Be An #ArtsHero Letters

Dear Mr. President and Madame Vice President —

It’s January 10th. Our country has changed in the last year, and in the last four days.

When I was initially going to write this letter, I was going to give you a bunch of facts and figures about what the arts contributes to this country economically. And we do, in fact contribute a lot.

But in light of the events of the last week, when our very democracy was at stake, I want to say that the arts can change hearts and minds. I believe you know this.

But as the last year has shown, our country is in need of healing. Of understanding other people’s points of view. Of becoming a community and family again. And that is what the arts is so good at doing. Gathering people. Giving them space to see, to speak, to converse, to bat around impossible problems to find incredible solutions. To dream of a world better than the one we are currently living in. To find hope when there is darkness. To imagine a brighter, more inclusive and democratic future when we seemed doomed to repeat our mistakes over and over and brush the racial, class and cultural issues at the bedrock of this country under the rug.

This may sound naive. This may sound crazy, but I became a playwright because I hoped to change the world. Or rather, at least a few hearts and minds. Every time I write a play, I hope to make people think, question, ponder what they believed to be true. And to ask them to think more expansively about family, love, community, duty, friendship, the meaning of life and why we’re all here. You have an industry of arts workers who have found the calling too. Please give the arts the support we need or else we will lose generations of artists who could help imagine a better world. Our poets are our prophets. Our theater makers are our dreamers of dreams. Our arts makers can help us find our collective soul again.

Please also consider a department and secretary of arts and culture. Obama had Lin Manuel at the White House. When Hamilton was just a kernel of an idea. But the light was shone on that project. And now I got to see a groundbreaking musical about our founding fathers which had people like me in it. This may sound small, but it actually does shift the needle. So that the idea that I can move the needle isn’t so foreign anymore. Help groundbreaking ideas and storytelling get birthed into the future. We need space, resources, advocacy and a seat at the table. And I promise you — we can help pave the way towards the future, in lock step with you.

With respect,

Carla Ching

playwright and television writer

Dear President Biden and Vice President Harris, It was my honor to support your campaign, and I share your sense that this election was a battle for the soul of this nation.

I write today because we need a new Federal Theater Project. As you answer the call for relief in the arts and culture sector, whose 5.1 million workers have been crushed by the pandemic, I urge you to consider more than keeping afloat what was. We must use this moment to lay groundwork for a new arts ecology in which the wealth of the arts reaches every American, regardless of where they live, how much money they make; regardless of race, class, gender, religion, or political affiliation.

The arts can be part of building the more the just and equitable America we need.

The Federal Theater Project (1935-1939) succeeded foremost as a jobs program, but it also represents the only moment in our history when the arts have come close to serving all Americans. If we come out of this crisis without dismantling the narrative that arts are for the wealthy, or the prerogative of one political party, Americans will continue to lose out on the lifesustaining economic and social benefits of the arts.

It has been documented: participation in the arts improves health outcomes, educational outcomes, and employment outcomes; it decreases recidivism, improves mental health, and creates strong social bonds. Where art lives, communities thrive. I have witnessed these transformations firsthand as a community-based theater practitioner and the Founder of Public Works. And pertinent for this divided moment, theater can help us acknowledge each other’s full humanity, across difference. The case for a new Federal Theater Project rests not solely on the benefit of jobs for artists, but on its potential as a massive wellness and educational campaign, an actual social good that will be direly needed as we move through grief and collective trauma, and as we work to address the profound inequities caused by systemic racism.

The original Federal Theater Project funneled resources to existing theaters, and it also created new, nimble cohorts to guarantee that the funding would benefit even states with few professional theaters. To this end, a new FTP could offer significant relief to our non-profit theaters, but moreso: •

Make federal funds available for a new working corps of artists charged with putting their skill to use in service of their local city.

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Commission local writers in all 50 states to write local plays; put artists to work making plays for schools, libraries, and community centers.

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Incentivize partnerships with hospitals, schools, YMCAs, parks departments, local restaurants, encouraging theaters to bind their fortunes to the wider community.

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Reward institutions that prioritize equity and offer robust opportunities for participation.

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Allocate the funding with geographic equity, not based on where arts orgs currently are. o Until we do this, arts will remain concentrated in a small number of urban centers.

As an artist from Baton Rouge, Louisiana who moved to New York for employment 18 years ago, I can say there are many more of us ready and willing to serve locally, but this will never be possible until we remake the arts ecology to include all of this country. And until the arts produce their noticeable, lifechanging benefits in all 50 states (which they will do if resourced), the arts will remain a partisan issue.

Thank you for hearing my concerns as a citizen. I have a number of more detailed concrete policy proposals and program models to share, and would be honored to discuss further if I can be of service.

May God bless your days and weeks ahead, Lear deBessonet, Artistic Director of New York City Center’s ENCORES, Founder of Public Works at the Public Theater, worker, director, mother.

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Jan 10 2021

Dear Mr. President and Madam Vice President

I have heard you both speak about our potential, and our opportunities as a nation.

After four years of us versus them, of weaponizing fear and prejudice. I am so ready to talk about the future, about innovation, about opportunity.

And as we talk about tomorrow, the artists must be at the table. Not just because an artisan made the table but because we are the tomorrow people. The creators, the craftsmen and women, the artisans, the performers, the vocalist, the writers, the educators. Essential workers. Essential to our mental health. Essential in helping repair a divided country.

When we laugh, hope, empathize When we are inspired, moved to tears When we are fascinated When we see ourselves When we are sparked by possibility----This is us at our best

Even before a pandemic the arts persevered, stretched, some supported by grateful & loyal communities and some from generous donors. But it is the responsibility of a society to support all artists, not just those lucky enough to find a golden ticket. We need a Department of Arts and Culture to ensure the arts are as vibrant and reflective as the nation where we work, praise and pay taxes

The art needs to be accessible to everyone. Because the arts are a reflection of each of us. Arts practice creates opportunities for self discovery and growth. Arts engagement provides opportunities for innovative sparks to rain upon us, giving birth to better tomorrows. Investment in the arts is investment in our culture, in our greatest wealth.

Which is the people. All of our people and ideas that live inside us.

The arts are our voice, our spirit, our story and if we don't know our story then we don't know who we are .

Congratulations on your new roles.

Yours in the arts.

Idris Goodwin Maker, Educator, Organizer, Black Son, Black Father

Dear Vice-President Harris and President Biden, First, I offer blessings on your historic leadership that begins none too soon. This week has made clear that true public service is selfless and dangerous in this country, and I am full of gratitude for your giving your lives to service. I know that you will both restore decency and integrity to the White House.

I’m writing to you as a playwright, along with many other magnificent playwrights, hoping to shed light on the importance of the arts in our culture, not only as a driver of the economy, but as an uplifter of the human soul.

The theater helped give birth to democracy in ancient Greece, creating a common cultural experience that could represent, through a chorus and a protagonist, competing points of view, leading to non-violent catharsis. After the events of this week at the Capitol, it’s clear to me that our country desperately needs catharsis that is peaceful and collective, offering a corrective to hateful mob violence.

Yet our theaters are closed, our catharsis forestalled, and our arts workers economically suffering along with so many other workers in this country. Restaurants, sporting events and theaters have a great deal in common—they feed our souls and our bodies and are multi-billion-dollar industries employing millions. And yet, while sporting events and indoor/outdoor dining have gone on in fits and starts this year, our theaters have been entirely dark, and received no government assistance.

We’ve lost so many jobs in our theater community this past year, and we’ve also lost so many lives.

Among the heartbreaks I’ve witnessed: a stage manager who worked at a prominent theater for the last twenty years, who functioned as the heart and soul of that theater, losing his job when the theater went dark. Beloved playwrights, character actors, directors and designers who have died after contracting Covid-19. Massive numbers of young hopeful theater workers who have been furloughed, and formidable actor-singers who are now Covid long-haulers and can barely sing.

We are a resilient bunch in in the entertainment industry, and we are used to working incredibly hard and singing for our supper. But we can’t sing for our supper right now. We are also used to caring for our own community, and we have continued to do just that. Among the countless kind acts I have witnessed in my industry this past year: a Broadway actor who organized meals for New York first responders for months; theaters that opened their lobbies during Black Lives Matters protests, giving water and sustenance to those trying to make our country a more equitable place; a small theater in Brooklyn transformed itself into a staging ground for an organization called We Keep us Safe to continue delivering food to food-insecure families in Brooklyn; an on-line effort sprung up to archive cancelled theater productions across the country and to provide elegies for an underground art form during plague time; a theater collective created on-line monologues to raise money for hungry children. All of these efforts have come from the heart, not funded by government dollars.

On July 6th of this past year, the British government revealed a two-billion-dollar arts relief program for theaters, museums, and cinemas to keep them going. The British government realized that arts workers are, in fact, workers, and that culture is essential to a country’s economic and spiritual recovery.

I don’t know as much about economics as I do about the life of the spirit, but I trust that my colleagues are addressing the numbers, which gives me permission to tell you a few simple stories.

This Christmas, my mother was in Chicago, and I was sheltering in place in Rhode Island. My mother is an actress in Chicago and has acted for years in small store-front theater. She’s also 78 years old, has diabetes and other underlying health conditions, making us reluctant to travel to see her in person. I feared the small Christmas without the usual festivity of my extended family to make it feel like Christmas. I hated to think of my widowed mother in her own apartment, all alone. I set a place for her at my table in Rhode Island and set up the zoom camera. Meanwhile, I unpacked a box sent to me from the McCarter theater in Princeton New Jersey where I’ve worked many times. The box was designed to help families make their own A Christmas Carol at home, now that we don’t have the ritual of going to the theater together. One part Seder, one part book-club, there were shortened scripts of A Christmas Carol inside, along with mistletoe, and discussion questions. After we ate our dinner, we read A Christmas Carol out loud with my mother who was in Chicago. She played Scrooge with great aplomb (she’d often played Mrs. Fezziwig in real life). I learned that my shy son is a ham and loves to do a British accent. I learned that my husband makes a good Bob Cratchit. I learned “how to keep Christmas” in quarantine. I learned how important that theatrical ritual is—a reminder of simple goodness—even when there are no costumes and lights. After the evening, I asked my mother how it was to have Christmas alone. “But I wasn’t alone,” she said. I know that the ritual of theater made us feel less alone that night, as it has so many nights, and will again, when we can return to our stages in person.

Another story. I’ve been working on a musical adaptation of Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg’s A Face in the Crowd for the past six years. It was to have been performed in New York City this fall, and is now postponed. The movie is about a populist demagogue who gets more and more powerful, and more and more terrifying, and the woman who brings him down by putting his voice on the air while he spews hateful vitriol about the American people. When Elvis Costello, who is composing the music for the show, was given his O.B.E. by Prince Charles, the monarch asked Costello what he was working on. Costello told him about the musical, and Prince Charles said, “It sounds quite relevant, doesn’t it?” Budd Schulberg saw what was coming to America all the way back in the 1940s. The stories we tell about American politics help us understand ourselves collectively. The theater can issue warnings, provide social glue, and help us to move forward into the future, changing the mythologies that we have inherited.

Without more help from the government, many of our beloved theaters across the country will close.

Our workers will be hungry, and also without a purpose, a moral and artistic task for which they are trained and ready. This will mean the loss of those theaters and also their education departments; and we know that children who are in plays learn how to be in dialogue with one another and with an audience from a young age. It’s also clear that Americans are losing the ability to be in dialogue with one another. There aren’t many places to train to be in dialogue with others—the theater is one storied place. We also have, apparently, a scientifically measurable loss of empathy in our nation.

And theater is an empathy training machine. While the transportation industry has received help from the government during Covid while continuing to fly planes, the entertainment industry has received nothing, although we transport the human spirit.

We need your help. We need a Cabinet position for the arts. We need a federal arts work project again. The arts bind us to one another— as such, the arts are a profoundly important infrastructure project for our collective heart and soul.

Signed with all my gratitude for your listening and for your service, and please let me know if I can be of service to you in any way during your time in office.

Thank you, Sarah Ruhl Playwright and professor, Yale School of Drama

Dear America and its Political Representatives,

Given that the nation just su ered another domestic terrorist attack, and in light of the plans for additional attacks still on the horizon, letter writing to compel people to support - yea, to SAVE - the arts worker and the arts industry may seem a bit small and irrelevant to some. Who cares about arts when the nation’s nuclear codes are at stake? Who cares about the arts industry when in broad daylight Asian people are being assaulted as harbingers of COVID, when a Black woman literally was attacked on the street because she was Black and not a Trump supporter — AND NOBODY WAS ARRESTED.

How do we make a case for the need for arts workers now?

I initially wrote a letter speaking capitalist language as a means to demonstrate the arts worker’s value to American life, since that seems to be the only case that politicians are willing to respect and support. “Look at all the ways in which we get the money to ow!” But I resent that reasoning now. Arts workers and the arts industry are not valuable because we help money circulate. That’s just a byproduct of our actual worth. We are valuable because we speak to the soul of the nation. We are valuable because we get people to re ect on who they are, and to consider who they want to be. We are valuable because our job is to seek Truth on behalf of us ALL and to provide spaces for empathetic healing. That is what we o er our society drowning in lies. That is what we o er our society more siloed than compartments of a bento box. Truth, Understanding, Empathy, Healing, and the coming together of people unknown to one another for a shared experience — THAT’S WHAT WE DO.

How much is Truth worth to us in a society where lies are justi ed means to any end? How much is empathy worth to you in a racially and economically segregated society? Where are the spaces for us to come together? Where is the chance to walk in someone else’s shoes?

Find common ground?

We, the arts workers, WE PROVIDE THOSE THINGS.

So if you believe the soul of this nation needs to be healed, if you believe that the complicated Truth needs space to take root, you’d better INVEST in us NOW. NOW. Otherwise, the chance of us healing and evolving from this mayhem, the chance of us coming out of this together and strong (e pluribus unum) is bleak.

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Nikkole Salter

actress/dramatist

January 14, 2021

Dear President-Elect Biden and Vice President-Elect Harris,

Congratulations on your momentous victory. I am proud to be one of the 81 million Americans who voted for you and I am excited about all the good you have the power to do. Taking a cue from my brilliant colleague the playwright Jeremy O. Harris, it will also be my honor to lobby you as fiercely as I can to make the structural changes we need to overcome centuries of violence and white supremacy, to push for economic equality, and to advocate for more compassionate policies in every arena.

To that end, I am asking you to provide support for the 8.8 million arts and culture workers whose livelihoods have been decimated by this pandemic. These folks live in every state in America, in huge cities and in tiny towns like the one I grew up in. They are musicians, writers, dancers, ushers, painters, designers, actors, stage managers, box office workers and more. They move from gig to gig, are often self-employed, and in spite of the fact that they work their asses off, have only intermittent access to health insurance. They were among the first people to lose their jobs during this crisis and they will be the last people who can go back to work — if there is even work to be had. The national tour of my play “What the Constitution Means to Me” was shut down last March, putting hundreds of people out of jobs; I don’t know when we will be able to reopen or if the theaters we booked will still exist. Ninety-three per cent of music venues and 41% of arts institutions report they will not survive this crisis. One third of museums are likely to close. And this devastation is of course distributed unequally; BIPOC, disabled and LGBTQUIA institutions and arts workers have been the hardest hit.

These losses are catastrophic not only for arts workers but for everyone in this country. From an economic perspective alone, art and culture is crucial to the well-being of the nation. The Department of Labor reports that it accounts for $877.8 billion dollars and 4.5% of US GDP; more than agriculture, transportation, or construction. Beyond that, museums, music venues,

galleries and theaters are the heart of local business ecosystems. They keep restaurants, hospitality and tourism alive; when they collapse, communities are gutted.

We cannot achieve a full economic recovery without the recovery of arts and culture.

Beyond that though we need art for a different kind of recovery. We need art because… Well because we’re human. We need art to delight us and to make us laugh. We need art to remind us of our mortality. We need art that doesn’t do anything useful at all. We need art that tells us the stories of our ancestors and art that helps us imagine our futures. We need art that shows us how the hell we ended up in this terrifying predicament.

We need art that reminds us that who we are now does not have to be who we become.

When FDR inherited a country in crisis, his visionary Works Progress Administration, including the Federal Writers’ Project, Federal Theatre Project, and Federal Art Project, demonstrated that the arts were as essential as bridges and buildings to a holistic national recovery. Those projects not only gave millions of Americans jobs, they encouraged theater, music and art to flourish in cities and towns all over the country, sometimes in places that didn’t have access to those resources. They created both institutions and lasting works of art — plays, novels, murals, photographs and poems —that have made all of our lives better.

Why not start there? You could do worse for inspiration.

I am counting down the days until January 20th and I am rooting for you both.

With gratitude,

Heidi Schreck Playwright

Dear Mr. President and Madame Vice President:

Now - more than at any point in our history - America needs theater.

I know this may sound strange at first glance, given all the crises we are currently faced with. Thousands are dying unnecessarily of coronavirus. Millions are without health insurance, food, homes and jobs. Our frontline workers are exhausted and sick and more exploited than ever. The murdering of Black people by the police continues unabated.

Violence against women in their homes has skyrocketed due to lockdown. The climate is in catastrophe.

We have a fundamental soul-sickness at the core of this country that connects all these crises and this is where theater comes in. In a deeply atomized and lonely society, theater is one of the few places where we come together. It has the capacity to get us to see and acknowledge what is right in front of us. It breaks the binaries of right and wrong, left and right and asks us to dig deeper. It invites questions and debate, challenges the status quo. It makes us uncomfortable and it breaks us out of our numbness by getting us to feel. It opens our hearts. It can offer platform and exposure to the most marginalized. It tells stories we may not normally hear, introducing us to unfamiliar characters and strangers. It educates and complicates. It reveals our shadow and our light. It insists we reckon with our history. It asks us to look at why people do what they do rather than only treating people as mistakes or outcomes. It puts issues in front of us that we fear or deny or feel unable to face. It builds movements and creates revolution.

Artists were at the heart of the New Deal of the 1930s. They made posters, created theatre, made music. They transmitted the vision of the New Deal into the culture. Today, the Green New Deal is calling for the same - a national arts campaign to reverse climate change by transforming mindsets and expectations and creating a vision of a sustainable future. We need a Green New Deal now and, once again, we need artists to be at its center.

In lockdown, we have yearned for each other. We have craved touch and intimacy and gatherings where we can locate ourselves within our human community. The absence of theater has shown us how critical it is for our psychological, spiritual and political survival.

These next years will be challenging as we reckon with our past and begin to reimagine our values and our future. We will desperately need rituals, ceremony and public theatrical events that give voice to our rage, our sorrow, our grief, our healing and our dreams.

This is the time to deeply invest in the theater and theatre artists - playwrights, actors, directors, designers, technicians - so that we can move beyond these constant daily fears for our survival and be freed to work our theatrical magic.

With highest hopes,

V (formerly Eve Ensler)