The Public Archives | Stage & Candor

Posted on April 4, 2017April 4, 2017 by admin

A Conversation with 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Posted on January 2, 2017January 2, 2017 by admin

A Conversation with 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Posted on September 1, 2016July 16, 2017 by admin

A Conversation with 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.