty in the piece, where is the mystery in the piece, and how can the bodies be activated in the piece? I think that, that’s very reflective in a lot of the choices that Carolyn and I found together in the set, because it was how do we find things that we feel can activate the actor’s bodies but doesn’t feel like we’re building a set inside of a church. And then we found really physically game actors, casting is a huge part of it to me—there are amazing actors who are really intellectual and always have to absolutely understand something before they do and I don’t work very well with them. I need people who will go and who will play and who will find hanging really compelling, not just because it’s athletic but because when you climb and hang, it makes you feel a certain way, and what is the relationship between emotion, sensation, and physical action?
 

CR: It feels related to what you were saying about how our bodies can’t lie to us as well as our minds can.
 

EH: Exactly. If we’re going for truth, we’re actually not going for alternative truth, we’re going for truth, and I think the only place that lives is in our bodies. I think that if you’re lying to yourself, you know or you will eventually get sick.
 

CR: And it also feels like the other side of the coin there is that I can’t help but think as beautiful and truthful as bodies are there’s also the great fear of the body.
 

EH: Exactly. And this is all about what is it to free the fear of your body. But then everyone dies. So it’s complicated.
 

CR: Well, sure, the body is the beginning and end of all things.
 

EH: I have a good friend who said, “Uh oh, yeah, because your body is where your feelings are.” So of course it’s dangerous.
 

CR: And ultimately you get planted and then you’re part of the body of the Earth, so it’s all about the body. The fear and the beauty both live there.
 

EH: And seeing bodies in action in a church somehow wakes up that image that feels really important to see. We’re desensitized to seeing people on a trapeze now, but you see someone in a sacred space using their body in a way you don’t expect them to, you start paying attention and seeing it anew.
 

Ellie Heyman
 

CR: Is there any central question you’ve been grappling with either with the content of the piece or in the context of your work these days?
 

EH: I think we’ve talked about a lot of them already, but something I think about a lot is who sees theater? It’s important to me to make theater for a popular audience, I’m not interested in just making theater for theater people, I want to make theater for everyone, so I want to make theater for people who do see a lot of people, for whom that is their church, and I want to make theater for people who saw a terrible production of Guys and Dolls and realized that they should never go back. And you know what, they shouldn’t ever go back there, but they should come see something else. That’s something I love about working in nontraditional spaces, there are the theater people who get that, oh here’s a thing in a nontraditional space, but for the people who don’t, it’s more of an event. It has the opportunity to be in between worlds, to be cool and inviting and not as exclusive feeling. My real question is how am I reaching the people beyond my theater community. I think theater is really amazing because it gives us a place to feel scary things together and a social processing, which is another reason why it’s interesting doing it in a church, but for people who would love that but don’t know that this is for them, my hope is that by seeing it in a nontraditional space, people feel invited and welcome to come.
 
 

 

 

Ellie Heyman is a New York City-based theatre director. She often collaborates with musicians and her work is best known for its athletic physicality and visually imaginative aesthetic. Ellie directed The Traveling Imaginary, a theatrical rock show, which was rated in the “top five shows of the year” by NPR and a Time Out  “Critic’s Pick” on two continents. Ellie is the Co-Artistic Director of The Orbiting Human Circus with Julian Koster and co-directs/develops the podcast The Orbiting Human Circus (of the Air). Ellie directs the ongoing projects of Erin Markey, Becca Blackwell, Heather Litteer and Banana, Bag & Bodice. Her work been developed by The Public Theater/Joe’s Pub and New York Theater Workshop and presented by The Kennedy Center, Abrons Art Center, The Bushwick Starr, La Mama, New World Stages (Incite Festival), Brown University, Duke University, The Drama League, Boston Center for American Performance, En Garde Arts and indie rock clubs across America. Currently Ellie is developing Elevation 506 in Bulgaria with Yasen Vasilev and Home in Istanbul with Turkish playwright Sami Berat Marcali. Upcoming projects include: Mr. Pictures by Dane Terry (PS122) and the NYC premiere of Beardo by Dave Malloy and Jason Craig (Pipeline Theater). She is a graduate of Northwestern and Boston Universities (MFA), a Drama League Directing Fellow, and current WP Theater Lab Member.

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A Conversation with Annie Dow & Eddie Martínez

Annie Dow Eddie Martínez

 

Within just a few years, Tanya Saracho has emerged as one of the most vibrant, creative, original, and, in many ways, important contemporary playwrights. Seeing her fantastic new play Fade, which is currently at the Cherry Lane as part of Primary Stages season, you understand why. In it, Lucía, an aspiring writer, crosses paths with Abel, a janitor in the building she now works in. The two bond over their shared Mexican background. Stereotypes and preconceptions are shattered as the two converse, and issues of class, culture, identity, and more are explored in depths rarely, if ever, seen onstage. We sat down with the two talented and engaging stars of Fade, Annie Dow and Eddie Martínez, to discuss their process and the play’s meaning and importance in this current political climate.

 

 

Margarita Javier: I really loved the play a lot, but first I wanted to know if you guys could talk a little about your background, where you’re from, how you got here.
 

Annie Dow: I’m from Monterrey, México, and I came here for college. I came here when I was 18. I grew up in Monterrey, doing my thing, doing theater stuff in my high school. So I caught the acting bug, I applied to NYU, got in.
 

MJ: Why did you want to go to NYU?
 

AD: Before acting was really in my head, I had this idea that I really wanted to go to a liberal arts college, one that had the trees and brownstones. I had this visual of what I really wanted. And then of course I applied to NYU that has basically no trees or brownstones, it’s just the park and that’s it (laughs). And I knew it’s a great theater program. I came to New York City for the first time when I was 15, and it was all Broadway and big eyes and “Oh my god, this is it! This is where I wanna be!” You know? So a few years later I was here.
 

MJ: How did you like it when you first moved here?
 

AD: You know, it’s weird because there was a lot of culture clash. I mean, I grew up speaking English at school and watching American TV, but there were a lot of little things that I didn’t know. Like saying, “Hi,” to people? Do you hug them? Do you kiss them? Do you handshake?
 

MJ: I had that too, because back in Puerto Rico we greet each other with a kiss on the cheek. But here they don’t do that.
 

AD: Right! And in groups of friends, or people you haven’t seen in a long time, it’s a big hug. Okay, great, but what do you do in the professional world, and what do you do on a date? It’s bizarre. ’Cause a handshake feels extremely cold, sometimes a little too cold for work, but then on a date kissing someone you just met on the cheek is weird. So that kind of stuff was a little disorienting at first. I was lucky enough that my program was very interested in the individual person’s perspective, so there was a lot of “Oh this is how you do it? Okay we’ll do that. And that’s how you do this other thing? Okay we’ll bring that in.” So it wasn’t like I had to shut down who I was or where I came from. I got to bring it to the table.
 

Annie Dow Eddie Martínez
 

Eddie Martínez: I was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. My parents are both from El Salvador. They met in the early ’70s in Chicago. I started doing theater late, when I was 16 or 17, around junior year of high school. My guidance counselor was asking me “What do you want to do with yourself?” And I sort of always was into film, so I thought I wanted to be a filmmaker. I started talking about that and she told me about a summer program at Columbia College Chicago, which is like a liberal arts school in Chicago, and through that I did an acting class, ’cause it was a backup to some of the film classes which ended up being full. I did the acting class and caught the bug right there. Ended up going to Columbia for theater, and then I got involved in the sketch comedy improv scene at Second City in Chicago. I was part of the first all-minority sketch group. We called ourselves BrownCo, ’cause all the touring companies are GreenCo, RedCo, BlueCo, so we were like, “BrownCo!” (laughs). It was just a joke at first, but it stuck. And then I got involved with doing shows with Teatro Vista, which is, I think, the only Latino equity theater company in the Midwest. I worked with Steppenwolf out there, the Goodman, Lookingglass. So yeah, most of my work has been out in Chicago.
 

MJ: And what brought you to New York?
 

EM: This show. I’m still in Chicago. I’m here just for the three and a half months or whatever it’s been or it’s gonna be. I got involved with the show like three years ago. It was just a reading at the Goodman Theatre in downtown Chicago. I’ve known Tanya for 10 to 11 years. You know, she started out as a playwright in Chicago, she was an actress in Chicago, so we know a lot of the same people, and we worked at a lot of the same places. You know, we were the Latino theater community in Chicago. So through that she just reached out to me and was like, “You know, I think you’d be good for this part, do you want to do a reading for it?” And the show was only like 55 pages at the time. So we did a reading of it at the Goodman and then a year passed and that was it, I did the reading and that was that. And then the people at Denver Center wanted to maybe commission it and all that, so then we did the New Play Summit at the Denver Center, and I went to Denver for two weeks to do that. Through that they decided to produce the show and then I did it this time last year in Denver for the world premiere.
 

MJ: And Annie, how did you get involved with this show?
 

AD: Oh man, it was just a goodness of heart, a good friend. Cristina Nieves and I had worked on one of Tanya’s other plays in New Jersey and I didn’t get a chance to meet Tanya at all during that process. We weren’t too familiar with each other. And when Primary Stages picked up the show, Cristina told Tanya, “You have to meet her.” So you know, casting reached out and I actually ended up doing a reading before Eddie jumped on.
 

EM: Yeah, ’cause after Denver it was sort of up in the air. I wasn’t promised anything.
 

AD: I think Primary Stages did an original reading in October or something to see where the play was and what made it work and what didn’t etc. So I came in for that, and then we did that other reading in December? November?
 

EM: Early December.
 

AD: Yeah, and then it was like, “Okay now you’re doing the show.” Okay! So it was really just the power of community. I’m eternally thankful to her [Cristina] because I never would’ve been on anybody’s radar if it wasn’t for that.
 

MJ: I’m wondering about your process in approaching your characters, especially since I notice there are some similarities in yours and your characters’ backgrounds. So specifically for this play, but also when you have to play a Latino character in other projects, how do you approach that? Is making sure the accent is correct something that you focus on? What are your processes as actors?
 

EM: There are some parallels between me and Abel, but then there’s these huge differences that I can’t even relate to. But we’re both from blue-collar working-class communities, which is what I grew up in. I went to Catholic school for 13 years but it was still very much representative of Chicago; Latinos, Black, Asians, everybody. So I grew up with the American experience. Hip-hop culture was also something that influenced me a lot growing up, because there weren’t a lot of salvadoreños in Chicago, so they thought I was Mexican or Puerto Rican or Middle Eastern, you know. I heard everything. But approaching Abel, I think the first thing I did was just learn about El Sereno, Boyle Heights, the people out there and what they’re like. And the little differences because, yeah, it’s similar communities, but LA and Chicago are two different things. As far as accents or anything like that, I didn’t really focus on that too much. I thought about doing this sort of, you know, more like Chicano rounding everything out, that sort of thing, but I felt like I’ve met a lot of people out there that don’t speak that way, and I sort of wanted to represent that. You gotta find the right places where it comes out and where it’s just like, “I’m at work, and it’s standard American English.”
 

AD: For Lucía, it’s hard because biographically the main stats are all very similar, I think. I mean, I look the way I look, I have the name that I have. It has put me in a position of being able to “pass” for white a lot of the time, so it creates an interesting dynamic where I was never really tokenized. It would be one or the other. Like extremely, “Oh, you are Mexican, you are a foreigner. Tell us about your culture, let’s go have Cinco de Mayo.” It was kind of like that level of interest and specificity, which is to say not much. And then on the other hand it would be me finding myself in rooms of people having very candid conversations about race or class or whatever and forgetting who I was and where I came from. So having to kind of be in the position that Lucía is in, of, like, “Oh man, do I say something? Do I call these people out? Do I pick my battles? Where is the line? What responsibilities do I have to represent who we are and where we come from? Do I even have the authority to do that?” Those kinds of questions have been in my head for a while, and so when this play comes along, I’m like, “Oh, this is exactly it.” So preparing for this was a lot of grappling with those questions, asking friends, asking people who immigrated the way I did, which is basically through education and work. Do you speak in Spanish to your servers? Do you wait? And it raises a lot of questions, especially coming from a place where I was the majority. They’re hard to contend with and interesting and fascinating questions. For me it was mostly engaging with those questions in my own life and with my friends and life. So in terms of the externals it’s not like I had to do a lot of body work or had to put on a voice. I think the closest was to do a Mexico City accent which is not my…
 

EM: Differentiating that, because you wanted to get it authentic. I remember you talking about getting it right for the mexicanos who do come see this.
 

AD: Right. Because I can pull off a pretty good Mexican Monterrey fresa [upper class] accent, but I think that comes across as a little provincial to someone from Mexico City. And Tanya wanted something a little more Mexico City, so I had to do some research, watch some YouTube videos, talk to some people I know. So for me it was a lot more internal work. Then of course getting into what position do I have to put myself in, in relation to the world around me, and am I going to do the things Lucía does? I think in Lucía’s mind it’s a lot of, “It’s either me or him, and I have to choose me.”
 

Annie Dow Eddie Martínez
 

MJ: One of the things that resonated with me about this play is how it deals with authentic representation, of Latinos and, in this case specifically, Mexicans. The play does poke fun of it when they talk about the executives having created a “generic Latino” character, so I wanted to get your thoughts about authentic representation in general, what has your experience been, and how this play deals with that.
 

EM: Yeah. I think that there’s still a lot of work to do. I’m trying to think of what Latino shows are really out there right now.
 

AD: There’s that new Netflix one.
 

MJ: It’s really good, One Day at a Time. With Rita Moreno.
 

EM: Oh, yeah yeah! I haven’t gotten a chance to see it.
 

MJ: It’s about Cubans, and it’s really good.
 

EM: People are saying it’s a good representation.
 

MJ: It is, and they have Latino executives and writers.
 

EM: Yeah, I think that’s what it is, more than anything. Nothing’s going to change until Latinos are behind the scenes. Producing, show running. It’s why it’s exciting, this sort of position that Tanya’s in right now. She may be one of the pioneers of this, you know what I mean? ’Cause it’s 2017, but yet we’re still scratching the surface. I think there’s still a lot of the archetypes that have been out there, like when I audition for stuff it’s still very much the thug, the criminal, or the janitor. Why I said yes to this, why I was okay playing a janitor in this, is because it’s more than that, you know what I mean? But there’s definitely those parts out there. The “wise janitor,” you know? But I’ve also done stuff that had nothing to do with my race. I did a movie called The Dilemma, and I played an IT guy. And actually the part was originally written for, I think, an Indian guy. And I went in there and I didn’t try to do an accent or anything like that. ’Cause that’s a whole other thing that I’m having issues with now. Somebody asks me to audition for an Indian or Middle Eastern, and I’m not. So I’m kinda turning those things down now. With this particular part, I just went in and did my own thing and they ended up changing the character and made him Latino, and that worked. But that’s not always the case. And it was comedy. I think comedy, I think they say something in the play about where in comedy it’s okay and for other genres it’s not. So I think in the comedy world there seems to be a lot more diversity. I hate that word sometimes, but yeah. I’ve had voiceovers where I’m the voice of a taco, things like that. Which I’ve done. But, you know.
 

AD: Oh, yeah. Or like, “Selling that cerveza!”
 

EM: Yeah, that sort of thing. So there’s still a lot of work to do, but we’re still in a place where we need to make money. But I’m a lot more conscious of what I do, especially after doing this show. I think before maybe I would’ve been a little bit more open to doing things that, even though I didn’t agree with, I was like, “Well, I need the money!” But now with this show it’s like, no. You have to put your foot down at a certain point or it’s going to continue. I mean they’ll replace me, you know? It is what it is. But there’s still a lot of work to do.
 

AD: I think for me it’s almost kind of coming at it from the opposite experience. I’ve had casting directors tell me, almost in confidence, “Oh you’re so lucky you get to play white.” And because I came from a place where I was the majority, suddenly realizing, “Oh, there’s something wrong with who I am? Being white, playing white is better than Latina? What does that mean?” And then also on the other hand people being like, “Oh you’re not Latina enough to play a Latina.” And it’s like, “But I am Latina! Do you need my passport? It’s here!” So I’ve had a lot more fluidity in terms of the ethnicity that I play or the nationality that I play. I do think that Eddie has a point when he says that things change a lot when the artist gets to bring their own lives into it. So I’m looking into, like, Orange is the New Black, where you get to actually bring in your own experience. And the Latinas aren’t “Latinas,” they’re Dominican and some of them are Mexican, and that creates a thing. And the Asian girl, Soso [played by Kimiko Glenn], who’s very privileged, is different from the rest of the Asian people in prison. And I think that does something. If we can’t create our own material, then at least let us bring something of our background, of ourselves, because if you don’t have the experience to draw out a full-fledged character, which is okay, then at least let the actor bring something to the table, or hire writers that are doing that. Shows like How to Get Away With Murder having Karla Souza there, or watching Sara Ramirez when I was a little younger in Grey’s Anatomy was transformative for me, because I was like, “She’s me! She’s not this idea of what I’m supposed to be.” And learning to challenge people a little more on that when doing a commercial or when doing whatever it’s like, “Oh, do you mind if I try this? Or is this okay, can I try it?” And most of the time people are open. Or maybe I’ve been lucky enough that I’ve auditioned for the right projects. But we still have a long way to go, and I don’t know, there’s just something more colorful about differences.
 

EM: Again, a lot of shows, a lot of productions, I think, are trying to be better about stuff like that. I know a playwright here that I was hanging out with a week ago, and he’s a consultant on the show Power, and what they have him there for is basically to make sure that when Dominicans speak Spanish, they sound like Dominicans, and that the Mexicans sound like Mexicans. Because in so many shows in the past, somebody’s Mexican but they obviously sound Dominican, and we all know that, we catch that. Or somebody’s supposed to be Puerto Rican and they obviously sound Mexican. So they have him there and it’s a position now, and that is a good step.
 

AD: It’s like that show Narcos, I think, where it’s like the colors of the Latino rainbow, but they’re all supposed to be Colombian. And it’s like, “Great, this is showcasing Latino diversity this is awesome,” but…
 

EM: Some of them nail it. But some of them are obviously not Colombian.
 

AD: I’ve just always assumed that the drug trade is multicultural and that’s what we’re going to do.
 

EM: We’re ALL drug dealers! (Laughs.)
 

MJ: I think that speaks to the fact that there’s still a pervasive idea that audiences are mostly white. You know? Because they don’t notice those things. But there are audience members for whom it does matter. Like you wouldn’t have a British character speaking in an obvious American accent, they would never do that, but they still do it with Latinos or with Asians as well. And I think it’s important to keep in mind that not only do we want more diversity on screen, but for everyone to realize that the audience is diverse as well. Cater to all of us.
 

EM: It matters.
 

AD: And I think at the same time it’s important to talk about creating that diverse audience. So especially theaters in the city they’ll put on this great Latino play or this great Middle Eastern play, and then where are the audiences? A lot of the time there is no culture of going to the theater because the theater has not provided anything that is interesting to us, and has been to a certain degree unwelcoming. I mean, for some people it has been dangerous to go out and participate in community events like theatergoing. So being able to reach out to these communities and continue engaging them is, I think, very important. Because, I’m sure Eddie has felt this way, but the show is a completely different show depending on who’s in the audience. It’s incredible.
 

EM: Where we get the laughs changes based on who the audience is.
 

AD: Yeah, if the audiences are mostly white, English speakers, then it’s a serious drama. And if it’s Latinos, or even younger people, it’s an uproarious comedy. It’s so strange.
 

MJ: Yeah, I noticed that when my friend and I saw it, we were reacting differently than a lot of the people around us. And we were like, “Oh, that’s because our experience and understanding is different.”
 

AD: Right, and I can imagine it’s uncomfortable to not be in on the joke for once. You know? But I think that discomfort is — I mean, I’ve been feeling it my whole life.
 

EM: I think that’s the best thing about the show: whether you enjoy it or not, or whether you agree with these characters and the choices they make, it creates a conversation. I think that’s the best thing about it. We’re talking about things that make people uncomfortable. And we want people to go home and talk about these things. I wish we had talk backs after every show, just to really be able to hash things out. So people are walking away with a clear message of what the show is trying to say, ’cause it can be interpreted, I think, a lot of different ways.
 

AD: Yeah, I mean it depends on especially what Lucía does or doesn’t do in order to get ahead. I’m sure there are many different perspectives on that, and whether that is okay or whether it’s not okay.
 

EM: Like the guy I told you about who’s a DJ, and he brought a date and she was a mexicana — dark skinned from Chicago, who grew up in a rough neighborhood, her dad was in jail for 10 years, and she ran far away from that lifestyle. She moved out here, created this whole new life, and then she saw the show and she loved it and she was crying. And I was like, “But what did you take away from it?” And she was like, “That you have to sell out!” And I was like, “Noooooo!” And this is somebody that doesn’t go to the theater, you know what I mean? She’s from a different world. And I was like, “Nooooo! That is not! No!” But it made me worried. I think people that go to the theater, they get it. But somebody who doesn’t, I’m afraid — is that what they take away? I wouldn’t want that.
 

MJ: I do appreciate the complexity in this play though, that it doesn’t have a moral absolute. Especially when it comes to Lucía’s actions, I think it can be interpreted in different ways. Do you hate her or do you understand where she’s coming from? That’s something to be discussed. The play doesn’t lay it out, and I like that, because I’m tired of seeing things where the moral is very obvious, especially in the context of a Latino play, to have that complexity in it, I was blown away by it. I think that’s a good thing.
 

EM: And I can’t think of another play that really talks about the classism thing.
 

AD: The only other play I can think of is one of Tanya’s plays. She seems to be the only one who’s really talking about it. And it’s an issue that, at least in México, is not talked about to the degree that it should be. So it’s funny that now I’m here and now we’re talking about it.
 

EM: In México they’re just now acknowledging their African roots, within some of the people. And that’s huge.
 

AD: And it’s not like it was, and maybe I’m wrong about this, it was never a taboo, or a conscious shunning of all that, it was just kind of like a whitewash. Like it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t matter, it’s irrelevant, why should we care?
 

EM: Who did that benefit?
 

AD: Right. And it’s almost infuriating that it’s so passive. It’s not coming out of hatred — it seems to be coming out of ambivalence, which is worse to me. Like I just don’t care either way.
 

EM: Yeah, that is worse, absolutely.
 

MJ: Yeah, and I had never seen it addressed before in an English-language play, and to have that addressed to a presumably English-speaking audience is great, because Latinos are usually lumped in as just “Latinos,” and we have so much conflict with each other, not just cultures but also class. And it’s good to show that to people who may not understand. That might help create a better understanding, especially for the immigrants living here, that there are these issues that we’re grappling with. Within our communities there is so much conflict, and it was great seeing that represented onstage.
 

EM: Yeah, or like Afro-Latinos who come here to the US and have to assimilate into the black culture, ’cause, “Oh, that’s who I am, that’s who I have to be.” And black culture isn’t acknowledging that. So there’s that, too.
 

MJ: Right, where do I belong in this conversation?
 

EM: Exactly.
 

Annie Dow Eddie Martínez
 

MJ: Not that I want to get too political, but given the current political climate, especially all the talk about immigration and all the negative attention immigration issues are receiving: Do you feel any responsibility as artists, as actors, to address this in some way? To elevate the conversation? And how do you do so?
 

EM: Yes. How is what I’m still trying to figure out.
 

MJ: I think even what you were saying before about turning down certain roles is a choice to address that.
 

EM: Yeah. The last thing I turned down was something where I’d be playing a bay worker, the guys who line up at, like, The Home Depot waiting for work. There’s nothing wrong with that. Like, I want to put dignity into any role, I would play those parts, as long as there’s dignity. If you show how they really are, they’re hardworking, doing it for a reason. But in this movie it was more like the white-savior thing, and I see too much of that. So that was one thing that I turned down. So yeah in that way, I think, I can be active. But it’s also going to the protests, things like that, which we’ve been missing out on ’cause we’ve been in rehearsals. I think in time we’ll know where we can do things.
 

AD: I think for me the most important thing that I’ve sort of learned over the last couple of years is: What’s the conversation that we’re having? Who’s in charge of framing that? Because if you start engaging in a conversation in the terms that the other person is using, you’re already losing. You really have to reframe the whole thing. And so I think the conversation that this country has been having over immigration, over nationality, over national origin, over race, puts anybody who’s arguing for inclusivity or for a bit more of a cosmopolitan, a political, or an expansive approach at a disadvantage, until we figure out a way to reframe the conversation. A show like Hamilton is, I think, doing an incredible job, and even with that — I love me some Lin-Manuel Miranda — but couldn’t we have a female Hamilton?
 

MJ: He said we could, actually. He went on record and said he’d support women playing the Founding Fathers.
 

AD: Oh good! That’s something that I’m excited about, just being able to reframe it so we don’t have this idea of the past or even the present that is shaped by somebody else who might not have the best interests of everybody at heart. I think that’s the most important thing for me. So I think yeah, artists and journalists, anybody who’s in charge of painting a picture of something you can’t see because you’re not there, I think there’s a huge responsibility there and I think, in a way, both those communities are at fault for what’s happening. Because we’ve abdicated that responsibility.
 

EM: In brown and black communities too, we want people to take part in our struggle, our plight of immigration, etc., but our communities as well have to address the homophobia, the sexism, because those are huge problems among the straight males in the black and brown communities. Still very sexist, misogynist, homophobic.
 

AD: Looking at it in a real, in a very unfiltered way, makes a big difference. I think a lot of people who maybe have formed certain ideas of Muslim immigrants or Latino immigrants or whatever, those impressions are not because they have been in touch with somebody who has affected their lives in a negative way. Those impressions are there because somebody told them that’s the way it is. So how do you change that conversation? How do you start telling at least the truth?
 

EM: When people interact with each other, it’s amazing how a lot of that goes away. You know what I mean? Like a lot of the people who are racist, they’ve been in all white communities in, like, the South. And they don’t really interact with anyone else. And even if they do, they’ll say, “Oh but they’re different!” Why are they different? Because you know them! ’Cause you interact with them. ’Cause they’re not this stereotype that you see on TV or the media or whatever. It’s just about interaction.
 

MJ: Yeah, and I think also greater exposure in the media is important to that effect. Because if you live in a community where there aren’t any Latinos or black people etc., and all you see is what’s on the news or what’s in movies, that’s the idea you’re going to have. And if we start to reshape the ways we’re portrayed that might have a positive effect. It might already be happening.
 

AD: Right, and it should be a diversity of experience. There are also women like Lucía, who have an ability to blend in and coast through and maybe trample on others to get what she wants. So there’s that too. The Latino experience is extremely diverse, but we’re losing the conversation because it’s been framed as this one or the other thing.
 

EM: And it’s not.
 

AD: Right.
 

EM: Another thing we do is we stereotype poor white people, rural America, and I think we need to be better about that. Connecting with those people. ’Cause if we all get together? Forget about it. That’s what they don’t want in this country. They want to keep it separate. And they use race and religion and all these things because it’s important to a lot of these people. But really? If the poor and the black and brown and LGBTQ and the women and the poor white people that have been forgotten in this country got together? I got chills.
 

MJ: is there a line in the play that resonates with you?
 

EM: So many good ones! “The language of assholiness is universal.”
 

AD: I don’t know. Oh, man. I’ve suddenly forgotten all my lines. I think Lucía has a moment where she grapples with maybe not knowing what her artistic contribution should be, so she tells Abel, “I don’t know if I have anything left to say.” That resonates with me because in it is wrapped up not only whether she’s maybe going through some writer’s block or if she considers herself a hack or not, but also who she’s supposed to be and what she’s supposed to say to whom. I think it’s a big question for her, and sometimes it is for me too.
 

MJ: Who are your biggest influences as actors?
 

EM: An actor that I’ve always looked up to is Benicio del Toro. ¡Puertorriqueño! Yeah, man, that guy to me is it, because he can play anybody. It has a lot to do with the way he looks, but it’s also how seriously he takes what he does. I aspire to that.
 

AD: I really like old-timey movies. So I think Greta Garbo, everything she ever did, was insane. She basically invented acting on camera. And then Bette Davis. The first time I saw Jezebel, I was like, “Oh my god!” So yeah. Nobody alive matters! (Laughs.)
 

MJ: What is your dream role, if you have one? Regardless of ethnicity or gender or any other constrictions?
 

EM: I like Aaron the Moor in Titus. I don’t think I’d ever play it. Maybe!
 

MJ: Oh, that’s a good one! Have you done any Shakespeare?
 

EM: I did As You Like it, [at the Denver Center]. I played Corin, the shepherd.
 

AD: I think probably Juliet. I just don’t think Juliet is some star-struck swoony ingénue. She’s a rebel! She runs away and gets married to someone she just met! And she fights with the guy all the time!
 

EM: That’s a Latino relationship right there!
 

AD: (Laughs.) Yeah! And you don’t see that. So I’d love to do that. Also if somebody reads this and wants to let me audition for the role of Hamilton, I will take that!
 

MJ: So I did a little research and I saw that you, Annie, co-wrote a short film and you, Eddie, I saw you were working on a script. Do you have aspirations as writers as well as performers, and how’s that going?
 

AD: I definitely write. I go back and forth between deciding whether what I write is meant for my own personal enjoyment or whether it is something that I should make, and I think at this point, given where we are, I think it’s something I should make. So originally I was supposed to produce a web series, but then I booked this role, so I’m pushing it to spring. So I’m excited about that.
 

EM: You’re doing it!
 

AD: Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely! This has been a pet project for a few years now so I’m excited to get it off the ground.
 

MJ: What’s it about?
 

AD: I think, I’m not 100 percent sure on the title, but I think it’s called Kink, and it’s about a young woman who decides that she wants to be an escort to provide kinky services and what that entails. So she, you know, lets people lick her toes or that sort of thing. Yeah. And what that journey is. She’s also somebody who maybe isn’t that comfortable with her own sexuality, so learning to deal with that.
 

EM: I have two or three ideas for scripts that I’ve been thinking about for two years, but I wrote one short film. It is done. I just haven’t shown it to anyone. I have Tanya and another friend that I keep on saying, “I’m going to send it to you guys! I’m going to send it to you guys!” It’s inspired by the neighborhood I grew up in and Catholic school and basketball, which was very important, the community got into it more than they probably should have. These were eighth graders playing, and I’m pretty sure they were gambling on the side, and people fixing games. Like this is an eighth grade game, but they were the priests, the altar men, the cops. Yeah so it’s about that but exaggerated a little. Elements of comedy. The main character’s just this kid who wants a pair of Reebok pumps, and he’s got these whole Payless-type shoes he’s had for five years, they’re two sizes too small, but he still brushes them with a toothbrush to clean, and it’s sort of what he decides to do to get the Reeboks and all these situations he ends up in.
 

Annie Dow Eddie Martínez
 

AD: Don’t you and I have a thing we’re going to work on now?
 

EM: Oh, yeah, what was that idea?
 

AD: We came up with something in the middle of rehearsal.
 

EM: And we were like, “We need to work on this.”
 

AD: What was it? It was like — oh what do you call those competitions?
 

EM: Oh, yeah, it was about in South Texas, at a grade school, a competition for El Grito, but how it’s all boys who compete in these competitions and there’s this little girl who wants to compete, but everyone’s like, “No, no, no, you don’t do that.”
 

AD: I think it’d be a short film. Just about that.
 

EM: I don’t even know, somebody was talking about it and we started riffing and then we were like, “We need to write it.” I know nothing about South Texas (laughs).
 

AD: That’s okay, I’ve been there (laughs).
 

MJ: You should definitely work together again because you have great chemistry onstage.
 

EM: Aw, thank you.
 

MJ: Finally, why should people come see this play?
 

EM: I think for the reason that we said earlier, about the conversation that can be had after seeing the show. Seeing something that you probably haven’t seen before about Latinos onstage, which is the classism. And it’s funny, it’s a good time! And it’s by one of the most important playwrights that we have right now, Tanya.
 

AD: Yeah. The same.
 
 

 

 

Annie Dow was born and raised in Monterrey, México. Regional credits include Much Ado About Nothing (Hero) with the Shakespeare Theatre Company in DC alongside Kathryn Meisle, Derek Smith, and Tony Plana; as well as the world premiere of Tanya Saracho’s Song For the Disappeared (Mila) with the Passage Theatre Company in New Jersey. In New York, she has participated in the development of new plays and musicals at CAP 21, Baryshnikov Arts Center, The New Victory Theater, Playwrights Realm, and The Lark. She has recently appeared onscreen in LMN’s I Love You…But I Lied, as well as Netflix’s “The OA” and “The Late Show with David Letterman.”  Annie is also a veteran commercial actor and voiceover artist, appearing in multiple national and regional ads in both English and Spanish. She earned her BFA in Drama and Psychology at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and is a proud member of AEA and SAG-AFTRA.
 

Eddie Martínez Chicago Theatre credits include: Parachute Men as Andrew (Teatro Vista), Big Lake Big City asStewart (Looking Glass Theatre), Our Lady of 121st Street asPinky (Steppenwolf Theatre Company). Denver Theatre credits: FADE as Abel (Denver Center Theater Company), As You Like It as Corin (Denver Center Theatre Company). Film & TV credits include “The Dilemma”, “The Break Up”, “Boss”, “Chicago Fire”, “Sense8’, and “Sirens”.

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A Conversation with Sarah Stiles

Sarah Stiles

 

Sarah Stiles does a lot of things. She sings, she dances, she acts, she crochets cozy hats and scarves in her spare time. And she’s picked up quite a few fans (and a Tony nomination) playing funny and fierce women on and off-Broadway. With a long list of projects lined up, she’s about to take over your TV screen too. Outside of her work, Sarah is a true believer in the radical and revolutionary power of love, empathy, and small acts of kindness, in a world where those beliefs couldn’t be more essential. I sat down with her to talk about life and art, and, most importantly, how we can start to move past fear and get to the hard work of building a world where everyone can be safe and smiling and free.

 

 

Kelly Wallace: Tell me a little about how you grew up, and why you were drawn to acting?
 

Sarah Stiles: I grew up in New Hampshire and I started doing theater in about 4th or 5th grade. Whenever we had school projects, I always found some way of making it a play. So my teacher pulled my mom aside at one point and told her to think about getting me involved in theater. I joined a theater camp and I fell deeply in love. I started doing community theater, semi-professional sort of non-equity stuff. It was definitely like a job though. Some of it was at Seacoast Repertory Theatre. I started doing that every summer starting when I was 11, until I left for New York, right out of school. I left school my senior year of high school, and I did get a diploma, but through a different school in the mail? I was fourth in my class but I dropped out my senior year and started working at that community theater in their office. And then I came straight to New York. So I didn’t go to college, I went to AMDA for a year and a half and then just started working. I’ve done a lot else to survive.
 

KW: And growing up in New Hampshire…it’s not really a diverse state.
 

SS: Not at all.
 

KW: Did you feel like you were exposed to art that was outside of your worldview?
 

SS: Yes, mostly because of my mom. She comes from a family of artists, fine artists, so we were going to the museums. We were going to Boston a lot. I was in a lot of road shows. Once I figured out I loved musicals, she started taking me. We watched great movies, we were well-read. We were brought up macrobiotic and we always had different food nights to try to experience different cultures as much as we could. There were a lot of influences. It was still a small town though.
 

KW: So when you came here, did you have total culture shock?
 

SS: For sure! I moved to the Upper West Side, somewhere around the 70s, and went to school. I don’t think I really left that area for the first six months. The subway terrified me – everything was crazy. I grew up in the woods where you had to drive to get to the nearest friend’s house. We were on a dirt road. Then to move here was…intense. But singing and dancing and acting…that was all the same. That was my grounding force.
 

KW: After you came here and started professionally acting…you’re in this position of constantly being judged. That’s kind of your career, in a way. It’s part of your job description. How do you stay sure of yourself when you’re in that position so often?
 

SS: I don’t…I think I struggle constantly with confidence. There’s just nothing in the world that I want to do more than this. When your drive is that strong and your love and passion for something is that strong, you’ll put up with a lot. You keep getting beaten down but you stick it out.
 

KW: They always say if you can do something else, do something else.
 

SS: Yeah. Isn’t that everything? The thing about being human is you have to figure out what you love and go for that. If you’re doing anything else besides that, whatever it may be, you’re not really happy.
 

KW: Theater is obviously your main focus, but you do other things too. You have your fashion line on the side, for example. Does having those other outlets inform your art across disciplines?
 

SS: Just being a well-rounded person makes you a better artist. I don’t necessarily consider myself a theater girl, I would say I’m an actor, whatever medium. I’m doing a lot more TV and that’s been really fun, and so different. Whatever I’m doing, I like to be creative. I love making things – tactile things like handiwork and crafts. I love cooking. I love creating things. It’s never a solo thing for me either; I really like working with people. That’s why being an actor is the greatest. There’s so many people involved in making this one piece. I love discovery. I want a million lives because there are so many things I want to do in the world. Being a student of life and acting and performing has been such an amazing way of being a student.
 

Sarah Stiles
 

KW: You did Into the Woods in Central Park, playing Little Red. I was thinking about this when we set up the interview…when they did the movie, the scene between Red and the Wolf was so different. The way it was played in the park was much less G-Rated. What was your take on that scene when you played the role? Most people interpret it as a sort of sexual awakening…
 

SS: It is 100% that for me.
 

KW: Then in the movie, it was overtly not that at all.
 

SS: They couldn’t, really, when they decided to go with an actual child. I deeply loved that particular production. I think that will go down as one of my favorite experiences. I just love the show; I loved that take on her. It was something that we really discovered in the rehearsal process. They weren’t sold on what Red would look like. The drawing of her was very different than what my costume ended up being. We really came up with that based on what I was coming into the room wearing and my approach to her. The director would give certain suggestions on how to move and what her vibe was and how she’d stuff all this food in her mouth…and I just saw her as this scrappy, tough, tomboy. It wasn’t the easiest collaboration in rehearsals, but it wound up being so lovely by the time we opened.
 

KW: Little Red goes through one of the largest growth arcs in the entire story. She starts out so young and so naive, and at the end, she’s left with pretty much no one. She’s gone through this sexual awakening, she’s gone through this horrifying, traumatic experience…
 

SS: James Lapine came and talked to all of us about it before we opened. And he told me that everyone in the show, when they go into the woods, they’re going in with a lot of fear. Except Little Red, who goes in with absolutely no fear. By the end, she learns fear. She learns that there are bad things, that there are consequences, and that life can be a little scary. I always thought that was interesting. I thought about that a lot when I started the show every night. She’s just fearless. Then it’s just a matter of letting things affect you. The way it ended, the way he directed it, with the four of us [Jack, the Baker, Cinderella, and Little Red] coming out of the woods…it’s like the apocalypse. He said basically, I want to feel like you walk through, the fog clears, and you’re looking at war. Everything around you has been destroyed. It’s a battleground, and there’s no one left. That’s what it should feel like. I remember walking through it, and we were by ourselves at that point, and it was so easy to imagine it that way. Being out in the park, it was so great. It was musical war. I felt like we started every show tucked underneath the mulch in back and everyone is on the floor all curled up and as soon as the music starts, we’d just go.
 

KW: Did you meet the Central Park raccoon?
 

SS: The raccoon was obsessed with me. I had to hide during Amy’s song, “Moments in the Woods.” I had the baby and all the luggage. I was just sort of in the mulch on the ground behind her, behind a tree. The raccoon would constantly come at me in that moment. I had my little fake dagger and I would be like, back off.
 

KW: Little Red could take a raccoon.
 

SS: Yup, and then eat it, and make a coat. She’s not afraid.
 

KW: You end up playing a lot of children in your career. What’s different for you when you play someone who’s 10, versus playing an adult?
 

SS: The thing about playing kids is you have to remember this is the first time they’re ever experiencing what is happening. It’s the first time I’m hearing someone say something, the first time being presented with new situations, so everything is constantly fresh. Thinking in those terms really helps me. There’s no baggage attached. Every situation has this undertone of not knowing, not being sure what’s gonna happen, and then going from there. It’s the moment to moment that gets hard, because they’re so all about what’s right in front of them. It’s actually very liberating to play children, honestly. I’ve always really loved it. There’s a freeness about it and a bravery and excitement. Does that make sense?
 

KW: Yeah, absolutely.
 

SS: It’s like you’re on your toes and there’s a bubble above your head. That’s the best way I can describe it. Even in Hand to God, Jessica is like that. Even though she’s very grounded and earthy, she’s closer to being a teenager, and she’s very wise.

KW: She is his grounding force throughout the entire show.
 

SS: She is. She’s kind of like the audience, in a way. She’s very steady. But still, this is the first time any of this stuff has happened to her; she doesn’t have a lot of experience.
 

KW: To be fair, not many people have puppet sex experience.
 

SS: No, certainly not. I don’t know how much sex she’s had…you know, that’s interesting. I’m not sure if she’s a virgin or not. I wonder if she’s had sex. She’s definitely had puppet sex…but she knew a lot of moves. She knew what she was doing. She’s either watched a lot of porn or read a lot of books or…
 

KW: You also did the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and understudied three characters – Marcy, Logainne and Olive. What did it feel like to do Marcy? Did you ever go on?
 

SS: No. That was my first Broadway gig and I was with the company for just a few weeks. I hadn’t had put ins, I hadn’t even rehearsed Marcy yet. It was a Sunday night when both Celia [Keenan-Bolger] and Sarah [Saltzberg] were out and I ended up going on for Sarah at the matinee and Celia at night. That was my big debut. It was insane. After that, I started rehearsing Marcy, which was super hard. Kate Wetherhead had been doing it and they said she played it like a smart, preppy, Southern girl. Like a Type-A kind of cheerleader. I’m so glad I never went on though.
 

KW: That character just seems so overtly Asian-American, so many of the jokes rely on playing off that stereotype. Did you ever feel a little uncomfortable with that?
 

SS: Oh yeah. I mean, I did not want to go on for that role. I just knew I wasn’t going to do it right. I had no idea what take I would do. Now, I’d approach it differently and try to find another way into the role, but that was one of my first big jobs. I couldn’t quite figure it out. But Kate went on and she’s great, so I guess she figured it out. When I was, on our Mitch Mahoney cover was white. It was Andrew Kober, actually. He played it kind of like Vanilla Ice.
 

KW: That was one of the first shows I saw where someone had gay parents. It was very cool to see that just as a thing that you can have. Was that your first experience playing a non-nuclear family?
 

SS: I think it was. Except Little Orphan Annie, I guess. She doesn’t really have a family.
 

KW: She doesn’t really have anyone.
 

SS: I mean…she’s an orphan.
 

KW: Vanities was another show that was fascinating that is just about female friendship that don’t involve a man or a love triangle. It’s about those women, their relationships – that’s the story. A lot of the time a girl always has some kind of man she’s tangled up with onstage.
 

SS: That’s so true. I did do Steel Magnolias, which is all ladies.
 

KW: What was it like to build those very close relationships in the rehearsal process for Vanities?
 

SS: I did two major productions with different girls. It was always awesome. That show really lends to that. It’s three very different personalities and you’re doing super fun things and you’re out of town and you’re bonding. We all loved each other.
 

KW: And your character, Joanne, is really a departure from you, Sarah Stiles.
 

SS: Oh totally. She’s a disaster. I mean, I’m a disaster too, but in a different way. She’s very closed-minded. But the thing is, she’s got a huge heart, she’s just been brought up in such a way that she can’t even comprehend other ways of doing things. She’s trying so hard to be loved and be perfect and be accepted. That’s the path she thinks she has to go down in order to achieve that. I have a lot of love for Joanne, even though she says some really terrible things.
 

KW: You move here, no high school diploma, no college…in a business of where women get take advantage of quite a bit..did you ever feel vulnerable or worried about that?
 

SS: Not necessarily, but my path was more…I did more damage to myself than other people did to me, honestly. It took me a very long time to figure out who I was and connect with myself and be really proud of myself. As soon as I believed that I was deserving and interesting and capable, then things got a lot easier. That was the hardest part for me. I don’t think it was other people.
 

Sarah Stiles
 

KW: In the time I’ve known you, you’ve always been such an outwardly loving and positive person. Someone recently told me that love isn’t just an emotion, it’s a conscious choice we make every day about how we interact with the world.
 

SS: I love that, that’s such a beautiful sentiment. I think I am positive person. I have darkness in me, you have to, you have to have both. I swing really far one way, but also in the other direction. I want people around me to feel good and to feel happy and feel loved, so I try to approach every situation that way. I do want that, I’ve always been that way. You have to make that choice. Authenticity is also really important to me though. I don’t want to bullshit anyone or be fake, but I think I’m able to look at someone and see something that is…like a jewel inside of them. That’s the part that I’m going to extract and focus on. That’s what I try to do. It’s not always as great for boyfriends along the way…that one part is so good, but the rest is so bad. That one thing is so shiny! That’s what life is about. That’s why I love theater so much, there’s that immediate thing that happens when you’re onstage and the audience is there and you’re connecting and you can just feel the energy coming back to you. That’s delicious to me. TV is not the same thing. Even though I really love some of the TV that I’ve done.
 

KW: It’s not that live, immediate response.
 

SS: It’s very different, there’s also a really wonderful intimacy on camera. When you’re in the scene with them, it feels so real and so close…
 

KW: Well, you’re not playing to the back of the house.
 

SS: Exactly. So there’s something incredible about that too, it feels unbelievably raw. I like both.
 

KW: Given your upbringing, when do you feel like you started to be aware of diversity and started being around more people who didn’t really look like you?
 

SS: I must’ve been older. There’s like no other race but white in New Hampshire. Like, super white. In my high school, I don’t think there were any people of color. Definitely not in my class. It wasn’t until I came to New York, really. But it wasn’t a shock of like…”Oh, there’s black people here!” It’s funny, I remember having the Guys and Dolls album as a kid and it was an all-black cast and I didn’t know the show, I didn’t know anything, but I grew up thinking it was just an all-black show. I had no idea. I just assumed that’s what it was.
 

KW: Do you think now, with a lot of these conversations we’re having about different kinds of privilege that people have or different ways that you present visually…does that make you think about the advantages and disadvantages you’ve had?
 

SS: I will say this, I will speak to just beauty in general, and the idea of…it’s very hard to be a woman, especially an older woman, in this business, where everything is filtered and social media is there…there’s such an emphasis on physical beauty. That’s hard, and once you go down that rabbit hole, it gets even harder.
 

KW: That’s part of your career, in a lot of ways…
 

SS: It is. I’ll be totally honest and I have no problem saying this…I’m 37, I play kids. On TV, I don’t look like I’m in my early 20s, but I’m also still not totally in my mid-30s, I’m in this in-between place and I absolutely started to get botox a couple years ago. I had to, I’ve got these teeny forehead and I’m crazy expressive, so I had a lot of creases. My manager and I talked about it, it was a very conscious decision. I went and got it done, I don’t know why I didn’t do it sooner. I come from this very hippie, natural background, but I also don’t think it’s a problem to do things like that. As long as you’re not doing it for other people and you’re doing it for yourself and you have self-love.
 

KW: You felt like it was really your decision and it was for you.
 

SS: Yes. I didn’t get it done until I knew totally who I was, and loved who I was. It has made a difference in my TV career, for sure. It’s hard. Where does it stop? I love actresses like Kate Winslet who is very open about being your own person and not doing things to yourself. In this day and age, most people do though. It’s a weird balance. As long as you really keep that core human inside you safe, happy, and feeling good…the outward stuff is easier.
 

KW: Right.
 

SS: It is hard though. I just started wearing my hair curly again, I’d been straightening it for years, because I thought it made me more beautiful. I went back to my natural hair when I started dating this guy who I really frickin’ love. I came out of the shower once and hadn’t dried it and he was shocked, he asked what was going on with my hair. I told him that’s just how it is and he told me it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. So I tried wearing it that way again and I booked a huge job a week later with this crazy, curly hair that’s actually me. I’m really embracing it. Beauty and appearance…that’s the thing I think about more than anything else in terms of me feeling insecure. Do I think I lose jobs sometimes because I’m not pretty enough? Yeah. I still think it sometimes. It’s just a constant process.
 

KW: Who are some of your inspirations and heroes when you were growing up? Or even now?
 

SS: It’s weird maybe, but my sister is who I thought of. It’s such a small thing, but she’s an incredible woman. She’s five years younger than me,she has two babies, and she just got divorced from her husband, who is transitioning to be a woman. It was a very intense, crazy experience. The road to that and also the acceptance of it. Living with it, trying to be okay with it. She realized it just wasn’t what they wanted and what their life was. But watching her go through it with such positivity and strength has been deeply inspiring to me. On a grander scale…I’ve never necessarily been obsessed with some diva or celebrity, but it’s really my circle of friends and the people I meet along the way who inspire me. My best friend, Jess Chase, who is at MCC – I love how she lives her life. Watching her and how she’s grown in her career…I see all sides of her and it inspires me. Is that a bad answer?
 

KW: There’s no bad answer to that question!
 

SS: That’s really how is. It’s the people who taught me along the way.
 

KW: What role have you played that’s the closest to you? Real life Sarah Stiles.
 

SS: Oh gosh. I think every role has a piece of me in it. I think the raw core of me, the essence, is Little Red. If I had no boundaries and was just really able to do anything that I wanted, I think that would be her. I’m feisty like that. I’m also just curious and brave. She’s so brave, she throws herself into things. Logainne was for sure the worst pieces of me. Because of that, it was one of the hardest roles I had to play. When I say worst pieces, I mean the parts of me that I find the hardest to deal with. It’s her anxiety, her need to be loved and to be perfect, her competitiveness and her drive…there’s a lot of me in that. Those are parts that I’m not as comfortable letting out into the world. So playing her on the road like that almost broke me, for real. Jessica was a big turning point for me. I told the director and the writer this, but I said that I felt like I grew up so much through Jessica. She really taught me a lot. I’ve come to a place where I’m much more Jessica in my real life than I ever was before. The calm, the balance, the ability to see a situation and find a solution. And not needing to be validated, totally feeling validated on my own and by myself. I learned that from her and being in her shoes for a year. I cried so hard at closing. I was so worried that I was going to lose that part of myself. Every night, I got to remind myself to be that way. And so I was really nervous that I was going to leave her and fall off the rails. But I didn’t! She’s still in me!
 

Sarah Stiles
 

KW: Tell me about the projects you have coming up and where people can look for you, I know you have a lot of exciting things in the works.
 

SS: Dude, yes! I can’t believe how much has happened. I’m going to be in I’m Dying Up Here on Showtime, which is debuting June 4th. I’m in one of those episodes, I’m in the trailer…without my clothes on. And then I just started shooting the third episode of Get Shorty with Epix. They picked up all 10 episodes…I play Gladys, who is Rick’s [Ray Romano] secretary. I’m doing the whole series and we’re in the middle of it in Albuquerque right now.. It’s been really fun so far. And then there’s the animated series, Sunny Day, for Nickelodeon. I play the mean girl, Lacy, in that and it’s coming out this summer.
 

KW: Talk about the night of the election, after the election, how did that go for you?
 

SS: This is so awful, but I went to sleep at like…9? It didn’t even occur to me that this would happen. I remember going to bed early. I don’t remember why, but I was asleep by 9. My phone started blowing up later and I started getting all these text messages from a girlfriend saying she couldn’t believe what was happening and didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I remember looking at it and thinking there’s no way, and then I woke up at something like 4 or 5AM and seeing a text from the same friend freaking out and I looked online and all of the headlines and I just…I thought it was a joke. I remember calling my mom at like 4:30AM and we both just cried. My sister called me first thing in the morning just sobbing. All of these powerful, amazing women in my life, men too, but especially the women in my life…people were just heartbroken by it. I got on a bus immediately that afternoon to go see my sister in New Hampshire so I could be with her because it was just so crazy. I watched Hillary’s speech on the bus and just sobbed.
 

KW: That speech was so much more dignified than I would ever have been able to be in that moment.
 

SS: It’s been one of the strangest things ever. It’s like a horrible movie.
 

KW: I’ve heard a few people say this but I agree…if you pitched this as a movie, they’d tell you it was unrealistic.
 

SS: I totally agree. It’s so strange and it’s caused such an upheaval. I have moments of a lot of fear about it, but at the end of the day that doesn’t do anyone any good. I was preaching to all my friends about it, about how we have to…it’s not about thinking positive. We are in charge of ourselves, our happiness, and the space immediately around us. We need to keep paying that forward and pushing out and stay committed to our happiness and faith. It sounds like a Pollyanna thing, but it does help. It gives comfort and peace of mind and small acts of kinds will lead to bigger acts of kindness. That’s so important right now. The fear and the hate is very loud and splashy and it’s intimidating.
 

KW: The opposition is very in your face right now.
 

SS: Absolutely. But kindness and truth and love always…ugh, I want to say trumps it but that phrase is sort of ruined now. But it does. It will prevail. I have complete faith in that. We have to keep loving and being authentic and believing that there is a reason for all of this. I don’t know what it is but…
 

KW: I hope you’re right. I keep thinking of something Cory Booker said this week, “The arc of the moral universe does not just naturally curve towards justice, we must bend it.”
 

SS: That’s a great way to put it. I read this amazing quote about the morning that it happened:
 

“There’s a concept in behavioral therapy known as an “extinction burst”—basically, when you’re trying to remove a behavior (let’s say in this case, xenophobia, misogyny/etc) often you will actually see an increase in that behavior before it dies. The old world order is SCREAMING right now. What I’m seeing tonight are the death throes of a system that cannot last. Whatever the outcome, remember that what happens at the federal level is not the end of the story. We can take charge in our communities and we can continue to move in the right direction. Let ‘em scream, the rest of us have work to do.” – Amanda Jennison-Sousa
 

It really gave me some peace to read that in the weeks leading after the election.
 

KW: Do you feel like as an artist and someone in this community, that there’s a role and a responsibility that we have now as people who are leaders or have an influence that not everyone else has?
 

SS: I think we all have a responsibility as humans. In one way, it’s all the same. But as a performer, you’re reaching more people. We have these built-in platforms where we get to speak to large groups of other humans. We do have a responsibility in the sense that we have a much bigger audience.
 

KW: What would you say to the people who follow you and who you can reach who are probably pretty scared or angry or freaked out right now?
 

SS: I say choose love, honestly. I think it’s really easy to get wrapped up in scary quotes and horrible Twitter things that he sends out…it’s very easy to get caught up in all of that. It’s so important to keep yourself healthy and happy and full of faith. It’s the only thing we have control over, to care for other people and be kind. And faith…just have faith that we’re not going to fall. The universe doesn’t want us to fail and get trampled. Now we know how important our own voices are and that we really need to find the things we believe in and fight for them. A lot of us just never realized this could happen, it didn’t occur to us to do more. I don’t think anyone can make that mistake again.
 
 

 

 

Sarah Stiles has been seen onstage as Annelle in Judith Ivey’s Steel Magnolias at the Alliance Theatre, Jessica in Hand to God (Tony and Lucille Lortel nominations), Little Red Riding Hood in Shakespeare in the Park’s Into the Woods. On Broadway: Muriel in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (Muriel) Avenue Q (Kate/Lucy), The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Off-Broadway/original cast recordings: Joanne in Vanities (Second Stage), Nazirah in The Road to Qatar (York Theatre). She also toured in the first national companies of Spelling Bee and Tommy Tune’s Dr. Doolittle. Sarah will be featured in Showtime’s upcoming I’m Dying Up Here, Epix’s Get Shorty, and Nickelodeon’s Sunny Day.

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A Conversation with Mark Russell

Mark Russell

 

In the dying fire of 2016 we met in the heart of the Public Theater to speak with Mark Russell, the Festival Director of the Under the Radar Festival. UTR itself is a conversation, within each piece and across artists and disciplines, and Mark Russell has been orchestrating this dialogue for over a decade. He reminds us that a festival is a celebration. Always and especially in our current climate, art gives us the opportunity to tell the truth in ways we don’t expect and that is certainly something worth celebrating.
 

As I look into the darkened unknown of 2017, it is in conversations like these, about and in the art and truth that I find hope.

 

 

Corey Ruzicano: I would love to start by talking about what it means to be a curator. From PS. 122 and Portland and now the Public, what are some of the things you’ve learned and what values have become important to you, as a curator?
 

Mark Russell: Well, curator is an interesting word. I’ve never really embraced the word “curator”; I usually call myself a programmer, because I feel I’m just a lens on what’s going on and I’m trying to reflect that. And in theater, where this stuff moves around a lot, if I wanted to do my Blue Period or my All Hamlet Festival, it would take so much money to make it happen. So I have to be really open and available to what’s going on. The real agenda of the Under the Radar Festival is to give a snapshot of what we think is going on in performance and new theater around the world.
 

CR: What role does this medium play during any current event, but particularly this current political climate? What can you speak to with a festival that you couldn’t speak to in the same way with a house that has more established yearlong programming? What tools does the festival give you to react?
 

MR: Well, you know festivals are celebrations, they are a time when you can break the rules. Either it’s celebrating bringing in the crops or Lent or having a whole bunch of bands together, and this one is all about the theater community. It’s a time when we throw away the rules, go binge on theater, bring together that community around it, and join it. It’s also open for people around the city to join in the celebration. Within celebrations, especially theater celebrations, there is room for sadness and anger and loss and poignancy, but coming together is the force of the festival. There’s a lot of need. I feel a need to come together with these people.
 

CR: Absolutely, I think there’s been so much interesting talk about how the language of our country has become a utilitarian one, that we’ve made a shift away from the communal and spiritual-based vocabularies of the past, and I come to theater the way I think a lot of people go to church. I’m interested in how you’ve come to define that idea of community for yourself and how you’ve built the community for this event?
 

MR: The community sort of built itself and I’ve been adding on, of course, drawing in the artists and what they bring to it. Sometimes the festival can sort of shift in communities, in what it’s addressing and who comes. It’s interesting because I didn’t know what to expect this year. I thought, either it’s going to be really happy and joyous or we could be despondent, we could be bored—we just didn’t know. And then when this election happened, when certain things happen, I looked around at the work that we had invited and thought, yes, it’s going to fit. In fact, in this room are going to be 600 Highwaymen, where the audience makes the show themselves, and in that sense it’s all about community and how far you can push it and stretch it—what our agency is in community. I’m very happy about what this festival will say in January in all its different parts. The Bengsens are more about the joy.
 

CR: Yeah, Hundred Days is such a celebration of life.
 

MR: And I need that as well.
 

Mark Russell
 

CR: What’s it like to have all these different voices and vocabularies speaking together in one conversation and how do you go about orchestrating a conversation like that?
 

MR: If I knew the conversation, I would be bored, so I’m just waiting to see what this festival is going to say along with everybody else. I have a few more clues than most people, but actually, when you start to go through these festivals, there’s a different thread and you go, oh everyone’s about missing dad. All these different themes and threads come out. And actually we’re gonna do this: Jeanie O’Hare, the new dramaturg, is going to do a special event called “The Sweep” and it’s going to be in this room. She’s going to be embedded throughout the festival and then talk about the different themes that she sees and allow everyone to join in on the last Saturday of the festival to talk about what they saw.
 

CR: What else are you excited about this year?
 

MR: Oh gosh. This year we have more things being made for the festival than ever before.
 

CR: Oh really, what is that process like?
 

MR: It’s like commissioning 600 Highwaymen, which is our centerpiece, but also things like Club Diamond, which began as a workshop last year and is now a full blown, beautiful piece that we’ve helped shepherd to get there. I have an associate that I work with, Andrew Kircher, who sort of acts as a producing dramaturg for all these pieces. So we get into some of the technical challenges but also the dramaturgical, the textual, the larger challenges within each piece, and I’m very excited that all of them are coming together. Keith Wallace is taking a piece that is a promenade piece for basketball courts that he was doing in San Diego, and we’re taking it and making it into an actual sit down piece and trying to make that crossover, and of course it will really be a different piece when it gets here. I’m really excited about it. It means that this piece, which is one of the strongest Black Lives Matter pieces I’ve seen, is going to reach more people, and I think that’s even more important than the interactive version.
 

CR: So what is that submission process like? How do you go about choosing which voices you give a platform to?
 

MR: Now I’d have to shoot you. I’m not an intellectual curator, I’m more “go from the gut” and “I feel like…” I see something and think, “This is a voice that my community of Under the Radar needs, those that have been there and those that I want to reach out to and bring into the room, those people need this part of the conversation.” I spend all year looking for it, I travel places, people send me videotapes, I have a lot of spies around the world that call me up and say, “This is the piece you want.” I’ve been doing it a while and there’s a flow to it. I’m also thinking of pieces for ‘18 and ‘19. I think of it as a privileged position, of course. It’s a joy. I work with a lot of people to make this happen; it isn’t me coming down from the mountain. I’m working with people like Andrew or my producers Ellen Dennis and Lily Lamb-Atkinson. It’s a conversation, and at the end I end up taking responsibility for it, so someone can hate me. We try and create a shape, you need a little bit of joy like the Hundred Days, and you also need a little bit of beauty like Manuel Cinema’s Lula Del Ray, or Club Diamond, and then you need to look into pieces that are taking the form and stretching it like Gardens Speak, which is about Syrian martyrs and is the most powerful piece I saw this year. It doesn’t have any actors in it, it’s more of an installation piece and I’m really excited about it. We have interactive pieces like 600 Highwaymen which is all about community and the piece that we’re doing out in the Brooklyn Museum in the Egyptian wing by Rimini Protokoll called Top Secret International (State I), and by the end of that you’ll think of everyone as spies. It’s about the spying community, and you actually do a little spying yourself in and amongst this beautiful exhibit of Egyptian antiquities.
 

Mark Russell
 

CR: It’s so interesting to get to see the vernacular of a piece like that in relation to different mediums. I always feel the most fulfilled when I can see the shoulders that people are standing on, not just theatrically but visually or aurally, etc.
 

MR: Under the Radar is dealing with a lot of cross disciplinary things, which is really where a lot of the inspiration goes or a lot of the rules get broken. And that transgression opens up a certain truth, and that’s what I’m interested in.
 

CR: I love that idea of truth, especially in this era where truth feels like a really rare commodity, or maybe that it’s over produced and so people are inundated and oversaturated with it.
 

MR: We’re in the KMart of Truth.
 

CR: Exactly, Ira Glass, before the election, said, “it’s easier than ever to check if a fact is true and facts matter less than ever.” I’m interested in how theater can speak to the art of telling truths in interesting and unexpected ways. I wonder if you could talk about how the festival gets at that.
 

MR: Again it’s something that we try to feel. Sometimes things can be all about facts. Rimini Protokoll has tapes in it from Edward Snowden. Or it can be completely fantastical, an artificial world, but get at a core, human truth, a more spiritual truth that we know and can share. That’s what we’re going for. When I’m in a room and I feel that or I feel an artist going toward that, that’s where we want to go and those are the people we try to include in this thing. Marga Gomez is doing a solo performance piece, but it’s so much about gentrification and loss and all the things that are going on in San Francisco, in her hometown, but also about her missing her dad who was this crazy Latin music star.
 

CR: I’m interested still in how, as a programmer, when you talk about this community, a lot of which has built itself, how do you go about knowing them? Even practically, how do you get to know them and how do you speak with and about them?
 

MR: Once the festival starts I spend most of my time in the lobby. I feel like I’m meeting that community while trying to expand on who else we need to include. It’s interesting to see who selects and makes the effort to come and who does not. We have a lot of opportunities to exchange and speak after shows, we meet in our reading room and talk. In some ways festivals are transient communities. You’ll go and say, I saw you at that show, what did you think? The whole idea is to see more than one show and join this thing, this celebration, and then it all goes away. Hopefully they come back next year, or maybe find themselves at a mainstage Public Theater show, but the main experience is the festival. A lot of these names are not known at all but they’re all really interesting artists and they have a lot to say, and the audience is taking a risk with them. The way I book these things is by imagining how I see or want to see New York City. I want it to reflect everything. I want it to be queer, I want it to be multicultural, to have passion, to have energy. That’s how I put this together. And sometimes I look at it, I looked at it in July, and we realized something was missing. By the end of August we found something, took the whole festival, turned it upside down and put this other thing in it. It really stretched us, but that’s how we make this soup.
 

Mark Russell
 

CR: I just want to ask you why you love theater? Why have you stuck with this?
 

MR: I started as a theater director and now I’m directing a theater. I’m just honored that I get paid to do this. I’ve always been about bringing people together, at one point I think I could have gone into the church if I’d believed in that Jesus story. I think that could have been a lot easier and with a better health plan. In some ways it’s a lot of that, I’m tending to a flock.
 

CR: You have a congregation.
 

MR: And these vessels, these places where people meet, there’s such history. It’s an honor to be building on top of that and answering to that.
 

CR: And continuing its relevance.
 

MR: Exactly.
 

CR: And since you’ve gotten to travel and see art all over the world, what do you hope New York City can learn from the art of other countries?
 

MR: Well, one particular one that’s very relevant here–and let’s hope it doesn’t get this bad–but the Belarus Free Theatre is a truly underground theater. We talk about underground theater, but they are truly underground. If they do anything and the authorities find out, they arrest the audience and the actors. I went to Minsk and I saw this piece, Time of Women, and I’ve tried to recreate as much as I can, except the police part, the experience of going to see one of their pieces. It’s kind of like seeing a Birdman movie, you’re so close to these great actresses and the story is so powerful. This one is about women journalists that were arrested and questioned and toyed with and eventually got out, but when the regime began to down the hammer, they were there and this is their real experience. I could have done this in a room where I could get 200 people, but instead I’m doing it in a room where I can get 49. Makes it tough. We’re doing lots of shows of it. God forbid we have to actually go underground considering certain people’s lack of allowing diverse voices or hearing answers they don’t like. It’s a cautionary tale. These things happen. When I came in on Nov. 9, I was walking in here and I ran into Gale Papp, Joe Papp’s widow, and said, “Gosh this just reminds me of the night when Reagan got in.” And she said, “It reminds me of Mccarthy.” That put it in a whole new perspective.
 

Mark Russell
 

CR: It will be interesting to see artists either continue to play like they did in the Mccarthy Era or have to invent a new way to exist as we move forward.
 

MR: It brings up, where are you going to stand? What are your limits?
 

CR: The lines are getting drawn.
 

MR: The lines are getting drawn. With whom do you collaborate, how do you collaborate and to what level? These questions I hoped I’d never have to answer. It’s been luxurious, we haven’t been put on the line, but that could be happening in our world and I hope something like this begins to get people thinking about those things because those questions are coming.
 

CR: What are those questions you’re having to grapple with as you build this festival and exist within this particular community?
 

MR: I’m always trying to keep this community a bit on edge and challenged, so it goes both ways. I don’t want us to feel comfortable downtown. I don’t want it to feel like, we’re all friends and we all laugh at each other’s jokes … I’m not interested in that work, I’m always looking for the group that’s trying to crack out of that and at the same time doing really professional and important work. I think those questions haven’t been asked yet, and who knows how they’ll show up as questions and how we will be asked to put ourselves on the line. We’ve been watching this, Mitt Romney shows up for the circus, how does he sleep with himself at night after this experience of being stumped by Trump? Are we going to be considered irrelevant to this world? Rudy Guiliani came down on a bunch of work during his administration, not as much performance as visual artwork that he thought was disgusting and should be shuttered, and it took the artist community coming together and saying no. There will be an economic effect, they can take away the money. I’m thinking about the people in the middle of the country, across the country, those are the real trenches. It’s unlikely that we’ll feel it in the same way. We might get threatened, but it’s going to be hard for them to affect us financially. But in Iowa it’s different. You could be driving home and someone could egg your house, and just as you watch the few protesters in the Trump rallies that were pushed and shoved and abused as they were going—it’s trying to keep a perspective on all that.
 

CR: Exactly, I keep thinking about the short game and the long game and how you balance those two things when it feels like a state of emergency, like there’s only time for the short game, but that’s not necessarily going to best serve us. I’m trying to look for balance in how to approach both of those things, and I’m sure for someone who is programming for this moment right now as well as in the future, there are a lot of ingredients that have to get balanced. How do you define success for this festival?
 

MR: Well I have to say one of the most successful moments we’ve ever had was getting Belarus Free Theatre out of the country right after they’d been arrested and they had to go through safe houses and safe cars and not ride the train, etc. and we reworked their visas to actually get them here. So it was the first time that we were more on the front page than the Arts & Leisure page. That was one of the most striking moments in our history. I love it when shows really resonate. HuffPost just put one of our shows that we did so, so far last year, Germinall, as one of their favorite shows. I love that. These things really do land and stay with people.
 

Mark Russell
 

CR: In a world where we’re constantly inundated with headlines that aren’t physical, that you can’t touch, so often the only thing that does stick is story. So how do you find the stories and get them to the people that need them? Do you have any advice for this up and coming generation, in this field, in this time?
 

MR: I have really high hopes for this generation. The people that I’ve met and that work with me are so much more savvy and know better how to take care of themselves in the long run that I have really high hopes that they will be a great resistance. There is a spine. I’m excited to see how they’re going to deal with this because there will be some marching in the streets, but it’s going to take totally new tactics that we don’t even know about to get actual things done and to keep everyone together and safe. I have great hopes and I listen and that’s what I’m trying to put forward.
 
 

 

 

Mark Russell created the Under the Radar Festival in 2005. The Festival moved to The Public in 2006 and became an integral part of its season. From 1983-2004, Russell was the Executive Artistic Director of Performance Space 122 (P.S. 122).

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A Conversation with Alana Arenas

Alana Arenas

 

Alana Arenas loves drama and in Erika Sheffer’s new play, The Fundamentals, she gets to see plenty. The show takes a backstage look at the staff that keeps the sheets turned down and the bar stocked at a fancy New York City hotel. Arenas plays Millie, a housekeeper and a mother trying to make ends meet and our winsome guide through the highs and lows of hospitality. As she approaches her tenth year in the ensemble, I sat down with her before a performance at Steppenwolf’s Front Bar, to talk about taking care, onstage and off.

 

 

Kelly Wallace: How did you get started? What brought you to this company and why?
 

Alana Arenas: I was a student at DePaul. And I’m not originally from Chicago; I’m from Miami, Florida. So when you’re a student of a craft and you’re preparing yourself to enter the professional world, you know what the standard of excellence is. I had a list of all these places I wanted to work because based on reputation they were the biggest within the city. I honestly didn’t know the whole history behind Steppenwolf, beyond that I knew it was somewhere I wanted to work. So I kept going and going and wasn’t booking anything and so I decided I was going to call the casting director. Now, I know you’re not supposed to do that, but I called anyway and asked them to tell me what I was missing, what I was not getting. They said, That’s why we keep calling you in, we love you, we have to find the right role. And at the time there was nothing in me that would see that one day I could be an ensemble member there. I ended up doing a young-adults play by Lydia Diamond, which was where my relationship really began with Steppenwolf.
 

KW: What’s the experience like, of being an ensemble member as opposed to going from company to company?
 

AA: Interestingly enough, I was thinking about that onstage the other night. I have so much respect for the actors in this theater company; they’re the best actors I’ve seen. There are beautiful, wonderful actors everywhere, but this is an ensemble of amazing people. Something happens when somebody allows you to have more work opportunities and you know when it’s going to be, it alleviates that pressure you feel as an artist where you’re always reeling in limbo. You’re always reeling from a “no” and desperate to get another “yes.” When you can relax a little bit and know a job is coming and work with people you feel safe with…it really fosters an environment where you can strive for your best work. People are not at their most creative selves when they’re stressed out. When you can relax into discovery and play and really work as your creative self, it affords you the opportunity to continue to get better. It should push us all to seek to get better. It’s a real gift.
 

KW: I’ve heard that from other actors and artists that having so much focus on the machine and the product is exhausting, or at least, distracting. Having the stability of such an outstanding company whose work and actions really fuel themselves, it must be a nice change.
 

AA: I was thinking about that onstage too, looking at all the wonderful actors I had working with. I was thinking about how fortunate we are to be in this ensemble and have a home as an artist. Sometimes what you do might not be that great, but you still have a family who is supportive and who loves you, almost unconditionally. That might sound far reaching, but when you invite somebody into the ensemble, you enter a kind of marriage with them. That was the first thing I asked when they invited me in. I was like, “What do you have to do to get kicked out?” They were like, No…you don’t get kicked out. So, to have somebody make that type of commitment to you as an artist is extremely liberating, inspiring, and it’s just…a real incubator for that artist to become their best self.
 

KW: What made you want to pursue acting as a career?
 

AA: It was in high school. I went to performing arts high school, completely by chance. When I was young, I never wanted to be an actor. My mom made me audition for the school and I got in and it changed my life, for real. I have no idea what I would’ve done if I hadn’t gone down that path.
 

KW: Were there any actors who were role models to you? Or shows that you connected with?
 

AA: It was the school. It helped me discover who I am as a person, through my involvement with theater work. A lot of theater work and theater training is based on an individual really getting to know themselves. You have to have a great level of awareness beyond yourself as an actor, which starts with becoming aware of yourself. I appreciated the invitation to become conscious about who I am and what’s unique about me. To see that for myself, and then see it in other people was revolutionary for me. I got excited about an art form that made me have to be more in touch with human beings. I get to learn about people. And it’s really hard to get to know a person, or a character, and not find something to love about them.
 

KW: Theater is such an empathetic art. I mean, we’re in such divided times, do you think theater can play a role in helping to heal that divide now?
 

AA: My entryway into the art was to find it extremely therapeutic. Having gone through high school, college, and worked a little bit…I come to it with a desire to be the healing for other people.
 

KW: When did you find out about this show?
 

AA: We workshopped it. I’m gonna be honest, I don’t really remember; I just had a baby. It must’ve been a year ago.
 

KW: What jumped out at you about the character?
 

AA: Moreso, I was interested in the play, not just Millie. I’m a sucker for drama. I feel like…take the audience on a ride. Take them on a journey. I like when people are surprised, so I was interested in that experience. I think the actual vehicle, the play itself, is the unexpected thing. Millie herself isn’t an unfamiliar person, but she does finally gets to have her moment onstage in the spotlight.
 

KW: It’s not often that you see a well-rounded interesting female character be the lead in the show at all, and have her romantic life not be at the center of the plot.
 

AA: I think it’s about her wanting to be the things she believes she can be. But she learns she has to do a lot of juggling to have all the roles she wants within her circumstances. She’s still a mom to three kids. It’s very unfortunate but when you’re a wife, or a mom – and I’m both – you kinda have no idea what those titles are until you’re inside of them. Definitely having a child taught me that I had no idea. You think you can imagine, but you can’t. Some people think being a mom is a frustrating idea that’s projected on a woman, against their desires. Me, personally, I want to be a mom and I want to be there watching every second of his development as much as I wanna be onstage fully invested in that career. You have to figure out how to juggle them. But I will say, my son has put everything in perspective. Being an artist is such a precarious career; every audition I went on felt different. It was all or nothing. I’m either going to be an actor and this is my job or it isn’t. So everything I do, I have to go my 100% for him.
 

KW: I don’t have a child, but I would imagine that if you have one, you really do arrange the rest of your life around that.
 

AA: I feel like I know the point of view of women who will say, Oh, that’s not all you are, you’re not just a mom – and that’s so true. But I also do understand that being a mom is a part of my identity now and I love that.
 

KW: Why did you feel so called to the theater? What would you say to people who are having a hard time or who might be gay or a person of color who might not see a place for themselves in the industry?
 

AA: Personally, I am a person of faith. The first thing I would say is don’t let anything in society determine your path. Get in touch with the thing you feel you were placed here to go. Someone told me, “Welcome to not working,” and I thought…that might be your story, but it won’t be my story. I’m not going to walk out with a negative point of view. I’m going to do my best and hope. I feel like a lot of what has been afforded to me had to involve some kind of divine orchestrations. I really feel like God saved my life. Everybody has their talent and we have to share our talents with each other. You might find it disappointing if you’re looking for a spotlight and looking for it to be about you. Revisit yourself. See if you’re passionate about something that can help fulfill you and aim to be a gift to someone else too. I’d say do not take any struggle we have experienced in this life, our history, and assume you will be defeated. If someone has a problem with you for being gay or Latina that’s their perspective, but amongst your people and the people who understand that’s not a reality. You’ll find the people who need you and who support you, I promise.
 
 

 

 

Alana Arenas joined the Steppenwolf Theatre Company ensemble in 2007 and created the role of Pecola Breedlove for the Steppenwolf for Young Adults production of The Bluest Eye, which also played at the New Victory Theater off Broadway. She recently appeared in Belleville, Head of Passes, Good People, Three Sisters, The March, Man in Love, Middletown, The Hot L Baltimore, The Etiquette of Vigilance, The Brother/Sister Plays (Steppenwolf Theatre Company); Disgraced (American Theater Company); and The Arabian Nights (Lookingglass Theatre Company, Berkeley Repertory Theatre and Kansas City Repertory Theatre). Other theater credits include The Tempest, The Crucible, Spare Change, The Sparrow Project (Steppenwolf Theatre Company); Black Diamond (Lookingglass Theatre Company); Eyes (eta Creative Arts); SOST (MPAACT); WVON (Black Ensemble Theater); and Hecuba (Chicago Shakespeare Theater). Television and film credits include Boss, The Beast, Kabuku Rides and Lioness of Lisabi. She is originally from Miami, Florida where she began her training at the New World School of the Arts. Alana holds a BFA from The Theatre School at DePaul University.

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A Conversation with Keiko Agena

Keiko Agena

 

In the first decade of the millennium, there were only a handful of (East) Asian Americans in mainstream media who regularly represented Asian women. Sure, there were the random side characters portraying the usual stereotypes; Pick your two-dimensional poison: masseuse, sex worker, nail salon tech or even that one time we had a kung fu kickass like Lucy Liu in movie blockbuster Charlie’s Angels. In this desert of representation was Japanese American actor Keiko Agena who played Lane Kim, the young Korean American best friend of Rory Gilmore on the WB/CW television show Gilmore Girls. Over the course of seven seasons, we learned about Lane’s quirky hobbies and the stresses of being the “good daughter” in a strict Christian, Korean immigrant family. She wasn’t just a caricature but a rare “well-rounded” character who had time to breathe and evolve during the long run of this popular network television show.
 

It has been nearly a decade since the final cup of coffee was poured in Stars Hollow and Keiko Agena has continued her steady and successful career as a Hollywood actress. Recently, the Thanksgiving release of the Gilmore Girls mini-series Gilmore Girls: A Year In The Life on Netflix has also revived interest in Keiko’s character and how far we’ve come as Asian Americans in media.
 

In December, I sat down with my dear friend and collaborator Keiko Agena, to debrief this latest Gilmore Girls mini-series madness and what it’s like to be an Asian American actor and comedian in today’s media landscape. Feel free to imagine this conversation punctuated with lots of giggles and cackles of love and delight.

 

 

Jenny Yang: Keiko, first thank you so much for sitting down with me. This is fun for me because I feel like we get to chat more formally about the stuff that we would typically talk about anyway because we are in a community together–
 

Keiko Agena: Yes, and we are supportive of each other as artists, I feel.
 

JY: We are.
 

KA: We totally are.
 

JY: You’re a big supporter of mine.
 

KA: I would say with many exclamation points and stars that we do that for each other.
 

JY: Aw, thank you. So I think what interests me and Stage & Candor readers about you… Okay, we just have to talk about Gilmore Girls first.
 

KA: Okay, yes!
 

JY: Can I just say, day after Thanksgiving, when Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life dropped, my ass was at home watching the whole damn thing, all day.
 

KA: Did you really?! All six hours?
 

JY: I saw all six hours, and it felt good. I don’t know if you remember this, but I feel like people who grew up on 80’s and 90’s sitcoms, whenever they do a reunion show, they always would give you what you liked, right? They give you what you wanted. Do you remember those reunion shows?
 

KA: Yes, yes, yes!
 

JY: Whoever would write it made sure of that.
 

KA: Someone became a princess, someone became the editor of Time magazine…
 

JY: They gave you what you liked, and I think that – definitely spoiler alerts ahead–
 

KA: Stop reading here if you don’t want any spoilers.
 

[Editor’s note: The Gilmore Girls section of this conversation will be in grey.]
 

JY: Skip ahead to where we don’t talk about Gilmore Girls anymore. But I feel that as a 60-70% Gilmore Girls fan, that even I got the itch scratched for all that I needed.
 

KA: Yeah.
 

JY: Number one, not enough Keiko.
 

KA: Not enough Keiko! More Keiko!
 

JY: Not enough Lane Kim.
 

KA: #MoreLaneKim.
 

JY: Yes!
 

KA: #MoreLaneKim is very lame. Don’t do that.
 

JY: We don’t say ‘lame’ anymore, Keiko.
 

KA: Oh, sorry.
 

JY: It’s okay. I just reprimand. But yeah, it’s not cool. But I think #MoreLaneKim is good.
 

KA: Let’s Donald Trump this hashtag. What is the most direct and simple–
 

JY: As Donald Trump would tweet, “Gilmore Girls. It was good. But not enough Lane Kim. Sad. #MoreLaneKim”
 

KA: Exactly. To the point.
 

[Everybody laughs]
 

JY: But anyway. It did scratch that itch of it opened with a meta joke about talking really fast and a lot, and crazy commentary, and pop culture references. Then we got into seeing what their lives are all like – all the cameos, all the different men in their life, and where they’re at.
 

KA: They got a lot into those six hours. You pretty much saw or heard about every character that you knew about in the original seven seasons – which is an accomplishment – and introduced you to a few new main characters as well. I don’t know that there’s a stone left unturned.
 

JY: Yes. I feel the only thing that I was a little surprised by but definitely loved, was the fact that Rory Gilmore didn’t have her shit together.
 

KA: No. And it got worse as the episodes went on. She really hit a low. You saw her fall apart. All of the things that she was counting on slipped away, and you’re really going with her on this journey downward. It’s heart-achy.
 

JY: Thirty-two and not super together with her career goals–
 

KA: And her relationship goals–
 

JY: –and her relationship goals. Not that I know what that’s like.
 

[Everybody laughs]
 

KA: Are we veering off?! Are we tangent-ing? How personal are we going to get?!
 

JY: No, no, not personal.
 

KA: Follow Jenny and I on our new show as we talk about personal things. We are going to create it right after this interview.
 

[Everybody laughs]
 

JY: Anyway. That kind of intrigued me because of course it made it more interesting. There was a sense, watching the show before, that Oh okay, miss ‘I got into Yale, I’m so smart’, maybe she’d have her shit together. But knowing a bunch of these overachieving people – maybe myself as one – I know for a fact that after you go through college, and you’re an overachiever, real life happens, and it’s not perfect. You no longer have this structured world. I feel it’s almost like it’s a stereotypical overachiever Asian American story. Maybe at 32 you’re not going to have everything you’re supposed to have.
 

KA: Yes, not all the boxes are checked off. Especially if you go for the primary thing that you want, which she did – she wanted to be a journalist and a writer – and she’s going for it, and this is that time in her life where… It’s not that she’s been unsuccessful, because she has had success, but that’s not the end of the story. It’s not that you can just check that box and say, Okay, career success, let me sail into my 70s. That’s not the creative life and I think maybe people who read Stage & Candor know that. I have yet to meet a creative person where that is their journey. No artist I know found exactly what they wanted to do at 23, and rode that train safely–
 

JY: Uphill.
 

KA: Yes, uphill to greater and greater success.
 

JY: It’s not a linear process.
 

KA: It’s not.
 

JY: Totally, which is why we’re supportive of each other!
 

KA: It takes a village.
 

JY: It does. So how do you feel about being back in the Gilmore Girls revival? What was it like for you?
 

KA: You know what’s funny is, besides feeling like slipping into comfortable shoes, or something that’s fun, is that seeing it as an audience member really made me appreciate what we were just talking about. The people that were kids when we first met them – Paris, Lane, Rory – they’re all of a certain age, and their lives aren’t perfect, and they still have a lot of stuff to work out. I think when I was originally filming it, I was so focused on where Lane was that I thought, Oh it’s only Lane that doesn’t have her perfect dream life. Now, watching the series, in the greatest way possible, I think we feel the angst and the struggle and the ambition of all of those 30-something gang of people, where we have some successes but there’s still a lot to discover and a far way yet to go.
 

JY: Yeah, as if turning 30 is this magic number where everything is figured out.
 

KA: It’s not now, and I don’t know that it ever was in the past, or if that’s just the fairytale that previous stories have taught us.
 

JY: Right. So it was very gratifying, with lots of jokes and references and dialogue packed in there.
 

KA: Did you enjoy that? I know that I loved all that fun stuff that only happens in Gilmore World.
 

JY: Yes! I loved reading on my Facebook feed, where a comedy writer friend of mine who was confessing on a status update, Already got through my first viewing of Gilmore Girls revival. Getting started on episode one again. Same day.
 

KA: Wow.
 

JY: I know. Day after Thanksgiving. She was so happy.
 

KA: There’s a lot packed in there.
 

JY: There is. I feel like it’s like fine art. You see something new probably with every viewing. But #MoreLaneKim.
 

KA: #MoreLaneKim!
 

[Everybody laughs]
 

KA: I like that they won’t get to hear our laughing. Wow, Keiko is really uppity! That’s all she talks about! #MoreLaneKim!
 

JY: Chuckle chuckle chuckle. When did the final season end?
 

KA: 2007.
 

JY: [gasp] That’s like nine years ago. Almost ten years ago.
 

KA: Yeah. So a lot has happened.
 

JY: So for you, what have you seen in terms of changes as an Asian American actor in that time in terms of the industry?
 

KA: I feel that last year, especially, was such a high tide year. We were talking about it when we were doing the fundraiser for Angry Asian Man where we were talking about Wow, if we were to choose what our favorite scene was that an Asian person was in on television for the last year in America, we’d have so much to choose from.
 

JY: Much more.
 

KA: Way more than you would five years ago. Five years ago, you’d have to really search your brain for any scene that you could remember that an Asian person was in that was your favorite. I feel like now, there are so many shows that are out now, and there’s a lot to celebrate. Again, there’s a far, far way to go, but I think the content and the quality that is coming out is something to be supported and celebrated.
 

JY: Yes. Seven years ago, if we asked the question, What are your favorite characters and scenes up until that point? It would be maybe a Lane Kim reference, maybe Margaret Cho, maybe Lucy Liu, and maybe Brenda Song.
 

KA: As you know very well, 2016 has been a crazy year with whitewashing feeling like it’s making a resurgence of some kind, which is challenging to come up against.
 

JY: I feel like it happened in 2016 because it’s been an increasing drumbeat of Hollywood wanting to be like, Oh, we’ve got to make Asian stuff so that China will want it, so let’s maybe start making more Asian stuff. But it’s also the drumbeat of, We have these other ‘diverse’ properties like the Marvel and DC world, let’s just also bring that up. So they’re deciding they just can’t bear to take a risk on non-white talent, not even have us play Asian characters. They do these crazy mental jiujitsu public gymnastics around justifying why the whitest actors are playing the Asian characters.
 

KA: Right.
 

JY: It’s almost a joke to me that the palest, porcelain, transparent actors are chosen, right? Emma Stone is translucent. Benedict Cumberbatch?! It’s like the whitest… It’s not even like Italians, you know?
 

KA: Maybe it’s the love of the geisha.
 

JY: The paleness? The pale Asian?
 

KA: Yes.
 

JY: In the right light, Scarlett Johansson’s European roots will look kind of pale and Asian.
 

KA: It’s tough, man.
 

JY: Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Benedict Cumberbatch, Emma Stone: they all have the most pale ethnic heritage.
 

KA: Yes, I think it’s true.
 

JY: And then there’s Matt Damon, but he played a white person that’s saving China.
 

KA: Yes, and that’ll probably do well, too.
 

JY: So I feel that’s kind of upsetting that China is also down for it. I feel like they got brainwashed. The world got brainwashed to want white people as heroes.
 

KA: I feel like I’m part of that generation too of being brainwashed a little. You think it’s natural and then one day, you go, Is it? What would it be like to have a different option? I look at that trailer for “Ghost in the Shell”, and – first of all, I love Scarlett Johansson, I think she’s incredibly talented and she does play that type of character very well.
 

JY: You mean slightly robotic and a little flat?
 

[Everybody laughs]
 

KA: I know you said it as a joke, but yeah, kind of! It’s funny because that’s actually a very tough thing to play – to still be human, and still create empathy, but be dead inside. Anyway, as I’m watching, I cringe and clench a little because it’s so Asian-stylized, and there are just a few people that pop up in Asian dress that it’s uncomfortable to watch. But the second or third time I watched it, I thought, What would it have been like to see a fresh Asian face in that role? It would’ve been incredible. It absolutely would have been star making material, because it’s so incredible. I guess that’s the whole point though, that they don’t feel like it’s bankable – but I don’t think this is bankable the way it has been done.
 

JY: The trailer shows oriental things as only costume and backdrop.
 

KA: Someone already wrote this, but all the bad guys get to be Asian, and that’s been true in other movies too.
 

JY: Since the 80’s films.
 

KA: Yes. You can have the people that actually know kung-fu and different martial arts, the bad guys, be actual Asian people, and that’s acceptable.
 

JY: So you came up during a time where you were probably a part of seeing the default as this is how it works. It’s white people who are the ones that are chosen to lead. How has that shifted for you, or not?
 

KA: I guess it has shifted, little bits over time. I do know when I was a kid, I didn’t think about Asian people because there were none. But I was a huge consumer of media, and I related to all of the white characters, and I emotionally invested in them. So I didn’t feel at that time that I was cheated, but maybe that’s because I didn’t know what I was missing. When you actually do see someone that’s Asian, there’s a different level of excitement that comes with that, that I didn’t even know was an option, I suppose.
 

JY: Right.
 

KA: It’s like living on skim milk ice-cream and being satisfied. When you have a taste of full fat ice-cream, you’re like, Dammit, I want more! Give me more Constance Wu! Give me more! Then for some reason, you’re not satisfied anymore.
 

JY: I think that’s a good analogy. If you think there’s only skim milk ice-cream…

KA: Damn, this is alright!
 

JY: Oh it’s sweet, and kind of creamy. It’s ice-cream!
 

KA: This is what ice-cream is!
 

JY: Oh, I like that. Do you ever feel like now, especially with the rise of social media, and the ability for us to basically protest something that’s not good, how different that feels? You’re basically a Generation X-er, and now Millennials are like, Oh what the fuck, this isn’t good.
 

KA: I think without social media, there are pockets of people that would have this opinion, but there wasn’t a way for you to know that a thousand miles away, there’s another pocket of people that have the same opinion. Asian Americans are concentrated in some big cities, but we’re also spread out all across the United States. So having this platform where people can come and show themselves – we have a voice in this way that has been very productive. In a lot of ways, niche groups have used social media to be very dangerous also, but I think in this way, for the Asian-American community, it’s been extremely helpful.
 

JY: And therefore, #MoreLaneKim, #NotDangerous.
 

[Everybody laughs]
 

KA: Now, let me ask you, how do you feel as someone who has switched – because I think this is very interesting viewpoint – from a completely different career where you were seriously involved, into now having become an artist and producer full-time? What are the changes that have happened for you in the past five or six years? How do you think it’s coincided with how the country has been changing?
 

JY: Oh god, that’s a big question. So I used to work in politics, where creativity was very limited. I didn’t start pursuing entertainment in my early 20s like a lot of folks I meet in LA, so I feel like I had the benefit of work experience and some maturity, but I personally could not have the kind of career I have just five years in, now, if I had started in my early 20s, because of social media.
 

KA: The timing was right for you.
 

JY: The timing was right for me – oh, I’m reliving my early 20s, girl.
 

KA: You’re not in your early 20s?!
 

[Everybody laughs]
 

JY: It’s a completely new terrain. I’m able to have my career because I decided to do a very old school craft of stand-up comedy, where it’s just you and an audience. That’s the core of what I do, but I’ve been able to grow an audience and get work because of new media. Honestly, if I wasn’t on the ground floor of when Buzzfeed Video started… I mean, that’s when they started, three or four years ago. It doesn’t sound like that long ago–
 

KA: But so much has changed in that time.
 

JY: Yes, so much has changed in three or four years. If I wasn’t there, knowing one of the original director/producers who comprised of this new BuzzFeed Video unit, I don’t know if I could’ve had the career I’ve had already in just the last two or three years, simply because I was a part of that process of figuring out what made a viral video. I feel like I’m a part of that history.
 

KA: That’s also half of where I see the success of your career, too, because you’re a very proactive go-getter/producer person.
 

JY: Right – touring, events, and shows.
 

KA: I think it’s an interesting point to say that from an outsider’s point of view – knowing you for a long time – I can see all of the experience that you have gained through the work that you’d done previously of knowing how to organize people, knowing how to set up an event, learning all of that on the job, training, and being very proficient at that… All of that translates now into a new goal and a new dream. That life experience isn’t lost, it just gets funneled into your new creative endeavor. Sometime what maybe would’ve taken 10 years previously, now the time is even quicker because you have an engine of knowledge that’s pushing you forward.
 

JY: Damn. That’s a good summary of my professional life.
 

KA: It’s true though.
 

JY: Yes, all the skills I learned while working, I have been using to build my career now. It makes me hit the ground running a lot more. I have all these business skills because I know about resumes, I know about business communication, I know how to negotiate contracts, because that’s what I used to do. I know how to run meetings, I know how to run large scale events for people, and produce things.
 

KA: Exactly.
 

JY: One of my first jobs was in communications. I was being trained to write a press release, or know how to pitch to a reporter. All of these skills I learned in politics like organizing campaigns and being a part of that all applies to leadership skills, and business skills for being an entrepreneur, essentially.
 

KA: Right. One of the last big things that we worked on together was the Comedy Comedy Festival. How many people were a part of that team and that were volunteering? You had a leadership circle that was how many people?
 

JY: We had about 15 people on the leadership team that took big chunks of what the work needed to be.
 

KA: Right. Then with volunteers–
 

JY: That was another 20.
 

KA: And that’s not even counting performers.
 

JY: 150 performers.
 

KA: So there was a lot happening.
 

JY: Right, and I was able to do that because that was stuff that I did in my previous career. I feel very fortunate that not every stand-up comedian is able to do something like that. I feel very grateful that people feel grateful that such a thing exists. It has helped my career – me personally – but I think what’s tough is balancing external energy like producing things versus, Oh yeah, I need to be writing and creating new material. I think that’s a struggle.
 

KA: Right.
 

JY: But going back to you.
 

KA: We will get back to me, but one thing I do want to say is that that is also a great thing that has happened in the last couple years, where there is the Comedy Comedy Festival that you put on, which is a place for Asian Americans to come and perform, and it’s important for us to have a place with that much support and that many people involved to make it great. Even Will Choi, who is starting to do this stuff over at UCB, is starting to put together shows that have an Asia focus. I feel like this is also a new thing that’s starting to happen right now, where maybe five years down the line we’ll look at this year and be like, Wow, can you believe that this last couple of years, the seed of us all coming together and doing these shows have built into something else? Who knows where that goes.
 

JY: I hope so. When people ask me what I do, I say, “I’m a stand-up comedian, writer, actor, host, producer,” but I really do still think of myself as an organizer, cause that’s what I did for politics. I just apply that same perspective to organizing my career and organizing like-minded people. I see myself as organizing Asian-American audiences and creatives. We have to, or else we’re missing out on opportunities to collaborate and strengthen each other if we don’t get to know each other and build these relationships. I’m super proud about that.
 

KA: You should be super proud.
 

JY: I’m super proud of Comedy Comedy Fest. Will Choi gets complete credit for creating these really successful shows at Upright Citizens Brigade, and really expanding the Asian-American presence at UCB. I personally also feel that it’s part of this greater movement of all of us through Comedy Comedy Fest, or even Tuesday Night Cafe, if we want to go back to that institution in LA of Asian American Artists – that’s where you and I met.
 

KA: Right.
 

JY: I feel like it’s up to us to keep really solid institutions like Tuesday Night going, but also to build on that, and to adapt to current needs. Let’s get all Asian-American people doing comedy together, and include YouTubers, live performers, up-and-comers, as well as veterans.
 

KA: Totally.
 

JY: I feel good about that, that we’re a part of that, you know?
 

KA: Uh huh, I think so.
 

JY: High-five. [They do.]
 

KA: Final thoughts?
 

JY: I feel like a lot of the drum beat and the message that everyone has been saying is, We have to tell our own stories.
 

KA: Yes, absolutely. We have to create our own stories, right?
 

JY: And we’re not the first ones to say that.
 

KA: Yes.
 

JY: How has that call to create or tell our own stories evolved for you, in terms of your work?
 

KA: Hm.
 

JY: For example, I know that you had taken a stab at improv, and it wasn’t a super positive experience necessarily, and then you came back to it, and now you’re an improv beast. You’re an addict! You’re in it, and you love it.
 

KA: Absolutely, for sure.
 

JY: I know that you write, you draw, all this stuff. So that idea of creating your own material and telling your own stories, how has that call operated in your career?
 

KA: I have a podcast called “Drunk Monk,” where the shell of it is where we get drunk and we watch Monk and we talk about it, which is a fun starting point, but really, we go into a lot of tangents. What’s fun about that podcast is that we didn’t intend it, but we’re two Asian people – me and Will Choi, who we mentioned earlier – so we have our point of view, which is an Asian-American point of view by the mere fact that we’re Asian Americans. It’s something that comes up every once in awhile, but I think even if you weren’t coming to it for that perspective, it’s just part of what it is, which is something that I like about it. We also get very personal and we share a lot of personal stories over the course of it. I find that really fulfilling, because that structure is something that we create on our own, and it could be whatever we wanted, and so it is exactly what we wanted. In that way, it’s completely fulfilling because you’re not answering to anybody.
 

JY: Right.
 

KA: The other thing about creating through improv is that part of the reason why I think improv is a draw – especially for people of color – is because you can play family members to anyone that’s on stage. It might sound silly, but it’s not really silly if you think about the fact that I can’t go in and audition for a family member for 90% of the roles out there. I’m not going to match that person as a family member. The freedom of being able to play any type of role that I can think of and not have to be constrained by the fact that I am a 43-year-old Asian woman is freeing in a way that almost feels at this point necessary to my creativity as an artistic person. It’s not something that necessarily gets fulfilled in other areas of my career at this point.
 

JY: Because you’re at the mercy of the character descriptions that you get sent for auditions.
 

KA: Yup, uh huh.
 

JY: Asian. Thirties. Blah blah blah, you know?
 

KA: Yes. I really do appreciate that a lot of them, especially recently, are written as open ethnicity. I appreciate that. That’s most of what I go out for, or a mix of that. The good and the bad of that is, almost everything is written now as open ethnicity, which is great, but, the other side of that is that the two leads have already been cast, and they’re white. That’s the ‘norm.’
 

JY: Yeah…
 

KA: So they’re open to all ethnicities, except for the leads.
 

JY: We’re working on that, Keiko.
 

KA: We’re working on that.
 
 

 

 

Keiko Agena is best known for the TV show, GILMORE GIRLS, where she played LANE KIM for seven seasons. As a guest star she has appeared on such shows as SHAMELESS, SCANDAL, TWISTED, HOUSE, ER and WITHOUT A TRACE, and got to work with Frances McDormand on the film TRANSFORMERS DARK OF THE MOON. Besides iO she has also trained with Dave Razowsky, at the Groundlings and UCB and her band FLYING PLATFORMS has a monthly residency (first Fridays) at the Grandstar Jazz Club in downtown LA. Plus (believe it or not) Keiko was once featured in PEOPLE MAGAZINE’S 100 MOST BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE ISSUE, in the “they play meek and geeky, but off screen they shine” section, with America Ferrera, Jenna Fischer and Mary Lynn Rajskub!

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A Conversation with Amélie van Tass & Jinger Leigh-Kalin

Amélie van Tass & Jinger Leigh-Kalin

 

Until recently, when someone mentions “Magician” and “Women” in the same sentence, the images that immediately come to mind are perhaps the illusionists in hit movies like Now You See Me or the image of the “Magician and his Lovely Assistant.” But, if one dives into the history of the art and performance of magic, you will discover a rich history of spectacle, performance. Skill and theatrics that, in its prime, had a fair share of female powerhouses. So, why can’t we name any of them? Magic, like any other industry, may have a gender equity problem, but talented stars like Amélie van Tass (of The Clairvoyants) and Jinger Leigh-Kalin take center stage as an artful mentalist and elegant conjuress in the third incarnation of Broadway’s best magic show. Jinger and Amélie shine in The Illusionists: Turn of the Century, which pays homage to the golden age of magic in one spellbinding performance that is not to be missed.

 

 

Alicia Carroll: I’m curious, neither you or Jinger are a stranger to performing in front of large crowds, but how do you like Broadway?
 

Amélie van Tass: Broadway, for a performer, is probably the huge-est thing ever, next to maybe The Sydney Opera House which we did in December last year. It’s amazing. We love the theater; this theater has a lot of history. Houdini, The Greatest Cape Artist, performed here 100 years ago, and we are standing on this very stage right now, and this is like a very big dream come true for us.
 

We are very happy that people appreciate our show being here because it’s so different; it’s not a normal magic show. There is a lot of history in this show and it’s very theatrical – the costumes, the stage itself, everything is in turn-of-the-century style. And throughout the show, performers will also get a little into history detail, so the audience goes home with some new information about the history.
 

AC: That’s amazing. Did you research the craft and history before coming into the profession as a mentalist? Was it always something you were interested in?
 

AVT: I was always interested in the history concerning performance, and a hundred years ago, magicians were the rockstars. When they entered the stage, people would come, and they would scream and cheer and… the girls would go crazy for Houdini, for example. You can imagine nowadays, it was very similar. And I think there were some very golden times of magic too, but I think now is a new time and it’s coming back anew – although it’s an old thing the show presents it in a different way. And people are very excited about it, and magic is coming back – differently.
 

AC: What about the modern presentation of magic, in your opinion, is reinvigorating it with audiences and performance artists?
 

AVT: I think it is very interesting to them – and also there are female positions too. It’s not always the magician and his assistant which we have too in the show, which is completely fine and they do an amazing job. Females come more in the spotlight, and I think a lot of people can relate to that. In the whole world, there are male and female positions and especially in show business and then especially in magic. It’s very important that females are coming back into the spotlight. And also what Thommy [Ten] and I do – the Clairvoyance style, Mentalism – we perform onstage and every night is different. And people always ask us, Is there ever a chance of failure? Are there mistakes happening? And we say, “Of course,” because we are all human and humans make mistakes. And that is very interesting for the audience too so they feel, Okay, performers make mistakes so that I can make mistakes too in my life. I like the relationship between the audience and us in our performance.
 

Jinger Leigh-Kalin: Magic goes through cycles. I think we are back to a cycle of pure magic; that is very parallel to the Golden Age. There are some really good performers out there now, and that’s how it was in the Golden Age where there was this healthy competition going on that was forcing a certain amount of innovation and forcing people to be creative and make new things as opposed to recycling old things. In this show, we sort of pay homage to the classic things, but there is a very imaginative aspect to some of it.
 

Amélie van Tass & Jinger Leigh-Kalin
 

AC: You spoke about the tradition of the magician and his assistant and how, historically, it’s all very gendered, but you and Thommy are very much on equal footing, which I love. When you got started in the industry, was it a deliberate decision that you wanted to be equal partners?
 

AVT: Both of us wanted it. We are equal partners onstage – and I forgot to mention in the Golden Age of magic, a hundred years ago, there were some female rockstars – clairvoyant rockstars – so there was this time when women were in the spotlight. It was clear to us from the beginning, since our style is very different and it’s all about the connection between Thommy and myself, so it just works with the two of us. It’s never I do something alone, or he does something alone. We have a very good connection and we want to present that connection to the audience, and then we can work together. And it is very difficult sometimes, still, although we always present ourselves like that, there are still people who will say, “Great job Thommy Ten and your assistant was great too.” We have to mention it over and over, and I don’t know if it will ever stop. And it’s okay; it’s the cliché that there’s the magician and his beautiful assistant who is fine, but we want to be equal partners on stage. We mention it over and over; we will probably do that for the next 20 years and we have to work on it.
 

AC: So what brought you to mentalism?
 

AVT: I am interested in doing magic without any props. And in mentalism we have – in this show, for example – we don’t have any props. In our main act, we have a blindfold, and that’s it. We work with the audience, their minds, and what they have in their handbags. Every night it’s different, and that’s what I enjoy. Never will there be a show that will be the same. It’s always different and it’s always challenging for us. I think what I love about it so much is the challenge, and that it will never get boring. Because I have to be very aware and Thommy has to be aware, and the connection has to be good – only then it works.
 

AC: Between mentalism and the other acts in this shows, do you think there is a major difference between the different sects within magic?
 

AVT: The great thing about the show is there are very different acts – everyone in the show, the whole cast are masters in what they do, and they are the best people in the world. We have great illusionists, great slight-of-hand magicians, great comedy magicians. It’s a great mixture. I love being part of it; I am very thankful. And since it’s such a mixture, you learn a lot from the others. And I think only the mixture makes it good. And everyone does their best, and together we create this cool production.
 

AC: And, Jinger, what brought you to stage magic?
 

JL: Well, I started in show business in song and dance. I started taking dance lessons when I was four, and I started doing it seriously around 11 and got my first professional job when I was about 14. Then I did a lot of dinner theater and stuff that was really performance based, not just chorus based or choir based. That’s what inspired me and what I was passionate about. I met my husband Mark. I had seen some magic, and this was 25 years ago, so there wasn’t a lot of magic. I was working on the same show as him – it was a Las Vegas Style review show called American Glitz – it was the sister show to Follie Bergère. Anyway, he was the variety act in the show we were performing in, and my contract was coming to a close – I was gonna go back to LA and work and I watched the magic from the front, and I was very impressed. I was impressed with his performance, however, it was the connection to the audience in the performances that convinced me that there was a different utensil – a different tool there – to connect to the audience and that’s what I loved.
 

So I went backstage during the show and said, “If you ever want anyone to work with, I would love to give it a shot,” and he took me up on my offer and brought me back to work with him like three months later or something like that. And within the first month of working together, I realized that it was what I was meant to do. And he allowed me to turn everything upside down and restructure the act and add the skills that I had to bring to it. And from that day forward, we were a team.
 

Amélie van Tass & Jinger Leigh-Kalin
 

AC: And the two of you still perform together as a team?
 

JL: We still mostly perform together, and we would work some separate shows as well. In this show, I do some of my things, and I’ve been focused on that for maybe five or six years. But even when we’re performing together, like in our full-length shows, I’ve always had independent things.
 

AC: There’s a lot of messaging from a young age that maybe in magic – unless you’re a magician’s assistant – there may not be a place for you, so how did you forge your path and discover your place in it?
 

AVT: When we first started working together, I was always interested in magic. But I never did it to the people; I was in the audience and experiencing it. So when I started performing it and getting more into the whole theme, I realized how much I could do with people and how happy I can make them and how people feel enchanted, and they can just feel this magical experience. And for me, this is a great feeling; I stand there onstage and do something and people will sit there with open mouths and open eyes and just don’t believe what they are seeing. And then I started to realize what I do when I am onstage, and I wanted to make it better and work on it. And now we are on tour worldwide, and I’m very thankful for that and also the huge acknowledgment from the people we get.
 

AC: For both of you, when you decided that this was what you wanted to do, what was your first step? How did you develop your craft?
 

AVT: I think it’s very important never to lose – since I started late, I was 21 years old–
 

JL: –that’s not late!
 

AVT: The boys all started at like 5 or 6 years–
 

JL: –yeah, well, it’s a process; it’s a journey. You learn a lot from your audience. You learn a lot from preparing to a certain extent because you want to have respect for your audience and be well prepared, but you also want to be open to how they respond and so you know it’s a constant learning process. So refining our craft, you know, you let one mistake lead to an improvement and then the next day an improvement on top of that and after you get a few thousand shows under your belt you go, “Okay,” but you have to enjoy the process as well. You can’t just say, “One day, I’ll be great,” you have to enjoy and appreciate it as you go. But the audience will let you know how you’re doing and then you take that and figure out how to make this magical for them. There’s so much psychology that goes into it.
 

AC: In what way?
 

JL: For the stuff that I do, and for the stuff that Amélie does with the predictions and mind reading, you have to create a picture for the audience. You have to let their imaginations fill in some of the blanks. Stage magic is a different thing; sometimes there is a certain timing to things, a certain amount of space that has to be involved. A certain amount of what they call “convincers’ or “verifications” – something that lets people forget that it’s a puzzle,lets them go past that and they simply experience the magic. So that’s our job, and that’s a pretty hard job. You have to think how is their brain reacting and how is their brain reacting to tell their heart – and did I give them too much time or did I give them just the right amount of time to feel that rather than to think it.
 

AC: That’s so interesting because I am an audience member that tends to overthink things.
 

JL: But if you see the good magic, you shouldn’t have time to think about it, and then you should go and think about it afterward and go, “Hmmm,” and that’s what I mean about psychology. There’s a psychology not just to the staging, but the structure of magic. And when you see good magic, the audience doesn’t realize how much work went into that or how much psychology went into that. All they realize is that was “good” or that was “not so good.”
 

Amélie van Tass & Jinger Leigh-Kalin
 

AVT: I had a very naive point of view in how I saw magic, so when Thommy asked me what I wanted to do I said, “I want to fly through the room and everything and I want to levitate.”And he was like, “Well, let’s see,” because I didn’t know how anything was done. I was crazy; I had so many ideas and some of them we could realize and some of them not, but we are still working on it. And I think you should never lose sight of how the audience is seeing what they see so that they are fascinated, and they can’t explain how it’s done. You should always keep that in mind: they are seeing it for the first time and they don’t know how anything is done.
 

Also it’s so important to believe in yourself and to believe in what you do. If I don’t believe in what I do–
 

JL: –they won’t–
 

AVT: –they won’t believe it, the audience feels it.
 

JL: That’s 100% true.
 

AC: To talk a bit about the representation of women in the industry, how do you think the representation of women in magic affects who becomes a performance artist?
 

JL: I think more and more to any art form or sport – you know there are a lot of female basketball teams now and world cup soccer players, so women are coming up now in so many mostly male-dominated fields. Magic is no different; however, it’s not necessarily – you know men dominate magic, but that doesn’t mean there haven’t been successful women in magic in the past. In fact, there was more so in the history of magic – in the Golden Age – there were female headliners, there were illusionists and magicians at the time. They may have come to magic in a slightly different way – they may not have studied since they were five or six years old in their room practicing sleight of hand things. For me, I mean I do a few slight of hand things, but that’s not my area. My area is a presentation for the stage, you know? That’s how I perform; that’s my area of specialty. I don’t think it’s a sleight on women. I just think women will find their own, and there is a place. Absolutely. 100%.
 

AVT: Also the other way around, I think it’s important nowadays that people allow men to be weak, or to be another part and not be the powerful person on stage and also off stage. Men can also cook and–
 

JL: –and be nurses and do all those things–
 

AVT: –exactly, so I think it’s a good age for things like that, and it’s changing. It’s changing.
 

JL: I think for women, it’s important to be true to yourself, you know? Just like in anything. You don’t have to wear slacks and a tuxedo and behave “like a man;” you can be a woman and still be popular on stage and do magic. You can.
 

AC: Are there any challenges you’ve faced in your career? And how did you overcome them as you were growing as performers?
 

Amélie van Tass & Jinger Leigh-Kalin
 

JL: You know, women in magic it’s a difficult thing. For me, it’s been a constant struggle. So, for instance, when I perform with my husband, we do a wide variety of material. In this show, we are only doing a few things, so it’s very important to choose what we are doing – it’s unfortunate that when a woman gets inside a box, it’s perceived that she’s the helper and she’s not doing the magic. So we have struggled very hard to counteract that stereotype and say one wouldn’t happen without the other, and that the magic is a partnership. And it’s essential that both the performers be strong in what they’re doing. That’s kind of always been a battle. That’s why sometimes if that’s in the show, then something else of mine, solo, is on the show just to give me credibility. So we have had to be careful of that because it’s stereotype; people will believe what they believe. You can say it all you want – that the magic happens equally – but it is what it is.
 

And a side note on that – this is the funny story I tell with this because females are perceived most often as “the Magician’s Assistant” in this day and age, however, all magician’s assistants in history before the Golden Age of magic were men. So it was sawing a man in half and it was always the men, because women’s costume and wardrobe didn’t allow itself to be placed on tables and things, so it wasn’t until the Golden Age in 1921 when P. T. Selbit was getting ready to do the sawing a man in half did he suggest – because it was an unspoken political, violent act because women were going for the vote – that he decided he would get better headlines and better crowd draw if he would saw a woman in half. And from that moment on, most of the magicians realized that…women made better assistants [laughs]. So you constantly fight that, constantly.
 

AVT: Also in our case, we still have to always remind people that we are equal partners on stage, and it still happens that people come after the show and tell Thommy how great he was and, yes, “His assistant was great too,” and he has to remind them and I remind them until things change.
 

JL: And you’ll do that for 25 more years like me! [Laughs]
 

AVT: Probably. That’s what I said before; I will do it for the next 25 years!
 

JL: The Clairvoyants are a really good example of the choice of material. Working in teams is the same thing – when you do intelligent magic, and there’s a perceived skill from the female it’s hard to deny, and I would not think that anybody would deny Amélie that there’s a skill involved in being smart enough to perform in the way she performs.
 
 

 

 

Jinger Leigh’s unique blend of elegance and theatricality have redefined the role of the magician. A modern conjuress in a very ancient art, Jinger has earned fans around the world and was recently featured in the touring show, “Masters of Illusion Live!” She began her professional career as a dancer when she was fifteen years old. She was one of the “Young Americans,” and toured for companies like Disney, appeared on Fuji Television, and starred in Southern California dinner theater productions. She also toured with artists like The Beach Boys, Tony Bennett and Cab Callaway. It was while working as a dancer in Guam that Jinger first met magician Mark Kalin. The results were magical, in every sense of the word, combining the arts of dance and illusion. Working together, as Kalin and Jinger, they appeared in their award-winning shows, Carnival of Wonders and Before Your Very Eyes, in their own Reno Theatre, “Magic Underground”.
 

Amélie van Tass and Thommy Ten are “The Clairvoyants.” They were both born and raised in Austria and now reside in Austria and America. When they met in October 2011, they began to develop their “second sight” act, and two months later brought it on stage for the first time. Within a year they had developed a full length show. Shortly thereafter, they started touring Europe. The Clairvoyants have traveled the world as part of the touring company of The Illusionists with The Illusionists 1903, The Illusionists 2.0, and The Illusionists-Live from Broadway. In 2016, they decided to take part in the biggest talent show in the world, “America’s Got Talent.” After four months, six different performances and over 100.000 contestants, America voted them second place. In October 2016 they will appear, together with winner Grace Vanderwaal, at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas. Being part of this show was another major step in the evolution of their career. Van Tass and Ten were awarded “The German Champions of Mentalism,” “Magicians of the Year 2015,” and, also in 2015, were enthusiastically chosen as the “World Champions of Mentalism,” a prize that hasn’t been awarded in 30 years.

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A Conversation with Jorge Molina

Jorge Molina

 

Since November 9th, the art world has been entrenched in discussion and debate on what the purpose of Art is now – what is its impact? What does it look like? What do we want it to look like? And how does it affect us? Now, more than ever, the fight for inclusion is a battle that must be won, and we look to up and coming artists like Jorge Molina and countless others to lead the charge for the next generation of cultural influencers.
 

As a recent graduate, artist, immigrant, and a member of the LGBTQ+ community, Jorge speaks to the importance of intersectional representation on screen, “breaking in” in Hollywood, and his experience on the up and coming TV Land pilot anthology adaptation of the seminal 1988 classic, Heathers.

 

 

Alicia Carroll: So, why don’t you start by telling us a little about yourself!
 

Jorge Molina: Sure! I was born in Mexico City and raised in a suburb right outside of it. I always knew I wanted to work in the film industry in some way and knew that I had to come to the U.S. to do that. I’ve also always loved writing, so screenwriting seemed like an obvious career choice. I applied to several schools my senior year and got into USC with a scholarship. So I moved here, graduated last May, and now am in the process of getting my artist’s visa to stay.
 

AC: What is that process like? I know so many people who have stayed on education or work visa, but how does it differ for artists? Has your experience been smooth?
 

JM: It has been smooth, luckily, but it’s a long and complicated process. The way I describe it best is you’re preparing for a job interview you won’t be present in. It’s a talent-based process, so immigration is basically deciding if you’re talented enough to stay in the country. You compile literally everything you’ve ever done in a binder (your work history, education, awards, letters of reference, etc…) and present it to immigration and they base their decision off of that. There’s other things to it, like lots of paperwork and bureaucracy, but that’s the gist of it.
 

AC: Wow that seems highly subjective. Maybe that’s just me.
 

JM: Hah, I feel you. That’s exactly how I feel.
 

Kelly Wallace: When you decided to come to the U.S., what kinds of concerns did you have?
 

JM: To be honest, I was much more excited and looking forward to come here than concerned. It was always a conscious and active decision to come here and actually move countries, so when it happened it was all very quick and surreal, and didn’t really give me much time to be afraid. I had some worries that I would be home sick, and wouldn’t fit in, but I felt so well versed in American culture – film and TV culture especially, which is what I came here to do – and I wanted it so much that those worries quickly dissipated.
 

AC: That’s wonderful. What made you gravitate towards film and television at a young age?
 

JM: I still ask myself that a lot of the times. I think for me, film and TV have always represented a place where anything that can be conjured up in your head can come to exist. If you can imagine it, it can become a movie or TV show. And that’s enormously appealing. I know it’s a bit of a cliché to be the young, closeted boy that didn’t fit in and yearns of bigger places with more creative freedom, but clichés are grounded on truth.
 

KW: It’s a common feeling, I think. I felt the same way when I was younger. How helpful was TV and film for you when you were discovering your sexuality and when you were coming out?
 

JM: Ah, I can go on about that for ages. More than film and TV directly informing of my sexuality – they were not great at that, since the content we got back home wasn’t always the most inclusive – they served as an escape and kind of a gateway for me to start creating my own worlds. Now looking back, I can see that I was always attracted to stories about underdogs and people not fitting in, and to films with so much queer sensibility, but at the time I didn’t see that. That’s actually a big propeller of what I write. I try to create stories that I would like to have seen when I was growing up.
 

AC: So what kind of worlds do you create for yourself now, in your writing?
 

JM: I am very attracted to coming-of-age stories, people realizing who they are and their identities, and people fitting in. I feel that’s a topic I’m very familiar with, and I’m a believer in the “write what you know best.” I try not to be bounded by genres, but by themes.
 

AC: I am very similar in that I gravitate towards themes. From what I hear, you also write for the stage?
 

JM: I have dabbled in that. I’ve written a couple of one-act plays and would definitely like to explore that more one day, but right now I am more focused on features and TV especially.
 

AC: What draws you to the film and television mediums? It’s always interesting to hear since writers have so many storytelling avenues available to them; why the screen?
 

JM: I think ultimately for me it comes down to the number of people it can reach. I grew up with American content all around me, and it’s the same for so many places around the world. Hollywood is a world forefront in film and TV, and the stories they tell can really make an impact. So that’s what I’m after. I’m sure of the power of art in all its forms, but few have the widespread reach that film and TV have.
 

AC: Agreed. I also went to film school and I’m drawn to it for the same reasons. There is also a certain unlimited freedom to the medium, which I love. In terms of impact, what characters or stories had a significant impact on you? Do you see representation of aspects of your identity improving as you grow?
 

JM: As far as specific characters or stories, I always talk about Ugly Betty and how big that was for me. It had this character of her nephew Justin and it was the first time I saw someone that was a young, Latino gay boy like me and that was huge because his family and coming out circumstances looked a lot like me. I’d seen some gay and Latino characters before, but never one so specific to me. Glee was also huge because it was the first show for me to really both normalize and shed a direct light on gay characters.
 

As for if I see representation, yes. It is definitely growing and changing and that’s what’s so amazing about today’s current entertainment landscape: everyone is getting a voice. Where I think it sometimes lags is getting into nuanced representation that go beyond a single identity. Intersectionality is tricky.
 

AC: It is very tricky. I love seeing intersectional representation because it makes the stories more rich – more human.
 

JM: Exactly. No one is just one thing. I’m gay, and Mexican, and an immigrant, and a writer, and so many more things
 

AC: You mentioned that you use pieces of your real experience and what you know in your writing. How do you think the different parts of your identity have helped you develop your perspective as an artist?
 

JM: Well, it took me a while to realize and embrace that no one else has my experience. I think that in Hollywood, you are often forced into a box and to fit someone else’s vision, but if you look, it’s the people with unique perspectives that stand out. Those are the people I admire, so now I search for stories that only I can tell, in whatever way that may be. Maybe I identify with a character’s story, or am familiar with a world, or know a certain central feeling well.
 

AC: Inclusion in writing is definitely improving but still generally white-cis-straight-male dominated in the industry at large. Because of that, so many people write outside their experience or write stories that…maybe they shouldn’t be telling…or maybe are stories you should be telling, or they should include you in. What do you say to those people? Or is there a way we can combat that aspect of the system other than diversity pipelines?
 

JM: That’s a tricky question. What many people forget a lot of the time is that filmmaking and television are collaborative mediums by nature. I am generally not against people writing outside their own experience, as long as they do their homework. Reach out to people that do have that experience and let it inform the project. Have them read over the script and give an honest opinion. If it’s a TV show – since it’s a writer’s room – a diverse group of people is essential in my opinion. But for more solitary projects like filmmaking, it doesn’t have to be a one-person duty, even if the writing itself is. I don’t know if that makes any sense.
 

AC: That makes perfect sense. I think that is what all of us hope for. The ideal is that anyone can write anything as long as they include research and points of view that make it authentic. It doesn’t always work out that way, but that’s what we strive for.
 

JM: Exactly, I mean no one can write everything. But if you’re going outside what you know, learn it before. These movies and shows do have a very big social and cultural impact.
 

AC: What kind of impact do you hope to have with your work?
 

JM: I do believe entertainment should be the first goal of any of these, so of course to get people entertained. But beyond that, I want people to 1) feel something, and 2) either feel identified [or represented] or feel they knew someone/something they didn’t. I guess I want people to find meaning in what I do, whatever that is for them.
 

AC: Definitely. So we want to transition a little bit to talk about TV Land’s Heathers. For background, what was your journey to Heathers and TV Land? You graduated recently, correct?
 

JM: Yes, I graduated in May. And that’s actually a funny story. When I found out they were developing Heathers – my all time favorite movie – into a TV series, I made it a goal to be a part of the project. So when my school contacts gave me no leads to anyone involved, I tracked down the showrunner on Instagram, DMed him and told him I was willing to do any type of work but I wanted to be on the show. After some months of bothering him, he agreed to interview me, and I ended up as his assistant.
 

AC: That is a bold move. A true Hollywood story.
 

JM: It was crazy. While I was on set just watching the show being made, I couldn’t believe I actually got there.
 

AC: I can imagine. From what has been released thus far about the new Anthology series, the show is diverse in terms of race, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Has it been exciting for you to work on a show that values that?
 

JM: Oh of course! I mean, besides the original being my all-time favorite movie and kind of my model for how I want to write, this new version does such an amazing job of bringing it to the 21st century in those very important terms. I couldn’t be more excited to have been part of a project that sees that, and values that, and kind of plays around with that.
 

AC: That’s truly amazing. You seem like a very dedicated Winona Ryder fan.
 

JM: [Laughs] Oh I am. Favorite actress, I’m sure you can tell.
 

AC: Heathers has such a specific tone. Do you gravitate towards dark comedy? Or the macabre? I feel that is Winona’s wheelhouse.
 

JM: Hm, yes, I gravitate towards dark comedy, but even more towards satire. That’s my favorite genre. Shows like The Comeback or Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, or this new show Search Party, they all take a subject and examine it under a lens and pick it apart and make fun of it. I like pointing things out about society and making it fun.
 

AC: All great shows, we have similar taste Comedy can be such a great avenue for subversion and commentary too.
 

JM: Oh of course! I can’t really do pure comedy; I’m not really good at that, but I like the dark funny – when anytime it can jump to a drama.
 

AC: It’s weird to say that comedic drama or dramatic comedy is “in” right now, but it is. [Laughs] #SadCom
 

JM: Absolutely, it is. And that’s good for me, because that’s my wheelhouse.
 

AC: I agree that the new series does an excellent job of bringing the story into the 21st century. What do you think the benefit of re-inventing stories for a new era or generation is?
 

JM: Well, I don’t think every story should be reinvented. I think if a story still has relevance today, or the creators can find a way to make it relevant for today’s audience, there is big value to it. And Heathers definitely does that. But what’s the point of telling a story that lost its value or that feels dated?
 

AC: Agreed. So what is the relatable/relevant element of this story, Heathers? Or other reboots that are on television now – there are a lot.
 

JM: Well, it should say something about the audience that watches it, or the characters inside them. Heathers does a wonderful job of portraying teen culture like it is now, and not in 1989. I don’t know if I can say much else, but it feels 2016. I think that reboots, whether they do it directly like this, or more nuanced – like say, Westworld, is doing – should really say something about today.
 

AC: So, what do you feel the role of art is, today?
 

JM: Wow, that is a broad question. I think the role of art today – and always, really – is to provide some sort of meaning to whoever is enjoying it. That can be everything from inspiration, to information, to emotion. What’s great about art is that it can be anything you want it to be. Both from the artist’s and the audience’s perspective.
 
 

 

 

Jorge is a professional screenwriter and filmmaker from Mexico City. Jorge is a two time recipient of The Juan Rulfo National Short Story Award, and his works have been published in several anthology collections from the Universidad Iberoamericana and his original script “Fool Me Once” won him the Best Screenplay Award at the 2014 Ed Wood Film Festival. Jorge is a contributor to Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) website, as well as The Film Experience and AwesomenessTV. Currently, Jorge works on the television reboot of the 1989 cult film classic Heathers, spearheaded by TVLand, written by Jason Micallef (Butter) and directed by Leslye Headland (Sleeping with Other People, Bachelorette).

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A Conversation with Hilary Bettis

Hilary Bettis

 

Earlier this year, The Sol Project was announced as a new initiative to raise visibility of Latina/o voices in the theatrical landscape. To kick off this venture, The Sol Project is collaborating with New Georges to present a brand new production of accomplished playwright Hilary Bettis’ Alligator, which opens on December 4 and runs through December 18 at the A.R.T./New York Theatres. I sat down with the smart, funny, charming, and wittily self-deprecating Hilary over hot tea on a rainy day in Williamsburg, where we chatted, among other things, about her play, her creative process, the current political climate, and the complicated nature of her personal cultural identity. I also attempted to get her to spill some spoilers for the upcoming season of FX’s The Americans, for which she is a staff writer.

 

 

Margarita Javier: The first thing I wanted to ask you is about The Sol Project. I’m very excited about it. How did you become involved with them?
 

Hilary Bettis: It’s one of those things that happened organically. Elena Araoz, who’s directing, has been a longtime friend of mine. We’ve done lots of readings and workshops together over the past four or five years. She actually directed a reading of [Alligator] in 2012, and that’s how she and I met. She was part of the founding members of [The Sol Project], and this was one of the plays that they had been considering. New Georges – who I also had a relationship with and had done a lot of workshops with for this play years ago as well – ended up being the first producers. I got a phone call one day from Susan [Bernfield] and Jacob [Padrón] and they were like, Hey! We’re gonna do your play!
 

MJ: That’s amazing. And it’s been a good experience so far?
 

HB: Yeah! It’s been a great experience. There’s been bumps in the road, because The Sol Project is new and they’re trying to figure out how they produce together. This is the biggest play that New Georges has ever done, on top of the first play in the A.R.T./New York space that’s still literally under construction. We just figured out how to have heat in the theater two days ago. It’s the first production that Elena and I have done together, so we’re trying to figure out what that relationship is, how we work together, and how we communicate. It seems so easy in theory, and then you’re in the thick of it and you’re like, Oh, we didn’t talk about this, or maybe we should talk about this, or maybe we should approach it this way. It’s actually really exciting, despite the stress and the lack of sleep that I’ve gotten throughout this process.
 

MJ:Tell me about the play, Alligator. What is it about, where did the idea come from?
 

HB: It’s this crazy, messy, chaotic, bloody, ensemble-driven play that I wrote when I was going through a lot of shit in my own personal life, like taking care of a friend who was dying of cancer and living with my alcoholic ex-boyfriend – a lot of a lot of a lot of a lot of chaos. That play came in like a fever dream; it sort of vomited out one night. It was very instinctual. I’ve never written anything quite like that since in that way, and I think it came out of trying to survive my life at that time and find meaning in this messy chaos with all these people that are literally wrestling life and death demons, including myself. It’s set in the Everglades. It’s in a really small rural town and it’s about all of these teenagers, and they’re trying to figure out how they fit into the world and trying to figure out how to love and be loved, but none of them have the tools or even know what that really means. It’s like a collision of pain and how these seemingly innocent interactions translate into this bigger destruction of this community.
 

MJ: Why the Everglades?
 

HB: I like to write about places that I’ve never been and I get really excited about, and I think for a long time it was because I was so poor and couldn’t actually travel. I wanted to see the world.
 

MJ: So you could write it.
 

HB: Yeah, and when you have an excuse to just dig and research and let your mind go on crazy tangents. I love being able to do that, but I also think there’s something really interesting about it, because you don’t have the familiarity of that place. In some ways, you can have a bigger perspective of it if you really do your homework. In all of my plays, place is always the number one character. All of who we are as people, the choices that we make, the decisions that we have to make, come from our environment and surviving our environment. The Everglades in particular is this messy, swampy, isolated part of the world that you really have to understand how to fight to survive in because everything in there is trying to kill you. It takes a certain type of person in and of itself just to be able to live in that environment, and that becomes a metaphor for these deeper struggles.
 

Hilary Bettis
 

MJ: Why do you write? Out of all the things you could be, why a writer?
 

HB: Oh man, I don’t know. Insanity? [laughs] Writing is really a byproduct of surviving my own life, you know? My family moved a lot when I was growing up and we didn’t have a lot of money – and I was the oldest, the only girl, and I was “the new kid” every two years. I saw a lot of violence and sexual abuse and all kinds of shit when I was growing up. We never lived in a community long enough to really get to know a community. My parents both worked 60-hour work weeks, and so we would end up just having to learn how to survive and navigate people with our instincts. And sometimes that was good and sometimes it wasn’t good. Being the only girl on top of that, writing was a thing that I did to deal with life and deal with feelings, and it was the only place I felt safe because you can say the most poetic thing or the most horrible thing, and you can rip it up and burn it or you can show the world. There’s a sense of empowerment that I never felt in any other aspects of my life.
 

I never actually wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a veterinarian and then I probably wanted to be an actress. I moved to LA a week out of high school to escape this very small, rural, conservative Minnesota town that we’d moved to when I was 15. I ended up homeless in LA. My first job was cocktailing at a strip club when I was 17 years old. I saw the greatness and the rottenness of that world and also the complicated humanity. You know, people don’t lose their dignity just because they make hard choices for survival, and I think that it’s so easy to place moral judgment on people when we have food and shelter and water, you know? I was going out for terrible, terrible acting roles, and reading scripts where women were non-existent – they weren’t human, they were body parts. My 17/18-year-old brain was like, Well, I’ve lived in six different states at this point and I’ve been through so much shit and survived so much shit. I’ve had my big existential crisis over religion; I’ve seen people die when I’ve lived. Why is it that nobody writes people like me? I can’t be the only one in the world, you know? And so I think asking that question started this career path that has been – I mean, I’ve been really blessed. I have this sort of beautiful, lovely career that I never thought would happen to someone like me.
 

MJ: As a woman playwright, how has your experience been in the theater community or in television? Given the fact that it is – some would say and I would agree – harder for women to make it in these environments. Do you feel that pressure at all, or are you fighting to get more representation for women – is that a struggle?
 

HB: Yes. Especially in the TV world where people are really starting to recognize the importance of diversity. In some ways, I think that I’ve had doors opened that even three or four years ago women trying to break into TV didn’t have. I think it’s harder in theater for women than TV really, truly. Truly. In TV there’s a lot of turnover and executives tend to be younger. Everybody wants who the next up-and-coming voices are, and so they’re really excited to at least read your work. In theater I feel, you know, artistic directors who have been in the same position for 20 or 30 years feel very much a generation behind in their tastes, and I think there’s a lot of subconscious biases in there. They look at young women playwrights and it’s like, Oh well, you are a niche market, you cannot be mainstream. Whereas you can be a straight white male writer and, you know. I watch my classmates out of Juilliard, and hands down the guys always had it very easy in a way that it wasn’t for the girls.
 

MJ: You look at representation right now, and there’s not that many plays being produced or written by women happening in New York, or women directed plays, but there’s so much talent out there. What can be done about that?
 

HB: Really, I think that women need to be in positions of power and leadership. I think that it’s not enough unfortunately and I wish it were, but it’s not enough just to write a play. It’s not enough just to want to be a director. You have to also be an advocate, not just for your work, but for your career. You have to be an advocate for other women, and you have to really think in versatile terms. What I am really consistently learning in my career is that if I really want to protect the things that I write, and protect the female characters that I write from becoming stock characters, gratuitous, or objectified. Then I need to learn how to produce and I need to learn the business side of things.
 

MJ: I’ve read a lot about you, and I know that a recurring theme in your work is identity.You’ve talked about your desire to reclaim your Mexican identity and that’s reflected in your work. That’s a very conflicting thing: not quite fitting in, not quite knowing. I identify because I’m Puerto Rican but don’t fit into a stereotypical look, so I understand the conflict that comes from that, but being part of The Sol Project, and the fact that it is something that recurs in your plays, how do you feel about your identity or wanting to reclaim that side of yourself?
 

HB: God, yeah, I feel like it’s gonna be something that is always gonna be – I don’t think I’ll ever have a definitive answer. I think it’s always going to be evolving as I evolve and the world evolves. Growing up, we mostly lived in really rural parts of the country that were really, really white. My brothers and I were always the most ethnic kids at our school, and I never thought about that as a hindrance to my opportunity in the world. My grandfather had experienced it – I mean, his whole life was fighting against prejudice – and he really felt that he was deeply held back and denied opportunities in his life because he was Mexican.
 

I think in order to protect us from that, he really deeply advocated for us being as American as possible and not learning Spanish.He didn’t speak Spanish around us. When my mother was pregnant with me, his biggest fear was that I would be dark and I would look too Mexican and I would have to deal with the same prejudices he dealt with, and so for me in some ways… I mean, yes, there are a lot of prejudices in the world, especially with Donald Trump in power now and it’s really, really scary. It’s really scary. But part of reclaiming that side of my family is giving dignity and honor to my grandfather’s life and his struggles, and it’s a complicated thing, right? My entire life people have told me that I don’t fit into any community. When I moved to LA and met a lot of Chicanos, they were like, Oh, you’re a white girl, you’re not Mexican at all. And yet being in rural white communities in the Midwest, I was always Latina. And so it’s been a strange thing. Am I allowed to claim? I struggle with it. I actually struggle with whether or not I’m allowed to claim that part of my identity, and yet it’s my blood and my DNA.
 

MJ: Absolutely. And I understand where the dissent comes from because I do feel very protective about portrayals of Puerto Ricans specifically, and I do have that same struggle where I’m like, Well, you’re only ¼ Puerto Rican. I don’t know if you’re qualified to represent us. But at the same time, why create that conflict? It’s really complicated.
 

HB: It’s really complicated and I would never claim to be able to speak for Mexican culture. I’m an American. I was born in America. I speak a little Spanish, but it’s not great. I don’t know what life is like to be Mexican in Mexico. I don’t really know what life is like really to come to this country as an immigrant from Mexico. It’s a complicated thing, but at the same time, it’s also part of my own family identity.
 

MJ: I think it’s admirable because it’s so easy to give into not claiming that, because doing so makes it harder. If you are ethnic, it is harder in this country, and there’s this constant struggle to want to assimilate. I think it’s admirable of you to want to claim that part of yourself because it would be easy to just be like, No, I’m just American. That path would be easier, I think, than saying, No, I want to talk about this. I think it’s important to do so.
 

HB: Well, I really appreciate that. I really do.
 

Hilary Bettis
 

MJ: So you mentioned Donald Trump. And I wanted to bring it up, especially since somewhat recently Vice President-elect Mike Pence went to see Hamilton, and it became this big thing where suddenly the president-elect was launching an attack against the theater community, and I was just wondering if you have any thoughts about that.
 

HB: I mean it’s scary, right? On the surface, it’s like, Oh, you know, he’s crazy and his ego was hurt, and it’s just somebody complaining on Twitter and it’s harmless. But the reality is that those are the beginning steps towards really taking away some of our basic fundamental rights in this country. And it’s not really even about theater – it’s about freedom of speech; it’s about being able to be safe in this world and say things that might not always be popular, be able to talk about and give voice to marginalized communities, and be able call into question the people that are in power and the way that we always have… That’s one of the foundations of our country. I think we have to be very vigilant about it, especially as artists. Our purpose in this world really is to call into question the world around us and make people uncomfortable.
 

MJ: Absolutely, and it’s about challenging ideas and theater has always been challenging and arts have always been challenging.
 

HB: Yeah, and it should be! We’re doing our jobs.
 

MJ: What is the intended audience for your plays when you’re writing?
 

HB: I know that my plays are probably never gonna be at places like MTC. Especially with Alligator, I wanted to write plays that my friends would go see. My friends who weren’t in theater. I wanted to write things that I would want to go see and I also wanna write things that ask really uncomfortable questions. I know that that’s not always popular, and people want to go to the theater to escape and you have to have money, really, to see theater, for most people. Many of them will walk out of my plays, and that’s fine. But the ones that stay, I want plays that are really gonna make people think, and make me think as the writer too. I mean, it’s not just about, Oh, I’m gonna use this as a soap box. It’s just as much about, These are the things that I also struggle with or the hypocrisy that I see in myself, and let’s talk about it. Let’s not pretend that we’re better, or that these things don’t exist.
 

MJ: So why theater specifically? What drew you to theater?
 

HB: You know, I think part of it is just always being a new kid and never having friends growing up, and really yearning for a community. My dad’s a Methodist minister, and so the church was a big part of my childhood and my father’s very poetic and he loves to tell stories. I think part of it was growing up watching my father write beautiful sermons, and the way that he could captivate a room of people. That’s what great theater does; it’s a shared experience. Especially in this day and age where we’re so addicted to technology, we’re having less and less human interaction, and our entertainment, our love lives, and our whole existence is us and a screen. Theater, I really and truly believe, is going to become more and more relevant because people are going to crave human connection in a way that I don’t think we quite understand yet, because of what technology is doing.
 

MJ: What are your theatrical influences, and who are your favorite playwrights? Or is there anything you’ve seen recently that you thought was great?
 

HB: Well, I haven’t seen anything recently because I’ve been so crazy [busy], but I have a very special place in my heart for Marsha Norman, of course. I fell in love with her work when I was 18 years old. To have gotten to study with her at Juilliard for two years and be… I actually talked to her on the phone today, and to have a relationship with her is incredible. I really love [Edward] Albee and Sam Shepard and Sarah Kane, and unapologetic writers, and I really love Westerns too. I love Cormac McCarthy and [Quentin] Tarantino and super masculine genres. I love to try to find a woman’s perspective in those worlds, and so I tend to write things that feel really gritty on the surface but have a lot of empathy and vulnerability underneath.
 

MJ: Have you ever had a great idea that you abandoned because it didn’t work?
 

HB: [laughs] Um, every day. I don’t know if any of them are great. I have ideas all the time. I have a lot of files on my computer that are false starts to things that seemed so cool and then five pages in you’re like, Oh, this is not a thing at all. I have a lot of those. A lot. And then I have these ideas that are like, Oh, that’s my magnum opus that I’m gonna write some day when I have the ability to. I think there are some things that I want to write that I just don’t have the craft yet. I haven’t written enough to be able to execute it.
 

MJ:You’re a staff writer for The Americans. I love that show. How did that gig happen?
 

HB: It’s such a good show! And it’s such a great culture. My bosses are amazing. They’re at the top of their field and their craft and are the nicest, most respectful, down to earth people, that also have families and lives and treat everyone with respect and value everybody’s opinions. To have that be your first TV job and to also really see that you can be successful in this career and you can write things that are of really high quality and you can still be a normal person and treat people well – I feel really blessed to have that be the place where I’m starting from. So yeah, they were looking for a writer for my position and read some of my plays and I went and met with them and then they hired me.
 

MJ: That’s amazing. They’re filming now, right?
 

HB: Yeah, it’s insanity. We finished the first two episodes. We have the producers’ cuts for those; we have the entire season broken; we have scripts through episode nine written and all the rest of the episodes are in process of being written right now. They’re like a machine, it’s insane.
 

MJ: Can you tease anything about the upcoming season?
 

HB: [laughs] It’s going to be awesome!
 

Hilary Bettis
 

MJ: I read that you have a development deal for a show called Finding Natalie?
 

HB: I have two! I have a project at the Weinstein Company with Alyssa Milano, who’s executive producer on it, and we’ve been working on that for about a year. Then Finding Natalie is a gritty hour drama about sex trafficking. It’s about a young Mexican girl whose sister is kidnapped by a sex trafficking cartel, and she gets herself kidnapped to find her sister, and so really it’s a love story at the heart of it about two sisters, and what family will do for each other and the things that we will endure for love, for real love, and having that juxtaposed against this brutal world. Our culture really associates sex with love and being wanted, and to be able to say that’s actually not at all, that what these sisters are willing to do for each other is real intimacy. It’s in the pretty early stages. I’m in the middle of writing the first draft of the pilot right now, so I’m sure that I’ll have hundreds and hundreds of drafts with all the network notes and things like that.
 

MJ: And there are a few movies you’ve done as well.
 

HB: I have. I’ve done a couple of short films, and produced, and I have a feature film project that I’m developing with some producers as well that’s in the super early stages. I don’t quite know what that will be yet.
 

MJ: Do you think you’ll continue to do theater?
 

HB: I have to do theater. I have to. I do, but it’s so damn hard to get a production. I see why so many playwrights that are like, I’m done with theater. I’m gonna write for TV. I get it. I totally, totally get it. You have to continue to write plays because you love writing plays, and you don’t care if they’ll sit in a desk drawer and never see the light of day and you’ll never be paid for it.
 

MJ: What advice would you have liked to have had when you were younger and deciding that you wanted to be writer?
 

HB: Don’t be so hard on yourself. Just write and let things be terrible. I think I had the impulse to write long before I really started doing it, and I think that I was really scared and didn’t think I had anything worth saying. I didn’t think that I was smart enough to be able to do it, and I meet a lot of people that say, “I just started writing” or “I want to be a writer” or “I want to write a play, how do you do it?” I think the biggest obstacle is fear. You have to take the pressure off yourself and give yourself permission to just be really terrible for awhile. Even when you learn how to write, the first draft of everything you write is going to be terrible. Giving yourself permission allows you to really trust your instincts and really conquer your fear. I think that more than anything is what prevents people from following their heart and saying the things they need to say. Also, learning how to protect and advocate for your work. Start in that place and really give yourself permission to be terrible.
 

MJ: Why should people come see Alligator?
 

HB: Yes, come see my show! Because, first of all, Elena has done an incredible job with the direction, and it’s messy and it’s bloody, and there’s an alligator onstage who also happens to be my boyfriend. There’s an actual alligator.
 

MJ: Well, I’ve heard so many wonderful things about it. I can’t wait to see it.
 

HB: Good! It’s so scary right now. The past week I’ve been like, Oh my god, I’m just gonna call everyone tomorrow and say this is terrible, let’s pull the plug, let’s pretend this never happened, let’s never talk about it again! Elena and I just sit in the corner ripping the whole thing apart and being like, Oh my god, what have we done? We’re both perfectionists.
 

MJ: I think if you get to a point where you’re entirely happy with what you’re doing, you’re doing something wrong. I think you always have to challenge yourself to be better.
 

HB: Yeah. Yeah! I hope you’re right!
 
 

 

 

Hilary Bettis writes for the theater, television and film. Her work includes: “Dolly Arkansas,” “Blood & Dust,” “The Ghosts of Lote Bravo,” “The History of American Pornography,” “Alligator,” “Dakota Atoll,” “Mexico” and “American Girls.” A two-time recipient of the Lecomte du Nouy Prize from Lincoln Center, she is a 2015 graduate of the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwright Fellowship at The Juilliard School.
 

Bettis has received many fellowships and residencies at the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, York Theatre Workshop, SPACE at Ryder Farm, La Jolla Playhouse, New York Foundation for the Arts, Playwrights’ Week at The Lark, Audrey Residency at New Georges, Two River Theater, Great Plains Theatre Conference, The Kennedy Center/NNPN MFA Workshop and more.
 

As a screenwriter, Bettis has written and produced two short films, “B’Hurst” and “The Iron Warehouse,” which have screened at multiple film festivals across the globe. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she works as a staff writer for the TV series “The Americans” on FX.

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A Conversation with Morgan James, Torya Beard, & Richard Amelius

Jesus Christ Superstar

 

Walking into St. John the Divine to meet with the three masterminds behind the upcoming one-night-only female centric Jesus Christ Superstar concert felt epic. While I’ve never been religious, St. John always felt like a sanctuary to me. I first started visiting the cathedral as a young art student, sketching the Gothic interior architecture for hours on end, while visiting Tibetan monks created Mandala Sand Art in an adjacent chapel. As years passed, I would often return for New York Philharmonic’s free concerts, and often stopped by to light candles for loved ones and their families during challenging times. This conversation was Stage & Candor’s first scheduled exchange since the election, and it felt like the quiet revolution I’ve been craving – to meet in a space that’s built and held so many representations of the patriarchy. We sat down with actor/singer Morgan James, producer Torya Beard, and director Richard Amelius to discuss the conception of this concert, the timeliness and timelessness of the material, and what it means to be an artist during the incoming administration.

 

 

Michelle Tse: Let’s start with the obvious. Why Jesus Christ Superstar?
 

Richard Amelius: Morganza?
 

Morgan James: Right around Christmas of last year, I had a dream that I did Jesus Christ Superstar with Shoshana Bean as Judas. I didn’t know Shoshana very well at the time ­– I didn’t even have her number. [Richard and Torya] were coming over for Christmas dinner, and when they came over, I said, oh, I had this dream, and they both immediately said, when are you doing that? That needs to happen. So I asked a friend for Shoshana’s number and I texted her: It’s Morgan James. I had this dream. She said something to the effect of WHEN ARE WE DOING THAT? and I thought, ok, there’s three people that I like a lot who don’t think I’m insane.
 

Michelle: I was certainly looking for tickets the second I heard.
 

Morgan: We started spitballing immediately and went into production mode. We didn’t know how hard it was going to be to get the rights, who else would say yes, if anyone, but we started putting together an idea of what we could feasibly make happen.
 

Michelle: Right. Our mutual friend had mentioned something in passing a few months into this year.
 

Morgan: We initially wanted to do it in April. We thought around Easter would be interesting. We didn’t end up getting the rights in time. We encountered a lot of red tape because I don’t think it’s been done this way, ever, maybe. Certainly not in New York.
 

Michelle: Assembling a cast must have been a fun challenge as well.
 

Morgan: Everyone we wanted or ended up getting, I reached out to personally because I figured that’s the best way to communicate with someone that you’re asking to do a lot for very little. So first of all I called my friends [laughs] – that’s always my rule of thumb.
 

Michelle: Why one-night-only if it’s so much work?
 

Morgan: If it’s a nightmare, or a terrible idea, then i’ll go down with the ship. I would love this concert to serve as the start of the development process.
 

Jesus Christ Superstar

 
Michelle: So the evening is billed as a ‘female centered concert of Jesus Christ Superstar.’ The two leads, typically played by male identifying actors, will be portrayed by two women. The role of Mary will be portrayed by Alex Newell—
 

Richard: Ninety percent of the cast is typically male – there are two female roles in the whole show: Mary, and there’s an ensemble member named “Maid by the Fire.”
 

Michelle: Would you say the event is more about challenging the spectrum of gender, a gendered or role reversal, or more the idea of casting people as characters they’ll typically never be able to play?
 

Morgan: I want to say that I don’t love concept-y things generally. I don’t love the ‘all-Asian this,’ or the ‘all-Black this,’ because that defeats the purpose of being inclusive or ‘color-blind.’ If something is not completely based around race, then any person should be able to play them. So I hate when people say, well, they wouldn’t have been there back in the day. We get it. We’re smarter than that. So I think to reverse it completely defeats the purpose of inclusion. I don’t want to be gimmicky; I initially just thought that women don’t have these good roles to play, period. There’s no other show that has this many great female roles, but there are plenty of shows with this many great male roles.
 

Michelle: I just saw a production of it that our contributor Gina Rattan directed. I forgot how high the voices that are required are.
 

Morgan: That was one of the things R&H was worried about – the keys. We aren’t changing the keys. Richard can probably speak to the concept on a greater scope.
 

Richard: I think what [Morgan] said is very important. The majority of the names [Morgan] was throwing out in terms of who would you like to do this with were female. So it was bound to be female centered. But we were always open to possibilities.
 

Michelle: And Alex? I love his work.
 

Richard: Morgan had met him and he said he’d love to do something with her. She asked me, what do you think about him? I said I think he’d be great. At the time, Mary was sort of a question mark. Ironically, of the roles, once you do cast women in the roles, Mary is the lowest, vocally. Alex happens to have a high voice, and he’s going to sing that role with no problem. He is interesting because as you said, this is on the spectrum of femininity. He is what makes it female-centric as opposed to all-female. His point of view adds to the inclusion; it doesn’t detract from it.
 

Michelle: Were there any female names attached to it before Alex came along?
 

Richard: There were many women that would sing the crap out of it and be awesome. Then the idea of him came up and it was a game-changer.
 

Morgan: I also had a conversation with him because we were teaching together. We were getting to know each other and finding out what the other person likes to do. He said that he was having trouble because his agents would say, well, what roles could you even play on Broadway now? He goes through every show and he can’t list one, because he has a female voice and wants to sing female roles. It’s not as black and white as oh, are you this? Are you that?
 

Michelle: It’s more about the vocal range.
 

Morgan: He would say, I am an actor and this is the voice I have. I don’t have a traditional male voice, why can’t you understand that?
 

Jesus Christ Superstar
 

Richard: This was written 40 years ago. I think that the men who wrote it were trying to say something provocative. And I’ve seen many productions where it is a robe-and-sandal passion play – Jesus is a beautiful white guy with abs and a great wig, who wears linen and you think to yourself, that’s what you heard? We know what white people think Jesus looked like in 4BC, but I don’t think that’s what they were trying to say.
 

Michelle: What’s your interpretation of the material?
 

Richard: To me, they were talking a lot about celebrity. Jesus, today, would be a rock star. Today, people would follow him because of his celebrity, which Judas warns about in the first song. Jesus had an incredible ability to communicate with people and people were drawn to him. It is a story that will always be relevant because there will always be people that… I’m not comparing Jesus Christ to Donald Trump in any way, but look what just happened.
 

Michelle: That’s kind of my next question. Go on.
 

Richard: Christ was speaking to politics and people thought that was dangerous. They thought he was anti-government, which he certainly was, and so this narrative is not hard to imagine. It is something that’s very relevant.
 

Michelle: Right. So my question is, to be putting this concert together post-election, to be performed four days before the end of Obama’s administration—
 

Torya Beard: On MLK Day.
 

Michelle: Has your idea of the production shifted in any way, in terms of somehow amplifying exactly what you’re saying?
 

Torya: I don’t think it shifts the way we’re thinking about it, but it validates [Richard’s] point – shines a light on it. A multigenerational, diverse group of mostly women telling this story gives you a multifaceted prism through which to view it.This is a story that everyone is familiar with on some level. If you examine it from all sides, informed by our current climate, it becomes a new story in some respects. Different things bubble to the top.
 

Morgan: I agree with that. I’m in depression mode right now, so I don’t think I’ve really thought about how I’m going to tell anything differently, but like [Torya] said, all the more reason to tell this story with a diverse group of people. I definitely want it to represent every color, shape, size, voice, and otherwise. I called my friends that I love and people I wanted to sing with, and there are so many great female singers that we can cast it 12 times over. We have a burden of riches. Theoretically in an administration that would look out for this faction of people… what better time, I suppose.
 

Richard: Tim Rice is a brilliant guy. He had a lot of really important things to say. But music is so cool, you get lost sometimes in the points he’s trying to make. The great thing about doing it in a concert setting is that the audience will be listening more than watching. It was our responsibility to cast it in a way that your ear would automatically tune in. I think by having the first voice be Shoshana singing, “Heaven on Their Minds,” it’s going to be an unfamiliar sound. [Shoshana] is very creative and she’s going to do things with it, and I think it’s going to set the absolute right tone. When each of these roles you’re used to hearing a certain way is taken over by a female voice, you’re going to hear the words in a new way.
 

Morgan: It’s also going to be an all-female band. We’ve all been trying to bring as many women into the fold as possible.
 

Michelle: Have all the roles been cast?
 

Morgan: Yes.
 

Michelle: It seems you’re selling well without any promotion. The VIP tickets are already gone despite the fact that you haven’t even done a press release.
 

Torya: We’re finding that it’s very popular, which is good.
 

Jesus Christ Superstar
 

Michelle: The three of you are educators, artists, dancers, singers, and entrepreneurs – all things that are considered ‘elitist’ in this post-truth new climate that we’re living in. Moving forward, how do you think these roles you all occupy inform and intersect with each other? How does it affect your ways of storytelling, if at all?
 

Torya: It helps to see people who believe in racial equality, gender parity, and inclusion for all people speaking out, advocating for themselves and others. As it relates to telling stories, I am even more committed to maintaining a No Bullshit Policy. For me, that means working harder and more truthfully – saying what I mean and doing what I say. I am not interested in work that is self-serving. I want to put things into the world that change it for the better, even in the smallest ways. It’s hard to even scratch the surface without accountability partners. I have an incredible crew [Morgan & Richard, the artists at Siena Music] and because of them, I feel strong. I am leaning into possibility.
 

Morgan: I find solace and comfort in the community. Everybody keeps talking about how divided we are, that the two sides of the country don’t understand the middle of the country. We definitely learned that. But the middle of the country doesn’t understand our side of the country, and they don’t see it. The way we work, the way we see our working class. They think we are elitists. They’re not the only part of the country that has a working class, a middle class, or people who are disenfranchised… they think they’re the only ones who are. They don’t see it and they’re in a bubble, too. Now obviously the reason we got into this mess is because neither side wants to talk to the other, but I take solace in the community that I have here. We’ve survived worse, and people have still made art.
 

Michelle: Has it, in this way, here? Not since—
 

Morgan: We have to go further back. My father was drafted, during Vietnam…
 

Michelle: Right. I’m in a fascinating position, having been born in Hong Kong at the beginning of the Tiananmen conflict. I get to hear first person accounts from differing sides of a lot of conflicts.
 

Morgan: We’ve survived things. God forbid it turns to that, but we have to press forward. We have to surround ourselves with like-minds. We have to understand we both live in bubbles. There’s no way to solve it by getting further apart.
 

Richard: There is that great Nina Simone quote…
 

Morgan: “It’s the job of an artist to reflect that time they’re living in.”
 

Richard: Right. When this was written in 1970, Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber were talking about the present. If you listen to the music, it’s 70’s vernacular. Now, it feels like a period piece, but what they were doing was telling a very old story in a very modern way. So the best way to approach any project is from the truth. When you read it, what does it say? Not what you want it to be, not how you’re going to decorate it vocally, not making your stamp as a director, but what is the book in front of you telling you? The works that have existed the longest still speak to you and they’re honest. It doesn’t matter who you cast, how you dress them, or what set they stand in front of. If the material is good, and people relate to it, it’s a home run before you even start. Sometimes you just have to do the show. You have to tell the story that’s been told before you. We didn’t write our own version of Jesus Christ Superstar, we’re doing the one that’s always been done. The point of view is different, but we didn’t have to rewrite the material in the process.
 

Morgan: The other thing is – and I hear this from a lot of younger singers – that idea of oh, I want to make it my own, or let’s change everything! It really made me come to this idea that, do you really think you’re better than someone who has done it before you, better than something that’s classic? We’re not trying to make something better. It sounds cheesy, but it’s already great. All we have to do is put in the hands of great people, and great ideas. We add value to things by being there.
 

Richard: And working together, listening to each other, and collaborating.
 

Jesus Christ Superstar
 

Morgan: I didn’t have to call Richard or Torya to convince them of something. These things happened organically.
 

Richard: I think you come to that realization in any discipline when you reach outside of your bubble. When you start writing songs, you have a great appreciation for the songwriter. When you start directing, you have a greater responsibility for telling everyone’s story, not just one person’s.
 

Morgan: I can’t speak for Shoshana because I didn’t know her back in the day, but there may have been a time ten years ago if you’d asked me to do this, you’d get a very indulgent performance. I think you’re getting us at a time when we’ve been through our particular struggles, and I have an appreciation for where I am, and I think she does too. There’s this humility and grace about Shoshana, and I’ve always loved going to see her sing. I’ve always been blown away by a grounded wisdom in her instrument.
 

Michelle: She’s great.
 

Morgan: I basically forced my way into her life. We didn’t even know each other! I tricked her into being my friend.
 

Richard: She’s going to betray you. I can feel it.
 

[Everybody laughs]
 

Michelle: I want to go back to a point made earlier because I usually end with asking what kind of advice you’d have for future generations. As it was brought up earlier, Nina Simone has said that our job as artists is to reflect the times, and it seems so now more than ever. We’ve been standing on the shoulders of Nina, of Ethel Merman, Josephine Baker…
 

Torya: Absolutely.
 

Michelle: What I’m interested to know is, other than continuing to tell the truth, make art, and exercise your constitutional rights, how do we as a community keep fostering our support for one another during this hostile time, and assure for the generations to come that art is ‘worth it’ to devote your career to? How will we continue to grow the platform the way giants before our time have done for us?
 

Torya: Recently, I assisted a friend, Brian Brooks, with choreography for the opening number for the BC/EFA benefit Gypsy of the Year. It was a condensed version of The Wiz, maybe 15 minutes long, and members of the original cast were performing. We sat in the room with them, and they shared stories about their experiences working on the show. It was an incredibly powerful moment. As our society continues to obsess over youth, beauty and all things fleeting, our elders can often fade into the shadows. Interaction with the people whose shoulders we stand on is essential for sustaining our art. We need to hear those stories. It provides an opportunity for us revel in the joy of being a part of a legacy. I have joy, so just by having this experience with you now, [the joy is] being multiplied. The communities that we are building are largely virtual: we share, comment, post, like, and love on social media and that’s fun, but having face time with people, spending time sitting at the feet of our elders while they are still alive, sharing our combined joy, and multiplying that joy is really what’s going to keep it alive.
 

Morgan: I love that. Whenever I am about to sing a cover of a song – which I often do – I say, I’d be nothing without Nina and Aretha. You’re only as good as what you listen to. Artists that come along and think they’ve just invented something – it’s just mind-boggling to me, you know? I think what happened at Hamilton the other night is amazing. I don’t think we have to worry about kids finding music or theater, but we have to hope that they pass through their tumultuous 20s and discover that they need to feed themselves with everything that came before them. We need to lead by example, lead with humility. If I get to make a living doing what I do, it is with a greater sense of humility everyday, because I did not understand what that meant ten or fifteen years ago.
 

Jesus Christ Superstar
 

Richard: I’m asked this question a lot because I work with kids often. I feel that young performers want the chance to play the lead, so they end up at places where they will get the lead. My advice? Don’t do that. Find the best place, and get in any way you can, because you’re going to learn a lot more being in a show with really quality people. A healthy ego is great for any artist, but if you think you’re the most talented person in the room, go find another room, one where you will learn something.
 

Michelle: Pay your dues.
 

Richard: I know that when I was 20, I thought, I can do this! Just give me a chance to do this! As I grew up, people would always be like, you’re good… but I think it’s a lot harder than you think. So I said to myself, fine, I’ll direct, and I’ll choreograph, and I’ll write. I want to see how hard it is. It’s horrible! Just to have the guts to sit down and write something, you realize how much courage it takes to ask, ‘will you read this?’
 

Michelle: I’m still struggling with that.
 

Richard: Do it all. Learn everything. Keep your eyes open. When someone invites you to be a something experimental, don’t ask, what’s in it for me, you will be rewarded, even if it’s not a success. Do you want to learn to drive from someone who has been doing it for 20 years, or do you want to get in the car and go? But at the beginning of Stephen Sondheim’s career, they said, you need to write the lyrics with established composers and he said, I don’t want to do that. I want to do my own thing and I have my own ideas. But what would West Side Story or Gypsy be—
 

Morgan: And what would he be!
 

Richard: Exactly.
 

Morgan: I was teaching high school kids, and they all just wanted to do new music, which is great, but I wanted to teach a class on Sondheim. They love him, but they don’t want to sing it. (Frankly, they hadn’t put in the time to learn the rhythms). So I went in, and I told them, “you like Hamilton? There’s a reason Lin-Manuel exists. He idolized Sondheim. Who did Sondheim idolize? Hammerstein.” These things don’t exist in a vacuum. You can’t understand one without the other. You just can’t.
 

One more thing about what we’re telling, and how divided our country is – we’re going to tell a story that a lot of people think ‘elitists’ don’t understand. I’m not a religious person; music is my church. Now it’s my job to understand this story. Maybe it’ll bring me closer to the middle of the country, and maybe them hearing it done this way will bring them closer to us.
 

***

 

Jesus Christ Superstar – In Concert is playing one-night-only at the Highline Ballroom on January 16, 2017. Tickets can be purchased at highlineballroom.com.

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Theater Breaking Through Barriers

TBTB

 

“Disability is an experience that shapes my life and view of the world…it is the one minority class in which anyone can become a member of at any time.” — John Belluso

 

As of 2012, the US Census Bureau estimates that close to 1 in 5 Americans have some form of disability. You’d think something that affects 20% of the population would take center stage a little more often, but theater has been slow to to present productions that truly represents people with disabilities and often when they do, able-bodied people are chosen to play roles that could easily be filled by actors with actual lived experience as a person with a disability. But for 37 years, Theatre Breaking Through Barriers has been creating art Off-Broadway with a mission exclusively focused on producing work for both writers and actors with disabilities. We sat down with Nicholas Viselli, the Artistic Director, to talk about the history of TBTB, the importance of inclusive casting, and the work we all have to do to normalize the experience and the art of actors with disabilities.
 

 

Michelle Tse: Where do you think your empathy comes from, as a Straight White Able-Bodied Man running a theater company that ‘breaks through barriers’?
 

Nicholas Viselli: In order to have that empathy, you have to filter through the intellectual stuff and identify with people on a deeper level. I have a sister with lupus, and both her and my older brother had epilepsy. I also lived with my grandmother, who had just suffered a stroke and couldn’t walk without a walker. I had a neighbor who spent time at our house all the time who had Down Syndrome. I have a cousin with cerebral palsy. My wife has multiple sclerosis, and she is a wheelchair user. I was immersed with a lot of different disabilities throughout my early life. Disability and diversity were never a big deal for me, and I was always attracted to people who were different from me because I found those interactions interesting. I can credit my parents with that, because in the town I grew up with, people were small-minded and if you were different you were segregated because of your differences.
 

Empathy is a combination of things. Another part of it is that you always have to be open and not shut the door and label. When you do that, you’re shutting out empathy and not acknowledging it. You need to keep feeding it and opening it up, because that will help you.
 

Helen Schultz: Can you talk a bit about how you became involved with Theater Breaking Through Barriers? I know you’re an actor as well as an artistic director.
 

NV: Richard Harris’s brother was producing the Camelot tour in the late 80s and it had stopped in my hometown. His brother passed away while they were on the road, so our local university, University of Scranton, said they wanted to set up a memorial scholarship in his name. Richard Harris was so moved by that that he said, “I’ve always had this idea to do a production of Julius Caesar and I want to take it to Broadway. I would like to do it in Scranton as a work in progress.” So I ran home when I graduated from Hofstra University and auditioned for the play and I got a small part.
 

There was an actor, George, in that play who managed to come in from New York and he was blind. He was wonderful and we became very fast friends, and he told me he worked with this theater company in New York called Theater By The Blind and they were doing a production of an Agatha Christie play called The Unexpected Guest. That was my first experience with TBTB. At that time, the artistic director was working with a lot of blind actors and creating performances in which you would not be able to tell whether the actors were blind or not. George was completely blind, and he was moving around the stage and it was a non-issue. At that point I didn’t think TBTB was an integrated company [the way it is now]. It wasn’t until about 10 years later that they started hiring sighted actors to do play readings, rather than printing scripts in braille and large print. One of those readings was how I started working with the company, and it was also sort of my audition. If the artistic director liked those sighted actors, he would continue to hire them and eventually feed them into the shows. So I really started working with the company in the summer of ‘97 and the company started growing and became a really solid professional corps.
 

MT: What have you learned, being the Artistic Director of TBTB?
 

NV: One of my biggest revelations through all of this as a new Artistic Director is that I want to be as open as possible. I don’t want to be limited. When you start building walls and creating parameters – in art, it’s all valid. If you only want to do plays that deal with being an Asian female, that’s great and it’s absolutely valid. If you are a theater company that only wants to do Jacobian drama, that’s great. And it’s great that we live in a city where you can do something that specialized and still thrive. But for my money, I don’t want to be limited by anything. I don’t want to just talk about disability because there’s more to life than that.
 

MT: It’s right in your company name, “barriers.” Breaking through barriers. Ah, those pesky walls.
 

NV: We’ve gotten criticized by saying, “oh you’re a company of disabled artists and it’s so great that you’ve got these disabled people breaking the barriers, aww, that’s so nice.” But they’re not getting it. It’s barriers of perception. We’re all others. We all have our limitations. We’re never going to be omniscient. The great thing about this life is that every person you meet is a new story, unless they’re putting up walls and identifying as something. Then they become less interesting. I want to know about you, not your label. That’s why I love theater and art, because it is the expression of humanity. We’ve become very compartmentalized and dehumanized. We spend so much time on our phones and in our own little worlds, and it’s much more interesting to live in your heart. Your head will mess with you all the time – it’s our greatest gift as humans and our worst enemy.
 

TBTB
 

MT: To go back a little bit, how do you deal with triggers, offensive words, and labels?
 

NV: When you go through something without fear and limitations, you make the best art. We did Unexpected Guest last year and some advocates in the disabled community were very upset with us because the play was written in 1956 and there was a character in the play who has a mental disability and becomes one of the suspects in the murder mystery. In 1956, if you had a mental disability, you were called ‘retarded,’ and that’s the standard vernacular of the time. I wasn’t willing to change that because we were doing a play set in 1956. A lot of advocates were upset with us and said, you should at least have program notes that talk about it. I’m not going to change it because that turns into something else called censorship, which to me is more offensive than any other political correctness.
 

I had a discussion with David Henry Hwang, who has also written for us, about when he did Kung Fu, the play about Bruce Lee. In the 60s and 70s, if you were Asian, you were often called ‘Oriental.’
 

MT: I was actually called that just a few days ago.
 

NV: And you will be called that because there are older generations that grew up on that. Oriental, colored, crippled…
 

MT: They’re just not going to catch up. And us ‘others’ have learned to try to ignore microaggressions.
 

NV: I think the best way to do that is to talk to each individual and ask, how do you want me to address that if it ever comes up? I have a friend with cerebral palsy who says, “Yeah, call me a crip, I’m crippled, I don’t care.” If that’s how he identifies, I’m going to respect that. That goes for anything. Any type of vernacular. If a person identifies as that, I only care what that person thinks.
 

MT: It’s similar to people that are taking back the word “bitch.”
 

NV: David Henry Hwang said, “Of course I’m going to use that in my play because the play is set in that time period and in the 60s in San Francisco, people who were Asian were not referred to as Asian.” They were referred to as their ethnicity or as oriental as a general blanket term. And I agree with that. And as an artist, I want to be able to say and do whatever is right for the play. And if people are offended by it, good.
 

MT: It starts a conversation.
 

HS: How do you make sure that your work, or any work like this, is evaluated at the same artistic standard and treated as a serious piece of theatre?
 

NV: We had to fight that for a long time in our company. When we used to be Theater By The Blind, we had a great group of talented people – some experienced actors mixed in with some other people who were not as experienced – and it became a kind of community theater. The common theme was blindness, so it became a connection – so the work was not as professional. We were getting reviewed in the early and the mid-90s when we were still forming, and critics would come and say, “This is actually really good work for a group of blind artists.” And it’s like, don’t give me the “Special” award. If you’re going to judge the work, judge it at face value and judge it for what it is. And if it sucks, say it sucks! As a group of artists, that is what we need to hear.
 

TBTB
 

HS: We also go so far out of our way to praise actors without disabilities that play people with disabilities, or actors who are not trans that play trans characters, yet we don’t privilege the stories of people who actually live that. Why do you think that happens?
 

NV: There’s this whole idea of what an actor must do to prepare and endure to create a role, the hardships they have to put themselves through and the positions they have to twist themselves into. Oh, I played someone who was blind, and for six weeks I lived in total darkness. It’s like, Great, that’s lovely and interesting, but why don’t you even consider hiring someone who has that disability to play that role?
 

MT: People seem to be afraid of what they don’t know or see every day.
 

NV: In theater and in film, they’ll hire a disabled actor to serve as an advisor. And yet they also say, “We don’t want to work with a blind person because there’ll be too much liability, too many demands, too much work. They’re going to have needs we won’t be able to meet.” There’s the star factor too. If I’m going to do a production of My Left Foot, I’m going to want Daniel Day Lewis. I don’t want someone who has cerebral palsy who I don’t know to play the role because I want to see Daniel Day Lewis do it. And then I can say, Wow he is really an amazing actor, because look at his range.
 

HS: It’s remarkable that the first person with an actual disability to play Laura in The Glass Menagerie is going to happen next season on Broadway.
 

NV: The fact that a major producer like Scott Rudin is considering and casting a person with a natural disability to play the role of Laura in Glass Menagerie is great and it shows that there is indeed progress being made.
 

MT: Disability is so often an afterthought in the conversation of inclusion.
 

NV: People always look at disability as something that makes a person less-than. You say, I have a disability, and they go “Aw, can I help you? You need a hand?” Because suddenly you’re a poor damaged bird who needs help. When it comes to disability, there are definitely people who are in a position where they might need more help than others, but it’s up to the individual to make those decisions. It’s not up to the society to make those decisions for them. That’s horribly condescending and it’s just wrong. It’s a perception that has been hardwired into us forever.
 

HS: And it’s so interesting that, as you said, it intersects with other forms of diversity. And yet, those categories usually become the more dominant form of diversity.
 

NV: The idea of non-traditional casting always came down to making sure that we’re being inclusive. If possible, we also try not to look at gender. I’ve always tried to address [issues of inclusion]. Our world is full of limitations; there are obstacles everywhere. If you have a disability, getting through daily life means you have to learn to really navigate through many obstacles. I don’t think anybody wants to be disabled, but if you become disabled or have a disability and you learn to adapt and live with it, you may realize, I don’t need my eyes, I don’t need my legs, I’m still me and that’s wonderful. The idea is that, if you were to become disabled tomorrow it would be horrible but you would learn to adapt and you would still want to be treated as you. And that’s how it is for everybody.
 

MT: So you’re talking about inclusion beyond disability at TBTB?
 

NV: I want our company to be able to explore all types of diversity. Most of the performers I know with disabilities are white. I don’t know a whole lot of actors with disabilities who are actors of color. I know they’re out there, and I want to work with them, I really want to meet them. Anytime you bring someone into a work, their energy and their life experience changes it and adds a different tone and color to it. It always makes the work richer. To me, that’s what’s exciting. Let’s see what we can get out of this.
 

MT: How often do you communicate with casting directors about inclusive casting?
 

NV: We’ve had a lot of conversations with casting directors, and they for the most part are on board. They want a fresh perspective and face. A lot of the issues with casting comes down to the money people, because they wonder, Is this person marketable or sellable? If they’re disabled, will people be uncomfortable with that? And that’s the perception we have to get over.
 

MT: I’m sure you hear a lot of stories from your cast members…
 

NV: We’ve had actors who have been told over and over again that they didn’t get a part because their disability was too real. You’re a congenital amputee, and that makes people squeamish. One of our actors, Mary, was up for a role a couple years ago in Army Wives. The part was for a female soldier who just came back from Afghanistan and she had lost her arm. Mary is a congenital amputee and is missing her arm. They auditioned her, called her back 6 times, and her agent thought she had it in the bag.
 

She didn’t get it, and the other actress who was not disabled got it, and they CGI’ed her arm out. They thought the cast and crew would be too uncomfortable being in the presence of an actor with a missing arm, that was why they did it. And everyone has those stories.
 

TBTB
 

HS: Let’s talk about The Healing, your last production. It was written by Sam Hunter, and was commissioned for TBTB. Without giving it away, I found it fascinating that Joan, the one character in the show without a disability, is actually the most fragile and the one we’re most worried about. The rest of them have their lives so together. Sharon, for example, is this very successful woman. Her detriment is almost that she is so together.
 

NV: It’s very subtle but the fact of the matter is it’s about a group of people that are haunted by their past. Sharon especially, she’s haunted by Zoe – was I able to help her? Was I able to do anything for her? And all of them are haunted by the ghost of Joan, a second ghost in the play. She’s painted as this horrible person, she’s awful, so you expect this crazy fanatical woman to enter, but instead you get this very sweet fragile woman who is terrified. Which sort of says something about all of us. That’s something that says, when it comes right down to it, we’re all the same in that regard. We all can relate to this play because we’ve all had things happen to us in the past that have affected us, good and bad, and changed our lives. That’s the parameter of what this life is I think. But I think it is important to realize that the other great message is to realize that we all matter, we all leave something behind. You are influence over the people you interact with in your life. Maybe it’s not a huge influence at first, maybe we won’t feel that influence for months and years down the road, but it’s important to think that everybody you encounter sort of nudges you in a different direction or different way.
 

MT: So Helen saw the show when there was a primarily deaf and hard of hearing audience. I went when VISIONS was there. Do you partner with them? Do they come to most of the productions? How does your accessibility program work?
 

NV: They don’t always come. We try to do at least one open caption performance whenever we do a show, but it’s my goal to make everything we do fully accessible to everyone always. We’re not there yet and I’m not saying we’re gonna be there next year or even in five years. But it’s something we’re constantly working on. Until the time that we can create work that is fully accessible to all people at all times, there will be those limitations. This year we did two open captioned performances and we did not do an audio description performance, because I don’t think this show really needed an audio description performance. It was a very dialogue driven play, there wasn’t a lot of non-verbal action that a blind or low-vision audience member would miss. We did create a series of program notes for our braille programs so that if you were blind, if there was something that was a non-verbal indication, there would be a note about what that thing was.
 

MT: What about the time changes and flashbacks within the show?
 

NV: Our blind and low vision audience got that. They might not have gotten it right away, but if you saw it, you might not get it right away either. The lights change, but you realize eventually that Zoe was dead and now Zoe is onstage talking. We like to do talkbacks for all of our show, and we very intentionally did talkbacks for our Deaf and HoH audience and our Blind and Low Vision audiences because I really wanted to get their feedback. I wanted to know what they thought – did they miss anything? Was there something we didn’t do right? What could we have done better? I thought it was great that you guys attended those talkbacks.
 

MT: And John McGinty was in the show. I know from the talkback that the role was slightly edited to fit him.
 

NV: This was the first show that we worked with an actor who was deaf. We’ve worked with hard of hearing actors and actors with assisted devices, but John is deaf and needs an interpreter in the room. That was all a new but great experience. It’s work we should be doing.
 

MT: It’s often people that are empathetic and compassionate that actively look for shows that are not about themselves or the majority. We at Stage & Candor look at it and talk about it because we’re interested in confronting it. But the people who actually need to be there will never seek it out. Do you ever think about that with TBTB, about how you can somehow reach out to a larger audience and unexpected groups of people?
 

NV: The thing you have to do is just keep reaching out. If you try to force a message on people they will not want to hear it, especially when it comes to entertainment. People go to the theater because they want to be entertained, not because they want to be educated or talked down to.
 

It’s always been a tough thing for our company because, bottom line, disability doesn’t sell. People hear disability and they automatically think it is going to be less-than. I cannot tell you how many times we’ve had people send us a donation and say, “That’s great work you’re doing,” and I think, “Wait a second, how do you know it’s great work if you’ve never seen it?”
 

Our ultimate goal has always been to create great work. We want to do work that you’re going to want to come and see, and you will see a group of great artists, many of whom have disabilities, and it’s going to be an eye opening experience.
 

TBTB
 

MT: Have you ever chosen to not disclose the fact that most of the company members have disabilities?
 

NV: As a non-profit theater, when we’re asking for funding, we want it to advance the work of performers, writers, directors with disabilities. Last year we did Agatha Christie’s The Unexpected Guest and sold out 95% of the run when we announced we were doing Christie. Our audiences didn’t know what TBTB was. We had a cast of nine artists, seven of whom were performers with disabilities. And at the end of the show when people would read the program it was like, “Where was the disability? I saw one actress in a wheelchair, but I thought that was a character choice!” This world is full of limitations. And in our lifetime, we may never see a wheelchair user working as a construction worker on a high rise, we may never see a person who is completely blind doing brain surgery. What we do as artists is create our own world and set our own limitations.
 

MT: “If you can believe in a singing crab in a Disney show, why can’t you believe in a person with a wheelchair playing an able-bodied role?”
 

NV: We say it all the time, but disability is a human characteristic. Sometimes you’re born with a disability, sometimes it comes to you in your life. As you age, the chances are you will have to deal with a disability at some point. Whether it is minor, whether it prevents you from being able to do something you were able to do earlier, that is a disability. Disability is personal. And it’s not.
 

We were talking before about hierarchies in our society and how we strive for equality and a level playing field, and this sounds negative, but we will never have a level playing field because our world and our society is one based on hierarchies. Who is smarter than whom, who is richer than whom, who lives here versus there, and we make judgments on that. And as long as we’re making judgments on those levels, there will always be the haves and the have nots. There will always be someone who we can point to and say, “’You’re different because you don’t have what we have.” It’s human, but that doesn’t mean we can’t keep working on that. Our goal for this company is to change the perception of disability and make people realize it is simply a human characteristic, and not something that invokes pity, not something that makes a person lesser-than. In fact, anybody who has a disability but lives in this city who is able to survive and exist and get around and do things – they are the truly incredible and true survivors. We always say the strong survive, but it’s not the strong, it’s the ones who are adaptable to change. And change is one of those things that – it’s the only constant in our life. We don’t like change, we’re creatures of habit, we like to know that when we roll out of bed the floor will be there, the water will be on, and we’ll be able to get to our favorite coffee shop. And when that changes, it’s earth shattering.
 

MT: Any general goals and challenges?
 

NV: Ike Shamblin, the founding artistic director of this company, started this company back in 1979 and he ran it virtually single-handedly for almost the entirety of its existence. This little off-Broadway, essentially community theater, existed for 38 years with such great potential, but he was only able to grow the company as big as one person can grow a company. You can be the hardest worker in the world, but there are only so many hours in the day and one person can only reach out to so many people.
 

My goal now is to grow this company and blow the walls out and grow our administrative staff and try to get more money. We need to do more work. Because, if we’re going to change perceptions, we need to be out there all the time, tapping people on the shoulder saying, “Come see this.”
 

MT: Is that why it went from Theater for the Blind to Theater Breaking Through Barriers? Was that part of that perception shift?
 

NV: It was a part of our expansion. It was also for practical reasons. The disabled performing arts community in New York City is probably one of the largest in the country – but that’s not saying much; it’s a very small community and everyone knows everyone else. If you decide to limit it further, and focus on just one disability, you’re really narrowing the field and you really have just a handful of actors. It got to a point where Ike was working with the same actors and casting shows for the same actors and felt constrained by it. I really pushed for this change. One of the things we’re fighting against is being discriminated against as a disabled performer. What we were doing is discrimination in itself, and why would we do that? So we need to change the name and open it up. Many of our blind actors felt that they were losing their company and losing their identity, and we had to say, no, you’re not losing it, you’re gaining something and growing the company. Some people didn’t like it and walked away. But it was the best move we could have ever made for the company and it changed everything. The work became richer. [The Healing] would not have happened if we were just theater by the blind. It’s a great gift. And what that taught me was that if I see myself limiting anything, I need to check that. Do we really want to limit ourselves? One of the reasons that our world is in the mess it’s in right now is because of the closures that we make and the judgments that we make.
 

The other goal is that there are so many different types of disability and I want to be able to work with anybody. We haven’t even gotten into working with artists with mental disabilities. That’s a very unique experience and it depends on the artist and the project, but it’s all a possibility and it’s all something I hope to do.
 

TBTB
 

MT: What’s coming up next for TBTB?
 

NV: In March, we’re going to be bringing back our short play festival, which we haven’t had for a couple of years. We used to do plays about disability; we don’t want to do that anymore. I’ve reached out to a lot of different playwrights and I want to do plays about otherness in our society. I want that otherness to focus on racial otherness, sexual orientation otherness, religious otherness, social otherness. The plays will be called “The Other Plays.” That’s the title of the festival and it is going to be a group of plays – and the idea is that the playwrights will write these plays knowing that they’re going to be performed by performers with disabilities. I don’t want the otherness to be disability, because the point is disability is one diversity that cuts through all other diversities. We want to examine transgender and race and religion through a lense of disability.
 

MT: Any fun commissions coming up, from other writers? Do you guys do it every couple of seasons or every season?
 

NV: I don’t have any actual formal commissions, but I’ve spoken to several different writers and I’ve asked them to write for us. Lameece Issaq, who is with the Noor Theatre, she is Arab American, and I would love for her to write a play about that experience. I’m just curious about the experience of being an Arab-American female in our world today. That role could be played by someone with a disability. Dennis Allen, who is a wonderful playwright, who does a lot of work for Theatre Harlem, I’ve asked him to write. I’ve also asked Neil LaBute to write. Now Neil LaBute, that’s going to be an interesting one, because his plays are always very misogynistic. But I think he could really come up with something really interesting when it comes to social otherness. I’m also especially fascinated because I’ve asked this other writer, Basil Kreimendahl – Basil is transgender so a lot of Basil’s work focuses on transgender issues. And I’m thinking, how cool would it be to bump Basil’s play up against Neil LaBute’s play. With a short play festival, you want a bunch of different perspectives thrown at you. As for other writers, Neil was interested in writing a full length for us, as was Bekah Brunstetter. There are a lot of writers out there I’d love to have.
 

Here’s the hard part – there are a lot of people I want to work with, but I also have to think, as a small off-Broadway theater company, we do very few shows per year and we have to make those shows count. We have to sell tickets. My biggest goal is to draw people in to see our work. So if I have a playwright I’m interested in but no one else really knows them, I can’t do the show, at least not right now. So my goal is to keep building so I can get back to doing a three-show season and I can have a brand new play by Sam Hunter, a fun crowd-pleasing play like a Neil Simon company, and another play by a new up-and-coming playwright. That will allow us to introduce new writers, as does the short play festival.
 

MT: Other than, from my knowledge, New York Deaf Theatre, I believe you are the only two companies in New York City that cater to disabled artists. Beyond donating money and showing up to support the productions, what can people without disabilities, people wanting to help, do?
 

NV: Perceptions of what disabilities are need to change. I think we have a good shot at really making a change through theater, through film, through television. America was the pioneer that innovated many things, and one thing we still do better than anyone else is entertainment. There are other parts of the world that produce more entertainment, but people look to us. The world learns about America through our television and our films – that’s why our stars and celebrities are such commodities. The sad part of it though, is that perceptions won’t change as long as it is misrepresented, or represented in a way where it becomes, “we’re going to have a celebrity winning an Oscar for playing a disabled person.”
 

Normalizing what disability is is really the only way to help change that. And I think it’s that way with everything! And talking about it helps, when we talk about racial diversity, religious diversity. The more we can talk and come to an accord that the bottom line is we’re all just people. We’re all human beings who are inhabiting the same planet, and there’s so much more to us than our bodies. Take the time to look at how absolutely special and unique every person is, because every person’s life experience is unique. You’re a walking story book, you’ve got stories that are your own that nobody else has. It’s overwhelming, but it’s true.

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A Conversation with Tom Phelan

Tom Phelan

 

A year ago, Taylor Mac’s Hir became the buzziest show off-Broadway: extensions, sold-out runs at Playwrights Horizons, and Critics’ Picks from virtually every publication in New York. At the center of it all: a TV actor who had made history playing a transgender teen on ABC Family’s The Fosters. Tom Phelan would again make history by playing the genderqueer Max – a young person whose preferred pronoun, “hir,” inspired the title of the new American classic.
 

A year later, Tom is no longer onstage at the Peter Jay Sharp. These days, he’s a college student by day, working actor by night. And, of course, a rabid fan of theater. We sat down to talk with him about the historical resonance of Hir, the power of unlikable marginalized characters, and his hopes for the future of a more empathetic theater.

 

 

Helen Schultz: How did you discover the role in Hir?
 

Tom Phelan: I got an email from the team and a message on Twitter. It was the most gobbledigook, millennial casting process ever. They asked me to put myself on tape, so I did my audition in my high school auditorium, and had my high school drama teacher be my reader. I practiced for days with my dad going back and forth, doing it over and over. I happened to be in New York because I was auditioning for Juilliard, and they were like hey – can you come in and do it with us? I went into the room and it was Taylor [Mac], Niegel [Smith], and Bailey [Koch] and one other casting person. I freak out and I do it and I don’t remember a second of it and I leave. I’m shaking and I call my mom and I’m going to Chipotle because I haven’t eaten, and then they call me back and they say, hey, can you come back? We need you for one more thing! Niegel had been giving me these notes, and I was kinda getting it but I wasn’t quite there, and I walked out feeling a little weird about it, and they called me back, and I finally got it, and I walked out and it was just the craziest thing that’s ever happened. Off-Broadway was the dream of all dreams and I don’t know…I just love theater so much, and for it to be Playwrights Horizons, and for it to be Hir, a play that I literally read in American Theatre Magazine and was like, oh! I’ll see that when that comes out! It was the craziest thing.
 

HS: Did they give you sides to read from?
 

TP: It was about four pages of sides, and they didn’t change at all from audition to the show.
 

HS: What was it like to go into a play that you loved so much, and so wanted to be a part of? And being DM’d on Twitter about being in a show you’d dreamed of being in?
 

TP: It was crazy. It was the first time I’d done a project that I cared so, so, so deeply about, which radically changed the experience. It made it so much more difficult to work on, honestly, because I cared so much about how it turned out, and I knew that I could sink the play. It’s a pretty evenly-balanced play in terms of how much every character gets to play and be, and I really wanted to do justice to Taylor’s play. The pressure was on.
 

HS: And you got to work with so many incredible actors.
 

TP: You should’ve seen me when I found out Kristine Nielsen was going to be my mom. I hit the floor. I dropped. Just the talent and the level of expertise – I was so daunted and so terrified and felt so horrible after so many rehearsals…but I learned so much. I can’t imagine ever touching an experience like that.
 

HS: Did you see something on Backstage at all? I know that Hir lead to a real rethinking of their casting calls, and the binary in so many casting notices.
 

TP: No. And I wasn’t even looking at the time – I was in high school, taking Calc AP and freaking out. They reached out to me.
 

Tom Phelan
 

HS: Had you wrapped The Fosters by then?
 

TP: I had, I think so. The last thing I shot was on my high school graduation day. I couldn’t make it – “I’m sorry, I’m working!” They were like we might bring you back, and they’re always sort of “maybe.”
 

HS: That’s amazing to have both of those experiences at the same time – filming a TV show and living your life in high school. Were you doing school plays and amateur stuff as well?
 

TP: Oh yes. Oh god… what’s the worst thing I did in high school? [Laughs] I was in a production of In The Heights – #InTheWhites – as my high school was predominantly white. That was very shameful and it was horrible. It was horrible. I was in School for Scandal; I was in Sweeney Todd as Beggar Woman as a freshman. I did this play by Richard Greenberg, this short play, that originally starred David Hyde Pierce, Patricia Clarkson, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, and I was Philip Seymour Hoffman. And that really solidified “this is my type, this is how I’m typecast, as a Philip Seymour Hoffman.” It was about a troll, and I played a troll, and I was like, this is it! This is who I am! Finally! [Laughs]
 

HS: Was it a magnet school?
 

TP: I went to an off-set of Cal Tech, which was an offset of the university, but they just happened to have a really great theater program.
 

HS: They were cool with you doing stuff outside of school?
 

TP: Yes!
 

HS: And now you’re in college and living that life! Do you think you’re going to work during your studies, or take some time off?
 

TP: I’m really going to try to! I have a reading tomorrow actually, whcih is awesome. Other than that, I’m going out on calls and, you know, the grind.
 

HS: Do you ever find it hard to balance all that?
 

TP: Telling my professors that I was going to miss my first day of classes because of a reading was not a fun task.
 

HS: I’m sure that they knew that going in, having accepted you as a student and as an actor. What work inspires you, and what are you most looking forward to this season?
 

TP: I have a list on my phone! I bought a subscription to the Signature, because their season is unbelievably exciting. All the Suzan-Lori Parks, the new Annie Baker, Will Eno, new BJJ, it’s going to be amazing. Obviously I’m excited for Taylor’s play – tickets are a lot. But I’m going to see if I can get my dad to go see it and ride his coattails and hook on.
 

HS: And the new Sondheim!
 

TP: Yes!
 

Tom Phelan
 

HS: Something that we really believe in at Stage & Candor is that theater is all about empathy. Hir feels that way too. They’re not the sort of characters you’d meet, point-blank – they’re so isolated. The entire play takes place in their home, this sort of world of their own creation. They don’t really leave their house. Could you talk about the process of that show, and a moment of empathy you’ve had as an audience member or an artist?
 

TP: I feel like I so often enter a room with hostility, and entering a rehearsal room, that’s not something you can do. The play really taught me a lot about that and not assuming anything about anyone. I think that identify politics is a little bit deaf, and I think… I think approaching people as human beings is the first thing you should do.
 

The play itself, everything I think about it, it just breaks me. It’s really, really brutal. Everyday it would shift and I would feel more for a different character. I would get so angry at the audience – the audience a lot of times would come out really hating Paige. I remember feeling so much anger about that, and being so furious that they refused to consider it from her angle. We had a lot of audience talkbacks that were horrible in that way.
 

HS: What do you think that’s a product of? Misogyny?
 

TP: Absolutely misogyny. A misplaced…I think people assume that because there’s a Capital T Trans Character that they are infallible and that they are, I don’t know, the “good ones.” It’s good representation, whatever that means, to have a perfect model of a trans character. I think a lot of times the audience would be l really feeling for Max when they should be feeling for everyone in the play. I just love the play so much, I love it so much.
 

HS: So much of that play is about misogyny – not just gender, but the idea of dismantling patriarchy from a very female perspective. The mother really is the one driving the action.
 

TP: Dream. That’s crazy. I read this interview with her where Young Jean Lee was like, I wanted to write a play. I went to my students and I asked them all, what do you think? How can a straight white man be a good person? She asked them all and then she wrote a play about that person, who would listen and didn’t speak over people and did all these things their students said they wanted. [Editor’s note: Straight White Men.] He was a loser and no one liked him. And I think that’s so fascinating, that the idea of the person we believe these dominant people should be is not actually what we want them to be.
 

HS: There’s definitely a parallel between that character and the dad in Hir. It’s sort of this immobilized person.
 

TP: You think you want that but ultimately that’s not what you want, and also incredibly dehumanizing and horrible. People are people, people aren’t monoliths. They’re not representative of their group.
 

HS: Your character really has the button at the end of the play – hir goes and forgives everyone and offers a way forward, this new cycle.
 

TP: It was a lot. It was a lot. I don’t know. Theater’s the best. Getting to do that play for so long and become a family with those people was transcendent. Like, just amazing.
 

HS: And it really started so many conversations about casting. What really sort of baffles me is that there’s so few plays about the LGBT experience, especially the “T,” and TV is blowing up with stories about queer people. It was really interesting for me to go on Instagram and go through and see these kids who are like 11 and are like, correcting each other and saying, No, you should ask somebody’s preferred pronouns and not assume, because of The Fosters.
 

TP: It’s really crazy, it’s really cool. TV is the new frontier and, I dunno, you just hope that it allows…I think there’s a lot more room for nuance in theater. Not to generalize, but I think theater oftentimes is just smarter and more thought-through. Just for the fact that these opportunities are opening up for all these actors is fantastic. It’s really great, the fact that people are finally being paid to do this. That’s a step forward.
 

Tom Phelan
 

HS: And you were involved on the new series, Doubt.
 

TP: Yeah, my parents created Doubt and I worked as a PA over the summer. I got lunches and printed out scripts and collated. It was the best job I’ve ever had. I love and trust my parents and I think it’s going to be a really good show.
 

HS: I’m so excited to see that Laverne Cox is just everywhere.
 

TP: Thank god!
 

HS: I was so upset that she wasn’t on the last season. Don’t keep her locked up, she’s the best part of the show.
 

TP: Honestly. She’s deserves all the opportunities in the world. Seeing her face on a bus is going to be mind-boggling.
 

HS: Was it at all strange to see yourself with ABC Family and The Fosters blowing up? You received a ton of press for you and your character, Cole.
 

TP: It was really weird. But it was really cool and I’m so lucky that I got to do that. I’m so glad that weird, awful, in-between part of my teen years is so well-documented. It’s amazing to see me in between figuring things out. It’s embarrassing but great. Nobody wants to be documented that well at 16.
 

HS: Your character now has so much weight too. It’s really very interesting to see how much backstory and importance is packed into a small character.
 

TP: They devoted a lot of time to Cole, which was really cool. I’m just so lucky that I got to be…I think there was, the pre-requisite capital T trans storyline, but after that I got to have a love interest, and be funny, and have fun, and have friends, and go to the beach. That’s the sort of story I think is the most important. Just normal people, doing people things.
 

Tom Phelan
 

HS: Where do you think it goes next? How do we start to create trans characters that just…are, you know?
 

TP: That’s something I think that Doubt is doing pretty well. Literally in the pilot there’s one or two lines about her being trans and it’s just a huge deal. I think a lot of that stems from having a trans writer on staff whose name is Imogen Binnie – she wrote a novel called Nevada that is mind-blowing. She’s the greatest. Obviously, having trans storylines about being trans is important because that’s just a fundamental part of our lives but having that be the smallest piece of the pie in storylines about losing your lottery receipt and taking your dog to doggy day care…I think that’s great.
 

HS: I thought it was interesting, what you said about likable characters. Because now, Shakina [Nayfack] is on Difficult People and she’s just an awful character.
 

TP: Oh my god, those scenes…I look forward to them so much. The scenes with Cole Escola and Shakina and Derrick Baskin, who is amazing…But I think it is really interesting in that being unlikable is something we’ve talked about with women, but not necessarily with POC or trans people and all these other groups that when they’re put into a story, have to be representative and perfect.
 

It’s so uninteresting. It’s so, so, so, so boring and un-nuanced. I mean, take it if it pays well but it’s not a story that I want to tell. And it’s not a story for people like me. It’s for other people; it’s for a different audience. And I think considering who you’re aiming your media for is really important.
 

Michelle Tse: Do you think that contributes to education of the general public?
 

TP: I think it does. I think people try their best and they mean well and they want to spread the word and get these issues out there, but it’s so often second hand information through a friend of a friend or through a fact page on Wikipedia. I don’t know. It’s just boring.
 

HS: And at the same time, I feel like there’s been…something that Black Lives Matter talks about a lot is that you need to educate yourself. It’s not the job of marginalized folks to do that for you. Do you feel similarly?
 

TP: There is just a huge pressure to be vulnerable and educate people using your own personal pain. That’s so coercive and awful. There’s pressure to put myself on display, and so often it’s unpaid and just expected of me no matter what. Expect people to educate you if you’re paying them to educate you. Other than that, do it yourself.
 

HS: You love Sondheim a lot. Talk about that, because I feel like Sondheim isn’t someone we talk about much anymore, now that we’re in the Lin era.
 

TP: I have been in love with him. I listened to Assassins for the first time, it was the first Sondheim musical I ever listened to. I was in 7th grade, and I only listened to it because I was infatuated with Neil Patrick Harris and I got the revival cast recording for all of his songs and I was like, I actually like this, let’s listen to the whole thing. His work…I could try to pinpoint exactly what it is but it moves me so much, more than anything else. I think Sunday in the Park with George is the most…
 

HS: There are no words, honestly.
 

TP: It’s the best musical.
 

MT: Especially since it’s art, visually…
 

HS: It’s hard to articulate it in words. It’s theater.
 

TP: I know.
 

Tom Phelan
 

HS: I was listening to the new Carly Rae CD…
 

TP: Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Emotion Side B…queen of everything. It’s so good. I keep telling my friends to listen to it and they’re like, mmm, okay. But I’m like, you don’t understand. It’s the best pop album ever written.
 

HS: Sondheim and Carly Rae.
 

TP: I’m not kidding all I’ve been listening to is Carly Rae, a little bit of Sondheim, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, that’s it.
 

HS: Donna Lynne Champlin…did you run into her at all when she was working on The Qualms at Playwrights Horizons?
 

TP: Oh my god, no, but what an amazing, amazing person. I will go down with character actors until the day I die.
 

HS: In a lot of ways, I feel like TV is becoming what I want theater to be: a much more accepting, rich representation of all of these people whose stories we very rarely see in the mainstream.
 

TP: Me too, but I hope TV becomes more like theater. I was watching Horace and Pete, which failed in a lot of ways but was also incredible in a lot of ways, and seeing Annie Baker’s little touch on that, how she influenced it, was really cool. I think it accomplished a lot more depth than I’ve ever seen in TV. I hope the two can influence each other.
 

HS: Is there anyone on Doubt or on The Fosters who is a playwright on the writing teams?
 

TP: That’s such a good question…no. We have a lot of lawyers. One lawyer who is very New York and into the playwriting scene. We have a folk musician on the writing staff who is just a really good writer. A woman who went to Columbia and is really cool. It’s a diverse little room.
 

HS: It’s so interesting now that so many people we’ve talked to write for TV too, because it’s sort of the way to make a living. It’s usurping all our writers.
 

TP: I know. Literally.
 

MT: Playwrights know character development. They know how to do it and fit it into two-and-a-half hours, so imagine what they could do with 13 or 22 episodes.
 

TP: I do die a little bit whenever another one bites the dust and then gets taken away.
 

HS: Yeah. I mean, Jordan Harrison is on Orange is the New Black now.
 

MT: Hilary Bettis is at The Americans. Tanya Barfield is there too, I think. Carla Ching is at I Love Dick. Oh, there are so many. David Henry Hwang is working on The Affair…
 

TP: He is doing a lot. He’s head of the American Theatre Wing too?
 

MT: Yeah he’s the Chair. I believe ATW just started a diversity committee last year.
 

TP: Good for them, that’s awesome.
 

HS: It’s interesting. Sometimes I worry about diversity in theater because TV is producing so much and they can pay so much more…It’s like, you don’t say no to writing for Netflix, and when you’ve been standing outside in the theater world banging on the door for 20 years…
 

TP: You just hope that companies like Playwrights and The Public are able to work with enough money and really finance these playwrights and get them developing.
 

HS: It makes me so sad that Playwrights is the first company to offer even half of healthcare.
 

TP: And the amazing thing was that they paid Taylor to be in rehearsal every single day, which was really important. It was such a boon to us.
 
 

 

 

Tom Phelan made headlines becoming the first transgender teen actor to portray a transgender teen on a major network show, ABC Family’s groundbreaking series “The Fosters.” Credits with Pasadena’s Theatre 360 include Hair, Spring Awakening, The Authors’ Voice and School for Scandal. Hir is Tom’s Playwrights Horizons and New York stage debut.

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A Conversation with the cast of Julius Caesar

Julius Ceasar

 

The production of Julius Caesar currently playing at Writers Theatre is, in many ways, feels like a 105-minute meditation on ambition and the nature of power. And though Caesar’s reign came well before the eventual collapse of the Roman Empire, it’s hard not to remember the fate of the ancient world’s biggest superpower as the projections onstage light up with the hashtag #MakeRomeGreatAgain. The words may have been written in the late 16th Century, but juxtaposed with the imagery of a rabid mob clamoring angrily for the complete destruction of its political enemies feel just a little too familiar. This Caesar is unapologetic about its modernity, and doesn’t waste time condescending to its audience by over-explaining its message.
 

I sat down with some of the cast to talk about the show’s point of view, which instead of transporting us to Rome, reminds us that we are all, in many ways, Roman…even today.
 

 

Kelly Wallace: So this is a very non-traditional production of Julius Caesar. When you first got the script and saw how modern and political the themes and undertones would be, what did you think? How did you react to that?
 

Arya Daire (Portia/Decia/Soothsayer): For me, when I got the script…I haven’t done Julius Caesar before and I hadn’t read it in a long time. I got the eight sides and I saw our current political climate reflected in it, and that was the vibe I had with Michael Halberstam, our co-director, when I went in to audition. It was informed by a lot of current events, especially the omens, were very reflective of our current politics all over the world and that’s all I saw. I think the casting itself was a broader pool, but it wasn’t set that it would be this way. I don’t think it was predetermined with minority reflection in it in advance from the start.
 

Madrid St. Angelo (Julius Caesar): Julius Caesar is one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. I was familiar with it and have seen productions of it throughout my life. When I was invited to audition for it, and especially the opportunity to work with Michael and Writers Theatre, there was no question. It’s a great role and I would’ve played him in any way that they’d chosen to depict him or portray him.
 

As far as reading the script, I really appreciated the stripped down adaptation and I thought it gave a great deal of focus to this idea of ambition and how ambition can trickle down and infect an entire population of people. I personally saw that parallel in the political climate, not that it was told to me, but I saw the emphasis on the relationship between Brutus and Cassius and the central characters’ obsession with power and how it spreads to the entire city and the people.
 

Kelly: It almost reminded me of something like Hamilton, in the sense that it takes historical figures or characters that we’ve seen in history books and have pre-determined ideas about and what they look like, and flips that on its head. What do you think it does to open up the show, if you remove that visual barrier?
 

Madrid: This is something I think Lin-Manuel Miranda has done incredibly well in Hamilton. It’s an indictment on our education system here in America. We learn very little about our political leaders from the past, in particular Hamilton. What we know and what we think about him is so small when you actually look at the history, where he came from, the world he lived in, what his upbringing was…it was completely multi-ethnic. It was a very dark-skinned world, not a white-washed world like we see in our history books. Lin was super smart in trying to cast and write the show with people of color, and give us the world that Hamilton lived in prior to his coming to America and studying in American schools. The world he came from was slaves and Dominicans and blacks.
 

Arya: And contemporary casting isn’t always accurate anyway. We’re all aware of it. Sometimes you see, in plays with all-caucasian casts, a mother and a daughter cast who look nothing alike, even though they’re both caucasian. Even if there’s no way this daughter came from this mother, the fact that they’re both caucasian makes it okay. When there are works done about Ancient Egypt, Cleopatra is often white and the Egyptians are played by Caucasian actors. When you read about the history, that’s not very accurate.
 

Kelly: When you think of Rome, it was in a lot of ways the melting pot of its time.
 

Madrid: It was a multi-cultural epicenter.
 

Arya: We’re used to that kind of casting that isn’t necessarily accurate and correct. We’re just used to it so we accept it as “correct.”
 

Madrid: I think that somehow, theater-makers believed for a long time that it was a safer bet to cast “traditionally” to make it palatable for the audience. It’s like…oh my god, girls, hide your gold, there’s some dark people coming onstage! I think what Michael’s doing with this production is painting Rome in a very authentic manner, and hopefully, if somebody says God, Caesar looks like Che Guevara, or ask why there’s a Latino Caesar, they move beyond that and we draw them into the world that we’re crafting and they get the story and start to see that the world is multi-faceted and multi-colored.
 

Kelly: Would you say that’s something you really want people to focus on in this? That they leave the show realizing that their mental picture of that character doesn’t mean much other than it was their pre-conception? I think about young people seeing something like this…all they know is mostly multi-cultural interpretation, which is incredibly valuable. 
 

Julian Parker (Caska/Cobbler): I spent most of my process trying to convince myself that this was a reality that I could accept. I was fortunate enough to have a mother who is an English teacher and I was always the…not that I loved school, but I loved English and History. My first experience with Julius Caesar was in sixth grade and nobody wanted to read any parts, so I was the only one doing all of them. I love language and finding that balance between finding my voice through a culture where I don’t have many representations of people that look like me with my age, speaking the words I do.
 

I spent a lot of my time trying to convince myself that I didn’t need to speak how I’ve been told people speak from this time and to use my own voice. I realized it today when we had the high school kids. It was a real pleasure to have them, and they’re much closer to where I’m from at least, even in hue. It made me want to make sure that this shit was understood and –I hate to use the word but – to represent. This table in this room is beautiful. This is what it should look like. We have so many different voices at this table alone. So most of it was about myself, and any time I became hesitant, I looked around and I was constantly reaffirmed by my castmates, who also may have had a similar plight.
 

Arya: Also, the thing about doing Shakespeare is, you can take as many classes as you want, or as many monologues as you want, but the fact is minorities are not often in the productions.
 

Madrid: Or it’s only in minor roles.
 

Arya: Right, and because of that, you don’t get that mastery and fluidity in the language. The only way to get it is to do it night after night in front of an audience. I was so nervous with this text, it took me a long time to relax. Maybe a week or two ago, I hit a point where I was happy with what was happening. The language started to pull me and I understood what people meant in those books when they talk about acting Shakespeare. I would’ve never been able to reach that understanding if we hadn’t been given an opportunity to actually play it. If theater companies say they want to encourage diversity in casting, there’s just one way: You just do it. You don’t talk about it anymore. Talking has happened enough, and it’s time to just do it, and Michael is just doing it. He just said, the people who came in for these roles were the best. We need that kind of acknowledgment and we all earned our spots here in this production.
 

Kelly: Yes, how often do we use “the best person for the role” and they mean who’s the best white person?
 

Arya: It’s very coded language.
 

Madrid: This time apparently it was the best faggot for the role.
 

Julius Caesar
 

[Everyone Laughs]
 

Kelly: We’ve seen it a lot in Chicago recently too. First at the Marriott for Evita, and now with In the Heights. Those were more conversational exchanges, not necessarily any concrete action. But this is a choice, this is an action. This is in front of an audience every night, it’s not a conversation about how we could do that.
 

Arya: Exactly.
 

Madrid: I don’t want to monopolize the conversation, but I want to say that on the hand of diversity in casting: just do it. A lot of people have their hearts in the right place, but aren’t at the place where Michael and Writers Theatre are at. It could be all of Michael’s experience as a man and an artistic director and an actor, where they’re actually laboring over the conversation pre-casting. They’re saying, can this role be portrayed this way, that way, and the other way? In a recent interview, Michael talked about Octavius and Cinna. Is it possible to cast that person and have one actor play both? Is that person, given the sexual ambiguity of Octavius historically, cast as a woman? Can we cast a man? Can we cast a trans-person? They’re advancing the conversation and pushing the envelope before they go into casting. Not enough Artistic Directors are doing that. They’ve never thought to. You can’t have a casting call and say we’re going to bring in 500 Latinos or 500 “ethnic people.”
 

Arya: It really was like that. There were all kinds of people at the audition for this production, caucasian included, and he really made an emphatic point to say that the person who got the role was the best, regardless [of identity]. It wasn’t based on trying for anything specific thing.
 

Kelly: Syd, do you feel that being trans has really informed your work here playing Octavius?
 

Sydney Germaine (Octavius/Cinna): Yes, absolutely. Originally, I was called in for Calphurnia and Octavius and that was really interesting. I was excited, because those are two very different characters who could be grouped that way. Something I had to get over in playing Octavius was, historically, as far as we know, Octavius was a cis male.I started trying to put on some very masculine things that may not have been right or authentic. In my everyday life, I always am having to “put on” something to be a little more presentable to people. There’s some stuff I do in my everyday life that I do onstage, but I had to realize that whatever I am is fine. That’s who the person is onstage. It’s not a trans person playing a male character. It’s, this kind of person is playing this kind of person and that’s how it is. I’ve never been able to do that onstage. I’ve always played characters who are very clearly a man or a woman, without ambiguity, which is something I deal with in my everyday life. People don’t get how to deal with what’s going on, they have to choose one or the other. Does that make sense? There’s a parallel between figuring out things onstage and figuring out things in my personal life. It’s informed and helped me in my personal life.
 

Kelly: It makes sense, and Octavius is figuring himself out too at this point in history.
 

Sydney: Right! It was also just exciting to me to be called in for a Shakespeare character who was very clearly a male, because I medically transitioned and stopped hormone therapy a few years ago because I was like, Fuck it, I don’t want to do that anymore, I’m beyond whatever this thing is. That has resulted in a lot of people reading me as female, which is what I don’t identify as, and no one had given me the opportunity yet to come in and read for a character that is traditionally cast a male. That was really, really cool to me.
 

Kelly: Performing Julius Caesar in this way, in this political moment, is fascinating. In the playbill, someone said something to the effect of that if you want to see more of this world, just turn on CNN when you get home. What is that like for you, to know you’re performing this show in a context that’s ever-evolving? You do this during the day, and go home and live it at night.
 

Sydney: I started thinking about it, even in regard to the Senators onstage today, there’s so much about this mob mentality and so much of that happening on social media. I see all these very blanket statements where people are grouping together and getting very excited or very upset about stuff and it’s all very polarized. All of that, onstage, is reflecting what I see in real life. It’s made me more aware of when am I doing that? When am I not doing my research on something and how easy is it to let myself get worked up and out of control?
 

Arya: Or just being carried along by a current opinion.
 

Julian: There are small things that are very touchy in the show, that came as a surprise. We spend so much time at the table, contextualizing and over-contextualizing, and then we finally get on our feet and we’re feeling it out. A couple weeks ago, [we were doing] something that we had been doing forever: at the very top of the show, a gun was pointed at me onstage, but in lieu of what had happened the night before in the news, I saw the other actor realize at the same time I did, that this is potentially bigger than us, even in that small moment that’s going to end in a paragraph. It can cause you to drift in a place where you have to force even your ego to override whatever’s going on with you internally. That freaked me the hell out. Something else that I saw was that we did a really good job of trying to create a culture in the room that was as nonpartisan as possible in order to stick to the work, although we did have a theme of wanting Caesar to represent a hybrid of Trump/Bernie Sanders…
 

Kelly: You even use the hashtags on the projections, like #MakeRomeGreatAgain, which is a pretty explicit reference…
 

Julian: Right, right, right. I allowed myself to dismiss that idea in the marketplace scene…where [Julius Caesar] is laying on the ground for what must be at least thirty minutes; I can’t imagine what he’s thinking under there. Something really intimate happened where he was under the cloak and I could see the brown of his skin on his calf and I don’t associate that skin tone with Bernie or Trump and now I see Barack. Now I see people that killed a brown man based on what he achieved and off of what they fear him to do based off of some social science of people who historically don’t look anything like him. So it’s a completely different variable and you’ve taken it into your hands, literally, to murder someone. Some nights I’m like, wow, we kill somebody every night, in one of the most tragic ways possible. We know this man, we’re close enough to stab him in the back, and we kill this man on the ground based off a fear of what he could potentially do, which is bullshit. It messed me up. I see somebody that looks like me on the ground. I wouldn’t have been able or allowed to have that in my brain if this hadn’t been cast in the way that it was.
 

Arya: History repeats itself. This was written how long ago and we always consider ourselves very highly evolved. Every generation considers itself more evolved or civilized than the ones that came before it. But…are we really?
 

Madrid: And there are more ways than one to kill somebody. In one way, we’ve been killing Barack Obama for eight years. We’ve been killing Hillary Clinton for thirty years. The media encourages it. We actually have candidates implying that somebody should shoot this person, and you have somebody saying here’s a President who wasn’t even born in this country and amassing an incredible amount of hate towards someone. That’s another way of killing any good that they might do, be it out of fear, jealousy, or envy. When I think of Caesar, I heard the Trump allegory and the parallels that were being talked about when we were working in the script. I always liked Caesar, and I try not to judge the characters that I play going in. I was able to separate Caesar, the way he is with his wife in the play, versus this idea of ambition and how ambition can spiral out of control and blind you to everything. It blinds you to decency, and general good-doing. It catapults you somewhere else. People can love it, hate it, want to bury it, want to kill it, and I think that’s what happens.
 

Julian: That’s so interesting. I believe there’s a lot in the show that revolves around ambition. You could play a drinking game with how many times we’ve mentioned it. I also think that it can even be about reform versus tradition. And I think, again, with Caesar in this adaptation, we or at least I, see a man who sees what the people need. Who’s to say that Rome doesn’t need a fucking dictator right now? It could’ve been like the one dictator that did it right. It’s reform versus tradition. We have a Republic who insists to keep it how it was, versus the new. That is the crux of the play and what’s driving it, and how quickly it all falls apart. You see at the beginning of the prologue we created, and the beginning of a hint of what a Democracy should look like, it’s like 12 Angry Men almost. Then you see it again at Portia’s house. That’s the moment where I think it would be like a back room, where they’re actually trying to fight this out. They don’t all agree. You get to see the Republic they set up, that they understand, and the workings of that, and then you see it all fall apart immediately after they stab and kill him. People decide this maybe wasn’t a good idea.
 

Sydney: When we leave the house, at the end of the scene, it’s not settled. We were talking about this in rehearsals, but they didn’t have an exit plan.
 

Julian: And Cassius is a dictator!
 

Arya: The ideas are connected, the ambition informs the reform versus tradition. We don’t reform unless ambition informs that wish to better what comes before. Ambition runs everything. Ambition informs a lot of the honor that Caesar stands on, but it’s also ambition to kill your best friend.
 

Julius Caesar
 

Kelly: This is fascinating…Julian, since you brought it up, I’d love to know what’s the crux of the piece for all of you.
 

Madrid: I would like to believe that it has to do with love. Love of country can take you in directions that are both good or bad. Everyone clearly loves Rome – I think Caesar loves his country, I think Brutus does, I think Cassius loves Rome. But I think that when you add the ambition to that, like they say money is the root of all evil, ambition can take you in directions that ultimately result in your own demise. At the end everyone’s dead.
 

Arya: For me, the crux of it…I always go with psychological things to help me understand plays I work on. Every character in the play has certain traits about themselves that they value and certain other traits about themselves that they try and silence. Using Brutus as an example, he values honor, virtue, nobility, but he doesn’t listen to his emotional self, which is kicking underneath very hard. The harder it kicks, the more brutal his words become to suppress it. He’s not respecting that other part of himself. All characters in the play have this duality. The reason I think of it this way is I do that a lot in my own life. I don’t respect my emotional side, I always think the logical, rational thing has to happen. And if I cave to the emotional side, it’s weak. So, in the play, that’s the crux of it. That’s where I see the human in all of the characters.
 

Christine Bunuan (Calphurnia/Metella Cimber): I feel like for the characters that I play, it’s coming from a place of love and maybe righteousness, and a protection. I feel like that’s where I’m coming from. Metella loves her brother and is trying to find a way to protect him and bring him back because what was done to him was not right and she is fighting for him. And Calphurnia absolutely loves her husband and the last thing on earth that she wants to do is lose him and it’s just horrifying. I mean, I’m married, so the thought of losing my own husband is awful. If the only way I could protect him was to keep him in the house for just that one day, then…I would do everything that I could to keep him in the house. I actually come from a very emotional place. This play has touched a lot of emotional things in my life, because I also don’t normally get to play roles like this. I play funny, quirky roles. So to play a woman like Calphurnia has been very rewarding and has allowed me to be the strong person that I am in my life and to represent her onstage.
 

Kelly: What do you think about the diversity of theater here in Chicago? You have a lot of theater, from the storefronts to the bigger theaters like this one…
 

Madrid: People should keep in mind, about storefront theater, that you’re talking about a city that has over 300 non-equity theater companies. You’re talking about a lot of actors getting work, but not making any money. Here, we’re working at a theater that pays actors really well. Is there the opportunity to take this elsewhere? Sure, but not making what we’re making here. Money is a factor.
 

Kelly: What do you think is so different out here versus other cities?
 

Julian: I think it’s all about the handshake here. It’s very much rooted in a complete open-door policy. You can meet anybody from the Artistic Director all the way down the ladder. Through my non-profit, Definition Theatre Company, I truly believe it’s all about the handshake here and relationships, more than anywhere else. If you do good work and want to do good work, people will link you in. There’s so much shit happening here all the time. As far as representation goes, I think Chicago is doing much better in the theater scene, but it’s still a huge gap of what should and could be. I know I’m preaching to the choir, but it starts with representation from a young age, in the classrooms. That’s why those performances are the most important.
 

I was almost a manager at Hollister. I didn’t know where I was going, I was out in Northbrook trying on clothes and they signed me up to be a manager. But what I learned from it is that they put you in the front of the store wearing the clothes. If I’m the only one who wears that, it’s like, oh, somebody looks like me wears that! So you have to get in the schools and get these kids to know. There’s such a push to have all-black or all-lady administration on both sides of the table. If they don’t know that’s even an option, all we’re doing is twiddling our thumbs that we can’t find them because we never showed them it was cool, or a trustful place to go, or that you could accrue cash from it too.
 

Kelly: I think it’s really moving for people to see people who look like them. It shows them that they can do it too, whatever it is.
 

Sydney: The first time I saw someone onstage who was like me was three years ago and a thing happened to me where I was like oh…OH. It’s okay. You can be different. I am still very impacted by that.
 

Christine: Performing is a part of my culture. People start singing karaoke when they come out of the womb and they all start dancing and stuff. So I was trying to think back about when it did affect me. My mother always encouraged me to sing as a child, then I did see somebody doing a talent show, and she was Asian. So I never necessarily believed I couldn’t do it, because I saw other kids. Sometimes I think that talking too much can actually separate us. I didn’t see colors, really, until I came to Chicago and not really until I’d graduated from school, because I was told that I was Asian. I would see auditions and I would just go in because I “didn’t know any better,” but it wasn’t until everyone started talking about diversity that it actually made me fearful of it. Then I started to only go in for Asian roles, and I put myself in a little box and started to live in fear. A few years ago, I saw I put myself in my own box. Some people do need to see someone like them in order to know that they can do that too, but it’s also on us to be like, well, this is what I want to do, so I’m just going to do it anyway. If it’s in you, the worst that someone can ever say is no. So go try again.
 

Kelly: The last thing I want to pose to all of you is…what do you hope people take from this? When someone leaves the theater, what do you want them to have that they didn’t have before the show started?
 

Madrid: A) An appreciation for the language, B) I hope that the story inspires them to have a real conversation amongst themselves.
 

Sydney: And an understanding that the ideas that they have about what casting should be is not…
 

Arya: It’s not set in stone.
 

Sydney: Yeah, I think especially a lot of the people in this area –and I don’t want to make assumptions –but a lot of people have a certain idea and I want it to be shattered.
 

Christine: What’s fascinating is they did a reading with the Chicago Inclusion Project of Saint Joan, and [Michael Halberstam] presented a very diverse cast, and asked the question to the audience, did it throw you to actually see this diversity onstage? And one woman raised her hand and said she thought about it for a moment, but that’s it.
 

I think it is important for Artistic Directors to understand. Michael is one of the rare ADs who actually understands the complexity. When he did present this show to his audience, he was like, did this change the story in any way? And the audience said no, not at all. It’s our responsibility as artists to give our audiences more credit, that they are smarter than what we think they are. So the door’s open, and it’s going to be a different world.

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A Conversation with Emily Simoness

Emily Simoness SPACE on Ryder Farm

 
Emily Simoness and I met seven years ago on a blustery January morning. Emily was an actor and I was working at Disney Theatricals. It was 6:45am in Harlem; we were stationed outside of the Apollo Theater, registering legions of hopeful young Simbas and Nalas for an open call of The Lion King. As is customary among chilly compatriots working an open call, Emily and I stole time to make small talk. Warming on our hands on dunkin donuts coffee, we discussed, among many usual topics, our aspirations to make a lasting impact in the industry in the interest of new, exciting, and vital work. We spent a harried day freezing and thawing our fascia all for the sake of the dreams of these little ones — and a paycheck from doing work in the biz.
 

After spending the day with Emily I was struck by two wonderful things about her: she was confident and powerful in a warm way. She has nothing to prove – she knew she had a place at the table just by virtue of her passion for art and artists. She’s not arrogant. She knows she can make a difference, and does. She sees you. She listens attentively without waiting for her turn to speak. Okay, so maybe this is more than two things. If you don’t know her, you don’t know it’s hard to just pick two. And if you don’t know me you don’t know that I say “just two little things” which eventually leads to an effusively extended list.
 

When Emily created a space for artists I wasn’t surprised. But, SPACE?! Who knew the woman had a three hundred year connection to a farm in upstate New York? I don’t know that for much of her life even Emily knew. I love visiting the farm. Everyone you encounter looks well fed and contemplative and yes, they really are all theater artists. They’re well fed, nurtured by nature, and trusted to do their work. Emily’s leadership on the farm is apparent not only in her involvement but also in her delegation. She trusts those she’s hired to be ambassadors of the SPACE mission – let the people do the work in the most beautiful place with the confidence and validation that just being at SPACE is enough.
 

What follows is the transcript of what always proves to be an enlightening conversation with a very real, very honest, and very special person. Emily, thank you for the space. From all of us.

 

 

Gina Rattan: So is Ryder Farm your mom’s side or dad’s side of the family?
 

Emily Simoness: My mom’s.
 

GR: Was she ever out here?
 

ES: She was born in upstate New York, but she never visited the farm until I visited the farm. So her father, my grandfather, had been here a lot but she had never visited. So it really wasn’t until…she told me tales of it when I was a kid, and one of my aunts had visited a few times, so she told me about it. Now they come and visit. My branch of the tree was sort of far flung – my grandparents moved them all to Wisconsin and they weren’t really involved – and now they’ve come back, which is cool.
 

Emily Simoness SPACE on Ryder Farm
 

GR: It’s cool that it skipped one generation in your family and has now come back. What brought you here in the first place?
 

ES: That’s the part I still don’t know. I had heard about it as a kid. We would get like a yearly letter from the corporation which owns the land, which is comprised of 87 family members, and I remember getting that letter and I remember hearing about it and then I honestly don’t know what made me cold call Betsey Ryder, who is my fourth cousin once removed. I called and said, “I’m Emily, I’m related to you, can I come and check out the farm?” And she was like, sure. But I don’t know what made me curious.. I was an actress, I was bored, I was curious, and the farm seemed so groovy. That’s the part that like…I don’t really believe in God, but…destiny or something. It’s weird. It was great timing. It’s very clear to me why I stayed, but why I went in the first place? I don’t know.
 

GR: So, now the dream has been realized, right? This incredible place exists, you have a phenomenal team, and really well-developed programming. Is your ultimate goal achieved?
 

ES: Right now, because this 1795 homestead is not insulated, we’re limited with the time we can be here because the winters are not bearable. One of the things I’m interested in is getting the place (buildings) online for the whole year, what that would look like, and what that would necessitate. It’s something I really have my mind on.
 

In terms of the first six years, I do feel like it’s been a test kitchen. It’s been great, and successful – we’ve tried a lot of different things. We started out with just a general residency, which meant that any individual artist or artistic organization could apply with a project. Now we have the Family Residency and the Creative Solutions Symposium, which is for those working in the social justice space and are looking at creative solutions for their organization’s mandates. We have The Working Farm, which is where seven or eight playwrights come up for five weeks and they all work on a play. Additionally, we support a bunch of institutions, and they come up and either work on strategic planning or workshop plays for their next season. We also just hosted a week of social justice activists, their guiding question was how to combat racial inequity. I would say 80% of our constituents are theater artists, and the other 20% sort of wax and wane between activists and dancers and some visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers. Next year, we’re really going to clarify the communities we’re serving are and why; who’s primary and who is secondary.
 

GR: What’s down the road in the immediate future?
 

ES: We’re also on the brink of a capital campaign. We’ve done what we can do with the existing physical plant. We’ve rehabilitated these structures and started renting them; the outdoor stage was built – there’s now a stage in the barn – and there’s now a dock on the lake. We’ve converted a chicken coop to an artist studio. There isn’t any other existing structure that we can do anything with. We’ve had some informal performances in the barn, and I really think having a barn-like structure, whether it’s the existing one or a new one, would allow us to have rehearsals and workshops and present shows and hold conferences for farmers. Part of what I’m trying to sort out is what the earned revenue engine is of this place, from a business standpoint. A commercial kitchen is on my mind, because that would allow us to take our farm-to-table dinner situation to the next level. And then, ultimately – and this is down the road – really looking to have a different housing set-up with artists and farmers. This house – which is called The Sycamores, and was built in 1795 – ultimately probably wants to be the show piece and a love letter to the family, so [I want] to preserve the house.
 

Emily Simoness SPACE on Ryder Farm
 

GR: Did you ever think you were going to be here, at this time, looking at all of these past and future endeavors? It’s really remarkable what you’ve all accomplished.
 

ES: No, fuck no. Thank you, and no. No way. I did not grow up in a rural setting so that wasn’t ever anything I saw for myself. There’s always so many new challenges here. The minute you figure out how to get your 501(c)(3) non-profit status and [figure out] what that even means, and what a board of a non-profit means, and all of those things…the minute you sort all that out, you have to hire staff and understand what that means, both from a person-to-person place and also a legality place. And then the minute you figure that out, you have to start working with building inspectors about what compliance looks like, in terms of buildings. It’s just a lot of different areas of learning. I think that’s been good for my temperament.
 

GR: Because there’s enough variety.
 

ES: Yeah. I’m trying to learn now what a conservation easement would mean. I don’t know a lot about that. Learning how people organize around that, and what a winning application would look like, and how that differs from a winning application from the NEA.
 

GR: What is a conservation easement?
 

ES: There are a bunch of different kinds of easements, but essentially it would ensure the land’s safety and security from development. So essentially, you apply to the state…well, you first get an appraisal on the land, and the appraisers tell you what it’s worth. Then you apply to the state and if you win, the state puts up 75% of the appraised value of the land, and 25% in matching funds is secured for the rest of the appraised value. So Ryder Farm would get paid a nice sum of money in exchange for agreeing to never develop the land, which is funny, because if you had said to me seven years ago that land conservation was of interest, I wouldn’t have even known what that meant.
 

GR: Or why it would be important.
 

ES: Right. It factors in hugely to me, because our artistic mission is a big one, but there’s also the mission of this family and keeping this land. I guess that’s another question. What’s next? Ultimately, I’ve got this thing in my craw about saving family farms through art, which sounds crazy. When I first said this to my mom, she was like, “So you’re putting a church on a farm?” But I do think that if a template can be created here, who knows? You might be able to take that to other places.
 

GR: Saving family farms through art, meaning people setting up similar things to this because it revitalizes everything?
 

ES: Yeah, basically learning from what we have done at Ryder and seeing what the components are that we can take forward into the next venture that would yield a similar result.
 

Emily Simoness SPACE on Ryder Farm
 

GR: Does this help make money for the farm? Or is not really about money?
 

ES: I think it’s more about reviving. This makes money because [SPACE] pays rent on the structures we use, thus we created revenue streams through rent. There are a lot of ways to skin that cat, but it might be a viable model. We’ve got a lot of work to do still.
 

GR: This seems like a place where no matter who comes here, they’re profoundly impacted by it and want to be around here. There’s something that’s revitalizing about the place. What a wonderful lifecycle for the artist to give back to the farm and continue to engage.
 

ES: Exactly. And I guess a question I have is, was SPACE a fluke? I doubt it. I’m sure there are other places like this that could use a similar model.
 

GR: Oh, especially being able to get out of the city and into a different place. It has been inspiring for artists of many generations, retreating to nature and the country and all of that…but something you guys do that’s unique is that the whole experience is very home-y. Everyone eats meals together that are cooked fresh in the kitchen with ingredients from the farm.
 

ES: Being in someone’s home is different than being in a dorm. Having your rehearsal studio be a barn or a chicken coop is different than being in a fluorescent-lighted, mirrored space. Actually, a lot of the feedback we’ve gotten, is that there’s something about the wildness of the land and imperfect nature of these homes that lets people feel like it doesn’t have to be so perfect, you know? The pressure is off. In the beginning we said – and it’s on the website still – that this is “your artistic home away from home.” It really does feel like a home. It wasn’t by design because we’re using what was here, but it certainly has been leaned into.
 

GR: Feeling at home and releasing your non-fluorescent work are correlated.
 

Emily Simoness SPACE on Ryder Farm
 

ES: At the beginning, the intention was to paint a wall or fix a ceiling so we could inhabit it. It wasn’t much beyond that. The fact that there’s a guy gardening there [points to the field] is hilarious to me, because for four years we didn’t even look at the land – I couldn’t take that on. I couldn’t focus on how to spackle a wall and how to erect a loft in the corn crib and how to insulate a structure and also look at manicuring the hedges.
 

GR: I like that idea; that being in a space that’s not perfect allows you to take the pressure off of yourself, or allows you to focus more on the process. This house is keeping me dry in the rain, it doesn’t have to be fabulous, so what’s the purpose of what I’m working on now?
 

ES: Right, which like, when we do “improve” the things here, it wants to be in line with this sentiment. I never want to get too fancy, because that’s just not what this is. I love the idea that people came to Taylor Mac’s performance here and used a port-a-potty.
 

GR: That’s the gig.
 

ES: That’s what this is, and most people are pretty great about that.
 

GR: In a way, it attracts a good fit artist-wise.
 

ES: That’s true. And I take that really seriously. That’s one thing I’ve really learned about this – managing expectations. In a lot of ways, this is a hospitality job. It’s really important for people to feel safe and comfortable. They know what they’re getting into and what it’s going to look like and I think that’s a part of feeling safe. They need to feel safe to be creative. It can be dangerous too, but there needs to be a container for it. There are so many variables here, like the weather…
 

GR: There are bugs, there are raccoons…
 

ES: Yeah, it’s like, really freakin’ old. That’s why the days are grounded in the three meals, so there’s some sort of grounding or common denominator.
 

GR: Well, yeah, it allows it to be a cohesive experience. Is it worth complaining about something when you have this beautiful meal in front of you and you’re all working away?
 

ES: The staffing has been a huge part of it, too. At the very beginning, it was like ten of us who were hardy and down and it was a totally different thing. There was no evidence that what you and I are talking about right now [SPACE] was ever going to exist. And then it was like I was on a life raft for a very long time with various founders who would come in for short spurts or we’d cobble together a little bit of money and hire a contractor for a stint, and then in the last two-and-a-half years we’ve really had people who get up in the morning and think about the organization like I do, because they’re paid to. That’s a radically different thing, and there’s so much responsibility that comes with that too.
 

GR: Well, it must’ve changed a lot for you to have full time support.
 

ES: Right, the fact that Maggie [SPACE’s Company Manager] was able to take you guys down to the lake, and that there are three contractors with the kids who are in residency with their moms, that’s the only way we can do this. I was never going to run this Family Residency program if SPACE didn’t have this kind of professional oversight. I would say that is the number one thing that has changed since the beginning. I mean, time is this crazy thing, because you’re like…could [SPACE] happen? Will all the things I want in terms of the buildings and the programs and the infrastructure come to fruition? Something that I can point to is staffing. It’s alleviated the strain and made us able to do more things and helped us serve people more deeply.
 

GR: I imagine, too, that every year you do it, the more you realize is possible, because you accomplish this, this year and then next year…
 

ES: That’s a big thrill of it too.
 

GR: Wanting more.
 

ES: There’s so much responsibility to do what I see as the right thing for now. But also…I’m seventh generation of this family. I want the place (the farm) to still be flexible enough so that the version of me 140 years from now could have some amazing idea that isn’t this idea. [Emily points down towards the road] You know, there used to be a tennis court over there. There was an apple orchard over there for a long time. Towards the back of the property, at the lake, is a forest, but 40 years ago it wasn’t a forest, it was pasture, which is crazy. I find myself constantly trying to zoom out, and that’s challenging.
 

Emily Simoness SPACE on Ryder Farm
 

GR: Right, what allows you to be here today is that legacy and then you are also realizing that you’re a part of someone else’s legacy in doing it. I wonder then what it would be like to make those decisions and go, “Okay, we don’t want this to be a prohibitive choice”…it would be so interesting to see how your relatives in the past made those decisions and what plays into it historically, because some of it is out of necessity, of course. You build this and that and build a forest or an apple orchard because it was time to do that.
 

ES: That’s what’s so crazy about it. Different iterations.
 

GR: I have a question for you about transitioning from being a freelance actor – which you were for years in New York – to doing this. In some ways you’re using similar skills – having to be bright, resourceful, and excellent at dealing with people, but in a very different way. That’s a huge transition. What was that like? Did you have regrets?
 

ES: It was hard. When I first came here, [SPACE on Ryder Farm] was a hobby. It was not a salary, it wasn’t even a thing…it was just this crazy notion that was distracting at a time when I needed a lot of distraction.
 

GR: Because you were unhappy?
 

ES: Yeah. I have tremendous respect for actors. My husband [Michael Chernus] is an actor, but it was such an unrelentingly hard profession for me. For Michael, [SPACE] would be unrelentingly difficult. I really believe that it’s all going to be hard, it just depends on what you’re built for and what you want to do. Anything worth doing is going to be hard. When I was an actor, I hated not being able to get up in the morning and have a thing I was doing. I hated waiting for other people’s permission and invitation.
 

I landed here in 2009 and I would say I really stopped acting in 2012. So for three years, I was still identifying as an actress. SPACE was a hobby on the side, and then all of a sudden – not all of a sudden, a couple mornings in a row, a couple of weeks in a row, and then for a couple months in a row – I realized, I am only thinking about Ryder Farm. I’m never thinking about being an actor. Right around the time that I started making the decision [to focus on SPACE] is when things really started to kick in for me. It was hard in some ways. Acting was my life. I went to conservatory and failure is not something that I had a good time with. Not to say that I was a failure, but my time acting was incomplete for sure. What I set out to do, I didn’t do as an actor, but I also didn’t want to be an actor anymore.
 

GR: Being a super successful working actor didn’t happen right away for you but you found something else that had a greater number of elements of what you were interested in.
 

ES: In a lot of ways, thank God success in acting didn’t happen right away, because we probably wouldn’t be standing here. At the beginning of SPACE, the concept appealed to so many actors. It’s such a tactile thing. It’s making something. There were walls to paint.
 

GR: Like, oh look I painted that, it’s done, it’s accomplished.
 

ES: Right, it’s really good for people. Something I really try to instill in the interns, the ones who are actors, is to figure out what you’re doing between acting jobs that is meaningful and uses your skills.
 
 

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A Conversation with Lyndsay Magid & Josh Aviner

Lyndsay Magid & Josh Aviner

 

Walking into the studio where producer Lyndsay Magid and director Josh Aviner are rehearsing is like walking into EDM slumber party fever dream. As they tell the story, the performers walk the line between precision and wild abandon. We sat down with Lyndsay and Josh to talk about their dazzling hybrid of dance-circus-storytelling, SLUMBER, premiering at House of Yes.

 

 

Corey Ruzicano: I would love to start by talking about the language of circus. How does the cirque vocabulary add to or shift the process and limits of storytelling?
 

Josh Aviner: I think circus traditionally is very trick-based. Most different cirque disciplines have a series of tricks that you learn and do. In the last thirty years, a lot of circus schools have been focusing less on the trick and more on the over-the-top physicality stuff you might see at Streb. It’s closer to dance, but still circus-esque. A challenge for us is picking what tricks we think enhance the storytelling and which are just too “show-biz-y” to use. It’s a balance between, okay that trick looks like you’re choking her and is also a really impressive circus trick, versus, that one looks too much like a style, like it belongs on a more old school style show. It’s important to be familiar with the vocabulary, seeing a lot of different acts, and being able to say, out of the thirty tricks you can do, which are the fifteen that work best for what we’re doing, and then using Keone and Mari [Madrid, choreographers] to fill in the gaps to make the tricks look a little less like tricks and a little more like acting moments.
 

Lyndsay Magid: Something that’s been really interesting is that most circus performers come with a specific act and then there’s a process of restructuring it so it has the feeling of the song and the moment of the show, which is different than a traditional circus show where they just book the act.
 

JA: They already come with a song.
 

LM: They come with the song, they come with the act, that’s what you get. With this it’s: let’s deconstruct your act and mold it to fit the dynamics of the moment.
 

JA: That’s the fun part.
 

CR: I would love to hear more about what are the things that you love about doing this? As a pair you have such compatible backgrounds for this kind of work –what is it like working on a project where you’re both coming at it from such different angles?
 

LM: Well, I’m like, what’s the story? Who are you? What is their connection to each other? Because I’m a musical theater girl. Make me feel something. And Josh is like, I want to feel something but I want to be wowed.
 

JA: What’s special about circus, at least to me, is that in-the-moment, visceral reaction. When you see someone drop from fifteen feet and all you know is that the only thing catching them is their own hands, that gives you a gasp you can’t really get in another medium. So the tricky part is tying what’s best about circus and what’s best about theater, and now that we have Keone and Mari here, what’s best about dance. What’s interesting about adding dance is that it’s this level of precision that theater and circus don’t really have. Theater often, with the exception of Curious Incident, isn’t so specifically choreographed. Circus isn’t choreographed at all – it’s athletic, it’s a trick and then another trick. Having Keone and Mari has been so helpful because they point out that we can take all of these little moments in between and just by moving your hand in this direction you can add a whole meaning to it without text. And that’s been my favorite part.
 

We’ve been working on this contortion number with Olga, where the premise is that she’s coming back from being almost dead. Usually a contortion number is just picking the trick sequences and now that we have the song, we have all this cool movement you can do within a trick with your free hand or your free foot or leg or head, to make it way more creepy and make the character way more clear. So that kind of collaboration, taking what the artist brings to it, has been the most fun part.
 

LM: It’s almost like the dance is the bridge between these two worlds, it’s connecting it. When we started, I knew it would be additive, but I didn’t think it would be so connecting of the two. It’s so cool because we have the dancers and we have the circus performers, and both groups keep saying, I feel so out of my element. It’s not a circus show, it’s not a dance show.
 

Lyndsay Magid & Josh Aviner
 

CR: Absolutely. What’s it like when all these people who speak different languages get in a room together?
 

LM: It’s awesome. I think a lot of people would think it’d be hard, building a show with so many different vocabularies, but everyone is so game to do it. It’s funny, we’re doing lift and the dancers are trying to figure out how to do it, and the circus performers get it in one go, and then they’re doing a section where they’re dancing in counts and that’s easy for the dancers, but it’s so different from circus. So it’s really cool to see the different skills, it’s what makes it a show I’ve never seen before, it’s a whole new genre.
 

JA: All the numbers that we’re making are ensemble numbers, and usually when you’re seeing a circus show, you see a Chinese pole act, there’s a sort of lamppost looking thing. If you’re doing an ensemble piece in circus, you have a bunch of people coming down and doing flips and things, but now that we have all these dancers we can do all these things with dance that match – like, as he drops, what kind of dance movements can we do that a typical circus performer wouldn’t have the physical awareness to be able to do? We picked Keone and Mari when we were looking around, because they do this very close storytelling thing that we really want to do and because we thought our languages were similar.
 

CR: In that vein, what has it been like cultivating these different creative partnerships, both with each other and with the community? How and with whom do you collaborate? What’s your recipe for success?
 

JA: Well, I think I have a recipe for collaboration, not necessarily for success. I think it’s being super, super open, to start with. Not taking anything personally if someone throws up an idea that’s different from your idea. And I think listening, particularly for me as the director and Lyndsay as the producer, it’s really about getting everybody’s thoughts on how they imagined it, because usually that’s so much better than I imagined it in my head alone. I feel like if we let everybody bring to the table what we hired them for, why we wanted to work with them in the first place, I think that’s really key. Listening.
 

LM: Yeah, not treating any idea like it’s precious. Being open, knowing that ideas can come from anywhere; I think that’s really important way to think about the process. My idea isn’t the right idea, it’s just an idea. It’s how we go about it, even with each other when we’re talking about something. It’s like, well I have an idea, so we just start with that, and then it usually ends up a totally different idea, but if you’re not open to it, it can never get to that other place.
 

JA: Circus is also a little bit different from theater in that there’s no playwright. The job of the director is mostly to come up with the concept for each of the scenes. Circus community doesn’t call the rehearsal period rehearsal, they call it creation, because so much that actually needs to be created in that period that typically the playwright would probably have created prior to, that would map out the beginning, middle, end of the scene. With circus, it’s like we know we need to hit this trick and this trick and we have to get to the finale trick at this musical cue, and I want to use you guys…and there’s no way to really script that.
 

CR: Do you guys use text in this piece?
 

JA: We do. We have two characters who have pre-scripted text and there’s about ten minutes of talking in the show – some of it is improv, some of it is set. We do acknowledge the audience is there, so some of it, who’s in the audience that day will determine what we talk about.
 

CR: That’s so cool. I ask because I remember reading this article on HowlRound while Les 7 Doigts de la Main were doing their show Traces at ArtsEmerson, about how the use of spoken text in circus was so form-breaking and shocking for a lot of people, that it’s a different practice with a different set of rules. So I think it’s so cool to hear about how you’re taking this rulebook and reframing it for what you want to make and do.
 

JA: Oh yeah, we’ve definitely been inspired by 7 Fingers. Gypsy [Snider], one of the co-founders who directs many of their shows, was actually very helpful in getting two of our circus performers. We called her and said, we need a contortionist and we need someone who can do Chinese pole, and she was like, I have the people for you. It’s so great to be able to all help each other out and it’s a pretty small community, you get to know everybody pretty quickly.
 

CR: Of course, I’m sure there aren’t very many performers who can do all those things. How do you see horror and circus being used as a lens for autobiography?
 

JA: That’s a good question. I think the tricky part about circus is being very specific. It’s hard to hit or talk about specific themes. In a play, you’re talking, so you can talk about things, about what you want to artistically say. I think the purpose of circus is to give you emotion, and we’re trying to use the text to get you the ideas, that hopefully over the show, the music, the dance, the circus, has put you in the right kind of mood to be receptive to the little bit of talking they have, to what the motivation is behind the show, why we’re here doing what we’re doing.
 

LM: I also think the idea, when you see horror, that person doing the horrific acts has a very strong motivation, and that motivation is clear to see when you go see horror.
 

JA: And the way in which we’re treating horror less like slasher film and more like a Quentin Tarantino movie: lots of thriller, blood, action, but it’s not just gore.
 

LM: Exactly, and I think it helps that it’s horror because this character with the motivation, we follow her through the whole show and she has a very strong point of view and a very strong point to her actions, so it’s a really easy story to follow. I think sometimes with contemporary circus, you get the idea or theme of the show but it’s hard to follow the actual story; whereas with this I understand what’s happening to these people, especially with the talking, it clarifies exactly what’s happening. You get the story and you get the visceral motivation.
 

JA: The most important thing is character, so with all of the physicality, with your dance, how can we be really clear about how everyone is related together, who’s the one who’s not cool, who’s the one who’s super cool, who has a crush on whom, who’s angry at whom? Without words you have to get that all across, but if you manage to do that, then you can get the audience aligned with the performers the way you would in a play.
 

Lyndsay Magid & Josh Aviner
 

CR: What about fear is compelling for the act of storytelling, especially when there’s a choice involved?
 

JA: Circus is very fear-based I think. You can imagine someone walking a wire or doing an aerial act and the danger is just real, and therefore the fear is real.
 

LM: I mean, they train lots and lots and lots of years. It’d be different if, say, I decided to get up there and do it.
 

CR: Oh yeah, me too.
 

JA: Of course, but fear is still really tied to circus. Even the best acting moments…you could have Meryl Streep stabbing Al Pacino on stage, and at the end of the day, you know it’s all fake. With circus, if you mess up, the danger is real.
 

LM: I really want to see that show.
 

CR: Well, there you go, that’s your next project!
 

JA: Definitely. And that’s what makes fear such a fun thing to play with. Our performers totally know what they’re doing, but maybe to the audience there is a question of whether or not they’re in control of what they’re doing.
 

LM: It’s new every time – even though I know exactly what trick he’s doing, I know the setup, I still gasp. As an audience member, it is really fun to feel that real, urgent sense of fear.
 

CR: And it’s so interesting to juxtapose the manufactured horror-fear with the very real physical fear.
 

JA: Yes, exactly. Nailed it.
 

CR: Oh amazing, I passed the test. So why Brooklyn? Why New York? How does circus relate to place?
 

LM: Well, we both live in Brooklyn. We’ve lived in New York for the past seven or eight years, my formative understanding of the field is what it’s like to be part of the field in New York. I spent a lot of time in commercial theater and Broadway and I loved the community. Meeting Josh three years ago at Columbia and talking about where New York fits in this greater scheme of circus…it’s a pretty small community here. And it’s such a hub for all other art forms that it’s strange that circus is so underrepresented here.
 

JA: But the thing about New York circus is that it seems inherently a little more theatrical because it’s in a very theatrical city, and there are other cities like Montreal or Chicago or Las Vegas, where it’s a little more traditional show-biz-y, and not in a bad way, it’s just more presentational. And because we’re in New York and there’s less circus, the circus that does exist seems to pull a lot from the theater and from the dance community and so I think we both realized that and thought, oh, we really really commit to that and really pull from theater and really pull from dance and try to make something that New York audiences will like.
 

LM: And we also both felt strongly that we wanted to stay in New York and create this new voice of our voices in circus and what the future of the American contemporary circus is and can be, because there’s a lot of people doing it that I really admire, and so in trying to create our own voice, doing it in Brooklyn felt like the most authentic place to start.
 

JA: And then we can tour it.
 

Lyndsay Magid & Josh Aviner
 

CR: How does audience engagement differ for this kind of art? How has the development of your podcast informed your work?
 

JA: Oh man the podcast has been so awesome, because when we started it, I think the idea was, it doesn’t really matter who listens because we’re just going to get to talk to all these amazing people we admire. They come over to our house and have beer and hang out and we chat, but we never really get into it in the way you sometimes do in an interview. And after the podcast we felt like all these amazing people give these snippets of advice and things that have worked for them, that we’re trying to absorb as much as we can. As to how we’re trying to work with the audience in this show, we start off with the audience thinking that there’s a fourth wall and there are all these perceptions that get shattered pretty quickly.
 

LM: It’s an immersive show in that you’re actually inside of this environment of the world. It’s not invasive in that you have to participate.
 

JA: It comes to you.
 

CR: What is the role of technology in the conversation – both of making the art and producing or communicating it?
 

LM: Well we found Keone and Mari on YouTube. Their career started through YouTube.
 

JA: And the internet is so amazing in terms of casting. Circus performers are spread all over the world, and sometimes you’re hiring people from Mongolia or Russia or Australia, and that’s pretty normal just because there aren’t that many people who can do all that stuff, so you have to find them wherever you can. And the internet is the number one way to find them, and then you try to go see and meet them in person. But that casting is pretty key for the conception of the project, but other than that this is a pretty low-tech show. The blood effects have a little tech in them but pretty much everything else is done by hand, old school ropes and pulleys.
 

LM: And as far as the audience using their cell phones, the good thing about circus and being in the space we’re in, we don’t care if you post a photo.
 

JA: As long as you use the right hashtag.
 

LM: Yeah, we’re lucky in that sense that it’s not destructive to the show, it’s additive in a way. Just no flash. Other than that it’s a pretty low-tech show, which is nice.
 

JA: The more tech, the more things can go wrong.
 

CR: Definitely, there’s already a lot of fear involved. When you feel stuck, what do you do? To whom do you turn?
 

JA: One another.
 

CR: That’s awesome – do you have pieces or places you look to for inspiration, or heroes that you draw from?
 

JA: Oh absolutely. Sort of all over the place. Artistically, 7 Fingers and James Thiérrée, Charlie Chaplin’s grandson, who has a lot of shows that come to BAM, and frankly Cirque du Soleil have been huge influences in shaping what I like and got me excited abou circus in the first place. Whenever we’re stuck, Lyndsay and I sit in our apartment and we just talk it out.
 

LM: And coming from musical theater, I love contemporary musical theater songs. I think they’re great at telling a song telling a specific story and I love listening to the builds of those songs. I worked at Atlantic Theater Company for a while and the Managing Director there, Jeff Lawson, I call him my theater dad. He’s really great at being part of the theater world but also understanding what we’re doing.
 

JA: And both our dad’s are entrepreneurs, totally self-made people, so whenever we have a real legal problem like, oh man this contract totally blew up in my face and it has nothing to do with theater, it’s nice to have parents who have that business background and have been through that struggle.
 

LM: Because that stuff is a struggle.
 

Lyndsay Magid & Josh Aviner
 

CR: My last question is, what’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten?
 

LM: The best piece of advice I’ve actually ever gotten has nothing to do with anything, but I was an actor at one point and studied at BADA in Oxford, and Alan Rickman came and taught class and someone had said, you always play the villain – and I think this is really pertinent to this show – and he said, I never think of myself as the villain. The villain never sees themself as the villain. They want whatever they want more than anyone else and they’ll do whatever it takes to get it. And I just thought, that’s so smart and it’s so relevant to this show with a character who wants what she wants more than anybody else.
 

JA: Mine’s more circus-y but Paul Binder, the founder of Big Apple Circus, told me this thing about working with collaborators which is that, you know you have a good or bad collaborator if, when you tell them you don’t know about an idea, they get very defensive. Because people who are genuinely creative are open to new ideas and coming up with more things. But if someone is so defensive and fights so hard for their idea it’s because they’re worried they won’t have more. And even though that sounds like something you would use as a template to hire people, it’s actually great internal advice: don’t fight so hard for that one idea, you’ll have more, be in a place where you can let them go, be confident enough that you’ll think of new ones. And if you go into that, you will be in a place to be a good collaborator. 
 

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A Conversation with Ayodele Casel

Ayodele Casel

 

Ayodele Casel is one of those people you can point to and say, that is one of the most exceptional humans I know. Fierce and funny, disciplined and brave, Ayodele is quick-footed and lion-hearted as she takes on the world. Whether it’s on tap dancing, safety tips, how to play video games on her couch at home or active, hopeful ways to look at the world, she teaches me monumental new things with every conversation, class, or performance. Ayodele upholds a level of excellence across the board in art and in heart, a reminder of what we can all strive for.

 

 

Corey Ruzicano: You have this new, extraordinary piece coming up, so I wanted to start out by talking about storytelling. You’re a dancer and an educator and a leader and an actress and a photographer, you’re now running this space, Original Tap House, you’re bursting with talents, and I’m wondering how all these different roles inform one another, and how they’ve shaped the way you communicate and the way you tell your story.
 

Ayodele Casel: Thank you. Yeah, it’s such a great question because I’m not sure I’ve ever actually verbalized how they all intersect. I suppose that there is a throughline, right? There has to be. I was always into telling stories. I think kids are so naturally engaged with their imagination. I knew I wanted to be an actress since I was nine. I knew then: that’s what I wanted to do. So everything that I experienced from that point was with the knowledge that one day I was going to be an actress.
 

CR: That filter was always there?
 

AC: Exactly, it was always through that filter. If I played with my friends, I was practicing. If I watched a film I would think, how are they doing that? How does that work? I was always processing in that kind of a way. I was also a very introverted person, so I think it was also easy for me to kind of play and imagine and pretend in my own space and time. This is kind of related to the piece that I’m doing. When I was eighteen, I discovered classic films and I was really, really into them – analyzing who the directors were, what kind of stories they liked to tell, who they worked with consistently, what kind of storyteller was Hitchcock, what kind of films Cary Grant always did… and so I knew that who I was watching was masterful at what they were doing. I’d like to think that I had, at an early age, a sense for quality. When I started tap dancing in college, I was fortunate enough to meet someone who was an incredible tap dancer. I was fortunate to always have a high level of people around me and for some reason, I just always sought that. I always wanted to surround myself with the best. Having danced with some of, I feel like, the best tap dancers to grace the earth, you can’t help but be filled with that. It just happens naturally; their greatness rubs off on you. At least you hope it does. You know what’s good, there’s a high standard, a bar that you’re always reaching for. That discipline, you can’t escape that. I feel like I have carried that through every aspect of my life. When I became interested in photography, I wanted to look at the best images out there, the best photographers. Even with this space that Torya Beard and I have created here, we wanted to have an elegant space for artists to create. The through line would be integrity and quality, that’s what I’ve tried to draw through everything. But I think I may have lost what your initial question was about storytelling.
 

CR: Not at all. I’m really interested in this question of, how do you tell your own story? Especially for people who are used to expressing themselves through different lenses and with different mediums, how do those vocabularies start to inform the very nature of how you talk about yourself? And then I feel like there’s the tendency or the opportunity to step into the narrative you create for yourself, from that. When you have so many different intersecting interests, how do they come together and shape the way you communicate?
 

AC: You know, it’s so interesting because I feel like I have just recently tried to articulate my story. For many years, I was just dancing it. There are no words, and I was dancing for myself a lot of the time. And with acting, you’re saying words but they aren’t yours. Even now as I struggle to find the words…this piece has been a really great gift and tool for me. For so many years I had always either been acting or dancing and I wanted to combine the two.
 

I had actually explored doing my own show about fifteen years ago, and it was a concert, I had a ten-piece Latin band behind me, and basically I wanted to give voices to my influences. Like my grandfather, I grew up with him and I started listening to Latin music because of him and then I wanted to honor my great-grandmother, because I was so fortunate to know my great-grandparents. I had these really vivid memories of them and I loved their spirits, they were so humble, and I wanted to share that with people. Not a lot of people tell their story and I want to hear everybody’s story. I have wanted to also really give voice to these women tap dancers that I had done as much research as I could, because there’s such little information on them and I’ve had such a great career; I’ve been so blessed that sometimes I don’t think it’s fair. I don’t take it for granted that I’m so fortunate and I don’t like it when people just think they’re the origins of something. One of the things that I’m so connected to and proud of is that I am a part of a larger picture, not just of my family but of this art form, and I think that it’s important to honor the people that put in good blood, sweat, and tears before you so that you could safely step on the stage or express yourself or be recognized.
 

Ayodele Casel
 

CR: Absolutely. Your piece is called “While I Have the Floor.” What are some of the floors or platforms that have been given to you or that you’ve had to fight for along the way? How has artistic mentorship played a role in your life?
 

AC: I feel like it’s important to be very mindful of gratitude. Not always on purpose, but we take things for granted – where you live, being able-bodied, getting to go to college. My mom was really proud that I attended college because she didn’t get to go. For her to have given me that space and encouragement, and to have that vision for myself, right there, that’s one more leg up than what she had. It starts there. And actually, I started dancing in college, so really it was like a double blessing! To meet this guy who was a freshman who said, you like tap, I like tap, I’ll teach you for free. It was just a sharing, there’s no monetary value you can put on that. People take private lessons all the time, I give them all the time, but here I was and he was freely giving his knowledge and sharing his love with me, so that was another leg up for me. When I started tap dancing, there were women in my generation who wanted to dance, but I felt like they were very intimidated by the energy that the men were giving off. They were very confident and virtuosic in improv circles – and I just wanted to dance so badly it didn’t really matter to me. I didn’t see gender in that way, I just thought, we’re here, and I want to do that, so I’m gonna put myself in that circle. As far as having to fight for something, one of my favorite shows and influences was Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk. I was so inspired by that show and also so incredibly disheartened by the fact that there weren’t any female roles for tap dancers. Ann Duquesnay was the singer/actress, but the dancing was all done by men at the time and there were no conceivable openings for women. How do you react to that, if you don’t see yourself fitting in the picture? Do you quit? Do you say, screw it? I thought, I’m gonna make space. It didn’t deter me, I just kept dancing.
 

So when Savion [Glover] first created this group, Not Ordinary Tappers, which was my first big, professional group thing that I did, I was the only woman. That gave me a huge platform. At the time, it wasn’t like, I am woman, hear me roar, I stand for all women, watch out! I just was happy to be there. I didn’t realize it was a thing for me to be the only woman, until people would interview us or they would interview me and say, I didn’t even know women tap-danced. I thought, I get that my presence must feel like an anomaly, but surely I can’t be the only one that’s ever done this. There was Brenda Bufalino, she’s one of our pioneers, and Roxane Butterfly who’s maybe five years my senior, but in terms of that circle of men and people of color doing it…I was kind of alone, especially in New York, in this particular environment. So I thought, clearly there’s a platform here, for me to really speak on this. My first solo show, the one I was telling you about, I called out these same women that I’m calling out in this piece now. It was important to me then to say their names. Nobody was saying their names. The first time I saw Lois Bright, my jaw dropped to the ground, because we knew about Lon Chaney, and Chuck Greene, and Buster Brown, and Jimmy Slyde; they were all alive at that time, but nobody had ever said: Lois Bright, Juanita Pitts, Louise Madison, the Whitman Sisters. And I get it, I know that it comes up when it comes up and sometimes the focus just isn’t on any particular gender but I just thought, isn’t anyone talking about these women?
 

CR: Yeah, whose stories do you think we’re missing – either the stories that you name in this piece or stories you’ve encountered in life that you want to lift?
 

AC: I want to know so much about Lois Bright. Cholly Atkins writes in his book that she was a beautiful, wonderful dancer and his right-hand person for when he would choreograph. That’s a small piece of what we know of her and we know that she was gorgeous and an incredible, flashy, and athletic tap dancer because of the ONE dance clip in “Hi-De-Ho”. She was married to one of the brothers that she danced with and there isn’t much more on her. I don’t know when she started dancing, I don’t know why she quit. I just want to know and see so much more. Louise Madison, there’s just a small short paragraph on her in this dissertation I discovered by Cheryl Willis and it says that she could eat Gregory Hines alive.
 

CR: Wow, what a thing to be remembered by!
 

AC: I know, I was reading it and just thought, oh my god, where is she? Where’s the rest of it? They say she may have fallen in with drugs, and then she essentially just fell off the face of the earth.
 

CR: The way so many women’s stories do.
 

AC: Exactly. We know more about the Whitman Sisters because they were producers and they had their own show, their own Vaudeville act and they were very successful in that circuit, but there’s no footage on them, not in all my twenty plus years of dancing have I seen anything because it doesn’t exist. We’re missing all of their stories, we’re missing all of their voices and I don’t want to be that. I just feel like it would devolve dance and the lineage, so I just feel like it’s really important to write it down.
 

Ayodele Casel
 

CR: How does it change the relationship you have to what kind of story you want to leave behind?
 

AC: I’ll tell you, I’ve been wanting to do this kind of thing since the year 2000 and what really kind of woke me up was a tap history book that was recently published. There’s this section on me and as iI was reading it and its depiction of other women it wasn’t that I was expecting a full story, the book isn’t about me, it’s about a tap dance history, and I’m thankful to even be mentioned in the lineage, but what really bothered me about this particular version of my life that’s now in print forever and ever, amen, is that it reads: “and she stopped for two years.” Period. And then on to the next section. It’s three pages and it ends with that, and I just thought, oh my god this is not my story. This will not define me in print. God forbid something happens to me tomorrow and that’s what’s left. I don’t want to let other people define what that is, because I know what a loss it was to me not to have those other voices and stories of these other women.
 

CR: It’s that same need to “see it to be it” idea, what Jeanine Tesori said in her Tony speech, what we always talk about, how deeply important and revolutionary it is to see representations of people like you doing what you want to do, being who you want to be. Especially when you don’t fit into what’s been presented to you as the canon of whatever that field is, being yourself in that is a political act.
 

AC: Yeah, it absolutely is. I think that, that is one of the wonderful things that tap dance has given me: it teaches you to recognize your individuality from the get-go. In improvisation, you cannot be anybody else. If you aren’t being yourself, you aren’t being authentic, you aren’t being interesting, you aren’t honoring the dance that you’re doing, you aren’t honoring the art form and most importantly, you aren’t honoring yourself because we all have our own unique and wonderful point of view. If you’re paying attention, you learn very quickly to start honing some authenticity.
 

CR: And I love that word “attention” – you’ve said that before to me about making conscious choices about what you pay attention to –
 

AC: Yes, what you put your attention on grows stronger.
 

CR: Yes, I love that idea and that language.
 

AC: That’s how I try to live my life, very intentionally aware of your energy, your point of view, how you see things, positively or negatively, and if they’re negative, you’re going to attract a lot of crap in your life. When I was in my twenties, I read a book called The Four Agreements and it really changed my life because I thought, oh I don’t have to be mad at little things, I don’t have to take things personally. I really started to shift internally how I was reacting. I witnessed a lot of violence as a child and I wasn’t a violent kid, but…well, actually I was going to say that I wasn’t a violent kid, but I used to fight all the time! They used to call me Muhammad Ali, because I was constantly fighting boys, so actually, I was taking that out on the playground. But I was a very good student, I got straight A’s…
 

CR: And you were also in fight club.
 

AC: Yes!
 

CR: It’s so interesting, because female aggression is something that’s so little talked of and so seldom represented, especially for young women growing up.
 

AC: And it’s judged if it is.
 

CR: Right, it’s only the Wicked Stepmothers.
 

AC: Exactly. The book was life-changing because it felt like in my personal life I’d released a lot of tension of anger and lack of control, I felt much happier and at peace. If you cut me off while driving, clearly you’re having a bad day, that doesn’t reflect on me, but then I started to going to William Esper Acting Studio and doing Meisner work, and you have to take everything personally in your work. I realized, doing that training, that, though I’d become a more benevolent, graceful human, I wasn’t honoring the full spectrum of my feelings and emotions. When we’d be doing scene work and you’re supposed to really take in the other person and my partner would be dismissive, and just let it go and Bill Esper would say, how do you feel about it? And it took that for me to actually go back and honor and exercise the full spectrum of all my emotions. Maybe because I was a little bit older, I had the maturity to actually apply that concept into my life with me. I meet everybody now with as much positivity as I can muster, I’m very even-tempered, but I’m from the Bronx. I could beat you down if I wanted to. I don’t have to access that all the time, I cultivate a very peaceful existence because that is something great to put my attention on but I do think it’s important for young girls to know that it’s okay to have that strength. It’s really valuable because, for any human you’re going to face things, things that will want to beat you down, but especially for girls we are constantly judged for how we exhibit strength. She’s a bitch, why’s she so angry? We’re judged on a different scale but I say, don’t apologize for who you are.
 

Same thing for the presidential elections, I just find it so interesting that all of a sudden everyone cares so passionately about a candidate’s honesty and whether or not they lie – and I’m not saying that’s not an important thing on it’s own, but all of a sudden it’s her honesty and her purity that’s under scrutiny and I call hypocrisy.
 

CR: I can only imagine how many more hurdles she’s had to jump than her male counterparts – of course she’s more of a politician, she’s survived this long.
 

Ayodele Casel
 

AC: Yes, that’s the other thing, I read these comments that say: she just feels like “it’s her turn,” she just wants people to vote for her because “it’s her turn,” you know what? YES. It is her turn; she’s held just about every imaginable office. It just makes sense that if you start your life, just like I did at nine years old with the intent of being an actress and joining art programs and going to school for it and doing community theater, and training and this and that and the other thing, then now, yes. If I audition for something now, I want to get it because it’s my turn, I’ve been at this a long time. Don’t tell me that the audacity of me wanting it to be my turn is a bad thing. That double standard is killing me.
 

CR: It’s just equity versus equality, it’s not an equal chance at the goal if they playing fields up until that point haven’t been equal.
 

AC: And I believe the parallel to be absolutely true about tap dancing for men and women. How is that we had someone like Louise Madison, who had the reputation of being able to eat Gregory Hines alive, but we don’t know anything about her? And I get it, we’ve evolved, society has evolved, then in the fifties and the forties, it was different especially for a black woman, but let’s just call it what it is – there is a definite difference in how the genders have been treated. I’ve had such a breeze comparatively, it’s not a complaint because I’ve been so lucky and that’s not lost on me, however, even after I’d worked a lot, agents would call me and say, they’re looking for a tap dancer for a commercial…and I’d say, so, you called me…? And they’d say, well they want a man. They would call me to get the name of a male tap dancer. That was then and it’s gotten so much better, even from twenty years ago. I’m so happy to have witnessed the evolution of it, because, as I said, when I started there weren’t a lot of women getting in the ring with the fellas.
 

CR: Except for Muhammad Ali!
 

AC: Exactly, I was in there, and a lot of women tap dancers would tell me how momentous it was for them to see me up there because it would show them that they could do it. Now I’m looking at so many women flourish, Michelle Dorrance just won a MacArthur Genius Grant, there are so many female dancers who are working at high levels, so I hope that they are aware.
 

CR: And that their history begins to get chronicled in the way that it should.
 

AC: And then, only because I’m obsessed with it, that they then recognize that they’re standing on the shoulders of many, many others.
 

CR: Definitely, and with that in mind, how have you come to define the word “community” for yourself? Has that influenced the genesis of this Tap House you’re creating?
 

AC: Yeah, so many of my friends have been talking a lot lately about that idea of finding your tribe. Because sometimes you land in something that looks like a community and sounds like a community, talks like a community, but really is not a community. It’s really confusing, especially when you’re the newbie, but in my old, wise age.
 

You know, in July, when I was doing the piece at City Center, the reason I was so moved, that it had such an impact on me was because I think it was the first time in my entire career that I felt so supported by fellow artists and the people around me in these last few years. It’s the first time. It felt really good to have people genuinely cheering for you and encouraging you, being moved and expressing that freely, not withholding their compliments and experience, it was an incredible feeling.
 

CR: I wonder if that’s because of the people or because you’ve developed a sense of what you’re looking for, or both maybe.
 

AC: Yeah, I think it all goes back to that community. I got to a point where it’s not about what you have or your status in the field; I now try to keep people around who are great people. That wasn’t always the case. I was trying to fit the circle in the square or the square in the circle. There was a lot of conflict. I mean, I wasn’t fighting anymore! But when you grow up and you aren’t fighting anymore, if you haven’t resolved that way to deal with conflict then you do it internally. And I finally stopped doing that, I stopped trying to fit into people that weren’t my tribe. I’ve definitely cultivated that and I’m much happier for it.
 


 
CR: Absolutely, so then tell me about the Tap House! What are your dreams for this space?
 

AC: Yes, Original Tap House! Torya and I, my little lady love, several years ago we were walking – we used to live on the Upper West Side – so we would walk to the river and were talking about how we wanted to have a space, a building where artists could come to collaborate and make work, we wanted to commission work, we want them to take risks and, as a tap dancer, it’s really important to me to actually have space to rehearse, because in New York a lot of those spaces are closing down.
 

CR: Really?
 

AC: Yeah, we used to have Fazil’s – rest in peace Fazil’s, I love them so much – it was this rickety, rickety studio with holes everywhere but it was amazing. It had wood floors and when I first started it was eight dollars an hour and it was so cheap and there was no pretense. When you were going in there you were going in there to work, you weren’t going in there to get cast or get discovered or hob nob, you were there to work out yourself. Since that space closed, there have been others. We used to go to Chelsea Studios, but now they no longer accept tap dancers. So we’ve slowly and systematically been shut out of all rental and rehearsal spaces in New York City, and that pisses me off. I think if Gregory were alive, he would be banging down doors. It’s important to me for tap dancers to have a space to come and work and not be harassed – you’re tapping, you’re going to scuff the wood, that’s just what happens.
 

So Tap House is all of these things. It’s a space for artists to create, collaborate, in a space that is positive and not oppressive, and elegant at the same time. You should feel as free as possible to create. The big dream is the four-floor building, I have my sights set on one in particular, but we did not want to wait for that. So often we wait and tomorrow is not guaranteed, so what can we do now, while you’re still breathing? I’m a real believer that if I wake up and have breath in my body it’s another chance to do something great. So we thought, what can we do now? We don’t have the million dollar building and we don’t have the time to sit down and write grants which is a job in and of itself. So we thought, what we have now is this space. It’s kind of like the shell, like the body, what matters is what happens inside. Right now, this is the shell, but really what it is, is the program, the idea that you can come here, if you have a play that you’ve written and you’re too scared to invest five hundred dollars in a day to have a reading, you can come here, invite twenty people of your choosing, it looks great and you get to share something. And that is the environment we’re creating. Like when we had Johan Thomas come here, we presented this artist who’s been doing oil on canvas for many, many years, but only for himself because he was hesitant to share his art with the public. So over brunch Torya said why don’t you just present at Tap House? Get some cheese and grapes and wine and we’ll just do it. Just get the ball rolling.
 

CR: That’s what Van Gogh did.
 

AC: Yeah! So he committed to it! He was really nervous, and that’s real, it’s such a vulnerable position to be in. But he came here, forty-five people came, and he sold about eighty percent of his work that afternoon! He didn’t anticipate such interest and I feel like he released something in himself. That is what we want to do for artists. When you talk about opening up the floor, I feel like that is what Jeanine Tesori did for me. She said, you have this idea, here’s a platform for you to do it and I think it’s really important to have people support you in that way. So that kind of energy? That’s my community. If you’re on board with that, with helping us be the absolute best we can be while we’re on this earth, then I’m good with you.
 

Ayodele Casel
 
 

 

 

Ayodele Casel began her professional training at NYU Tisch and is a graduate of The William Esper Studio. Hailed by Gregory Hines as “one of the top young tap dancers in the world,” Ms. Casel has created commissions for Harlem Stage, the Apollo Theater’s Salon Series, and Lincoln Center. Ms. Casel co-choreographed and was featured on the PBS special The Rodgers & Hart Story. Other TV/Film: Third Watch, Law & Order, The Jamie Foxx Show, Bojangles, and Savion Glover’s Nu York. She has performed with Gregory Hines, Jazz Tap Ensemble, and American Tap Dance Orchestra. Ms. Casel was the only female in Savion Glover’s company NYOTs and recently performed in his work STePz. Ms. Casel is a founding director of Original Tap House and Operation:Tap. She is on the faculty of A BroaderWay, and LA DanceMagic. She has appeared on the cover of Dance Spirit, American Theatre, and The Village Voice.

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A Conversation with Nathan Alan Davis & Megan Sanberg-Zakian

Nathan Alan Davis & Megan Sandberg-Zakian

 

The story of Nat Turner is going viral these days as the United States continues to confront slavery’s legacy when we witness and respond to police brutality, mass incarceration, and more. Nat Turner’s story is also made current by the premiere of the film, Birth of a Nation by Nate Parker and by the premier of the play, Nat Turner in Jerusalem this season at the New York Theatre Workshop. Since Nat Turner is on everyone’s tongue and mind, I sat down with playwright, Nathan Alan Davis and director, Megan Sandberg-Zakian, the visionaries behind the play at New York Theatre Workshop, to talk to them about all things Nat Turner including their new play, and the continued fight for diversity and inclusion in contemporary American theatre. Here’s what we had to say.

 

 

Darrel Alejandro Holnes: Nathan, you’re making your New York debut with what feels like a very timely play. Is it true what they say, that timing is everything?
 

Nathan Alan Davis: Who says that?!
 

Megan Sandberg-Zakian: They!
 

[Everyone laughs]
 

NAD: I mean, yes, timing. I definitely feel like there are forces at work, besides myself, in terms of this play. The way that Megan, myself, Phillip [James Brannon, who plays Nat Turner], and Rowan [Vickers, who plays Thomas R. Gray and Guard], all came together – the way the theater came around to support us and the work has kept us together as a team to continue the process all the way to production. [This] has just been a dream come true. It’s allowed us to, as fully as possible, develop this story and get the play out. So much of the timing and those types of things are out of my control as an artist, so when it all falls into line, it’s a beautiful thing.
 

DAH: Why is Nat Turner in Jerusalem so timely? What does it mean to see the piece produced now as conversations around race in America continue to heat up?
 

MSZ: Well, one of the scholars who writes about Nat Turner – his name is Ken Greenberg – has said that the story of Nat Turner continually resurfaces. There have been these moments over the last couple hundred years where the story suddenly arrives back in the consciousness, and how we’re telling the story this time and why we’re telling the story now probably has a lot to do with where we are right now. So I think the questions that you just asked are the set of questions that we are hoping people will be in conversation about and around the play. Why do we need to hear this story right now? I actually think that in a way, that is what the play is about. The play isn’t about here’s the story, the play is about why do we need to be in a room together and engage with this story at this moment? So I don’t know that I have a really great answer. If I did, I could solve everything.
 

DAH: Thank you for your response.
 

MSZ: Partially, for me, the thing that feels really rich and activated right now, around this story, is the questions [raised] about how we view violence. What is the story we tell around violent acts? What is our understanding of the social violence that is shaping our daily lives and our awareness of it? What is our stake in maintaining ignorance about violence? – Ta-Nehisi Coates calls it “The Dream” – What is our stake in staying ignorant of these really violent social systems? Then, what is our response to violence that resists those systems? For me – for all of us – it’s been a very uncomfortable conversation. When you read about – as we did in development – the shooters in Baton Rouge and Dallas who are taking out cops with sniper rifles… to experience the coverage of those things, and see the families of those people whose lives were taken, our reaction, whether it’s grief or activism or sharing on social media – whatever it is – [must be to] then consider our ongoing reaction of, or ignorance of, or complicity in all of the other kinds of deaths that are going on all around us…
 

DAH: What are the other kinds? To name a few…
 

MSZ: All of the deaths related to poverty and disenfranchisement in this country; the deaths of people who aren’t receiving adequate healthcare; the deaths of people who are in dire types of housing situations; the deaths of people who are wrongfully incarcerated in a system that is strongly biased; and of course, the deaths of people all over this country, particularly black people, gunned down by our police forces. So, it’s really hard, as a human being and a progressive person, to say that the violent taking a human’s life is somehow necessary.
 
In the play, when I hear Thomas Gray talk about all of the people that were killed during Nat Turner’s “insurrection,” as it’s called by Thomas Gray, the lawyer character, when 75% of the deaths were women and children – small children, infants and babies – it’s very hard to hear. It’s very hard to listen to, you know? You think about describing the deaths of those 55 people, and then you think about if you had a play describing all of the violent deaths of people under the system of slavery, it would be a 15 year long play.
 

DAH: Yeah, or a 400 year long play.
 

NAD: It continues.
 

MSZ: It’s just very uncomfortable stuff to engage with. So coming back around to my answer to your question, I wonder if part of the reason that the story comes back is that somehow we’re at a place where we’re more motivated to tolerate that discomfort.
 

NAD: I remember Megan and I had a conversation on the phone after I’d written an initial draft of the play, which barely anybody had seen; it was kind of a dream state type of the play; it didn’t really have a lot of the plot elements that this play has now. Megan read it, and it wasn’t even a complete draft, but Megan was like “I’m really uncomfortable! This makes me feel bad!” And that was the main takeaway for me; this is hard stuff to think about, to process, and to look at. It was actually a very important part of the growth of the play for me. You write something, and you have a response…I had to take a breath and be like, yeah, the territory that this delves into is extremely difficult to handle and it asks so much of the artists who are involved in creating it and carrying it and sharing it. It asks us to give everything to it, to honor it in the right way, and to live in a place of discomfort, and to not hide from it. It’s been extremely challenging and also a rewarding part of this process, staying in that conversation.
 

Nathan Alan Davis & Megan Sandberg-Zakian
 

DAH: So a few of the words I’ve heard you both mention are: difficult, hard, complicated. I have not heard the word contentious, controversial. I’m wondering, is this play about controversy? Is this play a controversy?
 

NAD: I never looked at it that way, and I never defined it that way. I think when I approach a play or a piece of art, I’m not particularly thinking of it attempting to cause a controversy or attempting to respond to a controversy. To me, controversy kind of is in the realm of what people find aesthetically acceptable or what people find can or cannot be spoken, or should or should not be said. I’m not saying that…Megan mentioned, when the Nat Turner story does appear in our consciousness over and over again, controversy does erupt out of it. Probably the most famous example is the William Styron novel about Nat Turner, which caused a lot of controversy, because William Styron is a white author portraying Nat Turner, so there was backlash of that from black writers and scholars and people who just found that that wasn’t a fair or accurate depiction. So it happens. But looking at myself now, as an artist, I feel it is my responsibility to tell as much of the truth of the story as I could see. That means me looking inward, and looking outward, having conversations, and keeping the story moving forward. I think for all of us, we really want to honor the spirit of Nat Turner and the spirits of everybody who was involved in that insurrection, you know? Knowing that that is a real thing, and that this is a thing that happened, and that we just want to do our very best to bring as much light as we can to it. As one of many Nat Turner stories that will be told – I certainly don’t claim to be writing any sort of a definitive interpretation, I don’t think that exists, but we’re just really focused on doing our very best.
 

MSZ: I will say though, that we have a lot more information than William Styron did. I would say pretty much more than anyone else has had, in creating this story, just because there’s been a couple of books published recently and one in particular that is extremely exhaustive in terms of the research. I think that book was published after Nate Parker’s film was already happening. So I think once we read that book, by David Allmendinger, we felt a lot of responsibility not to actually have facts that we knew were wrong. For a play that’s very poetic, and is really an invented event, it’s very factually correct. I can only think of one thing in it that is tiny, that I know is not historically true.
 

DAH: And what is that?
 

MSZ: The lawyer character was disinherited by his father. His father made him the executor of his will where he was disinherited. In the play, the father also wills that lawyer a desk, to be the executor of the will on. I would say that was a poetic, dramatic underscore of that historical fact, but really, I don’t think there’s anything else. And I’ve been very, you know, nope, that’s not right, find another way to do that!
 

DAH: So historical accuracy was a priority for you guys?
 

MSZ: Oh yeah. I mean, it’s more like I don’t want the play to contain something that I know to be a historical inaccuracy. Although, I don’t think that it can be historically accurate, it is a crazy idea anyway.
 

NAD: It actually helps a lot, artistically. I think if I felt limited to “Oh, I can only have hard facts in the play,” or “you’ve got to make sure all the facts will tell the actual story,” that would be a problem. But when you actually get down to real specifics of the story – like if you find the historical truth – it actually brings a specificity to the play, which I think actually makes it more poetic. You also just have to realize these were real people, living real lives, with real problems, who did real things. It’s not this portrait of a distant past.
 

MSZ: Every single new fact that we’ve found, has been like oh, shit! It feels like it drops you deeper and deeper into the truth of what the story was and why we need to tell it. It’s like there’s no inconvenient facts for this play… This is what we do all day, except you guys are not usually here.
 

[Everyone laughs]
 

Nathan Alan Davis & Megan Sandberg-Zakian
 

DAH: You mentioned William Styron and the controversy of who gets to tell Nat Turner’s story. Nathan, can you speak a little to the politics of racial identity and authorship?
 

NAD: Wow, that’s a big question.
 

DAH: I can point the question more if you want me to.
 

NAD: Please do, and I’ll either take the small point or the larger point.
 

DAH: In what ways does your personal experience of race inform your writing of the play, and what kind of responsibility does your unique experience as a person of color give you in telling stories with characters of color?
 

NAD: I guess the first part is that, in every way, being black in America yields full-time internal conflict. What does this country mean to you? How do I reconcile being part of this society? I think that the internal conflict and questioning, naturally, makes its way into all aspects of my life, especially the art that I create and the plays that I write. I don’t know that there is [a specific], identifiable way, it’s just a part of who I am, you know what I mean? The thing about responsibility is a big question because I think one of the biggest difficulties, being a person of any marginalized community, is that you feel the need to represent everybody in your group every time you have a platform, every time you have a chance to speak up. You feel that you’re not just speaking for yourself. I think on one hand, that’s just the truth, and I hope to embrace that responsibility. On the other hand, I need to find room for my own individual voice, my individuality. Who am I? What do I have to say? How do I do things as a person? I think oftentimes, if you get too caught up in representing, what does that mean? It doesn’t mean the same thing to me as everybody else. You can lose you own fire and your own artistic passion if you start to generalize your approach, because you’re repping a group. But at the same time, the need to rep the group is always present, you know? I think it’s a constant balancing act.
 

DAH: Megan, as a female-identifying director, can you speak to the absence of women in the show, and the ways in which their presence might be felt, whether it’s in the writing, or in any decisions you’ve made as the director?
 

MSZ: There’s a physical absence of women in the play. Women are talked about in the play, as the victims of murder, as mothers who die in childbirth or abandoned by their families – helpless victims. I think to some extent the play does a really great job of representing the 19th century view of women. The politics of the time, as we have them recorded, are very male. I am quite sure that there are lots of very interesting female viewpoints on this history that we just don’t have. That would be another really interesting play, but we unfortunately just don’t have it.
 

DAH: Are there any women referenced by the men who played an integral role in this particular history during its time? Someone we should all know about and have never heard of?
 

MSZ: The one woman that stood out to me in the research didn’t make it into the play at all. She was a woman named Elizabeth Harris, I think, who was a slave owning white woman whose house was deliberately skipped by the insurgents as a favor to one of the original core group. We don’t know why, we don’t have any other information on it, but the thing that we do know about her is that there’s a free black man who was living in the household of some of the white folks who were victims of the insurgency. Immediately following it, he sold himself back into slavery to this woman, Elizabeth, for $1, which to me is just the world’s craziest story. It makes you think about – as opposed to women as victims – women as protectors, and what women were actually doing at the time, in the context that they could, with whatever the oppressive and the unjust structures that were in place at that time. How were people resisting them? There isn’t anything about that in the play. The focus is on violent resistance and revolution.
 

DAH: That’s remarkable. She didn’t make it into your play, but has discovering her influenced how you think or dare I say fantasize about history at that time?
 

MSZ: My fantasy is that there were black women and white women – and women in between – who were finding ways to subvert this stuff everyday. But I think I kind of keep that narrative alive, because I need to, working on material that doesn’t really include us.
 

DAH: Would you say that intersectionality is a way for you look closely at mirrors that do not reflect your own face when you polish them? How is intersectionality at work when you work behind the scenes on this play?
 

MSZ: My assistant director is also a woman, a biracial woman, and it’s been incredibly important to have the directorial perspective of two intersectional women. Our design team is predominantly women, and our design team is very intersectional in terms of identity. That kind of multiplicity of holding of different identities and perspectives is incredibly helpful with this story. Working on a story like this, as a 21st century artist, I feel is an asset. If you are an artist that identifies as white working on this play, I think that it may be… More painful? Or harder. It’s like you get stuck in where the racial politics are now and then, somehow you can’t find your way out of it. Rebecca [Frank, assistant director] is black and Jewish; I’m Armenian and Jewish – there’s something about being able to breathe into owning parts of it and not owning other parts of it, and respect parts that I don’t understand. I think it gives it a little bit of the breath, and is maybe useful. As any human being, sometimes you just have to go, “This shit isn’t about me! And it’s okay that there’s a play that isn’t about women.” This play is very important. And it’s not about part of my own identity. It’s not about queerness, which is part of my identity. It’s really not about me or my identity, but in some ways, it really is.
 

Nathan Alan Davis & Megan Sandberg-Zakian
 

DAH: Hmm. Your answer makes me think, Is this history, her story, their story, is this our story?
 

NAD: Yes? I think what Megan said was really poignant – our ability to find ourselves in a story that is relatively narrow and limited in some ways, finding an expanse within that. One of the most beautiful things about this process for me… I think it’s sort of a mark of our maturity. There’s oftentimes talk in and around the theater and in general about who has the right to tell what story. I think those are always going to be ongoing negotiations that we should be involved in, but I feel like being able to collaborate with people who have widely diverse identities and represent the facets of life is so enriching. It’s shaped this production the way that it is. This play is this play because of the people doing it – I have no comparison, but I will say that the way that everybody has been together… Megan came in and said, “Okay, we’re going to pray together every day, we’re each going to bring our own version of prayer, whatever that means to us.” Everyday, somebody would come in, and bring some kind of offering – whether it was a poem, a prayer, or some spiritual practice – and we’d do it together, so we found this collective identity together. It has been really essential for us staying cohesive. Having that foundation has been so key.
 

MSZ: For me, the play is a kind of a dance between history and poetry. Even in just the physical design of it, there’s a kind of dance between the intimate and the epic, the physical shape of it, experience of both the elemental and the apocalyptic, the personal and the interpersonal. To me, that’s what it is – the relationship where you can hold history and watch it become something poetic that can help you come back to it and understand it better. For me, that’s what it is. I think it’s a story that is critically important to all of us, but I wouldn’t say that it is “our story.” I think that we have a responsibility to come together, live, in rooms that have a shared encounter around this story, but I don’t think it’s all of ours.
 

DAH: Megan you talk about how in a way, the play is a story of violence. Thinking about this play as a story of violence and as a story of all male characters, is the story of violence also a story of men?
 

NAD: Yes, very much so. I think one of the things that causes of violence is the imbalance between the masculine and the feminine aspects of society. I think our value of men and of masculinity and that as an ideal – or making everything revolve around it, marginalizing femininity and women and femininity in ourselves – I think this is one of the reasons why we have such imbalance and violence in society. I don’t know that I went into the play attempting to expose that thesis, but I think it’s very much a part of that world, and very much part of the fabric of the world we live in now, but certainly in a more obvious way, in the world of 1831.
 

DAH: Is it also a marginalizing of peace?
 

NAD: Yeah! That’s a great way to put it. I do think in some ways we don’t recognize the peace that we do have. It’s that old story of the more violent, the more extreme things that happen are going to get more attention. Certainly, we shouldn’t ignore [that]– when violence happens, it should be known – but marginalizing peace is an interesting way to look at it because do we honor the peacekeeping, not only of now, but of our history? There’s that book, A People’s History of the United States, that goes into stories of everyday people that often wouldn’t be told. It features more stories about women, of people working together for change than we usually get. To a certain extent, our obsession over the violence or the wrongs can drown out the goodness that’s happening. We have to know what’s working if you want to improve upon it. The play tries to hold some goodness in it, even though the situation and the events of the play are extremely violent. I do think it’s important to hold space for light to come in as well, and for there to be some sense of hope or a possibility of peace, even if it’s distant.
 

DAH: Can you talk a little bit about the poetry that’s in the play? Or perhaps, not “poetry” per se, but please speak about the lyrical language that’s in the play. What are some of your influences? Is the play’s language a mix of southern vernacular and biblical language? How have your aesthetics related to language come together when writing this play?
 

NAD: I do consider myself a poet at heart; I’m not a poet in practice, and I don’t write poems very often, but I’m always looking for and gravitating towards musicality in language and creating poetic images. That’s incredibly important for the kind of theater that I want to make. I think that the experience and the world that’s created in someone’s mind when they’re processing poetry, to co-create a picture, expand the person’s horizons, just by the way the words are put together, is incredibly important. A lot of it also comes from the actual document; “The Confessions of Nat Turner” by Thomas R Gray, is written in this lyrical, biblical, heightened style. When I read that, that sort of ignited me, reading the style of that document. I felt like it was a place where what I do, what I’m attracted to, and what the document has given me kind of met, and I retained some of that style throughout the play. I’m always thinking about language, poetry, hip-hop – I love Shakespeare, I love language, and always have.
 

DAH: Can you talk a little bit about Dontrell Who Kissed the Sea, and in what ways that play prepared you to write this one?
 

NAD: From the purely practical standpoint, that’s the play that helped me get engrossed into the profession. Dontrell was the play that I used to apply to the 2050 Fellowship here at New York Theatre Workshop. I also learned quite a bit from seeing Dontrell produced – it had a National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere, so several small productions in different places. It’s also how I met Megan. Megan directed the production in Cleveland, and I met her through that process. It certainly paved the way. I’d hope that every time I write a play I’d get a little bit more refined in my understanding of the craft, that I get wiser, but I also feel like every play is it’s own puzzle I have to solve, so I can’t necessarily take everything that I might have learned on Dontrell and just apply it to this. I think, everytime I write a play it forces me to grow and transform, and this is no exception.
 

DAH: A favorite moment of mine in the play was a scene where the two lead characters debate whether the lives of the slave owners’ children were more, less, or just as important as the lives of enslaved children. It made me think of the lyric, “I believe that children are the future” from Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All” song. Does that ring true as a key value in Nat Turner in Jerusalem? Can you talk a bit more about the thinking behind that scene in particular?
 

NAD: Wow.
 

MSZ: I think you saw the second time that scene was ever performed, so we’re still working on it.
 

NAD: I mean, for me, I have three children, all girls, and that’s just such a huge part of who I am that it’s always with me. I think it makes its way into my writing in different ways. When I’m around these little people who are just giving this very innocent unfiltered perspective about life – I find constantly refreshing, at times scary, at times challenging. What our children say or do – they mimic and reflect us – they live in the world that we made. I think that that scene is too fresh for me to have perspective that is useful right now.
 

MSZ: I was laughing at directing that scene because we got the scene at night, and these amazing actors memorized it – they must stay up all night or something. We have this tiny little amount of time to rehearse it before they perform it that night, so for that particular performance that you saw, they just did it in rehearsal. The guys have already figured out that at the end of the scene, Thomas kind of collapses, and Nat displays an enormous amount of compassion towards him, and it just felt like such a powerful moment of this white fragility idea that people are talking about now. The white guy falls apart by being overwhelmed by the things in the world that are really hard in his life, and the fact that he’s being asked to come up to this larger truth and be part of the revolution and it’s just overwhelming and intense. The person that’s actually in the oppressed position, in this case actually getting executed momentarily, is required to step in and comfort him and provide compassion. Yet that’s the only way forward. That moment is so real to me. I think that what the rewrite did, which is the text that you’re talking about, provided Nat with some language to say what you feel, what you experience, the things that cause you pain and grief, you can have company in that. You can stand with the rest of humankind and be in the beloved community if you choose to stand with us. I mean this is the poison of privilege. It makes you alone. It doesn’t allow you to be connected with other people. It’s so clear now how much loss there is there. Also, when Nat stands up and says, “The signs of revolution will continue to come until injustice ceases,” that’s one of my favorite moments, and also one of the things we were talking about earlier about what’s so scary about the play. It really does feel like that.
 
One of the things I keep listening to over and over again as we were developing the play is the long outtake interview at the end of To Pimp A Butterfly, that long interview he does with Tupac, and Tupac is like, yeah you’re young, but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do now before you turn 30 because the world beats brothers down once you turn 30. You have to make your mark. Kendrick is like, yeah, I mean, what do you see for my generation, because things are getting really scary. Tupac says, oh yeah, white America isn’t ready for us. They think that whatever the next thing is is just us looting TVs out of stores. But it’s going to be Nat Turner 1831 up in here.
 

Nathan Alan Davis & Megan Sandberg-Zakian
 

DAH: There’s this beautiful metaphor of crossing the river in the play, where Nat Turner discusses America coming to the river but not yet crossing it as a metaphor for this nation attempting to confront the horrors of slavery yet not engaging in true healing and reparations; thinking about diversity and inclusion in contemporary American Theater, have we come to the river, have we crossed it?
 

NAD: Wow. Great question.
 

MSZ: I don’t think that we cross the river. I think we go in the water. We get baptized, we come out, we go back in and get baptized again. I wish that everyone in the American Theater would let go of the idea that you could cross the river and come out of the other side and be like now we are diverse! That’s not a thing.
 

NAD: I’d answer just like Megan did. That was perfect. I do think that to some extent we look at it as a numbers game. We think if we check this box and that box, we’ve achieved. I do think assessment and numbers and important aspect of assessing progress, but they’re not the thing itself. The thing itself is a revolution of the mind and the reorientation of the way that we interact together, you know? It’s actually much harder and more painstaking, longer work. It’s not that it isn’t happening, but the question is where is it happening, and where isn’t it happening, and are we aware of that?
 

DAH: Any advice for young theater artists of color or who identify with a marginalized group?
 

NAD: I think the most important thing is to find a place where you have unquestioned support, where people know you and support you, and you feel as much as you can able to be yourself and grow. As a young artist, one of the difficulties I had was just being comfortable with my own skin – not that I’ve totally solved that in every way. I think especially for artists of color or marginalized groups, you often feel like you’re the person on the outside looking in, or you’re the odd person out. You just have to find that place where you’re you. People can hold you up and support you. You really have to believe in yourself, like authentically believe that you can do it, which is a very hard thing to do. I think maintaining a sort of somewhat irrational belief in yourself is a good thing, knowing that the mountain is really high, and if I just start climbing, I’m going to get there. There’s no guarantee that you’re going to be affirmed every step of the way, you have to cultivate that belief in yourself.
 
 

 

 

Nathan Alan Davis’ plays include Nat Turner in Jerusalem, Dontrell Who Kissed the Sea (NNPN Rolling World Premiere; Steinberg/ATCA New Play Citation), The Wind and the Breeze (Blue Ink Playwriting Award; Lorraine Hansberry Award) and The Refuge Plays Trilogy: Protect the Beautiful Place (L. Arnold Weissberger Award Finalist), Walking Man and Early’s House. His work has been produced or developed with New York Theatre Workshop, The Public Theatre, Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre, McCarter Theatre Center, New Neighborhood, Baltimore Center Stage, Merrimack Rep., The Kennedy Center, Theater Alliance, Skylight Theatre, Lower Depth Theatre Ensemble, Oregon Contemporary Theatre, Phoenix Theatre, Cleveland Public Theatre, The Source Festival, Chicago Dramatists and The New Harmony Project. He is a 2016 graduate Juilliard’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program and a recipient of NYTW’s 2050 Fellowship for 2015-16. MFA: Indiana University, BFA: University of Illinois.
 

Megan Sanberg-Zakian is a theater-maker based in Watertown, MA. She is a current recipient of the Princess Grace Foundation Theatre Fellowship, working with Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell, MA, as their Director in Residence – nurturing, developing, and directing work that will premiere in MRT’s and other theatre’s upcoming seasons. Previously, Megan completed a TCG Future Leaders grant at Central Square Theater in Cambridge, MA, aimed at deepening the theater’s engagement with its community. In addition to her directing work, Megan is an activist and consultant supporting theaters to work towards inclusion and equity. She is a member of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, a Merrimack Repertory Theater “Artistic Patriot” and an Associate member of SDC. Megan is a graduate of Brown University and holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College.

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A Conversation with Brian Quijada

Brian Quijada

 

The Chicago born, New York based writer and performer Brian Quijada is young, witty, energetic, talented and oozing charisma. His technologically ingenious hip-hop, dance and poetry infused one man show Where Did We Sit On The Bus? is currently playing through October 9 at Ensemble Studio Theater. The title of the piece comes from an episode in Brian’s childhood when, during a third grade lesson on the Civil Rights movement and Rosa Parks, Brian – suddenly realizing his people were not represented in this story – raised his hand and asked the titular question. His teacher’s dismissive response prompted a lifelong examination of the role of latinos in the US historical narrative and of his own personal history. I sat down with Brian after a matinée of his show to talk about his upbringing, his creative process, latino identity, the political climate, and the future of diversity and representation in the theatrical world.

 

 

Margarita Javier: This is the first time I’ve ever seen a show where they say, “There’s use of Bluetooth technology, turn off your phones or else there’s going to be interference.” Has there been interference at any of the performances?
 

Brian Quijada: Today there was interference.
 

MJ: Do you have to stop the show when that happens?
 

BQ: No. Luckily today it just happened while I was already [onstage], and it just requires me to press a button that reconnects. But we’re prepared; there are a few moments in the show that we are prepared to accommodate when I can’t go back [behind the equipment]. Luckily, though, here the audiences have been pretty good about it. So that’s good.
 

[Editor’s Note: Read about the technology Brian uses here.]
 

MJ: I saw the show, and I was blown away.
 

BQ: Amazing!
 

MJ: It was absolutely fantastic. It’s very close to my heart. I’m from Puerto Rico, and I brought my friend from Puerto Rico, and we were talking about how much we identified with it and how wonderful it is. And after the show she was texting her husband, “You have to see the show. Tines que venir a verlo.” So I just wanted to let you know how much I loved it and can’t wait to talk about it.
 

BQ: Oh my God, thank you.
 

MJ: She actually wanted me to ask you: When you’re recording with the Looper, do you ever save those recordings or listen to them after the show, or do you discard them?
 

BQ: I discard them. Well, the play actually started with improvisational looping, à la Reggie Watts. Reggie Watts is one of my favorite loopers. He just totally improvises everything, and that’s how I started developing the show – through improvisational loops. And the ones that I really liked I would save. But the looping that’s in the show is kind of now set. Sometimes I don’t have perfect pitch, so it’s sometimes a little different, different ranges of my voice, but it’s the same construct. But improvising the loop is how I first developed the show.
 

MJ: Can you talk a little more about the development of the show? Where did the idea come from? How has it grown from when it started to what it is now?
 

BQ: I was at the Denver Center and I was working in a different show, and I was looping. I’m in a band. We’re not really a real band, we go to theater conferences and perform there [laughs]. My friend and playwright Idris Goodwin is the rapper; I’m the looper. Chay Yew, who directed the piece, saw us perform and afterwards came up to me. He’s the artistic director of Victory Gardens in Chicago, and when I used to live in Chicago, I auditioned for him. And he says, “Do you ever write plays?” And I’m like, “No, not really. I write poems.” I felt stupid [laughs]. Very dumb. And he said, “Well, if you ever write anything about Chicago, let us know.” And so a few months later I wrote this piece and then I submitted it to terraNOVA Collectives soloNOVA. And they accepted it, and then I was like, “Hey Chay, by the way, you told me to write a play. I mean, you didn’t tell me to write a play but you were like, hey!” And I sent it to them and they liked it, and now I’m doing it over there. And then it went to Ignition Festival with Chay; we worked on it together. It went to the Millennium Stage at The Kennedy Center. I kind of developed it at these theater conferences. Anytime I had a little support…people wanting me to workshop it around the country. And then it premiered in Chicago earlier this year.
 

MJ: And now you’re here.
 

BQ: And now I’m here!
 

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MJ: I thought the direction and the overall aesthetics were really impressive. I loved the use of projections. How much of that is coming from you, and how much is it a collaboration with the director and the designers?
 

BQ: Very little was coming from me. I didn’t tell them to do anything. They read the script and Liviu Pasare – who did the projection design – it was his interpretation. He’d worked a lot with Chay. I think the only thing that I was fascinated with was the Michael Jackson blocks. Because it’s not like the choreography is the same. It’s an Xbox Kinect Sensor that reads where I’m walking on the stage, which is amazing. The design is great. The lighting designer is just mind blowingly good. All those aesthetics and the blocking and all, I really had very little to do with it [laughs]. But I’m happy that I was in great hands.
 

MJ: You’re doing pretty much everything onstage. You’re acting, you’re singing, you’re playing instruments, you’re dancing, you’re rapping. What do you do to prepare when you’re backstage?
 

BQ: I dance. There’s a little bit of dancing. I like to go over the text. Because I also wrote it in a certain mindset. Sometimes I’m saying a line and I go over line notes and I’m like, “Oh. The way that I wrote it is better than the way that the actor in me is saying it.” So I go over super simple but really huge notes. It’s a solo show; it’s not like a play where you’re talking to a character. It’s talking to the audience. It changes based on who’s in the audience and it changes every night. The big note that I keep repeating to myself over and over backstage is to talk to the audience and not at them. And that’s also something that I work on throughout the run. I don’t want it to become stale and the same. So reminding myself to be honest and talk to the people is important to me.
 

MJ: The show is obviously very autobiographical. Can you talk about your upbringing?
 

BQ: My parents are from El Salvador. They came here in the 70s. They already had two children, Fernando and Roberto. And then they had me and my brother Marvin, and they gave us those names to give us easier lives, I guess, in the States. And we first moved to a Trailer Park, cause that’s what my parents could afford. And then my dad started making a little more money and we moved to a ‘burb that’s surrounded by a very affluent – I would say 70% Jewish town. You can’t leave my town, where I grew up, without going into their town. I remember being the first latinos on our block, which was all Italian. And now when I go back and visit my parents it’s a latino street, which is great. It’s blasting a lot of music [laughs]. Going to middle school and high school was a weird culture shock. I was just like, “What is this? What is Jewish?” And then going to people’s houses and being like, “Your house is enormous. What do your parents do?” And then I started becoming really great friends with my new Jewish friends and then you kind of have an identity crisis. But anyway, this “Where did we sit on the bus?” moment that the play is named after, to me was the supernova. Asking my third grade teacher that question and her responding, “They weren’t around,” it flipped my mind. It was the first time that I was just like, “Where the hell were we in history?” There’s a whole other thing that I feel about the way that history is taught in the public school system. That’s, honestly, I think a totally separate show that needs to be tackled. It’s something else. But yeah, my upbringing was moving around and new cultures, and a cultural explosion for me throughout my life.
 

MJ: Since you mentioned that comment the teacher made in the classroom, I had a question about that, because it really stuck with me, when she said, “They weren’t around.” And I was like, “What do you mean we weren’t around? We’ve been around since the 17th century! Look at the names of some of the towns in this country, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, those are Spanish names!”
 

BQ: [Laughs] Yeah, yeah, totally!
 

MJ: So it’s blatantly false and it speaks to what you were talking about – the gaps in education in this country. And I feel like maybe it’s the role of the artist to fill in those gaps, to tell the stories of the people that have been marginalized.
 

BQ: Yeah, totally!
 

MJ: Do you think that’s one of the roles of art? Is it your intent to maybe educate people about these gaps in narrative history?
 

BQ: I think the beginning wasn’t that. I didn’t feel that a story like ours was being told often enough, so I was just like, “Well, I’m gonna tell it!” Cause who is gonna write a show for me where I get to play a bunch of instruments and beatbox, sing, and dance? Nobody. So I’m gonna do it. And then later as I started working on it, people were like, “This is my story” or “This touched me because I love Michael Jackson” or “This touched me because my parents are Polish” and “Your parents are my parents” or “This touched me because I’m an artist.” And then I felt an obligation to write in more things that – it’s still honest, but it’s a little more opinionated where I’m like, “Ok, we need to talk about the political climate right now.” But I don’t think it started that way. It was just me trying to tell an infrequently told story.
 

MJ: Speaking about politics, there’s a moment in the show when you make a very impassioned speech about immigration. You keep repeating, “Let them in,” which to me felt like an act of rebellious compassion. Just let them in. Which is something that for some of us who are immigrants or have parents who are immigrants rings true. Yet it’s still one of the most hotly debated issues in this country. So what would you say to detractors, or people who say things like, “Well, why can’t they just immigrate legally”?
 

BQ: Listen, the thing is that I don’t think that this show, nor I have an answer for the immigration policies. I think it’s a little too complex to really go into it. It’s already messed up. I don’t have the answer, but there needs to be a little more compassion, I think. And that’s why I feel that it’s important to have people who don’t believe, or are not with my certain opinions, that they should come. Even though it scares me very much to have somebody who doesn’t agree with me watch this show, I think it’s important. Because I think that what’s missing is being able to hear the story from a person who you see as a human first and not as a stereotype. The biggest thing that warms my heart is if people who watch the show would leave being like “Oh I see things just a slightly bit different than I used to.” In a good way. You know? That’s the best.
 

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MJ: Speaking about immigration, I did notice that there was a line in the show where you said, “All latinos are rapists,” which I felt was a reference to Donald Trump’s comments during this election cycle.
 

BQ: Absolutely.
 

MJ: Are you influenced by current events and then you write it into the show, or do you feel it’s pretty much set?
 

BQ: That Donald Trump line, I couldn’t help it, it’s unavoidable. It’s so big, it’s so scary right now, and putting that into the show felt like a no brainer. The thing is, a lot of people are like, “Oh, this show is so relevant right now!” And it’s relevant always, I think. It’s just that right now it’s hot because somebody just said something really racist. But I think that it’s relevant always; it’s just that we forget about it a little bit. We put it in the back of our heads and we put it on the back burner. But really, it’s still burning, it’s still right there, it’s just that now we’re talking about it again. You know? That’s why when Colin Kaepernick sits down or he doesn’t stand, all of a sudden it’s fired up again. But no, it’s still always been there. It’s just fresh.
 

MJ: I feel like latino identity is an important part of the show. Being latina myself, every country in Latin America is so different and so distinct.
 

BQ: Totally.
 

MJ: We each have our own culture, and Mexico is different from El Salvador and from Puerto Rico and from Cuba. And yet in this country, we always do talk about a unified latino identity. Why do you feel that it’s important to talk about latinos as a unified whole?
 

BQ: I think because as a country the United States unifies us so much that we stick together. So that when Donald Trump says something about Mexico, we’re all affected. Even though, yes, the small town where I grew up is now all Mexican, and I’m not Mexican, what can we do but unify, really? Somebody told me recently that we like to stick to our traditions, which is true. But there is this other half of our brains, I think, that is trying really hard to assimilate, and fit into the norm that is American culture and society. But it’s hard to let go of the traditions, nor do I want to lose those traditions. That’s in the show, where I say, “Am I going to speak Spanish and you’ll speak German?” to my fiancée, who’s Austrian and Swiss. I have something deep within me that wants to pass on what was passed on to me because I find so much comfort in my racial and cultural identity.
 

MJ: I feel the same way. There’s been some talk recently about there being greater diversity in the theater world than ever before, especially when you look at the success of a show like Hamilton.
 

BQ: No doubt!
 

MJ: But do you hope, like I do, that it’s a trend that’s going to continue, or is it a fluke?
 

BQ: Oh man, I don’t know! I think I’m always going to lean on the hopeful side of “Yeah! This is the beginning of something great!” But I really don’t know. What’s cool is that there is, like Ensemble Studio Theater, a great place that said, “Yeah, let’s do this show! We want to include the untold stories.” And that’s what’s great; it’s going from the smaller theaters to the Broadway scale theaters, which are finally being like, “Let’s maybe listen to something else. Let’s try to take in an American story in a completely new way, in a new light.” I hope so. Hamilton is pretty remarkable in the way that it kind of just opened up a cast of, what, 30, 40 people of color to show up there and play these familiar faces that have been on our money. It’s kind of beautiful; it’s a beautiful thing.
 

MJ: Yeah, and it’s putting people of color in the audience as well.
 

BQ: Absolutely.
 

MJ: If we want more diversity onstage, we have to have more diversity in the audience, because that’s where artists are born. You know, you were watching Michael Jackson on MTV and wanted to do that.
 

BQ: YEAH!
 

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MJ: Is that your goal? Cause I’ve noticed the audience is pretty diverse.
 

BQ: That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to reach out to a youthful, people of color audience. They’re making an effort to reach out to the latino community, to the young urban spoken word kind of audiences. Because that’s what it is, really, it’s a whole bunch of spoken word poetry and rap put onstage. And it’s real. It’s such a part of me and my brother Marvin’s experience growing up in Chicago land. It was such a no-brainer that that’s how we would begin to express ourselves. We listened to hip-hop and that became the way of storytelling. “The art of storytelling,” like the rapper Slick Rick. I’m happy that they’re making an effort to reach out to a new audience that doesn’t usually sit in those seats.
 

MJ: I noticed there were people in the audience who were older and white, and they were like, “Oh the show is fantastic!”
 

BQ: [Laughs] Yeah, right!
 

MJ: So it’s also great to appeal to that audience as well.
 

BQ: Yeah! I think that a show like this shouldn’t feel like anybody’s excluded. It shouldn’t feel like that. To me this show is a celebration of the path that this country is going in. Hopefully. That maybe there’s a little bit of humanity and compassion in all of us, and if we unite we’ll be able to come out all right. This is the country that experiments, so let’s try to go into this experimentation with good vibes and good intentions. And that’s something that – it’s easy to be like, “Nah! Nah! I’m not down with that!” You know what I mean? But you have to embrace the fact that we’re all in this big bus together trying to get somewhere.
 

MJ: You talk a lot about your relationship with your parents in the show, especially your father, which I thought was very relatable to a lot or artists. That idea of maybe your parents don’t fully approve of your career choice. Have your parents seen the show, and what did they think?
 

BQ: They have. They saw the show. They saw it front row opening night in Chicago. And before that, they saw it at Ignition Festival, which is Victory Garden’s new play festival at Chay Yew’s theater. I’ll sum it up with this one story where my dad had just gotten out of the show. Ignition Festival’s free for all, which is amazing. And a guy came up to my dad and he’s just like, “Hey, are you Brian’s father?” And he’s just like, “Yeah, yeah. I’m his dad.” And he’s just like, “Oh my God, I just saw a show at the Goodman, I paid $65” – No shots on Goodman, no shots on Goodman. Love the Goodman! – But this guy was just like, “I paid $65 for a show at the Goodman, and that shit sucked! I paid zero dollars for this show, and this show was amazing!” And my dad said, “Thank you, thank you.” And then he came up to me and he was just like, “Brian, you could really make some money doing this show.” [Laughs] And I’m like, “Of course that’s what you’re gonna say, dad! It’s so typical!” And it made sense. My relationship with my dad now that he’s kind of given me the go-ahead with doing art – and especially now that I’m getting married and we’re talking about having kids – is that I finally, now, after so many years of him being like, “Don’t do it, don’t do it, please!” I get it. Because I’m about to get married, maybe have kids in a few years and I get it. Of course! He doesn’t want his kids to die. He doesn’t want his children to starve.
 

MJ: Right, it’s coming from a good place.
 

BQ: It’s coming from a great place, and before I was just like, “He just wants to cramp my style! He just wants to stunt me!” And I didn’t get it. And I totally understand now. And so we have a much better relationship. He’s still on the whole, “You have no idea how much I did to make sure that we could afford a house, a car – that you could afford to go to college.” But I think he’s finally seeing that the American Dream is not a one-way street.
 

MJ: You have a strong theatrical background, so I was wondering: What is your dream role?
 

BQ: Oh man! The very first play that I ever saw was Cabaret. I saw it in Chicago, and when I saw it I went home and just listened to the soundtrack. Alan Cumming. The original, well, not the original, and not the recent one, but the original revival. And for my birthday a couple of years ago, I went to go see it again, and he was in it, and it was the most amazing thing. I was crying the entire time. Just dying of tears. Because it brought me back. Of course, I don’t know that I could ever do it. It would be a very crazy world where they’d cast a Latin dude to play a German guy or a French guy.
 

MJ: But Raúl Esparza played the Emcee!
 

BQ: Really?
 

MJ: Yeah, you could totally do it!
 

BQ: It’s gonna happen! You’ve given me so much faith! It’s gonna happen! Yeah, I would love to play that part. That part is amazing. And that play is just so political as well, and so great and beautiful, and dark, and lovely and funny. Yeah, Cabaret. It’s the first play; you have such a deep connection to the first play you ever see.
 

MJ: I wonder if you wanted to talk about your new project, Kid Prince and Pablo.
 

BQ: Yes, Kid Prince and Pablo was at Ars Nova. I was asked to write it for Texas Tech University, for their WildWind Performance Lab, where they bring in artists who are doing the work and established and write a new play. And it serves as new play development and a way for the theater students to have conversations with and collaborate with professional artists. So the new play takes place in the future of an alternate universe of America, where when America seceded from England, they sat their own monarch. So it’s still a king in the United States but it’s in the future so at this point, everybody’s mixed race, everybody is brown, for the most part, except the Royal family, who stayed white. And it’s set in this hip-hop world where the Prince is this aspiring rapper, and this poor pauper, this Mexican boy, whose name is Pablo, is a bucket drummer. It’s based off Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper story. So when they switch spots, Pablo, who barely speaks a lick of English, has technology, futuristic, beautiful hip-hop technology to be able to make beats and become a producer. And the Prince is kind of like, “What is this, what are these streets? What are these colored people?” Blah blah. And through his hardships is able to actually rap about something as opposed to rap about, you know, what I like to compare it to is being in the club, popping bottles, a life of luxury. And then finally he experiences something real to rap about. And it’s the same thing. Trading places, etc. I’m working on it with my brother, his name is Marvin. He’s an actor, too, so you can imagine what my parents were like.
 

MJ: Oh your parents must love that!
 

BQ: [Laughs] My parents were like, “We had two kids in the States for them to become artists.” They’re dealing with it. Yeah, no he’s done well. He’s done Chicago PD, and Chicago Fire. He still lives in Chicago, he’s doing well. He’s great. We’ve never really worked on a play together, so, and we’re both actors and I’m writing plays now, after this one.
 

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MJ: You should absolutely keep writing.
 

BQ: Yeah, I’m excited about it.
 

MJ: So what are your hopes for this show?
 

BQ: I didn’t know that people would be like, “This is an important story.” Because, again, I started just telling it because I feel like I needed to tell it for myself, for my own health. But now that I’m seeing people respond to it and I’m going to some colleges to talk about it and teach workshops, I’m realizing that it’s a story that I think other people also need. So I’m hoping that whatever it means to have the most amount of people watch it and see it, that’s what I want. Isn’t that the point of all art? To have as many people watch it? And I know that this is a play that will not, on a totally broad scale get everybody.
 

MJ: It has a very wide appeal, though.
 

BQ: Yeah, yeah, but still, there are some people who are just like, “Nah!” But my hope is that people at least take something away from it. Whether it be a red state or a blue state, or whether it be in a big city like New York, or we’re going to Boise in January, so we’ll see how it goes there. I’m very excited. My friends run the company over there, Boise Contemporary. So we’ll see. You cross your fingers that people like it and continue to talk about it.
 

MJ: Yes, I’m sure they will, because it’s fantastic.
 

BQ: Thanks.
 

MJ: Finally, what would you say to young artists, especially young latinos, who are now getting started? Any words or wisdom or advice?
 

BQ: If there’s anything that I’ve learned out of doing all this is that every story is worth telling. Every story is worth telling. I didn’t think that I had it within me to do this, until somebody was like, “You should write a play!” And I’m like, “Oh ok! I’ll write what I know.” I didn’t know that I had the capacity to write something where designers would sit at home and conceive of design, whether it be light or set or projections. That’s insane! And it wouldn’t have happened if somebody hadn’t just said, “Do it. Just go home and write it.” I guess that’s the advice. There’s no one stopping you other than yourself.
 
 

 

 

Brian Quijada is a Chicago-born, New York-based actor, musician, and playwright. As an actor, Brian has helped develop new work across the country. New York collaborations include: Ensemble Studio Theatre, Repertorio Español, The Lark, The Brick, Page 73, Atlantic Theatre Company, Up Theatre, Astoria Performing Arts Center, Primary Stages, TerraNOVA Collective, LAByrinth, New Georges, The Public, and Playwright’s Realm. Regional: How We Got On(Actor’s Theater of Louisville’s Humana Festival), Beat Generation by Jack Keroac (Merrimack Rep), The Solid Sand Below by Martin Zimmerman (The Eugene O’Neill’s National Playwright’s Conference), No More Sad Things by Hansol Jung (Boise Contemporary Theatre), andInformed Consent by Deborah Laufer (The Baltic Playwright’s Conference in Estonia). Most recently, Brian was seen performing in his newest play development, Kid Prince and Pablo (a Digital Age, Hip Hop, American retelling of Mark Twain’s The Prince and The Pauper) at Ars Nova’s Ant Fest.

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A Conversation with Lauren Molina & Bri Sudia

Lauren Molina Bri Sudia

 

“What year is this?” Bri Sudia, in-character as Ruth, asks in a promotional video for Wonderful Town. In the video, Lauren Molina and Bri Sudia run all around Chicago, trying to figure out if it’s quite as wonderful of a town as New York City. And even though their characters are confused after arriving straight out of 1935, you could be forgiven for asking the same question in earnest with one look around today’s world. So you can see why The Goodman would think we all need a little more Leonard Bernstein in our lives right now. The production, helmed by MacArthur-certified genius Mary Zimmerman, opens this week and from what audiences are saying, the break spent with smartphones and cable news turned off is giving them a rare respite from a rapidly changing world, a chance to live in an exuberant, silly, joyful Wonderful Town, even if it’s just for two and a half hours.
 

 

Kelly Wallace: Let’s start with how you came to be involved with the show.
 

Lauren Molina:  I got an audition through my agent and fortunately I had a wonderful experience doing Candide here at The Goodman years ago with Doug Peck, the music director. They brought me in for an audition and after some callbacks, I ended up with the part!
 

Bri Sudia: I’m based here in Chicago so I knew the show was auditioning and was sort of trying to figure out how to get seen for it, since I don’t have an agent, who usually makes that process a little smoother. But actually our musical director, Doug Peck, who is fabulous and just a great music director and also a really good human being…he threw my name out. He said, “It sounds like you’re looking for Bri Sudia.” And then they had me send a tape, because they were in New York City, probably because of Lauren, and then I came in when they were back in Chicago and it all just fell into place from there.
 

KW: Did you know each other before working on this show?
 

BS: No! We actually met for the first time on a phone interview, just like this one.
 

LM: Which is actually hilarious because we were on the phone for this interview for what seemed like 40 minutes and when we got off, a couple days later the interviewer sent us an email saying that interview was never recorded, so we have to do it all over again.
 

KW: Well, I promise you this is recording and we won’t do it over again. So you didn’t know each other, you come into the rehearsal room and you’re playing sisters. How did you create that bond with each other in a believable way?
 

LM: I have to say, Bri makes it super easy to be her sister. I really feel a kindred spirit towards her and I feel like we are sisters in comedy as well as we have a sense of…I don’t know. I just feel like we both get it.
 

BS: Yeah, we had to do a couple of different press events before we even started rehearsals. For example, we had to take the poster photograph.
 

LM: They flew me out to Chicago a week early, just to do that kind of thing.
 

BS: So she came out for the photo shoot and I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a professional photo studio but it’s very…models have it hard; I get it now. It’s not easy but we had such a fun time and we had the whole day to get to know each other outside of the confines of a rehearsal hall and any pressure to chat. We had the choice to get to know each other and then we did another day doing the promo video, which you can see on the website, of us just going around Chicago and talking to people about what makes Chicago great. We had a really good time and just enjoy each other. The other thing that’s wonderful is that there’s nothing better than being onstage with someone who you really think is funny and who you really think is a great singer. We learned to love matching our voices together. We’re different singers but when we sing together, we wanted it to sound like people who grew up together and they do sound alike. We found a way of blending our voices into the duets we sing together and that’s just been a bonding experience on its own.
 

Lauren Molina Bri Sudia
 

KW: So you were asking people what’s so great about being here in Chicago…what do you love about being out here? Lauren, you’re based in New York and Bri, you’re based here, so I’m sure you have different experiences.
 

LM: I love Chicago theater because everyone is so genuinely nice. I feel this warmth here that is so special, that I feel no cattiness or competitive divaness here. I feel like it’s a community that builds each other up, in my experience. Bri, you live it more, but just whenever I’m here I feel that. And whenever I’m in Chicago, I’m doing a dream job, so that doesn’t hurt. Even just the city in general, people are very friendly and in the summertime, I think people are extra happy.
 

BS: That’s so true.
 

LM: I just find a general sunniness here. Also, people are very smart here. At least working with The Goodman, the people in our cast, the creative team – the wheels are always spinning. Mary Zimmerman is actually a certified genius: she’s a MacArthur Genius Award winner! So in general, I love Chicago.
 

BS: I came here because, well, I went to grad school out here, but I’m from the East Coast, and I applied to a lot of graduate programs on the East Coast and for graduate school they do these sort of interview/callback weekends where you go and you meet the other potential students and see the facilities. All the schools I saw on the East Coast…everyone at the callback was really beautiful. I remember being there and taking my shoes off and wanting to do my monologue barefoot. When I auditioned for a school in the Midwest, before I even had a chance, the school I ended up going to, he said why don’t you take your shoes off and let’s talk? There was something about that – I’ve always hated shoes my whole life, so I love working barefoot – it felt like a sign to me that the type of work being done here is just dressed down and it’s about people. It’s not about how you look as much. I feel like I can walk into a room in an audition in Chicago and they will really consider you if you’re outside the box. I’m 5’10” and I’m not super-petite and I don’t really fit into a type. I’ve made my own type.
 

LM: Yes, girl! I feel the same way.
 

KW: I definitely get that vibe. Lauren, I had seen you in Sweeney Todd, so I knew that aspect of your voice, and then I saw you sing “King of Anything” by Sara Bareilles and it was just a totally different thing. It’s so important for women who aren’t that cookie-cutter stereotype musical theater girl. I’ve seen both of your work enough to know that neither of you “fit” in a box, in a great way.
 

BS: And that’s what’s awesome about Chicago; Chicago says yes. Chicago says show me your idea. Show me your idea of this character. Show me who you are. And when we all say yes together, it makes it really exciting and different. It’s so filled with people breaking expectations and filled with people breaking barriers and getting out of that box. We’re also fiercely protective of our own and that’s something I just really admire. If they identify a problem, they go after it and they attempt to solve it. We don’t just bring it up and say this is a problem, someone fix it. The community is really driven, as we’ve seen lately, to make change and make things better for everybody. I just couldn’t be more proud of our community.
 

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KW: You’re right, we’ve seen a lot of that especially in the past few months, for better or worse. There’s been this series of conversations about appropriate casting and diversity in shows. In New York, I didn’t necessarily hear those conversations happening in as big of a way, the way that you hear it here.
 

LM: From the New York perspective, I feel like small, experimental theater does exist, but it’s so priced out in New York. Everything has become so commercial; things that are happening Off-Broadway are basically guaranteed to not make money, so people don’t want to do that anymore and people aren’t taking the same kind of risks in New York that they can in Chicago, I think just simply based on funding.
 

KW: You don’t necessarily have access to the top of the food chain in New York, so to speak. New York is such a machine.
 

LM: It’s so money-driven. I really see that, as an outsider, coming into this community. I feel everything that Bri is talking about. People are very aware and conscious.
 

BS: Also, casting people here are way more accessible. They’re more accessible to young actors and old actors alike and you develop relationships with them. I first met Bob Mason at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre six or seven years ago and he has seen me and he sees a lot. He comes out to Utah Shakespeare Festival most years, so he’s had the chance to see me out there. We had a relationship where it wasn’t a matter of if you were good; it was about if you were right. You can ask questions. You can get feedback. I feel like the one-on-one relationship is really special and helps young actors get better and do better and work more. That upward mobility and support is really exciting.
 

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KW: Lauren, you’re very active on social media. You’re very openly political; you talk a lot about your personal views. Do you feel like marrying your performance with that activism is something that’s important to your art?
 

LM: I mean, I believe in speaking up for equality and justice. I don’t think you often get an opportunity in a commercial way to be in a show that’s going to address some of the greater issues we have. For me, I haven’t gotten to do any political pieces or anything, but I do think that what I can do is use any…I’m like an F or G-List “celebrity,” maybe like H or I or J. But any people that respect me as a person, I can use that platform to bring up things that I believe in or sing about them with The Skivvies and talk about them. It’s very important. I wish I could do it more through big plays or musicals, but often it has to be on a smaller scale. I like to be a part of benefits and concerts that raise awareness too, that raise money for all different types of organizations.
 

KW: Bri, you worked on Shining Lives at Northlight, which is such a women’s story and definitely the heart of it was the bond between those women. It addresses the very real issues that existed at the time – these are real events. What was it like to build that character and engage with that kind of history?
 

BS: That show is incredibly special to me mostly because it was the first time I’d ever worked on a new musical and originated a character and I was with it for about a year before we actually went into rehearsal. Multiple people did multiple workshops of it. During one of those workshops, when we were up at Northwestern rehearsing, Molly Glynn and Bernie Yvon passed away. We got word of their passing during the workshop. We were all together. We had really just met and we were working on this show about what it is to be friends and lose friends and grieve friends and how to move on, figuring out if it’s even possible to move on, and what that looks like. I didn’t know them personally, but the moment that happened between all of us in the room that day was…it was an unspeakable level of grief. Once you show that deep of an emotion to a stranger, you’re linked to them. Because we don’t often really, really ugly cry in front of people we just met, let alone our professional comrades. It’s a rare thing to really let it fly. I think that day, and in the following days, all of our barriers were down and we were walking with that in our hearts. After that workshop, making the show really always kept the preciousness of life and the time we have together in the forefront of the piece. I think that was a big factor in why we actually felt such a strong bond, the women in that show particularly. We genuinely love each other. It’s the only cast I’ve ever been a part of that regularly tries to see each other. The four of us regularly try to hang out and have a glass of wine and catch up because we shared so much of our lives together.
 

KW: I think a lot of people are drawn to theater, as you were describing, because it can be very healing and help people through their struggles in real way. Shining Lives took that on in a very serious way, but at the same time, you’re both working now on Wonderful Town and that kind of show brings a different kind of healing, almost a form of escapism, at a time that we’re in right now.
 

LM: Absolutely. I want to touch on this topic as Bri is talking about the sadness. I feel as a performer, part of the way I can give back is by making people laugh and bringing people joy through theater and music. And in a different way, on a side note, I have a band called The Skivvies and we perform in our underwear and do comedic mash-ups and on October 17th, Bri is going to be doing a number with us! But I do feel like there’s something to feeling confident and empowering in being that exposed…literally in my underwear but also just being real and natural and bring people joy by connecting with them. And I think with Wonderful Town, you escape. The comedy and the deliciousness of the characters…I think we definitely need that in today’s world.
 

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KW: And to touch on another issue that I think is important in theater now…Bri, I noticed you have a degree in interpreting sign language. What made you decide to pursue that? Have you had experience using that in your work?
 

BS: Yeah, I was actually involved in community theater as a kid, but I went to college for interpreting and worked as an interpreter for several years in New Jersey and Philadelphia. I started regularly interpreting for theatrical performances. I trained at the Theatre Development Fund, the Juilliard School theater interpreting program, which is a summer intensive where they train you specifically in interpreting theatrical performances. That was what I did. There came a point where I became deeply conflicted because I wanted to be onstage and it was hard for me to continue that on the sidelines, so I stopped and went back to graduate school for acting. But I love working and performing in ASL, it’s one of my favorite things. I’m so happy to see a resurgence of shows like Big River as a Deaf West Production and Spring Awakening which had such success.
 

LM: The deaf production of Hunchback of Notre Dame.
 

BS: Yeah! John McGinty, he and I worked together on Tribes at Steppenwolf. I’m always excited to incorporate ASL into my acting. The time commitment of interpreting would be impossible right now, but I would definitely go back to interpreting. My hands feel a little rusty.
 

KW: Lauren, you briefly touched on your group, The Skivvies. do you want to tell us a little more about that and how it came about?
 

LM: Absolutely. It was kind of a fluke how it got started. My best friend, Nick Cearly, we met in 2003 doing a children’s theater tour together and then became best friends. So we made music together, with our clothes on. But it wasn’t until four years ago, when we were hanging out one day, where we were putting a cover on YouTube and we wanted to strip it down in the quirky way that we usually do. We made this arrangement of Rihanna’s “We Found Love” and set up the video camera. I was trying to figure out what to wear to film the piece and I was walking around in my bra and Nick said, you should just wear that. I said, well, we are stripping it down. What if we did a whole strip-down music series? And then my boyfriend said you should call yourselves The Skivvies and we did a whole series. The videos started to go viral, and fans started asking when we’d do a live show, so we did. Everything blew up since then. We’ve had amazing Broadway friends guest perform with us and it’s so collaborative. It’s all about the music and coming up with fun new arrangements constantly. I love the freedom of being creative with my best friend and starting a small business has felt. This industry can be so miserable sometimes and so full of rejection…being able to start something and keep it up in a way that is so fulfilling and bring it around the country has been incredible. Right now, we’re just trying to balance theater and The Skivvies and try to plan concerts when one of us is out of town doing a gig, we try to do concerts in that city. We jump around all over and what’s next…who knows.
 

KW: And Bri, you’re doing Sweeney Todd at the Paramount next season, is that right?
 

BS: Yes, that’s correct!
 

LM: You are!?
 

KW: Do you have any tips for her?
 

LM: Wait, I didn’t know this! Who are you playing?
 

BS: I’m in the ensemble, I think I’m going to sing in the quintet.
 

LM: Oh super. We did it just slightly differently…
 

BS: Just a little bit! And before that I’m doing Miss Bennett at Northlight.
 

LM: You’ve got things all planned out. I don’t have any theater planned yet after Wonderful Town but I have a bunch of concerts. In January, I’m doing a show called Eating Raoul and we’re just doing a few performances of a reading version of that musical at 54 Below. We have a holiday show, we’re taking it to San Francisco and Cincinnati, Nantucket. All over the place. It’s going to be crazy. It’s so fun; I love traveling so much.
 

BS: She does really good train station dances.
 

LM: Ohhh yeah. When I’m miserable and waiting for delayed flights or trains, I like to dance when there’s no one else in there at 1AM and send my videos to Bri.
 

KW: See, and just based on this conversation, I would buy that you were sisters.
 

LM: Absolutely, we are.
 

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KW: What is it that attracts you to this piece? What do you love about it? Is there a moment or a theme that made you want to do this?
 

LM: I think it’s the joy. The music and the characters are so classic – classic musical theater comedy.
 

BS: Exactly, it’s what I grew up on. It feels like…it feels familiar. We were talking a lot in rehearsal about the running time of the show because you know, musicals used to be allowed to be these big, epic experiences that were hours and hours long and our tolerance as American audiences has gone down a bit. Movies are shorter.
 

KW: Well, you would know specifically, just based on doing Tug of War at Chicago Shakes. I saw that, at first I have to admit I balked at the idea of 6 hours. And I swear, I went and at the end of it, I was like, wow I could sit here for three more hours. I’ve been to 75 minute shows that felt longer. So I feel like, when you have something that’s engaging, it should be allowed to be as long as it needs to be.
 

BS: Absolutely, that’s something that’s really exciting to throw the kitchen sink at an audience. We joke about it in rehearsal, but I don’t think there’s anything in rehearsal that the show doesn’t tap. We have singing policeman…
 

LM: Irish step-dancing policeman.
 

BS: Swing dancing, secretaries on wheels…we have pretty much everything that you can want out of a musical comedy, and we’re just hoping to bring our audiences a few hours of a great time and leave them smiling.
 
 

 

 

Lauren Molina returns to Goodman Theatre, where she previously appeared in Mary Zimmerman’s Candide (also at Huntington Theatre Company and Shakespeare Theatre, Helen Hayes Award). She appeared on Broadway as Regina in Rock of Ages and Johanna in Sweeney Todd (IRNE Award). Off-Broadway, Ms. Molina played Her in Marry Me A Little (Keen Company, Drama League Award nomination), originated Megan in Nobody Loves You (Second Stage Theatre and also at The Old Globe, San Diego Critics Circle Award nomination) and Regina in Rock of Ages. She most recently performed as Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors at the Cleveland Playhouse and the Countess in A Little Night Music at Huntington Theatre Company. Other regional credits include Murder Ballad (TUTS Houston), The Rocky Horror Show (Bucks County Playhouse) and Ten Cents a Dance (Williamstown Theatre Festival). Television credits include The Good Wife, and she has filmed pilots for A&E, WE and FOX. She is half of the comedy-pop duo The Skivvies and can be found performing in New York City and on tour across the country. LaurenMolina.com. TheSkivviesNYC.com.
 

Bri Sudia makes her Goodman Theatre debut. Chicago credits include Shining Lives, A Musical (Northlight Theatre); Far From Heaven (Porchlight Music Theatre); Road Show, Pericles and Shakespeare’s Greatest Hits (Chicago Shakespeare Theatre) and understudying in Tribes (Steppenwolf Theatre Company). Regional credits include three seasons at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, the Texas and Arkansas Shakespeare Festivals and the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre. Ms. Sudia received her MFA in acting from The University of Illinois and holds a degree in sign language interpreting for the deaf.

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A Conversation with HowlRound

HowlRound

 

Discussions are had by those who show up. HowlRound has been showing up to facilitate conversation about theater since its inception at Arena Stage. Now at Emerson College under the leadership of its original team plus some new recruits, the online commons has been disrupting our views about the performing arts online and in-person through positive inquiry.

 

 

Helen Schultz: How do you end up at HowlRound? These aren’t jobs you necessarily train for or think about going into when you study theater.
 

Vijay Mathew: In the summer of 2007, I got the directing fellowship at Arena Stage in D.C. Through the course of the year, I met David Dower and Jamie [Gahlon] was there too. I told David that I wanted to make it more of a producing, behind-the-scenes fellowship. Then what happened was at the end of that year in 2008, at that moment, David Dower was able to get Arena Stage to be a cooperator with the National Endowment for the Arts new play program, so we we’re administering that program for the NEA, running its application process and its panel, and then eventually documenting the results of this grant over the two years.
 

Jamie Gahlon: I started in 2006 in the fall, part-time. Then after the NEA, kind of in tandem with the NEA, we got this grant from the Mellon Foundation to start the American Voices New Play Institute, and that in combination with the work we were doing with the NEA became the precursor to what is now HowlRound. The Institute was founded in 2009, and then we stayed at Arena doing that work in 2012. And in January 2011, we officially started HowlRound as the Journal. And then we moved here; we basically moved everything with us from Arena. And so Vijay, Carl, David, and I moved here from D.C. up to Boston to be here at Emerson. That’s how HowlRound as it was currently conceived came to be.
 

VM: In terms of the platforms that are still in existence from the original start, there is TV – which was the New Play Development Program TV, then New Play TV, and now HowlRound TV – and then there was the New Play Map which we started in 2009 once Mellon funded this thing called the American Voices New Play Institute. And then, a year and a half later, we started the Journal, the HowlRound.com Journal.
 

JG: The other thing that we had been doing, since 2007, was having convenings – in-person gatherings that we were hosting about topics that felt important for people from our field to be discussing together. And so we were also doing that.
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Ramona Ostrowski: And the Twitter chats, which used to be under #NewPlay.
 

JG: So in terms of how we ended up here, for Vijay and I, it has been a sort of journey of many different roles and different versions of an organization that is now HowlRound but began at Arena Stage.
 

RO: I got this job last April, April 2015, and I had been working at a local arts services organization and as a dramaturg at a local company and was sort of feeling like I was interested in not focusing quite so locally in my career, so not necessarily just working for one theater company, which had been my goal throughout college and for the first few years of my career. So when the HowlRound job opened up and it was clearly a chance to interface with the field more broadly and think about the trends of the international theater community rather than doing a deep dive into one theater’s season and dig deep into individual plays, but to think more broadly it felt like a really exciting fit for me.
 

Adewunmi Oke: I had heard about HowlRound while I was in grad school, and it was probably spring 2012 when someone in the dramaturgy part of the department was like, “I read this HowlRound article,” and I was like, “What is that?” Throughout grad school, some of the articles from HowlRound and some of the livestreamings that were happening, they turned into the conversation, and I was like, “Oh. Okay. Cool.” I actually started the job last July, and when I was applying for it, I was just so happy there was an opportunity with HowlRound because I was like, “Oh my gosh – this is them!” I wasn’t when I was applying to stuff after grad school I didn’t think I was going to get anything in theater – I had applied to different theater companies in Philly and Atlanta and just nothing was coming through and happening. And then with HowlRound I was like, “Oh my gosh – I know about them!” and just to be a part of them, to work with the different platforms and work in them, has been really beneficial.
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HS: A lot of all your roles and the work that HowlRound does has to do with tech, and the role of disruption in theater.
 

VM: I think the key idea, to boil it down, is using the internet in its most powerful way, which is empowering and enabling everyone to have a voice and everyone to produce content and have a voice through that. It’s all peer-production. Just that idea is basically how all the HowlRound platforms work and are designed. What that allows is for an incredible power shift, it allows for democratizing, and it allows for previously unknown perspectives to be amplified in a way that they’ve never been amplified. And so that deals with gender parity, and every kind of issue that the theater is facing.
 

JG: And also, practically speaking, the power shift is an intentional power shift; it’s a really intentional means of making sure that no voice is privileged over any other, which hilariously in the theater scene is still really radical while you think it would be at the forefront of all of these sort of countercultural alternative movements in some ways. At least in America, it has been replicating these sort of dominant power structures and hierarchies, just like in all over the world; we’re trying to use the internet as a kind of means for that democratization to happen in a way that is quicker and more connected than sort of in-person reality could allow.
 

VM: These ideas are changing this dynamic of democratization that the internet has enabled. It’s really social media platforms and YouTube in earlier days – YouTube and Twitter and Facebook that used that technique on social media, of allowing everyone to be a media producer. However, all – because they’re corporations – to leverage this media and leverage this collaboration to gain a profit by selling advertising, by selling attention. What we’re doing differently than that: we’re using the same technique, but leveraging this attention and all of this media in order to do something good besides just making money, to help the future. So we call it common space peer production as opposed to profit-motivated production.
 

AO:: I think the cool thing about social media and the internet at large that really benefits us is the idea that there is no geographical boundary. Anyone can pitch an article for us, and as a team we figure out whether or not we think it’s a right fit in terms of the issues that our authors dole out. Anyone can livestream – if you’re interested in livestreaming, we’ll teach you how to livestream over the phone. If you’re in the area, you can come by. I think this idea of not having geographical boundaries and I think that’s something that, with theater specifically, if you don’t see a show in New York, you miss it. If you can’t get to Chicago to see a new play, you miss it. It’s something that really drew me to HowlRound, this idea of erasing boundaries, erasing those borders, and being able to traverse them in ways that you couldn’t do if you were just like in isolation.
 

RO: It’s been so interesting – we’re going through a strategic planning process right now, and so we did a survey of various stakeholders: readers, writers, and livestreamers and just people we’ve intersected with. One of the things that we’ve heard is that people are hungry for us to do more convenings, more in-person gatherings. So as amazing as the internet is – and realistically, as we move to a more international focus, our main platforms probably will be digital – I think there’s also a hunger to see people face-to-face. To share a room and share ideas too.
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HS: I feel like so many conferences in theater are focused around software and business – all people who use AudienceView, all people who use Tessitura. But you bring together underrepresented artists. What sort of conversations and actions come from those gatherings?
 

JG: From the beginning, our convenings have really focused on trying to bring together people who share some common ground in terms of issue at stake, but it’s never been focused; it’s always been focused on hot button issues, or issues that feel like they’re bubbling up in many different places and are affecting many different parts of the sector. We usually start by figuring out who needs to be in the room. I don’t mean specific people – I mean like what is the sort of DNA the room needs to look like, what should the artist to producer ratio be, are we looking for people from a specific region or are we trying to make this a truly national conversation? Do we have varying levels of experience in the field? Are we getting people who are all working in the same aesthetic or are we focused on making it intentionally broad in that way? A lot of what ends up dictating the types of conversations that we have is actually making that room full of people that can represent different perspectives on the same thing, and engage in meaningful and productive dialogue. The other thing that we do particularly well and has been a focus of ours is really trying to structure the conversation in a way that can be productive and action oriented, but also can allow for the kind of grey areas that do exist and the nuances that do exist within a topic. We also livestream every convening that we have, and so that’s a really intentional thing. We’re trying to be really transparent about not only the conversation that’s happening, but also make everyone that’s in the room physically feel as though they’re a delegate for a broader community that they’re representing so people feel like when they can find a way to look beyond their kind of individual eye, their own self, and think about the broader implications of being in that room and what they can do by being in that room, not only for themselves but on behalf of other people who can’t be in the room because of capacity, economic barriers, geographic barriers.
 

HS: At the trans theater convening, you had people like Carl, who’s hugely prominent, and Will Davis in the same room as people who are more emerging. You’re bringing people together from all these different perspectives and I think that feels like a physical manifestation of what HowlRound is.
 

VM: Totally. And that’s what the soul of disruption is about at HowlRound – no longer maintaining this old hierarchy, and this scarcity to the conversation and who gets to have the conversation and who has access to what knowledge is produced from that conversation. And so, in the very beginning, making these convenings accessible to the very people who didn’t have the resources or didn’t have the connections or didn’t know the right people to get in the physical room that we were filming it, tweeting about it, make broadcasting basically everything that was happening in this formerly very private, scarce room where these conversations would happen. That changes social dynamics hugely. It allows that knowledge to do more and to advance more.
 

RO: One thing that we did for the trans convening and we do as much as possible for convenings is to pay for everybody’s travel and housing, so that it is truly accessible for people who don’t necessarily have personal or institutional resources to travel to be a part of those conversations. We’re really just trying to break down as many barriers as possible to get as many perspectives and experiences in the room as possible.
 

HS: So much of theater criticism is so snarky and negative. HowlRound has a guiding editorial policy of “positive inquiry.” Could you talk more about that policy and why it exists?
 

RO: We have this policy not just in our articles, but in our comments section as well. We really don’t do a lot of moderating, but the community as a whole has one of the most generous and respectful environments that you’ll find in a comment section almost anywhere else on the internet. A lot of times the comments section becomes a sort of second article – so many people are weighing in differently and the author is responding and it’s a real conversation. The times that we do step in and delete comments and tell that person why is when they’re making a personal attack against the author, like saying “you are stupid” instead of saying “this idea you’re laying out is problematic.” Or that they’re speaking in a way that shuts down the conversation – it’s hard to respond to “you are stupid,” but it’s really easy to respond to “I don’t agree to this idea that you’ve laid out here” or “I don’t understand the way you went about this” or “in my experience, I’ve done this differently and it worked out” and stuff like that. So I think that sort of expectation that we set up not just in the content that we publish, but in the way that we center the conversations around it has been really positive and really worth it.
 

HS: HowlRound has had so many articles about Hamilton. A lot of the conversation around the show in these articles has been that the diversity of this past season is not reflective of the theater world as a whole – we have so far to go. Could you talk a bit about how these new representations in commercial theater are both helping, hindering, or changing the conversation you’re having here? And how non-theater people are getting in on that conversation?
 

JG: On that level, I think Hamilton is a good thing. I saw the show, I thought it was incredible and life-altering and all of the things, all of the good things. In terms of HowlRound, we’ve have a lot of pieces about Hamilton and I am proud that they haven’t all be one note. They haven’t all been “this is the greatest thing since sliced bread.” We had a really smart piece by James McMaster called, “Why Hamilton Is Not The Revolution You Think It Is” and it’s a deep dive look into Hamilton’s politics and what the representation means through certain lenses and even how the story is told. I think there are as many different opinions about Hamilton as there are people in the world right now. But, on the whole, in terms of what I think it’s doing for the American theater right now, I think it’s fantastic. Are you kidding me? There’s a bunch of New York public school kids who are getting to see the show and are getting to see a show in the first place, period – which is a sad statement. The world of arts education in our country… But that’s great. I think that the story is an important story to be told, and the way that Lin is telling it is brilliant. Masters of craft.
HowlRound

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A Conversation with Tyrone Phillips

Tyrone Phillips

 

Byhalia, Mississippi closed at Steppenwolf’s on August 21st, but don’t expect that to be your last opportunity to see this American classic in the making. The play tells the story of a young, blue-collar couple expecting their first child. The baby, Bobby, is born and Jim realizes immediately he isn’t the father because of an extra-marital relationship Lauren had with an African-American man. It complicates Jim’s relationship with Karl, a black man, who is one of his closest friends, and it lights the fuse to a powder keg that had been lying in wake in their small house in the small town of Byhalia. The play is doing the same thing for the theater community both here in Chicago and around the country. Byhalia, Mississippi, written by Evan Linder, has enjoyed productions in two countries and all across the United States, and if you love art that asks you questions, that demands something of you as an audience member, and leaves your mind turning at the final blackout, make sure you get a ticket when you have the chance.
 

I sat down with the Artistic Director of Definition Theatre Company and the director of the show, Tyrone Phillips, whose hand guided his incredible cast and whose vision took Evan’s brilliant words and made them so real that they hurt you, they give you hope, and ultimately, they heal you if you let them.

 

 

Kelly Wallace: I was so excited when I heard about this play; I was so glad to see that it was coming to this new space and having this second life. Is that gratifying?
 

Tyrone Phillips: It’s been so strange for me because I didn’t realize how many people hadn’t seen it yet, and we’re basically sold out. So it’s been great.
 

KW: How did you get involved with the play?
 

TP: Julian Parker was reading Karl’s part and was in the reading and we throw plays at each other all the time. He’s a co-founder of Definition Theatre Company as well, so once he said that, I said alright, let me read this play. And Evan [Lindner] sent us the scripts and at the time we were talking about producing it, just being co-producers, which we did. But I wasn’t directing. I went into rehearsals and took a page of notes and I just remember getting so invested in this play from the first rehearsal. We had half the cast that I’d seen or heard do a reading of the play. The one thing we didn’t have was Momma, and we didn’t have Cecelia Wingate until tech. But after I listened to her read the scene and I thought, this is Momma. It was written with her [Cecelia Wingate] voice in mind, and Evan jazzed me up about her. I met Cecelia and I went down to Byhalia myself, and to Memphis, and I rehearsed with her. Evan played Liz and she was here finally and met her cast and luckily it all worked out! She is a force to be reckoned with, as you now know.
 

KW: She’s incredible.
 

TP: I still remember reading the first scene of the play, between the mom and her daughter, and thinking this is an American classic. This is going to be done over and over again. We need to get this play. Immediately as I continue to read and find out about the son, Bobby, that’s where it got my heart. That’s where it got me as an artist, that we can actually say something here. There’s a reason this is all coming together for this story. And as time went on, no one could predict the events of the world. The show has become even more meaningful now.
 

KW: Of course it’s been through a long development process, it’s being done all over…
 

TP: Six different cities are doing it at the same time.
 

KW: So already, this story has been all over the country.
 

TP: As far as Toronto to Memphis to L.A., from readings to full productions. It’s really exciting.
 

KW: And now you are putting this piece up in this specific political moment. You couldn’t have planned for it, but here you are.
 

TP: I just knew that story could help. We’re all learning. There’s still things we’re trying to fix. At the end of the play, that question, no matter what happens, will always be relevant. How do we start to see each other as human? How do we do that before these things escalate? When we watch these videos of black people being shot on the street, and even after they’re shot and killed, the way that they treat the body…is not human. There’s something missing there. That’s what got me going. Finding out about Butler Young Jr., in 1974, shot and killed, hands behind his back. It happened back then and it’s happening now. How?
 

KW: The conversation between Karl and Jim where he admits that he doesn’t know who Butler Young Jr. is…
 

TP: I can’t watch the play from that moment. I couldn’t even watch it at opening. After Karl can’t find the words to describe it, it breaks my heart. From that moment on, the whole rest of the play, I’m crying the whole time.
 

KW: The range of emotions and the arc Karl takes, I found to be incredibly compelling. At the end, the play talks a lot about forgiveness. Do you feel like you would be able to forgive in Karl’s situation?
 

TP: It’s so interesting, all these characters change in front of us, which of course is another sign of a great play. Every single person changes. Momma’s the only one we’re not sure of, she just leaves, but we’re hoping and praying and wishing that when she gets in that car, she will change. Something’s gonna happen. I do think one day maybe Karl can come to forgiveness. One lady, after the first production, came up to me in tears. She was an older, white lady and she said that she had a friend in college – she could barely get it out. I stood there because I wanted to know what was happening and she said, “She just passed away, she was African American, she’s been my best friend her whole life.” She said, “I just hope I never made her feel the way Jim made Karl feel. And I don’t know. She’s already passed on.” My hope is that everyone finds peace for themselves, and that everyone finds forgiveness here and in the world. We can all be friends. But sometimes, there is just too much baggage to hold onto. People need to be okay with that sometimes. It’s not always about you. You’re not absolved of all of it. I could talk about this play all day. I was going through some personal things during the first rehearsals and love and forgiveness and how much and how far you’re willing to go to make a relationship work, and all of that was fresh in my mind. It’s been a healing process for me too.
 

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KW: One of the things people seem to really love about the show, and keep talking about, is the authenticity. People look at these characters and say, “I know these people. I’ve seen these people.” It could so easily have veered away from that. You have many stereotypes in your head going in about poor people, or about “white trash,” or about how people in a town like that would behave. As a director, how do you feel like you dismantled that?
 

TP: That’s something I’m always asking – in my own work as an actor – and when I’m directing. This is new for me. This is the second show I’ve professionally directed. Be truthful, be honest. Love each other, tell the truth. That’s the motto of the play and that’s the motto of the rehearsal room. I know you’re all amazing actors, that’s why you’re here, and I’m gonna try to make you better. Cecelia’s a well-known director in Memphis. They were almost all older than me. There’s that. So coming into the room, I thought, what do I have to offer? Why am I directing this play? It is something every director needs to know. But how can I help them tell the story? The end, this child, that’s where I see myself. I told them my vision for this show is about Bobby. I want to feel him in the room when you’re walking, the arguments you have; I need you to know that everything you say and do in this house is affecting that child immediately. He’s right there, overhearing everything.
 

KW: He’s not onstage, but he is distinctly a character in the show.
 

TP: And he’s the most important character, in my view. I was always worried about that child, and he’s not revealed to the audience, not once. I didn’t want a fake baby. Everybody knows. Everybody knows it’s a fake baby. You check out immediately, because it feels like a prop. But it’s not, this is a real life. My actors were all also really talented, they’re great. It was awesome. You can only hope for a collaboration to go as well as this one between actor and director. They know I’m crazy, and they’re used to it. I give them notes and I can be like, “Well, that didn’t work at all!” And they can be like, “Yeah, that was pretty terrible…” and we’re okay. The honesty, the trust, it’s there. It happened very fast. They were creating these characters, and I just wanted to help them be three-dimensional. As you said, you connected to them personally, and that’s huge.
 

KW: What do you think the show has to bring here in Chicago? What do you like about Chicago as a theater town?
 

TP: I grew up in Chicago, so I know the audience. I was the audience, growing up as a child. I didn’t see much theater, but I was always involved in school. My family’s here, and that’s also very important to me. All artists need a support system. You can’t make a living in this business by yourself, you need a support system. This is home. If I ever go anywhere, I’ll come back. If you’ve got a job for me, I’ll pack my bags, but I’m still coming back here. To me, this is where the best theater happens. There’s heart in Chicago theater. The actors are the most hard-working. The institutions are trying to do better. Authentic acting happens here. It’s not about backstabbing or competition, it’s the best man for the job. I’m Chicago born and bred, I love it, and I won’t leave. Definition Theatre is also my passion, and as the Artistic Director, I hope it shows people that I’m staking claim here and building a foundation here and having a visible flag. I mean, we don’t have a building yet, but when we do, we will have a flag and it will be here. I just love it here. Why are you here? Why not New York? I mean, I love New York, don’t get me wrong.
 

KW: It’s interesting, I always like to ask people about why they’re in Chicago because the prevailing wisdom is that New York is the epicenter of the theater world. It’s Broadway. You know, the whole idea of it…
 

TP: Totally, and sure it’d be fun to do shows in New York.
 

KW: New York is great! Chicago is interesting in that I feel that there’s a diversity of opportunity in Chicago that’s very different from the New York theater scene. It’s interesting, of late, to see some of the conversations we’re having here about race, about gender, about how to treat artists, are not happening in New York. And I can’t imagine them happening on this scale in New York…
 

TP: Not anytime soon, no. Because of what it is. Because of the machine.
 

KW: Right. Here, you can actually communicate and be in a conversation with the people at the top of the chain.
 

TP: And you do!
 

KW: It’s been my experience here that, now, when something is brought to the attention of a theater company and you say you have a problem with it and want to have a conversation, you actually get a real response.
 

TP: It’s incredible. The heart and compassion and the level of care people have for their art…we need this. We need it now. I’m over the gun violence. It can all just numb you. I remember asking…how are we helping? How are we in theater changing the world? Is this play helping anything? To go back into rehearsal immediately after the trip to Byhalia, told me that yes, it is. It was more than reassuring. I know theater can change hearts.
 

KW: Theater, unfortunately, isn’t as diverse as it should be either, but at least you can see the conversation starting to be had.
 

TP: That’s what we want to do. Our staff is multicultural, as it should be. Theater should look like the world. And if you look at institutions – unfortunately Chicago is not the best either – I know there’s work to be done.
 

KW: It almost has to start at the top, but representation is so important. If you don’t see people who are like you succeeding in your field…
 

TP: Right! Why would you do it? I agree, I hear you. That’s what we want to do at Definition Theatre Company. The day that we don’t exist…I mean, there could come a day where we don’t need to exist, but I highly, highly doubt it.
 

KW: I think a lot of people working on these kinds of issues wish that they didn’t need to, that we could put ourselves out of business, but…
 

TP: It’s not going to happen anytime soon.
 

KW: A play like this makes you confront a lot of your internalized prejudice in an interesting way too. Have people expressed that kind of reaction to you? What do you hope they take from this?
 

TP: I want to take care of my audience members the same way I take care of my actors. Enlightenment is the best word I can think of. I don’t want to get into preaching and telling everyone they’re wrong. I want people to reflect. We’re all grown-ups – look inside yourself, take a look. Sometimes you don’t know. It’s making people take a step back and ask questions. All good theater does that. I remember being told that as a kid, that good theater asks questions. I couldn’t comprehend that as a child, but now I totally do. This play isn’t going to solve everything; it won’t just end racism. But people do leave changed, in their own lives, and with their own stories. Who hasn’t been in love? Or wanted to be in love? These things affect everyone.
 

KW: The emotions are absolutely universal. It’s a very focused story. It’s about these very specific people at this moment in their life, but at the same time, it speaks to things that transcend all of our human experiences.
 

TP: It’s absolutely crazy how good it is.
 

KW: What was it like being down there in Byhalia?
 

TP: I’m a new director, so that was something I always wanted to do. I wanted to go to the actual place. We were doing research, taking pictures, when we were stopped. I was with Evan, the playwright, and a reporter as well, and apparently there’s a bank down the road. So they thought maybe we were taking pictures of the bank. So we were stopped and questioned. And I remember thinking, “Holy shit, I’m gonna die here. This is real.” The problems we’re facing in this play are real. Evan talked to the officer for the most part, we were there for about ten minutes talking to him because we were taking pictures as research for a play. And sometimes I get so stressed out and I just try to remember…it’s theater. We’re doing theater here. It’s not life or death right now. But it immediately became that.
 

KW: And most white people don’t experience that. I would never feel that fear to take some pictures for my play.
 

TP: It was insane. But to see the town, to see how small it was, that helped. When they say, everybody is going to know, they mean it. When we walk down the street with our half-black baby, they’ll know he’s not adopted. This isn’t New York. That’s real life, when you’re in a smaller community. It’s a microcosm of the bigger picture in America. We’ve been hiding things, sweeping them under the rug. There’s no way to heal that way.
 

KW: The adoption issue really hit for me, being adopted myself, but both my parents look like me. Nobody would ever look at my family walking down the street…
 

TP: And think like…they don’t match.
 

KW: Right, it just wouldn’t happen.
 

TP: That’s the thing, it’s very telling. I want the audience to realize that when Bobby grows up, as he’s growing up, they’re the ones. They have a big say in how his life will go. It’s that town. That’s Byhalia, Mississippi. Nothing ever changes unless people are forced to look at it. The audience is moved to tears sometimes because they never thought about these issues this way before. People are fascinating to me. Our meeting…it’s for a reason, I feel. There’s so many people in this world, and even the strangers you pass, you can just smile at someone, and it could change their day. We’re all here for a reason. That’s it, that’s all you can do. You don’t have to do everything for everybody, but I want my experiences when I’m dead and gone to be positive.
 

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KW: Where do you see the play going next?
 

TP: I see it going everywhere. My thing is that I want as many people to see it as possible.
 

KW: And of course bringing it to New York would be great for the audience, but you’re right that this show should be done everywhere, especially in the South. Do it in Mississippi!
 

TP: Yeah! Exactly, it should be everywhere. We can start those conversations. They’re already started, so it’s really that we need to confront those conversations. The play was preserved at the Harold Washington Library already, our first production. I just want more people to see it. That’s literally it. Theater can change the world. I believe in that, and it sounds cliché, but that’s how you actually get in someone’s psyche. Everyone sits down and we pretend and here we are. Evan was passionate and he was smart, and I’m honored he asked me to direct this play. Who’s telling the story? What stories are you responsible for telling and what opportunities are you giving? Two different conversations. Sometimes bigger theaters get confused.
 

KW: It’s so complicated to untangle. I’m a solutions person.
 

TP: Thank you, yes.
 

KW: We’ve found a problem. Now what are the steps we take? What do we do to make sure that all of this is resolved in a way where people feel heard and represented?
 

TP: That’s what we strive for at Definition. I grew up in a very diverse school environment, and I’ve seen it work. It’s not a mystery to me. The other part of it for me is that I’m Jamaican American, and people have no idea, but I’m first generation, born here from Jamaica. So, my outlook and experience as a black male and seeing the difference in how we’re culturally treated, it’s unique and propelling me. My mindset is just different. I want to show people that this is for you, too. The first thing I said when I started Definition was…if you don’t see anyone who looks like you, you’ll never know it’s for you. If a ten-year-old kid goes and sees a play and everyone in it is white, or even the reverse, you wouldn’t think, “Oh, that could be me!”
 

KW: I always think of that photo of the young boy with President Obama who was so enthralled by the fact that the President had hair like his.
 

TP: Yes! That is it. That’s the key. I’m passionate. I could talk about this all day.
 

KW: What do you want see Chicago theater go from here? If you got to direct the next five years…
 

TP: I see a beautiful world, I really do. Another thing that’s become really important to me are younger people that love theater. I’m really hopeful. They see past all the bullshit that we’re fighting. They believe we can do it. They think differently. I hope that we, Definition, can say hey, come here. We can do it. We’ll help you. I hope that all of Chicago is like that. What are you leaving behind? Legacy is really important to me. It’s morbid but…when I’m dead and gone, what have you done? What can you speak for? What can you say you’ve changed? What opportunities have you given someone else? Being able to spend time with these people and their passion and their energy and finding their voice because the media isn’t doing it and the world isn’t doing it…that’s exciting to me. There’s no place like Chicago – I couldn’t have started this company anywhere else. I couldn’t have found the traction or gotten the people that we have behind us. That mystifies me a little, but it’s also why I’m so proud of this city. I believe in Chicago, you can do whatever you want to. We’ve fought and scratched but we’ve done it all by not being afraid of asking. People are going to say no. But you won’t hear the no if you don’t ask. In five years, I hope I’m singing a song about how happy I am to be in Chicago.
 
 

 

 

Tyrone Phillips is the founding artistic director of Chicago’s Definition Theatre Company where he recently appeared as Torvald in A Doll’s House. He holds a B.F.A. from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign where he graduated with departmental distinction. He is proudly represented by Grossman and Jack Talent. Recent onstage credits include Stick Fly (Windy City Playhouse), Genesis (Definition Theatre Company), and Saturday Night/Sunday Morning (Prologue Theatre at Steppenwolf Garage Rep). Tyrone has also studied abroad at Shakespeare’s Globe and was an artistic intern at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. At Milwaukee Rep he was seen in Assassins (Ensemble), A Christmas Carol (Ensemble, U/S Bob Cratchit), The Mountaintop (U/S MLK), Clybourne Park (U/S Kevin/Albert), and A Raisin in the Sun (Moving Man, U/S Walter Lee). Directing credits include Dutchman, Evening News, A Taurian Tale, Just Suppose (Definition Theatre Company), Amuse Bosh (Pavement Group), Luck of the Irish, Lord of the Flies, and The Tempest (Niles North Theatre). Film and television credits include Boss, Divergent, Gimmick, and Intersection. In fall 2015, the Chicago Tribune named Tyrone a “rising star” in Chicago theatre.

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A Conversation with Shaina Taub

Shaina Taub

 

We sat with Shaina Taub in the quiet, ghost-lit Anspacher Theater of the Public, on break from her rehearsal for Twelfth Night, on another of these swelteringly hot Manhattan days. Having for years known her genius through her music, it was no surprise that her head was full of beautiful, revolutionary things. As a performer, composer, and maker of things, she lends herself generously to the conversation of how to love each other better, how to leave this planet better than we found it.
 

On the record of the world, Shaina is moving the needle toward empathy in her words and trade and deeds, reminding us that we all have much left to learn and how better to do it than together.

 

 

Corey Ruzicano: I said this to you the last time we chatted, but I haven’t stopped thinking about an idea you said you’d borrowed from the Public Works program, that singing together is a proposal of the best humankind could be.
 

Shaina Taub: Yeah, that’s part of the Public Works language, that it’s a radical proposal to humanity through unified singing.
 

CR: Have you felt that reflected in your work here with Public Works? Has that sentiment deepened for you?
 

ST: Yeah, I think about it all the time. In the times we’re living in, just to come together in a room and do something joyful is kind of a radical act. When I think about what it took for all these people to be in a room, all hundred people, everyone in the ensemble, from all different walks of life, all different economic, social, racial backgrounds – just what it took for every person to arrive in that room. Including the team, that’s not an us and them situation, it’s such a miracle for all of us to be making art together. It’s important to remember how much that took and how easy it feels in a way, and how natural it feels. And there’s a quote right now that’s outside the Public on all the window-casings by Nelson Mandela – I’ll probably butcher it so you should look it up – but it’s something like, no one is born hating, people learn to hate so they can also learn to love and loving is more natural.
 
And especially the kids. We have maybe ten or twelve people all under the age of thirteen from, again, all different backgrounds, and just watching them teach one another dance steps – it always reminds me of that final line in Ragtime. Are you a Ragtime person?
 

Stage & Candor_Shaina Taub_Quotings-01
 

CR: Clearly not enough of one!
 

ST: I’m a super fan. It’s Tateh saying, I have an idea for a movie, a gang, a bunch of kids getting into trouble, getting out of trouble, black, white, Christian, Jew, gay, straight – he doesn’t say “gay” and “straight” in Ragtime, but – all the time, despite their differences, seeing these kids together, you see that it’s true: we learn these biases. We learn to hate and just being around young people has changed the way I look at the city. And what I’ve realized these past couple weeks is that I know that I’m inside it right now and the processing is going to happen later, in these next couple months, so I don’t even know how to articulate how I feel about it because it’s impacting me so immediately but it’s already changing how I walk down the streets of New York. Every block, everyone I see, I just think, you look like you could be in our show. Every person has that story to tell.
 

CR: That’s really beautiful; I don’t think you have to be any more articulate than that.
 

ST: Yeah, I’m just so grateful to be involved in this kind of work and it’s made me realize, I can never not do this kind of work now. It’s not that I don’t want to do all kinds of work but it’s one of those moments where there’s no going back.
 

CR: You can’t unsee it.
 

ST: Exactly.
 

Shaina Taub
 

CR: A word that I really love and am often sensitive to its overuse because it is one of these nonprofit buzzwords, but I would love to hear what the word community means to you. How have you defined your artistic community?
 

ST: It’s interesting. I think my answer before these couple of weeks would have been different. In my own artistic community, it’s the idea of truly supporting each other and truly being on the same team and having this mutual inspiration ecosystem of talent and ideas where we’re all feeding off each other and not feeding into the myth of the individual genius alone in their room, that we all make each other better. Actually embracing that, actually letting yourself learn from each other. I feel more a part of the city this past month than I have in a decade of living here.
 

CR: That’s amazing.
 

ST: And part of it is that it makes a difference to actually know people. It’s one thing to intellectually say I’m an ally to lots of people different from me, and yes, of course I believe in equality and stand against oppression and institutional racism, but it’s another thing to really know all the people with the differences. I’ve realized to know these people from all the different backgrounds, that I might not have crossed paths with otherwise, when I think of something happening to any of them… just thinking about it, I get emotional – if anything were to happen to any of us, especially at the hands of something to do with our oppressive system, it kills me. It now kills me in a different way. Knowing people matters. It’s one thing to have your politics and be on the right side of history – and I’m not trying to put everything in binary, but I do think if you stand for equality and freedom, that’s the right side – but it’s important to build those real relationships; it’s a different kind of engagement.
 

CR: Yeah, I think that is absolutely true. And it is a special thing; it’s not always obviously accessible all the time.
 

ST: And you do have to seek it out. You should…and I don’t want to preach, I want to engage actively with as many people who are different from me as possible.
 

CR: It enlarges your life.
 

ST: And it makes you realize we’re not different. The more different a person you meet, the more you realize we’re not so different. It’s the thread I’m trying to pull out of Twelfth Night, because when I was assigned it, I had to look at, what about this story would this community possibly care about? What would be the way in? I was reading the various literature that the Public Works has put together over the past couple of years where they’ve had some amazing anthropologists release reports and study how this work affects the community. It’s so hard to convince people and institutions that the arts matter, because their impact is not as tangible as other things. It’s qualitative not quantitative, so they’re trying to really study to gather data to show the various places funding comes from, that this stuff does matter. One of the big takeaways was the idea of empathy, and that this program and this work and community arts engagement helps you empathize in this deeper way I was talking about before. And then I was like oh, Twelfth Night is all about empathy; it’s all about walking a mile in another person’s shoes. It’s about Viola taking on her brother’s identity, taking on a male identity and pretending to be something she’s not. By taking on that other person, she learns more about herself and learns more about others. That became my way in.
 

CR: That’s a really beautiful and fascinating way of looking at it – I don’t know that I’ve ever thought about it like that, and it makes perfect sense.
 

ST: Yeah, that was a challenge with this. Oskar Eustis is a great man for so many reasons, but in the first draft I had written one finale song and it was kind of about wearing your heart on your sleeve, kind of all these platitudes and plays on words about how it’s not about what you wear, it’s about who you are…it didn’t quite land. It didn’t quite nail it. And he said, really try and write a song that sums up why we were here this evening. What’s the point?
 

CR: Ooh that’s a tall order.
 

ST: That’s when I really went back to the drawing board and had to think about why is she here, why does New York care about Twelfth Night, what does it have to say to us in 2016. From that came our finale song that’s called “Eyes of Another” and it’s about looking through the eyes of other people.
 

CR: I wonder if you could talk about some of those relationships that have taken shape in, and helped to shape, this process?
 

ST: I think it’s just seeing people, beyond all the differences I was talking about, the generational differences, to be seeing the nine- and ten-year-old from completely different walks of life teaching each other dance steps, remembering that every person was that age. Looking at the senior citizens and knowing they’ve gone through so much. One of the organizations we work with is called Military Resilience Project, so it’s a lot of people who fought in the armed services, and we work with the Fortune Society, which provides support for reentry for people who have been recently incarcerated, people who have served time. What it’s taken for all these people to go through all that and show up in a room and still say yes to life, and say yes to joy, has been inspiring and perspective-putting for me.
 

CR: Yeah, absolutely, in both the practice of art-making and for this specific story, it feels like it’s really all related.
 

ST: Right, and something that is so important about Public Works that I think is really central is the value of excellence. This isn’t a pageant where we’re patting ourselves on the back and, you know, gave it a college try, and the community did the best they could. This production, every element of it, is at the highest level. We all bring our best selves to it, and what’s so beautiful about it, when I’ve seen the Public Works shows in the past, is we have five equity actors and you don’t always know who they are. You can’t spot them – I mean you might know who one is, like there’s Nikki JamesBook of Mormon, but you don’t totally know. When I saw The Tempest, I wish we could do an audience exit poll: which do you think the five equity actors were? You don’t know. There’s so much talent in the community, and that’s something else I love: there is talent and genius everywhere. It’s kind of an accident which ones end up making it to the pedestal, but it’s just incredible creative, artistic virtuosity. And I think one incredibly powerful thing is, with some of the young people in our cast, they’re incredibly gifted singers, performers, and I’ve gotten the sense that, when I tell them that, that potentially they haven’t heard it before, and how powerful that is. What an honor for me to get to get to encourage them – because it’s clear to me how talented they are, so if my believing in them can help facilitate them having the courage to keep pursuing it, that would be such a great reward.
 

CR: And I think for young people to be treated with the same kind of creative responsibility as the adults in the room is such a powerful tool toward agency-building.
 

ST: Yeah, and that is a talent-continuum. Talent is not something that people have or don’t have. Theater and art and music – it’s not something that divides between people who do it and people who don’t; it’s something we all own and can take part in.
 

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CR: I read your tedX talk and I love what you’ve said about listening, and I would love to hear more about that – how has your work, with Public Works and beyond, informed the way you listen and how has listening informed the way you work?
 

ST: We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants, no one is making art alone, no one is not a combination of their influences. And how awesome? I think this is a Billy Joel quote, that you can spend all your time taking in art or music and you can never be done – even if art stopped now, you would never get through it all. And that’s such a gift. For me, whenever I’m stuck on a song or a character or lyrics, there’s just a trove and there’s so much to borrow from. Being in conversation with it is not stealing from it or plagiarizing – but to get to be in conversation with all that came before me and all the people that are working around me is one of the most exciting parts of it. I’m constantly looking to other musicals, other artists, to see how they handled a specific character or moment and then try and put my own spin on it.
 

CR: Yeah, and someone said to me once that great leadership is being able to ask the question and actually hear the answer, and I think that listening is actually a much more radical idea than we give it credit sometimes.
 

ST: Yeah, and accepting that…I hope in forty years, I’m writing my best shit. I’m aware that there’s so much I don’t know yet. I don’t want to be the best writer I can be already, I want to get there, it’s like that quote, I think it’s Cheryl Strayed, that humility is the first byproduct of self-knowledge. I’m aware that I have a lot to learn. So maybe up till now I’ve written in the hundred-ish range of songs I’ve written. I hope that in forty years there are still three of those songs that I’m standing by or still playing life, that would be ideal.
 

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CR: Yeah, and it just takes all of that time, to become. Becoming is hard.
 

ST: Yes, and being okay with throwing things away. That’s been a big lesson for me and Jeanine Tesori has been a big mentor for me and she’s always told me, it’s okay to productively fail. I’ve had various projects or collaborations that haven’t panned out necessarily but what I’ve learned from them is so worth it. I don’t for a second think of it as lost work.
 

CR: We do talk about making mistakes a lot in this field, that pro-failing rhetoric feels really common, but I was talking to a playwright friend the other day who was saying, yeah, yeah everyone says it’s great to fail, it’s so important to fail, but they don’t remind you how bad it sucks! How do you make it not suck? But maybe that’s part of it, maybe you can’t dilute that part without also losing what you learn from it? I don’t know.
 

ST: Right, me either.
 

CR: But throwing things away or moving on from them isn’t a bad thing.
 

ST: Oh yeah, I released an album six months ago and for every song on it there are four or five songs that didn’t make it in – the songs on the album are the culmination of all the songs that have been able to stick around the last couple of years.
 

CR: Is there something about those songs that you can recognize as similar? Can you trace why they’ve all remained?
 

ST: The common denominator is that they all withstood two years of being played live. It gets fed back to you. it’s the reaction they get over time. If a song lasts for two years in concert and I’m still playing it, it still feels like it’s getting an honest response and my band is still excited about playing it, after two years – and this is going to sound too lofty for what I mean – but after that, it enters my canon. It reveals itself.
 

CR: Something that I find so exciting about your work is that you are an interdisciplinary artist and I wonder what that ability to be in different roles has informed you about your practice of each one?
 

ST: I have a thing that I think helps feed doing the multiple things which is that the grass is always a little greener. When I’m only acting I think, oh man I have all these creative opinions about the show, I wish I had a hand in it, but then when I’m writing, I think aw man I wish I could just be an actor and go home at six o’clock and be done…and every combination of it there are different benefits. It all informs each other.
 

CR: That’s awesome. I think it is becoming a much more common story that people do more than one thing, and that’s exciting at least to me.
 

ST: Yeah and I think part of it, and this is sort of a truism but I believe it – that how you define yourself and treat yourself is how you teach everyone else how to treat you. I think for a while I was skating back and forth saying, oh I’m a writer, I’m a performer, I have to choose. I had different bios, I’d use a different one if I was trying to pursue this or that and I felt that pressure to choose, or that split, but then a couple of years ago I was like, I do all these things. I introduce myself that way, I present myself that way all the time, and I don’t try to backtrack or apologize about it and I do a lot of it. From there, it started to roll back to me in that those were the kind of opportunities I got, those were the calls I got, to come do Old Hats, and write songs and perform and improv little songs and dances and arrange…the jobs I’ve been lucky enough to have in these last few years have started to reflect that.
 

CR: And something else that I really value in your work is that you use your art really explicitly to bring awareness to and ask for change around certain things, and I wanted to know if you had any thoughts about how artists can be part of the conversation around social and policy change?
 

ST: Yeah, well…now I’m always quoting other people, but I love the Nina Simone quote of how can you be an artist and not reflect the times? I don’t think there’s political or social art and then not, it’s all one big conversation with the world around me. People look for stories, they love to watch their stories on TV, that’s the thing that people respond to, they don’t want to listen to data numbers and facts and polls and pundits and twenty-four-hour news cycle, people want stories. That’s what they listen to. For me the kind of stories that we’re putting out there through music, through theater, it’s not that it necessarily gets legislation passed, but it informs a conversation, informs the communal hive-mind about what we care about.
 

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CR: Yeah, absolutely. I’m always really excited to hear about how someone who has a totally different skillset to mine, talk about work and how that informs their view of the world. Do you see any lessons that songwriting has taught you when you look at the rest of your life?
 

ST: Well, I think why I’m drawn to writing songs is the way they’re always constantly being re-taken on. If you write a song, it’s just not definitive – other people cover it. One of the most rewarding things to me has been other people singing my music, and I think that’s one thing that draws me to theater, that I like to perform myself too, but to me that’s the conversation, that’s the generational lineage of how many people have sung “Hallelujah,” or “Hey Jude,” or “You’ve Got A Friend”? It’s not just something you can take in, you have to wear it, to try it on yourself. It’s not like a painting where it is what it is, no one does a new version of it, or maybe that’s not true, I don’t know enough about the visual art world, but I love that songs are this thing that everyone gets to continually examine.
 

CR: Absolutely. Is there a song that’s taught you a specific lesson – in your writing or someone else’s, in the listening?
 

ST: Yes, oh man. Well for me, I always think of “He Wanted to Say” from Ragtime, which I recently found out that in the libretto is one that they make optional to do, which is crazy because to me, just in thinking about theater songs, in terms of songs that can uniquely use the form of music to tell that moment better than a scene could, I love “He Wanted to Say” because it’s this moment of Mother’s younger brother, going to Coalhouse. And he has all these things inside of him of wanting to join in Coalhouse’s cause, which is black men speaking out against systemic racism, and there’s all this stuff going on because Mother’s younger brother is this wealthy white guy but he really wants to stand with him. So he goes to him and he’s trying to think of how to express that, and he also has technical skills that can help in what Coalhouse is going through, but then Emma Goldman, who’s this other character, comes forward while Mother’s younger brother is saying he wanted to…and she says, he wanted to say…? And she sings this whole song about all the things he wants to say, and then the last line of the song is but all he said was, and he says: I know how to blow things up, because he can help build a bomb. And I just love that song because it’s all the emotions and all the things he has inside, and it works so uniquely and so specifically as a song. I always point to that one.
 

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CR: So I’ve heard a little about what you’re up to next but I would love to hear more about your dream project.
 

ST: Yeah, as soon as we finish Twelfth Night, the project I’m starting – which I’m already in the research phase of – is the women’s suffrage movement. It does feel like a dream project because in a way, like I was saying before in terms of productive failing, I’ve known I wanted to write musicals, but I’ve had kind of a tug-of-war with it because I’m such a musicals person but it links everything we’re talking about because I still have so much to learn. I constantly have songs I want to write, I always have statements I want to make in two-three minutes, and that feels like a well that keeps serving me, but to make an evening length story, to find a thing that I really care enough about…and what Jeanine talks about is, even when you’re going crazy, because musicals make you crazy because they’re so hard, the running engine, the slow hum underneath it all has to be how much you don’t want to die without telling that story. And I feel like I hadn’t quite found that, but getting this history feels like the first time I’ve felt that way.
 

CR: It’s certainly a story I’m still so hungry to hear. That’s really exciting. And it’s so cool getting to see you bringing to light this story about women, when you’ve worked with so many incredible women in this field.
 

ST: Yeah, there are so many freaking awesome female directors. I feel so lucky that I’ve gotten to work with Rachel Chavkin twice and Tina Landau and Lear deBessonet. And those are my favorite directors; it’s not that they’re women – I mean, they’re women and that’s awesome – but even beyond that, they’re my favorite directors. They’re the people I’m most excited about, genitals aside.
 

CR: Totally, and it’s just exciting to have so many different people at the table. Not that enough room has been made at this table we’re all sharing yet, but that it feels like more room is being made.
 

ST: Definitely, and walking into this building always feels like magic because Liz Swados was my mentor in college and now Jeanine is my mentor, and there are no two more badass women than those two. I’m sure the shit they went through as women in the 70s, 80s, 90s, being the only ones, or one of the few in positions of leadership at that time, the way they’ve paved the way…I’ve had my difficult experiences of what it is to be a woman in this field, for sure our work is far from over, but my path has been infinitely easier because of the barriers they knocked down, and before them, the suffragettes, so it feels like, yes, the work is never over, but that’s no excuse not to do it. You have to move your little inch in the line, and sometimes it can feel like, I can work my whole life and only move it a millimeter forward, and why bother? It’s just a millimeter? But we all have to do that, and over time—this is another quote that I’m going to butcher, but, the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice. You have move your link in the chain forward.
 

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CR: And it takes so much longer than even conceivable. And yes, probably nine times out of ten, the things you do won’t change a thing, but that one time, you have no idea who or how or what things you’re setting in motion, so you have to keep at it.
 

ST: I’m gonna quote again, cause I’m a big dork; I’m gonna be really Jew-y, this is a Talmud quote sort of in the idea of tikkun olam, of social justice, that our duty is to leave the world better than we found it and there’s a quote that you are not obligated to complete the task, nor are you free to abandon it. You’re not gonna finish it, but you have to do your part.
 

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CR: Yeah, and this feels like your music is part of you discovering what work there is to be done and what of it is yours to do. When you have a gift or a tool or a platform, like you do, it feels exciting to be able to use your art to reflect the things that you want to see.
 

ST: Yeah, and – oh man I’m full of quotes – but it’s like the Moral Bucket List, the question should not be what do I want out of life but it should be, how can I use my gifts to meet the deep needs of the world? And that really resonated with me; I have these things that I happen to have skill in, and have worked really hard on, and how can I use that to fill in gaps and fill holes. It’s not just, what do I want out of life – doing that work actually becomes the thing that I want. It’s the humility thing we were talking about earlier; if I can just inspire the fourteen-year-old girls in my cast, [sung:] that would be enough. Had to, I’m sorry, how can you get through a day without quoting Hamilton?
 

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CR: You can’t, it’s not possible. And I think it’s really true, and it feels like for a lot of this work you really have to know who you are and the Public Works program really feels like a channel to be in a space with people who are different from you, and realize how similar everyone really is, like you were saying before. I mean, I’m not in the room where it happens, but it sounds like that’s what it’s like.
 

ST: Yeah, yes, yes it is. It’s such a gift, I’m already feeling how much I’m going to miss them, but when I started to feel sad about it, Laurie Woolery, who’s another amazing woman who works at The Public and Public Works, said, but now you get to watch them grow; it gets to continue on.
 

CR: And that’s amazing, and to know that New York City is full of that, even when it’s hard to see. The storytelling around New York is often so polarized – it’s really nice to hear about something that encompasses all of it.
 

ST: Yeah, I’ve been here eleven years, and maybe I just haven’t been here long enough to be jaded about it, but I love it. I grew up in a very small town in Vermont, and rural Vermont is lovely, but it’s pretty homogenous. My being Jewish was pretty exotic. So to now be constantly immersed in so many different cultures and stories, I don’t think I fully appreciated or knew how to appreciate it before this project. It’s just such an exciting and inspiring place to live. You can’t hide from the world here, for better and for worse.
 

CR: Exactly, and I’ll give you a quote too, that James Baldwin wrote: “the role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover; if I love you I have to make you aware of the things you can’t see.” New York is a really hardcore love, you have to keep being aware.
 

ST: Yeah, and how you act and the energy you put out does matter. We’re not powerless. A thought I had in the wake of one of the unfortunately fill-in-the-blank terrible days we’ve had this year, was that: we’re not powerless, we can’t give into the myth that we’re powerless. We can love each other and put out a loving, joyful energy and that doesn’t count for nothing. It counts for a lot. We can’t let anyone take that away from us.
 

CR: And that telling stories spills out into everything, everything we do is a story and it’s really easy not to take responsibility for the plot. There is deep power in just being aware of what story you’re telling, as a person.
 

ST: I’m trying to pick a show next year; I’m trying to pick a play that responds to what we need, and a thing that keeps coming up, that comes up a lot in Shakespeare and also in our lives and in the lives of a lot of these community members is the idea of second chances. It’s never over, no matter the terrible things you’ve been through, you can start again.
 

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CR: Yeah, and it’s amazing that Shakespeare is one of these things that continues to give and give and give, and lend itself to all times and all people. Were you big into Shakespeare before this project?
 

ST: No. I did a show in middle school and I worked on a production of The Tempest two years ago at A.R.T. but no, I just hadn’t spent a lot of time with it, so I have a newfound appreciation for it. The stories are big, and for a lot of the lives of the people in New York, the lives are lived in these epic proportions, so it really resonates. And you feel it, it’s so exciting to see community members click in. And our director Kwame has a particular gift for finding the ways to connect those dots with people working on Shakespeare, in ways I had never thought about it. He just has a way of making it feel immediate and necessary, like it happened yesterday.
 

CR: That’s beautiful. And language sort of is this amazing human-made gift, and it’s almost like music or a score – that everyone can own in the way you were talking about songs before.
 

ST: Yeah, we’re constantly doing it again and again. For me, the main thing has been figuring out Viola in 2016, and that’s so cool. I hope in another hundred years, someone does another musical adaptation, so these things continually hold the mirror up to ourselves again and again.
 

CR: So what have you learned about Viola today?
 

ST: I feel like a lot of her journey is figuring out that it was inside her all along, that she thought she needed to dress a certain way or act a certain way or take something on in order to be taken seriously in order to succeed, in order to survive, but she had it. And I think for me, working on the show and collaborating, so to speak, with Shakespeare, it’s been a process of, no, it’s in me, and owning yourself and not apologizing for it. You can still have that humility and know how much you have left to learn and still trust yourself without any added accessories. I used to have this thing where I thought, I need to wear pants and suits, like I would never want to dress too girly if I had a fancy meeting, and it’s been a process of taking ownership of however you want to dress and however you want to be. It’s you that matters.
 
 

 

 

Raised in the green mountains of Vermont, Shaina Taub is a New York-based performer and songwriter.
 

She made her Lincoln Center solo concert debut in their American Songbook series in 2015, and plays regularly in New York with her band. Her sold-out Joe’s Pub concert and debut EP What Otters Do were featured on NPR/WNYC’s Best of the Year listing, and her debut full-length album Visitors was released at the end of 2015.
 

As a songwriter, Shaina won the 2014 Jonathan Larson Grant, and was Ars Nova’s 2012 Composer-in-Residence. Her original soul-folk opera, The Daughters, has been developed by the Yale Institute of Music Theatre, CAP21 Theater Company, and was featured in NYU’s mainstage season. She has created songs for Walt Disney Imagineering, Sesame Street, and recently signed a publishing deal with Ghostlight / Sh-k-Boom Records and Razor & Tie, as the first artist in their new joint venture to represent songwriters that fuse theatrical and pop music. Six-time Tony winner Audra McDonald is currently performing Shaina’s song, The Tale of Bear & Otter, on her world concert tour.
 

Shaina is currently creating a musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night for the Public Theater with director Kwame Kwei-Armah that will be performed in the summer of 2016 at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park as part of the Public Works initiative. She is also currently writing a new musical about Alice Paul and the last seven years of the American women’s suffrage movement.
 

As a performer, Shaina has traveled the world as a vocalist, actor and musician. She was Karen O’s (of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) vocal standby and back-up singer in her psycho-opera, Stop the Virgens at St. Ann’s Warehouse and the Sydney Opera House. She earned a Lucille Lortel Award nomination for her portrayal of Princess Mary in the the hit electropop opera, Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, and performed the songs of Tom Waits in the American Repertory Theater’s production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, for which she also arranged the music. She recently starred in the critically acclaimed west coast premiere of Bill Irwin and David Shiner’s Old Hats, directed by Tina Landau, performing her original songs along with her band. The production will return for an encore run at New York’s Signature Theatre, beginning performances in January 2016.
 

A fellow of the MacDowell Colony, the Yaddo Colony, the Sundance Institute and the Johnny Mercer Songwriter’s Project, winner of the 2013 MAC John Wallowitch Award, a TEDx conference speaker, and a featured artist in the Gc Watches ad campaign, Shaina served on the music theatre faculty at Pace University, and is a University Scholar alumnus of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

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A Conversation with Carla Ching

Carla Ching

 

Carla Ching is in full LA-mode: she calls us from the car in – you guessed it – immense traffic. She was rolling into a spacing rehearsal for her newest play, The Two Kids That Blow Shit Up at Artists at Play. After rehearsal, it’s home to work on rewrites. There’s a new project for The Kilroys to be constructed, a show to open, and more scenes to be written for her gig on Jill Soloway’s I Love Dick. But she still has time to talk to us about the educational system in America, balancing the worlds of television and theater, and why representation matters – especially when it comes to Asian artists.

 

 

Helen Schultz: You developed this play at a week-long Lark/Vassar retreat. For our readers, what’s a quick synopsis of the show?
 

Carla Ching: It’s the story of a Chinese-American and Korean-American kid who meet when they are nine years old and their parents start sleeping with each other. We follow them through their lives together: they get married, divorced, fall apart, and then get back together. It’s really about who they become to each other over the course of their parents’ relationship.
 

HS: You have two actors playing two characters are at different stages in their lives – sometimes they’re 9, sometimes they’re 30. Knowing you didn’t want this to be a memory play, how did you decide on the ‘order’ of events? How did you go about casting actors who had the range to do all of these parts justice?
 

CC: It’s an insane challenge, and I’m so lucky that I have amazing actors – Nelson Lee and Julia Cho – who’ve both gone above and beyond. We also had the help of an incredible movement specialist named Donna Eshelman who taught them the specific behavior and movements and body of a nine year old, a thirteen year old, a seventeen year old, a twenty-four year old, and finding the body that comes to convey how you feel on the inside. So we worked really hard to achieve all those different ages. The play poses a challenge because it’s not in order – it doesn’t go nine, 14, 17, 24. That would be one thing. They have to go through the extra rigor of dealing with a play that is not even in order. They are heroes for sure.
 

HS: How did you go about determining that order?
 

CC: It’s something that we talk about a lot. I had originally made it out of order – that’s how I built the play when I was at the Lark, and each day I would write a scene: one from when they were children, and one from when they were adults. And that’s how I really constructed the play. When I was at the workshop, I did put the play in order, largely for the actors to see how it felt to play it in order, and to make sure that there weren’t any holes that were being appeared by the fact that it was out of order. At the time, we sort of enjoyed the chronology, so it stayed that way for a while. But after that, my wonderful dramaturg, Andy Knight, talked to me about the different incarnations it had and the different shapes of the play, chronological and not chronological. He said to me, “Well, can you tell me what you get from the play either way?” He said that when it went forward it felt more like a memory play to him, whereas when it was not in order, it evoked the title more – The Two Kids That Blow Shit Up, and these fragments from their lives. It showed the challenges in their friendship and their relationship, which I wanted. So we kept it like that, but it took us quite a long time to find the right order, and to make sure that it suited them. We were still making changes to the order up until a few days ago. It was a lot of trial and error, but it was trying it a bunch of different ways until we found the order that had the emotional journey that we wanted the audience to go on. We wanted to see what broke them before we saw what got them back together.
 

Carla Ching
 

Michelle Tse: You used to work a lot in poetry. Do you use a specific medium to achieve a specific goal, or do you stick with your theater and TV work now?
 

CC: I pretty much stick with theater and my TV work now. I haven’t written a poem in a very long time. I used to very much love it, but I think all of my stories go into the play now. I enjoy writing different worlds and different characters and I have a selfish need to write people, because that way they’re sort of all-encompassing.
 

MT: Was it figuring out what the proper medium was for you, or were you drawn to different mediums of writing at different parts of your life?
 

CC: I went down a pretty long road with poetry. I was doing the whole poetry and spoken word thing in New York. I even went back to school and tried to do my MFA at City College of New York in poetry and I got about a year and change through before I realized I wasn’t having a breakthrough and there were other people who were far better at it than me. It’s a very lonely way of writing. In the best case scenario, I could publish a chapbook and forty people could read it, which made me sad. At the same time, I was writing and performing with a Pan-Asian Performance group called Peeling where we would read my poems and they sort of became plays. So I transitioned from doing poetry and writing poetry into doing performance pieces that looked more like theater. I really liked them and the nature of them, which naturally started to send me down a road of trying to do theater.
 

HS: Is there a big difference for you between writing a play and writing a TV show?
 

CC: Playwriting is different in that it took me a little while to find that frame. And when I first started doing TV writing, the TV writing made my playwriting suck, and my playwriting made my TV writing suck. And I think – I would hope – I’ve gotten a little bit more of a handle on it. Television is just so much more about digital media, and you have to be a lot more terse and pithy with your dialogue. Your scenes are much shorter. You can control people’s gaze and what they’re looking at, and do a lot with the image in a way. In theater, you need to have dialogue do that for you, because you can’t do a close-up. You can’t focus in on someone’s eye. You can’t do a close-up of someone’s chest heaving. So we have different tools to do it in different media. I enjoy both of them a lot.
 

MT: You discovered theater in high school. Would you say that’s maybe why you gravitated back to theater?
 

CC: Theater will always be my first love. It’s this seed of an idea and then it grows into something collaborative in the room. In TV, you get these great writers together in the same room and it’s just the biggest treat ever. It’s very different breaking story in a room with seven or eight other people. It has its challenges, but it’s also really wonderful because it means that you have seven or eight other minds at work and all their stories of the world. Sometimes you can break through a problem at lot faster with eight brains. With most of them you are writing to the world of the show, you are writing to the showrunner’s voice, but once the story is spoken together, you’re allowed to go off and spin out the story and give it a bit of your art. There’s some art in that you have to go off and write it all by yourself. And then it becomes lot like play production again where you have actors and directors and your own production team working together to spit this thing out really fast. In a lot of ways, theater is similar when you get to that juncture. Theater was a really great training ground for the other stuff. They’re both great in different ways. I wonder if – cause I’ve never been a showrunner and I’m still working my way up the ladder – I do wonder if perhaps being a showrunner is exactly like being a playwright.
 

HS: How does the writing process differ for you in New York versus LA?
 

CC: In New York, I had this really tiny, tiny apartment and my place was essentially a closet. I would try to write there, and I would sometimes write there, but the only place I had to sit in my apartment was on my bed. It was hard to be sleeping and working in the same place, and I’d also just get claustrophobic. I’d just have to go to a coffee shop or the library, or – for a little while – I subscribed to Paragraph Writing Space just to have a sure place to write. Even in a coffee shop they’ll eventually kick you out. Here [in LA], I have a little more space so I can work at home, but there’s also a completely incredible library near me that has these doors and windows and I can look out on this beautiful sculptural design center. I still need to hustle, but when I lived in New York I had six jobs at any given time – I wish that were an exaggeration. Now I still have to hustle, but I’m able to have one survival job and that’s the TV writing. And then I do my playwriting. For whatever reason – cost of living, hustle of life – I feel like I have a little more time to write [in LA]. I go to my job at I Love Dick from like 10 until 5 or 6, and then I go straight to rehearsal from around 7:30 until 11. Sometimes, at 11, it’s like, “are there any rewrites that need to be attended to, any more information? Then I get up again and do the same thing again. It feels a little like New York.
 

MT: So, just FYI, I’m also Asian.
 

CC: Oh, awesome!
 

[Everyone laughs]
 

MT: I bring that up because for me, it’s so great to see an Asian playwright, but also someone who is socially engaged – you’re part of The Kilroys. Does that clue you into social and political engagement?
 

CC: Completely. To me, writing a play with two Asian-American people is a political act. I do this with intention. I do not do it accidentally. I want to put Asian-American people onstage. My partner is an actor. I know a lot of super talented Asian-American actors. It hurts me sometimes, the parts that they get to play and they don’t get to play. So I just wanted to write a play that would show the breadth and depth of all of these actors, and to show a life. You probably grew up watching a bunch of stories over time – I know I did – and they never contained people that looked like me. So I wanted to write one.
 

MT: Yep. There’s this one scene in your play where they’re talking about Chinese school, and that their parents just wanted them to have a place where they belonged. Was that something you experienced as a kid? I know that you taught middle and high school, and you did a bit of teaching artist work. Does your identity and working in the education system foster your sense of empathy and how these kids are affected?
 

CC: I think because of a lot of gaps in my educational career, feeling invisible and not noticed… I worked hard and wasn’t the best student in the class but certainly wasn’t the worst. I sort of fell between the cracks. I was often frustrated in school and often felt unchallenged and lost. So I went into education to sort of figure out how to – at least for that period of time – how to give back and figure out how to engage young people in a real and meaningful way. I think that’s why, in a lot of my plays, young [characters] show up, because it bothers me how young people are often portrayed in theater, in TV, and in film in only a small fragment of their complexity, their bravery, and in how their incredible stories are told. So I try to put those out there too.
 

MT: Were your parents dismayed that you wanted to go into the arts and become a writer?
 

CC: My mom was horrifically dismayed. To be honest, I don’t think that they truly accepted that I could have a career as a writer until maybe a year or two ago. Their whole thing was, “Make sure you get a safety job,” which is part of why I actually got into teaching. I thought, “If I’m going to have a safety job, I want it to be something that I’m engaged with, that I can stand to do for the rest of my life, that is meaningful.” That’s why I chose teaching. Although, she got mad at me – she was a former teacher, but she got mad at me for teaching. She said something like she thought I could do better, or something about a teaching degree being a bullshit degree. Anyway, she didn’t agree with my choice to become a teacher.
 

MT: Sounds about right. And dad?
 

CC: My dad was very different. My dad is unusual as an Asian-American parent in that he thought it was very important to chase what you love. My mom is opposite – my mom is “do what’s practical.” I think that came from him growing up very poor – there were seven kids in his family and his dad was a gas station manager. He didn’t go to a restaurant until he was in college. They struggled.
 

MT: Were they first generation?
 

CC: They were not – my parents were third gen. When he said he wanted to be a doctor, they said, “You’re crazy. You’re reaching too far. You’re trying to be out of your station. You need to do something way more reasonable.” He fought his way through. It took him a long time, and he had to serve in the Navy in order to pay for it, but he came out and by the time he was forty-one he was a doctor. He loved what he did every day of his life, and you could see it. Having him as a role model was pretty great. And, in a way, having his permission, to “be smart about it, but try to do what you love, and then hopefully the money will come or you’ll get paid for it but you have to enjoy yourself, whatever you choose.”
 

MT: That’s incredible!
 

CC: I know. And especially – he’s a little older – for an older Asian-American man to have that mentality for sure.
 

MT: Are you at all sick of talking about diversity?
 

CC: No. I’m not. I’d really like to get to the point where we don’t have to talk about it anymore, but we obviously still do. It’s such a part of our theatrical seasons, and the problems are better in television and there’s still not as much representation as I’d like to see in front of the camera, and especially behind the camera. My first job, I was the only woman; often I’m the only person of color. What happens and who gets in front of the screen is determined by who’s writing stuff. No – I think diversity is something we still need to talk about. It’s why I work with The Kilroys, it’s why I worked with Second Generation for a number of years. I was still a struggling playwright myself, but Lloyd Suh gave me the opportunity: “Hey, you want to run 2G for a couple of years?”
 

MT: He’s incredible.
 

CC: He’s completely incredible. And I owe so much of my career to Lloyd: he gave me my first production, he was in my first production, he gave me the opportunity to run 2G, and he’s always been a dear friend. I learned so much from running 2G, and the best part was that we [tried to] see how many people – how many Asian-American artists we can cull. How many plays we can get started, how many directors, actors, and writers we can get to know each other? Let’s really community build here in New York so that most of the Asian-American theatrical artists that are working know each other. I think that’s fantastic. And what’s incredible now too is that so many names that I came up with, Maureen Sebastian, Ali Ahn, Rey Pamatmat, Mike Lew – everyone’s over there doing what they’re meant to do. People are working across platforms in theater and TV and film and just killing it, rooting for each other, helping each other, and casting each other when they can. I think it’s going to take all of us to change things. It’s a small force. But the more that we’re working together, the more we can pull the community forward, I hope.
 

MT: For us, as a community, it’s like we haven’t even identified all the problems yet.
 

CC: Yes. We still have work to do. I remember when I was in class in college, I was told, generationally, we’re behind the African-American movement by a generation or two. And I was like, “That’s not true!” But yes: we have a way to go.
 

HS: How did you get involved with The Kilroys?
 

CC: I was lucky in that they had already gotten started up a bit. Before it happened, there was sort of a backyard barbecue with a bunch of the women who are now The Kilroys who were meeting up and sort of talking about how they were sick of seeing seasons that were so non-diverse, and so many all-male seasons, and what they started to say was, “We can keep talking about it, or we can do something about it. Can we band together and leverage the people that we know and figure it out?” So I think they just started to get started, and I arrived a little later with Kelly Miller and maybe a couple of others. What I appreciated about them was that they were interested in doing specific actions. The idea of The List emerged to sort of combat the notion that the reason that more women aren’t produced is that they’re not in the pipeline, i.e. they don’t exist. So we figured, why don’t we survey the field, and ask what are the good plays being written right now? And they put them out here, they’re here, and here are the ones that they recommended. They do exist. So that artistic directors and theater companies don’t have the excuse anymore. So it seems like it’s been helping out a little more in terms of female playwrights getting more traction, which we are happy about. But also there should be celebration of the companies that are producing lots of women. That’s why we do the Cake Bomb. It was someone’s idea that we should do something fun and celebratory. And there are other projects that are currently in the bubbling process. It’s a group of women who were tired of waiting and ready to put their action where their mouths are. What I really appreciate about everybody is that it’s a super busy group of folks, but somehow everybody makes the time, finds the time, to pitch in.
 

HS: Something that we’ve talked a lot about is that some theaters think it’s okay to now produce 50/50 men and women, but that 50/50 is solely white men and white women.
 

CC: It’s so difficult. I feel like, currently, in seasons, we’re lumped together. In most rooms in television, when they talk about diversity hires in writers’ rooms, women count as diversity. That’s how bad it is. That’s how male-dominated it is. I don’t think much of theater is any different – when they’re looking to diversify their seasons, I feel that they’re looking at women and people of color the same, in the same breath. I don’t really know how I feel about that. I’m surprised nobody has done this yet, but I think some coalition building is in order to get people of color in the theater to work with groups like The Kilroys to really put pressure on theaters to do better. It’s also not just about putting pressure on the theaters – it’s about putting pressure on the theatergoers to chime in about what they want to see. Again – I would like to sometimes see people like me onstage, and so I probably need to make more noise about that than I do to my local theaters. That’s an action I can take – that’s an action we all can take – and if we are loud enough and there are enough of us, they have to listen.
 

Carla Ching
 

HS: Something that we talked with Leah Nanako Winkler about was that a theater asked her to provide them with her own list of Asian actors. You tweeted about having a theater ask you to replace your cast with white actors. Do you feel that playwrights of color have an unfair responsibility to educate theaters in diversity?
 

CC: Oh yes. White writers rarely have to provide a list of white actors, although they might have to provide a list of actors that they’d rather have. I’ve been asked to help cast before. Which is okay because I do know – through 2G – a lot of people. And being in Los Angeles for a couple years now, I know a lot of people here. I’m happy to help out if the people who are casting don’t know better. I personally feel a responsibility to be representative or to write Asian-American characters or to write people of color because if I’m not going to do it, then who’s going to do it? If I’m not seeing people of color onstage, then I need to write them. I, as a single writer, need to do it in any way I can. Again: I look at that as a political act. I’m putting people of color onstage – that’s intentional. However if I can change the world’s mind about how they view us, and give them a richer and more detailed perspective of what they’ve already seen, then great. I’m doing my job. I know that not all Asian-American artists or playwrights feel that way and they just want to write what they want to write, and more props to them. I don’t want to say I have an agenda, but maybe I have an agenda.
 

MT: But your plays seem to never be “here is an Asian person.” They just happen to be Asian.
 

CC: They just happen to be, and I don’t write overt identity plays. But I also like to say that my plays, like The Two Kids, need to be played by Asian actors. It’s how it’s written. These are these people. There are influences that are taken from my life, people that I know. So it can’t be done by white people. I don’t even think this could be done by another group of people of color – it’s race-specific. One of my other plays, Fast Company, a pretty massive regional theater said that they would consider it, but only if they cast it with white people. I said no. There are Asian-American people in your city that you could find to play these parts and it’s an Asian-American family – that’s the story. It’s the story of an Asian-American family. You can’t do that. I was even asked by another theater company if we could make it half-Asian, and the unspoken phrase after that was “and half white” so they could get more of their company membership in the show. And I was like “no – if you want to do this play, you need to get more Asian-American company members or you cast outside this company. I’m not going to change the race of these characters.” Even though it’s not an identity play, I think that it is very important that the characters are Asian American. They’re meant to be that; they’re meant to be that way. The way that they interact onstage is partially influenced by their identity and who they are to each other.
 

MT: And usually all of Asian cultures are lumped together. We’re just Asian… strength in numbers?
 

CC: I think identification and this umbrella is partially a political act, right? We coalesce communities so we can have more power. We stand together so we can fight together. While we’re radically different and our communities speak different languages, have different customs, ideologies, I still am proud that we’re able to fight the good fight together.
 

MT: Definitely.
 

HS: Do you have any advice for aspiring playwrights?
 

CC: Read and see as many things as possible. Being in New York for so many years was so great because theater is so accessible. There are ways to find cheap tickets – 99 Cent Sundays at Soho Rep is a great example. There are great ways to find a cheap ticket. My advice to theatermakers is always to see as much as you can, because – certainly – all of my practice is formed by the mind-blowing amazing shit that I’ve seen onstage and going to stuff and making yourself available for readings and making shit from the ground up as much as possible and learning every job that you can. New York feels so warm – if you’re really willing to spend time, you can insinuate yourself into so many different communities. They welcome you. Find your tribe.
 
 

 

 

A Los Angeles native, Carla Ching stumbled upon pan-Asian performance collective Peeling at the Asian American Writers Workshop and wrote and performed with them for three years, which she still considers her first theater training. Her plays include Nomad Motel (2015 O’Neill Playwrights Conference), Fast Company (South Coast Repertory, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Lyric Stage, Pork Filled Productions; recipient of the Edgerton New American Play Award), TBA (2g), The Sugar House at the Edge of the Wilderness (Ma-Yi Theater Company), and The Two Kids That Blow Shit Up (also forthcoming from Mu Performing Arts). Alumna of The Women’s Project Lab, the Lark Play Development Center Writers Workshop and Meeting of the Minds, the CTG Writers’ Workshop and the Ma-Yi Writers Lab. Former Artistic Director of Asian American Theater Company, 2g. TBA is published in Out of Time and Place. Fast Company is published by Samuel French. BA, Vassar College. MFA, New School for Drama. Proud member of New Dramatists and The Kilroys. On television, Carla has written on USA’s Graceland, AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead and is currently writing on Amazon’s I Love Dick, executive produced by Sarah Gubbins and Jill Soloway.

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A Conversation with Jocelyn Bioh

Jocelyn Bioh

 

Jocelyn Bioh plays William Hawkins in Men on Boats by Jaclyn Backhaus, directed by Will Davis at Playwrights Horizons. The fascinating show closes August 21st 2016. After attending a sold-out matinee performance, I spoke with Jocelyn Bioh about gender, race, and performance, and about her future projects as a playwright and actor. Here’s what she had to say.

 

 

Darrel Alejandro Holnes: After a solid run on Broadway, you left Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and have now joined the cast of Men on Boats at Playwrights Horizons. What has the experience been like joining a new cast-family in an Off-Broadway house?
 

Jocelyn Bioh: Joining Men on Boats has actually been quite a wild ride. It’s been ten months since I left Curious Incident, which was an extremely physical show. It took a few months of physical therapy to completely heal and feel back to normal again. So when I said yes to Men on Boats, it was like déjà vu! You wouldn’t know it from reading the script, but this show is extremely physical and calls for an actor to flex a lot of muscles at once, and even crazier, because it was a remount of the Clubbed Thumb production, I only had ten days, including tech, to learn the entire show. My castmates and my director were so great and so patient with me and helped me through the whole process. Truly one of the craziest rehearsal processes of my life.
 

DAH: How would you describe the character you play in context of the play? In context of history?
 

JB: Men on Boats is based on John Wesley Powell‘s journals of the 1869 expedition he went on with nine other men to chart the Green and Colorado rivers. In our production, all ten of the men are played by women and I play William Hawkins, who served as one of Powell’s right-hand men and also the cook for the expedition. Because of our fast rehearsal process, I didn’t do much research on Hawkins while we were rehearsing. From what Jaclyn [Backhaus, the playwright] wrote on the page, it seemed to me that Hawkins was dependable, a straight talker, shoot-from-the-hip kind of guy, so I built on that foundation. Because we only know so much about him based on Powell’s journals, it’s hard to know how much influence he had in our history – suffice it to say, Powell really depended on and trusted him, so I just want to do right by him in my portrayal and make him proud.
 

DAH: What were some of the steps you took to prepare for the role? How did you prepare on your own? And what was it like for you to work with the play’s director Will Davis?
 

JB: Working with Will was great! He is the perfect person to take on a play like this. We are both similar in that we have a dance background and understand the importance of telling stories with our bodies. The choreography of the show came pretty naturally to me in that way, but I did need a lot of help in crafting my interpretation of Hawkins. I decided one night that I would think of characters that I knew who were cooks to see if I could pull inspiration from them. The first one that came to mind was Lou Myers character named “Mr. Gaines” on the sitcom A Different World. I always thought he was so funny, yet stern and discerning and I thought I could infuse a lot of that into Hawkins and it would fit into this kooky world and language we were creating in this play. Will never gave me a note about it, so I think it works!
 

DAH: Would the men from your family or friend group recognize themselves in your portrayal of Hawkins?
 

JB: A lot of the men in my life, between my father, brother and all of my male friends are very funny and crack jokes a lot. If there is anything they recognize in my character, it would be that I think! [Laughs]
 

DAH: What was it like to play a man? Did it change how you view and interact with men? Or how and what you understand of male privilege?
 

JB: Playing a man has actually been really fun and, weirdly, easy. Will let us be free with our interpretations of masculinity. Some of my castmates are using a deeper register with their voices and some of us are speaking with our regular timbre. Some castmates are wearing a glamoured up face of makeup and others are rocking a more muted look. It’s been interesting because the more we do the show, the more I understand the simplicity of men – their wants, desires, and emotions. They want what they want when they want it. That is certainly indicative of male privilege. In 1869, the President was certainly not entrusting ten women to set off on an expedition through the Grand Canyon. Women are always questioned about their skills and their level of expertise on anything. Considering the time we are in now politically, I would say that idea still rings, sadly, true.
 

DAH: Was James Brown right? Is it really a man’s world? How can theater make it a world for everybody? How is this play and your performance in it part of that movement towards more diversity, inclusion, and equal representation in contemporary American theater?
 

JB: James Brown is always right in my book! I love his music, but it’s true – theater is definitely still a playground for men. The fact that The Kilroys List was created (an annual list of industry recommended plays written by female and trans playwrights) just shows how we need to force theaters and producers to take our work seriously. Men on Boats made the list in 2015, and as a playwright, I have been on both the 2015 and 2016 lists. I think what this play is doing, with a diverse cast of ten women playing men, is showing that diversity and inclusion can come in all sorts of forms. The theater community is thirsty for work that’s new, different, and innovative. This is what has always made the theater an exciting place to go to and it will continue to be exciting with the inclusion of stories not written by the same kind of people with the same kind of perspective.
 

DAH: The play is about much more than gender. As a black actress, or however you identify, telling a history written by white men, how do you think race is challenged in your re-telling of this historical white male narrative?
 

JB: Well, thanks to Hamilton, you don’t have to be a white man to tell the stories of other dead white men. [Laughs] As a black actress, I always approach my work with being true to the character and serving the story. With this play, I just assumed that the creatives knew that casting me in this role meant that I was going to bring a lot of myself to the table. Jaclyn also wrote a lot of contemporary language so this really freed me up to not shy away from the fact that audiences are experiencing Hawkins via the vessel of a black woman. This play would be far less interesting if it were cast to type. I think the non-traditional casting of this play only further emphasizes the narratives American history has created and how little women and people of color are included in them – regardless of how much we were a vital part of the construction of this country, of this world.
 

DAH: You are one of several women of color in the cast playing white men. How do you transcend differences between constructed dichotomous identities (black vs. white; male vs. female) to find your entry point to a character that on the surface seems so different from you?
 

JB: My entry point was simple – Hawkins was human, just like me. He had goals, dreams, and aspirations. He decided to take a risk and go on a crazy journey that changed the course of his life. As an artist, I live in constant cloud of goals, dreams, and certainly risks. Seeing the humanity of Hawkins transcended any barrier I could have created for myself in terms of race and gender.
 

DAH: Around NYC, your plays have a reputation of being quite humorous and in Men on Boats your character, Hawkins, provides a lot of comic relief. Do you have any tips for actors interested in working on their comedic timing? Or for playwrights interested in developing their comedic voices?
 

JB: Thank you for saying that. I have always loved comedy. I read a quote a long time ago that said, “Comedy is just a funny way of being serious,” and that has been my mantra and thesis statement really for my work as both an actress and a writer. I would encourage actors that love comedy and want to work on the craft to study the greats. Lucille Ball, Eddie Murphy, Whoopi Goldberg, Bill Cosby, and Sinbad were my heroes growing up. I did not realize it at the time, but I would watch them and marvel at how great they were at impressions, comedic timing and soon began to mimic them and eventually formed my own comedic language. Because all of them wrote their own material, they also influenced how I tell stories as well. I write a lot of character-driven plays and I’m sure that is a direct result of my influences. Truly, if there is any advice I always give it is to study the greats – they knew what they were doing and just like any other subject, if you study it hard enough eventually the formulas are easy to solve.
 

DAH: What is next for you? How can we continue to support you and your great work?
 

JB: As a playwright, in the beginning of September, my play School Girls; Or The African Mean Girls Play will be featured in the MCC PlayLab Series at the Lucille Lortel Theater. It’s inspired by true events but tells the fictional story of Paulina, the queen bee of her mean girls crew who has her sights set on winning the Miss Ghana pageant, until the arrival of a new girl at school throws her off course. It’s a fun play and I’m looking forward to working on it and presenting a reading of it.
 
As an actor, my next scheduled play is in January of 2017 where I will be starring in Branden Jacob-Jenkins new play Everybody at The Signature Theater. I’m really excited about both projects and hope for more things to come in the future!
 

 

 

 

Jocelyn Bioh is a writer/performer from New York City. She was last seen in the Tony Award-winning play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Other credits include An Octoroon (Soho Rep.), Bootycandy (Wilma Theater), SEED (Classical Theater of Harlem), and Neighbors (The Public). Her plays include Nollywood Dreams (Kilroys List 2015), School Girls, and the musical The Ladykiller’s Love Story (with music/lyrics by CeeLo Green).

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A Conversation with Klea Blackhurst & Andrea Prestinario

Klea Blackhurst & Andrea Pestinario

 

Andrea Prestinario and Klea Blackhurst are a musical theater family. Even their dog, Sprout, will sing along to Book of Mormon on command. But musical theater hasn’t been particularly kind to the lesbian community in return. The first lesbian kiss to appear on Broadway came early, in 1923, in God of Vengeance at the Apollo Theatre. That may seem progressive…until you read that the entire cast was arrested on obscenity charges for it. Lesbians have made appearances on Broadway since then, to be sure, but not quite in the way the community would hope. Legally Blonde turned a gay lawyer attending Harvard Law School into a running gag that even the New York Times called, “the object of the show’s most unsavory jokes.” Hairspray trades on the tired stereotype of lesbianism in prison, offering “extra credit” to shower with the female prison guard. Shows like Aspects of Love, Falsettos, and Rent fare a bit better in comparison, but the queer female characters are still there only in supporting roles, to further the plot for other characters, or simply as the butt of an ongoing joke. Fun Home brought the first lesbian protagonist on a Broadway stage, but saying that in 2016 feels less like a victory and more like a long overdue representation of an entire community, both in and out of the theatrical world.
 

We sat down with Andrea and Klea in what Andrea affectionately refers to as their “brownstone of dreams” to talk about their experiences as a queer couple trying to find a home in an industry that has, thus far, failed to tell their stories.

 

 

Kelly Wallace: So let’s start with some basics. Where are you from, how did you end up in Chicago and then in New York?
 

Klea Blackhurst: Well, I’m from Salt Lake City, Utah. And I came to New York…and I came here because this is where they kept Broadway. That’s what I wanted to do, my whole mission was to do Broadway shows…so I got a musical theater degree; my mom was a performer in musicals. She did “Bells Are Ringing” with Hal Linden and Betty Garrett and old school kind of people would come in and work in Utah. So I always knew those people’s names and had an awareness of what that was. I followed that, moved to New York right after college (a billion years ago), and I’ve been here ever since, just following that dream. That’s how I ended up here.
 

Andrea Prestinario: I grew up in the South suburbs of Chicago; since I was 11, I always wanted to do musical theatre. I was in a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat with Donny Osmond, our children’s choir, so that is what made me decide at 11 – bam, this is what I’m doing for the rest of my life. And it has dictated most of the choices of my life. I then went to Ball State University in Indiana for musical theater, I had professors encourage me to go back to Chicago first before coming to New York. They said, “Get your card in Chicago, start there.” And I liked Chicago so much that I stayed for eight years before I got here. I left because I had gone through a breakup and I was kind of at this point in my life of…if I’m gonna do New York, I need to not be afraid and just go. So yeah, I’m very glad I’m here. I don’t regret that choice.
 

KW: Where did you two meet?
 

KB: We met doing a show…
 

AP: The last show I did in Chicago before I moved was Gypsy and I was considering moving to New York and I played Louise and she played my mother…
 

[Laughter]
 

KB: That’s a good meet-cute. We shared a dressing room, with Sprout, Sprout played Chowsie. And it was a beautiful production. I’ve done another Gypsy since and I didn’t end up falling in love with Louise, so I don’t think that’s the thing.
 

AP: Well, we didn’t fall in love then…
 

KB: No, no, but since I was living with my Louise, I was looking at the new Louise and thought…I would never live with you. A soprano…I don’t know. It was a slow burn, this relationship. I’m not really…first of all, I’ve never dated anybody in the arts. That was not a dream of mine. It’s just too much up and down and too much neediness. For both of you to have that component…it’s actually working out great. It’s not as bad as I thought. It was nothing I sought out.
 

AP: It kind of became of thing of…we were friends for a while, she was a mentor of mine, and she went through a breakup and was newly single and needed a roommate. She had been with her ex for many years and was going into the rental market kind of scandalized by the rent prices. I actually needed a roommate too at the time. We just had a moment where we were like…we can’t be roommates.
 

KB: Yeah, she came with me to look at a place in Brooklyn, for me, and we were supposed to go for dinner. So we just went and I saw this place and I thought I would rather die than live in this commute. Nothing against Brooklyn, but it was tough. And then I was like…should we just address the obvious? Like, we shouldn’t be roommates, right? …I actually think you’re pretty cute…and it would just wreck everything. So we finally confessed the feelings and didn’t become roommates. Because I was like, “Nothing gets you in the wrong place faster than real estate in Manhattan.” People get into things they shouldn’t, they stay in things they shouldn’t. So I at least had that awareness.
 

AP: It’s funny, because now we are roommates. But it was the conversation that was the catalyst. Like, we have this sexual tension, we need to address it.
 

Klea Blackhurst & Andrea Prestinario
 

KW: Growing up in Utah…did you have a lot of exposure to gay culture, to even lesbianism as a broader concept?
 

KB: No. I was twisted up in Mormonism. I was taught it was a grievous sin, second only to murder. I ultimately felt grateful that I was gay because if I wasn’t gay, I think I would’ve stayed there. Being gay was what drove me to feel like I had to get thousands of miles away from this to figure out if I am, what it is, and I see that as a good thing.
 

AP: I’ve read so many articles about how people flock to cities and urban areas because of sexuality, feeling like, “I need to get out of this place.” So it’s interesting to think of what the future holds for that. As more places become accepting, how does the landscape change? Will there not be as much of a huge concentration of the gay population in large cities?
 

KW: Now we have the internet, which makes access to information about different cultures and experiences so much more accessible. Even when I was growing up, which wasn’t so terribly long ago but it was before social media, before the internet was a thing everyone had…you just didn’t have the same tools to figure it all out.
 

AP: I’m so jealous of the kids now! You have so many resources at your fingertips.
 

Michelle Tse: But it does increase the amount of bullying.
 

AP: That’s true, maybe I shouldn’t be so envious.
 
KB: I find that’s what’s challenging about all that access. I run into a lot of younger people who aren’t curious about anything, because you can go right to Google at the dinner table. Somebody asks, “Oh, who got the Academy Award that year?” and then there’s three people on the phone, and I would get insulted, until I realized they were looking up who won.
 

AP: As opposed to talking about it?
 

KB: Oh no, I just mean that you used to just have to wait or go figure it out from a book or something. It wasn’t instantaneous. I did this show about Ethel Merman; it’s kind of my calling card.
 

AP: It’s not just a little show; it’s a huge deal.You’ve made a living off that show for the last 14 years. Not solely, but…
 

KB: My research on Merman was thrilling. It all came from used bookstores and the Strand and going to the index and seeing if there was a listing for Merman. It was like actual research. Now, everything I found could probably be looked up on the internet. I’m not sure if that’s true; I still hope I have some corner on the market. But researching something is no longer this giant mountain to climb. When I teach a master class with young people, I get so delighted when they know who Jerry Herman is. And it’s like…well, they googled him last night. And that’s good, but they weren’t curious until I said one of the requirements was that you had to sing a Jerry Herman song, you know what I mean? I’m sure the future is going to be never-endingly fascinating.
 

MT: I’m starting to notice – I finished my masters not long ago – the difference of us looking stuff up and how it’s hurting our memory. I talk to my 80-year-old mentor and he’s like a dictionary or an encyclopedia, because he’s used to the first 60 years of his life having to memorize everything. You couldn’t look stuff up, so you have to remember everything. So you ask a question, and get like a 15-year timeline of the entire thing you asked about. I don’t have to retain information that way. I remember my house phone number from when I was five, but that’s about it.
 

KB: I have no idea what your phone number is.
 

AP: Honey! Learn it!
 

KB: I know my phone number.
 

KW: So, you would go to the Strand and look up all this stuff on Ethel Merman…
 

KB: The Strand Annex was down on Fulton Street. Now I own all the books. That’s what survived the move. We’ve got the feminism and every theater book…I got rid of things, because in this big move, I had to get rid of stuff. If you are a novel and I love you and I’ve read you…you’re now going away. Because I’m probably not going to read you again. And if I decide to, I will go buy you.
 

AP: She’s a theater historian. She really should be classified that way. She has an encyclopedic amount of knowledge.
 

KB: I love that part of it. I love our history.
 

AP: It really is impressive. She’s actually doing Lyrics & Lyricists at the 92nd Street Y.
 

KB: Deborah Grace Winer is the artistic director of the overall Lyrics & Lyricists programming. She invited me to join Robert Kimball and Vince Giordano to curate a show about Harold Arlen before the Wizard of Oz. It’s such a huge honor. It validates the historian in me.
 

AP: I’m excited for the future to see her do more of that kind of thing because people should take advantage of you as a resource…
 

KB: Yes, take advantage of me!
 

Klea Blackhurst & Andrea Prestinario
 

KW: Andrea, you’re a bit of a music historian too. You recently did a Smokeytown cabaret…
 

AP: That show was inspired by her show, very much so. So I have to give credit where credit is due; she was one of the influences, in that I had done cabaret shows in Chicago but I was inspired to do my Smokey Robinson show…
 

KB: Look, I’m a big fan of not waiting for permission. So, y’know, when you come to New York, or anywhere, there’s a lot of power, in particular we’ve been lamenting the power of casting directors, you have to get an agent, who will put you on a list to send you in to have the casting director say yes or no. And if for some reason you get on the list and get into the room, probably nobody who can make final decisions is there so you come back again, so you go through all this to actually be in the room with the person who can say no.
 

KW: I interned in casting for a little while and it was very much like that. You come back and you come back and come back; it’s such an ordeal.
 

AP: It’s an ordeal just to get an audition, just to get in the room.
 

KB: I wrote my show eventually just because I wanted to be busy. I wasn’t ready to quit yet but nobody saw me as what I saw myself as, casting-wise. And it just seemed like…well, I basically just wrote something and cast myself in it. I’m not famous or powerful, but you can rent a cabaret room, and go in there and do it. The whole thing took off out of necessity and drive. I think that’s part of what you were attracted to…
 

AP: And it’s a big transition. When I got here, it’s a brand new marketplace and there are a lot of casting directors to meet and learn and build relationships with. It was jarring to be at a place in Chicago where I was making a living as an actor – I didn’t even have a day job for the last three years of my life in Chicago – to then go here where I was not seeing results immediately. I don’t think I thought it would happen right away; I don’t know what I thought. I didn’t think it would take as long – relationship-building takes a long time. I can’t not have something artistically to dig my teeth into and that’s kind of how that show came about.
 

KW: What’s it like switching from playing a character to actually being Andrea onstage?
 

AP: It’s a very different medium. We talk about that a lot too. Producing your own work is really scary and producing my Smokey Robinson show is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It isn’t validated in accolades or any of that, but personally it really fulfilled me. I want to keep doing it, and I’m still working on it, and it’s so great because it’s this full show that I have in my back pocket that I can pull out.
 

KW: Obviously you did Gypsy…do you two want to do another show together?
 

AP: It’s interesting, we kind of laugh about doing a cabaret show together but we would just fight the whole time I think. She’s so not disciplined.
 

KB: That’s true. But it would get done, thanks to you.
 

AP: We’re polar opposites in the way we come about our work. I’m warming up to just practice in our bedroom and she doesn’t ever warm up.
 

KB: I’m just one of those performers that I feel like I might need those notes later.
 

AP: That’s such an Ethel Merman quote.
 

KB: I don’t do it. I’ll do a side run and stretch and bend, but I don’t need to practice the notes. Because I might actually need them later. I find them to be a semi-finite resource.
 

AP: She also has an old-school belt, and I’m a soprano. She’s a comedian; I’m academic and cerebral. I have a Moleskine that I use for every character I build and I furiously write notes about.
 

Klea Blackhurst & Andrea Prestinario
 

KW: It’s interesting to me, you both came to do cabaret work out of a want for artistic fulfillment and something to sink your teeth into. You almost can’t do a show together…how many shows even are there with two strong female leading roles? If you wanted to play romantic opposites, how many shows are there about lesbians?
 

AP: Right, exactly. That’s why Fun Home resonated so strongly with me.
 

KB: I think it might be the only one.
 

AP: Well, it’s certainly one of the first real lesbian protagonists.
 

KW: That’s the dangerous thing. We talk about diversity and wanting opportunity, and it feels like some people say… well, we gave them Fun Home, or, we have Hamilton, now we’re diverse, let’s move on.
 

KB: It’s gonna be really interesting to see how it plays out. Hamilton has really put musical theater in the national conversation and that’s exciting.
 

MT: I’m so happy people are talking about theater, and it is exciting, but at the same time the audiences are very white because they’re who can afford to see the show…
 

KB: And the new block of tickets came out and the top ticket is $850! I mean, come on.
 

KW: It’s a fantastic show but there’s no show I could spend that much money on.
 

KB: Exactly. That’s exactly to your point.
 

MT: I feel like because Hamilton has become what it is…there are so many shows that are deserving of attention this year, like Waitress, Shuffle Along, The Color Purple…
 

KW: I think I was worried this season might be sparse because people would be afraid of competing with Hamilton, but it turned out that this season was actually really rich and diverse.
 

KW: Obviously it wasn’t a huge presence in your early life, but did you have any queer books, music, TV…for me it was Annie on My Mind…
 

KB: I don’t think I know it.
 

KW: It’s an older book about a girl in New York who’s at this private school and figuring out her sexuality, and she meets this girl Annie and it’s just a sweet, lovely book. That was one of the first for me. I highly recommend it.
 

AP: I definitely had Indigo Girls. I was in college and listening to that and quite literally went to the library on campus, and would just look up the homosexuality section. I would just sit in that section on the floor and hope nobody was around…
 

KW: I would just go to the LGBT section, grab a book and run, and hope it was something I was interested in reading so no one would see me in that section.
 

KB: Thank God, that’s something that’s changed.
 

KW: It used to be like, half of one shelf. It wasn’t even it’s own section, it was just this label in the middle of a wooden shelf that said like, “Gay and Lesbian.” I would always sneak downtown when I was younger and they used to have this great bookshop, the Oscar Wilde bookshop…
 

KB: I know!! Oh, that’s the first one I went to. I loved it; I just loved it. It was great. That was a real loss. It was very special.
 

AP: Was it just a gay and lesbian bookstore?
 

KW: Yeah, it was all LGBT-centric.
 

AP: I had a moment walking on campus and being like…I can’t be, I don’t want to cut my hair like Ellen, I can’t be. All I knew was Ellen and Rosie O’Donnell.
 

KW: The gay community definitely has an interesting relationship with portraying gay women. I always think of The Heidi Chronicles line, “You either shave your legs or you don’t.” And I feel like sometimes that stereotypical image lesbianism hurts people.
 

AP: I definitely felt that coming out at first.
 

KW: How old were you?
 

AP: It was 2003, I think that’s important given the cultural relevancy. It was awhile ago, it was in college. I was twenty-one.
 

KW: Ellen Page said recently that ever since she came out, she gets offered mostly gay roles. Were you concerned as an actress about how it would affect your career?
 

AP: Oh, absolutely. That was part of my neurosis about it, because my career has always just come first and it’s what’s most important to me but I didn’t want to sacrifice who I really was. There was this inner turmoil about how I could have both. How could I be myself and still be taken seriously in musical theater? And playing ingenues! I’m a soprano; I play ingenues. I’m a wildcard – there’s really none of that. That’s what’s so weird to about when we met in Gypsy. In Chicago, there were no lesbian, queer women in musical theater. Then I met her and I was like, “Woah, you’re gay? I don’t know anyone else that’s gay!”
 

KW: And Klea, when did you come out? How did that process work for you?
 

KB: I was about thirty. Late.
 

AP: But you had relationships with women.
 

KB: Yes, very closeted. But I found, I was coming of age in a time where you could sleep with anybody you wanted to. But like, don’t acknowledge it. Don’t say it in public, don’t say it at work. It has changed so fast, for me, from my perspective. I know we still have a long way go, but I remember when there were no gay people on TV. And now, you gotta have the gay friend! That whole phenomenon. And Ellen coming out…right on the cover of Time Magazine. I remember that summer. Ellen really risked everything.
 

KW: She was everybody’s best friend; she put everything on the line.
 

KB: She really lost her career for awhile.
 

AP: She really did.
 

KW: It took her so long to get back to what she was, but now she’s such an icon.
 

Klea Blackhurst & Andrea Prestinario
 

KB: It’s easy for successful comedians to cross a line between being funny and thinking that what they believe is more important than being funny. Bill Maher, Rosie O’Donnell, Lenny Bruce – their politics become more important than their comedy. Ellen has always stayed on the side of the line that says the reason you know me and love me is because I’m funny; that’s the reason you let me into your living room. I think that’s very unique and I love that about her.
 

KW: You as a comedienne wouldn’t want to lose the entertainment of what you do to put more political activist content in there.
 

KB: No. I don’t think I have an inner activist. I don’t think I’m a coward or I lay down though.
 

AP: She just isn’t political.
 

KB: It doesn’t drive me at the expense of other things, no.
 

KW: Andrea, you, to me, seem to be very political.
 

AP: Very much so. It’s how I see the world. I see the world through a feminist lens. It’s a curse and a blessing. Sometimes you want to not be able to see things so analytically and just relax. I have a gender studies and musical theater degree…
 

KB: That’s a rare combo, I think. I myself went for musical theater and geology. We’re very rare. I like to collect rocks and you like to introduce me to Dworkin.
 

AP: You do not collect rocks.
 

KB: I have a rock collection!
 

AP: Shut up.
 

KB: I do.
 

AP: She also has a rubber stamp collection.
 

KB: I love rubber stamps.
 

AP: I grew up in a house with just sisters and my parents are obsessed with fairness. So everything was always the same for all of us. If I got a phone in my bedroom when I was ten, I was the oldest, everyone else had everything else lined up that way. Then I went to an all-girls Catholic high school that was very progressive. There was even a sign in the hallway that said, “God is good, She is great.” It was very empowering. In my fourth year, you got to choose what theology class you wanted to take, there were options like God Talk or something else…I chose Women’s Contemporary Issues. That’s where my feminist seed was born.
 

KW: There was something on Facebook, I’ll probably misquote it, but it said something to the effect of, “God has to be a woman, why else would the Bible be a bunch of men explaining what she meant?”
 

[Laughter]
 

AP: That class sort of illuminated everything. I grew up in this household, and your household sets your guidelines for what you understand in the world and I understood it to be very fair and I went out and suddenly you’re coming to maturity and I was so enraged when my eyes were opened to it. At the end of freshman year of college, I started taking classes in the women’s studies department and that’s how it all started.
 

KW: Both of you…when you came out, what was your family’s reaction like? Was it supportive? Was it a welcoming thing or…
 

KB: I think it was good? It wasn’t talked about for awhile, and then it just like…was fine. It felt like a big risk but it actually ended up being great, I think. My first partner died very suddenly. I was in the closet, I was 27.
 

AP: They lived together but no one knew they were together.
 

KB: I was so invested in nobody knowing and family and stuff. I look back on it now, because I went through that whole experience in the closet, and I’m like…what was I doing? There was an obituary for her, because we lived here but she had been an acting professor at the university where I’d gone to school…the person writing the article talked to me and was like, “Do you want to be listed as a survivor?” And I was like…yeah, but I was totally in the closet.
 

AP: So what did it say…like, “friend of”?
 

KB: Yeah, something like that. It was so weird. That was a long time coming. I think it was easier for girls. This might be political here, I might get political.
 

AP: Whoa!
 

KB: It seems like boys were getting in more trouble because they’re actually like spilling seed and doing foul things…
 

AP: Spilling seed?
 

KB: That’s in the Bible! You know, you’re supposed to procreate, not just goof off. So they’re wasting it. I’m just talking like the Mormons. They weren’t enlightened, they were in hell on earth. The women it felt more like, “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Even if you had a suspicion, it was really like…they share expenses and snuggle. That’s what it felt like. In a way, if I had been the oldest son…
 

KW: Religion places such a high premium on masculinity and maleness…
 

KB: The patriarchy!
 

KW: So if it’s the person in the position of the most power disobeying this religious law or going against the faith…
 

KB: Exactly. That’s right. We’re just the sister wives. It was terrible. I was terrified to come out. I’m so glad I finally did. I remember the first interview I had, when I started giving interviews, when people cared…and this interviewer from Rehoboth Beach was like, “So, are you in-out or out-out?” And I was like…in-out? I think? By the end of the interview, I was like…I’m gonna be out-out. I was able to change that in the span of a conversation. I mean, I was going to Rehoboth Beach which is very gay-centric and your mom already knows, so what’re you saving it up for? But I did think, since I did a lot of solo performing, gay men like their women straight.
 

AP: That’s so true.
 

KB: They want you to suffer, like…over the man that got away. It is true.
 

AP: It’s so penis-heavy in musical theater, between all the gay men and all the straight women.
 

KB: And in Streisand and Garland, all the leading ladies, they flock to the one who is voicing what they’re voicing, which is always about a man. So I was reluctant. But then I was like, no, it’s okay. Nothing is really going to change.
 

AP: They also love a belter!
 

KB: I court that audience.
 

AP: Gay men love her.
 

Klea Blackhurst & Andrea Prestinario
 

KW: Andrea, when you first came to me about doing this, one of the phrases you used was “normalizing queer women in theater,” what do you feel like we can do? What do you want to see theater do?
 

AP: Exposure. Obviously you can’t recruit queer women to partake in musical theater. We are a minority, but I don’t know why…maybe the future holds the opportunity for that type of woman to be interested in theater. Right now, we’re not really telling those stories, so why would a young queer girl be drawn to it? I mean that in the sense of being an artist and an audience member, being a part of it in all aspects, arts administration, all of those components. I don’t know, do you have answers?
 

KB: No, I would never say something like that. I wouldn’t have been smart enough to even say that.
 

KW: Visibility is important; if you can’t see someone doing it…having the first black President, possibly the first female President, so young people can see…I can do that too.
 

KB: To me, that’s what Fun Home represented. We’ve heard gay male stories…
 

AP: So many times.
 

KB: It’s like everything else. The guys got there first. I was talking to a lesbian friend of mine about Fun Home, and she had decided she didn’t like it because she didn’t think we should know that the father kills himself from the beginning. And I was like.. anything else? She said no. And I said: okay, may I challenge you please to open your heart a bit bigger? That could be the artifact of the source material. You’re taking this one thing about the storytelling and have decided you don’t like this piece that is trailblazing like a giant comet through our lives. You’ve got to open your heart a little bigger.
 

AP: That’s a great example. I don’t think that queer women root for themselves in that sense the way that gay men do.
 

KB: Have you watched The Women? They’re so awful to each other and as I grew up, I was shocked to find out that’s how straight women relate to each other. They will take each other down.
 

KW: Women are pitted against each other so constantly, from a young age.
 

MT: People think there’s only one cake. So if you don’t get in there, you won’t get a piece. But it’s like actually there’s hundreds of cakes around you.
 

KB: That’s right.
 

AP: I think, in terms of normalizing and visibility, I think it irritates me that as a community, that men and women who are gay don’t come together more often. There are some gay men, I absolutely don’t want to generalize here, but there are some gay men that love their gay female friends. But there’s still that niche of gay men to whom we’re a bunch of jokes. You always say the example about when the AIDS crisis came, the lesbian community were the first to come to their side and take care of them. When your friends were dying…
 

KB: When it came down to it, yes, absolutely.
 

AP: And I would like to think gay men could support us in return.
 

KB: I know, I remember I introduced you at a party to a casting director and said, “This is my girlfriend, Andrea” and she’d been in for him before, and he did like a big cartoon eyes thing. Then later he comes over to me and says, “I’m sure she’s delighted that you told me she’s your girlfriend.” And I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “I’m sure she wants me to know she’s gay.” Meaning that I never should’ve done that because she’s an ingenue.
 

AP: And he’s gay!
 

KW: It’s within our community and these stereotypes – we should be the first to break them, and yet…
 

AP: I think it’s what makes me an interesting ingenue.
 

KW: Do you think your experience as a queer woman informs your acting?
 

AP: Totally.
 

KW: Some of the ingenue roles are just so thin. You’re a prop for something else or for the male lead so much of the time.
 

AP: And we blame the actresses sometimes, but it’s the source material; it’s not heavy to begin with. Last summer the choreographer, and I love this quote, said, “You’re the anti-ingenue.” I love that. I should put that on my website as a pull-quote.
 

KW: Obviously the competition for female roles is steep and the roles that do exist can be pretty two-dimensional and sparse; have you ever gotten a show or an audition or an offer that you’ve turned down because you didn’t connect with it or were offended by it?
 

KB: My thing is always…there are three reasons to take a job. And one can trump the other two. Sorry, I said Trump. Personal satisfaction, prestige, and money. I’ve recently added health insurance, for real. I’m doing a job coming up and the deciding factor will be that I’d get the four weeks for health insurance, because it’s certainly not the money or prestige. 
 

AP: There’s a lot of shows I’ve been in where I just disagree entirely with the plot. Like I was thinking, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers…
 

KB: Annie Get Your Gun!
 

AP: I did that show and I just hated it the whole time I was in it. I had the choice to not audition, ultimately I sometimes have to swallow my feminism a bit and choke it down in the sense…I just don’t understand why we’re still telling that story. Why are we still doing that?
 

KB: I’m not a fan of that show. I don’t know that it really has a place in 2016.
 

KW: I keep thinking about what you said about being in-out vs. being out-out, and I was rewatching Ellen Page’s coming out speech like a week ago…
 

AP: Ugh, it was so good.
 

KW: She said that she felt like she was lying by omission by not being out. Do you feel like people who aren’t out are lying by omission? Did you feel that way?
 

KB:I don’t think I did personally, because I was so wrapped up in religion and expectation and wading through all that, it felt like for the longest time just like bad news and how am I gonna break this to people? First, how am I gonna try to get rid of it? Then, how am I gonna embrace it? Then, how am I gonna show others it isn’t scary? I’m older, it’s a lot different.
 

AP: We’ve definitely had very different experiences.
 

KB: Now I can say, oh, that’s my girlfriend. Also, when you get to a certain age, towards your 50s, people ask are you married? No. Oh, um, do you have kids? No. If you’re being in, at 50, saying no to those questions, it’s a very different person. To me, the test of whether a girl was gay in high school and college…it was the girl who was with the gang, but kinda separate, an observer, she caught the comedy, she very often was a comedic person, and never talked about a boy.
 

AP: You use comedy as a vehicle.
 

KW: What about you?
 

AP: I waited until…I was telling friends and my sisters, but I was waiting to tell my parents until I was completely on my own financially. I was on my own as soon as I graduated college, so I was wanting to get that apartment and get out of their house as soon as I could. A couple months after graduating, I was dating my first girlfriend, and she broke up with me, and it was my first heartbreak. It was so overwhelming, they knew something was wrong. I told them, and it was a very emotional experience. My grandpa had just died, and my dad was in a very emotional place, and my mom, she can be very matter-of-fact, and she doesn’t cry, but my dad is way more theatrical and emotional. My dad just cried and my mom just sat there and listened and said, “We kinda had a feeling…”
 

KW: They always know before you do!
 

AP: Yes! I said, “I waited until I moved out because I was scared you were gonna disown me.” We can laugh about it now but I really did think…you expect the worst.
 

KW: Especially if you grow up in a family that is religious in any way at all, even if it’s in a small way.
 

AP: Catholicism has an effect. My dad just cried and said nothing would ever make me stop loving you. I still cry every time I say that.
 

Klea Blackhurst & Andrea Prestinario
 

KW: After all we’ve talked about…where do you see us in ten years? Where do you want theater to be?
 

AP: I want to see more gender-bending. I wanna see women playing Aaron Burr. I wanna see more of that. It’s funny to think about what we’re seeing illuminated by the activism in theatre right now. In the 60s, the Civil Rights Movement happened and there were these raising consciousness groups, and there were all these women’s groups that were like, we’re fighting about race but we’re also all still second class to these men. It’s that pecking order. Intersectionality, right? I want to see all of it at once in a way. I wanna see us work on all of them all the time and work on that in theater and tell those stories and have opportunities for women and men of color and minorities overall. There’s such a disparity of roles.
 

KB: Well, that’s why I was like…come on, Hazel. But that role doesn’t come along. It doesn’t exist.
 

KW: It’s a great part. You wish that there were ten parts like that.
 

KB: And it just doesn’t exist! Exactly. It could join the ranks of like, does Dolly get a guy? We don’t care. Does Rose get a guy? We don’t care.
 

KW: That’s part of what I loved about it. The love story was never the focus. The central question isn’t whether or not she’ll find a man.
 

KB: That’s what I think is actually Merman-esque about it, having nothing to do with Merman. But she was a star. She had thirteen Broadway hits. Thirteen! But none of them depended on the guy, nobody cared. Yeah, in Annie Get Your Gun, she throws the contest at the end so he can think he’s the big man so that one she ends up with him, but the other ones…it’s not the central thing. You didn’t need a guy’s name with her name. That’s all that anybody cared about, at a time when Broadway was a major growing concern. That’s what attracted me to Hazel, and is one of the things I think they need to do to it. Make it Hazel’s story. Focus that thing and just…people wanna know about Hazel, not because I’m Hazel, but the same thing happened with Hello Dolly! out of town. People didn’t want Act I to end with a song about how Horace became half a millionaire. We just wanna get back to Dolly.
 

KW: At least everyone I have heard talk about the show or what I’ve read, Hazel is what people are responding to. She’s the heart of the show.
 

AP: The work ahead is very exciting to think about.
 

KB: Taking that story, making it more. My questions became, if we’re going to encourage Mrs. Baxter to have it all, why can’t Hazel have it all? This millionaire guy dates her and it’s like, no, I’m gonna stay with the family…that I met last week. It doesn’t make sense. Those things could be more realistic and valid. And why can’t she date a millionaire and have a job? And why can’t Mrs. Baxter have a job?
 

KW: It’s very subtle, the way it’s done, but there’s a level of classism in the show as well. You do feel that she’s “working class,” that she’s the help.
 

KB: That’s right, absolutely. I think that should be fixed. Hazel has to come out on top on every question. And she should solve every problem. That’s what she does! To me, it’s so exciting, I hope they get it right, because I will play her forever. You would have to kick me out of my Broadway dressing room, you would have to ask me cordially to leave after like 30 years. I’d be like, nope, I like taking naps between shows on Wednesdays, I like having my soup sent in, I would not want to leave. It’s taken me so long to get to where I am. I was just thinking the other day, it’s kind of obnoxious to say, but lately I’ve done a string of roles where I get the last bow. And that’s just a fact; it’s how it is. It’s awesome, what an awesome thing! I’m hoping ten years from now that I look back and that I have opportunities to create things, do things, and that I stuck in this long.
 

KW: They say if you’re not a soprano, you won’t work steadily until your 40s…
 

KB: Yes, exactly! And I am hoping that’s true. ‘Cause once the Reno Sweeney years were over, the Gypsy years arrived, now that time has come. I hope it’s a long train. And a lot of stuff gets sent to me now, new stuff…Let’s see. One of them, there’s one called Vanishing Point, I love this piece so much… It’s about Aimee Semple McPherson, Agatha Christie, and Amelia Earhart, all of whom vanished. Aimee Semple McPherson who walked out of the dessert saying that she had no idea what happened to her, and then Agatha Christie disappeared for days and found her car wrecked by the side of the road, and she was registered at a nearby hotel under the name of her husband’s mistress. So three different experiences of women vanishing. It’s so smart. I did concept things and Agatha Christie was always Alison Frasier, I was Aimee, and Amelia has changed a couple times…you’d be a great Amelia Earhart.
 

AP: Cast me!
 

KW: There it is! There’s your show together.
 

KB: Yes!!! There it is!
 

AP: Oh, babe, we did it!
 

KB: That could actually be good. It’s been struggling, but stuff I get asked to do, I say yes yes yes unless there’s a reason to say no. They don’t want me for Seven Brides but let’s say no. If you can, just say yes. My whole career is a series of what happened because I said yes. Interesting combinations of things you could not have made up. So, I’m gonna do more of that.
 

 

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A Conversation with Jeff Augustin & Srda Vasiljevic

Srda Vasiljevic and Jeff Augustin have both played instrumental parts in my first year post-grad. Both as artists and as people they surprise me with their warmth, focus and generosity time and time again. Srda and I played in the same playground of college theater and the splash he's made in New York in the short time he's been here has been nothing short of inspiring. His hard work and clarity of vision teach me something every day, but even more than that, his willingness to make space, to pull others up with him has made me more excited than ever about being part of the New York theater community. I was struck first by the quiet precision with which Jeff enters a room, and quickly came to love both the joyful movement and radical thoughtfulness he brings to his work and his relationships. As Jeff closes The Last Tiger in Haiti at La Jolla Playhouse and Srda opens Dust Can’t Kill Me at the June Havoc, I am endlessly excited by the stories they share.

 

Srda Vasiljevic and Jeff Augustin have both played instrumental parts in my first year post-grad. Both as artists and as people, they surprise me with their warmth, focus and generosity time and time again. Srda and I played in the same playground of college theater and the splash he’s made in New York in the short time he’s been here has been nothing short of inspiring. His hard work and clarity of vision teach me something every day, but even more than that, his willingness to make space, to pull others up with him has made me more excited than ever about being part of the New York theater community. I was struck first by the quiet precision with which Jeff enters a room, and quickly came to love both the joyful movement and radical thoughtfulness he brings to his work and his relationships. As Jeff closes The Last Tiger in Haiti at La Jolla Playhouse and Srda opens Dust Can’t Kill Me at the June Havoc, I am endlessly excited by the stories they share.

 

 

Corey Ruzicano: How have you come to tell your origin story, publicly or privately, and has the practice of telling that story informed the way you tell stories as an artist? What is your story and how has it given you a lens to listen to other stories? How did you come to be who you are, and how have you drawn the lines between those points of the constellation for yourself?
 

Srda Vasiljevic: I was born as a refugee. Actually, I was born right before the Bosnian genocide happened, so I guess there was a six month period where I was not a refugee. I think when most people hear the word refugee, they think of women and children wrapped in layers of fabric, people huddled together, decrepit housing, but my understanding of what a refugee was, was based on the community around me. As a young child, I was always with other children – it was for the most part women and children, and I feel like that plays a huge role in the kinds of stories I’m interested in and the kind of relationships I hold dear. I think I’m drawn to telling female stories and have always loved female characters, because I love and appreciate my mom and my sister and my grandmother. I feel very tied to the women in my family.
 

Jeff Augustin: Did you still feel like a refugee, moving around?
 

SV: I actually wrote about this recently for a grant application or something – I don’t think I realized that I was a refugee until I started grade school in Iowa. When you grow up like that, that very, very early, elementary age, you don’t realize that your situation is different from anyone else’s.
 

CR: It’s like a categorization only in hindsight.
 

SV: Exactly, and then we moved to Iowa and lived with refugee families, so I was still surrounded by other people like me. For some reason that cultural smashing of Bosnian and Iowan together was normal, because that’s what everyone else around me was, too. It wasn’t until I met people with other understandings of what a refugee was, that I started to think about what I was or what it meant. That was a big time historically with Clinton’s involvement with Bosnia – specifically in those few years – you would say “refugee” and you would just think of photos shown on the news of the Bosnian Genocide, and think of these horrific stories. So my presence was always defined then by others’ insinuations, their very limited understanding of what this culture actually is. I started grade school and I guess at that point, I decided I needed to start American-izing myself. My name is so weird, I hated it growing up – you have to hate it growing up! Every substitute teacher is scared of it…
 

JA: You know it’s you when they pause…
 

SV: Weirdly, I remember as a seven- or eight-year-old going to the vending machine at the big K-Mart by where we lived that sold these really gaudy fake cross necklaces. I needed one. I thought if I had a cross necklace, that would make me feel so much more American. I’m not really sure why. I remember thinking, I’ll be one of them. I wore it for a couple of days until my family said, “you can’t just wear that, it’s not just a necklace, it’s a symbol that means something.” So I quickly moved on from that, but I do find these little vestiges of needing to become American, subconsciously. It’s always little things, little ways of wanting to acclimate myself to the culture and the art.
 

JA: Yeah, I grew up in Miami, the youngest of seven. So it was a whole lot of people. My sister and I are the two youngest and we’re the only two who were born here and everyone else was born in Haiti. I learned Creole and English at the same time. I remember distinctly in fourth or fifth grade finally figuring out how to say the word “iron”, because it sounded so different in Creole. Things like that stick in my mind even though my Creole is practically gone. But growing up in Miami, it just feels like the Caribbean – it’s just like all these different immigrants. It’s tricky. I also remember going through this whole thing of understanding what black meant – having a phase where I was African American and then reevaluating and realizing I’m very much Haitian American. My roots come from Haitian culture and so a lot of my journey has been exploring where that comes from, all sorts of things like vodou and the Haitian revolution. And I do think very much that the way I first started stories was very influenced by the folklore quality of Haitian culture. I think Haitians are some of the best storytellers. And then I think the first time I really began to understand the cultural difference of what it means to be American or what America looks like didn’t happen until I left Miami and went to college.
 

SV: Because Miami is such a specific pocket of American culture?
 

JA: Yeah. I went to Boston College, and BC is one of the whitest institutions and economically is also so different from where I grew up. That was a culture shock. And that was the first time I really felt like my identity was shaped out of that shock – it was the first time I really felt like “I am a Haitian American.” It’s where I started to understand the significance of place and what home means.
 

CR: What did some of those things mean or look like to you?
 

JA: I think I understood privilege in a very particular way. I understood my place and how I was seen. I was this poor Haitian kid and also very obviously gay, so there were a lot of different lenses to be seen through. A lot of people at Boston College are at least upper middle class and my fashion sense was so different – I think I always had a bit of fashion sense but what I could afford was so different from everyone else.
 

CR: Well especially when so much of the dominant culture only sees color, it doesn’t always see the cultural gradations within it.
 

SV: There’s a strange separation but overlap of race and culture that I think many people don’t really understand. I’m white, obviously I’m caucasian, but I feel such a very specific identity with Eastern European culture, so I don’t necessarily identify with white American culture, although I’m very obviously white. For example, a lot of Bosnian people are Muslim. It’s the predominant religion in Bosnia, especially in the countrysides. A lot of my community and friends and family are Muslim, so when Donald Trump says “let’s ban all Muslims” and focusing his attacks on the Middle East, he doesn’t realize that a lot of Muslims are not what he imagines Muslim people to be. It’s also the language. Anti-Muslim rhetoric is cropping up in schools, but the people that are persecuted for being Muslim are people with brown skin, people who look different, and that’s troublesome, because people are associating religion and a culture with a shade of skin. It’s very intricate, that way of compartmentalizing.
 

CR: And so much of it is informed by external projections from the outside world that aren’t factual, but exist in their own kind of fact because perceptions create reality.
 

SV: If they exist in any world, they exist. We as people need to understand why these biases exist and how to clarify… or do you need to clarify things?
 

CR: It’s an interesting question. I was talking to a writer the other day and he was talking about being a white-presenting biracial person and that for him, he’s gone through so many iterations of understanding and owning his racial identity that he’s begun to think of race as a fluid thing the way we think of gender as a fluid thing. But it doesn’t work like that for everyone because not everyone has the capacity for or is beholden to that fluctuation, or is able to make choices about that journey they’re on. When you’re having to identity yourself as a certain thing, how do you find the license or empathy or understanding, or the ground to stand on, when you’re trying to tell more than your own story?
 

JA: I think it’s tricky. I feel, at least in theater, there’s this mark of “I’m this Haitian playwright.” And I think the expectation, when I walk into a room or a meeting, is that I’m going to pitch you a play about Haitian culture. And I do want to tell those stories, but I shouldn’t feel forced or obligated to. Fundamentally I got into writing because watching TV and movies, I did not see any stories about Haitian culture, or if I did it was horribly exploitative or just wrong. So that’s kind of where I entered and that’s just part of the fabric of who I am, and so I do feel that pressure of having to be a specific type of writer. But the question of the ownership of work… I was born here. And my siblings who spent fifteen, sixteen, twenty years of their lives in Haiti, they are Haitian people.
 

SV: Do they consider themselves Haitian American or Haitian?
 

JA: I think they consider themselves Haitian. I’ve never asked. But for me, that American part of me is important and very much a part of my identity, but there’s also a fear when Haitian people come to my plays to know if I’ve gotten this quote unquote right. Am I telling the story right? And how am I presenting Haitian culture to these majority white audiences? And making sure it’s clear that this is my one experience, my one lens into this and there are many Haitian stories. Please do not make this your one reference.
 

SV: But people do that. People see one thing and just automatically assume that it’s everyone’s experience. Just like you were saying, there’s a such a gradient of white stories, there isn’t one experience. You don’t think all white people think this way, because Willy Loman does.
 

CR: Because white usually means “neutral,” and anything is defined by the negative space that that leaves. There are only these tiny corners made for the non-dominant culture, so it’s made to feel like there’s only room for one or two types of stories within that corner.
 

SV: You look at a theater season and there are six slots and you have to – I hate to say this – but there’s usually a show that caters to a “minority” audience. Why aren’t we focusing on human stories regardless of background for every slot?
 

CR: People are always worrying how you make any story relevant, but the theory of the United States of America should predicate that they’re all relevant. We aren’t carrying out the thesis statement we started with, so of course there’s a lot of gear shifting to be done. And it’s not only a cultural conversation to be had but a capitalist one. Because when there’s a price tag on everything, some things will always be valued more than others. You’re always in a marketplace, you always have to be thinking about how to sell yourself and your stories. So does that change the way you make choices about the pieces that you look for or the collaborators you’re interested in working with?
 

SV: As a refugee I grew up with stories – we didn’t have television to watch. So now as an adult, I want to tell stories that feel larger than life, a deviation from your normal circumstances. Theater is the last art form where you can present something on stage where the audience has the ability to use their imagination to understand the world you’re presenting. I feel like that’s what storytelling is, at it’s basest form, you’re saying “fill in the rest.”
 

CR: Especially when you’re thinking about what it means to own a story… and the word own has such specific, dark roots in this country –
 

SV: Yes, it can be very challenging being a director, directing a work that is outside of your own background.
 

CR: Yeah, I never think about it as much with directors as much as I do with writers.
 

SV: But I also think there is a stigma. August Wilson wanted his plays to only be directed by directors of color, which makes a lot of sense. I think there’s a specific reason why his stories about the African-American condition should be told by directors of colors. But do I, as a gay, Bosnian American director, have the ability to direct an August Wilson play? What is my “ownership” of that – do I have any ownership at all? Am I just the third party observing and trying to make sense of it? I think one of the reasons I love Jeff’s writing is that the cultural aspect of it resonates with me. It feels like our backgrounds are incredibly divergent. Do I have a clear understanding of the Haitian American experience? No. Do I have an understanding of growing up in an immigrant household? Yes. So it depends on what context you’re talking about. You definitely have to make choices about whether or not you have the authority to tell a story and why. You have to be conscious of it, or you aren’t really telling the whole story.
 

CR: Ultimately the idea is that the ideal we’re moving toward is that the playing field is not uneven, so that sharing each other’s stories will not be so fraught with inequity, that no one will be disenfranchised from the platform to tell stories. But that’s not where we are right now, so the choices you make sort of have to be prioritized in that direction. It’s hard because there are times right now when the gear-shifting feels really transparent and uncomfortable and pointed but it’s all about habit forming.
 

SV: You’re making a statement. I think there should be more cross-pollination of ideas and backgrounds, especially between directors and playwrights. A lot of the time we get paired together because of our similarities, rather than our differences.
 

CR: It’s like saying two people of the same culture will automatically have the same thoughts and want to work in the same way.
 

JA: It’s a tricky road. There are certain plays where there is a certain kind of director I would like to work with because of the matter that I’m diving into. I’m working on a play about a bunch of generations of Haitian women working on this farm and there’s this very particular director I want to work with that’s half Haitian, and that’s important because I’m diving into this world and I want that perspective. But other times, back to that idea of the machine of season planning, a company decides to do your show and the directors that they come up with are only people of color and you can feel the pigeon holing. This is our minority play so we’re going to stuff in every minority that we can. In the same way that plays written by straight white men should not only be directed by straight white men.
 

SV: Signature just announced their season and I think five of the six directors are female, and it’s so exciting to see shows written by men being directed by women, because women can and should do more than tell female stories. I do think the pairing thing is really problematic because sometimes the best stories are told by people with completely separate backgrounds. Look at John Doyle and The Color Purple.
 

JA: When I’m writing a play, I’m thinking more about what these characters are going through and what kind of director, what kind of people whose work I’ve seen connects with the heart of that story. We can’t forget that there are people on stage who are acting the way people act.
 

CR: Of course, and some of the circumstances have been informed by a social paradigm, but if I’m coming to your show as an actor, I’m looking for what anxiety or desire or fear would make me say the next line on the page. It’s an endlessly interesting conversation that never has an answer.
 

SV: I don’t know if people talk about it, though.
 

CR: Well it’s a privilege too, to have the time and space and resources to have these conversations. Sometimes I forget that. I also feel like I’m always asking this question, but I’m always trying to define what community is for me and for the people around me. What does community mean to you and how have you found your place in it?
 

SV: I grew up in one culture and then was plopped in another, so I never really felt at home in either. I feel a kinship with both, but do I feel at home in either? I think I finally felt at home in New York. It feels like an island of misfit toys to me. Everyone has weird backgrounds and weird ways they got here. The artist community here that didn’t take the same narrow path to get here but we’ve all sort of hopscotched to it, so it feels like we’re all very similar, yet incredibly different, and that makes me feel at home.
 

JA: I think one of the most important ideas about community for me is a place where I can feel grounded, where I can just be whatever version of myself I want to be, where I can find mental stability. When I work with people who are of both my artistic and my deep friend community, I feel like they carry me creatively and personally, and that always challenges me to be a better person. Community for me is very much about my personal alignment, because as a writer I spend hours and hours alone and feel like I’m in a bubble.
 

CR: And in New York as individual artists who aren’t always working collaboratively or with the same people, there’s also a very practical question of how you find your people.
 

SV: Yeah, finding community in a freelance life is definitely a puzzle. I’m part of an artist board and that introduced me to so many people on similar artistic wavelengths. I think you just have to be open to it. You meet people all the time, so you really have to put the time into finding out what your connection is with them. That’s my job as director – finding the connective tissue. I know that if I were working in an institution and using that as my main throughline to meet people, I wouldn’t have met the same kind of varied groups of people that I have freelancing. They connect the dots for me, make me a more whole person, supplement something in me and make me stronger, and truth be told, your artistic community doesn’t have to just be artists.
 

CR: Absolutely, and I love the idea that your community is the people who make you want to be a better person. I don’t know if I’ve ever thought about it like that, but I think it’s completely true for the people I’m most drawn to–they make me want to show up and be better.
 

SV: But it definitely takes a while. It doesn’t happen immediately. It accumulates, the people and the experiences.
 

JA: And you do make relationships with institutions over time, not just people who will do your play but people who are behind your voice.
 

CR: People do stick their necks out for you every once in awhile. It’s not an industry that supports corporate singularity, it’s totally a word of mouth world.
 

JA: Absolutely, and the more people you meet, the more new experiences you get pulled into, the more you’re stretching as an artist and as a person.
 

SV: I don’t want to say it’s happenstance but a lot of it is just where the chips fall… that’s an expression right? That’s one thing about being Bosnian is that I still don’t know idioms.
 

JA: Oh I know.
 

SV: It’s how the crackers crunch? No.
 

CR: Do you have any Bosnian idioms?
 

SV: No, just curse words. Bosnian language can be vile. And the literal translation of Bosnian curse words can be so much worse than English.
 

CR: Yeah, expressions like that are so cultural.
 

SV: And they translate so differently. I speak English fluently and I speak Serbian-Croatian fluently and there’s such a difference of tone between the two languages.
 

JA: I’ve been thinking a lot lately, talking about language, that so much of understanding my work is understanding the style. So much of the influence of my work is Haitian language and culture, and it’s big and it’s loud. Creole happens to be a lot more poetic than English, so people’s turn of phrase are different, and that has influenced the way I work. Sometimes when I’m writing, I think that’s not going to read or be understood. When you’re directing, do you feel like that ever?
 

SV: I feel like Bosnian, as a language and as a culture, exists in this slightly heightened realm. We would have parties at our house and seeing how Bosnian adults interact…everything is big. There are big screaming fights, big love, big feelings. There’s a lot of emotion. So when I look at a piece of text, I always want to know what happens if you pull this tiny string and elevate it to this almost hyper-heightened sensibility. Did that change the ebb and flow of a scene? How do you dramatize real life? I don’t necessarily consciously try to hyper-dramatize my work, but I guess in my head I see conversations as much more dramatic, because that’s what I grew up with.
 

JA: Right.
 

SV: Nothing is ever easy but it’s also just funny. There’s a lot of joy and laughter in my family and in storytelling, so all that emotion and the fights and the laughter all lead into how I tell stories and how I see characters interact. It has that blood flow.
 

CR: I’m a big believer that often language creates reality. It’s like that John Muir saying, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe,” and I think language is no different especially because it’s man made.
 

JA: I can only think about writing-wise, but sometimes I’ll have a line that feels like, there’s so much acting in that, and yeah, Haitian culture can dig at someone with one word, and it’s very still and very smiley. I do sometimes feel that trickiness of navigating having to unpack that more or figure out a way to sound a bit more American or pull in more Western dramaturgy, whatever that means. Sometimes it feels like it opens up the work, but not always.
 

CR: Where do you draw the line of I want to represent this, this way but I also want it to be understood? It’s a very delicate balancing act. I don’t want people to shut off, but I also don’t want to spoon-feed them.
 

SV: When you’re looking at a piece as a director, sometimes you feel like you understand exactly the intention of the writer in that moment but it may not read to the audience at large, because it’s so specific. So what do you do? Do you keep it specific or do you open it up so that it’s a moment that more people resonate with? Do you adjust?
 

JA: I think there’s also a bigger question about how we watch plays and critique works of groups you don’t have an education about.
 

CR: Totally, how can you engage as an insider and as an outsider or somewhere in between?
 

 

 

 

Jeff Augustin’s play Little Children Dream of God received its world premiere at the Roundabout Underground, where he was the inaugural Tow Foundation Playwright-in-Residence. His plays have also been produced by Actors Theatre of Louisville (Cry Old Kingdom, Humana 2013; That High Lonesome Sound, Humana Apprentice Anthology 2015), and Western Washington University (Corktown). His work has been developed at the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference, La Jolla Playhouse, The Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, American Conservatory Theater, and Seattle Rep. He is a member of The Working Farm at SPACE on Ryder Farm and was a New York Theatre Workshop 2050 Fellow. Currently, Jeff is the Shank Playwright-in-Residence at Playwrights Horizons. He is under commission from Manhattan Theatre Club and Roundabout. BA: Boston College, MFA: UCSD.
 

Srda Vasiljevic is a theater director living and working in New York City. Born in Sarajevo, Bosnia a few months before the Bosnian War broke out, Srda spent his childhood living in refugee camps across Europe before moving to the bustling Midwestern metropolis of Des Moines, Iowa, and later on, New York City. Srda has worked on and off Broadway developing new and reinvented works with artists such as Terrence McNally, Jeanine Tesori, Moisés Kaufman, Billy Porter, Leigh Silverman, and Deaf West Theatre Company. Working on the directorial teams of such productions as The Laramie Project Cycle at BAM, 2014 Tony-nominated Mothers and Sons, ENCORES! Off-Center revival of Andrew Lippa’s The Wild Party and the Deaf West Theater’s Broadway revival of Spring Awakening have contributed to Srda’s eclectic and electric style.

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A Conversation with Scott Gilmour & Claire McKenzie

 

The story of Forest Boy seems like it was meant to be put onstage: out of nowhere, a boy emerges from the woods, and tells the story of how he hid out in the forest and is all alone in the world. Or is he?
 

Scott Gilmour and Claire McKenzie, a composing team from Scotland, brings Forest Boy to the New York Musical Festival this summer. We sat down to talk about making a living as an artist, social media, and the freedom to construct one’s own identity.

 

 

Helen Schultz: How did you first encounter the story of Forest Boy?
 

Scott Gilmour: In 2013, Claire and I were commissioned to write a piece for the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. We were brought in for a very last-minute notice – they said, “We have a development week thing and if you have any ideas, you can come in and work with this cast,” but we didn’t have any ideas. That story was trending at the time on Twitter and Facebook, and we kind of got a bit hooked.
 

Claire McKenzie: I found it on Facebook one night and I read it, and it’s a fascinating true story and I just wanted to keep on reading about what happened. It was still unraveling at the time, so back then there wasn’t an end to the story – where it ended was that he was found working in Burger King. I thought there’s something very poetic about that. He came out of the forest and this land and character he had created, but in reality he was working at a Burger King. I found that there was something theatrical in that for me.
 

SG: We took the story and a song into this development week as a starting point, and the conservatoire that we were working with liked it. They gave us some commission money to go to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The story was still unraveling, [so] the version at Fringe didn’t have an ending. This version does have an ending, don’t worry.
 

HS: And you both went to the Royal Conservatoire in Scotland. How did you guys meet and start working together?
 

CM: I studied composition in the music school – they have a music school and a drama school. For the first four years, our paths didn’t cross because I was in the music school. Scott studied musical theater performance. I moved to the drama school for a year and did musical direction. We met and became friends through that course and through meeting in drama school. We decided that we liked the same things, and we went to see lots of theater and just became friends. One day we decided we might try to write together, and, actually [Scott] signed me up for something–
 

SG: –yeah… I kind of forced Claire to do it. We had put together another project, and it was a new works thing. I was working as an actor in it, and you were a musical director. The vibe of the room was very cool, and I thought maybe we should try to do this, the two of us. At the end of my degree, there was this sort of collaboration thing between the Conservatoire and this theater in Glasgow that was an underground, new works venue. They had this collaborative project where if you had any ideas you wanted to develop, you could do that. I didn’t ask Claire, and I [just] signed her up to work with me. We went for the pitch, and our first piece was a piece called Freak Show. It was based around a Coney Island freakshow, so it was a song-cycle type thing. It was sort of immersive, so the audience moved around it and if you’d stop by a performer, they’d have a song and interact with you. That was the first idea we had. From then on, that show went on to have another life and we were like, “Oh! Well maybe we should do this again sometime!” That was four years ago, and now we’re here!
 

Scott Gilmour & Claire McKenzie
 

HS: Forest Boy is of course based on a true story and real people that are still alive. How did you go about culling all these facts and figures, and putting them into something that’s also narrative?
 

SG: For me, I find it a challenge in that when you’re able to come up with your own world and your own story, there’s a lot more artistic license to do what you want with it. When you take a true subject, there’s a respect there. You can’t lie too much if it’s a true thing. The biggest challenge was trying – with the theatricality – to fit in these facts.
 

CM: True, and I’d say structure. Because we’ve done three or four different versions of the show over the years, I think the main thing that we’ve been playing with is what the best order and structure to tell the audience this story, because it’s quite complicated. Do you tell them all of the forest story, then all of the real story of what really happened, or do you tell them at the same time, or do you try and tell them as it was unveiled in the press? That’s this version. You can tell it lots of different ways. It’s just very complicated story to tell – it’s not a linear structure.
 

SG: It’s also that dangerous thing that when you get a real story, you’ve got to try and find the version of it that’s actually true because it was a story that came through the press and social media, and they have a tendency to exaggerate. In order to get the facts, you need to troll through the different articles. For me, when it came to getting the actual facts and figures about when he was there, when he was kept there, and how long he stayed in Berlin and all that, I actually turned to the German papers. Everyone else was a knock-off version of the German newspapers at the time. There were a lot of news sources in the UK, but there was a sort of a diluted version of the truth, so you have to do the detective work to get the real story.
 

CM: He hasn’t done many interviews. There’s not much we found of what he made of the whole thing. He’s decided not to really talk about it.
 

SG: I think that was a way in, of making it a drama, because he’s the only one that has not spoken out. So you’ve got all these people saying that he’s like this, or like that, and actually there’s this kid in the middle of it all who still hasn’t done any press – he did one interview in a little tiny paper in Holland, and that’s it. Immediately you go, well maybe we can make a character out of him.
 

HS: So much of this show is about media frenzy.
 

CM: That’s a big part of the show.
 

HS: And I feel like that’s a big part of our world right now, too.
 

CM: They made “Forest Boy.” They made the story what it is. In reality, a boy turned up and tried to be taken in by social workers, but we – the media and social media and the press – made it into the story of Forest Boy, a big mystery that lasted about a year. Without them, it would have never become a story.
 

SG: It’s enticing and I think it was one of the reasons that we felt maybe now is the time to tell the story in that way because even five years ago, ten years ago certainly, it wouldn’t have happened. He wouldn’t have become this huge, massive “who’s Forest Boy?” and #ForestBoy would have never become a thing. It would have stayed local, it would have stayed a national thing in Germany and it wouldn’t have permeated across into all our cultures. Forest Boy is one story, but – like you said – social media is doing that all over the place. It’s exaggerating everything. As a person, I get most of my news through Twitter way quicker than I get it through a newspaper – it’s immediate. That said, you take what’s said there as truth… It’s a different time now, I guess.
 

Scott Gilmour & Claire McKenzie
 

HS: Has it made you consider these things differently in your own lives, and how it forms your opinions?
 

CM: Scott doesn’t have Facebook, do you?
 

SG: I’m really bad at it; I’m really awful. I’ve been told to get Twitter because of work. But I’m getting better at it. I’ve started doing hashtags and everything, but I never got Facebook. It is a really fascinating thing: how quickly you can become reliant on it being there, and how quickly you can rely on it not just for communication, but for information. We take what it says as granted right away.
 

CM: Also, we know something that’s happened, instantly, anywhere in the world. In the past, it would take time to feed through.
 

SG: Exactly! Like the thing in Turkey, the madness that happened there. The Prime Minister, he’s out of the country, and they cut off the internet in Turkey, but he’s got Twitter and can see everything happening, like the coup. It’s a really different kind of time.
 

HS: And now celebrities like Forest Boy have morphed into politicians like Donald Trump.
 

SG: Because he’s become a character in himself.
 

CM: In Scotland, we have an opinion of him through the media. That’s all we have.
 

SG: Taking it back to the story, what always took me about that story was that it he has been turned into a character, like Donald Trump – he’s become The Forest Boy. But who actually is that, underneath all that stuff? Why did he do that thing, and how does he feel about it? It began to become a window into why we wanted to make a piece about it.
 

HS: Forest Boy also constructs his own identity, that’s so disparate from his reality. Could you talk about identity in this piece, and what role it plays?
 

SG: I think one of the most exciting parts of this story, for me, is that it immediately divides people. On one side, you have people saying this guy is a hero! He managed to convince the whole world that he was this kid from the forest, he escaped his life, and he said I’m not going to accept that this is the life I’ve been given, I’m going to do something different about it. And I feel that. I think he’s brilliant. And that fact that his imagination could do that to the world. But then you get all these other people, who are like he’s like a little dick. How could you do that?! He lied, and cheated, and played everyone along in that way and I think it’s one of the interesting parts of the story: what is it about his identity and our own? Do you just accept what’s been laid out in front of you, or do you have a say in it?
 

CM: Can you change it? He did. He tried to.
 

SG: I think as a piece, it’s a massive part of it. One of the hooks about the story is that you kind of want it to be true. You want to believe that he actually did live in the forest. You think, wouldn’t that be great? Because in the back of your head, it’s the thing you ask yourself: could I do that? Could I drop everything and go live in this other place and become someone else? I think it questions an awful lot about how we feel about our own identity, and I certainly did when I first read it.
 

 

HS: Switching gears a bit: can we talk about the difference in making art in the US, Scotland, and the UK?
 

CM: There are some similarities – we have experience in Fringe; and this right now is a festival. There are some similarities in the kind of speed you need to make it, the speed you need to put it up in the theater; there’s no comfort time, everyone’s running at pace to make the show, which I think creates an energy. I think that’s something that, for shows that a take a long time, sometimes you can lose that momentum. So that’s a really positive thing. In terms of differences, in Scotland, musicals aren’t a big culture, and in the UK it’s not as big as it is here in the US. Scotland hasn’t made that many [musicals] so you’re trying to build an audience for musicals over there, while here the musical is the major genre of theater. It’s wonderful being in this environment where it’s such a big thing and you have a massive audience waiting to see the work.
 

SG: I think it’s a slightly different feeling about how you make stuff over here as well. It’s different in that – particularly in New York City, which is like this incredible place that all this wonderful work come from – even at this stage, you’re surrounded by a bunch of people asking you, “What’s the next thing? Where’s it going to go next?” I think that’s great, because to think in that way is really positive. In Scotland, because a lot of arts is subsidized by the government, if you want to do anything, you have to send an application into an arts council, and if they consider it and they like it, you get some money to do the thing. Whereas here, if you want to do the thing, do the thing. You’re on your own and you’ve got to make it. That energy is really present here, but sometimes you can see it clouding everyone’s vision on actually making a bit of art because everyone is so worried about the next thing, and how can we make it bigger.
 

CM: It’s very much a business here, isn’t it?
 

SG: That’s it! That’s missing from where we are.
 

CM: Well, we’re on a festival level, but on a Broadway level, there has to be a return. There has to be a viable business, which is understandable. Whereas in Scotland, you would get money to put on a show and if you made money, that would be great.
 

SG: It’s less for profit. It’s never “let’s sell this thing out.” It’s “let’s make another piece for people in Dundee because they don’t get theater that much and let’s make it for them” and that’s a slightly different tone. Actually, being over here, I think the best version is set somewhere between the two. I think it’s something that I think is a business, but also keeps the heart of it at the front.
 

CM: It’s probably why we’re grateful to be here, though, because we’re learning from both ways of doing it. We’ll hopefully find that middle ground of how to make work, but also make money while doing it. That would be nice.
 

HS: How does government funding affect the tenor of your work, and what it’s like to live as an artist in Scotland?
 

SG: You can live as an artist in Scotland. You can afford to. You can afford to do a couple of jobs throughout the year and that is enough to make a living and you can have your own place just by doing your job. Over here everyone has so many jobs and everyone does everything – it’s amazing! Everyone’s sort of like I do this at night, then that and that pace is really incredible.
 

CM: I have to move around Scotland to whichever theater wants some music for the next show, but I’ve only ever worked as a composer. I imagine I couldn’t have that here. I would have to do something else on the side. I imagine I would have to do something else and write in my spare time here with the hope that it would get on.
 

SG: We’ve been been quite lucky in that way. It’s that thing of allowing you some time to develop your craft. We’ve done five other shows since doing Forest Boy, and now we come back to doing Forest Boy and it’s like, “oh, we’re better at this now than when we started.” I think being away from it, working in a more regional environment, [in our case] Scottish theater, allows you that time to make mistakes; you’re allowed to get it wrong, and it doesn’t destroy your entire career if you get it wrong in an environment like that. It feels like – coming to a place like New York – it’s a wonderful place to bring stuff to when it’s ready to come here. If it’s really ready, it’s the perfect place for it to flourish. But if you mistime that, you kind of get eaten up, it feels like, and you can never come back here.
 

Scott Gilmour & Claire McKenzie
 

HS: Claire, I wanted to ask you, in the US, female composers are not the most common, and it’s just starting to get talked about. Is it the same in Scotland?
 

CM: It’s still a male-dominated industry. I’m a musical director as well, and that’s very male-dominated. The thing is, I’ve kind of gotten used to it because I remember even when I was back in school, I was the only one in my music class. I was the only girl in the composition department when I started at the Conservatoire. That’s gotten better though – they’ve started bringing in more girls. But I remember at the start I was the only girl in my year. I’ve just kind of been used to that environment. I stopped noticing it. I think if you do a good job and you keep doing good work, it shouldn’t matter, and I hope it would count over here as well. I remember I was warned when I thought I wanted to go into theater by quite a lauded musical director in London. He said, “It’s really hard for a woman.” At that stage, I think it really was. I hope it’s changing. I think it is in the UK, and I would hope it is here, too. It’s good that we are talking about it as an issue!
 

HS: I think Fun Home was our wake-up call.
 

CM: Yes. You know, you’re right. I can’t name anyone… even in London, can you name anyone? In the big shows?
 

SG: No, actually.
 

CM: It’s an interesting one. It’s funny – when you’re living it, you don’t realize it so much. Maybe we should change all that.
 

HS: The stories we tell about ourselves and others are at the center of this piece. When you choose to write stories about yourself and others, how do you decide on what stories you choose to tell? How do you take on that responsibility?
 

SG: The way we always work is the story has to come from both of us. Usually the idea has got to be a thing that we share and we both connect to because if it’s not that, it’s never going to work. From that point, we find a way in, make a story, make what it will be as a structure, and write the thing. And then I give it to Claire, and she makes it sound good. That way of working always puts the story at the heart.
 

CM: For us, it’s always picking the lyrics first. In terms of picking a story, we probably go with something that would allow music to have a voice, because I think there’s nothing worse than a very domestic story where you’re trying to chuck music in there.. Certainly with Forest Boy, there was such an environment and imagination, and so many themes that allowed me to be a bit freer in the writing.
 

SG: I think it has to be a story around an idea that has a way in for music and song for it to make sense, otherwise it’s a waste of the form and it just allows for a lot of storytelling that way. Even if it’s not on a domestic level, if it’s pitched right… Fun Home is totally brilliant that way. It’s allowing the music to do some storytelling for you. I think that’s where musical theater can suffer a little from “I’ve got this great idea, let’s make a musical from it!” Yes, but that idea has to be musical as an idea.
 

CM: In terms of our ideas, some of our ideas are completely original, whereas I think with Forest Boy and a couple of our other shows, it’s like more of an adaptation, but here’s what we can make our own. It’s always how original can we be with this?
 

HS: Does Forest Boy know about this musical?
 

SG: No, but we’ve tried to find him. We went to Berlin to try to find some information about him, and we went to the various places where he appeared. We found the people he appeared to and it was crazy! We met them, and they remembered him. When he arrived in Berlin, he turned up and said to them, “I’m all alone in the world; I don’t know who I am”. They totally remembered him. It was odd because we only knew about him through social media, and suddenly we’re at this place and it’s like my god, it really was real – this was a thing! 
He doesn’t know about it because he’s missing again. After they found out about him and that it was a hoax, he went on trial, disappeared, and they found him nine months later, as we said earlier, at a Burger King. After that he had to do the community service and then he just vanished. He was meant to be sent back home to the Netherlands but he never did. So that’s why he doesn’t know, I guess.
 

CM: We would love to meet him. We have a million questions for him.
 

SG: The biggest question that we’ve always spoke about is did he plan it? Or did it just come out? That was a choice in the writing and I had to decide that. But I’ve always been so intrigued: did he actually plan it, or did he just appear in front of them and it just came out at that moment? It just changes the whole color of the lie, and the story.
 

CM: Maybe if the story has another life and we can get to him some way, that would be a goal.
 

HS: Is it weird to talk about this person and think about what they would do and know that they are out there somewhere?
 

SG: In my head, if he is the character I think he is, I’d imagine he’d be quite cool in that he is a total fantasist, and I think that the idea that your story is so good that people would spend years writing a musical… I think that’s the fuel for more fantasy. It’s kind of weird, that he’s out there somewhere. All of them are! All the people in that story are really real. That’s the weird bit: the fact that these people are normal, everyday people and just were just thrown into this crazy limelight and then they go back to being normal again.
 

Scott Gilmour & Claire McKenzie
 

HS: And there’s this sort of empathy in writing about these people who are all pretty “grey area” – can you talk about theater and empathy and how you access that?
 

SG: For me, it’s where’s the heart? What’s the idea? It has to fit the theater and it has to fit the imagination. It also has to answer the question, “why should we care about it?” Going to the theater is kind of a pain in the ass, actually – it’s expensive and not always good and if you can answer why I should care about this thing, it actually helps with all of that. I think talking about empathy, it only becomes relevant when the story that you’re telling can in someway be taken back to the present, watching it and going “Oh that’s me, and my own life”. With this story, it’s the subject of identity, and do we have to just accept who we are, or can we make a change in that too?
 

CM: And we’ve played with different endings as well – we won’t give it away, but in terms of giving the audience the “oh! I could make my life what I want it to be!” and “I have some control,” it’s that sort of… you can make your life exactly what you want with some confidence and courage.
 

SG: And I think it’s the magic of theater. It’s that actual live conversation between the people onstage and the audience out there, and if we can strike some kind of note that the audience can take away, the note is what theater has over all these other forms. You can’t really get that note as strongly from a film or a book. They speak to us in different ways because they speak to us in the way of life. Think about this and it is magic in that way and I think that what you said in terms of empathy, that’s how you get into it.
 

HS: And I love that idea of courage too, and I was wondering where you get the courage to go out there and make something like this, and put it in the world as artists.
 

CM: Because… the two of us.
 

SG: Definitely.
 

CM: I was composing a little bit before we started writing together, and I was doing fine, but I think, like, having the courage to come up to New York is a lot easier when you’re a team doing it. And facing it all the difficulties, I don’t think I would be here without you.
 

SG: I think that is the thing though. We’ve been a partnership for four, five years now, and you give each other confidence in that way.
 

CM: And you push each other!
 

SG: Exactly. Absolutely.
 

CM: If I was on my own, writing a musical, the writing would not be half as good. It’s only because we’re trying to make each other write the best we’ve ever written. And I’m trying to not only write for myself and the audience, but I’m also trying to write the best thing for you as well. So I do think that we’ll get the best part of each other out of that.
 

SG: I do think that it’s being alone, I think it’s something difficult as an artist out on your own, it is hard – it’s hard to keep momentum, to keep courage, but when you do have that other person –
 

CM: – even in those hard times, those stressful moments –
 

SG: – it’s okay, because it’s just a stressful moment. In short, it’s because there’s two of us.
 

HS: What advice would you give to someone who’s where you guys were when you first met?
 

CM: Don’t try to be anything you’re not when you’re a writer. Write from the heart. Only write something you connect with and want to tell. Don’t think “I know what a musical is,” because we don’t follow a form. Try and find your own voice, try to be original, but mostly don’t be afraid of making mistakes while you’re learning. And I think we’re absolutely learning.
 

SG: Totally. Get it wrong. Allow yourself to be inspired by other artists – by other writers, by other stories. But don’t try to emulate them. Just find yourself. Be inspired, but don’t emulate.
 

 

 

 

Scott trained at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and now works as an actor, writer and director within the UK and internationally. Alongside composer Claire McKenzie, he runs multi award-winning musical theatre company, Noisemaker. Together Scott and Claire are dedicated to creating and developing original and innovative musical theatre. Previous work includes The National Theatre of Scotland, The BBC, Chichester Festival Theatre, The Royal Lyceum, Clerkenwell Films, Dundee Rep and Starz.
 

Claire trained in composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and now writes music for theatre throughout the UK. Claire has worked for theatre companies such as National Theatre of Scotland, The Royal Lyceum Edinburgh, Dundee Rep, Citizens’ Theatre and was recently nominated for a BAFTA New Talent Award for Original Music. Alongside writer Scott Gilmour, Claire runs multi award-winning company, Noisemaker, who create and develop original music theatre in the UK and internationally.

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A Conversation with (some of) the cast of Hadestown

Hadestown

 

There’s something in the water at New York Theatre Workshop the famed East Village theater is known for producing hits: RENT, Once, and – most recently – David Bowie’s final project, Lazarus.
 

But Hadestown, a new musical based on Anaïs Mitchell’s concept album, has a certain magic all its own. The show, based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, combines bluegrass music with the inventive staging by Rachel Chavkin (Preludes; Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812; The TEAM). The result is an intoxicating glance into the underworld and a tale about the perils of love in an unforgiving world.
 

We sat down with some of the cast of Hadestown to talk about the development of the show, what Hadestown has to say about Trump-era America, and why theater – now more than ever – is the ultimate textbook on empathy.

 

 

Esther Cohen: How did each of you come to be involved with the show? I know it’s had many iterations.
 

Damon Daunno: In 2012, I received an email that they were doing a reading of this piece called Hadestown based on a concept album by Anaïs Mitchell, and this gang from Vermont was coming down to New York to try it out in the big city. I happily agreed to audition and was immediately blown away by Anaïs and her cronies and all the beauty that followed.
 

Lulu Fall: Rachel Chavkin, whom I know from doing Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, reached out to my agents and asked if I could personally audition for the show. I’m really happy that I accepted the audition and that I … did a good job!
 

Shaina Taub: I grew up in Vermont, where Anaïs is from. I’d been a big fan of hers for a long time because she’s musical royalty in Vermont and beyond. So I’d been a fan of the record and then I was working with Rachel on Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812. And one day in a rehearsal she turned to me and said, “Do you know Anaïs Mitchell?” And I kind of just put it together in my head; I was like, “You’re developing Hadestown, YES! That’s perfect! That’s perfect!” I was so happy that they had found each other. And then I got to audition for the 2014 Dartmouth workshop and went to Dartmouth for 2 weeks to work on it and have luckily been a part of it ever since.
 

Amber Gray: Rachel Chavkin is sort of my partner in crime. Thank god – she keeps me employed. This is may be my sixth show with her, all of which have had many iterations. When we were doing Great Comet, she asked me to audition for Persephone and I GOT IT, yeah! [laughs] I also did the workshop in 2014.
 

Jessie Shelton: I did a reading with the Foundry Theatre upstairs at New York Theatre Workshop. The casting director saw me there and asked me to come in to audition. There was a long time where I heard nothing, but I went back for an open call cause I really wanted to work on this piece. They eventually called me back to be one of the Fates and that’s how I met everyone and joined the magic!
 

Nabiyah Be: I met Rachel when I was in college and ever since then I’ve been involved in many of her projects. She asked me to be involved in this, so I did the last workshop in the fall and have been involved since then.
 

Chris Sullivan: I also joined in the workshop right before this production. That’s about it for me.
 

061916_Hadestown Cast_S&C_04
 

Alicia Carroll: Even though this show has been in development for a long time, much of the music is very similar to the original concept album. In what ways have you all seen the show change over the years?
 

Damon: The core remains the same for sure. The greatest hits are the greatest hits. But what’s on the cutting the room floor is of course always vast. What have you guys noticed?
 

Jessie: I’m new to the show, but it’s really cool to hear how it started, the audience it had, the people who made it, and how it was made. Anaïs says on her website that the first album and production couldn’t have happened anywhere but Vermont. So to bring it to this city, obviously things had to change. I think that the story has shifted to be more accessible to a wider audience.
 

Esther: For those of you who have been with the show for a longer time, do you feel that you’ve had a big role in the development of it? What influence did the developmental climate have on the rehearsal room and how much influence do you think you had as actors?
 

Damon: Whenever I came back into the room for a new iteration it felt very collaborative. For example, I play tenor guitar. Rachel and Anaïs and I had a been in conversation for a long time about “What is going to be Orpheus’ golden gun?” And they were very open to my preferences and skill set and thoughts. The same went for the singing and musical phrasing. They gave me some license but then wrangled accordingly. That was really lovely.
 

Amber: I work on a lot of new plays and can sometimes be slow to say, “Oh, this isn’t working.” That’s never what I’m trying to do in a two week workshop. I’m just trying to do the thing that the writer has written for that one phase. When we did the workshop at Dartmouth a few years ago, that was the first time it had ever been on its feet in any form. Anaïs had originally written Hades for a tenor. And just by having it on its feet, you figure out, this works or this doesn’t work. And we realized that some cliches and archetypes were right on – like, Hades should definitely be that low bass. So that’s what actors can help figure out. The biggest thing that I’ve seen change over the past two years is that more has been added and spelled out for the audience. I think that’s a bit out of fear that people don’t know the myth.
 

Nabiyah: During the workshop in October, there were two polar opposite ideas of what Eurydice was in both Anaïs and Rachel’s heads. Either she was the wide-eyed, child-like soul not too experienced with pragmatic things in life, or she was hardened. And I feel like I was very much dwelling and swimming in the wide-eyed Eurydice in the workshop, and that was working for me. But then for this production I really had to dig into the other side of it.
 

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Alicia: Do you see yourself as more of an Orpheus, or more of an Eurydice?
 

Jessie: It’s all in all of us. It all exists and sometimes Orpheus wins, sometimes Eurydice wins. Sometimes even Hades wins. What I love so much about Orpheus is that he can make something from nothing. I often feel that way as an artist. Maybe I don’t have a lot of skills in terms of making money [laughs], but I can make a lot of things just with my body. Then again, I also need to make sure that someone can give me money to put food on the table. So that’s a bit of Eurydice.
 

Lulu: If we all dig deep and think about it, there is a little bit of Orpheus in even the most practical people, and a little bit of Eurydice in the dreamers.
 

Esther: I love the line, “Orpheus has a way of seeing the world in the way that it could be.” Everyone needs a little bit of that hope.
 

Chris: There are so many moments like that in the life of an artist. You can’t see how anything you’re doing is going to do you any good, but you put all of your faith in your creativity and hope for the best. I mean, that is literally why we’re all sitting here. Because at one point we did it for the first time. And sometimes it works out, and sometimes it doesn’t, but we keep doing it.
 

Amber: When I was a kid, I actually thought art could change the world. And now that I’m 35, I don’t really believe that any more. However, I stay for the community. Having a community of artists is a radical thing and can change things. When I was a kid, I was very much an Orpheus and that’s why I went into theater in the first place. But I’ve gotten a little less Orpheus and a little more Eurydice.
 

Esther: Because you have to.
 

Damon: As you get older, you get smacked around enough that you do lose a little bit of the glow. You have to fight to get that back and remember why we do this and what’s so pure and potent about it. But it’s fair enough to move more towards Eurydice as you grow.
 

Jessie: That’s what brings you back to theater, though. Going through different periods, feeling jaded, having frustration and difficulty. But what I love about theater and the people in it is their child-like desire to always learn and be open to new people and opinions. When you work on a character that is so far from yourself, you have to meet them halfway and get inside their mind. That experience changes you, and you can let it go if you want, but the better artists carry it with them. I find that a lot of artists, even those in their 60s, 70s, 80s, still have a vital curiosity and willingness.
 

061916_Hadestown Cast_S&C_01
 

Alicia: Let’s talk about the politics of the show. The first thing out of everybody’s mouth at the talkback was, “Is this an allegory for our election?” The relevance of the message, especially because so much of it was written ten years ago, is astounding.
 

Esther: “Why We Build The Wall” was written in 2006. That’s amazing.
 

Amber: But those archetypes have always been around and they always will be. That’s why myths are so great for teaching lessons.
 

Chris: Exactly. It’s so thoroughly entertaining to see people surprised and offended by Donald Trump saying those things. Politicians have been saying this forever.
 

Nabiyah: It’s so funny to me because I was born and raised in Brazil, a place where corruption is a part of life. We have had Donald Trumps in our elections many, many, many times. It’s funny to see Americans react to someone who is gaining status through corruption and bigotry. It affirms the existence of this ongoing archetype that lives in any political system.
 

Esther: The concept of an “Us” and a “Them.”
 

Nabiyah: Yes.
 

Esther: So if Hadestown is America, what is our “Wall”? And who is the enemy?
 

Chris: The wall is money and the fact that we have all been conditioned to seek money above all else. The choice becomes, do you pursue financial security or do you pursue spiritual happiness? And can they coexist? I believe heaven in right in the middle, but that happens so rarely.
 

Jessie: The idea of a class system is also key to the concept of the wall.
 

Shaina: And fear. That’s the common denominator of humanity, that we’re all always scared. But it’s about how you channel that fear, and how leaders choose to manipulate that fear in order to unite people, either uniting them against an enemy or uniting them for good. Leaders throughout history, just like Trump, have gathered people based on fear. They say, “This is the enemy, and if this enemy is gone, your fear will go away. So we must build a wall against that enemy.”
 

061916_Hadestown Cast_S&C_02
 

Esther: At the end of the show, everyone says, “We’re going to tell this story again and again and again in hopes that it turns out differently.” Can you guys talk a little bit about retelling stories and, partially why this story now, and also what the point of retelling stories is in general. Is it because we hope they’re gonna turn out differently?
 

Chris: The point of telling a story again and again is because every time you tell it you’re at a different point in your life. And the people watching it are at a different point in their lives. And you learn something different from it every time you tell it. Every time we perform this on an acting level I learn something. So that repetition and that reintroducing it into the ether is – it might be the same story but it’s never told the same way twice.
 

Esther: Which is the magic of theater.
 

Jessie: Yes. Live theater is such an amazing space and I’m just at the very tip of the iceberg of discovering how amazing it is. People come back to see the show many many times and they learn something completely new. The four of us [The Fates and Hermes] watch the entire show every night – for one thing, we have to stay activated, so obviously I’m watching everyone and trying to figure things out afresh. But it’s not hard to do because if you just think thinking about – like I was hit by a bunch of new stuff today that I just never –that didn’t get me before. And that’s because every day, we go through a different day before we get to the theater. We have different conversations with each other, with other people, we have different experiences walking down the street in New York City. And that all comes into this story. And because it is so specific and yet so universal it’s – there’s constant turnover.
 

Damon: There’s a new audience every day.
 

Chris: The themes are why this story has lasted for thousands and thousands of years. There’s something primal. No matter how hard we try to evolve, we will never evolve out of this story.
 

Esther: And as you said, every person has a little bit of every character in them. And that’s why myths survive because every human being can identify with them.
 

Jessie: And I was taught growing up that we learn history so it won’t repeat itself. I don’t believe that is true because I’ve seen it repeat itself so many times, and it’s horrible – or great! And I think that’s another reason why retelling stories in different places, different times, even this show as written now with different people versus us a year from now is going to be completely different. And I think that’s because, yeah, to check back in, now that you’ve been in that headspace, now that this election is coming, whatever it is, you will see everything differently. And you can watch film over and over again and have a similar experience, but something about everyone coming to the table fresh every time is – that’s chemistry.
 

Esther: And people come to the theater to experience something, not to just see – if they already know what the ending is, they come to experience the story overall.
 

Nabiyah: I also think there’s something unique about retelling myths and tales, which is the aspect of dissecting archetypes. Because you can dissect an archetype as it is outside of yourself and in the external world, but you can also use it to dissect aspects of your psyche and learn so much about yourself, and therefore learn about other people and be more compassionate and be a little more understanding. So I think there’s something special about the classics.
 

Shaina: Specifically musicals, musicals that join sort of the canon of musicals that become a part of our international vocabulary and are done over and over again – and I believe Hadestown will join that canon – is that unlike films that get passed down over generations or paintings or other art forms, theater is constantly re-taken on. Like everyone does Fiddler in high school, there are these stories that generations of people grow up actually getting to embody and immerse in and it’s just this amazing shared dialogue of the generations that is unlike any other art form. Especially the musicals, what musicals do for community. That we gather to tell stories, the great ones again and again and again. Something that is simultaneously timeless and interacts differently in the ‘50s and the ‘70s and the ‘90s…2016, 2050…and will hold that mirror up to us again and again in different ways.
 

Damon: And that is the way in which art can change the world. I mean, this medium is epic; it is storytelling. Before the modern world, people gathered. And so, this kind of piece, that asks you to think about whose side you’re on, or where do you stand, what do you stand for. Do you want to fight for that, do you want to stand for that, do you wanna find that within yourself in this otherwise cold world? This hard world? It’s beautiful and magic, but it is hard, so it’s natural to wither sometimes. So to have children and young folks step into these themes and to have audiences, like waves, come in every day to take this really beautiful question into themselves. And hopefully they say, no, I am a light, I do want to stand for goodness, and can carry that into the world and can be that for their mini worlds, y’know? That’s how you do it. That’s how you change the world. You start on an individual level and ask people to find their humanity and then you find that humanity is a bit richer for it.
 

Esther: And one thing Stage & Candor is trying to do – it’s amazing going to this show and seeing such a diverse cast onstage, that’s incredible, and to see women in creative roles, directing and creating new musicals. But we also want to look around in the audience and see that reflected in the audience.
 

061916_Hadestown Cast_S&C_03
 

Jessie: There are theaters that have initiatives like “99 cent Sunday” and it’s like, even if you can’t, even if you’re a person who will camp out for something like that, those are often the most fun shows. Because those people really want to be there. Sometimes there are audiences – and I try not to be at war with them, but rather just send more and more energy out to get more back in hopefully – but people who just buy a ticket to be seen at a place. I hope that we will change something in their minds over the course of the show. But oftentimes, it’s like, yeah, you’re here and it’s a status symbol to have spent the money on this ticket, versus someone who is like, “I desperately want to see this!” And afterwards, those people say, “Thank you” after the performance and it’s genuine and real and I miss that a lot of the time. But of course, we have to get paid too so you find yourself at the higher-priced ticket venues.
 

Lulu: You can learn a ton from kids. My nephew, he wants to be an architect, and every time I visit he has me read the same book over and over again. And I always say, “Sure!” And every single time I read it, same words, same pictures, same everything, he tells me that he learned something different. And that fuels your imagination, that fuels your hunger, that just opens you up to endless possibilities. And going back to why storytelling is important, why doing what we do is important – it’s just to get a different perspective, to chip away at our walls and open up a little bit. And learn something new. And I think that’s so important, to open up to things. We did a student matinee a couple weeks ago, which was great and terrible and funny and weird. And they were with us in the end, they all gasped, they all went crazy. And I hope that they go see different performances; I hope that my nephew, hanging with me, hopefully will be able to check out more performances and be able to open up his world a little bit more – fuel his imagination. I believe in the power of moving the spirit and opening up your horizons and opening up that third eye.
 

Amber: It’s a human right to have a creative outlet. You have to have it.
 

Damon: And hopefully they’ll grow up to be police officers who don’t shoot people, y’know what I mean? There’s a sad element, there’s such a crazy element of this waking life, everyone on their own spiritual trajectory, but if you can just tip the scales a bit …
 

Jessie: I have to do a shout-out – because I’ve had people tell me to my face that they don’t see the need for the arts. And it’s just for all the stuff we’ve said here today – so vital. Because it’s not just about learning to sing and dance. That’s not what the arts mean; that’s not what an arts education means. It’s about looking at things differently.
 

Esther: It’s about learning compassion.
 

061916_Hadestown Cast_S&C_06
 

Chris: The only thing I wanted to say about theater, regardless of the show that is being performed, the mere act of theater is an act of revolution. We don’t have campfires any more, we don’t have anywhere to gather, so the theater is a place to gather and to witness something human and to witness something communally. It doesn’t matter what the show is because the act of doing it as a group affects the group in the same way every time. Now, the better the show, the better the effect on the group. But there’s a reason why – especially musicals, Shaina was commenting on musicals – there’s a reason the word “harmony” has become the most beautiful word in the world. Because if you watch enough people sing together in harmony, you will cry.
 

Shaina: I’m stealing this phrase from the Public Works program at The Public, but it’s, “When people are singing together, it’s a radical proposal of what humanity could be.” And are all the different factions and boroughs of New York and the world in harmony? No, of course not. But if they’re all singing onstage together, it’s saying, “It’s possible.” So take that out onto the street.
 

Chris: The most basic song ever written – lyrically, melodically – is “We Shall Overcome.” I mean, it’s a crappy song. But if you sing it with 10,000 people, it’s the greatest song in the world.
 

Nabiyah: I like to think that art itself, what is being created, is so much farther ahead than whoever is creating it, than us who are trying to figure it out. And whatever it is that we’re doing and expelling out with our bodies and voices and consciousness is much farther ahead. It’s like in music – music is so much more intertwined than the labels [think] – they’re trying to fit in all of these types of music. It’s already there, and we’re here trying to hold it back and categorize it.
 

Shaina: And it’s unkillable. There’s this quote that “theater artists don’t leave artifacts for the museums.” We put something out there and it happens and you can’t kill it or change it.
 

 

 

 

With Hadestown, celebrated singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell and inventive two-time Obie award-winning director Rachel Chavkin transform Mitchell’s “phenomenal concept album” (Rolling Stone) into a bold new work for the stage. This folk opera follows Orpheus’ mythical quest to overcome Hades and regain the favor of his one true love, Eurydice. Together we travel from wide open plains where love and music are not enough nourishment to survive the winter, down to Hadestown, an industrialized world of mindless labor and full stomachs. Inspired by traditions of classic American folk music and vintage New Orleans jazz, Mitchell’s beguiling melodies and poetic imagination pit nature against industry, faith against doubt, and love against death.

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A Conversation with Jaime Lozano & Lauren Epsenhart

Jaime Lozano & Lauren Epsenhart

 

Lauren Epsenhart and Jaime Lozano are hard at work. It’s almost opening night and there are decisions to make: what costume to choose; which lighting gel looks just right; where to seat their friends and family for the best view. But this dynamic team isn’t sweating any of it: having worked together since their time in graduate school at NYU, the two share a closeness and common vocabulary that is clear from the moment you meet them. Though these two artists were raised worlds apart, they’ve since learned to harmonize beautifully.
 

Their show Children of Salt, which has been in development for nearly ten years, is headed for its world premiere at NYMF. We sat down with them to discuss the state of diversity and empathy in the American theater, the wide-reaching Latinx influences in the show, and their longtime collaboration.

 

 

Esther Cohen: The two of you met at NYU’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program.
 

Lauren Epsenhart: Yes, about nine years ago.
 

EC: How did you decide to work together and collaborate; when did it start clicking?
 

Jaime Lozano: They actually put us together.
 

LE: NYU has a process: It’s a two year program, and so the first year, you collaborate – so all the words people collaborate with all the composers, so you get to kind of feel each other out. At the end of that first year, you compile a list of people that you’re interested in working with. They do their best to match you with your top picks and people on your list, so they paired us!
 

JL: Yup! It was so random, but so right.
 

EC: So it was an immediate click for you guys?
 

LE: Yeah, pretty much.
 

JL: We wrote a couple of songs together during the first year, and I think we have a great collaboration and that’s why we were in each other’s lists in some way. I don’t know where I was on the list –
 

LE: I’ll never tell.
 

EC: Obviously it was up there!
 

JL: [laughs] So all the second year, we worked on this project. During the summer, we were trying to figure out about what we should write –
 

LE: Yeah, school isn’t really over in the summer in that program because that’s the time you’re paired up, at the end of the year, and then you’re exploring material. What we had to do was, we had to present an original option, then an adapted option at the beginning of the year to the faculty. So we started an original piece, which we actually are continuing to work on, and then we – we didn’t explore Children of Salt first, I thought about that today. We wanted to write Like Water for Chocolate, and the rights weren’t available, which I suppose worked in our favor.
 

JL: I’m sure someone is working on it right now and bringing it to Broadway.
 

EC: Well, darn it.
 

LE: Darn it, what do we do!?
 

Jaime Lozano & Lauren Epsenhart
 

EC: So let’s talk about why you did decide to adapt Los Niños De Sal.
 

LE: Jaime had seen the stage production in Mexico.
 

JL: Yeah, I did. I saw the stage production in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2001, I think. So eight years before we actually talked about adapting this piece. I told Lauren that I’ve seen this piece in Mexico that I liked, that is very poetic, that it could be good material to adapt into a musical. I sent her the script –
 

LE: It’s funny, you had actually printed the script.
 

JL: Right.
 

LE: So I remember reading through it – I don’t think I ever shared this with you, Jaime – I finished reading it, and I’m scared out of my mind, even trying to think about tackling it, because the stage show is so existential in a way, and it is very poetic, so I had to ground that into a solid musical piece –
 

EC: – without it losing that touch?
 

LE: Right. So I was quite intimidated by it.
 

JL: It was a big challenge. Now we keep the story –
 

LE: – and the theme –
 

JL: Right, but no: it’s a very different show. We made it our own, and we added a lot of different scenes that weren’t in the original play. We even changed a character. I think we brought a lot of ourselves into the piece in so many ways. It’s changed a lot from during that time at NYU to now eight years later.
 

LE: Yeah, a lot has happened and a lot has changed in that time.
 

JL: When Lauren said go for it, we contacted the writer and we asked him for the rights, and from there we have been working during the last eight years.
 

LE: We’re not always in the same state. He went back to Mexico for a period of time then came back to New York, then I left New York, so we’ve been doing a lot of it through email, and messaging.
 

EC: I can’t imagine how hard that must be.
 

JL: I think we dealt with a lot of it during those two years [at NYU], and knew each other very well, good and bad. We collaborated a lot. So we learned a lot from each other and helped us to keep working.
 

LE: You learn your vocabulary. And there were periods of time where nothing was happening.
 

JL: Yeah, like even for a year.
 

LE: Yeah, a year would go by, and we wouldn’t work on it, because he was in other projects and I was working, so it just all depends on where life is taking you in that moment. But that’s probably why the time doubled for us to get this on its feet – because we were together.
 

JL: But that helped the show as well.
 

LE: Definitely. I think something really clicked this past year, at least for me, in editing it, cause I finally got to that point where… it’s a Mexican piece, and I’m a Jewish white girl.
 

JL: Really?! I thought you were Mexican!
 

LE: [Laughs] But really, there’s so much richness in Mexican culture that I’ve not been privy to in the past because I didn’t grow up around it. I finally got to the point where in making those edits and in working on the book and lyrics, realized I do have to make it my own in some way.
 

JL: But at the same time, I always say that when something is very specific, that’s what makes it universal, you know? So the fact that it’s set in Mexico and they’re suppose to be a Mexican story is actually what makes it universal because of that specificity.
 

Jaime Lozano & Lauren Epsenhart
 

EC: Theater operates on the idea of empathy. When you see or listen to a piece of music or theater, you can relate to people that are different from you. But on the other hand, Jaime, you may have a better idea of adapting a Mexican piece of art because of your background. Lauren, theater is about playing pretend, but you also have to respect and relate as a Jewish white woman, while not knowing everything about that experience. So can you talk a little bit about how you both approached it?
 

LE: Well thankfully, Jaime is in my skin now. He’s kept me in check. There are a lot of things that have come up in writing the piece that I didn’t necessarily understand. For example, there’s something that happened recently. You weren’t there for it, Jaime, but we were talking about costume design. They showed me the costumes for one of our characters, Ángel, and I thought oh wow, it’s a little over the top there. Then I was speaking with our director, José Zayas, and our lead actor Mauricio Martinez, who said, “No, that’s common!” I didn’t know that. There are things that I just don’t know. Other people in the cast that are Latino or Mexican are able to say hold up, white girl, that’s not what it is.
 

JL: We’re very glad that we have a good mix of people in this production. We have a guy from Venezuela, another from Spain, an American with Mexican parents, Puerto Rican, a girl from LA, two Mexicans. Our choreographer is from Hamilton, Stephanie Klemons. We have people from all different cultures, and that helped the show a lot.
 

LE: Definitely. And they’re very proactive in suggesting ideas, and it helps, and makes it a bit more authentic.
 

EC: It’s funny that you say that you’re the only white person in the room, because in most rehearsal rooms, in the United States and across the world, it is very rare for it not just be white people. So it’s actually a very unique experience.
 

LE: You’re right. My past experiences have been like that.
 

EC: Theater is usually overwhelmingly white, and overwhelmingly male, especially on the creative side. In theater right now, diversity is growing, but a big issue is that non-black people of color are still extremely underrepresented. Hamilton is definitely helping, but how would you like to see that change, or how do you think that is changing?
 

JL: We’re lucky to be living in this era of the musical theater. There’s a lot of diversity on Broadway right now. We have Hamilton, we have On Your Feet!. Right now, two very close friends of mine are the stars of Chicago, and they’re Mexican. So I think it’s the right moment for this show to happen at NYMF. New York City is this big diverse city, people from all around, but for some reason, musical theater was about Jewish people, and gay people.
 

LE: Well, hey now.
 

EC: My boss always says that American Theater, for a very long time, was just the white upper middle class Jewish experience in the living room, and that’s all that it was. And then people started realizing oh wait! America is not all white Jewish people!
 

JL: What’s great is that, me as a Latino, I can identify myself with a lot of shows that have no Latinos. And white people should be able to see themselves in shows not about white people. That’s the great thing about theater and art. You can reflect yourself and whatever kind of show.
 

LE: Right, and that’s the point. And I suppose my experience is a bit colored, but this is my only true musical experience. In terms of being a part of something like this, I don’t have any other experience. It feels different for me – not in a bad way, but this is all I’m used to. How I’m perceiving things right now is different because all I see is Latin things on Broadway, because my head is so in it right now. I know it’s not a lot, but to your point, there’s a lot going on right now.
 

EC: This year is definitely a jumping off point for the Broadway community. This year was the first time in a long time it was possible for all black people to sweep the musical acting categories.
 

LE: I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a moment. I agree with you, but did you follow what happened at the Oscars this year, with all the people boycotting? I wonder if the Tonys had something to do with that, not to say that all the people who won didn’t deserve it. When I watched them, I had that moment of, good or bad, but this person is extremely talented but why are they really winning?
 

EC: Three of them were from one show. So part of it was obviously that Hamilton was going to sweep. I think without Hamilton, having four actors from four different shows that are people of color winning those trophies would’ve been much less likely.
 

JL: We’re not there yet.
 

LE: Absolutely not.
 

Jaime Lozano & Lauren Epsenhart
 

EC: Jaime, you work with – I’m going to butcher the name of this, I’m so sorry – R.Evolucion Latina. Did I just totally ruin that?
 

JL: No! No you didn’t. And before [NYU], I didn’t speak English.
 

EC: Wow.
 

LE: That was the first thing that came out of your mouth when you got here. I remember that. You introduced yourself and said “I don’t speak English” and then you sat down. I still remember that. That’s brave. That’s strong.
 

EC: I have so much respect for anyone who has to learn English in the twenties and thirties.
 

JL: At the end of everyday, I get a headache, because I was trying to understand what they were saying in class, and I didn’t get it. After class, I’d have to talk with friends.
 

LE: Really? During the first year?
 

JL: Yeah, and every week or two, the faculty would go over all the information with me.
 

EC: That’s really amazing.
 

LE: You never gave that away. You were always confident.
 

JL: I tried to fake it.
 

EC: You faked it till you made it!
 

JL: Yeah!
 

EC: Back to R.Evolucion Latina, can you talk about why arts activism is so important to you?
 

JL: R.Evolucion Latina is a non-profit organization, founded and led by Luis Salgado, who was the In the Heights Latin choreographer, and now he’s in On Your Feet! We they do, what they say, is that they do “art with a purpose”, to touch people, to move people. Luis Salgado is bringing musical theater to every suburb, for example they do this summer camp with hundreds of kids. During the fall, they do a free workshop with New York City actors and dancers. They bring kids to the theater. They’re just trying to bring arts to the Latino community. I work with them as a teacher. I went to different schools to teach musical theater or theater or music –
 

LE: A teaching artist.
 

JL: Right. A teaching artist. I worked on a couple of projects. We did something with a lot of Broadway artists – Corbin Bleu, Janet Dacal, so on, all the In the Height people – recorded an album and I was the music arranger on that. It’s called “Dare to Go Beyond”. Things like that. What is it called, a catchphrase? “Dare to Go Beyond” is actually their –
 

LE: Oh, motto.
 

JL: Motto. “Dare to Go Beyond” is their motto. It invites people to know that they can do anything they want to do. Just be brave, and go for it. Some of their projects are very private, some are very big, like this album.
 

Jaime Lozano & Lauren Epsenhart
 

EC: That’s really cool.
 

JL: I’m really glad I crossed paths with them. It started out when I was very alone in New York City. So this took me into a Latino community in New York City. Because of that, I met a lot of people that now have collaborated with us in the show. That’s what’s really great about New York City and musical theater in New York City – we’re really a community.
 

EC: Everyone knows everyone.
 

JL: Exactly. And especially in the Latino community. So it’s been really helpful as a Mexican to have this community.
 

LE: Hm, I just learned a few things.
 

JL: Another thing I want to bring up is that we have a lot of women on our team. Of course Lauren, our choreographer, our music director–
 

LE: Your wife.
 

JL: Right of course. Anyway, we have three very important women in our creative team.
 

LE: It’s interesting because – you’d mentioned earlier, being a women – it’s interesting being a woman in this particular instance amongst all of that, and not being Latino. I’m not saying this to be like… and I’m not saying it’s bad, I mean Jaime, I don’t think you’d even think twice about it, but there are times when I’m not completely comfortable and at times I feel like wow I really don’t fit in here. I definitely have those moments.
 

JL: Is it because one person speaks Spanish and then all of a sudden everyone’s speaking Spanish?
 

LE: No, no, you guys are very good about that with me. No. It’s not that. It’s just sometimes I don’t – I’m not a part of your culture necessarily.
 

EC: You’re not sure where you fit.
 

LE: I think that’s very true, in a certain way.
 

JL: I mean that’s how I felt at NYU.
 

LE: But you’ve moved on in a way that I haven’t.
 

EC: But I think it’s an important experience, I think – especially – as white people, to be in spaces where you think you don’t fit. Because you fit in most spaces.
 

LE: I’ve felt that way my entire life. That depends on perspective and experience also, though. Not every white person has the same experience. But it’s there.
 

 

 

 

Born in Monterrey, Mexico. Jamie Lozano is an accomplished musician, vocal coach, composer, arranger, orchestrator, musical producer and musical director. Jaime’s musical theatre works include Tlatelolco (composer, lyricist, librettist), Myths (composer), The Yehuatl (composer, lyricist), Lightning Strikes Twice (composer) Off-Broadway, The Yellow Brick Road (composer, lyricist) Off-Broadway and National Tour, Carmen La Cubana (additional orchestrations) Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, France, Children of Salt (composer) New York Musical Festival 2016. Albums: Tlatelolco (producer, composer, lyricist), Carols for a Cure 2010 (arranger, orchestrator), R.Evolución Latina’s Dare to Go Beyond (arranger, orchestrator, music director), Florencia Cuenca’s Aquí – Los Nuevos Standards (producer, arranger, music director), Doreen Montalvo’s Alma Americana, Corazón Latino (producer, arranger, music director). As a director: The Last Five Years, Into the Woods, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Fantasticks, Jekyll & Hyde, Songs for a New World, Joseph and the Amazing Dreamcoat Technicolor, some of them Spanish World Premiere or Mexican Premiere; as well as his very own works Tlatelolco and Myths. He is a teacher and activist for the New York City based not-for-profit organization R.Evolución Latina. BFA: Music & Composition, Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León; MFA: NYU/Tisch, Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. Proud member of the Dramatists Guild of America and BMI. “A mi hermosa familia, Florencia (Mi Henrucha hermosa), mi inspiración. Alonzo, bienvenido a este mundo, y mi princesa Ely Aimé. Los amo todo, siempre”.
 

Lauren graduated from the SUNY Plattsburgh, where she received a BFA in Writing. Lauren earned a MFA in Musical Theatre Writing from NYU. Lauren began a M.S.e.D. at CUNY Hunter and finished her studies at Indian River State College. Recent projects include Children of Salt and Pushing Daisy. Past productions have been featured at Lincoln Center, Julliard, NYU, The Secret Theatre, Goodspeed Opera House, Triad Theatre, Queens Botanical and The Theatre for the New City.

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A Conversation with Aya Aziz

Aya Aziz

 

Look up any positive adjective in the dictionary and Aya Aziz should be cited as an example: bright, magnetic, gregarious, compassionate, insightful – the list goes on. In short, we’re utterly obsessed with her. Read on to see why you will be too.

 

 

Esther Cohen: Let’s start by learning a little bit about you.
 

Aya Aziz: I grew up in New York City in many different social spaces. I had a grandmother who was an actress, and my mother was a dancer and a mad scientist type, so I had an interesting childhood where I jumped between all of these different social spaces, classes, cultures and perspectives. I was a very loud, dancing child, and I’ve used that in this piece about identity and growing up. How do you become one thing from so many different things? What is the process of differentiating between different identities or honing in on one particular vernacular or perspective or culture? The question of who we are is very prevalent and interesting to me and I’m still trying to figure it out.
 

ES: Can you tell us a bit about what the piece is, and also how you came to create it? How did you make the transition from doing more traditional theater to writing specifically your own story? What challenges did you discover as you made that transition to being a solo artist and a playwright?
 

AA: I would say that this is – I don’t know if this is a real term – but a friend once said, “I write autobiographical fiction.” That feels like what I’m doing. I’m taking autobiographical elements and things that have happened, but weaving them into an arc that isn’t as consecutive. I take liberty with how I portray different people in my life, and also to protect my family so I don’t embarrass anyone. So there are many, many fictional elements within how this story is organized and how it came together.
 

Stage & Candor_Aya Aziz_03
 

The piece is about a young woman who travels to Philadelphia to see her Muslim Egyptian family. She’s not estranged from them, but she’s certainly distanced. She lives her life separately as an artist New York City and, ultimately, leads a pretty privileged life. She has a relaxed life where she can think about the world and take liberties with how she spends her time. So she spends a few nights with her family in Philadelphia and she’s pushed to confront what it means to have distanced herself from their reality. It’s a reality that she’s never lived. She’s documented and has a white American mom, so she has that privilege that her cousins do not; she’s taking liberty with her time and taking time off college; she lives as a performance artist while her family is very conservative and traditional. There’s a culture clash: in one scene, she comes out as Princess Jasmine in this performance piece that she’s devised against orientalism, and her family doesn’t know what orientalism is. She comes to her art with certain privileges because she hasn’t actually lived the experiences that she writes about. That concept encouraged me and guided me towards this piece. How did I experience so many different spaces that I never had to experience the consequences of?
 

Michelle Tse: Can you elaborate on those different spaces?
 

AA: I spent a lot of time in public housing. I lived across the street from the Elliott Houses in Chelsea and I spent a lot of time there just by virtue of my mom being busy and my dad being away. And yet, ultimately, I had vastly different experiences than the kids that I grew up with and who were my friends. The projects have a unique atmosphere and I got to leave that. Even though I was across the street, I was a world away. Similarly, I could visit my Muslim family but never feel surveilled, never have ICE pressure me for documentation, never have green cards denied, never having to leave the country, which they ultimately had to do.
 

MT: It baffles me when someone like you can accept your privileges, but a lot of white people can’t.
 

AA: I have so much privilege because I can get close to these parts of my identity but never experience the consequences of them. I can pretend to be them. I get to pick and choose. The play takes that lens and explores that privilege in her meeting with her family, reflecting on her childhood and moments of closeness she felt, and how that sits behind the present day distance she has from the traumas that happened between childhood and now.
 

MT: When did the piece take shape?
 

AA: The play came out of my time living in Lebanon. I was given a chance to play my songs at a cabaret theater. I didn’t have enough songs to fill an hour and fifteen minutes, but I love performing and telling stories, so I thought, “Oh, I’ll do short vignettes between each.” People really responded to it and I realized that all my music had this kind of common thread of identity because it was something I’d been working out internally. The play came out of that. I’d never produced anything myself before.
 

EC: So I’m sure it’s been an adventure.
 

AA: NYMF is a whirlwind! And it’s so shiny! And I wonder the entire time, “Who let me in here?!”
 

EC: Let’s talk about the challenges of doing a solo show. Is it hard to be critical of yourself, or to be a collaborator but still stay true to your work?
 

AA: Oh my god, I’ve faced all of it. It’s been a kind of continuous meta crisis. The work kind of came out of me whether I wanted it to or not. And last year, I turned 21 and I wanted to commemorate my adulthood by having done something. So I just sent these vignettes to Fringe and Planet Connections and they said, “Yeah, great.” And I was like, “What? No! No!”
 

EC: “I was kidding!”
 

AA: So I had to make an actual piece! There was a lot of cognitive dissonance in the process, because the people I’m writing about are inspired by real people in my life, right? So even if I change names, I’m still in a position where I can really embarrass people. I didn’t appreciate that until the opening of my first show at Planet Connections. Almost nobody was there, but my mother was. And in my former show, I talked much more about New York City than I did about my Muslim family. The show was about growing up in Chelsea and this triangle of different classes and that ever-gentrifying, changing space.
 

Stage & Candor_Aya Aziz_01
 

MT: How did Mom react?
 

AA: My mom told me she was really hurt by it. I was talking about growing up in this crazy tenement that was so unattractive and so shabby that it was featured as a heroin den in a Nicholas Cage movie. I mean, we didn’t have a bathroom in the apartment, it was in the hallway. And the whole time growing up there – I spent 16 years there – I wanted to leave. I was embarrassed about it, but upon reflection, I realized it was this great show material, because of all the crazy stuff that would happen in that tenement. Oh, the characters I wish I had space to fit into my show! 
Back then, I didn’t realize that the work carries its own narrative. Even if the place I was writing it from was loving, just by sharing it I could embarrass people. I don’t want to reflect negatively on, or hurt, anyone in my life. I’m in a position where I can do a lot of damage to people. So that’s been difficult, because that is truly my nightmare and I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I hurt someone.
 

EC: But of course you also still want to be honest.
 

AA: Yes. So I’m wrestling with how to be honest while also being careful. And of course I have to confront again that is such a position of privilege! How many people get to be in a space where they can reflect to mass audiences on other people’s lives that they have not lived, whose traumas they have not experienced? So I was writing about that and I was acting out that privilege – and it was a little overwhelming, honestly. But it’s also pushed me to grow up. Because ultimately, I can’t walk away from the piece. And that’s what Fringe and Planet Connections represented. I have to keep moving forward. I’ve since had many talks with my parents about it.
 

MT: Did you edit down or take things out because of those conversations?
 

AA: Well, another reality for me is that Egypt is not the nicest of places right now. My family is there and my father is not liked by that government. So it’s very real. I had a theme I loved in one of my earlier pieces where I rapped the Quran, because that was how I’d learned it as a kid! I loved learning the Quran and I wanted to be a part of that world, but I was also bringing my New York with me. And no, of course, I couldn’t keep that in.
I’ve lived so sheltered from that aggression and violence that I haven’t had to think about how parts of me that I love will be used as weapons against other people and myself. That reality has been difficult to wrestle with as I shape and go forward with this work.
 

EC: There are still huge gaps in diversity in theater. One of the big ones is that people of color, and especially non-black people of color, are still extremely underrepresented both on and off stage. What do you see as non-black people of color’s role in the American theater right now, and how would you like to see that change?
 

AA: Wow. I think you’re right, and that is such a good and such a frustrating point, the lack of availability of theater to non-white communities. And I think so many people are making their own theater because of it. There are so many people making incredible art in this city who are just not seen. They get to La Mama and then it’s the end, because, until recently, those stories weren’t wanted. Culturally, we’re now seeing a change by virtue of the immensity of globalization and multiculturalism. We’re seeing a change in the forced or protected singularity of the American narrative, and what it means to be American.
 

EC: American theater used to be only about the white, upper middle class Jewish experience in a living room. But now, people are realizing that white Jews in a living room is not all of America. It’s not even most of it.
 

AA: And it’s wonderful that Hamilton has done what it has done. But I want to see more shows like Hamilton that are accessible to people who can’t afford that ticket price. There’s certainly been a change in the pressure that the public is putting on big outlets to diversify their ensembles. We need to see more lives and more faces and bodies that are traditionally not marketed, intentionally not marketed. Those populations have been making work forever, so we should just keep making what we’re making and putting pressure on those outlets to attend to our art. The quality of the work I’ve seen out there is unbelievable and yet it never sees an audience more than 30. And that’s a real issue, especially in this city.
 

EC: And there’s definitely a balance to strike between only talking about niche identities and just using theater as a means of pure storytelling, which is something I think your show really does. Theater should be about the ability of any person to tell any story.
 

MT: And yet, some people can suspend their disbelief enough to believe a talking crab, but not to believe that a black woman could be, say, a 19th century explorer, like in Men On Boats.
 

AA: Arpita [Mukherjee, producer] would sometimes joke, when we’d go to festival meetings, that “when it comes to you and your presentation, folks are just not going to get it or believe it.” It never happened, but we always made that joke because in theater, people are reticent to suspend their disbelief when confronted with body types and faces and people they don’t want to see. And let me tell you, my whole show is premised on suspending disbelief. I have to completely get rid of disbelief.
 

Stage & Candor_Aya Aziz_02
 

EC: Let’s talk about Girl Be Heard. Girls, especially young and minority girls, are told to be small and quiet. Girl Be Heard completely throws that out the door and says, “Be big! Be loud! Tell your story!” Tell us about how you, as one of their teachers, encourage girls to tell their stories.
 

AA: I’ve been with Girl Be Heard since 2011. It started as this little collective of radical women and teenagers in a synagogue somewhere in Dumbo and now it’s an NGO and is co-sponsored by the UN! The organization works with young women globally and essentially says, “Whatever you are feeling, talk about it.” Because from those narratives, we can reflect on how the experiences of girls intersect with larger political platforms and problems in the world. The work is inherently political. Asking a young woman to speak out about her story is both a political and personal act. 
I work a lot with middle schoolers. They’re at this beautiful age that’s also somewhat tragic to me. The change that happens between eleven and fourteen with puberty and the pressures put on their bodies and the pressure to express femininity can be painful to watch. They’re at this age where they’re becoming something, and what they’re becoming is not necessarily what they want to be or how they really feel.
 

MT: So is it sort of like a seminar, or a writing class?
 

AA: When the girls enter the room I have them free write immediately. I say, “Write anything that you need to get off your chest! Give me something that you feel is really important that people should know! Either about you, or about the world – something that people aren’t thinking about that they should be!” It’s incredible what comes out of that writing. Kids have so much curiosity, but in women that curiosity is sculpted down into something that is acceptable and packaged. So I made sure that whatever we did in that classroom, whether it was talking about gun violence or talking about domestic violence or the question of “what is a woman?” came out of the questions that they wrote down. You give girls a pen and an incentive – they have so much of it – and they fly. 
I’ve seen that a lot of storytelling comes out of having the space and freedom to let yourself inspire yourself. As women, there are so many voices in our head telling us what we cannot do. I had one student who would constantly say, “I’m too stupid, I’m not good enough, no I can’t” about everything. But after many, many group hugs and read-alouds and chanting her name, she got onstage and went crazy with this incredible dance! When she got offstage, she immediately said, “I messed up.” So I said, “Yeah, but you did it.” And she said, “Yeah! I did!” Learning to turn off those voices is an essential lesson for women.
 

EC: I think that’s part of the reason we see so many women, and especially young women, embrace theater. Because theater is an empowering, but not too personal, way to express ideas and face doubts.
 

AA: Pretend and play have been powerful tools in the classroom. Even when we’re playing other women, at least we’re in control of those women. By being outside of your body and your head, you actually are more in control.
 

EC: What are the best and worst pieces of advice you’ve received? And if you were to give advice to a young, female theater artist, what would that advice be?
 

AA: Something my mom has told me throughout this entire process is, “Just let the work take you.” Once you’re not thinking about whether you’ll make it and who will like you, you’ll realize that if you’re doing what you love, you will be good at it. If you do what you love, what you love will carry you to where you need to go. Being unafraid to keep going and keep doing what you love is such a simple piece of advice, but it’s been incredibly helpful.
 

EC: That is such a Mom piece of advice. Only moms have that kind of wisdom.
 

AA: Yes! Thank god for moms! And to anyone who wants to do what I’m doing, I’d tell them not to second guess themselves. When festivals accepted my work last year, it scared the bajeesus out of me! But if you have the opportunity, you have to take it. Take every opportunity. 
On the other hand, festivals can be stressful and it can be difficult to know when to take time for yourself and say, “Actually, I can’t do that right now.” That knowledge is especially important for women because we’re conditioned to say yes to everything or give a highly apologetic no. Creative energy takes a toll on a person, and while being on a deadline can be a good way to be productive, it’s also a fast way to become exasperated with yourself. So to love yourself throughout that process and take time when you need it is really important.  
Love yourself, that’s my piece of advice. Just love yourself!
 

 

 

 

Aya Aziz is a performance artist and songwriter based between New York and Beirut, Lebanon. She is a graduate of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics and a longtime member of and current teaching artist for the feminist theater ensemble Girl Be Heard. Sitting Regal by the Window is her first full production and has been featured in the Fringe and Planet Connections Theater Festival in New York as well as at the Metro Al-Madina cabaret theater in Beirut, Lebanon where the show was first produced. When Aya isn’t preparing for a show, studying, or guiding middle-schoolers in the writing and performing of their stories she is probably playing her music at a local restaurant or coffee shop in the city. You can follow her work on SoundCloud and Facebook.

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A Conversation with Mia Walker

Mia Walker

 

Mia Walker greets us with a hug and we immediately feel like she’s been our friend for years. Maybe that’s what it’s like to be in the rehearsal room with her. It figures: Mia is responsible for some of the most galvanizing, vulnerable theater in New York right now. She is the assistant director of Waitress, the emotional and optimistic musical about a working-class woman surviving and thriving through an abusive relationship and illicit affair. Then there’s Normativity, the project she’s helming off-off-Broadway at NYMF. Penned by twenty-year old Jaime Jarrett, starring a cast as diverse in gender expression as anything we’ve seen onstage, the new musical is the buzziest show of the festival this year. So it’s natural that we feel right at home with Mia – she’s in the business of empathy.

 

 

Helen Schultz: Looking at the projects you’ve done – you’ve done American Sexy at The Flea; Normativity, which is about gender identity; and Waitress, which brought domestic violence to a stage that it hadn’t necessarily been on before. How do you come to pick projects?
 

Mia Walker: I wanted to do a show that told a love story between two women. To me, that hadn’t been represented. People don’t empathize with that, and that’s how homophobia perpetuates itself as well because we’re not identifying characters that are women falling in love. There are shows about lesbian love, but I wanted to see something that felt very real and honest for a younger generation. With Normativity, I don’t think I totally understood how bold it was or how needed it was in the theater community until I got involved. It wasn’t until auditions, when I was getting Facebook messages and emails from people coming in to auditions for us. Multiple people wrote me and said, “I don’t care if I don’t get cast in this show – thank you for letting me audition,” because our casting notice said, “all gender identities welcome.” Our casting director, Rebecca Feldman, works at The Public and is an amazing advocate for queer trans performers being welcomed and embraced in the community. People were saying how liberating and empowering it was to go into an audition where they could just be themselves, where they didn’t have to hide their gender identity, where they didn’t have to find a song that didn’t sit well in their voice because that’s not how they identify in terms of their gender, that’s when I started really realizing how necessary this piece was. It became a movement.
 

HS: How did that translate to the rehearsal process?
 

MW: When I first started it with Jaime [Jarrett], I was just really excited to be doing a musical, and I thought it was dealing with something that was bold and marginalized. And I was excited about that. But as we were getting more and more people involved, I realized that it was truly a movement. Normally, in theater, your first production meeting you talk about set design and you figure out when designer runs will be, you talk about budget – it’s a pretty straight-forward model for a production meeting. But our production meeting was different because I started telling our whole team about all these emails and messages I was getting. As I was telling our crew how important this piece really was, I started expressing how much of a movement it is, and how I’ve become part of that movement just by virtue of caring about Jaime and wanting to represent [the LGBT community] in the world and I saw their eyes light up, and I thought, “everyone on our team just became part of that movement.”
 

HS: Can you talk a bit about the phenomenon of “Bury Your Gays?” It looms very large in Normativity.
 

MW: What’s interesting about Normativity, the whole premise, is that there’s this phenomenon called “Bury Your Gays.” It’s a tendency in arts and culture and media where gay characters are killed off. It’s crazy – if you do the research, you’ll see. The percentage of gay characters that die, commit suicide, get hit by a stray bullet, it’s like society is subconsciously telling us that being gay is a sin. That is ever-present in the media, and Jaime has been reacting to that and trying to fight that. The quest of Normativity is to rewrite the queer narrative. The idea is that we want positive representation in the LGBTQ community, and everyone deserves a happy ending. There’s a song where one of the characters, Taylor, sings “I’m sick of reading stories about girls who don’t make it past age nineteen” because there’s this phenomenon of queer characters committing suicide.
 

HS: And in the wake of Orlando, that movement feels even more urgent.
 

MW: It was a very somber reminder that tragedy is still happening in this world to the queer community, and our show is not trying to erase that or deny that. I met with Jaime after Orlando, and we were both very shell-shocked and in a weird place and we sort of went through the show and we sort of worked on ways to recognize that it doesn’t erase the fact that tragedy still happens in the queer community, and that’s been a really important part of the piece. Something that’s so exciting about working on a new musical that actually deals with timely issues is that it’s being affected by the moment. It’s not like we’re working on a show that was written fifty years ago and isn’t being impacted by current events; we’re actually working on something that’s living and breathing right now. Jaime’s making changes every day based on what’s happening in the world. That’s been what’s been really eye-opening about this experience – how much our daily lives play into it.
 

HS: Could you talk about Jaime, and how you connect with them for this show?
 

MW: Rachel Sussman is the programmer at NYMF. I had an informal meeting with her, like “Hi! I’m a female director. Hi! You’re a female producer. Let’s meet.” She said to me, “If you could direct anything right now, what would it be?” and I said, “I’ve been trying to find a piece that has to do with a lesbian love story. She said, “I think I may have something for you,” and sent me the materials for Normativity. I met with Jaime and that meeting was pretty amazing because it was pretty clear that we were having some sort of soul connection. Jaime is a student at UArts in Philly. Jaime is twenty years old. Jaime wrote the book, the music, and the lyrics, which is an incredible feat for anyone, let alone a student. And the music is beautiful. When I met with Jaime, I really got this sense that Jaime was very open to making changes and delving through and working with this piece. I got the sense that there was potential, and a spark, and an amazing story that needed to be told; and I could tell immediately that Jaime’s voice as a composer was deeply needed in the musical theater community, but I was also reassured by the fact that Jaime was totally game to delve into an intense rewrite process. And that’s what we did – we cleaned for months. Jaime was churning out draft after draft, creating new characters. We actually went to an open call that NYMF had for casting, and we met one of our actors there, Soph Menas, and Soph inspired a whole new character – Jaime wrote a whole new song to do with the experience of being trans. And that was really inspired by Soph, who identifies as a trans man. I really felt deeply connected to Jaime, and excited to go on this ride with them.
 

HS: And this play is so personal to Jamie’s own experience as a gender-queer person.
 

MW: When I first met Jaime, it was like a whole new world opened up to me. … Jaime explained to me the use of ‘they’ as a pronoun. It’s amazing because now that’s so second-nature to me, because there are multiple people in the show who identify as gender-queer and so pronouns are a very sensitive issue in our rehearsal room, and we all take great care to respect people’s gender pronoun preferences. But I just think back to that meeting in October, November when that kind of blew my mind. And now it’s second-nature.
 

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HS: I wanted to ask you about the design of Normativity, in as much as the set echoes what’s going on in the characters’ minds and in their emotional lives. Could you talk about that process of putting together the design and the world of the show?
 

MW: So, we have an amazing set designer named Kristen Robinson, who studied at Yale. And her background actually is in installation art and painting. So she does a lot of set design for plays and musicals, but she also has that installation side of her. I went to see something she did recently – it was called The Heart of Darkness. And it was an immersive experience where you were thrown into the jungle. It was just incredible. But it also felt like modern art – it felt like I was at MoMa or something. I knew she was the right person to bring onto this because we had a few meetings with Kristen – it was me, Jaime, and Kristen – and we were talking about why Jaime wrote this show, where it came from in Jaime’s soul, why Jaime felt the need to write it. Kristen sort of took that away and came back with a list of locations that we needed to have: a high school, a writer’s office, and a bookstore. Then we had a meeting with her and she was like, “my instinct is rather than to have a very literal world, that we have a sort of surreal – this was her word – ‘poetic gesture.’ She wanted to have a poetic gesture so that we’re in a space that’s already surreal. I think the design element is very important because with NYMF, it’s a festival show, so there are certain restrictions. Their entire set needs to be taken down within twenty minutes and put up in half an hour. Every prop and every set piece has to be stored within a set amount of space. There’s a really incredible floor treatment that Kristen’s doing and it’s a very minimal set but it all comes together in this one poetic gesture. I’ve never been interested in literal theater and so, for me, the approach that the show takes is embracing the fact that we are in a theatrical space and we’re not in a cinematic world where we can just be in a school, a store, and an office.
 

HS: Choreography is a big part of that world too. And your brother is the choreographer!
 

MW: Adin just graduated from Princeton this year, so he’s right out of college. He’s an amazing choreographer. I’ve never had an experience with a choreographer before where it felt like we were really creating a vocabulary of the show together, and Adin – I don’t know if it’s because he’s my brother, or because he’s a genius – he’s illuminating the world of the show in a way that I don’t think anyone else would have. And I think that’s part of why Kristin and I wanted to keep the space sparse – now it’s really about bodies and space and the awkwardness of not feeling totally in your skin. Adin has been exploring how to create a stage vocabulary of that, and I actually think that people are going to see the show and go “who choreographed that?”
 

HS: Let’s talk about your time at Harvard. It’s interesting that you went from being a film major to working in theater.
 

MW: When I was nine, I was actually on Broadway. I lived in Washington, D.C. and my grandfather took me to a Broadway audition as a present. I wanted to be an actress – “I want to go to a real Broadway casting call!” Then I booked it.
 

HS: Can I ask what show it was?
 

MW: It was Annie Get Your Gun with Bernadette Peters.
 

HS: Oh, wow!
 

MW: Oh yeah. So I spent a year in New York doing that show when I was nine years old. I think that’s when the theater got in my blood after that. Like whenever I’m working on a show now, or on any of the shows I’ve worked on with Diane [Paulus], being in a Broadway theater to me feels like home. I thought I was going to be an actress, and that was my whole thing; after Annie Get Your Gun, I was auditioning for more shows, I went to LA for pilot season, but when I went to college, I started to feel frustrated when I was in shows. I don’t really want anyone else telling me what to do! I was lucky at Harvard that there wasn’t a theater major at the time because I was able to do whatever I wanted. I got space in the experimental black box, and I was allowed to do whatever I wanted as soon as the on-campus student groups gave us permission to do it. I was really able to explore and treat Harvard as my lab. I started out with directing a three-person play that was about college students, and then I did The History Boys, and Grease was my senior project.
 

HS: How did you connect with Diane?
 

MW: Diane actually generously came to see a tech rehearsal of Grease and that was sort of what connected us. I had been flinging myself into her office, asking for advice, like, “How do you work with a choreographer?” and in between meetings, she would for ten minutes bare her soul to me, and I was just taken by that: how generous she was to actually mentor me. It was incredible. She took me under her wing. So after I graduated, I started going from project to project with her. The access that she’s given me has been such a gift.
 

HS: What is it like to learn from a female director in a field that’s so hugely dominated by men?
 

MW: It’s funny because when people say to me, “theater is dominated by men,” I literally have not seen them. I’ve worked with so many women, because Diane surrounds herself with women – and not intentionally, by the way. It happens organically. I think she just has this incredible network of strong, amazing, talented women and she just happens to staff her shows with them. A lot of men, too. But I’ve gotten so used to working with women, and it’s been such a blessing. I guess in a way it’s how people say, “you grow up knowing what you know,” so for me the idea that women are not empowered or not represented in the theater… I’ve literally never seen that because I have had the blessing of just seeing women kick ass for the past six years. Diane is so strong, but she’s strong in a way that is non-gender. She’s just a person with the vision and the endurance to push people to their best. That’s what I’m most thankful for: the fact that I don’t see being female as any sort of hindrance. In fact, I see it as a benefit. I don’t want to make any gender-divided assumptions, especially after working on a show right now that’s bashing all expectations and assumptions about gender and sexuality that I’ve ever had. I do find that the women I work with are incredibly focused on detail and incredibly compassionate, vulnerable, and strong, and I feel very much at home working with other women. I hope that, as I continue to turn into my own director, that I’m also giving opportunities to women. Diane’s whole thing is that I’m a director. I’m not just a female director. I’m an artist. My gender is part of me, but doesn’t define me. I very much feel the same way too.
 

Stage & Candor_Mia Walker_01
 

HS: Something people talk about when they talk about women and directors is confidence and taking up space and being bold, things we really try to beat out of women from a very young age.
 

MW: I read this article about how women tend to use the word “just” more. They write emails with questions more. “Just checking in,” “just wanting to know.” There’s a tendency for women in rhetoric to excuse themselves or apologize. I do see that – I see that happens. Part of what’s great about working with Diane is that she doesn’t apologize for herself. She takes up space. Hugely confident. I think I, personally, have definitely struggled with confidence. I think part of being a child actress and getting rejected from auditions at the age of nine impacted me. Part of why I didn’t want to continue being a performer was I didn’t like that feeling of being rejected. My mom used to say, “you care a lot about what people think of you, and that’s what is going to be hard for you as a performer,” and that’s ultimately why I ended my career as an actor. It made me very anxious. I’ve found my confidence in directing. It’s funny – in real life, I’m very indecisive. It’s hard for me to pick out clothes; it’s very hard for me to make general life decisions. But in a rehearsal room, I’m decisive, I’m in my element, I’m working from my gut. I would like to try to apply that to the rest of my life.
 

HS: I think it’s starting to change now, but there seems to be a certain level of shame that women feel, just because we’re women.
 

MW: I do think that women have to stop apologizing for ourselves. I know someone that works in resources in a media company, and he told me how little women ask for more. Men ask for a promotion every six months, and women go ten years with the same paycheck. It’s the asking that’s scary. I’m really trying to attack that, because asking for more, for me, is also really hard. Asserting my needs is not easy. It’s definitely a process. I’m getting better at that; directing is forcing me to get better at that because I think directing is all about asserting your needs and not being afraid to take up space, ask for what you want, demand it, not doubt that you mean it, not try to please anyone.
 

Michelle Tse: As a director, you’ve stepped in so many other people’s shoes that are different than your own. Where does your empathy come from?
 

MW: I remember this moment in college where I was really trying to figure out what to do, and I wanted to be a director. But then I decided that my goal had to be bigger than “I want to be a director.” So that’s when I identified: I want to move people. I think it’s because I’ve had the blessing of being moved myself. My parents always took me to see shows when I was little. My parents would take my brother and I to Shakespeare festivals when we were five years old. I love that experience of sitting in an audience and feeling moved, or feeling sick, or scared, and I think that I wanted to give that to other people. That’s my goal, to do that. My parents have also said that I’ve always been very sensitive. When I was a kid, if something was upsetting me or I saw something in the news about a bomb I would just immediately throw up. I think in artists, that’s often mistaken for mental illness or depression or anxiety, and it can be all of those things – and that’s certainly part of my life. But, to me, that’s what allows me to tell stories. I think the most important thing about theater and about a piece worth telling is that there are not good guys and bad guys. I would like to never do a piece where I’m perpetuating an idea that someone is good and someone is bad. To me, it’s messy and I’m drawn to pieces where you can see the reasoning behind people doing evil things, and you see the reasoning behind people doing good things and it’s hard to locate a black and white structure in that.
 

HS: It’s hard to get people to really embrace that ambiguity, that discomfort.
 

MW: The shame is that the people who are seeing these things… it’s like preaching to the choir. I think that Normativity will attract people who are excited and happy about it, but I would love to go find some really homophobic people, sit them in the theater, and make them feel compassion for those characters. That’s the struggle, I think: reaching people who actually need these stories.
 

MT: That’s a doozy of a struggle.
 

HS: We can probably talk for the rest of the day about that.
 

MT: I’m hopeful, though, with musicals becoming more popular in the mainstream the past year, that people will start to seek out and do theater. Do you have any advice for aspiring theater artists?
 

MW: I am still learning myself, so it’s definitely coming from a place of still taking advice myself, but I definitely think that the most important thing that I’ve learned is how to listen. I think when I graduated college there was an environment that was so focused on your opinion, your voice, what you think, and as soon as I graduated and started working with Diane, I learned to silence myself and that didn’t mean that I wasn’t expressing myself, but that I was able to take in what other people were saying around me, and know that if I don’t express my idea right now, it’s okay. They’re going to eventually arrive at it in their own way. I think that’s a really big kernel of advice that I’d give to aspiring directors in general – if you are taking the path of assisting and working with other people, it’s learning how to listen and not have to voice yourself in order to feel confident. You can know that you have value without other people validating you.
 
When I graduated college, my icon was Lena Dunham. She was twenty-five and doing it. I was feeling that if I wasn’t doing it, there was no hope for me. But now I’m six, seven years out of college, and I’m grateful for every minute and I feel like I’m really ready for my voice and to direct. It definitely took me that long, and it may take me longer. My advice is, also, in this time and generation of feeling like you have to do everything now, there is something to be said for learning and developing a path and being ready. Growing and becoming ready. Once you express your voice, it’s out there.
 
 

 

 

Mia is currently Assistant Director for A.R.T.’s new Broadway musical Waitress, directed by Diane Paulus, with music by Sara Bareilles. She is also Assistant Director on Finding Neverland, Pippin (winner of 4 Tony Awards in 2013, including Best Revival and Best Director); The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess; Invisible Thread (Second Stage). Recent directing credits include world premieres of new works by Trista Baldwin and Israel Horovitz (The Flea); recurrent projects at Ensemble Studio Theater; Zoe Sarnak’s The Last Five Years at 54 Below; Gardenplays (East 4th St. Theatre). 
Mia is also in development for the film adaptation of American Sexy, her feature film directorial debut; she also made a dance film with Sonya Tayeh, award-winning choreographer on So You Think you Can Dance and frequently shoots and edits video content for Amsale the fashion designer and singer/songwriter Rachel Brown. Not Cool, a short film Mia directed was recently screened at the Soho Short Film Festival and LA Indie Film Fest. B.A. Harvard University. While at Harvard, Mia was one of the founding members of On Harvard Time, the university’s first student-run news station, that still exists today.

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A Conversation with Diana Oh

 

I’ve lived in cities all my life. On the sidewalk, I have been called a slut, a princess, a whore, a bitch, I’ve been bowed to and guilted and leered at and grabbed at and followed home. And, of course, it doesn’t just happen on the street: I’ve been propositioned at corporate events, had hands slid onto knees under tables, been called jailbait. I live in a state of recoiling, of doubt, full of questions that I never know how or when or whom to ask, when so often the story written is of The Girl Who Cried Wolf. So I stay quiet more often than not. This year, I met Diana Oh, a performance artist whose ten-piece installation and social movement is dedicated to creating a safe world for women to live in. Diana is a Courage Woman whose acts of art and of activism are intimately entwined. Working with Diana has granted me permission as an artist, as a citizen, and as a woman to speak up, to question, to push back on a world that grinds along, fueled by silences like mine. In a world like this one, where bombs are falling and bullets are flying and people are abandoning one another, I look to people like Diana for how to talk about these impossible things. We sat down to talk on the threshold of her show at Joe’s Pub to about the messy process of making art and making change, and figuring it out as you go along.

 

 

Corey Ruzicano: So this is it, right? This is the final installment of {my lingerie play}. Do you see an end goal for this project?
 

Diana Oh: I don’t know if there is one. I can’t really see an end, if anything I see a passing onto. If I were to move on from this project, it would look like: okay Corey, it’s yours. Have fun with the facebook page, it’s your cultural hub. Take over the website. I’d like to blog, when I want to blog, but it’s yours.
 

CR: Now you have a written text, you have songs written, so in the next world do you think it’s a different installation? Do you think that this text lives on or pieces of it live on? Or you write new text that lives in the same world of questions?
 

DO: I have no idea.
 

CR: That’s kind of amazing.
 

DO: It’s what’s so awesome, right? It’s not my lingerie play, it’s our lingerie play. We really did reinvent the wheel with this one. Rather than it being, I’m scared it won’t work or no theater is going to produce this…it will work. We know what we’re trying to say.
 

CR: So when you find other people with that vocabulary –
 

DO: or enthusiasm –
 

CR: or the same kind of values or respect…it keeps moving?
 

DO: Exactly. With the ‘Catcalling Sucks’ shirts – I have my own artistic experience wearing them. It’s not a public street installation, I’m not standing on a soapbox, but it’s a very one-on-one thing. I always end up engaging in conversation about it, because it always spark questions. Just last night, some guy stopped me in a Swatch store and said talk to me about your shirt, what does it mean? And I said to him, catcalling sucks. It sucks. And so he asked what men should do when they want to talk to a woman, when they have something to say to a stranger, and I said you just don’t. Don’t say anything. We don’t leave for the day wanting your attention, so don’t. And if you genuinely feel a real connection with a person and you think you want to get to know that, then you can pursue that in a sincere way. But we don’t need to know that you think we’re pretty.
 

CR: We weren’t made for that.
 

DO: Exactly. I realized it while talking to him, that, wow, we both just had a learning experience.
 

CR: And an artistic experience.
 

DO: Yes! I had this one-on-one performance thing. Isn’t that what theater is? We all get into a room to be changed in some way. You don’t just go to be entertained. I’m learning more and more that theater isn’t just entertainment. It can be entertaining, but there’s something there. You’re going there to be challenged.
 

Stage & Candor Diana Oh Catcalling Sucks 1

(Amanda Tralle, @trallskis_writes)

 

CR: I think it’s about an intersection of those roads. There’s a reason people love television – not that there aren’t challenging and intelligent television shows, obviously there are, but it takes an extra step to show up in a room with strangers. I guess I struggle with whether or not it’s okay to have something that’s purely entertaining?I just can’t un-see how, say, white everything is, and especially in something where people are bursting into song spontaneously, it feels like there’s just zero justification for whether or not there were historically people of color in that particular story’s setting. It’s a space to be expanded, why can’t we just lean into that?
 

DO: I know…I can’t enjoy Disney movies anymore. I can’t watch children’s television. I know too much…so because all of that is true, I can’t see {my lingerie play} ending.
 

CR: I guess the ending is that we have racial and gender parity. With this publication, too, our mission is in hopes that the space for conversation about these things is no longer necessary because it’s already habit, it’s already known.
 

DO: Exactly. But even then, maybe it’s a celebration of gender equality. There was a decision, I remember, when I changed all my social media stuff from my name to {my lingerie play} where I felt: I am ready to be this, to be {my lingerie play}. Just this, right now.
 

CR: It’s your calling card.
 

DO: Yeah, it’s comfortable now. I’ve already accepted that I’m a multi-disciplinary actor-singer-songwriter-whatever, so I’m not trying to push myself as one thing, as Diana Oh.
 

CR: Which is so exciting to me, this rise of the slash-person, of the interdisciplinary artist. What is it like to pursue many things at once?
 

DO: It’s exhausting and really exciting and manic. You can’t turn it off because your senses are always on fire. You’re always inspired. There’s a genuine curiosity and a genuine hunger for anything. Even if it’s “bad”, it still feeds some part of you.
 

CR: Everything connects to everything.
 

DO: Yes. I’m so thankful JLo exists. I just feel like she’s the only person we can really look up to.
 

CR: Really?
 

DO: Yes!
 

CR: Please say more about this. Why do we love JLo?
 

DO: In terms of commercial success, I feel like she’s the only true hyphenate artist –
 

CR: singer, dancer, actor, producer –
 

DO: Produces her own things, makes her own projects happen. I’m sure she has a perfume line in there somewhere, or makes baby clothes or something. She does it and makes time for it, or maybe it’s all a team. I don’t know her strategy but she does it and she has a platform. She’s like the commercial version of Taylor Mac, whom I would love to have as a mentor.
 

CR: Because they both do it all?
 

DO: Exactly. It’s about being able to answer the vertical, the core why or calling – you’re given these gifts, why? What are you trying to communicate into the world? That higher purpose calling is the vertical, for me. And by being secure in my mission, in my understanding of what I’m trying to do, I can then answer the horizontal.
 

CR: You mean how you relate to other people?
 

DO: Exactly, how you can spread yourself with communication? You need tools: social media? Manipulative tool. Websites? Manipulative tool. All this stuff, we use to spread ourselves out into the world, and they can only occur as long as your vertical is clear. Does that make sense?
 

CR: I think so. You have to start with something, so you have to be clear about what you start with?
 

DO: Yeah, cause otherwise you’re just a horizontal blob that exists and here’s my selfie and here’s all this stuff…but if you have a vertical line that you’re answering, that I’m posting a selfie because there are people out there in the world that want to kill me and people like me, now I’m tall and horizontally wide.
 

CR: Totally, start with why.
 

DO: Yeah, that’s how I made peace with all the social media stuff because I used to hate it. Then the street installations happened and I realized this is just a tool. This is an artistic tool.
 

CR: That everyone has tools or weapons that take all different forms. Words are definitely a weapon, pictures can definitely be a weapon. But it’s all stories so however you end up telling them –
 

DO: It’s just like what you were saying about stories and how stories shape the world.
 

CR: It sounds dramatic, but I believe it – people live and die by stories. You can change a life in the telling. And I’m sure music is a huge tool or weapon in all of this.
 

DO: It’s the best. It’s the best one. I think it’s also the hardest one. I’ve been trying to record for the past five years and it’s been impossible to me. I have yet to put anything out because there’s always a problem. There’s too much of an inner critic. I can’t release it in the way I can release live performances or acting. I only ever want it to be experienced live, but I understand that you need that tool. You need the recording to get your voice out there, but I don’t know…
 

CR: I guess you either have to redefine your picture of what success looks like, or find a different way to get the same picture.
 

DO: Yeah…probably the answer is just to record. And you have to figure out the way to do it. The moral of the story is everything is hard, and what makes it easy is that you have to do it.
 

CR: What do you do when you get stuck?
 

DO: DEADLINES.
 

CR: I know you love a good deadline.
 

DO: I do. I’ll have a rewrite deadline coming up, and I won’t know how to fix any of it, but I’ll find a way because I don’t have a choice. Pressure is cool like that, and the singing-songwriting stuff is the best one because everyone loves music. It’s another tool, another manipulator.
 

CR: That word, manipulation, is so full of negative connotations for me, but it’s true, music is incredibly communicative. There’s a stage direction in one of Jeff Augustin’s plays where two characters are listening to music together and inevitably something happens to them, they are changed, in the way theater wishes it could but music is simpler, more visceral than we can ever be in the theater. It reaches right on in and you can’t help yourself.
 

DO: I can’t tell you how many projects I’ve done and it’s been fine or good but then the sound designer comes in and it’s like, whoa we’re doing a play now, I’m ready to take my job seriously. Now {my lingerie play} has a band, which it didn’t have in January. The scheduling is crazy in the wild freelance arts world, but it’s all worth it. Matt Park leaves his job in Brooklyn on his lunch break to take the train for an hour so that we can play music in Hell’s Kitchen for an hour, so he can go back to his job in Brooklyn, because we love it so much. Playing music is the best.
 

CR: It always feels like a magic trick, too, even though I know there’s study and precision and science behind it, songwriters still always feel like wizards to me.
 

DO: And it’s also a unifying thing, right? Maybe this play is making some people sleepy and some people are really into it, but if there’s music, at least we can all sway together?
 

CR: And some of these things, the feelings that your play, and that all stories elicit to some degree, are bigger than language, in the way that music too is bigger than language. I think that some of those complicated, deep things are really hard to express in a linear monologue form. It’s possible but really hard and language-bound.
 

DO: Yeah, it’s a really powerful tool and I’m still just barely learning. I’m only scratching the surface. I wish that the tickets for the Joe’s Pub show could be pay what you can, because really this is just visibility. It’s just a vehicle to ask the question of how to get a producer who can make this their pet project, who can connect and produce it in a way that breaks the form with us. How can we do it so the audience pays at the end of the show and they pay what they can? How can we learn to trust our audiences?
 

CR: Well and it’s funny because my first reaction is always naive. Or, I guess I should say, that my first reaction is idealistic and then my immediate second reaction is, oh, right, I’m naive, of course I don’t know. But maybe the answer that I don’t necessarily know how to do this or what these venues need or whatever, maybe the answer is that we don’t even want to live in the same system.
 

2016-07-02 11:55
 

DO: Exactly, and when I even just try to picture it, I don’t see it in a Broadway house. The day that I do, the day that this fits there, will be revolutionary. We will all feel that like a revolution – the day this weird badass feminist story thing that started as street art is in a big commercial space? Who’s even going to come see that? People are going to be fucking confused. But it’ll have to be in a way that works for us and our audience.
 

CR: And that idea of trusting the audience is such an interesting thing, because so much of it does feel like it stems from a divide between the people in the seats or the people behind the curtain. But if it started with trust, at least if it crashes and burns, it started in the right way? I’m not sure. It’s complicated.
 

DO: Exactly, at least you were striving for authenticity. And I’m falling so much more in love with grants and fellowships. There are a lot of opportunities if you keep looking.

CR: Especially if you walk in these spaces where the paths meet.
 

DO: Last night was an excellent example of that – I was asked to come in as an actor, and I love acting so much. It’s the first of my hyphenates. And I came in because Adrienne Campbell-Holt knew me from having worked with me in Chris Nunez’s play, the work that I do with {my lingerie play}, and she had me come in and do this reading of Winter [Miller]’s play to honor Dr. Willie Parker, hosted by Gloria Steinem. It was just this perfect synthesis of soul-brain-heart-talent-gifts. And it was the most rewarding thing. This is what every job should feel like. I just kept thinking, whoa, this is an option? You don’t just have to do Nickelodeon? This is real. Your acting roles are your political choices, and there’s space for that.
 

CR: And it’s such a hard balance to strike when work for actors is so scarce – you have really tough choices to make: do you work on a project you don’t believe in because you might meet someone who will lead you to a project that will feed you, figuratively but also literally?
 

DO: Oh yeah, I went through that. There were so many years of does this headshot look like me? And now I can’t even look at my headshots. I just feel like, you’ll ask me because you want me. Not my face picture, but me.
 

CR: And probably part of that is knowing who that person is, and the confidence of knowing who you are.
 

DO: Yes, and there’s always another way in. How many people can say, oh yeah I met that playwright because I did their friend’s workshop in a garbage can where I ate trash and then they cast me in She Loves Me or whatever. I feel like 89% of the past few years has been that, just building those little things in an organic way.
 

CR: Do you have any other advice for young artists?
 

DO: You have to set your Dope North Star. You put that star, that dream, up here and you say to yourself: that’s my Dope North Star and I just have to let myself be dope so I can reach it, and all I need is one other person to believe in it. Everyone else can think I’m crazy, because all I need is that star and that one person to help me keep going. So when I start to doubt my star, I can turn to my person and they’ll tell me to shut the fuck up and keep my eye on the prize. Half of it is just figuring out what you actually want. We don’t have to have all the answers. The conversation can be messy.
 

CR: And it should be, probably. Life is.
 
 

 

 

Diana Oh creator of {my lingerie play} that culminates into an 80 minute concert-play of her original music featured on People.com, The Huffington Post, Upworthy, Marie Claire Netherlands, at Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Lark, and All For One. One of Refinery 29’s Top 14 LGBTQ Influencers, recipient of the Van Lier New Voices Fellowship in Acting with the Asian American Arts Alliance, the first Queer Korean-American interviewed on Korean Broadcast Radio, a featured Playwright at the Lark, a Radical Diva Finalist, an Elphaba Thropp Fellow, and one of New York Theatre Now’s Person of the Year. Great big music from the {my lingerie play} band coming soon. The Wall Street Journal and Upworthy call her “bad-ass.”

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A Conversation with Gabriela Ortega

 

Though New York still has yet to embark on its Fringe Season, the Pacific coast is already underway. The Hollywood Fringe Festival provides a platform for developing artists in the Los Angeles area to bring their work to an audience hungry for new voices – a mission that is furthered by the Hollywood Fringe Festival Scholarship, which was awarded to five productions that “features the participation of ethnically diverse artists; the production will enrich audience experience through the presentation of unique, underrepresented themes…” One recipient of the first inaugural scholarship is Gabriela Ortega, a native of the Dominican Republic and BFA Acting student at University of Southern California who has written, produced, and stars in a one-woman show entitled Las Garcia, currently running at the 2016 Hollywood Fringe Festival. In this conversation, we discuss the process of writing a solo performance piece, fighting for your space, embodying personal history in your work, and how Disney Movies can make a difference in a person’s life.

 

 

Alicia Carroll: If you could, start by telling me a little about the production you have created!
 

Gabriela Ortega: Well, the production that I am doing at the Hollywood Fringe Festival is called Las Garcia. It’s a solo performance inspired by my heritage in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. I wanted to write a show about how I felt when I moved to the States, which was sort of split in two because I felt like I was drawing inspiration from this place that I left. So it was sort of like the representation of discovering myself as a Latina in [another] country rather than my town. But I didn’t want to write it just about me, and I wanted it to be more universal. The story came to me in different pieces, and basically what it is right now – it follows two women of the same bloodline from different generations. One is in 1960s Dominican Republic, and one is in 2016, or present day, in Los Angeles. They both are struggling with a literal war in DR and the other is struggling with a war against herself. It’s a coming of age about how generations pass on that culture, and sort of my coming of age -which is kind of half true, half not – but because it’s part of the creative process, I was able to draw from my experience and my imagination. So it was kind of fun to have those two aspects of storytelling.
 

AC: How was it moving to the United States from The Dominican Republic?
 

GO: I came to the US at 17 to start college. I had visited the US multiple times before I got to go school at USC [University of Southern California] for acting. I had done a few summer programs and I sort of got my feet wet in terms of what it was to get a degree in acting. I wasn’t sure what four years of that was going to be. So I moved here and USC was kind of a reach school for me; I didn’t think I was going to get in. So when I did get in, I was like, “of course I’m coming here.” But I’d never visited California, nor the school. So, I kind of thought, “Ok, I am going to wing it and go to this place” and it was really shocking to me to see how independent people are here, you know? You move out of your house when you get married in Dominican Republic, or at least when you had a really steady job. I mean, my sister moved out of the house at 28, when she was about to get married and she had a full-time job – like a whole career, and an MFA everything – and it’s just how we do it there. You don’t have dorms or roommates; you just live in your house and commute to school. And everything just stays like that, you go to school with the same people you’ve known since you were three, and I came here and there were so many people from so many places, and so many languages, and so many…labels and perceptions. And the most amazing thing was, I think, being identified as a Latina for the first time in my life because I didn’t really have to deal with that back home, you know. Because we were all Dominicans, we were all there. There were people who were black, or white, or sort of in between, like my color, and that’s just how it was. But, here, you have “what are you?” “Are you mixed?” “Are you ethnically ambiguous?” “Are you Middle Eastern?”… and it was really shocking. It took me leaving my country in order to realize what it really meant to be a Latino woman. So, it was kind of this whole new discovery, which was both scary and exciting.
 

AC: And so now are you the only person in your family who has left the Dominican Republic for an extended period of time?
 

GO: My sister went to grad school. She went to Georgetown for Law, and that was only a year. And then some of my cousins have gone to grad school – that’s usually how you do it; you go to grad school. But for undergraduate, I actually moved here and lived here – for sure, I am probably the only one. I have family in the States like in New York and stuff, but they moved there when they were really young, so they were already there, but definitely even in my close friend group, I was probably the only person who left. And not only left, but also pursued a creative career. A lot of my friends and family members are lawyers or doctors or architects and…not something that necessarily has to do with the arts – or the performing arts I would say.
 

AC: So I know something I have talked about – and we have probably discussed in the past – is the privilege of being able to study the arts. How has going to school for Theater, and the relationship between you and your family and the “lawyer-doctor tradition” – because it’s the same in my family I am the only one. So how does that dynamic work, or how do they view your studies?
 

GO: Well, I am very persistent. I have always had an affinity towards the arts. Like I started painting early on, so they thought I have always been creative. And I talk a lot and I wanted to be a comedian when I was little. So not that they didn’t take it seriously in my young age, but they just thought it would develop into something else. So in high school I thought I was going to be a lawyer because, honestly, I was more ignorant than that. Because I had been taking classes as an extracurricular program outside of school, in acting and theater. But I didn’t know you could major in this. I thought if by the time you were 14 if you weren’t on Disney Channel, you were done. So I thought, “Well, I am not Hannah Montana, that means I am going to be a lawyer.” So realizing how young I was and how much more there is to the arts was so crazy – like I went to a camp at AADA when I was a junior. And then things started changing because some of the kids there, in New York, they were like, “I go to a performing arts high school” and I said, “What is that?” Then, I started doing the research. I think once I started taking it seriously and saying, “Okay, I gotta find a way to get myself there. I gotta get my grades up. I’ve gotta get good scores on the SATs, I gotta get extracurriculars, and my essays and everything. My parents started to say, “Oh, she’s actually serious about this” and, I mean getting into USC helped, but I guess my commitment to doing this really opened their eyes to like, “Well maybe, that is what she does” and, you know, I always believed that they were supportive, but as soon as I started seeing a little bit of a result and me getting it together and going for it, they were like, “Let’s let her do this and support her fully.” And now, they’re not anything but excited, you know? And they have faith that this is what I came into this world to do, and that is not, honestly, a privilege that a lot of people share, but it’s not something I am going to take for granted you know? It sort of opens your eyes when you study theater. It makes you a better person because you start seeing different perspectives.Just being able to learn about other people’s stories, and maybe sometimes you shut up and listen and see what the other person is about before coming in with your own perspective. That has definitely helped me, at least.
 

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AC: Well, speaking of other people’s stories, did you see yourself in the media or culture you consumed when you were little? Growing up with television, you mentioned Disney Channel and stuff; how did that affect you?
 

GO: I think now I am realizing stuff, looking back. Because I remember when I would dress up for Halloween, I wanted to be Little Mermaid but people would be like, “You’re not a redhead,” and stuff like that. You know the little things that you realize – like I was almost always a pumpkin or a random witch. [Laughs] My mom would joke around, “You’re going to be a pumpkin this year” like, thanks, Mom. So it was always a pumpkin or something. I was thinking, you know what changed for me? What you just asked made me be like, “Of course, this made me see those things differently, High School Musical. A girl named Gabriella, and Vanessa Hudgens cast, she looks a little bit Hispanic, I don’t know if she has any [in her heritage]. But when I saw her in that musical, I was like, “She has my name, and she can sing and she is doing it.” And I saw the staged version in the Dominican Republic – the girl that played her in the DR, she was Dominican, and she looked like me too, and I was with my cousin and it was the first musical that I saw…and I was like, “I wanna do this.” And after that I started taking acting classes, to be honest. It was really astonishing to me that someone could have my name and be up there and do that.
 

AC: Wow, that’s so true; I understand. For Las Garcia, how does it embody your experience and how does it portray history? It’s two characters, but obviously a solo show, so how do you think each character reflects you and reflects the history after writing it?
 

GO: It reflects the history because – sister here had to do some research. It was going back and reading all these stories about our dictatorship in the 1930s and the 30 years of oppression and the women, and my own family. It was calling up my mom and my sister in the middle of the night and asking, “Could you tell me what were you doing around this time,” and putting the pieces together – how can I create this character, this woman? The character in the 1960s is a singer and she has this larger than life personality. I wanted to challenge this perception that people have of Latinos: like the Sofia Vergara, over-the-top accent, and that only means you’re funny, and you have big boobs. And, I mean, I love her, but people think that’s the only thing. And I wondered how can I have something like that, but challenges us to flip the coin. And how could I have a woman – she could be a delinquent. She could be a fighter on her own terms. She could be a singer. She could be fighting a war we didn’t even know about. And she has a thick accent and moves her hips and sings, but she’s so much more than that. And I wanted to make these characters different than just a stereotype you know?
 
And it reflects me because…I am the 1%. I’m the exception,you know? I am lucky enough to go to school for theater, to have an education, to have a different perspective and to be in the arts. And back home, a lot of them cannot necessarily do that, so I, as a Latina, have privilege. We have this character in the play that is a version of me and what was really most interesting about it was really exploring my own dark sides and the things that sometimes I don’t want to talk about. And how do I not make that indulgent, and how can I make that relatable? It’s really when you look at your story, and you don’t judge it, and you talk to the truth that… and in this play I am talking about growing up with nannies and I’m addressing that privilege – I mean, there’s a line in the play that goes:
 

“Look around, there are 101 paintings in this house. I know that because I have the privilege of being bored. So bored, that I counted them.”

 

I’m looking into the privilege that I have and the disadvantage that I have as a latino woman, putting those two together and seeing which one ends up on top. But the reality is that they’re both part of me and I can’t just bring you a story about how sad it is to be a latino, or how lucky I am to have everything I have. But I can bring you a story about how I was at times inside a bubble and how I had to see past myself, and grow up. I mean, we’re not all perfect you know? We all have lightness and darkness about ourselves, you know? It was very scary to tap into that. And then have people read the script and be like, “You’re afraid of this line, that’s why you’re paraphrasing. You’re subconsciously moving away from it,” and realize, “Oh, you’re finding subtext in something I wrote.” It’s been really an interesting experience, doing this type of work. It’s like driving a car in the middle of a raid and you can’t stop because you have to get to the finish line. It’s just you.
 

AC: What made you choose to make it a solo show versus having a partner on stage?
 

GO: I wanted to challenge myself – well, first of all, it’s cheap [laughs] – but also it’s my own past and my own story. But, I will say that the best discovery in the solo work, is that it truly is the story about women, and the women in my family so it should be played by a woman. And they’re related, so the fact that it’s me, you know, I am able to play into that and you can see the different generations without needing the male characters to come up. I wanted to make it a solo show because I wanted you to see the women and the generational aspects of it. And I think it could extend to a play, I mean, I believe in the story so much, I would love to see if I could turn it into a script for a film because I think there is some cinematic quality to it. But I really think of it as a first step; I think a solo show was the way to go because of that. We don’t see stories about women often…so you gotta force yourself to make it about the women because you’re a woman and you’re doing it on your own, you know? So it really challenged me to enhance these two female characters beyond a box, beyond the stereotype, or beyond a circumstance.
 

AC: Something that I don’t think writers get asked often enough, so as a playwright, if it were to get published right now and the rights were to become available, what do you hope for people to take away from the play, at its core? And what do you hope for potential future productions of the work? Especially something so personal and intimate. Like eventually some high school is going to do Hamilton – is there anything you’d nervous for?
 

GO: First of all, the only man who could play it is Lin-Manuel Miranda. [Laughs] Maybe Leslie [Odom Jr.] who knows? I mean, I think the show should be played by a woman…I think that there is a specific song in, it it’s called “Dondé es?” It’s sort of a theme in the show of “Where is your life hiding” I would like that song to be in it, as a guiding tool. I wouldn’t be opposed to – I wrote the whole thing as if it were a script, like the scenes between men and women, they are written as dialogue [as opposed to monologue] so I’d be interested in seeing it developed into a play opposed to a solo show; I would like to give people the chance to work with it and workshop it whatever way they would like, but definitely keeping mind the people and their ethnicities – because so many shows take advantage of that…because they think that “yes art is for everyone,” but there are certain stories that may need to be told by the people who can really tell them, and can give them justice.
 

AC: Yes, I completely agree. Interesting. Well, also, congrats on the Fringe scholarship!
 

GO: Thank you.
 

AC: What does it mean to you, that you received the scholarship? And what do you think it will give you in terms of furthering your audience and telling your story?
 

GO: I think it means a welcome to me and as a reminder that we are here. And the fact that we got that scholarship is nothing to be cocky about, or to be to think “oh, we got somewhere” – no, it’s actually challenging us to tell this story to the best of our ability, and my ability. And Fringe is such a wonderful platform to workshop new work because it really is a very supportive community; everybody wants to see each other’s shows. It is a competition in the way that there are awards and stuff, but at its core it’s an opportunity for everyone who’s an artist in Los Angeles and wants to create new work and be bold and wants to put up things at no budget pretty much to have that opportunity and to showcase their work. And to me, this is my coming out party as a writer and a performer and to me that scholarship is me saying I will not conform, and I will write my own work and I will star in it and produce it and I will wear all the hats, and I am a woman and I’m Hispanic and I’m here. And I won’t let anyone or anything that believes I don’t fit in this medium – or that I’m too this or too that for this art form tell me I don’t belong. So, I am happy that the Fringe Festival community sees that and is encouraging that and are hungry for stories that are different. It’s the first year that they’re doing this scholarship and the five people who won are all people of color and women, three of them I think are written, directed, and starring women. And I think that’s telling of what people are hungry for and the stories they want to hear.
 

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AC: Are there any last thoughts you’d like to get into the universe, or anything you’d like to say?
 

GO: Thank you, first of all, for reaching out to me and thank you for your support. For anyone that will read this and is a young artist or woman or girl who thinks they are too young to do something, don’t. Because honestly, if you look for space and if you fight for that space, the doors will open and people will come support you and people will be with you. The amount of gratitude I have for so many people who have reached out to me and offered their help and their services for me to create this piece of theater really gave me hope as to what I can do in the future and – you just gotta ask sometimes, you know? And just really fight for and go for it without judgment. So, I really encourage people to try this type of work and just get out there and figure it out.
 

AC: Absolutely. Awesome, well, thank you so much for speaking with us. And break a leg on your premiere!
 

GO: Thank you, thank you. I am trying to get it to New York, hopefully I can get it into the United Solo Festival. So, we will keep in touch, because I really want to travel with it. Thanks again, I really appreciate it.
 

AC: Yes of course, keep us posted!
 
 

 

 

Gabriela was born and raised in the Dominican Republic and is an LA based Actress, writer and Spoken word poet. She is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Acting at the University of Southern California.A proud Latina, Feminist and above all: a collaborator, Gabriela is thrilled to be returning to the Hollywood Fringe in 2016 with her own show. She is excited to bring her stories to life in her show inspired by her heritage and life in Santo Domingo. In 2014, Gabriela helped develop “The New Artist’s Festival” at the 13th Street Repertory Company in NYC. As part of the festival, she helped produce 7 original one-act plays (2 which she directed, 1 which she wrote), as well as two MainStage productions (Rabbit Hole, Dark Play/Stories for Boys). Some of her most recent roles include: HOMEFREE by Lisa Loomer at The Road*, SPIT! at HFF15, The House of Bernarda Alba with the Bilingual Foundation of The Arts (Magdalena), Grey Street, The Musical (Off-Broadway Workshop, Ensemble) and Blossoming readings with The Vagrancy. USC: Breath, Boom (Angel)**, Camille (Prudence), Marisol (Ensemble), Anna in the Tropics (Conchita), What We’re Up Against and other short plays (Lorna/Annie), Disappearing Act by Lena Ford (USC workshop/ Millie)
*WINNER: Noho Fringe Festival Best play/Best Ensemble
**WINNER: Aileen Stanley Memorial Award for excellence in Acting
Las Garcia (my solo show) won one of the 5 “2016 Fringe Scholarships”
webpage: www.ortegart.com
manager: Nick Campbell
Velocity entertainment partners
nick@velocity-ent.com

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A Conversation with Winter Miller

 

Winter Miller’s ferocious, forward-facing energy is contagious. In her words, in her work, in her sense of humor, she champions action and raises vital, challenging questions. Especially in a week like this one where fear and darkness feel paralyzing, speaking with Winter Miller calls me to action, to open up the conversations that are uncomfortable, to ask the questions that prompt complicated answers, if there are any answers to be had. Her upcoming piece, Spare Rib, hosted by Gloria Steinem and friends, and directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt, is a fundraising celebration honoring the legacy of Dr. Willie Parker and broadening the rhetoric around female reproductive rights.

 

 

Corey Ruzicano: I’m so excited to hear about your new project – maybe we should start there. Will you tell me about Spare Rib?
 

Winter Miller: Yeah, I can talk a little bit about process. First of all, the place of inspiration came from an intellectual idea, but out of urgency. Just thinking about how, in this country, we don’t have a way to talk about abortion beyond the semantics of pro-life/pro-choice, this is a fetus, this is a baby. We got really stuck in what those labels meant and the consequence was that our access to reproductive freedom has been chiseled away and is in deep danger of not being accessible to people who need it. That’s how it is. There are not enough clinics. Rhetoric got in the way of a movement for equality. And I was thinking about how the way the gay rights movement moved ahead was by being about pro-love and pro-family and that if we could say the same thing about abortion – that it is pro-love and pro-family because it allows us to choose the kind of family we want and to be able to love and care for them as we are able without stigma or shame, whatever that decision is. That debate had sort of been snatched from liberals by the Christian Right and the consequences of that are dire. So the inciting action of this was: how could I write a play that could be about the subject of abortion but could involve us in such a way that we could show up with whatever beliefs we had and come away with a broader understanding?
 

CR: Yeah, absolutely.
 

WM: So it’s not just about–
 

CR: –that binary.
 

WM: Yes, exactly. I think what I try to do with all my work is to get out of the binary.
 

CR: And I think that’s something that’s so particularly enlarging for me about this piece is that it expands that single-story narrative model. Because that single narrative is so seductive, we as humans are so compelled and attach so easily to that protagonist, part-for-whole structure. It’s so exciting to have a piece that’s really a quilt or a community of stories that are all confronting the same thing. And being able to talk about the way we talk about these different issues and open up the rhetoric is revolutionary.
 

WM: Well what’s challenging – what’s exciting, I’ll say that – is that this is a play with multiple narratives. There’s not one protagonist and we’re time-hopping throughout history. We’re time-bending and gender-bending and genre-bending. The play invites you to engage with it in kind of a Coney Island way. Welcome to the amusement park, get on whatever ride you want and some are going to scare you, some will make you howl with laughter, and – probably not that many rides make you cry – but some of this will make you cry. There is humor, you have to have levity with the deeply true.
 

CR: Yeah, totally. I’m always so fascinated with the different lenses and openings and ways in that writers provide audiences with, especially when the subject matter is something that every human body has to engage with, and I think humor is an incredible tool.
 

WM: Yeah, I’ve not written a play without it. I don’t exist without it.
 

CR: That’s really useful and important. Are there places that you’ve drawn inspiration from, in the realm of humor or beyond?
 

WM: There are different kinds of humor that I connect with. I like silliness. I like wordplay. I also like the juxtaposition of two ideas that don’t belong together. There’s a scene in the play where all these different women from different times and different eras are sitting around and it’s somewhere between a consciousness raising and an AA meeting and at the end of an introductory speech about herself, one of the characters says, oh is there reindeer milk? Like is there cream or milk, but it’s particular to the goofiness of time-hopping. It’s unexpected and probably many people will breeze right by it, but I giggle every time I hear it. I don’t know, is there reindeer milk? What would that be?
 

CR: Maybe.
 

WM: Most everything in my play is fact-checked, but I have not fact-checked whether or not there is reindeer milk.
 

CR: Well, it’s nice to have questions like that in there, more full of whimsy–
 

WM: Yes, there’s definitely room for whimsy. In researching the play I visited Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe and they have vast archives of first-person accounts of feminists and abortion providers and I read through a bunch of those accounts just to get a deeper knowledge. I spent a weekend in Michigan with these women who do really thoughtful work around de-stigmatizing what it is to be an abortion provider. They invited me to come and pitch creative ideas to them and part of that was spent at a Planned Parenthood shadowing one of the doctors but also several patients as they came in. I didn’t know the steps that people go through when they arrive at a clinic, and I followed a young woman throughout her visit.
 

CR: Could you talk a little more about what that was like?
 

WM: What struck me is just the precision and skill of someone who does her job well and has experience. When I walk down the street and see sanitation workers and watch the way they arc the trash perfectly into the back of the truck, I’m looking at skill and experience and athleticism, and I marvel at it. It’s the same thing with watching this doctor perform an abortion. I’m not sure the words to describe it. I was seeing experience and prowess and grace. I thought, of course, she’s skilled at this. But I haven’t sat in on anyone else’s dental or doctor appointment to see what anyone else’s experience looks like outside of myself as the patient, so I’m sure I would experience much of what doctors do, to be like that. It was impressive. This is something that this doctor has done over and over again and she’s good at it; the same way that the sanitation workers perfectly arc the trash.
 

CR: Yeah, there’s a procedure and precision to it.
 

WM: I sat on the other side as someone got an ultrasound to make sure that she was pregnant. I watched as someone was given a medical abortion, the pills that you take. You take some in the office and you take some at home later. The conversation is all very straightforward. This is what this does and this is what this does. It’s not particularly dramatic. Then I watched some surgical abortions and it was something that I had never seen. At the end of it, there is what’s been removed, blood and organs and the tiny beginnings of what will become a person. The doctor sifts through it to make sure they’ve gotten everything out; she’s looking for two hands, two feet. And that’s a fact. You can’t hide from the truth of what you see at fourteen weeks, but that doesn’t make it a person with any kind of rights that should supercede those of a woman. Women are not incubators, we have a choice. What is inside is something that is alive in as much as it is growing, just like a plant is alive and growing, but it’s not a person. It does not have personhood. It has been scientifically proven a fetus is not a thinking or feeling being.
 

CR: And I wonder how your connection with these different organizations changed the way you’re looking to tell this story? How do these different connections and conversations impact the way you’re trying to tell these many narratives?
 

WM: Any time that you see something that is new to you, it has an effect on the totality of the play. For instance, when I wrote In Darfur, I’d read many, many things and I’d heard many first- and second-hand accounts, and I’d looked at many photographs – things the general public wasn’t seeing but I was seeing because I was working with Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times – but I still felt I have to go to Darfur to see what I don’t know. You don’t know what you don’t know until you know more. I wanted to know: what is the ground like? What is the dust like? What does the terrain feel like; what does it smell like? All that stuff you can’t get from news accounts and things people don’t include in their stories because they’re it’s unremarkable to them. You don’t know the smell of blood until you smell it. That’s just how it is. You’re taking someone else’s word for it unless you’re seeing something or hearing something firsthand, and that matters to me.
 

CR: So this project is about to have a public showing?
 

WM: We’re just doing Act I. It’s a big play. I just keep slicing it down.
 

CR: That sounds so hard – it’s scope is so multivalent; it would be so hard to make it shorter!
 

WM: Yeah, it is. I think, Oh I want to include that. But there’s great discipline in cutting. One of the nice things about this upcoming reading is that it’s a chance for more discipline. I know that the length of this first act needs to be an hour, so knowing that I’m just choosing even more specifically what needs to be included and what doesn’t. You can fall in love with characters and then realize they have to go. I tell that to all of my students, so I have to take my own medicine.
 

CR: Always hard to kill your darlings. In a perfect world, what action steps does this play want us to take away?
 

WM: It’s broad. First of all, I hope that we open up for a greater dialogue about abortion. There are so many people that don’t know that their partners or sisters or friends or mothers have had abortions. It’s not something to be ashamed of, so I’d like to decrease the stigma so people can actually think: can I choose this for myself without fear of being judged? Can I talk about this without being slut-shamed or called a murderer? We have to make room for people to be able to say, “I had an abortion and it was really painful emotionally.” But there also has to be room to say, “I had an abortion and it was not a big deal and such a great relief.” We have to have room for the vast experiences in the way that we might talk about going to the dentist: “I had a tooth pulled but it was fine,” or, “I had a tooth pulled and it was upsetting.” Not to make light of when people have emotional thoughts about something, but to actually say let’s not project onto people what we think they might feel.
 

CR: Bodies have responses and you have to be able to talk about them without fear of being reduced.
 

WM: Or being stigmatized. I want to create a space where people feel included. I want to have a way of helping to create more community for people who are abortion providers. Because there’s an idea that they’re either killers or heroes, and they’re people doing their job. Some of them have a real attachment to the mission, for others it’s their job and they think it’s what needs to happen. But they can’t talk about that in front of many people without fear of how they’ll be responded to. That’s isolating. How many people are comfortable coming out as abortion providers in environments that are hostile to them? Not to mention the number of people that harass and threaten and in some cases murder abortion providers. So I think that we as a society could be less binary about heroes or killers and just say they’re people and this is the job they do. That would be less isolating and more people would be willing to provide abortions. It’s an area where we need skilled workers and access.I hope the play will galvanize people to stand up for reproductive freedom, regardless of what their personal choice is, that they would stand up and say that each person deserves their own choice. We’re dealing with issues of privilege – who has access to clinics, who has money, who can afford childcare for their already existing children, who has the ability to get time off work… We have to make sure that reproductive freedom is truly free, that it’s accessible, so that people can choose their families.
 

CR: Yeah, and that bottom line people should have control over their own body without jurisdiction from any of the systems that are at play.
 

WM: Yes. The parental consent laws are terrible. They leave young women with the option of a judge deciding their fate if they can’t tell their parents. Not only that, there are so many instances that are tied to incest or rape and it forces people to have to confront people in environments that may not be safe if they want to have an abortion. We have to do better at supporting reproductive freedom, whether or not we ourselves need it.
 

CR: Of course. Are there any other resources or things that are happening in the conversation that we should know about?
 

WM: Sure. I think campaigns like Shout Your Abortion – people underestimate how important that is. I think the organization that Martha Plimpton founded, A is For, is important because this is how we create acceptance and tolerance and support for something that is legally a fundamental right. But also I am inspired by Dr. Willie Parker, his life story and his mission are of great interest to me and I want more people to know about him. We need more Dr. Willie Parkers. I’m excited to hold this event to honor him and I hope we raise substantial funds for the National Network of Abortion Funders, they help they help provide money for people who cannot afford travel their abortion, to pay for what they need. With waiting periods, people have to factor in a place to stay – they have to take a bus, whatever it is; it’s doubly and triply expensive based on legislation that exists to prevent people from getting abortions. So this fund is allocated directly to people that need it. I think it’s great to that we all stand with Planned Parenthood, but it’s also important to stand with the clinics and the funders that are directly involved with making reproductive freedom a reality. Watch the movie Trapped – it’ll be on PBS – and see the sacrifices people are making; what they’re up against to keep these clinics open and for people to get their abortion. I’m so inspired by Dr. Willie Parker and I’m excited to hold this event to honor him. Two-thirds of the proceeds of this event will go to supporting the NAAF in the areas where Dr. Parker worked in the Southeast. The other third goes towards whatever the next Spare Rib event will be so we continue to grow. It’s not so difficult to arrange an abortion in New York City. It is in much of Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, and I could go on. But this is where we as a community help out the people who need it. This is sisterhood, this is brotherhood. Reproductive freedom affects all of us.
 
 

For more information visit Winter’s website. Ticket information can be found here. For those unable to attend but would like to contribute can do so here, even after the event has passed. For more information contact spareribtheplay@gmail.com  

 

 

 

Winter Miller is an award-winning playwright and founding member of the Obie-recognized collective 13 Playwrights. She is best known for her drama IN DARFUR which premiered at The Public Theater, followed by a standing room only performance at their 1800-seat Delacorte Theater in Central Park, a first for a play by a woman.

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A Conversation with Leah Nanako Winkler

 

Meeting Leah Nanako Winkler in a coffee shop is something everyone should do. Her imaginative character and insurgent passion for art, story, and equity leave her listeners not only more informed but somehow more hopeful for change. Whether it’s at Pret A Manger or in the studio of EST, Leah’s work and words light up the room.

 

 

Corey Ruzicano: I loved hearing you talk about the idea of “home,” those you’re born into and those you create. I would love to hear more about your search for home and how the shaping of your identity has played into that.
 

Leah Nanako Winkler: I moved from Japan when I was a child. There, I was known as “the white girl,” as in I look pretty white, especially to a really homogenous race. There weren’t that many HAPAs. I was actually a child model.
 

CR: Oh wow, what did you model?
 

LNW: I modeled for this clothing magazine called Samantha and it was really fun. Then, when we moved to Kentucky that life was taken away from me, and I had an identity crisis. I went from being viewed as an American in Japan to being viewed as a Japanese person in America, even though I didn’t know the language. I think it made me internalize a lot of feelings, and I grew changed from being a very outgoing child to a very shy and reserved child. I didn’t really have any creative or emotional outlet to express these feelings, until I found theater. I had a an exceptional drama teacher. Theater really kept me out of trouble. It let me go to college.
 

CR: Yeah, one good teacher really can change everything.
 

LNW: She helped me find a home in the theater. Hiro [from Kentucky] is actually kind of a bizarro world version of me. I don’t imagine her as a theater kid at all-but I did try to transport the passion I have for the arts into her passion for her amazing job in marketing and making a life for herself in New York City.
 

CR: Of course, and that idea to belong, too, can be anything. I do think theater has some special powers, but I think when you decide to devote yourself to a place, that can matter just as much. I really enjoyed that about the play, the passion that some characters had for Kentucky, as well as this desire to leave and get out. I think that’s so human and so relatable, and I have such a different background but I think those feelings are every bit as relatable. Having a vehicle, especially something like art or storytelling that includes this constant search for identity and re-examination of the self, allows you to move through the world in a way that brings home with you.
 

LNW: I define “home” as anywhere that you can be free to really express yourself. I wanted to stay away from expressing the stereotypes because a lot of people are really happy in Kentucky. All my friends who stayed aren’t jealous of me or wishing that they’d gotten out. It’s “oh, you have a play? Cool, I have a baby.”
 

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CR: Absolutely. And I think it’s really important because there are two, probably more, stereotypes of the South. Often it’s either the romantic, small town, everybody knows you or it’s this backwater white supremacist Hicksville everyone is trying to get out of. And I thought your play did a really good job of trying to straddle such a complex thing. In a show with so many perspectives, and different characters from different places, how have you struck that balance of developing and listening to each character and their voice?
 

LNW: I think theater makes you a really empathetic person.
 

CR: I hope.
 

LNW: Exactly, I hope. As a writer it’s been really important that I participated in various aspects of theater growing up because it teaches you to listen to people, be inquisitive and not judge. In my work, I like presenting various perspectives, sometimes through stereotypes and then breaking it to help dismantle preconceived notions that both I and the audience may have had. This was especially true with Kentucky.
 

CR: It’s almost more building a muscle than trying to balance an equation. How have audiences reacted to such different perspectives or if you see alignments start to form?
 

LNW: Everyone has a different opinion about my writing, and it’s been like that since I’ve been active here, which is actually about nine years.
 

CR: Congratulations!
 

LNW: Thank you! But this is my first produced play. I’ve been a self-producing playwright for years. I’ve always known that my writing is not for everyone.
 

CR: Nothing can be.
 

LNW: Commercial theater people think my writing is experimental. Experimental theater people think it’s commercial. Some critics say I write cartoons or too long monologues. But the people that get it, love it. I just try to be as honest as possible.
 

CR: And the truth is weird.
 

LNW: One night they love it and the next night someone walks out.
 

CR: Wow, well I certainly know which camp I’m in. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what it means to be an artist in the United States. What is the American Theater to you, and how has that affected your writing process as you’ve grown up?
 

LNW: I made my first play in New York at the Brick Theater where I did all the scene changes myself and there were like six people in the audience because nobody knew who I was. But I still had a blast because it’s a great place- and there is a compulsive part of who I am that needs to do theater. I think theater artists in the United States need this compulsion to keep going because trying to carve out a career in this industry can often be challenging. That being said- it’s a really exciting time to be in American Theater right now. There are a lot of conversations being had about diversity and inclusion and it’s finally, finally acceptable to talk about race and class. I remember even five years ago getting crucified for talking about those issues under the guise of a science fiction parody called, “ Flying Snakes in 3D!!!” [Co-written with Teddy Nicholas] People got so upset about that show! They were like, “How dare you say that people in the theater are independently wealthy. How dare you say everyone is white.”
 

CR: Wow. How dare you, Leah?
 

LNW: I know, it sounds so crazy now, but it wasn’t that long ago. This journalist, who shall remain unnamed, wrote a long, long tirade on facebook saying [essentially] “Why don’t we stop blaming the white man for our problems, you should just work harder.” And I got really mad because they didn’t even come see the show! Then it kind of became this whole big thing, and I got invited to give a manifesto about race and class at the Prelude Festival and ever since some people have assumed I’m an extremely angry person. But I’m not. I just grew up with stories that weren’t predominantly white. So, I kind of went through a culture shock when I started trying to make work here–
 

CR: Here, that we think of as the cultural hub of American Theater–
 

LNW: Yes! I didn’t really start thinking about the lack of diversity in theater in a serious way until I started doing theater here, and my way of processing it was writing about it. It was so shocking to me at the time.
 

CR: I wonder if, after these couple of years of really having to assess what the state of this place is, you have any action steps for yourself and your work moving forward?
 

LNW: Lately I’ve learned that audiences respond better to my work when I write actively and authentically. I’m less interested in making a play with criticism being the baseline and more willing to tell the stories that are often under-represented in a funny, engaging way.
 

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CR: Definitely. Do you have any advice to the younger playwrights coming up, both to those who have those diverse perspectives and to those that don’t? How do you tell stories responsibly in this world we live in right now?
 

LNW: It’s a learning process, right? I have a hard time writing outside of my identity.
 

CR: But you did it in this piece…
 

LNW: Well actually, on the page many characters in Kentucky can be played by any race. So maybe the answer is not to write for specific races because then they become beholden to that, their sole characteristic becomes about that. I don’t go around saying, hi, I’m half-Asian, let’s talk about it. White people definitely don’t say, hi, I’m white. Who am I to give advice because we’re all still trying to figure it out, but I think thinking outside the box when it comes to casting is key. I fundamentally believe that the everyman can be any race, the romantic lead can be any race. Same goes for the hero. I think it’s important to visually reflect the world we live in and while also checking my own biases. You grow up with these notions that the blonde, white girl is the “every girl.” And I’m not sick of seeing that, I love Reese Witherspoon movies, but I think that if you trust your audience, it doesn’t make that big of a difference if you put Sandra Oh in that role. People will come.
 

CR: Absolutely. We’ve been talking about the whitewashedout hashtag that was trending for a while, and when it was really popular Sarah Kuhn, who’s a HAPA writer, tweeted: “whitewashedout meant it took years for me to realize writing an Asian protag was possible, I cast myself as the sidekick in my own story.” And I wonder what, if any, resonance that statement has for you?
 

LNW: That’s actually the first time I’ve heard that statement. I had to take a break from the online activism world when a blog I wrote went semi-viral, and I got a lot of hate mail for it; and any time I tweet about anything Asian-related, those trolls come back. I love the whitewashedout movement, I just decided to take a step back and work on my play, but then I got complaints from people on twitter saying, why aren’t you a part of the whitewashedout movement?
 

CR: You really can’t win.
 

LNW: But taking in that statement now- I can relate. Growing up, white girls told me I could only play Pocahontas when we’re playing Disney princesses and -this is specifically for mixed races; I can only speak about being biracial, but I didn’t have a vocabulary to identify myself until I was twenty-one. Because I was white in Japan, and Japanese in America, it was like: you’re not white enough. I think it’s another reason I feel so at home in New York, because I really feel like I was able to find my identity here. I remember there was this exhibition at NYU with the APA Institute called Part Asian, One 100% HAPA by Kip Fullbeck. It was just a room filled with photographs of the faces of mixed race people. Until then I didn’t know about the artist, I didn’t know about any community, I thought we were just supposed to choose one side. All my life people have asked, “Do you feel more Japanese or do you feel more American?” It wasn’t until I saw that exhibition I was able to say, “I’m both and that’s OK.” I still think that there isn’t a lot of art out there that speaks to the mixed race- and maybe that’s because we’re still talking through the definition of diversity as one race against the other. In order to have the hapa conversation we need to be able to have the Asian conversation first. And people still don’t know what Asian American performers can actually do. For example- people still tell me Asians can’t sing.
 

CR: They do?
 

LNW: Yeah! But when we were casting an Asian American triple threat for Kentucky, we saw so many girls who were AMAZING. It really blew my mind when we had these open calls because I have my own list of nearly 200 Asian American performers and we saw girl after girl that I’d never heard of. When casting Asian roles I often have to come up with my own list because many theaters claim to not know many.
 

CR: Two hundred sounds like a lot, but it’s actually a tiny little fraction.
 

LNW: And there still aren’t that many roles that are specifically Asian American and a lot of my Asian American actor friends go in for the same roles even though they’re totally different types. It’s like getting Susan Sarandon and Emma Stone because they both have red hair to go in for the same part. The only type that these girls are , is Asian, whereas the white girls are broken down in so many more specific ways. Asian is still seen as a full characteristic. So what I’ve been trying to do is, not writing specifically for any race, and just casting outside of the traditional box. For example, I just wrote a two person play about sex that doesn’t have race as a central theme- but the casting criteria is that the actors be different ethnicities from each other. I’m less interested in blantantly commenting right now and more interested in showing.
 

CR: Yes, absolutely, and I’m excited about the way you talk about building vocabulary around these things.
 

LNW: It’s hard!
 

CR: It’s really hard, and it’s so easy to use language as a scapegoat – not having the language to have the uncomfortable conversation, when the conversation will always be uncomfortable. But, I do really believe in the power of language, and I think giving people literacy around these things is actually at the heart of this movement.
 

LNW: Yeah, I get the feeling that this movement isn’t about confrontation. It’s less about saying, “Fuck you.” I’ve learned the hard way that people shut down pretty quickly.
 

CR: You can only digest so much shame.
 

LNW: There’s a lot of fragility among white people. I think with theater culture, because a lot of people grew up a certain way, and it’s so free and it’s so fun that I think if you’re a trust fund person, of course you’re going to get defensive. That was a learning curve for me. I was misunderstood when I wasn’t careful of that fragility, I realized I have to be an adult. To be effective, there’s a way to do it. Shonda Rhimes is really great at it.
 

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CR: Yes, that’s a great example. Do you have a question that you’re grappling with right now? And how are you using art to help you ask that question?
 

LNW: I have no idea what is going to happen. I quit my job to do this play. I could afford to self produce because I had a really good job and then when the show started, I quit and in order to be able to pay rent I moved upstate. So I’ve been couch-surfing and I’m just at the point where I’m wondering: how am I going to live? What’s the best way to sustain myself as an artist? My whole life is a big question mark right now.
 

CR: Totally. But I’m so, so glad to hear you say the theater world is so fun.
 

LNW: Oh my god, yeah.
 

CR: I don’t know if people say that, that often.
 

LNW: I love it. I wish I could do this all the time. It’s a gift to have a production. I literally had the time of my life. The fact that they put sixteen diverse actors on stage to tell a story that deals with some big questions – that means things are changing. And we had fun.
 

CR: We had fun, too. 

 

 

 

Leah Nanako Winkler is from Kamakura, Japan and Lexington, Kentucky. Her other plays incluse Death for Sydney Black (terraNova Collective), Double Suicide At Ueno Park!!! (EST Marathon), and more. She was a winner of the 2015 Samuel French OOB Festical, 2016 Susan Smith Blackburn Nominee, member of Youngblood, and the Dorothy Stelsin New American Writers Group at Primary Stages. Pending MFA at Brooklyn College. Learn more at www.leahwinkler.org.

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A Conversation with Sigrid Gilmer

 

Even from 3000 miles away, Sigrid Gilmer’s exuberance, artistic insight, and hilarious writing brightened our days. In this conversation, we discuss why she reimagined Harriet Tubman as an action star in Harry and the Thief, the myth of niche writing, a pesky little thing called the fourth wall, and everything in between.

 

 

Esther Cohen: Give me the quick biography of Sigrid Gilmer.
 

Sigrid Gilmer: I was in born in San Francisco and raised out in the ‘burbs in Pittsburg, California–
 

EC: It’s called ‘Pittsburg’?
 

SG: Yeah [laughs]. It doesn’t have an ‘H’ on the end! The town had a steel plant early in its history so they changed the name to ‘Pittsburg.’ So yes, it’s not very original. But that’s where I grew up. 
I went to college at Cal State LA and studied theater, but not playwriting – I did acting and directing and was just a total theater nerd overall. And towards the end of my college career, right before I was about to graduate, I fell out of love with acting. I realized I didn’t have any control, it was high stress, and I wasn’t having fun anymore. You don’t have any agency when it comes to being able to do your art. You’re always dependent on somebody else.
 

EC: How did you make the transition from actor to playwright?
 

SG: I had a playwriting class and an English class to take right before I graduated. And the playwriting class just made sense to me. I found this new way to put myself in another person’s shoes. I could still pretend to be somebody else, something I loved about acting, but in a way that seemed to fit better.
 

EC: So tell me, what is the difference between New York and LA for playwriting? It seems unusual to be a playwright based in LA.
 

SG: So, the caveat here is that I don’t really leave my house that much [laughs]. So the scene that I’m in is a very small community. Most of the theater in LA is very small and company- and actor-driven. Personally, I feel much freer out here than I did in New York. It’s not exactly that nobody is paying attention, but the stakes aren’t as high.
 

EC: Tell me about the spark for this play. It’s a pretty traditional story presented in a really uniquely funny and fast-paced way. How did the base idea and the unusual structure of the play come together?
 

SG: A couple different threads merged to make this play. I joined two writing groups in LA, Center Theatre Group and Skylight Theatre, that involved writing a play over the span of one year. And I was talking to a friend of mine, a playwright who writes a lot of TYA (Theatre for Young Audiences) plays, and he was talking about how a bunch of TYA plays that deal with African Americans experiences – he made this big joke – that all of them were about Harriet Tubman. And I remember saying, “Well, I’m gonna write a Harriet Tubman play!”
 

EC: And it’s gonna be different!
 

SG: Exactly! I’m gonna write my own version of ‘The Harriet Tubman Play’! I had The Thief and The Mad Scientist characters from a previous short play. I started thinking, oh, I have these characters that I really love over here, and I have Harriet Tubman over here. And I just started playing around thinking, how can I mesh these characters together?
 
I went into the writing process knowing the basics of Harriet Tubman, but I was poking around on the internet and read that she apparently carried a gun with her. When the people traveling North would get freaked out, she would pull out her gun and she would tell them, “You’re gonna be free or you’re gonna be dead.” I read that and instantly thought it was the coolest, most action-movie badassery I had ever heard in my life. Like, why hasn’t Michael Bay done a big flashy Harriet Tubman action movie? [laughs] And as I was writing, a writer at Skylight said, “You should have a trailer for the play.” He was just being snarky, but I thought, “y’know, I should have a trailer. That feels appropriate for this play.” So the action movie concept kept informing the play’s style.
 

EC: Even outside of the guiding theme of “action movie,” the play has a structure I’ve never seen before. Did you dictate in the script the dance breaks and chase scenes and repeated montages? How much of that did you imagine when you first wrote the play, and how much was developed with the director and actors?
 

SG: The short answer is yes, all of the action sequences and songs are written into the play. Of course the specifics get developed in the room with me and the actors and the director. So the tone is everywhere in the script, but how it looks has been different in each production.
 

EC: What do you hope to achieve by very specifically dictating action in a script? Some playwrights love stage directions; others hate them. What’s your stance?
 

SG:: Theater is a visual medium. As much as it is auditory and linguistic, in the end, it must be visual. Movement informs action – it carries the story. I think you can get a lot of storytelling and emotional punch with gesture and movement as much as you can, and sometimes even more so, than with just language. So I do see the action in my head because it is part of the story I’m telling. What the actors are physically doing, how their bodies carry the story, is important to me. That, to me, is an essential aspect of writing a play.
 

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EC: The play also breaks the fourth wall a ton. Tell me about that.
 

SG: I enjoy the idea that my plays are really just me and the audience, in my backyard, playing. “Let’s pretend this is a spaceship; let’s pretend this is a horse; let’s pretend the floor is lava!” I like that proverbial play found in all theater. And I like the idea of the form acknowledging that and making the audience complicit in it. Saying, no, we’re not actually going back to the 1800s, no we’re not in somebody’s living room – none of this is real. Because you can see people breathe and spit.
 

EC: And that’s the point!
 

SG: Yes, exactly. That’s the point, and that’s the joy and the fun of it: that we’re all gonna sit here together and say, “Let’s play!” To me, that is one of the great things about theater that other storytelling mediums don’t get to do.
 

EC: And breaking the fourth wall is really just another form of audience engagement.
 

SG: Yeah, it’s “Hey, welcome!” I love that engagement and deciding that on this night, in this space, we’re all together and we’re gonna make some shit happen. For me, that always feels right and juicy and delicious.
Especially with this play, because I’m playing around with subject matter that gets told in a certain way all the time, I felt like I needed to reach out to the audience and acknowledge, no, this isn’t the way we normally tell this.
 

EC: You had to acknowledge the unusual circumstances.
 

SG: And also question “Why do we always tell it the other way?” Why are all stories about people of color always tragic, tragic stories? There’s a set frame around suffering. The play actively butts up against that and says, “We can still tell this story and these people can be happy and have agency and joy.” And at the same time, it still acknowledges – not even the challenges –
 

EC: The bullshit.
 

SG: Right! The insurmountable, horrible, messed-up shit that happens. But that stuff isn’t framed in a way that makes the people tragic. Being born into a situation that is fucked up and tragic is different from being fucked up and tragic because of a situation.
 

EC: This play, along with many of your other works, is chock full of both obvious and not-so-obvious historical and popular culture references. How do those references find their way into your writing? What do you hope to achieve with them?
 

SG: When I write, I’m writing for and from what’s in my head. This sounds so narcissistic and selfish, but my first audience is always myself. Like, naming the band of slaves after the Jolie-Pitt kids literally happened because I was obsessed with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie when I was writing it. And all the cultural references from civil war and antebellum-style movies were just what came to mind when I thought about the content of the play.
 
Music also helps me a lot in my writing process, so the soundtracks I make when I write will make it into the play. When I was looking for songs and trying to figure out characters through those songs, Rebel Yell started playing in iTunes. And it just dawned on me: oh, Rebel Yell has roots in the Civil War, and it sends a kind of fucked-up message. So in my mind, that song fit Harry perfectly. Because this show messes with time, it felt super normal to insert, like, a Dawson’s Creek reference. Because why not? Nothing else in this play plays by the rules. Also, I was watching Dawson’s Creek while writing it [laughs]. My writing is just me working through my own feelings and assumptions about the play and the content. I was working through what I’d read about Harriet Tubman and the Civil War in order to write the play. That ends up getting filtered through my own idiosyncratic interests and whatever I connect with.
 

EC: Tell me about the rehearsal process for this play.
 

SG: In this rehearsal process, and in other the rehearsal rooms of other productions, what I’ve found is that the table work, the first week of being with the play, is important for unpacking the themes, the hard stuff, the messed up stuff. So especially in this production, that first week was really remarkable because we just sat and talked about race, and slavery, and what it’s like to be a woman of color, and how we frame history, and how images about people of color and women get disseminated and framed, and how we negotiate those frames. The first week was laying all that stuff out.
 
The rest of the rehearsal process felt really playful. Katie Lindsay, the director, ran such a warm, open, creative, collaborative room. And this cast – I’m shaking my head now because I can’t even find the words. They are talented and facile and just badass. Everyday in that room was a fucking joy. And for me – outside of making an amazing, great, successful show – the process needs to be wonderful and joyful and encouraging so that I’ll actually want to make another play.
 

EC: And as a member of the creative team, your time is really the process.
 

SG: I think the process matters for everybody. Because how miserable and horrible would it be to be in a room and a process where people aren’t giving and generous and kind to one another? That energy filters down into the final product of the play and the audience feels it. I think, and hope, that our joy comes across onstage and informs the play.
 

EC: This play reclaims a story that is usually told in distorted or sanitized ways about people like you. Have you always had an attraction to writing about people of color, about women, about your personal experience, and rewriting those narratives?
 

SG: I mean, it might be super egocentric, but yes, a lot of the time, I’m writing about me.
 

EC: I’ll also go back on my own question and say that it’s not really egocentric. When women or people of color write about themselves, they get told they’re writing for a niche. But when white men write stories about white men they’re never told that.
 

SG: Exactly. There’s an idea that white maleness is somehow universal and everyone else is super specific. It’s just not true. Everyone’s writing is super specific. Tennessee William’s writing was super specific, but because he fit into the dominant power structure, he gets to be universal.
 

EC: Plays about rich white people are not universal.
 

SG: They’re specifically about rich white people. Which is fine! I love a good Noel Coward play, but let’s be real and say that that is a specific cultural viewpoint. And that’s great, and there really is enough room for everyone’s story. There are a ton of people in the world, so why do all the stories we see have to be about one specific, narrow group?
 

EC: And why do stories that are not about that group have to be ‘niche’?
 

SG: Exactly. Because it’s all niche. It’s all one person sitting down and saying, “I’m gonna think about and explore x, y, and z from my point of view, and my point of view is predicated on my race, my gender, my sexuality, where I grew up, how old I am, and all of that goes into it.”
 
So really, to answer your question, I honestly don’t even think about it. I get interested in a topic and it filters through me and what creatively inspires me and what I’m working through in my own life. I just think “I want to see people that look like me.” Because if I can’t be an actor, at least I can make characters that look like me and live through them.
 

EC: As you said at the very beginning of our conversation, acting is not the only part of theater that involves pretending to be someone else, and I think people forget that. Every single part of theater is about projecting yourself onstage.
 

SG: Hopefully we’re bringing ourselves as artists to the work. And if not, why do it? All of who you are informs your writing. So I don’t think of my writing as niche any more than any other writer’s writing is niche. It’s me specifically. Another black woman would write a totally different play. And you’d think I’m stating the obvious there, but unfortunately, that’s not obvious to a lot of people.
 

EC: Have people approached you and said, “you’re a black female writer, write me a play like a black female writer?” Do you feel lumped in with a demographic?
 

SG: I don’t actually. I’ve been very fortunate to not have an experience in which someone says “write blacker,” or you know, “write more ladylike” [laughs].
 

EC: That’s nice.
 

SG: It is nice. And if that does happen, I will cross, and then burn down, that horrible bridge when I come to it.
 

 

 

 

Sigrid Gilmer makes black comedies that are historically bent, totally perverse, joyfully irreverent and are concerned with issues of identity, pop culture and contemporary American society. Her work has been performed at the Skylight Theatre, Pavement Group, Know Theatre of Cincinnati, Cornerstone Theater Company and Highways Performance Space. She is a winner of the Map Fund Creative Exploration Grant, the James Irving Foundation Fellowship and is an United States Artist Ford Fellow in Theatre.

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A Conversation with Anne Kauffman

 

During intermission at Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, everyone was having a conversation. Not the usual, “Do you have to go to the bathroom?” or “I’m going to get a drink” chatter that generally fills a lobby. As I stood near the doors, I heard a daughter ask her mother what the 60s were like for her, two friends debating their level of empathy for Sidney, and a woman telling a girlfriend about how deeply she understood, on a spiritual level, what Iris was going through in her marriage. The theater was full of vibrant, smart, diverse people engaging with the complicated characters they’d come to know during the first act. And the guiding hand that shaped the beautiful, naturalistic production, running at The Goodman through June 5th, is director Anne Kauffman.
 

 

Kelly Wallace: How did you come to be involved in this production with The Goodman?
 

Anne Kauffman: Well, I actually brought it to the Goodman because I’d been wanting to do it for ten years. I originally came into contact with it when I was an undergrad and I was an actress and I was looking for an audition monologue. You know those anthologies of audition monologues. Well I was looking through it and I found this monologue, the Iris monologue about her fear of auditioning. So that was my first encounter with the play. And then several years later, when I was working at NYU (teaching directing) one of my students wanted to do this play for her thesis. I was like, “Really, you want to do this play? It’s so creaky…what do you want to do this old thing for?” But she really wanted to do it and so the faculty agreed to let her. I was her mentor and I sat in and watched rehearsals and I was totally blown away. I was completely blown away. I was first and foremost blown away by the marriage at the center of it and then its immediacy and urgency in terms of the social and political climate. So I started talking to Joi Gresham, who is the Director and Trustee of the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust, about doing this. I just fell in love with it. And so I started to pursue a production of it. And finally gave it to Bob [Falls] after Smokefall when we were talking about what we should do together next. And I said, “I really want to do this…” and he was like, “Great, let’s do it.”
 

KW: What made you feel like The Goodman was the right home for it?
 

AK: I feel like Bob and The Goodman are expansive thinkers. They’re interested in the epic, like 2666, and plays that are very ambitious in what they’re trying to do, who they’re trying to reach, what they’re trying to say. I feel like there’s a kind of large embrace that The Goodman has; they are interested in diverse voices and varying styles and eclectic subject matter so this felt like a really good fit in terms of that aesthetic. And also Bob was saying earlier at a board meeting, which I thought was kind of interesting, that he was interested in the lesser-known works of great writers. So, that seemed to be a little bit of a theme with Thornton Wilder this season, with The Matchmaker, and then I brought this to them. A Raisin in the Sun recently had its 50th birthday in 2009, and this had its 50th birthday in 2014. So all the stars aligned and here we are.
 

KW: You’ve worked in New York a lot too, what do you think the differences are between Chicago audiences and New York audiences?
 

AK: Oh gosh. It’s hard. I think that Chicago audiences come at things with their heart and New York audiences come to things with their brain. And neither one is better or worse. I think that they’re both necessary and ways of watching work. That’s where I’m at. That’s my very unprofessional opinion about it.
 

KW: How does doing this play today, in this political climate, affect your perception of the show and your process?
 

AK: Well, it’s really interesting. I think for awhile when I was passing this play around, people were really hesitant to do it because they felt like the issues being explored in it have been somehow resolved in our country. Unfortunately, recently these issues have raised their ugly heads once again. They sort of resurfaced; it’s all been underneath the surface for a while, and now we’re in a moment where all of this rumbling is actually erupting. Trump is really allowing the vitriol and things that have been buried for a while and never went away, that were just sublimated – he’s opening up the floodgates. It’s a little bit…it’s funny, I was reading the Carlyle interview that you did –which was really amazing – and he had said something about how it felt like The Purge, and it does. It has that kind of feel to it. We’re living in a time where gay marriage is…yes, we’ve made some strides, but there are still a lot of issues with sexuality and the fact that people can’t go into the bathroom they feel they have the right to go into, in this country, in this day. Definitely women – pay equity, and the struggle women have to gain the same access that men do…it’s still an issue. And we have a movement called Black Lives Matter, the fact that we actually need to have that in 2016 is pretty astonishing and reprehensible.
 

KW: Black Lives Matter is very close to my heart, I’ve demonstrated with them in New York quite a few times.
 

AK: Oh, that’s really cool.
 

KW: And the energy there in that movement, especially in the aftermath of Eric Garner, was transformative. It’s interesting because Lorraine Hansberry was so in favor of civil disobedience as a means of communication and protest. She’s pretty hard on white America when they don’t accept these kind of “radical” tactics.
 

AK: That’s exactly right, that’s what this play is about. She’s trying to excite the white liberal into action. That’s what The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window is all about.
 

KW: What is the heart of the play, for you? What excites you about it?
 

AK: I think the play is about commitment and engagement, and in order to do that you have to really understand who you are at your core, the revelation of your true self, and be honest with yourself. What I really really like about the play is that it’s not just a political statement, it’s a personal statement. This marriage is happening.
 

KW: The politics and the personal are so intertwined in this show.
 

AK: Absolutely. I keep thinking what’s happening is that Sidney has this young wife who is growing and changing right in front of his eyes and he’s still treating her the same way as he always has treated her and he not seeing the change. There’s a rupture that happened with him not being able to recognize the change and address the change. The same thing is happening in his world at that moment, the same thing is happening in our world. We’re very afraid of change and we don’t know how to adapt to change. It’s really crazy. Again, Donald Trump, wanting to send us back to the Dark Ages. For him, it’s not about change; it’s about going back to what it used to be. It’s oppressive. That’s what is exciting to me is that the political is being reflected in the personal, and in the marriage.
 

KW: Do you think it’s possible to separate the two completely?
 

AK: I think a lot of us are able to. I’ve always thought that a certain strata of society can very much separate the personal and political because they don’t have as much at stake, in terms of what laws are being passed. Meaning, there are certain people of a certain class in this country who can live a life unaffected by government policies. The first time I took notice of this was when I went to the Soviet Union when it was still the “Soviet Union.” I come from a very comfortable home and family – suburban Arizona, Jewish. And going to the Soviet Union and seeing how directly the government is mistreating its citizens, it’s like a 1:1 ratio there. It was very clear that the government was the parents who are treating the people, their children, poorly. And you could see it on the street. No one is exempt from it. In our country, there are people who can be exempt, not literally exempt, but they can certainly live in a world where they’re not looking it in the face.
 

KW: Gender issues come up a lot in this show, and in the world. It’s interesting because in theater, which you think of as such a liberal art form, or that the community is such a liberal group of people…but then you look at stats like 10.7% of works in the ’12-13 season on Broadway were written by women, gender parity in theater is not where it should be, even though audiences are 68% women. What has your experience with that been?
 

AK: This is a touchy issue. We talk about this all the time. It’s interesting to hear you say that, and it’s true, you have this liberal art form, this accepting art form, and they’re treating their women not so well, which is exactly what Sidney is. He’s this liberal guy, who thinks of himself as a very experimental, avante garde, forward-thinking person who is ignoring his wife. I mean, it’s true the statistics don’t lie. For me personally, I think it’s dangerous to get caught up in it. I feel like I need to put my head down, and do the work, and I’ll be recognized, and that’s a little bit naive because I don’t think I actually have the access that guys do to certain things. I’m a little myopic when I put my head down and think, “This is actually great, I’m doing my work and I’m getting stuff…” and I look up and around me and I’m like, “Holy fuck.” We’re nowhere near where some of these dudes are. It is difficult to identify, it’s hard to say that if you don’t get a certain job, it’s because I’m a woman. So it’s hard to identify it specifically. And the last thing I’ll say is that this all changed for me when I got back from graduate school in the late 90s. I came back to New York and I was having an interview. I was being interviewed by Zelda Fichandler for a job at NYU. She said to me, “How’s it going?” I said, “Well, you know, it’s hard being a woman in this field.” And she looked at me and she was like, “What?” Zelda Fichandler, who basically started the regional theater movement in the 50s. She translated Russian documents in World War II. She built the Arena Stage, the NYU acting conservatory, she’s responsible for basically a huge movement in the theater. And for me, that was when I decided I’m going to do my work, do it well, hopefully, and be recognized. It’s a very complicated issue.
 

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KW: You started as an actor…what made you switch to directing?
 

AK: I’m kind of a control freak, I think. I always was one growing up. I grew up in a family of six children and I was always organizing these little shows with the kids in the neighborhood. But I wanted to be a musical theater star, that was what I really wanted to be. I wasn’t very good. It became really evident in undergrad when I kept being cast as guys. It was because there weren’t a lot of guys in the drama department and they were like, “Well, what’re we gonna do with Annie? Just stick her in some breeches and whatever.” It became very apparent, I knew that I wasn’t good. Someone gave me a play to do in the dorm and so I did it and then I took a directing class and the guy who taught it, Michael Hackett, was like, “You’re a director.” So that’s how I came to it. Also, as an actor, not only was I not very good, I really checked out. When I was in a play and a director was telling me what to do I would sort of pay attention only when he told me what to do and then I would check out. I got bored. I didn’t have an idea of the whole play or any interest in figuring out where I am in the play. I’m actually, by nature, kind of a lazy person. So directing was the only thing that fully engaged all of my faculties in a way that I was interested in. It kept me excited. You’re responsible for so much, it was the only thing that would bring me out of what I think of as my laziness, to activate myself, to get me excited about something.
 

KW: When you direct a show like this, when you start the rehearsal process and start working with actors and putting the pieces together…do you find it helpful to talk to the cast about the outside, real life issues or is it more useful to you to stick close to the text and keep it in the bubble of the show?
 

AK: That’s a very good question. I don’t think I ever talked to the cast; I mean, we all agreed that the play is important to do right now but we actually, all of us, went inside the play. We have a great dramaturg team, so we all immersed ourselves in 1964. I think that the more we immersed ourselves in 1964 and the more expansive our knowledge became, just by being in that world, the parallels became really apparent. But we never said, “Oh, that’s like today!” We were just living inside of that world.
 

KW: As you said, you grew up in Arizona in a fairly comfortable environment. What’s it like to come at this as a white woman from a comfortable background, to look at something that touches on race, and privilege, and all those things?
 

AK: It’s funny because what I like about it, and why I think it’s interesting to have a woman direct it is because it’s Lorraine Hansberry, it’s a woman’s point of view so in a way that’s why I think I’m very attached to Iris. I think she’s the person with the most evident journey in the play from the beginning to the end. And I happen to be a white liberal, so having to take apart the play and understand all the different points of view and to identify where the white liberals’ blind spots are, was a really interesting process. It’s been really incredible. Joi Gresham has come into rehearsal, one of our understudies is very well-versed in the civil rights movement, so it’s been an education. There are so many different points of view, so many different kinds of people in the play, it’s really a community. It’s a motley crew of people. We’ve got politicians, we’ve got artists, we’ve got activists, we’ve got actors. It felt like my way of educating myself about where Lorraine Hansberry was coming from, to be in dialogue with this play.
 

KW: You’ve done a lot of new work, and then you come to a show like this that’s from the past. What’re the differences for you in coming back to a piece like this and doing something new?
 

AK: Since I’m exploring this piece for the first time, and we’re working with several different versions of the play, and again we have the dramaturgs, we have Joi, so in a way…it feels like a new play. We just changed where the intermission is, so it tells a very different story now. The major difference for me is, well, first, there’s a responsibility that feels different. I feel like this is a play that has been done, it’s had a rocky past, I think it’s so important for our communities to see this play, to access Lorraine Hansberry through this particular vantage point and to hear what she had to say and how it’s relevant today. So I feel a responsibility there. Of course I feel a responsibility for new work too, but it’s a different thing. What’s really interesting is I don’t actually have a playwright in the room, so I can and need to answer for myself. I’m so used to the collaboration and asking if something works, or a playwright telling me, “No, we can’t do that.” What’s nice is it feels like it’s all me. It’s generative in terms of the world, and that it’s totally my responsibility.
 

KW: Who are some of your favorite female playwrights? What other plays are you drawn to?
 

AK: Lillian Hellman. Contemporary ones…Anne Washburn, Jenny Schwartz, Annie Baker, Amy Herzog, Sarah Gancher, Sarah Gubbins. Oh god, there’s a million. A bunch of people. Tracy Scott Wilson, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Claire Barron, Lynn Nottage, Quiara Alegria Hudes.
 

KW: What plays did you feel like made you gravitate towards theater? What specifically about live theater is it that you’re drawn to?
 

AK: I grew up on musicals! All the greats. Oklahoma, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, Kiss Me Kate, The Wizard of Oz. I mean, those are the things I grew up on. And what’s so great about musicals is that they’re inherently not realistic. They’re really not realistic. So you’re entering another world, and I was always very drawn to these other worlds. As I got older, I got very interested in Eastern European writers who were very, very dark. They were coming out of World War II and so had very desolate points of view on humankind. It’s very stripped down; it’s a very different kind of theatricality. It’s very raw; it’s very real. It’s a really strange journey that I’ve had because then for a while, I was sort of known as the weird new play director in New York. It’s funny because growing up I was much more interested in linear narratives and these musicals, but wait, now that I’m thinking about it out loud, I’m like…of course, there’s nothing weirder than a musical, actually, when you think about it.
 

KW: You have to go in with an inherent suspension of disbelief that other art forms don’t require.
 

AK: Exactly. I think that’s really true.
 

KW: You walk in and you have to immediately accept, for example, that singing is dialogue from the very beginning.
 

AK: Right, it’s absurd!
 

KW: The show talks about idealism and the way we look at people and the ways that people can disappoint us or not disappoint us. How do you feel like political idealism has evolved between the world of this play and where we are now? In an election year where people talk about compromise and the lesser of two evils, is idealism a luxury?
 

AK: You know, this election season generates such a cynicism. And I feel like we’re at a very cynical point in our history. I do feel like there’s a lot of succumbing to the issues. We’re not actually solving them right now. It’s a difficult thing to figure out how to solve. And then you think about Lorraine’s time, where there was a lot of political activity, but then I think she would say that her generation and what was going on then, that they had a lot of cynicism too and I would say the same thing. I actually think not much has changed. What I mean is, I feel like the ratio of idealistic to cynical people probably has not changed. I think this is what I feel like Lorraine Hansberry was trying to say in a way with this play, and what she felt was so important to her, was that we cannot be subsumed by our cynicism. We cannot be subsumed by our failure. We cannot give over to not being able to solve these issues. We cannot acquiesce. Period. She believes that even though there’s a lot of darkness, there are a lot of issues, a lot of problems, a lot of conflicts, she believes in humanity. She believes in humanity triumphing. That’s what I find so moving about the play. Inside the play, there’s a duality. There’s David, there’s Sidney. David is absorbed in the existentialist, the absurdist, “there’s nothing we can do, so let’s give up and acquiesce to the darkness as human beings.” Sidney, weirdly, is the most positive cynic I’ve ever encountered. So the argument is what’s the path we want to take, and Lorraine was having it at her time too. Do not give into thinking we can’t do anything about. We’re all in the same boat. Yes, there’s a lot of darkness and cruelty and human beings are capable of terrible, terrible things but we’re also capable of really great things. I think that remains today. I feel like that’s where we’re at.
 

KW: Lorraine was such a political person. Do you consider yourself to be a political person?
 

AK: No! That’s the thing, I’m really not. How I align with Lorraine is that these plays are tools. These plays are a weapon. These plays are meant to provoke. I feel like, for me, I’m more interested in going inside of them and educating myself. I haven’t marched in years. I haven’t been involved. Her way was writing these plays, my way is directing them and sharing them with people. That’s my political act, my political act is directing, not marching on the street.
 

KW: What was your biggest challenge coming at this play?
 

AK: Stylistically, this is a tricky play. Lorraine was playing with a lot of different styles, so trying to figure out how to approach that was very tricky. I know when I first wanted to do it, I thought I would have to convince people that this was actually a relevant piece of writing. I felt like that was my chore, that it was going to be crazy to make it clear that it’s relevant, but that challenge has become the easiest thing. I didn’t have to really do anything, unfortunately, to have it resonate so deeply with audiences.
 

KW: For audiences, seeing a show like this will, hopefully, start a conversation for them. Do you listen to the audience reaction?
 

AK: It depends on the day. I really do like to eavesdrop. I think it’s important to hear how people are interpreting the story and sometimes I will actually outright say, “This moment, what did it mean to you?” I do canvas the audience sometimes to make sure that the story I want to be telling is actually coming through.
 

KW: Do you read reviews and listen to critics, or is it the audience you’re most interested in hearing from?
 

AK: Critics…I mean, you want them to like the show. I’m much more interested in how audiences are responding to it and receiving it. Unfortunately, after a review comes out, that’s the way the audience sees it. It’s nice to get to them before they’re being told how to react to something.
 

KW: Well, there’s a lack of diversity in criticism too. So when you put such weight on a review, sometimes you don’t realize that you’re only getting a certain point of view, a certain type of person who comes into that job.
 

AK: That’s totally right. And you know, the critics don’t do what they used to do. Critics were actually supposed to contextualize art. Contextualize the plays. Their role wasn’t to say see it or don’t come see it. Their role was to put it in the larger context of our art form, which is sadly, sadly missing these days. I actually think that some of our critics have no idea about theater history. So they criticize something without realizing the etymology of it, the antecedents to it. So yes, it’s very problematic. The diversity and what it’s come to.
 

KW: We don’t necessarily have a Frank Rich or a Brooks Atkinson. There’s this storied history of theatrical criticism, and you see what we have now; it’s a different world.
 

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AK: I don’t know if you read Joseph Papp’s biography, which is so amazing that he called up a critic and told him you have to get your ass back here and you have to re-review this, and the critic was like…okay. The same thing happened with this show. There were a couple critics who came back after panning it and re-engaged with it and changed their minds. What we do, it’s sad that it’s still happening, but Lorraine Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun and she was celebrated as a black voice. And then she writes a play about white people. There’s only one black person and he passes for white. So the critics come and they’re looking through these lenses and it’s so crazy for them, they come expecting something. They expect her to stay in the box they created for her, the black culture box.
 

KW: She’s been criticized, in this work, for not representing the African-American experience.
 

AK: Exactly. And we still have that, as a problem. We don’t let black writers write outside their culture. White people can write about anyone’s culture. So we’re still in that place where that’s happening.
 

KW: It’s that same problem of white stories or men’s stories are universal, but it’s always a qualifier for other people. She’s a female playwright, she’s an African-American playwright, you’re attached to a label.
 

AK: And that’s part of the issue that I have talking about women and all that. The New York Times did this piece on female directors and got a bunch of us together and did it. I was actually bummed I said yes to it because the fact that we need to have an article about it means we’re ghettoized. That’s part of my conflict with this issue. If we really give into it, then we’re saying that we’re a ghettoized community. That’s the tricky balance.
 

KW: We don’t do that to white men, we don’t interview them asking them to talk about the white male experience.
 

AK: Exactly.
 

KW: What do you think Lorraine would think if she came into the world now? Would she be horrified, excited?
 

AK: I think she’d be horrified. But I was watching the video for “Formation” recently and I thought…oh my god, she and Beyoncé would be best buds. I feel like she would love Beyoncé. Holy shit, that video totally blew me away. I didn’t realize, was there some controversy about it?
 

KW: Well, there was this reaction to it about this idea that somehow by celebrating black culture she was inciting racial conflict, or that she was inciting violence against police by referencing the Black Lives Matter movement. People saw it as aggressive instead of celebratory.
 

AK: And even so, what if? What if it is a criticism? I think that Lorraine and Beyoncé would be best friends. It’s really sad to me that she didn’t live to meet her. But I do think she’d be horrified. Don’t you?
 

KW: I do. I think she would be on the street in Ferguson.
 

AK: Oh my god, yeah. And then she would criticize Black Lives Matter because it wouldn’t be exactly what she thought when she first joined, or it wasn’t exactly what she wanted it to be. She was a very singular, specific, opinionated, and complex person.
 

KW: And she would be right to say that even that movement has it’s problems. I remember going to the protests and there would be TV cameras, and it would always be these young, white college kids jumping in front of the camera to explain why they were there, instead of saying this isn’t my microphone, this isn’t my place.
 

AK: Exactly.
 

KW: Where do you want to see us in five years, ten years? Where should theater be going?
 

AK: That’s such a good question. Well, I definitely think there needs to be a diversity of voices, and diversity of how to tell a story. We’re still kind of stuck in modern drama and not contemporary drama. I feel like the theater has a responsibility to show its audiences the gray area and contradictions and complexity. We don’t get that in our lives; we have to make these decisions. Politicians are so black and white, and we’re scared to acknowledge the gray area. I think it’s very important that we, working in this art form, address that. To do that, it’s not just a straight narrative, it’s a diversity of style. One thing I will say, I’m very interested in plays that are language heavy, that experiment with language. That’s what theater does best. Language creates the world, unlike TV or film where sets create the world, it’s actually the language in the theater… So I really want us to listen again, in a new way.
 

 

 

 

Anne Kauffman returns to Goodman Theatre, where she previously directed Smokefall in both the 2014/2015 and 2013/2014 Seasons. Ms. Kauffman is an Obie Award–winning director whose production highlights include You Got Older with P73; The Nether at MCC; Somewhere Fun at Vineyard Theatre; Your Mother’s Copy of the Kama Sutra, Detroit and Maple and Vine at Playwrights Horizons; Belleville at New York Theatre Workshop, Yale Repertory Theatre and Steppenwolf Theatre Company; Tales from My Parents’ Divorce at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and The Flea Theater; This Wide Night at Naked Angels; Becky Shaw, Cherokee and Body Awareness at The Wilma Theater; Slowgirl and Stunning at LCT3; Sixty Miles to Silver Lake with Page 73 Productions at Soho Rep; God’s Ear at Vineyard Theatre and New Georges; The Thugs at Soho Rep and the musical 100 Days at Z Space. Ms. Kauffman is a recipient of the Joan and Joseph F. Cullman Award for Extraordinary Creativity, the Alan Schneider Director Award and several Barrymore awards. She is a Program Associate with Sundance Theater Institute, a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect, a member of Soho Rep’s Artistic Council, on the New Georges’ Kitchen Cabinet, an alumna of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab and the Drama League, a founding member of the Civilians and an associate artist with Clubbed Thumb with whom she created the CT Directing Fellowship.

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Firebrand Theatre Company

 
As soon as the press release came out announcing the launch of Firebrand Theatre Company, the first equity, feminist musical theater company, we knew we had to sit down with its founders, Harmony France and Danni Smith. So, we spent an afternoon tucked into the corner of Hoosier Mama Pie Company in Evanston to talk about feminism and musical theater. A few days later, I attended the opening night of Hazel at Drury Lane in Oakbrook, and I mentioned that I’d met with them to a friend. She asked, “Was it at Hoosier Mama?” Our feminist pie summit had been overheard, and she was just as excited as I was. As it turns out, Firebrand’s launch was unintentionally well-timed, at a moment when the Chicago theater community is beginning to have some real conversations about the importance of representation and diversity. Firebrand and its founders are about to start a whole lot more.
 

 

Kelly Wallace: The timing of all this is perfect. It seems like you’ve jumped into a moment where this conversation is happening in a lot of different places.
 

Harmony France: It’s very odd. Because we didn’t plan it. There’s a couple of weird things that happened, and it’s why we think we’re on the right path. My post about body image and inclusive casting that went viral; we’d already been planning the company when that happened. Then we had to push our press launch day by a day because Steppenwolf was announcing, so we pushed it a day, not knowing that day was International Women’s Day. Not intentional.
 

Danni Smith: It’s all very serendipitous.
 

HF: Well, it is intentional in the sense that this is the conversation we wanted to have. What isn’t intentional is the “jumping on a bandwagon” – this is already the direction we’d been heading in for for a long time, actually knowing we’re starting a theater company for the last six months. But everything is happening very fast and it’s confusing a lot of old, white men. Our community is demanding change at a very rapid pace and I think a lot of people are really taken aback by it. I think it’s the quote, “Once we know better, we do better”. That’s what everyone needs to do. Take away the blame, take away the shame.
 

DS: And the defensiveness.
 

HF: And the offensiveness. All of it. And just…”oh, okay, now I know better, so now I’ll do better.”
 

KW: Why Firebrand? What inspired the name?
 

HF: We were stream of consciousness trying to think of something. We thought of Greek goddesses; I wanted something very ancient. This has been around for a long time. We thought Athena, but that’s a little on the nose. Then I thought of Cassandra of Troy, who was the prophetess who no one believed, and one of my favorite books from when I was younger was Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Firebrand, where Cassandra is the firebrand. We liked it, and then looked up the meaning and it was like, “to incite change or cause radical action”.
 

DS: We were like…yup! There it is. That’s perfect.
 

KW: You just launched. Firebrand is here. How are you guys doing? What’s the response been like so far?
 

HF: It’s been overwhelmingly positive. Yeah. We’ve got support…nationally, not just in Chicago. Just people reaching out. LA, New York…
 

KW: This doesn’t exist anywhere else.
 

HF: It doesn’t exist anywhere. We’re the first one!
 

DS: The more we work on it and realize that, because we are so laser-focused with our mission, I think some people would get scared and say that’s very limiting. And for us, we acknowledge that we’ve not made it easy on ourselves. But that’s the excitement; it’s going to keep us really focused on what kind of work we’re producing.
 

KW: What kind of work do you want to produce?
 

HF: We definitely want to do full-blown musicals. It’s less about the type of musical and more about representation of women onstage, passing the Bechdel test, passing what we’ve started as the “Firebrand Test.”
 

The Firebrand Test:
— In this work, there are at least as many women as men in the cast,
— It lends itself to inclusive, diverse casting,
— It empowers women.

 

HF: We’ve both been a part of theater companies before. There’s something different with this one. People are donating their time to us in ways that I’ve never seen before. We don’t even have to ask. People are just approaching us. So I think we’ve really captured something.
 

DS: We’d make a list of like, ten people we could potentially ask to do something assuming that the first eight are going to say no. And then we’ll be…
 

HF: We’re actually – we’re not in trouble, but our next benefit, it’s our “Sung By Her” series, so basically we pick an artist and find some kickass women to do a tribute to that artist. So, the first one we’re doing is Pink. So we’ve reached out to more than what we would normally put in the show, thinking not everyone would do it, and then every person has said yes. So…
 

DS: You’ll get to hear more of Pink!
 

KW:You’re calling yourselves the first equity, feminist musical theater company. Why is it important to be Equity; what’s the importance in differentiating that it’s a union theater company?
 

HF: There are a couple things. One is because the shows we can produce are going to be so limited, by us, by our standards. If we need an Equity actor to play like, a random older character, we don’t want that to be a barrier too. We want to be able to have access to all actors. Plus, we don’t want to be unable to use someone because they’re union. The goal, eventually, is to pay everyone a living wage. That’s important to us too.
 

DS: We want to be a part of that, and I mean commercial in the sense of like, people that come to the theater and subscribe and are theater-goers, we want them to see this as a valid part of the conversation in musical theater. There’s something about people who don’t know the inner workings of Equity and non-equity and all that, there’s something about having that stamp to appeal to a more commercial base. It’s just – ultimately, it’s access.
 

HF: We want to be on the same level as any theater in the city. We want to be competitive with any theater in the city. We don’t really see ourselves as a storefront. I mean, we definitely still want it to be Chicago and have that feel and be in glorious intimate spaces, but also to have the professionalism, and the quality. That’s the goal.
 

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KW: You both come from an acting background. Have you ever turned a role down because you were either offended by or couldn’t stomach the content?
 

DS: It’s an interesting conversation because…I certainly feel like it’s in the light now because of social media and the access we have to raising our voices. I am appreciative of being asked to think before I accept. It would’ve never occurred to me that I couldn’t accept that role or that I shouldn’t go in for that. So I don’t know that there’s anything I’ve turned down at this point, but I certainly have an awareness now.
 

HF: Yeah, I want to say that I’ve walked out of unprofessional situations. I think it’s kind of another reason why we started this company; it’s years and years and years of frustrated conversations on my couch. How we were being treated or having to dance around a male director’s ego or a leading actor’s ego.
 

DS: Or being tired of seeing each other every Saturday morning at whatever callback it was for the same one part that was available to us in that show.
 

HF: To the point that for years we were almost convinced we were the same actor. Which we are not, at all. But we were constantly up for the same roles. And it’s because there is not a variety. We are so different but we are enough alike that we fit into this one type, and it’s just because when you’re a man, in musical theater, you can play anything. When you’re a woman, you’re the virgin, the whore, the mother, or the hag. Those are the options.
 

KW: Now we’re seeing things like Lauren Villegas’ “Am I Right?” and my wonder becomes, at what point is it an actor’s responsibility to say no? It is hard to make a living as an actor; at what point do you have to say no to a job?
 

DS: I think there are instances in which it is very clear. It is, for lack of a better term, black and white. What I appreciate about Lauren’s website is that it’s a series of questions. And ultimately she says, at the end of that, if after asking yourself all of these things you feel like you can move forward, then do that. But just make sure you’ve asked the questions. I think that is a responsibility of actors to do that.
 

KW: Why Chicago? What brought you here? Why are you still here?
 

DS: I’m from Indiana. And I did a New York showcase and I visited L.A., and those were always like, the three options that we were given. You can go to New York, L.A., or Chicago. And I had a professor who was actually with Red Orchid Theatre, but she teaches in Muncie, where I went to school. And she told us, she encouraged everybody to go to Chicago right out of school. Because she said, Chicago is like street grad school, which I always loved. She was like, if you go to Chicago and you show up at auditions, you will work. You know? It may not always be at the Goodman or wherever, but you’re going to work. And if you go to work and you are respectful and you show up on time and you do your job and you’re professional, you’ll probably get the opportunity to work again. I think for me, I just see her people working. They are here to work on their craft. So much risk is taken here, particularly in the storefronts. There’s a glorious, rich storefront scene here. I love that any day of the week you can find something to see and celebrate. Monday’s not necessarily a dark day for everybody here.
 

HF: The quality of work, the risk. I actually grew up in New York. Basically, after being in the Navy for six years, I got out, and the whole time I knew I wanted to get out and be an actor. I auditioned for two schools, Julliard and Columbia College. There was just something about Chicago; there was something about Columbia. You can take a math class, but it’s art-based. Columbia is the craziest liberal arts school ever, and it really appealed to my brain, that had been in this very regimented thing for six years. And the thing about Chicago that has really come home to me after doing a Broadway national tour is what Danni said. It is about the art here. There are actually people here, we all have to make a living. We all have to pay the rent. But we want to be artists first. The show I did was so commercial, and I got to travel the world with it. It was an incredible experience, but all I wanted to do was come home and make art. That’s all I wanted to do. When you’re an actor, particularly musical theater, the ultimate goal for most everyone is Broadway. And I think doing that tour, I was like…oh, maybe that’s not my ultimate goal. Maybe my ultimate goal is that I want to help fix some of these inequities. I truly believe the longer we go on this path that this is my calling. This. Not to star on Broadway. But I want to make a difference. The kind of theater that makes me feel good. I’ve never been a hoofer. I’m not a dancer. I don’t dance in ensembles. Dessa Rose, which I did with Bailiwick in Chicago a few years back, was about slavery, or I did a play at Profiles Theatre, which was about 9/11. When it’s about something, an activist part of me gets lit up. I need that aspect in my art. I need to feel like I’m making the world better, and not just because they’re distracted for an hour. I want them to actually leave the theater thinking about something. There’s just no better place for that then Chicago. I’ve been all over the world and I just wanted to come home.
 

DS: I would say the word that I feel like always comes up among Chicago artists is “community.” I always hear people saying the theater community.
 

HF: We actually care about each other. We care about each other’s careers. Like, in a different world, we could have not been friends because we were constantly in competition with each other. Chicago lends itself to wanting everyone to win. If she wins, I win. There’s just that feeling of camaraderie that I haven’t felt anywhere else…if I am losing a role, I want Danni to be really, really good! It’s just what Amy Poehler says.
 

DS: Bitches get stuff done?
 

HF: Well, bitches get stuff done, yes. But “good for her, not for me”. In that…that wasn’t for me. And every time I have lost something that I wanted so desperately, as far as a role or something, something else has happened that has enriched me more than that initial experience ever could.
 

KW: You said you worked on Dessa Rose and had a lot of conversations about race. When you come into starting Firebrand, you are in a position of power. Your Firebrand Test for submissions specifically lists diverse casting as a priority for you. What does “diverse” casting mean to you? What do you hope this is going to accomplish?
 

HF: Quite honestly, we want to have as many different types of people and women as possible. It just enriches the conversation. I’ve been casting for awhile. When I was with Bailiwick Chicago, we always used inclusive casting. The first show I helped cast at Bailiwick was Aida, and we cast it with an almost all-black cast. And that’s not how Aida is normally done. And Lili-Anne Brown [the director] was like, well, they’re in Africa. And I hadn’t ever thought of that. And I was like…well, yeah! They’re in Africa. It makes so much sense if you really think about it. I don’t see it as, “oh, we have to make sure we have this many of this type of person,” I see it as a privilege to represent as many points of view as we possibly can. It’s so important to us. We are just looking for an open, inclusive community, and that’s how we’re going to pick our shows. We’re going to pick shows that lend themselves to diversity.
 

DS: It’s all about action. It’s like…just do it. Just DO it. We’re committed to going beyond that paragraph blurb, just speaking of our casting right now, you know the blurb. Where it says, “all ethnicities are encouraged to attend”, it’s like…we’re gonna go beyond that. That’s a token stamp. We’re putting it into action. I don’t know how else more to say it. We’re just gonna do the damn thing. It’s also important to us because we’re very aware that we are two white women starting a feminist musical theater company that is committed to inclusive, diverse casting. We didn’t want to be “whitesplaining”.
 

HF: It’s a very complicated and nuanced conversation and feminism has a history of not being the most inclusive for other races. We’re very aware of that too.
 

KW: What made you hit that point of “enough is enough”?
 

DS: It truly has been a conversation we’ve been having for years, that other women have been having too. For me, the turning point was for the past six months I’ve been going through this process…I was close to having the amount of points to take my Equity card but somewhere in my mind, it was still in the distant future. Then I was offered a contract at The Paramount for A Christmas Story and they were like, we need to offer you an Equity contract because of the amount of non-equity we have to use. All of a sudden, it was like, we’re gonna do this. And it made me sit back and reflect on the past ten years of my life in this city as a non-equity actor and the incredible experiences that I’ve been able to have. It’s not that that isn’t available in Equity but the opportunities and the kind of work that’s produced at houses that have to maintain a subscription base and a lot of money…some of those glorious shows for actors where you get to dig in and work on something…they’re usually non-equity storefronts. That’s where those risks are taken. I was having this pain in my heart of…I feel like it’s time to go Equity and give that a try and give myself a chance to be paid a living wage to do what I do. But where can I find my heart again too? And it was in helping others. It was in taking action and this theater company happened because we were like, we need to act. We need to do something about it.
 

HF: It came from conversations not just about theater. It came from conversations about the war on women, about inequities in the political situation right now. And both of us have come to points in our careers where we’ve been like…this is such a vain thing, what are we doing? Shouldn’t we be helping the world? How can we do that? And what we came to is…well, this is what we do, this is how we help the world. We’re not politicians or heart surgeons or any of these things. I make art. But what if we make art with a socially-conscious mission? Then we can change the world, in our way.
 

KW: One of the things that you said is important is feeling like you’re creating a safe space. How do you do that and create an environment where people can express themselves without worrying about being judged for it?
 

DS: I think it’s all about communication. I had an incredibly positive experience with a show called The Wild Party (LaChiusa) and the very first get-together that we had, our director Brenda sat there with us and said, “I care about all of you as people first. You are a person to me before you’re an actor. And so I want to acknowledge that if there’s ever a point in this rehearsal process where you don’t feel safe or you feel like I can’t quite go there today, because today is not a good day, just know we can have that conversation.” And so just for her to have that conversation with us and establish that right away, it empowered everybody to jump off the cliff together. Everybody dove in and I swear it was because of that initial meeting of, let’s take a few minutes and acknowledge that we’re all human beings.
 

HF: I think for actors to feel comfortable and not “diva out”, ’cause I’ve done it and I’ve felt a certain way…is they need to feel respected and safe. Those are the two things. And there are so many situations where actors are just treated like scenery, y’know, where as Danni said…they’re not treated as people, as humans, as employees, as people with rights. So I had a similar experience with Dessa Rose where it’s about slavery, so that first day, we talked about race. We talked about it for like five hours. It was instructive and made us all feel safe with each other, that our opinions weren’t taboo, and we could speak honestly about things. I think you can have, even if it’s just a half-hour “come to Jesus” with the cast, it’s important to feel like you’re respected, to not feel scared. I always – as an actor, I was terrified I am going to be fired every day until we open the show. Every day, when I was in nun bootcamp for the Sister Act tour, I thought I was getting fired every day. And part of that insecurity is just…actors are insecure beings, in general, but part of that insecurity is being treated like, “Oh, you’re so lucky to be here. There’s so many people who would like to have your spot.” And that’s probably true, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have worth. Even if there are ten people that could fill my spot, I still have worth, you still chose me. So treat me with the respect that I deserve as a professional.
 

DS: There are a lot of little things that add up too, like something as simple as…if you don’t think you’re going to realistically use that actor until an hour into the rehearsal…don’t call them until an hour into the rehearsal. If you’re not paying that actor a living wage to be there, try to at least respect their time. Use them as much as you can. If we need to have a conversation that’s about the company or something logistically that’s not working, rather than having that in front of the actors, say “take a five” and have a pow-wow. Little things that you’d be surprised not every company feels that way.
 

HF: I mean, I have a military background. So rule number one is that you praise in public and you admonish in private. Like, that’s rule number one. And I can’t tell you how many theater companies I’ve been to where they’ll pick on someone or call someone out in front of the whole cast. That kind of stuff isn’t needed. And specifically because we’re actors, I think it gives us a great insight into how actors want to be treated. We just want to take care of our employees, and not just our actors, all of our employees. We just want to make them feel as safe and respected as possible. It makes for better work. When people feel good, they give you their best.
 

KW: Who are some of your influences? Who do you look at and see inspiration in?
 

DS: I feel like I see it more in my people here, in our community; I see it in my friend, Harmony. I look at Jeanine Tesori or a Michael John LaChiusa, who writes gorgeously for women.
 

HF: Lin-Manuel Miranda.
 

KW: And even something like Hamilton sounds like a huge risk on paper. Who do you have in your head with a stronger image of whiteness than the founding fathers?
 

DS: We’ve all seen the paintings, the portraits.
 

HF: The marble busts.
 

KW: And then you say, okay, let’s cast a multicultural rap musical about them. The idea just sounds outlandish to people, and then you see it. The opening number wasn’t even over and you’re not even thinking about the fact that these people aren’t the same race as the people they’re portraying.
 

HF: It’s a suspension of disbelief. It’s part of theater.
 

KW: I mean, you can buy a singing crab in The Little Mermaid but you can’t buy that Thomas Jefferson is played by a black man?
 

DS: That’s such a good point.
 

HF: It’s a wonderful point. And the thing is that I keep stressing this to people that we’re pitching things to…as a businesswoman, it doesn’t make sense to not be inclusive. It doesn’t make sense. This is an audience that has probably stopped paying attention to you because you are not representing them onstage. As we spoke about in the 2014/2015 season, 68% of the audience on Broadway were women. It makes good business sense to tailor to women. So it’s just a little backwards to me. I think in every way. All it’s gonna do when we make theater more inclusive, is include more people. More people are going to see themselves onstage. It’s the future of theater.
 

DS: If we want theater to be for everybody, it needs to be by everybody.
 

KW: Now, on Facebook, you wrote a post that went viral about commenting on women’s appearances. In theater, and especially in casting, how do you not comment on women’s appearances? That’s a world where the shorthand can be…
 

HF: It can be gross. On the other end too, I cast a show once where we were auditioning guys and they were being objectified. It’s tricky because you almost need to go back to the text. Every time. Does the text specifically say that we need a 5’8″ blonde with a 36/28/36? Maybe it does.
 

DS: Does it say specifically caucasian? Does it specifically black?
 

HF: Does it say specifically one gender, even? So that’s kind of how we’re gonna increase our canon. We’re going to really look at texts and looking at what can we get away with, quite honestly. It’s almost a challenge to ourselves of…how diversified can we get?
 

DS: How can we break the preconceived norm of what that show is “supposed” to be? And just go back and commit to breaking down that barrier and seeing it with fresh eyes.
 

HF: We have to be so creative with musical theater because it’s just not there. Even the shows that are…it’s so funny that I say that Broadway is revolutionary right now because that’s so not normally the case but it is. With Hamilton and Fun Home and even Waitress, there’s some really inclusive stuff.
 

DS: Eclipsed!
 

HF: But we’re not going to get those titles for a very, very long time. So in the meantime, we have to think outside the box of how we can bring change and how we can make this better within what we have to work with.
 

DS: While we continue to foster new work…
 

HF: While we foster new work. We don’t want to be behind! Why should we be behind New York? We’re Chicago. Are you kidding me? This is the hub! This is where you go for exciting, brave theater.
 

KW: And even when you put on this great work, you’re still in the position of having so many men in power who get to comment on what you’re doing…Waitress had that article in the New York Post that Michael Riedel wrote about Diane Paulus and her “merry band of feminists”…
 

HF: Oh yeah! The piece I’m writing is a response to that.
 

DS: It was infuriating on multiple levels too. Like, why can’t women have that conversation? Why can’t we dive deeper into this stuff with musical theater? Why is it only in plays that we can address tough topics?
 

KW: And women buy most of the tickets…
 

HF: 68% of them! The article is ridiculous anyway. He used The Color Purple as an example of what we should be striving for, rather than the domestic abuse in Waitress. Have you seen either show? The Color Purple is definitely about domestic abuse. Like, quite definitely. I didn’t even understand what that article was about. It infuriated me. It was so confusing. That last line about, “leave domestic violence to Tennessee Williams and David Mamet”…I mean, my blood was boiling.
 

DS: I just want to ask him…why?
 

HF: Why can’t a woman tell her point of view in a situation like that? Why is that not as important? Just…all the questions.
 

KW: And can’t a show be both things? Can’t it be a hopeful show and be about domestic violence?
 

HF: It is! You saw it, I saw it. I think it’s very uplifting at the end.
 

DS: And aren’t most shows about reflecting on human nature? At the core of them, it’s about reflecting on how we get through everything we get through in this world, what brings out the best in us, what brings out the worst in us. So it’s an examination of that and I don’t think that you can only have one or the other. Life isn’t that way.
 

HF: I also don’t think musical theater should be exempt from that conversation. Why can’t musical theater be effective, life-changing theater? It is!
 

KW: To reference Tennessee Williams and David Mamet completely erases musical theater from the conversation.
 

HF: Yes! It deletes the art form, entirely. Like musical theater isn’t worth that kind of heavy material. Some of my most profound experiences have been in musical theater. There is something about music that can touch emotions in us that nothing else can.
 

KW: And this isn’t to pile on to Michael Riedel. He’s hardly the only culprit.
 

HF: It’s just society.
 

DS: I think that’s another goal of our company too. In this world, I think it’s harder for women, that we’re pitted against each other. It’s easier to tear each other down, it’s easier to leave a snarky comment and not be held accountable. Something you would probably never say in person to somebody’s face. In this world of crazy, we can create a place where we lift each other up and we create opportunities for each other. There are always going to be people out there trying to tear it down. So, it’s incredibly important to us to try and make something good.
 

KW: One of the things that’s important to us is the idea that there’s not one way to be a feminist.
 

HF: We talked about that, we didn’t know if wanted to use the word feminist or not because it’s so loaded. It has all of this baggage attached to it. And finally we were like, what else is there, we don’t have another word for this yet. Hopefully one day we don’t need this word, but when we talk about feminism, all we’re talking about is equality. That’s it. At our launch party, we did a gender bender concert, and so many conversations were started from that. We picked a show that’s typical all-male with one female character and we turned it. It was all women and one male character. People came up to me and were like, I didn’t even notice that it was weird that this is all guys until you flipped it, ’cause it looked strange. People aren’t used to seeing it.
 

DS: Or hearing the words in a new way, of something they were maybe very familiar with and there’s the potential to unlock that by simply casting a woman.
 

HF: It was just very interesting, all of it. And on the other end of it, we cast a man to play a role that is very vulnerable and has moments of weakness, and when do you see a man do that in musical theater? So, it was really interesting. How did the story change, how did it stay the same? But people didn’t come up to us just to say, “Oh, that was awesome!” They wanted to talk to us about that stuff. I think that’s our ultimate goal. To get this conversation going.
 

DS: A lot of people play devil’s advocate with us about feminism and running a feminist theater company and we just want to say, stop playing devil’s advocate and just play advocate.
 

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KW: There’s this idea that a show about women, by women, is a “women’s musical” as opposed to a show about men by men is universal, it’s for everyone.
 

HF: There’s also this expectation that if it’s a woman’s story, it’s everyone wearing pink or eating cupcakes or something. It’s this certain thing; it’s a chick flick.
 

DS: “I had to go see some rom-com with my wife; it’s my duty.”
 

HF: Exactly. And it’s not necessarily the case, you know? And so…we just wanna be human. We just want to be equal. It’s just exhausting. Every day, reading some nonsense like the New York Post article or what’s happening in the political campaigns…
 

KW: I don’t know any woman who didn’t watch even the Democratic debate and say…wow, I’ve been that person who’s had a finger pointed in their face, maybe that’s not how you engage with someone. No matter who you’re supporting, you see the double standard.
 

DS: They even did it on Scandal a little bit.
 

HF: I haven’t seen the last couple!
 

DS: Well, Mellie’s running and they’re practicing debates and it’s all of that.
 

HF: I love that. Obviously as a theater company, we can’t endorse anyone or anything like that. But what I will say is that all of that trickles down. If we’re gonna treat a woman as accomplished and respected as Hillary Clinton this way…then you’ll treat any woman this way. We all have these silent rules. We see it played out on a national stage in this situation, and we’re not under scrutiny, but even now, when we have to do business dealings with a man, I find myself having to correct my corrective behavior, if that makes sense. You think, “I could charm my way out of that if I want to”. You think of all those things. We’ve figured out how to get what we want, as women, without actually saying what we want.
 

DS: You have to tell yourself that it’s okay just to ask the damn question.
 

KW: Things like the word “just”, that you don’t even think about. You diminish the things you’re asking.
 

HF: Or, “does that make sense?” I do that a lot.
 

KW: “We don’t have to do this, but…”
 

HF: It’s all those ways that we’ve learned to try to get what we want, without just saying what we want.
 

DS: And it’s not just with men, it’s with other women too.
 

KW: Even women are raised in the same society that men are raised in. We grow up being told to compete with other women. That’s hard, even for women, to escape.
 

DS: We both acknowledge the whole “seeing is believing” aspect of things. When we’ve talked about Star Wars, seeing a woman and a black man as our leading characters, in Star Wars…
 

HF: But then you can’t find her doll!
 

DS: I remember reading some blog post, it was a Dad talking about his daughter, saying here’s why Rey is not a great example for my daughter. It was the whole anti-argument of…well, my daughter doesn’t need Rey to tell her she can be anything she wants to be. It’s like, actually sir, we do need to see that. For some of us, we need to see it to see that it’s even possible.
 

HF: When I was a little girl, when I would play Star Wars, I was a jedi. I mean, duh. Obviously. So, I’ve always known I’m called to be a jedi. But when you’re kids, there aren’t those rules, you learn them.
 

KW: People reacted the same way when J.J. Abrams talked about putting gay characters in Star Wars. And the reaction was that they were just trying to check the boxes…not really.
 

HF: No! And I think we need to stop that way of thinking. That like, oh, we need the tokens. I don’t think of it that way. I think of it like…it’s really important that we represent everyone.
 

KW: How is it more outlandish to be gay than to be an alien?
 

DS: It’s the singing crab and the founding father!
 

HF: It’s so absurd to me. It’s 2016. I look around at some of the stuff that’s going on, and it’s what feeds, and support feeds us to stay motivated because this is hard but I think the other thing that feeds me is looking around and being like, “No. This is 2016. Absolutely not.” It’s all crazy. We say every day that we have a lot of work to do. We’ll be talking about some of this and just stop and be like…we have a lot of work to do.
 

DS: We can do this, though.
 

HF: As cliché as it sounds, we’re just trying to make a difference.
 

DS: Be the change.
 

HF: I’m tired of bitching about it on my couch. I want to fix it…we’re trying to do things that…I mean, take all the activism away. We’re also artists that want to make really good art.
 

DS: We want to make really, really good theater.
 

KW: You have to balance the entertainment without losing the socially-conscious aspect of it. People want to go to a show and not feel like they’re being lectured.
 

HF: It’s a delicate balance, we talk about it all the time, how to get both things across? I don’t care if you came in the door because you believe in the cause or if you came in the door because you heard that show was awesome. I want both groups of those people to come in the door and see the theater. And maybe the people who heard the show was awesome are gonna leave with a little bit of that conversation started about activism and feminism. And maybe the people who came for the activism are going to see this great show.

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A Conversation with James Earl Jones II

 

From the way James Earl Jones II shows up, early, dressed to the nines when it’s barely noon, and with that disarming smile at the ready, you could easily assume he’s running for office. Currently though, Jones is starring in Carlyle, a new work by playwright Thomas Bradshaw, at The Goodman Theatre in Chicago. Carlyle is based on a simple premise. The Republican Party is in trouble and they need someone to save it. So, enter Carlyle, a black Republican man and the Republican Party’s choice for the role of cheery ringmaster, impossibly charming you with feats of daring and slights of hand, luring your attention away from the broken lock on the tiger cage in back.
 

Now, in an industry that sets schedules eighteen months in advance, Bradshaw and The Goodman have managed to produce their smart satire on the American political arena at the exact point of pique bloodlust in the election season. My trip to the campaign office, such as it is, was spent in one of those infamous back rooms (a lounge, upstairs at The Goodman) talking red, white, blue, and black.
 

 

Kelly Wallace: So this show…I’m very excited about it.
 

James Earl Jones II: As am I.
 

KW: You’ve done the show before, now you’re coming back to it in the middle of a complete firestorm in the American election cycle.
 

JEJ: Yes! I was telling someone…it just so happens that all of the stars are aligned and here we are in a discussion about the Republican Party and where it’s headed, who could be heading it, and people of color involved in the Republican race, and who will come out victorious. So I think it’s extra interesting.
 

KW:It certainly is. And who will be heading it is the interesting question we’re all stuck on right now. A lot of people seem to think the Republican Party is about to crack down the center.

 

JEJ: Right, yeah. Especially with our show, before we even really jump into the script, it’s like… “Did you hear?” That’s every day. Somebody comes in with something new. “Did you hear?” And sometimes we haven’t heard because, for me, I will say that I get a lot of information secondhand because… if I think about anything other than the script I will lose my mind.
 

KW: How do you separate the noise from doing character work – from doing the text?
 

JEJ: Honestly, I know it sounds really crazy, but I’m an actor first. It’s not only something that I’m passionate about, but it’s my job. It goes back to when kids used to say, “My dog ate my homework.” There’s a lot of things going on, but you have to get your homework done. And so I find myself in these moments where it’s like, “Wow, this is happening and this is happening…” I’m like…but I’ve gotta get my homework done. We did a show on Sunday afternoon that was drastically changed by half-hour for the evening show. And so, if I come into the theater, there’s a possibility that I can get an email maybe an hour or two before the show starts… here’s a new line. And that’s where I keep my focus, regardless of all of the outside stuff going on, regardless of what people are saying is coming up now. I’ll know about it because I have to say it.
 

KW: Were you a political/history nerd before this process?
 

JEJ: I was not. And I’m ashamed to say that I really wasn’t. My father was a CTA bus driver, but he’s from Mississippi and dealt with a lot of civil rights issues. My mother was a teacher for 42 years in East Englewood. I know that there’s a lot that goes on, just with education, the balance of who gets what in that particular arena. And so there are certain things that I know about as it applies to people of various colors not necessarily being on equal footing. …I’m a little ashamed to say that I didn’t know more, but it’s very weird. I was talking to a friend who is a dual citizen…people who are taking tests to become citizens know everything. So I’ve been learning – slowly but surely – about some things I was less familiar with. One of the big things – and it doesn’t really seem that big – but I didn’t know that Booker T. Washington was a Republican.
 

KW: I feel like that surprises a lot of people.
 

JEJ: Right. And that there was this conflict between him and W.E.B. DuBois and I was like…really? This happened? I had no idea!
 

KW: One of the things you say in the press videos as Carlyle, is that everyone might be a little more Republican than they think they are. Do you feel like you’re more Republican than you thought you were?
 

JEJ: I don’t feel like I’m a little more Republican than I thought I was. I know that I’m a little Republican, but just a smidge. In the play they talk about affirmative action. I find myself torn in many ways because I know people who have jobs, who work really, really hard, and they work really hard to get to about here, and they’re above poverty but not quite at middle-income, but they’re working their butts off. And no one just says here, have this. Then there are people who are like, I have had 5 or 6 kids, I’ve been in and out of homeless shelters, but I can have housing downtown if I work the system right. I think that’s a discredit to people who are getting up every day. You work hard to get a little bit of nothing; this person doesn’t work at all to get everything. That seems unfair. So yeah there are lots of things on the Republican side that I don’t get but with regards to empowering yourself and working hard for what you get, that’s something I do believe. It bothers me, just because I just see it so often. It just makes me sad sometimes. So I will say, yes there is a dash of Republican in me. Because I believe in African-American empowerment, I believe in Latin-American empowerment, I believe in people fighting and earning things and saying that I got this because I actually deserve it and worked for it, as opposed to someone saying I have this fantastic home and I have two hundred and-fifty dollars in food stamps, which I can sell at my leisure. You know it was something I had never been exposed to until maybe about 10 or 11 years ago. It was the first time a person approached me in a store and was like hey, I can sell you some food stamps. I was just thinking…this is supposed to be for food. But if I give you $50 or $35, you can give me $75 worth of food stamps and it’s no skin off your back. Okay, I say to myself. I look at my check. I look at my taxes. And I say that I’m paying them for this person to have free stuff. And that irritates me. But yeah, that’s just one aspect.
 

KW: At one point, Carlyle describes himself as a “political unicorn,” to be a Black Republican. One of the things I was looking over before this was a poll in the New York Times that said 1 in 5 Donald Trump supporters don’t believe in the Emancipation Proclamation. When you hear something like that, how is there a place for Carlyle in the party?
 

JEJ: As James Earl Jones II, I’m never shocked by something like that. And maybe in the years, decades, centuries to come, someone will be shocked. I’m not shocked today. It is disturbing to see what the Trump supporters – it’s really kind of like some kind of reckless, free card – , it’s anarchy almost. You’re like, “˜My God!’ I feel Trump’s people right now are caged pit bulls that were beaten over and over and then you release them. There’s no filter. And people are saying and doing things that they have been waiting to –it reminds me of that movie The Purge, where just for one night people just do all types of random craziness. Except it’s happening every day with Trump supporters. In general, it’s hard to think that an African-American, Latin-American, anyone of color is like, oh I found a comfortable place here in the Republican Party with a statistic like that.
 
I guess in that same vein, life in Chicago is not necessarily life in Wyoming or life in Glencoe, even. There’s obviously some give and take in everything. I think that’s how anybody of color says to themselves, “Oh, I fit here. Even if this person doesn’t necessarily agree with me. I still have the freedom to have my opinion. And maybe that person didn’t agree with the Emancipation Proclamation, but I don’t see them at home and I’m just going to go about my business. I’m not shocked by it. Carlyle might be shocked by it, but he lives in his own world.
 

KW: And Carlyle’s world is funny. It’s a comedy; there’s humor there. Obviously, these issues we’re talking about are serious but…
 

JEJ: Yeah, you know, I think somebody was telling me that in some magazine someplace someone called it a drama. And I was thinking, huh, where did they get that from? Because I think that – I’ve always loved comedy. It’s rare that I get a chance to do dramas. But, I mean, when I do them, sure they’re great. But I will say that heavy topics in my opinion are more readily accepted, easier to understand, or the message can sometimes sink in more if it’s lighter. I think there’s something to be said about not hitting people over the head with bricks of despair and sadness. Even if it’s one-act, no one wants to sit through 70 minutes of that. Pain, suffering, despair, more pain. And the audience is like, “God, when is this going to be over?” You don’t want people to come to the theater, I mean you want peoples’ lives to be changed, but ideally for the better, something to invoke thought…but not thought of suicide.
 
Like, my God, life is awful. You want people to – you hope that people will come away from this show and yeah, there are serious topics, but perhaps serious topics where you’re like, “Huh, I didn’t think about it that way.” But you’re ideally smiling about something. I think that this show is a comedy, but there’s no doubt that it’s going to touch on hot topics and push buttons. We found that out in New Stages. But as far as I’m concerned, this is the best type of theater. The theater that…it might shock you a bit, but it’s definitely going to make you laugh, it’s gonna make you think and talk about it after.
 

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KW: What has the audience response been like?
 

JEJ: I can only speak about a couple people who have approached me. I have had people approach me with nothing but good things to say. I’ve had a couple people secretly tell me they’re a Republican on the way out the door. Like, “Hey man, that was an excellent job…[whispered] wanted to let you know I’m a Republican…okay, take care, bye!” And they’d rush off. Like, alright then. That always makes me giggle. One guy in one of the talkbacks – I guess he got grilled in there because he was a Republican/African American, I just…I think the responses have been awesome. People who approach me are like, “I’m gonna tell all my friends, I’m gonna come see it again.” The word of mouth has spread the show.
 
It’s not necessarily Second City, but you’re not sure what show you’re gonna see. Tonight’s show could be potentially very different from tomorrow’s. I have three new monologues…we went to lunch and came back and there were 10 edited pages, there you go. And by “there you go” they mean, “James, this is for you.” ‘Cause it really is generally just me who gets lots of new stuff.
 

KW: Do you feel like there’s a different energy, for you, doing a show like this written by an African-American author, as opposed to someone else trying to tackle these issues? Does it feel more authentic?
 

JEJ: So, Stephen Sondheim writes these amazing, brilliant musicals; people are always trying to make the comparison. “Is this your life?” And Sondheim’s like, it’s not my life. None of these things are my life. One specific song in one specific show was about his life called, “Opening Doors,” and that was it. For the most part, these people write these things but it’s not their lives”¦.Too often you find that it’s just a whitewash of a creative team putting together this show for people of color. What they won’t do is hire me, Thomas Bradshaw, and a couple of other popular African Americans to tell the story of Fiddler on the Roof. I’m not offended by it, but I get it.
 
So they’re like…you might know Jewish people, you might even have a relative that’s Jewish, you may even convert to the faith at some point in your life, but what we won’t do is have you direct Fiddler on the Roof. I’m okay with that. But on the flip side, when you have shows that you know are speaking from this African-American perspective or this Latin American perspective, there’s nothing but a white creative team…it does something to you. It’s weird also when you know, when they write about it. Even going past color, it’s like…Spike Lee wrote this Chi-raq film…but he’s not from Chicago. And he can do the research and he can bring in all of these random actors from LA and New York but there were like two or three people, most of them not leads, from Chicago and it’s like…you don’t know the Chicago experience. You think you do. You’ve googled and you’ve gone on Wikipedia, but have you lived it? How often does a writer of color get to write first person stories? It’s rare and it’s unfortunate.
 

KW: And it feels like in a lot of ways, Chicago’s ahead of the rest of the country at least having these conversations; we’re talking about these things. Is this a new development, or is there more of an open dialogue in Chicago?
 

JEJ: Chicago is blue collar. Chicago is gritty. And we hustle in a different way than New York does. It’s very interesting. There are a lot of Chicago actors who are like, I’m in Chicago and I’m not thinking about going to Broadway; I’m just telling this story. I’m interested in doing this work here. And it’s odd sometimes because people are like, what do you want to do, do you want to go to Broadway? That’s the end game. And you’re like…no, I just love what I do and I love telling these stories. I think there’s a certain air that’s put on in New York that I don’t find here as often? Everywhere in this business, there is a question of being blackballed. Things don’t change like when things are going well. It’s like crisis. I have to give credit where credit is due. I have spoken to directors personally like – I think that this is inappropriate; I think that this is wrong – but I have to say, in my opinion, Bear Bellinger is really the catalyst for extreme change. Bear had nothing to lose. He was just like…here goes. He was fed up with various things that had happened to him in his own personal career and was like alright, this is the last straw. A lot of people make the argument that like….oh, couldn’t you have handled it a different way? What other way could this have been addressed so we can talk about race in theaters and identity in theaters? But the thing is, there really is no better way than just to do it. The people who are in positions of power in these theaters have been there for years. It’s not to think that this just happened overnight. These things have been happening at these various theaters for quite some time. But no one has spoken about it. After a certain amount of years, people say, well, what’s the alternative? Well..now, we gotta do this. Because I’m sure there probably were other ideas, but no one did them. So now we’re here. There might’ve been another one back there. I’m sure there were other ideas, but no one did them. So now we’re here. And I think Chicago’s already more conscious but now it’s even a bigger deal. Also, I do also feel there are some theaters that are going to have to follow suit with what’s going on at the Marriott. This theater [the Goodman] isn’t one of them. That is one of the cool things, all the madness going on out there, the audiences that come to the Goodman are regular people; they’re sophisticated, they’re intelligent, blue color, white color; they see themselves reflected on this stage. I think each director, each writer, and Bob Falls make these conscious choices to be extremely inclusive. I’m glad I’m in Chicago where we are more grounded and have a better take on seeing everyone included. I do think obviously some theaters need some help but, as a whole, we are ahead of other cities.
 

KW: You are. Yet there’s still this sense that Broadway is the goal. What made you want to stay here in Chicago?
 

JEJ: Well, I have done a tour. And I’ve done regional work. But I think for me…well, I have a daughter here. I wouldn’t want to uproot her life moving to New York. I think that New York, if you are living somewhere like in Ithaca, it might be ideal to raise your children. But there’s something about…every time I’m in New York I always think to myself, these kids go to school on their own, on these trains, and that guy over there might have just killed three people, like…you say to yourself…and then you look over and you see Bobby and Diane and Katie and they’re just sitting there with their chocolate milk and you’re like…this is strange. I’m nervous. So I feel bringing my daughter up in an environment that is healthy and normal and ideally nurturing is important for me. People want to be on Broadway for various reasons. I know someone who booked Les Miserables on Broadway as a Valjean cover, but he was just like, “My bills are killing me.” If you’re asking about being rich and famous, I don’t know anything about that, but these college loans are kicking me. And so people do it for various reasons. I think most people do it for fame. But I think some people do it for financial security. I personally have been very fortunate to be here, in Chicago, with very steady employment. That I haven’t felt like there was a need for me to go anywhere else or do anything else. Maybe I would cross that bridge if I found myself destitute, like I just had nothing, but I love Chicago. I love Chicago theater. I think we’re more real; I think we’re more grounded. We are truth-tellers. It’s like seeing Carlyle or 2666 as opposed to seeing Wicked. I mean, it’s grand. There are dragons. There’s a little bit of pyro but like, at the end of the day you’re just like…but it’s just The Wizard of Oz but really grand, and yeah it took her awhile to get that makeup on and God bless her, but after that it’s like…is there any real truth telling to it? That’s what I think is so amazing. I saw 2666; I was blown away. For one, they were out on that stage for about 5,000 hours. Two, because I was like this is so interesting, intriguing, thought provoking. Carlyle obviously provokes thought in a different way. It’s just 70-minutes. That’s just one Metra ride from Chicago to Wisconsin and you can learn a lot and be super entertained as opposed to like, “I saw this chick with green and she flew…and it was fun.” But I get it, I mean, sometimes people are drawn to that. It’s the Chicago theater audiences that are drawn to “the real” and that’s what you get here, but many tourists go to Cadillac and Oriental and they wonder what show is coming up. But this will always be here. It’s because of the stories that they tell and how they tell them.
 

KW: A lot of what we’re talking about touches on your kids, too. They need role models. What about you? Who did you look up to and think, “I wanna be that”?
 

JEJ: Ohhh boy. Well, when I was super young, Eddie Murphy. Eddie Murphy is always stuck in my head. For me it was like a bucket list when I played Donkey [in Shrek] at Chicago Shakes in 2013. I was just like, I get to play Eddie!!!! When I got a little older – at that time I just loved telling jokes; I wasn’t so much concerned with the acting. When I finally started to act, my father was like, “Well, you should probably know James Earl Jones is your cousin. And he’s coming here to do a show. And if you’re interested in goin’, we can go.” I was like…”Oh! Sure!” So I went. Whenever he came here, we would get tickets and see him perform. His story is specifically personal to me because he has an awful stutter. I have Tourette’s. Both he and I…it’s a matter of finding yourself so focused, so in love with what you’re doing, the stutter goes away; the Tourette’s goes away, the quirks and jerks, they stop, and watching him perform, knowing his story, helped me – as I got older – focus on my craft. It was easier to, in the moment, suppress all off my physical quirks and jerks. It was not, though, my desire to be an actor as a career. I wanted to be a doctor.

 

KW: Slightly different.
 

JEJ: It actually links to the Tourette’s. They say that it’s a hereditary disease. When I was a sophomore in college and I still had a great-great Grandmother,nobody in my family had tourettes. My mother was talking to me about my very difficult birth and how they thought it might break my neck. Me, theorizing as a non-doctor, I was like, maybe it was my intense breech that did something to the nerve, and perhaps triggered… I mean, a lot of things aren’t hereditary, but it has to start somewhere. I thought, okay, here’s my mission. I’m gonna become an obstetrician and deliver children all over the world and they will never suffer from hurt, harm, or danger, ever in life. And I did early application to Emory University. I was gonna go there for pre-med; I was all suited and booted. I was doing a medical program at UIC [University of Illinois at Chicago] in the department of transplant surgery and I just remember my supervisor talking to me casually about his trajectory through medical school and I was like hmmm…that’s just for you, right? Not everybody has to be there that long?” He was like, “Of course, you can skew it by a year, maybe two, but…you’re lookin’ at 8. Minimum.” So I was like, well, I gotta find something else to do, Jesus. I finished the program and then I immediately started applying to college. Someone told me I could get a scholarship if I sing, which I do, so I went to University of Illinois (at Urbana Champaign), specifically opera. I sang one opera in my entire time at the school. I never auditioned for a single one. Didn’t want to. I was forced to do it. And came out of school still confused. I went to Europe, sang. Came back to Chicago, confused. I didn’t know what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I was working in advertising and the catalyst that pushed me to perform, he passed away, and left me a letter saying that I had amounted to nothing. He didn’t say it exactly like that, but I kinda felt like in the words it was, “I’m leaving you my piano; I’m leaving you my music. You’re one of my dearest students. I’ve loved you for many years, You’re a wonderful person. You just haven’t done anything.” Like, you’ve spent your time casually singing with Grant Park Chorus or CSO, but you’re singing these well-oiled machines and it’s not something you really enjoy. It’s not something you really care about. You need to do something that sets you apart. Essentially the note was saying that he felt I had a star quality and that he thought I should embrace that. So, beginning of the next year, I auditioned, and I didn’t look back. I was doing shows. Singing on the boat at Navy Pier. I was super busy. Then I booked the show Spelling Bee at Drury Lane Water Tower in ’06 and that basically cemented it for me. Like….okay, I guess this is what I’m going to do for my life. So I did. And so that’s how I found my way here. Which is kind of random but…now that I’m doing it, I couldn’t imagine not doing it. This is all I wanna do for the rest of my life.
 

KW: It’s funny, my father is a doctor. He would love to be doing what you’re doing…he’d get off at the next exit ramp…
 

JEJ: [laughter] Well, it’s like Ken Jeong! He’s an M.D. But he’s hilarious. You would’ve never known. It can happen, clearly. If you wanna do it, you just gotta do it.
 

KW: We talked to Harmony France and Danni Smith…
 

JEJ: Firebrand!
 

KW: We were talking about responsibility to racial parity, in addition to gender parity, and how they want to navigate that without just “talking the talk,” why not just do it? Do you feel a responsibility as an artist or an actor to what projects you take or theaters you work at in the sense of being a socially conscious person?
 

JEJ: Yeah, I think that luckily, for the most part, I haven’t found myself in a really uncomfortable situation where I just absolutely don’t agree at all. But I have found myself doing a show where I thought I had a responsibility to speak up about things that I thought were not really appropriate. Or, I don’t agree. But I think that there has yet to be a show that I have felt my family could not see. There have certainly been shows my daughter can’t see, but I don’t think that I felt like there was a show she couldn’t see because of the subject material, but just that she’s a child I just think that if there’s an excessive amount of cursing…and you can talk about race, but when people get killed onstage then it kinda makes me a little uncomfortable honestly and I say no thank you. Obviously I think that adults grasp that stuff better. And yes, you can’t really seem to avoid something like that on the news. But at the same time, if I can, I want her to see the things that aren’t too intense. God willing, I’m still doing this and she’s older and she feels compelled and wants to attend, she can. I don’t think I’ve done something yet where I’m like – where my family can’t see this because this is just ridiculous. When the time comes, I’m sure that I will make the conscious decision, my parents encourage me in everything that I do. But I feel like I want to make sure that I’m making them just as proud as I think they’re feeling when they’re supporting me. As opposed to them smiling like, “Great job son, can’t believe you did that!” Now to be fair, my mother, I love her so much, [sotto voce] she’s so boring, but she’ll say James, I don’t know. That one moment I had to turn my head. Okay mama, that’s fine. My grandmother on the other hand is like, “Baby, I loved every minute! It was so FUNNY.” Like, in this show, my mom is like…”James, what’re you doin’ onstage?” And my dad loves everything. My mother is the nurturer, but she’s also the prude. She’s the prude in the family. But I don’t feel like I’ve done anything so out of pocket that my family could not be there to support me. And hopefully I never find myself at that point.
 
There’s art and there is morality. I do believe that they can coexist. I feel like there are probably people out there who think they’ve lost their souls years ago, but I still have it. I’d like to hold onto it for a few more years. I haven’t done a show yet where I’ve felt like I was being socially irresponsible, or inconsiderate to who I am, or to my family, or to who I am as a culture.
 

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KW: So you don’t want to lose your soul…where does your soul want to be in theater-future? Five, ten years from now? What conversations do you want us to be having?
 

JEJ: The conversations that we’re having now. The conversation that you and I are having. But on a grander scale…to the point that we don’t have to have the conversation. That we find ourselves in a place where the things that you talk about have nothing to do with race or height but just that you saw an amazing show. I realize that’s ambitious. For all of the stuff people say, many people are like it’s 2016 and you look out your window or watch your TV screen and you’re like, but this madness is happening. So as far as people think we’ve gone, there are still people who have taken 3.5 million steps back. You just hope that, especially in something like theater, like you go to the AEA website and go on any casting notice, the first thing they try to make clear is, ‘AEA is open to all ethnicities, disabilities’ and that’s not true. A lot of theaters will say well, yeah, we put it. We don’t BELIEVE it, but we have to put it, we have to put it. And I think that’s sad and unfortunate. So, hopefully, when we have conversations five years later, it’s not about asking whether there’s an issue with being too black, too hispanic, where it’s just like, we’re doing this show and we’re all various cultures and we all like to identify individually, but we are all accepted. When you sit down and watch a show, you’re not completely caught off guard by the difference in race or gender, but instead caught up in it. The Matchmaker…if that isn’t the most randomly diverse group of actors brought together in a long time I don’t know what is. To have someone say, “No, I only have one leg, but I’m all good.” That’s amazing. But the thing is, I read one of her interviews, you want people to just see the show and not think, which leg is real. You want people to see the through and not get caught up with something that is trivial. Are you in the story or not?” You know, like, don’t worry about how short this actress is as opposed to how tall he is or how short he is vs how tall she is or the fact that one of them is Asian American and one is Latin American or any of those things. Just being able to come to a theater, see a show, and have a conversation about how great it was. Not about how black, how dark, how light. How Asian sounding. I mean, there are so many things that people will sometimes touch on and you’re like, that’s irrelevant. So, that’s…what I’d like to see in 5 years? Hell, I’d like to see it tomorrow. The sooner the better.
 

KW: Do shows like this help? Do you think a piece like Carlyle gets people engaged who may not have been before?
 

JEJ: I will say the awesome thing about our time right now is that we have Google. And Yahoo, and Bing, and access to the internet. All types of searches. There are people who learn things about the show that they didn’t know…and they will wait until they can turn their phone on, and they will look this stuff up. It’s kind of random, but I don’t know if you know there’s a story coming out about Anita Hill.
 

KW: Yes, with Kerry Washington.
 

JEJ: So if you google it, Kerry Washington, Anita Hill, you’ll see it. It’s like, this show couldn’t be more on time. But it’s one of those things where 20 years ago, eh, 25 years ago where what you could do was very limited on the internet, people were talking about stuff that happened with Anita Hill. Things that happened decades ago, sometimes people talk about, but it’s not like, those things don’t “go viral” per se. The time that we’re living in now, everything can go viral. It’s like, there are young people who know nothing about Anita Hill or younger generations who don’t know, they’ll come and see this and be like…Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, what!? And they’re gonna google it and then Kerry Washington’s show is gonna get more heat – not that it isn’t already – but it’s out there and it’s being talked about. So it’s just interesting how that circle works. People will leave this theater and things that may be were never really relevant to a younger generation is going to be relevant, and people will talk about more. It’s very interesting how it all comes together. I know about Anita Hill, because I’m of a certain age, but a lot of people don’t. And they’re like, what’s the story? Huh. And I can guarantee that someone is going to see Confirmation and wish that they had seen this show too.
 

KW: Confirmation is, obviously, a TV movie. What do you feel you get out of being onstage that maybe you don’t get on film or in TV?
 

JEJ: Well, I do a lot of voiceover. But theater is great because every day it’s different. Every audience is different. Sometimes…some days the script is different. [Shhhhhh!] Alright, alright. But that’s the thing, when you’re doing a show like this or the Spelling Bee show where you have four spellers from the audience you have no idea what they’re gonna say, no idea how they’re gonna react or what they’re gonna do. Carlyle is the same in that it immediately breaks the fourth wall. The purpose is to talk to these audiences. And so just talking to them, just having a conversation, the reactions are…[pause] they’re great. For me, theater is the best because you know that you’re changing all of these people. Maybe for the better, hopefully not for the worse. But you know at that moment, you are affecting each of these individuals in a way. You don’t do that with film. You do the film, you leave. You do a commercial, you leave. But like the theater you’re in it, you see these people, you hear them. It doesn’t necessarily change my show per say but it’s interesting to hear and to see. It’s just as thrilling for the actor’s onstage watching the audience.
 

KW: So you have a daughter…how old is she?
 

JEJ: Ten…OOOOHHHHH. Eleven! She’s eleven, I’m in trouble.
 

KW: What kind of conversations do you have with her about all this?
 

JEJ: It’s no offense to anyone who happens to be a white child, but my daughter will find herself in the thick of more conversations…my daughter is me, she’s like a female Caryle. Carlita. In the regard that like, she’s a dark-skinned African-American girl, who really hasn’t had to deal a great deal of issues regarding race because most of her friends at her school, many of them, are white, Asian, or Latino. For some odd reason, and it’s super disturbing, you’re made fun of more as an African-American girl amongst other African Americans. At my mother’s school, I just felt like the kids said the most out of pocket things. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Hotel Rwanda?
 

KW: Yes.
 

JEJ: It’s like Hutu and the Tutsis. We have a problem with you because you’re darker, as opposed to just being a different color. That’s something she doesn’t necessarily deal with at her school. They’re just like, oh, that’s Semaje. As opposed to oh, that’s Semaje the African dark girl. She just happens to be dark skinned, that doesn’t classify her as something less than you, or not as important, or not as attractive. But for some odd reason, the ignorant black kids do that. And so that was…that’s been a slight issue for her when she finds herself around a lot of black kids that may be… She generally doesn’t deal with that, with us. And she’s intelligent, she’s an only child. She can have fun but she’s sometimes not as playful because she is the only child. I’m not outside every day doing cartwheels with her, we ride bikes together, but…I feel like there are things that I tell her that I want her to be aware of when I think that it’s appropriate. But I have to say that there’s also the drawback of sometimes, when you don’t find a good balance of being with people of various races, colors, creeds, what can happen sometimes and what I feel has happened with my daughter at some point, where she was like, “All you see on TV are these Disney princesses who are white with fair skin, and she was like…I want to be like that.” Until the Princess and the Frog came out, every princess didn’t look like her. And it’s so subtle, it like goes under the radar, but it can affect them greatly. There’s another cast member in the show, Patrick Clear, his daughter is doing her residency at St. Francis in Evanston. He said, “I’m so lucky that my daughter had great, positive, female science teachers along the way.” You don’t think about it, but…they were female, and they were great at their job, very interested, and this potentially shaped who his daughter was. My mother is a teacher at my daughter’s school, unfortunately there is one African female teacher. Ms. Easely, 2nd grade. I remember that during the teacher assignments, they gave my daughter the other teacher first. And I was like “Oh…oh no, laughter,”I don’t want to have to burn down the school.” Miss Easely is going to be my daughter’s 2nd grade teacher hell or high water. Why? Because my mother is a teacher, my mother is a positive female figure in my daughter’s life, and the only opportunity she could see that in action is Miss Easely. So then I’m gonna need her to have Miss Easely. This may be the only time until she gets to high school where she can be exposed to an African-American woman doing something great in the classroom setting. So yeah, that is important. It might seem like a subtle thing but like…having people who look like my daughter exposing her to musicians and actors and scientists…I try to expose her to as much as I can but I also want her to know that there are POC both male and female that she can read and learn about. I think it is important for her to know that if she sets her mind do it, anything she wants to do, she should be able to do. And so I try to expose her to what I feel is appropriate. We talk about Civil Rights. She loves Coretta Scott King. She’s done some research papers about her. She tells the whole story, the speech. That’s important to me. Unfortunately, we don’t see that enough, specifically in the African-American community. I feel like you’re surrounded sometimes by a sense of apathy and mediocrity in certain circles. It’s important to pull people from those circles. To encourage them to shoot for the stars.
 

 

 

 

James Earl Jones II returns to Goodman Theatre, where he previously appeared in the New Stages Festival production of Carlyle. Chicago credits include October Sky, Elf, Dreamgirls and The Full Monty (Marriott Theatre); Satchmo at the Waldorf, The Secret Garden, The Good Book and Porgy and Bess (Court Theatre); Sondheim on Sondheim (Porchlight Music Theatre); Shrek (Chicago Shakespeare Theater); Cymbeline (First Folio Theatre); Sweet Charity and the upcoming Company (Writers Theatre); Mr. Rickey Calls a Meeting (Lookingglass Theatre Company); Porgy and Bess (Lyric Opera of Chicago and San Francisco Opera); The Wiz (Theatre at the Center, Jeff Award nomination); Aida, Spamalot and Ragtime (Drury Lane Theatre); A Civil War Christmas (Northlight Theatre); Annie Get Your Gun (Ravinia Festival); The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (Broadway in Chicago and Mason Street Warehouse); Dessa Rose (Apple Tree Theatre); Aspects of Love (Jedlicka Performing Arts Center); I Pagliacci (Intimate Opera); On the Town (New Classic Singers), as well as The Gondoliers, Patience, H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance. National tour credits include The Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Television and film credits include Pokerhouse, Chicago Fire and Empire.

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A Conversation with Heidi Kettenring

 

First Davis, then Bacall, now Kettenring. That’s what the graphic from Porchlight Theatre Company read, advertising Heidi Kettenring’s turn as Margo Channing in Applause. And if you ask anyone who has seen Heidi perform, they would tell you that Addison DeWitt’s analysis of Margo in All About Eve could just as easily apply to her: “Margo is a great star, a true star. She never was or will be anything less or anything else.” Onstage, you can’t argue with the comparison to Margo, and undoubtedly Heidi will soon have even more pages of glowing notices to add to her collection, just like Bacall and Davis. But to get a real sense of what has made Heidi one of Chicago’s most beloved leading ladies, you need to dig a little deeper than that. As impressive as she is as an actress, and she is very impressive, there is just as much to be said for her offstage. There is an intellectual ease with which Heidi analyzes a text, a genuine passion for the collaborative process and a deeply rooted belief in the power of truth, kindness, and understanding. Put it all together and you can begin to understand the reviews she gets, not just from the critics, but from the people who have come to know her over the course of her multi-decade career in Chicago.
 

We sat down for coffee in Evanston, Illinois, and talked about the iconic roles she’s played, what it means to “have it all” as a woman in the theater industry, and why she doesn’t care what Hillary Clinton wears.
 

 

Kelly Wallace: Let’s start with some basics. Where are you from? Where did you grow up?
 

Heidi Kettenring: I’m originally from Metairie, Louisiana, which is a part of New Orleans. I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, and moved here to go to Northwestern, and just…stayed.
 

KW: Why acting? How did you come to the decision to pursue it professionally?
 

HK: I don’t think I really knew that until I was about 24. And honestly…other people? I graduated; I was never very confident. In particular, in my abilities as an auditioner. I was never good at that. I always sang the wrong stuff and walked in too shyly. And so when I graduated, I auditioned for three things, one of which I got. It was Healthworks Theatre and you travel to schools doing health –­ mostly at the time HIV/AIDS –­education shows. And I was doing that while I decided what I wanted to do. And I auditioned for two other things and one of the experiences was so bad that I quit. I waited tables in three different restaurants and did Healthworks for about two years, and then a friend of mine basically called me out for being miserable and told me to go audition at the Wagon Wheel Dinner Theatre, which I did. I got cast in everything there, and I met people who did theater in Chicago professionally. One of the gals there convinced me to audition for a show at Drury Lane, which I got cast in. And that’s where I met my future husband, my future agent, and got my Equity card.
 

KW: Now, you’ve chosen to stay here in Chicago. In theater, as you know, there’s a common wisdom that New York is the center of everything, and that Broadway is the standard. We would challenge that assumption. There’s a huge diversity of opportunity out here, especially for women. What made you want to be here in Chicago specifically, as opposed to pursuing a career out in New York?
 

HK: I mean, initially, it was because once I started doing theater, I was successful pretty quickly. I love this town. There are tons of opportunities. And then as I got older and was sort of faced with the choice of…well, I could go to New York. At the end of the day, I do think when people first start doing theater…Broadway is the brass ring. It’s the brass ring that’s in your head of…well, I’m going to be on Broadway someday. But my brass ring wasn’t ‘I want to be on Broadway,’ it was ‘I want to be a working actor’ and ‘I want to have a certain kind of lifestyle.’ Meaning, I love having my own home. Not that you can’t do that in New York, but it takes a lot more money to do that. But immediately in Chicago, I met people like Paula Scrofano and John Reeger, like Roger and Jill Mueller, and looked at them and thought, “They have the life that I want to live. They have a home, they have a family, their job is being an actor. That’s their job; that’s what they do.” And when I was first starting and waiting tables and doing theater at night, that was so exhausting to me. I thought, “I just hope that, sooner rather than later, I get to the point where I don’t have to do all of these other things to put food on my table.” That’s what I wanted. And that’s what I got. It’s just never really been part of my reality to want to move to New York. It’s not a hugely glamorous answer. Every now and then, you think, “Oh, wouldn’t that be great? To be on Broadway and live on the Upper West Side” and then, pretty immediately, I think…no. I love my house, I love this town, I love the supportive nature of it. I mean, I’ll be standing in a room, at an audition, with five women and we’re all audition ing for the same part, and we’re basically saying to each other, you guys would be great in this! As opposed to not talking to each other. And part of that, maybe, is because there’s a lot of opportunity, and you know that if this one doesn’t work out, hopefully another one will.
 

Lila Morse, actor, The Diary of Anne Frank:
“I learned a lot from her about being a principled artist and professional. Regardless of the circumstances offstage, or any mishaps onstage, she always focused her energy on supporting the rest of the cast and giving the audience a wonderful show. Not only was it a comfort to know that kind of support was there, I find it to be a great example of a standard to have in my own work. And that she was never mean or awkward around me after I busted her elbow and sent her to the hospital.”

 

KW: You came here and saw Paula Scrofano and Jill Mueller having the life that you wanted to have. Do you feel like you needed to “see it to be it”?
 

HK: I do. Because I didn’t know what to expect. I think that’s sort of why I was reticent at all turns to go into this field. I think being able to see anything and be able to put yourself in those shoes and try to see…and know that it’s possible. That’s great. Kudos to people who don’t have that and decide to do who they want to be and what they want to do and they just trailblaze and make it happen. But I know it helped me. I know it helped me to be able to meet people right away who were mentors to me, who were kind to me, but I believed them. I never felt like I was being condescended to or told that I was better than I actually was. I felt like I was truly being mentored here. Truly, right away. Sam Samuelson was one of the first people I met and he was married to Mary Beth and they were making a go of it and making it work. And I thought, well that’s fantastic. It’s not just about, oh, they have a relationship and they’re doing theater. It was, well, what are all the elements of life that I would like to have. Not just “I want to be an actor,” because that has never been all that I was. Can I read my book for an hour? Can I work hard at what I really love doing? Can I cook myself a meal and walk in my back door to my home? All of these elements of things that, over time, I cobbled together…that’s what I want. And I can do that here.
 

KW: Mentorship is a huge issue; there should be so many more opportunities for young women to be able to have that experience. You’ve taught before, and some of your former castmates have said you were a great teacher to them backstage. Is it important to you to give back in that way?
 

HK: Absolutely. I feel like it’s interestingly part of my job. I’m reticent to use the word job; it makes it sound like it’s something I’m supposed to do. But in a positive way. I feel like it’s something that we’re all supposed to do. What is life without being able to help anybody with the knowledge that you have? It is. I love it when people are asking me questions about what have you done to create this life that I would very much like to have. At the end of the day, everyone’s experience is going to be different. But I know as a woman, as a female in Chicago, as an actor, what it has been like for me. It’s one of my favorite things about working with younger people, is helping if they want my help. If they don’t, that’s fine. But if somebody wants it, it’s my honor to help.
 

KW: Sometimes there’s a lot women aren’t prepared for or don’t know about being an actor, and one of those things often is being comfortable saying no. Did that take you time to learn?
 

HK: Oh absolutely. I think that there’s always a fear of…they don’t know me, I don’t want to be perceived as difficult.
 

KW: Which can be such a uniquely female problem, to be called difficult or a diva, and then it makes you worry about your ability to work.
 

HK: Right! It definitely took me a long time to learn that. Even in just over-booking myself. That ‘no’ is a perfectly acceptable answer. It doesn’t mean that I’m not being agreeable, it means that I just can’t. It just doesn’t work. Yes, I could technically do that and run myself ragged and be really tired, but that doesn’t help anybody . Learning how to say no, I think, for anyone, but especially for women, is a really difficult lesson to learn. And to realize, why do I want to say no? Do I want to say no just because I want to say no? I want to say no because the answer is actually no. And I want to say yes because the answer is actually yes, I don’t want to answer any question unless the truth behind it is the truth behind it. But yes and no…they really are, they’re sentences unto themselves. When am I meaning it? And when is it important to say? It’s a wonderful, difficult lesson to learn.
 

KW: Seeing people like you be able to do that and say that is really important. Were there women you worked with who you helped you develop that skill as a performer, both onstage and off?
 

HK: Oh yeah, lots of them. I mean, Susan Moniz is one of the first people that pops into my mind. Just from an audience perspective, oh my god, she’s incredible. And then being offstage with her, she’s lovely and delightful and kind and works hard, but when it’s not working for her…she’s perfectly delightful in her way of standing up for herself and getting what she needs and wants. It’s my honor and pleasure, there are countless women in this town that I consider mentors. And a lot of them are my age, and part of that is because I was a little late to auditioning, it was really fun to meet people who initially felt like they were older and I was younger, because they’d been doing this longer, but we actually were very similar or the same age. Truly, the dressing room is such a wonderful, sacred, awesome place. The things that I’ve learned about how I want to be in rehearsal, backstage, onstage, are from watching and learning from all of these magnificent women that I’ve gotten to spend time with. And ones that I don’t want to emulate. Learning from, “Oh, I don’t want to behave like that. I don’t want to learn like that. I don’t want to be perceived like that.” It has been invaluable for me.
 

KW: What’s onstage can be just as inspiring. Seeing women take on challenging, powerful roles can really help aspiring performers find inspiration to pursue their own art as well. What performances have really changed you?
 

HK: Oh god, what would they be? There’s so many. Kate Fry in a production of Hapgood. A Tom Stoppard play, I don’t remember the play; I haven’t read it since. This was when I was a student at Northwestern. I will never forget that. I don’t remember the play at all, and I don’t know if I’d met Kate yet. I’ve known Kate since 1991 and we’ve never worked together, which is crazy to me, but we’re good friends. I remember she was doing this scene and food was flying out of her mouth and she was having an argument of some kind and just going for it, and I had never seen anything like it. I have truly never seen anything like that, to the point that I don’t remember anything except her in that play. That was a life-changer for me. And honestly, since then, everything I’ve seen her in, I have felt that way about. She just has –­ and she’s like this in life –­ she’s just an honest, true person. And it reads onstage. She comes to everything from a completely honest and true place, which sounds so easy and it’s so hard. That’s a big one.
 

Stage-&-Candor_Heidi Kettenring_personal

KW: Have you seen anything recently that really struck you?
 

HK: Renee Elise Goldsberry, the woman who plays Angelica in Hamilton. That was a performance that knocked me out, just knocked me out on every level. And part of it is that the material was so surprising, I didn’t know anything about it when I saw it. I hadn’t listened to it on purpose. So you know, the fact that this elegant, beautiful woman comes out and then starts rapping like a, just, diva, for lack of a better word, and then singing like an angel and emoting with every inch of her body…the whole show was mind-altering, but that performance for me stood out. She was my favorite.
 

Dara Cameron, actor, Little Women:
“I feel so lucky to have gotten to share the stage with Heidi several times and she is one of my dearest friends. The first time we worked together, in Little Women, was a magical experience. It was one of my first professional jobs and I remember feeling instantly comfortable with Heidi. She has this ease about her – we became close very quickly. We got to sing a beautiful duet together and I’m not sure I’ve felt more connected with someone onstage (except maybe when playing opposite my husband…maybe…). She is a uniquely respectful and attentive scene partner, and one of the most honest actors I’ve ever encountered. 
We were also lucky enough to perform in Hero together, also at the Marriott, where she schooled me on holding a coffee cup realistically onstage (you have to hold it like there’s actual hot liquid in there!) and where we consistently had the hardest time keeping it together in one of our scenes because we just were having too much fun. Every night I got to listen to her sing her big act one solo number while waiting in the wings to enter and I remember marveling at her both her consistency and her spontaneity. I love going to work with Heidi because she takes herself and our business exactly the right amount of seriously.”

 

KW: So, since you started, you’ve gotten to play some of the most well- known roles in theater history. You’ve played Fanny Brice, Eliza Doolittle, and you played one of my personal heroines, Jo March.
 

HK: Oh, Jo is one of my favorites too!
 

KW: Let’s talk about Jo and Little Women. She’s one of my favorite characters, I know you’ve said in the past that she was a big love of yours too. Why do you think she’s become such a hero for women?
 

HK: I think a lot of the time when women are represented as strong professionally or strong as a leader, their femininity is left out. Their ability to love and be loved is left out, and what I loved about her is that she –­ surprise surprise –­ she can do well at that and she can love as a sister and love as a friend, with Laurie, and love as a lover, with the professor, but more importantly than that she…I don’t want to say she’s unforgivingly who she is, because she does try to be kind and she struggles within herself and asks, am I doing the right thing? But she knows what she wants to do and who she wants to be and she does what she needs to in a healthy way, to get it done. But at the same time, she is open to following love, and getting married if she wants. I think that for so long there hasn’t been a heroine that embodied all of that, even from a time when that wasn’t considered the norm, it wasn’t considered something people would want to be read about, and go figure, they did. It was sort of interesting proof of that we’ve come so far, but then we haven’t at all.
 

KW: There’s a lot of academic debate about Jo’s ending, in the book and onstage, about whether ending up home with her family and her husband is a betrayal of her pursuit of her career and her independence.
 

HK: I don’t agree with that at all. That’s one of the reasons why I love her, you don’t have to sacrifice one for the other. She [Louisa May Alcott] isn’t in the room for us to ask, but that’s an interesting thing. I can understand that point of view, “Oh well, she got professionally what she wanted, but it’s just not enough, I have to be something for a man” but I don’t think that’s it. I think there’s a wonderful partnership with the professor and Jo does doubt herself a lot at the time. There’s something sort of wonderful, I feel, about the fact that he helps her. I mean, it would’ve been just as good for her to handle everything on her own, but how wonderful that she didn’t have to. There are many ways to be fulfilled and she happens to fall in love while she was becoming an author.
 

KW: I think that’s one of the things that’s important to touch on: the fact that there’s not one path, there’s not one way to be a woman or to be strong. But that there’s room for all different kinds of choices and that real empowerment for women is about being able to make the choice…
 

HK: Right! And not necessarily what that choice is.
 

KW: Obviously, her relationship with her family, and with her sisters, is at the heart of the piece. You did the show out here at the Marriott Lincolnshire, with a lot of other great women…Dara Cameron, Morgan Weed, Abby Mueller. How do you feel like you all worked together in the rehearsal process to make that bond really present onstage?
 

HK: It was immediate. It was really immediate. I had been doing Wicked for two years when I did Little Women. I had been out of the loop of Chicago theater, really, for two years. I knew Abby because I had worked with, at that point, Roger…I think Roger was the only Mueller I’d worked with at that point, and I’d worked with him a lot. So I knew them from when they were kids. But it truly was immediate. I mean, that whole company was just really, really awesome. And the show is set up that you kind of –­ at least with the sisters anyway –­ if you can’t create that bond, you’re gonna have a terrible time. And I don’t think you can play Jo; I mean, I feel this way about any show. If you’re playing Annie in Annie Get Your Gun, or Fanny in Funny Girl, if you go into it thinking ‘I’m Jo March,’ then the whole thing is doomed to failure. You’re part of an ensemble, in any show that you do. So that’s what we were collectively, although we did have an issue when we got our sweatshirts. And we got pink ones, and the guys were really mad. ‘Cause they were like, I don’t want a pink sweatshirt that says ‘Little Women’ on the back, and we were like…’tough!’. That was maybe the one time we weren’t very ensemble–ish. But, it was funny.
 

Annaleigh Ashford, actor, Wicked:
“Heidi Kettenring is an astoundingly versatile and wonderfully gifted actress that is such a treat to work with onstage and off. It is no wonder that her craft and work ethic has made her known as Chicago’s leading lady. I had the great pleasure of working with her in the Chicago company of Wicked, a show that celebrates female empowerment and female driven stories.”

 

KW: You were in Wicked for quite some time.
 

HK: I did it for three years! I want to say I did over a thousand performances of that show.
 

KW: That show attracts such a young, passionate female fanbase. Did you have the opportunity to really engage with the fans of that show?
 

HK: I did. It took me awhile to accept that. It’s such a phenomenon, and that’s something that here…nobody hangs out, really, at the stage doors. I never experienced that before. It’s gotten more –­which is kind of exciting –­ that people now know that they can do that. But for the first year, I was able to get out of the building before the orchestra had finished playing. And I’d be at my car before people were even out of the theater. And it was actually somebody in the show who said to me, “You know, it might behoove you to go to the stage door. Because there are hundreds of girls, there are hundreds of young people and not-so-young people…there are tons of people hanging out at the stage door, and they just want to meet you. They want to talk to you.” And I’m really good at being onstage and behind lights, but I get really nervous about when I have to do a concert and be myself, or speak in front of people as myself. I get really, really nervous. It was a really big learning curve for me. But once I started doing it…you know, I loved it. 
Facebook started really becoming a thing during Wicked . And I am still Facebook friends with a lot of the fans. I’m actually almost grateful, because I think if Facebook had started now, I would probably not have accepted a lot of friend requests from people I didn’t know. But at the time, I was like, “Oh, sure!” and I didn’t know who these people were. And what’s interesting is that these people who were teenagers, young teenagers at the time; I’m still sort of seeing their lives in an interesting way. And we’re still in communication, and there’s a handful of them who will every now and then drop a line about how important that thirty seconds was, at the stage door, of just saying hello. And I don’t regret that first year, because that’s how I learned how much I enjoyed it, by not doing it, but there’s a little part of me that wishes I hadn’t waited so long to actually experience that. And it’s not because it makes me feel good to have people say, “You’re so good!” It’s almost the opposite. That’s the part that makes me uncomfortable, once I get beyond that, and they’re telling me how good they feel because of what they just experienced…I love that. And there’s still a handful of people who now come see me in things all over the place because of that. Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of it’s own weird form of…it’s not mentoring, but it’s the same kind of feeling of like…realizing I’ve just done my show for the 725th time. But this is the first time for this person, who just spent their money to come experience that and how singularly awesome that is, the responsibility and opportunity that I have even when it’s over, to say thank you. Thank you for coming.
 

KW: The stage door after a show is a place where people really have access to their heroes. Anyone can go, anyone can say hi and share their experiences.
 

HK: Yeah, we’re all standing out there wearing our coats and our hats and our scarves at that point. I’m not wearing my costume that was designed by somebody standing on this big fancy stage. I’m just standing in an alley next to a dumpster and we’re complete equals talking about what we both just experienced from two sides of the stage.
 

KW: Have you ever met or worked with someone that was an idol to you?
 

HK: I’m sure. Well, Susan. I keep bringing Susan Moniz up, and it’s fun, because she’s such a good friend of mine, but I remember being in a show with her for the first time…I was just knocked out because I had seen her when I was at Northwestern; I had seen The Hot Mikado at the Marriott Lincolnshire and we’re sitting next to each other in a dressing room and it was just crazy, crazy, crazy to me. Ben Vereen! Oh my god, he was in Wicked for one week. He did the show for one week. And the Wizard didn’t walk onstage for 45 minutes, he could’ve shown up at half hour, and gone to his dressing room. But he came up on the deck at places every day, shook everybody’s hand. He said, “Make some magic out there!” He learned everybody’s name before he got there, for the one week he was there. Oh man, that was incredible.
 

KW: Have you found that the people who are the most engaged and kind and honest offstage are often also some of the best performers you’ve worked with onstage?
 

HK: Yes. I’m sure there are many who are not, but from my experience, the more open you are…being a good actor is reacting to what is coming at you. ‘Cause even a one person show, you have to react to the music, you have to react to the lights, you have to react to the audience, you have to react to your own self. And if you have a block up for that, then I don’t know how you can really truly tap into being a really good actor. If you can’t look someone in the eye and say hello, how are you gonna look someone in the eye onstage and see, “Oh, today their energy is a little bit lower, I gotta maybe kick it up a notch a little bit,” or vice versa.
 

KW: And in the moment you’re lost in the world of the show. But now we live in a world now where technology has enabled a lot of people to react offstage and share opinions on what they saw or how they feel. Do you read reviews or reactions to your performances online?
 

HK: I do read reviews. I went through a period of thinking, don’t read reviews, they’re detrimental. I’m the kind of person who…I almost even have a hard time not flipping through and reading the last page of a book. For me, it’s ripping the band-aid off. Yeah, sometimes I read stuff that I don’t wanna read, but I find they help me. I don’t necessarily listen to them, but I like to get that over with. Reactions…on the flip side, I learned very quickly, especially with Wicked, I don’t go to blogs, I don’t read message board type stuff. Because it’s too easy for people to…like, when people are driving a car and they feel like they’re in the privacy of their car and act horribly, sometimes I feel like behind the screen of a computer, even if people don’t necessarily mean to be really mean, I’ve read some really hurtful things about myself. And I don’t need that. But there’s something about, in the confines of a review, I can’t not. Every time I try to not do it, I end up thinking, “I wonder what they said. I wonder what they’re saying.” And I find that for me, it takes the mystique away. I read it, it’s done, and then I can move on with my life.
 

Jessie Mueller, actor, She Loves Me:
“Heidi and I did She Loves Me together at Writers’ theater and it’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever seen her do. She’s just kind of dreamy to work with. She knows how she works and how to work with others – when to get down to business and when to have fun. You’ll realize after a day of rehearsal that you’ve laughed your butt off AND gotten the scene blocked too. She’s also a gem of a human being and a great friend – the kind that can help you look at this business with a keen eye, or a healthy dose of humor. She’s a great human being and a great actor. You’d be surprised at how rare that is.”

 

KW: One of the other big shows you did here in Chicago was She Loves Me at Writers Theatre
 

HK: I love that show, I love Jessie Mueller.
 

KW: Ilona is so interesting as a character. She’s very open about sex and sexuality in a time when a lot of women were not, and that was a controversial thing to be. She’s very resistant to marriage and she’s even slightly afraid of Paul, whom she later marries, when they meet. The lyric is, ‘he looks really strong, I wonder if he could hurt me’.
Where do you think that comes from? Why does she find herself able to let Paul in, in a way she hasn’t been able to before?
 

HK: If somebody is bigger than you, somebody’s stronger than you…you don’t know them. It’s wise to be trepidatious about that. But for her, she finds him very attractive, but also it’s the first time that she’s allowed herself to be interested in somebody because of their mind, and he’s interested in her…they probably both find each other very attractive, they’re talking about books. They’re talking. They’re sipping hot chocolate and actually talking. They’re not flirting. It’s not just ‘a really attractive man has walked into the Parfumerie and I’m going to flirt with them,’ it’s ‘Oh, this respectable guy with glasses has asked me a question, asked me if he could help.’ There’s a moment, where the lyric is, “Clearly respectable/thickly bespectacled man,” by the second verse she’s singing “slightly bespectacled man,” it’s like even she stops looking at his surface because of what he’s giving her from the inside, to her inside.
 

Stage-&-Candor_Heidi Kettenring_Theater

KW: Have you ever had to do a show where you get the script, and you look at the text, and you don’t necessarily identify with your character or their story arc? How do you proceed from there?
 

HK: Oh sure. There are definitely times when technique has to come into play, if my human experience isn’t going to help me. Angels in America was a really hard one for me to tap into. The language is so beautiful but a little difficult, and the subject matter was difficult to tap into. I do tend to then lean a little bit more on technique. But interestingly, even those, after awhile they become easier, almost because they must. The longer they’re in your body, and the longer you work on them…your body as a vessel, it does become easier, just because it must, for lack of a better way to put it. In order to lose yourself into a performance, while at the same time bringing a lot of Heidi into everything I do, because I am who I am, so the more challenging ones, I think, the more of myself I let in, it helps me with that.
 

KW: Jessie Mueller she said something similar about playing Carole, that she felt that you can’t just play the character without bringing some of what you are into the role. Have you ever had the experience of playing a real person? How was that different?
 

HK: Oh, Jessie! Fanny Brice was the big one, probably.
 

KW: Did you lean on the biographical material? How do you combine that with finding your way into it as Heidi?
 

HK: Because of the nature of who I am, I am sort of a natural mimic. So I try very hard to not do too much visual, audio research because I will just innately have a difficult time shedding that. We actually talked about this a lot with The Diary of Anne Frank [Writers Theatre, 2015] actually. Some people read the actual diary and some people didn’t. 99.9% of the time, the words on the page of the play that I’m doing are gonna give me the information that I need. If I don’t understand something or I’m speaking of something historically that I don’t really know what that is, I’m gonna look it up so I know what I’m talking about, but if the scene on the page didn’t happen, knowing what really happened doesn’t help me tell the story I’m trying to tell. So playing somebody like Carole King, when there’s so much out there…it’s a really fine line to walk. You don’t want to do a mimicry of Carole King’s voice, but, you know, I’m Jessie. There are certain things that are quintessential that people are gonna think about…it’s a really fine line to walk.
 

KW: And a show like Funny Girl, people come into it with a certain expectation of what they think that character is or what it should be. You come in, and you surprise people. Do you enjoy that?
 

HK: I really do. I mean, playing Patsy Cline in Always Patsy Cline is one of the funnest times I’ve ever had. And it was really complicated. Now that’s one where I listened to her recordings over and over, because I’m never going to sound like Patsy Cline. I’m not Patsy Cline. But…she’s an iconic singer. So, I love that, I love the idea that there is no way I’m going to sound like Patsy Cline, but what can I do to give grace notes to her so that within a few minutes, people have forgotten the fact that I’m Heidi Kettenring playing Patsy Cline. And that was really fun, people knew she had died years prior, but you hear people saying, “I thought she died?” like, they would actually lose themselves into thinking, “Oh my god, I’m watching Patsy Cline in a play”, and I think that’s wonderful and fun and cool and such a challenge. I don’t want to do it all the time, because it’s a whole other element of taking a little bit of the freedom away as an actor. You do have to work to fit into that mold, but it’s a fun challenge.
 

KW: There’s been some controversy around Madeleine Albright lately but there’s something really interesting she wrote in an op-ed, “In a society where women feel pressured to tear one another down, the real saving grace we have is our willingness to lift one another up.” How can we do better about lifting each other up?
 

HK: I almost feel like if I knew the answer to that, the problem wouldn’t be there. All I do know is that it is the truth. It’s something that I don’t understand why it’s a conversation we need to keep having but we obviously do. Knocking people down isn’t going to help. Building people up is going to help. It helps you as a human being to build somebody up. It blows my mind that it’s a conversation we will need to have. So we have to keep having it. We can’t be afraid of having it. Don’t be afraid of, “Oh no, somebody might call me a feminist!” So? Be a feminist.
 

KW: Do you describe yourself as a feminist?
 

HK: Absolutely.
 

KW: Some people would say that it’s a loaded word. What does that word mean to you?
 

HK: Right, I think maybe I am because I don’t think it’s a loaded word. I’m a feminist because —maybe it’s a naive reaction— I’m a feminist because of the fact that we still have to ask if it’s okay for me to say I’m a feminist. I am a woman who believes that I— in every way other than my actually physiologically differences— I’m tongue-tied about it, even…
 

KW: “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people”?
 

HK: Yeah, exactly! Like the fact that it just blows my mind that we’re gonna have a conversation about what Hillary Clinton wore. It seems so irrelevant. I sit there and I’m like, okay, she wore a gold outfit. Show me a time that one of the men shows up not wearing a suit and a red or maroon tie, y’know? And even when they do, we’re not gonna talk about it. Because it’s not what’s important. I guess because of that it has this stigma that it’s a word that means I’m shrilly, speaking about what I’m owed and what I’m deserved…the fact that there still needs to be a conversation about what makes people equal…that alone makes me a feminist, because how could I not be? I’m a woman who in no way doesn’t think in every way we’re equal.
 

KW: Have you ever felt treated differently because you were a woman?
 

HK: Yes. That’s definitely been the case. I’ve never been one to be actively physical, I’m not a hugger. It takes awhile for me to walk up and kiss a friend of mine that I don’t know very well. In theater, that’s an interesting thing, I don’t know if it’s a gender thing or a me thing, but I do think it’s a gender thing. The immediate intimacy that a lot of people have…I don’t immediately have. Words come up like “lighten-up” or “oh, you’re such a prude” in that regard, and it’s not all the time, but when it happens my wall immediately goes up. “Oh, I’m a prude because I don’t like the fact that you just smacked my ass? Okay.”
 

KW: Do you feel like there’s that pressure onstage too…to “lighten up”, to be more likeable?
 

HK: I do. Yes. I do. And a lot of it is, in particular, with words that I’ve always hated. “You’re making her really shrill, you’re making her really strident.” As a woman, why are those a bad thing? That is actually the timbre of my voice. When I’m getting angry, I get a little “shrill” or “strident”, so really what you’re telling me is that you want me to be likeable. Well, in this moment, she’s not likeable. I’ve never heard “shrill” used towards a man. And…ugh, I just hate that word so much.
 

KW: We were talking before about politics, which feels relevant here…Donald Trump, who comes from a place of anger so much of the time, or even Bernie Sanders, who come from this place of being loud and having raised voices…if Hillary Clinton or Carly Fiorina matched that tone, they’d certainly be (and are) called “shrill”. But somehow with men, it’s seen as strong.
 

HK: That’s exactly it. People don’t realize that they don’t want to associate women with anger or strength until they actually see it happening. They’re like …ugh, what is this unladylike behavior? But at a debate, when a man is doing it, it’s not even considered.
 

KW: What do you want to see in the future? For women, for theater, what is your vision of where you want to be in 10 years?
 

HK: My hope is that, the gilded lily hope, it’s a conversation that we no longer need to have because everyone is on the same page and on the same foot. My hope is just that it’s not, “Oh my god we have this wonderful female director, we have this wonderful female…” that it’s just “wonderful director”, so what if it happens to be a woman. And that there’s just more. More opportunity to talk about it. To talk about it like this, like we are right now. More to actually do. That it’s not avant garde for there to be a play of all women. That it’s not avant garde that the team is all women, you know? The fact that it’s news in 2015 to have on Broadway the creative team for Waitress is all women…my hope is that in five years that not only is that not a conversation, but it’s not even a question. It shouldn’t be a novelty. I don’t want it to be a surprising thing. It’s just a thing. Well, of course it’s all women. They were the best ones to do the job. But there doesn’t have to be a press release, because of how great and unusual it is, and right now it is great and unusual, but it would be great for it to just be great.
 

Barbara Gaines, Artistic Director, Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, directing the upcoming Tug of War:
“Every performance I see of Heidi’s—no matter what the play—is my favorite performance, because she is the ultimate chameleon. She changes characterization depending on the show and the demands of the role. She completely blows us away with her versatility, and with her profound understanding of human nature. Besides that, having her in the rehearsal room is nothing but a complete and utter joy. She is a fantastic human being…wise, warm, and she makes the best egg salad I’ve ever tasted. I feel truly blessed for all of the opportunities we have had to work together—and for the great adventure we are embarking on this year with Tug of War.”

 

KW: Now, you’re on to Tug of War at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, a six-hour marathon of a show.
 

HK: Terrifying!
 

KW: Barbara Gaines is directing that…do you feel like the energy in the room is different when you’ve got mostly women?
 

HK: Oh yeah, just as we were saying before, the inherent fact that she’s a woman is different. Barbara for me is a singular, wonderful person to work with because she’s so strong and she’s so nurturing. She embodies for me all these wonderful elements of being a strong, full woman. She’s smart, she commands a room, she’s nurturing, she’s kind, and not that I haven’t worked with men who are like this, but there’s something about this petite, spark plug, lovely woman who I feel completely at ease talking to. It’s just a different energy. I don’t know what’s better, what’s not, but I love working with women, and with Barbara. She brings a positive, kind, strong forward momentum into the room every day. And I so admire that about her.
 

KW: And then, working on Applause, with Margo and Eve…their relationship starts off with a conversation at a stage door.
 

HK: Right, like, you’ve come to see me twenty-four times. You’ve earned my attention.
 

KW: Her instinct is to be the mentor. The break-up of that friendship feels like it is a product of the idea that there isn’t room for everyone. Eve feels like it’s her OR Margo, but there’s a place for both of them.
 

HK: That’s where my Margo is coming from. She’s mentoring her. Eve, unfortunately, I mean, it turns sour, because of the fact that…when Margo sees her with her, “Oh, I’ll take care of that, I’ll do that, I’ll sew your clothes” and then she goes back into the room and she’s bowing and holding Margo’s dress up to her. I don’t think –­I mean there is the undercurrent of Margot feeling old, so there is that element of it. Women can have less opportunity as they age. But y’know, what I see for Margot, because I’m coming at it on her side now. I’ve played Eve years ago. Margo’s reaction is to the dishonesty. As much as Margot is this sort of flamboyant, fabulous personality, she is unabashedly who she is. And here is this woman who is hiding completely who she is so there’s that part of –­ you’re trying to be successful by being completely who you are not. The number, “Who’s That Girl” she sings when Eve is there –­ y’know, does he want to marry this Margo, that Margo, or the one on the TV –­ well I don’t feel like she’s saying that’s not who I was, this is who I am now, that’s what I was, but I think one of the many things that bothers her about Eve is that she is completely not in any way who she says that she is. She’s covering up, whether or not she’s doing it because she’s a woman or because her dad was so horrible to her as a child; she is not who she says she is. It’s an interesting piece. What I’m struggling with is the end, is how to make the end not unpalatable. Because of the fact that Margo, the words to it are beautiful, ‘there’s something greater,’ I don’t need to just be the person on the screen. But then it’s like, she just gives it all up to be with Bill. So finding the way in a non-1960s world, to take that and make it work in my brain and not make it, “Well, I’m giving up the theatre so I can be with my guy!” That’s become a really interesting, fun, challenge.
 

KW: Gloria Steinem said in an interview with PBS a few years ago that women can’t “have it all” until we realize that not only can women do anything men can do, but men can do anything women can do, because women end up expected to do two jobs, one in the home and one out of it. Do you feel like you’ve been able to “have it all”? What does that mean to you?

 

HK: I do feel like I’ve been able to have it all. Well, all I wanted in the the time that I wanted it, if that makes sense. Because I don’t think anyone can or should have it all, because then…what do we need other people for? I was actually having a conversation with my husband just last night. We were talking about all kinds of stuff, but the conversation we had recently was that you can’t possibly understand what I’m feeling because I’m a woman. And he said, “I do, I understand”. And I said, “Well, no, I think it’s actually okay that you don’t. And it’s okay that I don’t understand everything that you’re going through since you’re a man. You’re a man, I’m a woman. The difference is how we handle those things and how we interact because of them. Because we’re all innately different. For me personally, yeah, I think, and I don’t look at it in any way as giving up anything, how do I want to say this…I feel like I have what I need and I want because…I try, I work very hard all the time and in every phase of my life to look at my life and think, “What do I need, in this moment, to have the full life that I need right now?”
 

KW: I’m really glad that you brought that up. The idea that we can’t ever completely understand what someone else is going through when you have such a different identity or life experience is something some people are afraid to say. Man and woman is one example, race is another. It’s important to have the conversation.
 

HK: Right, absolutely. I always feel like, if I don’t understand, which I can’t, with race, with gender, with class…you know, we’re all different. Talk to me about it. Explain to me what, you know, I’m going to say or do something “wrong” just from the sheer fact that I don’t know. And so…help me. Educate me. And I will do the same. Because it is impossible for me to understand the full experience of a man, of anyone of a different race than me, because I just am not those things. But I want to. I want to do everything in my power to understand that because we all walk the face of the earth and we should all walk it together, as much as we can. But I cannot pretend that I understand everything because I just don’t. I would like to learn as much as I possibly can. And I think that, I hope, that’s part of why I’ve been able to lead the life that I do, and that I’ve wanted, is that I try to have as much empathy and sympathy to the degree that I can, and I want to live to my honest and true self.

 

 

 

 

Heidi Kettenring’s favorite Chicago credits include: Wicked (Nessa) with Broadway in Chicago, The Diary Of Anne Frank (Mrs. Van Daan) and She Loves Me (Ilona), at Writers’ Theatre, The King And I (Anna—Jeff Award best actress in a musical) and Funny Girl (Fanny Brice), at Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire, The Merry Wives Of Windsor (Mistress Ford) and The School For Lieu (Eliante), at Chicago Shakespeare, Oliver (Nancy) at Drury Lane Oakbrook, as well as work with Chicago Commercial Collective, Court Theatre, Northlight Theatre, Theatre At The Center, Drury Lane Evergreen Park, and American Theatre Company. She toured the U.S. in Disney’s Beauty And The Beast. Regional credits include work at Fulton Theatre, Maine State Music Theatre, TheatreWorks Palo Alto, Peninsula Players and Bar Harbor Theatre. Ms. Kettenring has also sung concerts for Artists Lounge Live, Ravinia Festival, the Pensacola Symphony Orchestra and at Millennium Park. Heidi can be heard singing on two Disney Junior Books and can be seen in the film Man Of Steel. Television credits include Cupid and Chicago Fire. She is the recipient of a Joseph Jefferson Award, 7 Jeff Award nominations, the Sarah Siddons’ Chicago Leading Lady Award, an After Dark Award, the Richard M. Kneeland Award and is a graduate of Northwestern University. She is a proud member of AEA and wife of actor David Girolmo. Heidi can be seen this Summer and this Fall in Tug Of War at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre.

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A Conversation with Jaime Jarrett

 

Jaime Jarrett is a composer, playwright, and student at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Their musical Normativity is being produced as part of The Next Link Project at The New York Musical Theatre Festival this July. We sat down at The Last Drop Coffee House in Philadelphia to discuss Normativity, being a queer person in theater, the limits of representation, and of course, Fun Home.
 

 

Esther Cohen: What’s your elevator pitch? How would you describe yourself as a person and an artist?
 

Jaime Jarrett: I got started in theater really young, maybe 6 years old. My parents sent me to workshops and classes, so I was a performer in the beginning.
 

EC: Everyone starts out in community theater musicals.
 

JJ: Yes! I think the first thing I did was Disney. And I always loved writing songs – I was writing these little songs when I was really young – but I started actually writing songs on guitar and piano when I was in middle school. I put my songs on Youtube for a while, but those are all gone now, of course. When I got to college I deleted them, because some of my friends were finding them, and those were not the type of thing I wanted circulating. They were really embarrassing. I realized that I really loved writing music my senior year of high school. I wrote this song that was a parody about being a hipster. Everyone always called me a hipster in high school, even though, if they had used their brains, they would have realized I was actually just gay. Like, wow, I wore a lot of flannels, I wonder why that was! So I wrote this parody song for a class and I kept getting asked to perform it again and again at school functions. And I started thinking, “Wow, people like this. I’m doing something cool that people like.” And then I wrote a film underscore for another class, and I won an award for that piece. That was when I started connecting the dots and going, “Oh, I’m good at this.”
 

EC: Discovering that you’re good at something is the best feeling.
 

JJ: It’s really wild. My freshman year of college, I wrote this song, and I remember showing it to the girl I was dating at the time and my sister, and I remember them saying “How did you do that?!” That was one of the first songs I wrote for Normativity.
 

EC: How did Normativity come about? It seems like it’s had a long development period before even getting to NYMF.
 

JJ: It started as this 60-minute show called Don’t Bury Your Gays.
 

EC: Oh god, what a title.
 

JJ: I know! And I got this mishmash group together of my friends and people who were friends of friends and we just did a show. And a lot of people came to see it. I was totally blown away by that. The summer after my freshman year of college, I made myself stay at school in Philadelphia so that I would write everyday. I would go to the practice rooms at 11 am everyday and I would stay for 6 or 7 hours. I’d bring my lunch and I’d just stay and write music all day. I wrote so much stuff that didn’t even end up in the show, but the whole point was that I was working really hard. I’m so grateful that I had that summer to kick myself into gear and say “I’m going to finish this show. I’m just going to do it until its done.” I was grateful for the consistency that writing gave my life. The schedule of waking up, eating breakfast, exercising, and then sitting with a piano for 7 hours. I loved that. That felt amazing. Especially because I don’t think I’ll ever have the chance to really do something like that again. Life gets in the way, y’know?
 

EC: And now you’re going to NYMF! How did the show get there?
 

JJ: I applied on a whim, knowing that there was a really high chance I wouldn’t get in. They told me I’d hear back sometime in December about whether or not I was being considered. And on December 1st, I got an email telling me I was being considered as a finalist. And that was “¦ I mean, I was screaming and jumping around because I had never been recognized that way before.
 

EC:: And NYMF is such an incredible festival!
 

JJ: I mean, it’s blowing my mind. I’m really grateful. And since then, everything has just been falling into place. Like, Mia [Walker], our director, was just casually talking to Rachel [Sussman], the Director of Programming, about what she wanted to work on next, and she told Rachel that she wanted to work on a lesbian love story. So from the first time I spoke with Rachel, she was able to say “We already have a director who’s interested.” And Mia is great. I think that our morality and our issues with the world lie in the same place, so I think we’re really going to click.
 

EC: Normativity is a story very much plucked from your own experiences. What’s your view on queer representation in media? What void are you trying to fill with Normativity?
 

JJ: Even with a really supportive family and friend group, I struggled with coming out to people. And as I continued to come out – because it really is an ongoing process – I was trying to pick apart why I wasn’t feeling comfortable with my identity yet. So I started looking at the theater and the media I was taking in, looking at the portrait of lesbians that was being painted there, and I thought, “this is where I think something is going wrong.”
That portrait was abysmal and made me feel like I did not have a life ahead of me in any way. I just remember thinking, and this is kind of dark, but I remember thinking pretty confidently that I was going to die before I was 30. I wasn’t suicidal, I just felt that I wasn’t going to have a long life.
 

EC: You were asking “What’s next?” and there didn’t seem to be a clear answer.
 

JJ: Exactly. I didn’t see any queer stories. I remember going into Barnes & Nobles and saying “I want a book with a lesbian protagonist. Can you help me find that?” And they searched, and searched, and searched, and found nothing. In an entire bookstore! There were floors and floors of books, and they couldn’t find one. Eventually, they directed me to the queer section. Which is the same at every Barnes & Noble I’ve ever been to. It’s two shelves, one labeled gay, one labeled lesbian. And it’s all erotica. And I was standing there wondering “Is this me? Is this what I get as a person?” I did find a handful of books with protagonists who were questioning their sexuality, but it was always a really taboo thing. There’s actually a line in the Normativity script that is pulled directly from the back of a book like that, in which a girl’s life gets turned upside down when she falls in love with a girl because she didn’t even know that could happen and now everything is so wrong! Why does realizing you’re gay always have to be associated with “and now my life is going to shit”?
 

EC: Why can’t it be “I realized I’m gay. And then, life continues.”
 

JJ: Yes! Life continues! We never see lesbian stories that continue on past the point of realizing you’re gay. It’s always about the tragedy of coming out. I just wanted to read a book about a girl whose problems didn’t revolve around her being queer. And that was so hard to find. So Normativity is about literally rewriting the queer narrative and pushing it in that direction.
 

EC: How do you think Fun Home deals with telling a fully-realized story about a gay woman without being all about the fact that she’s gay?
 

JJ: If someone asked me what Fun Home was about, in one word, I would say family. It’s about the connections that a child and parent can have, and it’s about uncovering your family’s past and rewriting the past. And I think it just so happens that one of the connections that Alison and Bruce shared was that they were both queer. But I wouldn’t say Fun Home is about being gay. What makes that novel and that show so great is that it’s not just about one thing – there’s so much to connect to. It’s written for anyone who doesn’t see themselves, who doesn’t know how to identify themselves in the world. That “Ring of Keys” song isn’t just about seeing someone like you who is gay – it’s about seeing someone who is like you, period.
 

EC: It’s about the thought of “I can live past 30 being who I am.”
 

JJ: Exactly. And my “Ring of Keys” moment came really late, in that it came when I saw Fun Home. I saw the show and I thought, “Oh, this is me. This is the kind of person I am.” I’m so grateful for that, and I do feel very connected to Alison Bechdel as an artist because of that.
 

EC: The ability to identify oneself in art and the media is obviously important to your work. How far do you think representation and truthfulness need to go in creating narratives? In other words, do writers and actors simply have to look the part, or do they have to have lived it too?
 

JJ: That’s a complicated question. So I’m gonna give you a complicated answer.
 

EC: Great!
 

JJ: I have this discussion every time I newly cast Normativity. We want a cast full of people who are queer. But what’s the deal if we see someone who is really right for the role and they happen to be straight? It’s a tricky question. And so far, we’ve only had straight women play the two lesbian characters. We’ve never had queer women in those roles. So even in my own work, I don’t have a clear answer.
As far as gender and race goes, I’m very strong and unwavering on the point that, if a character is trans or if a character is black, it must be a trans actor or a black actor playing that role.
 

EC: And why is that? Is it about bringing truth to the role? Or is it about artistic opportunity?
 

JJ: My friend explained this in a great way the other day. He is a cis man and he once played a serial killer. And he was saying, well, theoretically, in some world, he could become a serial killer. That’s something that could happen, it’s an experience he can tap into that is in the realm of possibility. However, no matter the experiences he goes through, he identifies as male and is never gonna be a trans man. And, no matter the experiences he goes through, he is white and is never going to become black. Identities are developed over time, but there are certain aspects of your identity that do not change. Your race doesn’t change, and while gender is fluid, I think we can all agree that there are cis people who will always identify as cis. There isn’t anything that can change that fact about you.
So it’s about truth of experience and it’s also about opportunity. Because if my cis male friend is cast in a trans role, there is a trans actor out there being actively denied an opportunity.
 

EC: Does your take on this issue change when it comes to writing experiences? Because a big part of playwriting is accurately writing a whole host of characters who might be completely different from you.
 

JJ: As someone who is queer, I can certainly speak to the sexuality aspect of that. I do think straight people should be writing queer stories as well. If straight people only write straight stories and queer people only write queer stories, then we’re not going to – well, first of all, we’re going to have fewer queer stories, because there’s less queer representation amongst playwrights.
 

EC: Right, and if white people only write plays about white people – which they kind of already do – there will be very few stories about anyone who is not white.
 

JJ: Yes. And as a white playwright, I can’t fully speak to the race aspect. Because maybe I’d like to say that I can totally write a truthful story from a black perspective, but could I? What I could do is listen. A lot. I once had a man ask me, “How do I write about women?” And I told him, to get a truthful perspective, you just have to listen. You have to talk to actual, real, live women and actually listen to their stories. If you don’t know someone’s life and lifestyle, and you want to write about that, then you have to actively learn and not stereotype and not fetishize.
 

EC: Talk to me about your experience being a woman and being queer in theater.
 

JJ: So, while I can certainly speak to experiences in the theater as a woman – because for most of my life I’ve been treated as one – I think it’s important to clarify that I currently identify as genderqueer.
 

EC: Great point.
 

JJ: When I was younger and auditioning for female roles, there was this weird competitiveness. I was realizing that all my friends who were male got cast all the time because there was a scarcity, and because there were so many girls, I just wouldn’t get callbacks for things. I just remember thinking that that didn’t make sense, because these boys who I was working just as hard as or harder than were getting roles, and I wasn’t getting any turnaround.
 

EC: When I was maybe 14 I have a distinct memory of a director telling me I didn’t “look like a leading lady.” When you’re not traditionally pretty as a female actress your options shrink intensely.
 

JJ: I remember all my dance teachers talking about my weight when I was younger. I would always hear that if I lost a couple pounds that I would be more marketable. And I’ve always felt uncomfortable with my body, but I could never figure out why. In the past couple years, I’ve come to identify somewhere in between the binary genders. I’m somewhere along that spectrum. So being told that my body wasn’t right, that it wasn’t female or feminine enough, when I was only 12 years old, was difficult. And men or boys just don’t get as much flack for their bodies not being perfect or not looking right.
 

EC: How did your experience change as you moved from acting to playwriting?
 

JJ: When I made the switch over to being a playwriting major, I started to dress how I wanted to dress. I realized that I didn’t have to be female anymore. I switched my major and I cut off all my hair. I was changing my major to Joan! I used that joke a lot when I was changing majors. I don’t really wear dresses anymore, I don’t really wear makeup – except for my eyebrows –
 

EC: On fleek eyebrows are important no matter who you are.
 

JJ: Yes, of course. So moving away from acting meant I got to stop thinking about how to make myself desirable for men to look at. Because even though I was never actually trying to attract men sexually, it still mattered what they thought.
 

EC: Because men rule the industry.
 

JJ: Exactly. And that’s part of why I love working with women and with non-binary folks. I feel very safe in that environment. And even if I’m working with men who identify as queer, there’s a shared perspective there that I like.
 

EC: One last fun question. Who or what inspires your work? Who are some of your dream collaborators?
 

JJ: When I was really young, one of my first memories is of my Mom playing a song from Falsettos on the piano and my Dad singing along. It’s such a beautiful song – “What More Can I Say” – about falling deeply in love with someone. And of course I ended up becoming so obsessed with queer politics, so William Finn has always had a big influence on my work. I also have such a love for the basics. I love Sondheim. And – this sounds so nerdy – sometimes I’ll just sit and listen to A Little Night Music because I think it’s just such a beautiful score and there’s a lot to learn from it. Also, although I know I’m so different from Lin-Manuel Miranda, I’m obsessed with his work. And if I could work with him one day, I would die. He’s just so smart. I just admire his sheer creativity. And I think he’s very socially-aware, which makes me happy.

 

 

 

 

Jaime Jarett is a Philadelphia-based playwright, composer, and lyricist who is currently studying Directing, Playwriting, and Production at the University of the Arts. Writing credits include Normativity, Aubade, The Cabin Play, and Brief Connection(s). They were the associate music director of Sometimes in Prague and will music direct and orchestrate the upcoming Hear Me War. Dramaturgy credits include She Keeps Me Warm and Michael Friedman’s American Pop. They are the recipient of the NVOT Outstanding Original Score Award for their work on the film From Me To You. Projects currently in development include Hearts, Brains, and Other Organs: A Song Collection in Progress and Fair Woman. They are particularly enthusiastic about bringing queer stories to the stage.