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A&E
Complete listings online at cityweekly.net Information is correct at press time; visit event websites for updates on possible COVID-related cancellations or re-scheduling
Craft Lake City Celebration of the Hand: Faces of Creativity
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Early in the COVID pandemic, the cliché went that lockdown would be the opportunity for everyone to finally finish—or, more likely, begin—that creative project you’ve long been pondering. Things were more complicated than that, but that doesn’t mean the time has passed for anyone still pondering how to get those creative juices flowing. By way of offering some possible inspiration, Craft Lake City is using it’s Temporary Museum of Permanent Change public art spaces to showcase alumni from previous years’ DIY Festivals.
Faces of Creativity brings together 14 local artists and previous DIY Fest vendors who were asked to create self-portraits representing their distinctive styles. Participating artists include Nikkita Nouveau (pictured), Megan Hindman (whose illustration represents her as a female knight in armor), Trishelle Jeffery (showing herself as a printmaking artist-at-work), Mojdeh Azani, Chris Haggqvist, Noelle Margetts, Elaine Lee, Beatrice Teigen, Maddie Morrill and more. Whether through photography, painting, digital art or illustration, these works showcase the challenge of presenting oneself to the world through one’s art, and what you’re telling the world about the creative side of yourself.
Faces of Creativity will be up in locations on 300 South between 200 East and 200 West, now through April; the exhibition is free and always open, and COVID-friendly in its openair, view-when-you-wish environment. On Tuesday, Feb. 22 at noon, you can join a virtual “Lunch & Learn” discussion featuring many of the exhibition’s participating artists. Visit craftlakecity.com to register for the virtual event, or for additional artist information. (SR)
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Nate Bargatze
Comedians tend to break out from the pack by virtue of a “gimmick”—a unique vibe or on-stage persona that distinguishes them from their contemporaries. But it’s hard to convey exactly what makes Nate Bargatze a stand-up star. Yes, he’s from the American South, but he doesn’t lean into the downhome Southerner thing. His material tends to be clean, but not in a way that screams appeal to the “clean comedy” set. And while many of his jokes tend to be focused around life with his wife and daughter, it’s reductive to say his comedy is based in domesticity or being the “dumb dad.”
Mostly, he’s a storyteller, and one with such a natural delivery that the punch lines almost sneak up on you. The most memorable bits from his breakout Netflix half-hour special from 2017—about a strange encounter with at Starbucks, and a visit to a low-budget reptile house—became so beloved that he subsequently offered follow-ups in his 2019 special The Tennessee Kid. He even managed to turn COVID into humor in 2021’s The Greatest
Average American: “I can tell you one thing that’s gone forever … coughing in public. You drink water wrong in a restaurant? Just go walk in traffic.”
Bargatze visits the Eccles Theater (131 S. Main St.) for four shows, Feb. 21-25. While the 7 p.m. Feb. 25 show is sold out at press time, tickets remain from $34.75 - $74.75 for other shows. Proof of vaccination or negative COVID test is currently required for all audience members. Visit live-at-the-eccles.com for tickets and health & safety requirements. (SR)
NETFLIX
THEATER Ruffling Feathers
Playwright Carleton Bluford fights his people-pleasing instincts for the provocative The Clean-Up Project.
BY SCOTT RENSHAW
Make no mistake: The Clean-Up Project is not intended to be a comfortable experience for audiences. It confronts the effects of racism on the everyday experience of people with evident anger and frustration. And that reality kind of freaks its creator out.
“I’ll be honest with you: I’m terrified of how people will react,” says Carleton Bluford, playwright of The Clean-Up Project. “It’s scary. But I’ve written the play and done it anyway.”
Premiering this week from Plan-B Theatre Company, The Clean-Up Project is a four-character piece involving a Black couple and a white couple, in a speculative near-future where some racial roles have been flipped. It’s a work born out of Bluford’s anger and frustration over instances of institutional violence against people of color like the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor killings in 2020, originally expressed in a journal entry at that time. But Bluford wasn’t sure that he would be able to turn those feelings into a publicly-produced piece of theater, simply because of some deeply ingrained personality traits.
“Part of my identity has been to be a people-pleaser, to make everyone in the room feel safe and taken care of, before myself,” Bluford says. “Even Mama [his first produced play], an ode to mothers and written for my mom, was really just me saying thank you to all women. [The Clean-Up Project] specifically has brought out a lot of the things I haven’t really been able to say, because I don’t want to make people mad or ruffle any feathers. … The real meat and heart of this piece is figuring out what I want to say.”
That process of figuring out The Clean-Up Project wasn’t one that he had to go through alone, since it was developed in collaboration with Plan-B over the past two years. “Everyone has their own process,” Bluford says. “I was lucky enough o have two: My own process, and Plan-B’s process. [PlanB artistic director Jerry Rapier] offered me a workshop, we got actors who we thought might do well with the characters. Every week, I’d bring something in that’s written, and we shape it that way.”
What emerged was a story shaped by a few fundamental elements. One of them, according to Bluford, was the Joseph Campbell model of the “hero journey,” establishing an ordinary world and progressing to what breaks that world and gives the hero something to do. Another was the desire to have all of his characters—both Black and white—written in a way that felt genuine and compassionate.
“It was very important to me to have a correct voice of someone who was white in this show,” Bluford says. “The things that they say, they truly believe, and come from actual conversations I’ve had with my white friends. It’s so important to have a 360-degree perspective.”
That doesn’t mean, however, that it was easy to incorporate ideas related to white people’s reluctance to confront institutional racism, an idea that has manifested itself over the past year in the conservative attacks on anything that could be lumped under the term “Critical Race Theory.” “When things like this come up, I take care of myself and shield myself,” he notes. “It’s too hard to hear white people rationalize stuff like this. I get that it’s hard for them to face. But the difference for us is that it’s been hard for 400 years.”
So it became a tricky tightrope for Bluford to walk—an interest in confronting issues honestly, while also being fair to people of all races as individuals. “Hopefully, we can start a dialogue,” Bluford says. “People of different ethnic backgrounds were part of creating [The Clean-Up Project], and I think that’s okay. Empathy is so important, man. We have to listen to each other. Even if we don’t agree, we have to listen.”
And while Bluford believes The CleanUp Project has done what he set out to do, in terms of giving a non-BIPOC audience a sense for what it’s like to live as a BIPOC person in America on a daily basis, it’s still hard to feel conventionally “happy” about it in a way that other creative artists might be when looking at the final result of a great deal of effort.
“I am so proud of this piece, but it’s not a kind of play I’m excited about,” Bluford says. “Every time I go to rehearsal, it hurts over and over again. This is kind of a purging for me. But I won’t really feel better until I’m writing a play about how crazy it was that there was ever a time when this stuff happened to BIPOC people.” CW
The Clean-Up Project playwright Carleton Bluford
THE CLEAN-UP PROJECT Plan-B Theatre Company Rose Wagner Center 138 W. 300 South Feb. 17-27 Streaming Feb. 23-27 planbtheatre.org
New legislation signals a big shift for Utah mass transit.
By Benjamin Wood bwood@cityweekly.net
Between 1870 and 1880, the population of New York City crossed 1 million. That same decade saw the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge (it opened in 1883) and the proliferation of elevated trains, revolutionizing the ability of the average person to move about in a city that until then relied on ferries and horse-drawn buses.
The so-called “Greatest City in the World” would ultimately move the bulk of its commuter rail network underground while absorbing 1 million new residents each decade(!) during the first half of the 20th century. Today, the cultural reliance on those Gilded Age bridges, tunnels and mass transit routes not only continues, it is a defining element of a New Yorker’s lived experience.
Now, consider Salt Lake County, which crossed one million residents around 2008 and which is projected to add another half-million souls over the next 40 years. Around the Point of the Mountain, Utah County is projected to add a million new residents over the same period. While that growth is a far cry from the scale of 19th-century New York, there are lessons to be learned about anticipating, and preparing for, demographic trends.
“You think about the congestion going north-south along I-15 right now,” Rep. Mike Schultz, the No. 2 Republican in the Utah House, said recently. “We know we cannot widen I-15 enough to meet the demands of population growth 10 to 20 years from now.” As boring as “transportation infrastructure” sounds, government decisions around the movement of people shape the course of lives—collectively and individually—in astonishing ways. And, according to virtually every demographic expert, Utah’s cities of tomorrow will be crowded.
Schultz, R-Hooper, told City Weekly that Utah is reaching the point where mass transit must play a larger role in the state—to improve air quality along the Wasatch Front as well as maintain overall quality of life.
“Nobody wants to be stuck in traffic,” he said.
To that end, lawmakers are considering legislation this year that would bring state-funded “fixed guideway” (commuter rail, bus rapid transit, etc.) transit construction under the purview of the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT), which traditionally has focused—almost exclusively—on maximizing the efficiency of car travel.
When the bill, HB322, first appeared in early February, it sparked a round of trepidation from SLC’s transit twitterati. After all, the last few rounds of big, state-directed development haven’t exactly gone smoothly for the capital
city (see: inland port taxing authority and board representation, site selection for the new state prison, virtually anything having to do with homelessness) and UDOT, to date, has shown little appetite for ceding car territory to alternate modes of travel. But Jon Larsen, Salt Lake City’s transportation director, was enthusiastic about the proposal. He said the bill makes formal a growing consensus around transit needs (anecdotal stories abound of UDOT executive director Carlos Braceras sounding the alarm on public transportation). And Larsen noted that UDOT brings with it a war chest of $600 million or more, annually, and a track record of de“Nobody wants livering on big, complicated construction projects. “It sounds like a lot of money—and it is—but transporto be stuck tation is really expensive,” Larsen said. “It is really cool in traffic.” and really exciting that the state is stepping in and spendRep. ing transportation money on public transportation. The Mike Schultz [Transportation Investment Fund] was created almost 20 years ago—it’s a big pot of money and historically, it has gone to highway expansion.”
COURTESY PHOTO Carl Arky Brotherly Love
Utah Transit Authority spokesman Carl Arky said that UTA supports the legislation, with the expectation that it will facilitate the expansion of transit in the state. But he was careful not to cash any checks that haven’t been written by lawmakers yet. “We’ll all have to go down the road together and see how it ends up,” he said. Arky said that UDOT and UTA have a relationship of mutual respect—not every state’s highway and transit equivalents can say the same—and that both agencies work in their spheres to improve Utah’s transportation systems. It’s common sense, he said, to bring those spheres together and increase the oversight—and potentially buy-in—of lawmakers over mass transit.
“If we want to be corny and cliche, it does take a village to create this baby,” Arky said. “Everybody’s just trying to
find the best way to get the job done.” The 2002 Olympic Games catalyzed the state’s last major evolution in public transportation, with the construction of TRAX in Salt Lake County and FrontRunner along the Wasatch Front (roughly parallel to the north-south-running Interstate 15 corridor). And in very recent years, UTA has modernized its bus service, adding rapid transit lines in Utah, Davis and Weber counties and high-frequency routes and on-demand services in Salt Lake City. The city government has also partnered with UTA on several free fare initiatives, like event tickets and airport boarding passes doubling as a transit ticket and, currently, free services systemwide for the entire month of February. More indicative of Utah’s strategy over the last two decades are the road projects overseen by UDOT, most notably the multiple rounds of I-15 expansion, the steady freeway-ification of Bangerter Highway and Highway 89 and the creation of new auxiliary interstates like the Legacy Parkway and the Mountain View Corridor, which is designed to be upgraded to an express highway in the future. UDOT’s domain also extends along state-owned surface streets that cut through Utah’s cities—large roadways like 700 East (SR-71), 3300 South (SR-171), 9000/9400 South Utah Transit (SR-209) and too many others to name.
Authority HB322 sponsor Rep. Kay spokesman Christofferson, R-Lehi, said it makes sense to have one department coordinate all of the state’s transportation activities. UTA knows how to run the buses and trains but COURTESY PHOTO UDOT, he said, knows how to get things built. “They know the construction, they know the contracting, they’ve got the contacts,” Christofferson told City Weekly. “They can get it done a lot easier and UTA will still do the [transit] operations.” UDOT representatives declined to participate in an interview for this article, but department spokesman John Gleason responded to emailed questions. He said the department has worked closely with UTA and other metropolitan planning organizations on non-road projects, like
the pedestrian bridge to Utah Valley University spanning I-15 and a new FrontRunner station in Vineyard (which cost roughly $17 million). And it has not been determined whether any organizational changes will occur within UDOT if HB322 passes, Gleason said.
“Utah’s population is growing every day, and this means we need a comprehensive transportation system that provides safe, effective choices for all users,” Gleason said. “Our state’s leaders continue to make significant investments in improving and promoting all modes of transportation, including transit. We will continue to work with the governor, Legislature and our partners at UTA in planning and preparing for Utah’s future.”
Schultz noted that Utah’s transit network has many areas where service stops short of a potential rider’s destination. He suggested that some of those so-called “last mile” gaps might have been mitigated under HB322.
“Bringing that authority under one roof going forward, so that we don’t have UTA doing one thing and UDOT doing one thing, so that it’s being managed holistically for all modes of transportation, is going to save the taxpayers of this state literally billions of dollars,” Schultz said.
Larsen, of the city’s transportation department, credited lawmakers for broadly showing political support for investing in transit (every House member signed onto HB322 as a co-sponsor). Other states have seen transit devolve into partisan squabbles but in Utah, he said, “we get it.”
He said UDOT could face a learning curve, as it hasn’t traditionally focused on things like commuter rail (the double-tracking of FrontRunner, already funded in part by the Legislature, will be first on the docket if HB322 passes). But he didn’t expect any change in direction on anticipated projects, like the long-planned expansion of the S-Line streetcar (“putting the head on the snake,” Larsen said) or new TRAX connections on 400 West and 400 South.
“We’re all pulling in the same direction, trying to get the same thing done and figuring out how best to do it,” Larsen said. “We’re like siblings. We fight it out sometimes, but at the end of the day, we’re all team Utah and want to do what’s best for transportation.”
Jon Larsen
Salt Lake City transportation director
BENJAMIN WOOD
Down the Track
Double-tracking is already in place along some sections of the FrontRunner line, including the recently constructed Vineyard station that is scheduled to open this spring. But Arky said it’s too early to suggest when the entire second track would be completed.
“It’s a high-priority project for UTA,” he said. “It will make the system much more efficient and reliable and faster. But it’s expensive—there’s no question about it.”
Beyond the double-tracking of FrontRunner, Schultz and Christofferson were reluctant to speculate on the transit projects that would be born of HB322, instead speaking in general terms about the need to expand commuter rail both within and between cities and to expand transportation options perpendicular to the I-15 corridor.
“We need to get ahead of these things and figure out how we’re going to do east-west [travel] as well,” Schultz said.
But Larsen described several transit projects that are indicative of, or could benefit from, greater UDOT involvement. A bus rapid transit line (UTA) connecting Salt Lake and Davis counties along Highway 89 (UDOT) is under consideration, he said, which would link to new transit routes along 200 South after it has been rebuilt with transit-priority lanes (a city project scheduled to begin this year). On the west side, Larsen highlighted the proposed 5600 West rapid transit line, which UDOT and UTA have agreed to launch before the Mountain View Corridor is upgraded to a freeway-style road.
“It’s been cool to see UDOT morph and change and really become more multi-modal,” Larsen said. “When I started my career, this was unfathomable, that the state would be putting money toward public transportation.”
Larsen said he sees the role of the city as largely unchanged—advocating for the best possible transit plans and maintaining a “seat at the table,” only now with UDOT reps sitting at that table as well. “I continue to believe that what’s good for Salt Lake City is good for the state,” Larsen said. “The Legislature is trying to spend more money on public transportation, which we support.”
Whatever state spending is diverted to transit is unlikely to include making UTA fares free beyond February, at least for now. When asked if the Legislature had received any preliminary ridership numbers, Schultz was adamant that transit should carry a cost for the user.
“Somebody is paying for it, so is free fare really free?” Schultz said. “I believe those that ride [public] transportation should help bear some of the cost of that ridership.”
Arky said that compared to the first week of January, the first week of February with free fares saw a roughly 15% increase in ridership. He said UTA will collect more comprehensive numbers, which could help in system planning.
“That [increase] is promising but I don’t think that we can draw any conclusions from that yet,” he said. “There’s still the rest of the month to go.” CW
Vexatious Requesters
There’s the “Schoolhouse Rock” version of how a bill becomes a law, with multiple rounds of voting and debate. But just as critical are the many unseen logistical variables at play as Utah lawmakers attempt to cram a year’s worth of legislating into a 45-day period.
One such bottleneck is the drafting process, in which a relatively small staff is tasked with working out the on-paper legalese of an ever-increasing mountain of bills, amendments to bills, amendments to amended bills and so forth.
Here are the lawmakers who got the gears turning—or threw sand in them?—by requesting the most bills this year (as of Feb. 14).
School Daze
UEA president Heidi Matthews says teachers are under attack.
By Benjamin Wood
Education is once again a hot topic at the Utah Legislature—so hot that teachers are feeling burned, according to Heidi Matthews, president of the Utah Education Association (UEA), the state’s largest teachers union.
The 2022 session started quietly for public schools—the early legislative furor was reserved for overturning Salt Lake County’s mask mandate—with lawmakers making good on a nascent requirement to fund inflationary costs at the start of their 45day conclave.
But the friendly feelings turned sour fast, as bills became public that—through various means—would insert state government and public scrutiny into virtually every classroom decision, potentially with legal liability for teachers whose choices are deemed unbefitting.
City Weekly caught up with Matthews on Capitol Hill to chat about how UEA is approaching the back half of the legislative session and what parents should know about the ongoing fight over school transparency.
Benjamin Wood: How are things going?
Heidi Matthews: This has been rough. We started the session really hopeful, we had great things like the funding for enrollment growth and inflation that were approved in the base budget.
The tone that sets is what we had hoped for. It means public school funding is starting the legislative session from a true zero with the base budget, rather than being in the hole from the get-go and having to fight and claw for funding.
But then the bills started dropping—and moving at warp speed, in some cases without public comment.
I take it UEA isn’t being asked to consult on these bills?
No, and we’re seeing a wave of education bills across the country. In many cases, it’s cookie-cutter legislation from groups like ALEC or The Manhattan Institute. It’s part of a nationwide strategy.
We’re seeing it happen here and we’re seeing the impact of pretty egregious bills that incite controversy and put up barriers between parents and the educators in our classrooms. It’s unnecessary and divisive and creates this overall sense of distrust.
So we’re dealing with these political issues and the bill-specific language being sponsored. But then we also have an overall tone and context that has really cast a pall over the members of UEA. They’re feeling like, “I’ve had it.” We’re at the breaking point and then we see proposals like a bill that sets me up to be sued if I do something a parent finds objectionable in the classroom.
Most bills don’t pass. Has legislative leadership given you any indication of whether these transparency proposals will move forward?
There’s a collective responsibility of the Legislature to rein some of this in. Regardless of intentions, it is having an enormous impact on the very people that we need to be supporting right now. [Rep.] Teuscher’s bill [requiring teachers to post the minutiae of their lesson plans online and making it burdensome to deviate from those plans] was pulled, but that was after a petition that gathered almost 34,000 signatures in two days. It completely struck a nerve.
The bills just keep coming. It almost doesn’t matter what they say at this point. It’s felt as an attack and it’s a very real, important feeling and sense of underlying distrust that needs to be paid attention to.
Heidi Matthews UEA president
What are your goals for the last half of the session?
We are spending so much time opposing bad bills that won’t bring about better circumstances for our students or keep educators in the classroom while we have this dire [staffing] need. We’re spending so much time fighting that it’s preventing us from getting to what we support.
There is some good legislation being proposed that isn’t getting attention because of the nonsense. There are bills on literacy and funding proposals for special education, at-risk student support and all-day kindergarten. But one of the things that we are really pushing for is flexible, educator-directed time.
That’s what we hear about over and over and over. There’s the circumstances of the pandemic, there’s a substitute teacher shortage and all of these factors are coming together so our teachers are covering for each other during prep time and then they’re having to take work home.
Paying attention to that now is a critical piece in looking long term and addressing challenges. We had a teacher shortage before the pandemic and now we’re combining that with these political attacks.
Not Legislature-related, necessarily, but what should parents be aware of as the Salt Lake City School District downsizes?
I applaud the wisdom of the school board in looking at what they’re doing right now and how it will play out in the future. I think we need to take that approach. They’re assessing, they’re not ignoring the problem.
Things shift over time. We just want to make sure that we’re doing what we can for our people who are in the classroom right now. Retention is the best recruitment and they’re in a tricky situation with declining enrollment. CW
