SDC Journal Spring 2022

SPRING 2022

JOANN M. HUNTER + LORIN LATARRO IN CONVERSATION

Directors + Choreographers Reflect on Two Fundamental Questions:

HOW HAVE WE CHANGED? HOW HAS OUR WORK CHANGED?

SDC EXECUTIVE BOARD

SDC JOURNAL

OFFICERS

MEMBERS OF BOARD

MANAGING EDITOR

Evan Yionoulis

Saheem Ali Christopher Ashley Anne Bogart Jo Bonney Mark Brokaw Donald Byrd Rachel Chavkin Desdemona Chiang Hope Clarke Valerie Curtis-Newton Liz Diamond Lydia Fort Leah C. Gardiner Anne Kauffman Kathleen Marshall Pam MacKinnon D. Lynn Meyers Lisa Portes Lonny Price John Rando Bartlett Sher Susan Stroman Seema Sueko Eric Ting Maria Torres Michael Wilson Tamilla Woodard Annie Yee

PRESIDENT

Michael John Garcés EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

Ruben Santiago-Hudson FIRST VICE PRESIDENT

Dan Knechtges TREASURER

Melia Bensussen SECRETARY

Joseph Haj SECOND VICE PRESIDENT

Casey Stangl THIRD VICE PRESIDENT

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Laura Penn HONORARY ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Karen Azenberg Pamela Berlin Julianne Boyd Graciela Daniele Emily Mann Marshall W. Mason Ted Pappas Susan H. Schulman Oz Scott Daniel Sullivan Victoria Traube

Kate Chisholm FEATURES EDITOR

Stephanie Coen GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Adam Hitt EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Melia Bensussen Joshua Bergasse Jo Bonney Noah Brody Desdemona Chiang Sheldon Epps Ann M. Shanahan

SPRING 2022 CONTRIBUTORS

SPRING 2022 SDCJ-PRS CONTRIBUTORS

Zi Alikhan

Megan Sandberg-Zakian

DIRECTOR

David Anzuelo

NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY

CHOREOGRAPHER

Jennifer Schulz

Dani Barlow

POMONA COLLEGE +

SDC FOUNDATION DIRECTOR

Nicole Brewer DIRECTOR

Valerie CurtisNewton DIRECTOR

Leah C. Gardiner DIRECTOR

Sara Holdren DIRECTOR + WRITER

SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION EDITORIAL BOARD

JoAnn M. Hunter

SDCJ-PRS CO-EDITORS

Leslie Ishii

Emily A. Rollie Ann M. Shanahan

DIRECTOR

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Kathleen M. McGeever SDCJ-PRS ASSOCIATE BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Ruth Pe Palileo SDCJ-PRS SENIOR ADVISORY COMMITTEE

CHOREOGRAPHER

Lorin Latarro CHOREOGRAPHER

Ron May DIRECTOR

Macey Mott DIRECTOR

Robert O’Hara DIRECTOR

Anne Bogart Joan Herrington James Peck

Ralph B. Peña

SDCJ-PRS PEER REVIEWERS

Laura Rikard

Donald Byrd David Callaghan Jonathan Cole Thomas Costello Kathryn Ervin Liza Gennaro Baron Kelly Travis Malone Sam O’Connell Scot Reese Stephen A. Schrum

CAL STATE SAN BERNARDINO

DIRECTOR

Lonny Price DIRECTOR

DIRECTOR + CHOREOGRAPHER

Luis Salgado DIRECTOR + CHOREOGRAPHER

Chloe Treat DIRECTOR + CHOREOGRAPHER

Moritz von Stuelpnagel DIRECTOR

Gabriel Vega Weissman DIRECTOR

Diana Wyenn DIRECTOR + CHOREOGRAPHER

Annie Yee CHOREOGRAPHER

SDC JOURNAL is published by Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, located at 321 W. 44th Street, Suite 804, New York, NY 10036.

ISSN 2576-6899 © 2022 Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. All rights reserved. SDC JOURNAL is a registered trademark of SDC. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Letters to the editor may be sent to SDCJournal@SDCweb.org POSTMASTER Send address changes to SDC JOURNAL, SDC, 321 W. 44th Street, Suite 804, New York, NY 10036.

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COVER SDC JOURNAL | SPRING 2022

JoAnn M. Hunter + Lorin Latarro PHOTO Amanda Crommett

SPRING CONTENTS Volume 10 | No. 1

5

FROM THE PRESIDENT BY

6

EVAN YIONOULIS

FROM THE

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR BY

LAURA PENN

FEATURES

7 When the Way Is Lost: Making Believe in the Badlands BY

SARA HOLDREN

13 You Have to Get the Stories Out

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN

LEAH C. GARDINER + ROBERT O’HARA

Macbeth at DCPA Theatre Company, directed

by Robert O’Hara PHOTO Adams VisCom

21 The Curve in the Road

36 Finding the Nuance

A CONVERSATION WITH

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN

JOANN M. HUNTER + LORIN LATARRO MODERATED BY DANI BARLOW

NICOLE BREWER + VALERIE CURTIS-NEWTON

28 We Can Get There BY

LUIS SALGADO

30 Collective Effort BY

GABRIEL VEGA WEISSMAN

32 There Has Emerged an Additional Tidal Wave of Change BY

RON MAY

34 Ready Let’s Go BY

ANNIE YEE

44 How Do We Honor

Diane Rodriguez? End the Weathering of BIPOC Theatre Artists BY

LESLIE ISHII

49 Taking Off the Armor BY

LAURA RIKARD

52 The Lens Through Which I View the World BY

DAVID ANZUELO

SPRING 2022 | SDC JOURNAL

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53 Rupturing the Veil BY

DIANA WYENN

PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

71

56 Of Optimism and Adrenaline BY

ZI ALIKHAN

59 Mothers at Work BY

CHLOE TREAT

Risk, Resilience,

and the Essential Experience of Being Seen: Helping Actors Move from Self-Care to Deep Freedom with the Alexander Technique BY

61 The Need for Change A CONVERSATION BETWEEN

LONNY PRICE + MORITZ VON STUELPNAGEL

67 Willing to Bend BY

MACEY MOTT

69 How Are We

Responding to the Moment?

BY

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76

SDC FOUNDATION 77 From the

SDCF President BY

MARK BROKAW

78 A Message from

the SDCF Board of Trustees

JENNIFER SCHULZ

IN MEMORIAM

82 August 1, 2020 – DCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW S March 31, 2022 ilton: A Performance M & Community Engagement Experiment

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DC LEGACY S Jean Erdman

BY

PEARLDAMOUR REVIEW BY

MEGAN SANDBERG-ZAKIAN

RALPH B. PEÑA

SDC JOURNAL | SPRING 2022

The Broadway production of Mrs. Doubtfire, choreographed by Lorin Latarro PHOTO Joan Marcus

FROM THE

PRESIDENT We have turned our clocks forward and there is more sun today, and for longer, in our hemisphere. Spring.

Theatres are reopening. The diversity of voices represented and bodies representing on our stages is expanding. Creativity abounds and has found places to bloom. People are in rooms together again and touching again. Actors are cautiously taking off their masks, even as audiences and many directors and choreographers are (for the moment) cautiously keeping theirs on.

It remains a time of testing, rapid and otherwise. Exploring new models of making work. Investigating the true meaning of Live, and incorporating digital lessons learned into our storytelling.

Importantly, our community has used its pandemic pause to accelerate the pace of change toward equity in our field, and we can feel the collective momentum building as we interrogate our own practice as artists in this moment. How do we take the requisite steps forward toward sustained and sustainable transformation without allowing ourselves to be pushed back once again, like the clocks?

This issue of the Journal brings us a variety of voices contemplating the nature of change, both personal and in the work. These are inspiring offerings that make us think about the road we’ve traveled and the way ahead, about community and connection and activism and artistry. About rage and joy and struggle and perseverance.

In reflecting back on the last two years—the time since March 12, 2020—I am continually inspired by our Members, the resilience they have shown and the courageous vision they have offered in leading the charge toward necessary change.

In these past two years of so much uncertainty, I have been grateful for the abiding work of our Union staff, who have worked tirelessly, with the support of our dedicated Executive Board, to keep SDC serving our Membership, despite deep cutbacks and furloughs.

There were times when the Union’s very existence seemed in peril—and as Executive Director Laura Penn said at our November Membership Meeting, the journey back to stable ground from the treacherous peak of the pandemic will be no less challenging—but we have come through these two years stronger in many ways: In our resolve to create more access and equity for our Membership and their collaborators. In our commitment to preserve the strength of our agreements, hard-won over years of bargaining. In our work to ensure the safety of our Members, not just regarding COVID—in which SDC’s work with AGMA, and recently AEA, has been a model for the industry—but with respect to a working environment free from discrimination, harassment, and violence.

SDC has made important strides in this period, promulgating contracts covering remote work and advancing protections and compensation structures in our electronic capture agreements that

will serve us long after the pandemic. Excitingly, through the courage of our Broadway Associate/Resident directors and choreographers and strategic years-long work, we have finally secured, from the Broadway League, Union recognition of these workers, whose labor in keeping Broadway and touring productions running is indispensable.

But we know that some theatres and companies have shuttered completely. Others have reduced the number of productions in their seasons. Many of our Members are just trying to hang on until fall when there might be work.

SDC Foundation’s Emergency Assistance Fund has given out more than $200,000 since the beginning of the pandemic to support Members and Associate Members in covering expenses, as outlined in its guidelines, “from rent, utility bills, and groceries, to healthcare costs, child-care, eldercare, [and] access to technological equipment and supplies.” The generosity of those Members and others who have been able to contribute to the Fund—and the willingness of those in need to accept help—is a demonstration of Solidarity in action.

In this issue of the Journal, we join together in a place of conversation. From Sara Holdren’s magnificent meditation on what it is to be a theatremaker in this precarious and ever-evolving period to the many other rich dialogues and personal essays in these pages, we consider, collectively, how we might weather the unexpected, unavoidable changes thrust upon us and imagine and bring into being others more welcome and long-awaited. Here’s to brighter days!

In Solidarity,

Evan Yionoulis Executive Board President

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FROM THE

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Amid all that we do, that we can find time to consider the larger questions is impressive; it is even more impressive that we can do this together and that SDC Journal is a forum for sharing and discourse. Two years ago, the trauma and terror of COVID-19 collided head-on with the murder of George Floyd, laying bare the injustices that for too long have been ignored or denied in nearly every corner of our culture and the very real vulnerabilities SDC Members face as they put together their lives and careers. SDC led, with strength and humility, the humility to learn as we led. Last November, at our Annual Membership meeting I evoked the metaphor of climbing Mount Everest—and the peril of the descent from its highest peaks. I share my remarks with you now in an edited version.

I once traveled to the Atacama Desert, Chile, on the western edge of the Andes. I ventured as high as 14,000 feet. I remember saying, “Hey, I could climb Mount Rainier”—the highest peak in the Cascades. Well. That was completely untrue. While I was standing at 14,000 feet—equivalent to the summit of Rainier—I had traveled via passenger van.

I was reminded of this moment recently as I have been thinking about our work, your work, getting back to work. I been thinking about the climbers who summit Mount Everest and what it takes for most climbers (with great admiration and respect for Nepalese and Tibetan climbers) to get to the top. Athleticism is certainly a precursor but that’s the simple part. It takes years to become an expert climber. Years to develop the skills, and even more years for the skill-based knowledge to blend with and sharpen our instincts. Layer on some wisdom gained from failure—the peaks not reached, or perhaps other failed attempts at Everest. Then you need to prepare and prepare some more. You need—or I guess I should speak for myself—I need a guide (you probably do as well) and collaborators, a team. Proper equipment, supplies. Money—climbing is not a hobby of the under-resourced.

When you arrive for the first time at base camp, you have accepted that the days and weeks ahead will lead you across ice falls, crevasses, a haunting and daunting landscape/mountainscape. You are prepared for frostbite and altitude sickness and you pray for the weather to hold out.

You are not alone. Well, you might be alone if you are Tibetan or Nepalese—a Sherpa, some of whom have solo-summited many times over—or a few Westerners, as in fewer than I need one hand to count. So, I am not alone.

Solidarity. It takes incredible, unflinching solidarity to make the ascent—rope teams “walking the rope.” In mountain sports, especially climbing, a rope team is a group of mountaineers or climbers who are linked together by a safety rope. The common safety rope helps to protect individual members of the group from falling. Solidarity leads climbers to “walking the rope.”

Because, risk aside, in the best of times, the fall of one person—for example, into a crevasse—will be broken by the rest of the rope team members.

By walking the rope these past 18 months, we reached the summit— the apex. It’s not as romantic as telling a story of reaching Everest or any one of seven summits on the seven continents—but we did it, and we did it together.

the top of what we now believe/ know was the height of the pandemic. We can plant our flag, #UniteEmpowerProtect, at the summit.

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SDC JOURNAL | SPRING 2022

Hervé Hôte

What next? Now…we head back to base camp. Guess what? The trip back to base camp is exponentially more dangerous than the ascent.

More climbers perish on the return and never make it down. Why? We are now exhausted. We are nearly out of oxygen. I can’t feel my toes or my calves, my hands or my nose. I’m impatient, and super confident, because I just reached the summit. And I helped you get up to the summit and now I just want to get myself down. I get sloppy; my head hurts. Maybe the weather is changing as it is late in the day. Storm clouds and wind.

Solidarity now seems corny, a bit sentimental, as my ears freeze and my brain blurs.

At SDC, we have been working in 90-day increments for over 18 months, scaling the summit of this terrible pandemic. As we celebrate reaching the summit, surviving, and getting back to work, we must not lose sight of the reality that this next period of time will be treacherous for many.

Our Members going back to work are navigating new environments—with COVID safety at the center, and with real and right expectations for a recalibrated workplace culture. Workplaces free from discrimination and harassment. Workplaces driven by anti-racist practices.

You are going back to work having cobbled together health insurance as you figured out how to pay rent while home schooling your fifth grader in math, and keeping in shape by directing on Zoom or developing choreography dancing on your kitchen floor. You now have a dog—what to do with the dog?

You are going back to work for theatres and producers and communities that are struggling to find their new identities and sense of purpose and place while they battle the very real effects of the world’s supply chain crisis. And while they wonder whether their audiences are ready to come back—and stay back.

Or you are not yet going back to work, because even though all around us we keep hearing “theatre is back,” what is true is that it is not quite yet.

And there are still questions about when and if all the jobs that once were will still be there. And now we have inflation.

As your Union gets back to base camp, we are hard at work trying to anticipate the next moves. How to rebuild? And as our world reopens, there are many conversations about how we transform, adjust, and recalibrate to one that at its center holds equity and access as core values.

We are on our way back and we must be patient. We will rebuild, over time. Now more than ever, we must walk the rope together.

In Solidarity,

Your Union was fit. Strong. A well-balanced organization, with a solid base, yet agile and responsive. Well-resourced and equipped, with a solid financial position and a respected, resilient, and intelligent staff. We had oxygen.

Plenty of oxygen. Expert guides—your peers, your elected leadership.

And solidarity. We didn’t fray; we worked together and walked the rope, doing everything possible to support one another. And we made it to

PHOTO

Laura Penn Executive Director

W H E N

T H E

W A Y

I S

L O S T :

MAKING BELIEVE IN THE BADLANDS

BY SARA

Here’s much to do with hate but more with love.

—Romeo and Juliet Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?

Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice. God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It’s up to you to do the stitching.

Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.

Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.

HOLDREN

Harper: That’s how people change.

—Angels in America

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On the 21st of August, in year one of our global pandemic, my partner and I dragged two fully loaded bicycles across the sand at Virginia Beach, down to the water, where my mother snapped pictures as we teetered around in the surf, barefoot, giddy, and, for a moment, maskless and smiling.

We were dipping our back wheels in the Atlantic—a tradition for cross-country cyclists.

A few months before, we had finally called off our wedding celebration, slated for the fall, and in the same moment had decided, “Let’s bicycle across the country instead.” (We called it “the ultimate social distancing project,” but really, it had more to do with maintaining some sense of passion and purpose, some feeling of movement through the uncertain dark.) We did the research, we scraped together the gear, and on August 11 we went

Sara Holdren, somewhere north of Breckenridge, CO, on day 54 of biking across the country PHOTO c/o Sara Holdren

to the courthouse in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Under a magnolia tree we put titanium rings on each other’s fingers; they seemed able to survive anything, and we could afford them.

Ten days after that, we were riding westward, front wheels aimed vaguely at the Pacific.

Eighty-three days, 3,865 miles, six Mount Everests worth of climbing, two absentee ballots, innumerable flats, one injured knee, one injured neck, and roughly 17 billion jars of peanut butter later, we reached the Oregon coast. There, we explored the sand dunes and the wet, windy cliffs, and gathered our first chanterelles with my uncle, a marine biologist and enthusiastic amateur mycologist. In the months that followed, hunting for mushrooms would get us through some very hard times indeed.

But that’s another story.

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What do mushrooms and bicycles have to do with theatre?

It’s autumn, in year two of our global pandemic, and the profession that I am at least theoretically a part of—that of getting together in dark rooms under hot lights to play pretend—is part-tiptoeing, partpontificating its way back into life. Broadway is “back.” Regional theatres are announcing and rehearsing in-person seasons. Artistic directors are turning over like iPhone models, and subscribers are getting emails full of anxious surveys (“Would you be more or less likely to attend an event at Such-And-Such Playhouse if you were required to show your vaccine card?”), along with effusive, familiar promises of magic, urgency, and relevance.

For the most part, we—and the institutions we’ve built—really do care about Doing the Right Thing. We also want to do it first, best, loudest, and, preferably, with applause.

There are new promises, too—Bidenesque assurances of building back better, reams of anti-racism statements and land acknowledgements, pledges to do away with six-day work weeks and 10-out-of-12s, new commitments to equity and transparency.

A funny thing about theatre people is that we’re able to combine ferocious earnestness with degrees of performativity that are simultaneously unsurprising and appalling.

(It’s about time we had an adjective for that particular combination.) For the most part, we—and the institutions we’ve built—really do care about Doing the Right Thing. We also want to do it first, best, loudest, and, preferably, with applause. Sometimes, our pageants have real substance. You can feel the breath within—the immense and complex cooperation, the ethos of mutual aid, the generosity, goodwill, vision, vitality, and shared delight that have conjured this thing, this story, this little gap of time, this empty space, into magnificent life.

Often, though, the show is, to some degree, hollow. Often, it’s hard to breathe. Lines have been memorized, blocking learned, money invested, and tickets sold. A play happens, and perhaps parts of it are even “good.” But somewhere along the way, the soul has been lost. This kind of theatre—this kind of art—is everywhere. How could it not be in a country

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SDC JOURNAL | SPRING 2022

A masked and socially distanced production of As You Like It, SUNY Purchase BFA Acting Program, directed by Sara Holdren PHOTO Zoë Markwalter

that considers art just another opportunity for ownership and profit, a kind of hoity-toity theme park—or, god help us, a non-fungible token? It is the theatre James Baldwin was talking about when he wrote, in the introduction to his 1964 play Blues for Mister Charlie (which he had long wrestled over writing at all), “I did not then, and don’t now, have much respect for what goes on in the American Theatre. I am not convinced that it is a Theatre; it seems to me a series, merely, of commercial speculations, stale, repetitious, and timid.”

Theatres may once again be open for business—and it’s never been clearer that it’s all, perforce, business—and theatre people may have learned a whole script full of new lines and new choreography, and learned it with the very best, the most ferociously earnest of intentions—but something about the great season of reopening feels dispiriting, hollow. We long to make meaningful change, but we’re trapped in the cogs of the machines we’ve built, and those are grinding again at a rate we know is unsustainable, with settings we know are dehumanizing, toward a product we know is mediocre, and yet…

We—theatre folk, artists, Americans, human beings—are not well. Vaccinated or not, we remain surrounded by sickness and we are sick at heart—frightened, enraged, and exhausted. Constantly, furiously paddling to keep our heads above the churning swells of apocalyptic thinking that are far more profitable to the mighty than our art is.

Taking frenzied shots at each other from the padded hunting blinds of our social media

accounts. Quick to accuse, rabidly defensive; our stores of grace depleted.

Many of us were without work, without purpose, for over a year. The lucky ones weathered it—are weathering it—somehow.

We baked, we gardened, we exercised (or didn’t), we moved out of The City (or didn’t), we “pivoted,” we lived with parents, we missed friends, we had our opinions about Zoom Theatre, we got new pets, we went for walks (or very, very long bike rides), we had babies, we watched Bridgerton, we screamed into pillows until our throats were ragged—and every day we worked to convert grief into philosophy, aching loss and uncertainty into positive thought, which is the preparation for right action.

Now, here we are, caught in the gears.

Our desire for change at odds with the excruciatingly slow and imperfect reality of actually changing; our grooming for productivity biting us in the ass; our desperation for rent money and health insurance taking the wheel on a car that has no gas in it. No wonder things feel hollow, no wonder we still feel sick, when in this late pandemic autumn the lucky ones among us are stepping back into routines that feel eerily familiar, and yet…

In 1978 the British playwright Peter Barnes wrote a play that—if there were more right action in the world—would be in performance on every stage and in every field right now. Red Noses is the story of a troupe of clowns facing the bubonic plague.

They go from entertainers to radicals, from easing the suffering of the plague-stricken to denouncing the system that profits from that

suffering—and when the powers that be sniff the shift in the air, they come for blood.

“The plague left them trembling but free,” says Barnes’s Pope Clement VI, “But man is too wicked to be free…

Now I summon back the great engines of authority, Rack, stake and gallows, palaces, courts and counting houses…

The plague was a time of tearful innocence, Now a greater darkness falls For we return to normal.

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It’s dark out there. You can’t find a therapist or a veterinarian; they’re all booked solid. In less bourgeois news, we’re still flirting with fascism, helping Jeff Bezos take over outer space, and setting fire to the planet.

But the darkness is not—is never—all. “And,” wrote E. M. Forster, from within the particular and fearsome shadows of 1938, “one can, at all events, show one’s own little light here, one’s own poor little trembling flame, with the knowledge that it is not the only light that is shining in the darkness, and not the only one which the darkness does not comprehend.” In the same essay, he also wrote, “One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life.”

Perhaps here is something—something humble, humane, and deceptively simple, as was dear E. M.’s wont—to put into practice.

Here is a thought for theatremakers: our ability to trust, and to be fond of each other—to care for each other in every sense—is an indispensable part of our work, of our essence as artists. But it has been critically wounded, and we must revive it. Our ability to make art depends on it. Our survival does, too.

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Theatre is an absurd art form. It asks—and attaches the highest stakes to—questions like, “What do I do with my hands?”; “Can you both stand eight more inches downstage when you gouge his eyes out?”; “Do we need gobos for the dream ballet?”; and “The fairy wings are still on backorder and we open in two days—what the FUCK do you expect us to do?!”

It also asks no less of us than life does: Every moment it offers us the opportunity to practice, consciously, being a human being among other human beings. It asks us to make little societies and govern them well.

It asks us to talk to each other, constantly.

It asks us for the continuous exercise of attention, moral courage, good faith, and care. Despite our best efforts to turn it into just another Disney World (for those who consume it) or just another day job (for those who create it), it stubbornly refuses to forget its ancient, sacred, undomesticated essence.

It’s like a cat that way.

In an exquisite essay on the contradictions and possibilities of utopia called “A NonEuclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be,” Ursula Le Guin quotes Lao Tzu: “When the Way is lost, there is benevolence.

When benevolence is lost there is justice.

Twelfth Night at Two River Theater, directed by Sara Holdren PHOTO T. Charles Erickson

When justice is lost there are the rites. The rites are the end of loyalty and good faith, the beginning of disorder.”

All the lists of regulations in the world won’t save us. Our bureaucracies—no matter the goodness of their intentions—won’t save us.

Our unions—notwithstanding their efforts in the face of other, more terrible machines we’ve built—won’t save us. We cannot policy our way back to the light. Much has been broken, innumerable hurts inflicted, and it makes perfect sense that, when we’ve been hurt, we human beings try to create structures to prevent it from happening again. Perhaps we even create new, necessary, and better structures each time around. All the while, Dionysus laughs at our attempts to heal ourselves with yet more rules.

Did you go to summer camp as a child? There was something overwhelming and a little frightening about it—it seemed to be all of life compressed into three or four weeks. You had no choice but to make friends quickly.

You had to open your little heart and say, “Hi, I’m Sara, do you want to go and braid lanyards at the art building?” These were your people, your whole world, for a long little while, and you had to dig in, be brave, love as much as you could in a short time, and then let it all go.

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Trust and hope are sisters. Bright, tough girls who will spend their lives being brutally, repeatedly disappointed. But the temptation to abandon benevolence in our pain, to seize upon the rites as our salvation, is a trick of the devil.

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In her play Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, Anna Deavere Smith takes on the words of Cornel West. “Hope and optimism are different,” says West, through Smith: Optimism tends to be based on the notion that there’s enough evidence out there that allows us to think things are going to be better much more rational whereas hope looks at the evidence and says it doesn’t look good at all!....

We gonna make a leap of faith beyond the evidence to attempt to create new possibilities based on visions that become contagious so people can engage in heroic actions always against the odds, no guarantee whatsoever.

That’s hope!

“It is required you do awake your faith,” says Paulina in The Winter’s Tale. It is required— and yet, these days, we have little faith in each other. It’s one thing to lose faith in institutions, in governments, in countries; it’s quite another to lose it in people. The pandemic didn’t begin its sibling plague of dislike and distrust, but it has gravely exacerbated our national status quo. Last winter, I started to notice how easily, how quickly I was apt to get angry at strangers. I’d see someone maskless in the grocery store, or someone would elbow by on the street well within the six-foot radius—and I could feel my chest tighten with rage. Rage?

muscles, just like patience, generosity, and tenderness. The pandemic has taken us to the gym of suspicion and outrage every single day. It has left our better muscles atrophied.

Social distancing, a necessity for our bodies, has trapped our souls in the lonely, loveless boxes of our devices, where, at best, we are arch and memeable; at worst, we’re frothing and flailing in a kind of road rage, howling curses at people we’d treat with equanimity in person, desperately seeking some feeling of control in the widening gyre. (I can’t help thinking of more ancient plagues, and how our lack of medical knowledge meant that, while our losses were even greater, we probably held each other closer.)

in the blank: people of color, trans people, women…], and hesitant to re-address process—the day-to-day ways we actually go about making theatre—in a radical, imaginative way. We are proud to participate in the Big-C “Conversation” but are afraid of having small-c conversations with real people.

We act like there is such a thing as a “safe space,” when we know in our marrow that every human relationship brings risk, that we must be vulnerable in order to make anything in the world—that we cannot trust a friend, a lover, or a collaborator without the possibility of pain. And punishment will not cure the pain. And the pain does not absolve us of the task of trying, of trusting, again.

Control, of course, is one of the great lies.

Again, Baldwin speaks out across time— here during a 1962 talk at New York City’s Community Church:

“I’m thinking about how sometimes, when we look at our history, we have a visceral response of shame,” said the poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama in a conference with the On Being Project in 2018. “And it’s no wonder we don’t want to look at it. And shame begins in the body…. And then we put language around it, and then we put protections around it, and then curricula and policy and elections around shame.” (This is true on both the right and the left.) “But it begins in the individual language of the body.

And it’s understandable that it is so seizing of us. It is like being arrested by something.

I mean, it does stop you. And I was trying to think, for a long time, what’s a counterpoint, not a challenge, but what’s a counterpoint to shame? And I think it’s trust.”

[This is] a time…when something awful is happening to a civilization, when it ceases to produce poets, and, what is even more crucial, when it ceases in any way whatever to believe in the report that only the poets can make. Conrad told us a long time ago…

“Woe to that man who does not put his trust in life.” Henry James said, “Live, live all you can. It’s a mistake not to.” And Shakespeare said—and this is what I take to be the truth about everybody’s life all of the time—“Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.” Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion.

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The hollowness of our current theatre practice is the hollowness of fear—of frantic action based predominantly on optics, shame, and an anguished scrabbling for safety. We seem to believe that if we check enough of the right boxes, everyone will be less angry, less hurt: safe. We seem ready to work on numbers, to hire more [fill

Shame folds us in on ourselves.

Unacknowledged, it brings along the demons of paranoia and sanctimony. It curdles our efforts at better policymaking and turns us into boring, bad artists. It’s also inevitable: “All art is faced with starving children and apocalyptic politics. All art is ashamed and angry and desolate because of its impotence in the face of reality,” said Peter Schumann

We had already been primed to hate half of the country (we with our “Hate has no place here” signs), but in this new and anxious world, after months of isolation and millions of avoidable deaths, there suddenly seemed to be visual markers for morality, in both our physical and virtual spheres. Mask, good. No mask, bad. Repost this square, good. Don’t repost that square, bad…. JUST KIDDING, reverse that! KEEP UP, CAN’T YOU? This kind of simplistic, automatic fury is disastrous training for the psyche. Judgment, indignation, resentment—these things are

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Josephine Stewart as Puck in MIDSUMMER, directed by Sara Holdren for her theatre project Tiltyard PHOTO Dianna Bush

in 1985. Then he went back to building giant puppets and feeding people bread.

We must be joyful exorcists of shame.

Theatre—real theatre, not the business of putting on plays—can only happen when hearts are open, when faith is awakened, when joy is present. Happiness can come and go but joy is imperative. Conflict and struggle are inevitable. Bravery, honesty, generosity, and discernment are all indispensable, and joy above all. “We must risk delight,” wrote the poet Jack Gilbert: We can do without pleasure but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only The Comedy of Errors for Two River Theater’s A Little Shakespeare program, adapted and directed by Sara Holdren PHOTO Scott L. Friedman

measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

So many theatremakers have become embittered victims of Robert Frost’s ideal—an almost impossible dream in the capitalist marketplace—of uniting one’s avocation and vocation, as “two eyes make one in sight.”

The vocation part takes hold: for the vast majority of us, there’s no such thing as a living wage in the theatre. We scrape for rent and health insurance, we take on side hustles and “survival jobs,” we pour our souls into artist’s statements begging for grants and fellowships that don’t amount to the cost of a sofa on the Upper East Side. Meanwhile, we are inundated with the world’s ongoing horrors, and we start to feel like it’s our ethical and creative duty to be responding to all of them, all of the time. (Another recipe for bad art.) We take ourselves as seriously as morticians. Terrified to put a syllable wrong, we browbeat and plead with our audiences as if we’re coaxing them to attend a temperance rally.

When will we remember that we’re actually inviting them to a feast, a carnival, a wake?

What are we making theatre for? From what wells in us does it spring? Why did we want to dress in funny clothes and tell each other stories in the first place? Surely it had something to do with love.

There’s a Russian word: obraz. Translated simply, it means “image.” But more accurately it refers to an icon or a sacred image, an image replete with figurative meaning and visceral power. It’s more than a symbol— obraz is an instant that contains the cosmos.

In a piece of theatre, it’s that sudden, shocking alchemy of elements—the radiant convergence of what you see, what you hear, and what you feel into a psychophysical fusion bomb that bursts inside you, revealing

to you the whole play—sometimes, it seems, the whole world—in a single gesture. Dmitry Krymov, the director who taught me the word, defined it as “an image, but an image of God.” We are in pursuit of nothing less. Or we should be. Anyone who cares about theatre has felt it—makers, writers, audience members. Isn’t it why so many of us have stuck around this nutty traveling circus? With its commercialism and its bureaucracy, its lack of security and its scarcity culture, its selfrighteousness and its neuroses and its many, many, many institutional failings? We’re here because at some point, we’ve seen God.

Theatre—real theatre, not the business of putting on plays— can only happen when hearts are open, when faith is awakened, when joy is present.

Happiness can come and go but joy is imperative.

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I am being a bad Marxist. Talking about God. Not talking enough about theatre folk as workers, as members of an industry that, despite riding a sea of rolling reckonings, has yet to get its act together as a sustainable profession.

Last December, the chef and author Gabrielle Hamilton gave an interview in the wake of her New York Times editorial, “My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore?” If you’re a theatre human, reading her conversation with Resy’s Ben Leventhal can feel uncanny: Wait, she’s talking about restaurants, not art, right?

“I do find myself wondering a lot about the kind of heroic classification of [our] nearly athletic pivoting, scrambling to stay alive,” says Hamilton. “I think we get lost in admiring that kind of hustle, but I do wonder if it might not be more heroic to actually figure out a way to harness all that energy and spread that out among everybody and make radical, substantive change across the whole industry.”

The questions of how to maintain integrity, creativity, and a feeling of contribution, of how to put something beautiful and substantive into the world while also paying rent “haven’t been answered for any of us,” says Hamilton.

“Industrywide, there has been no answer to how will we all make a legitimate living.”

I’ve been prone to talking about how, as an art form, theatre is unique. Nothing else can do what it does, how it does it, when we really invite the gods into the room. But as a profession, it’s hardly special. We share our ills with plenty of other methods of trying to survive under American capitalism in 2021.

Many of us live with one foot in the service industry and one in the arts—getting by on whatever amount of blood we manage to squeeze from two different stones.

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that have it seem committed to turning it into yachts, spaceships, and ammunition. It’s a cruel riddle, and I don’t know the answer.

despair on the Wyoming roadside and drive them 100 miles through the badlands, and eat lunch with them, and wish them luck.

But perhaps I know a few important things.

Perhaps we all do. Le Guin writes: “If utopia is a place that does not exist, then surely (as Lao Tzu would say) the way to get there is by the way that is not a way. And in the same vein, the nature of the utopia I am trying to describe is such that if it is to come, it must exist already.”

I know that being a human takes practice. It takes falling short and then doing better: it takes rehearsal.

I know that the world doesn’t need more mediocre, compromised art.

I know that we can reduce harm all we want, but the gods won’t show their faces until we rediscover joy.

I know that, whilst we stand demanding change, we are already and always changing.

And the process is painful, frustratingly unspectacular, and full of shadows. It’s never the brilliant metamorphosis we want it to be, and it has no grand finale.

I know that the only way through the shadows is to care for each other. To stay interested, delighted, amused. To be fond and to trust. To protect our little trembling flames.

I know that mushrooms have patience and perseverance—and that the individual fruiting bodies arise from vast networks of underground mycelium, that they are all part of a single living organism.

I know that this country is wide and broken and ugly and beautiful, and that there are human beings in it who are irretrievably buried in fury and fear, and that there are human beings in it who will pick up two shivering, wind-beaten cyclists sitting in

And I know—because I like looking these things up—that “rehearsal” comes from the Old French for repeatedly raking, or harrowing, the ground. The hears that gives us harrow and rehearsal is the same as the hearse that still carries us to the cemetery. The original root word referred both to a rake and then, eventually, to the rake-shaped frame for candles that used to be hung over coffins.

Somehow we have this word, this word that we use to describe the process of making believe together, and it means harvest and life and repetition and death. It means to go over, again and again. We enter an empty space, imagine that it’s the vast fields of France or a sitting room in provincial Russia, and then we practice walking and talking and living and dying. We practice love and grief and justice and forgiveness. Hardest of all, we practice change. We figure out how to survive with our guts in tatters. How to keep loving with broken hearts. How to sew with bloody hands.

The plagues are not over. Perhaps they will never be. But here we are. Together in the dark, in search of a land that may not exist, but on a road that’s real enough, its every pebble, crest, and curve concrete beneath our feet. Here we are, still walking—still learning to listen, to take care, to reimagine the world.

November 10, 2021 Richmond, Virginia This is for Beau and for Josephine

Lainey Helmers + ensemble in The Winter’s Tale for Shakespeare Academy @ Stratford, directed by Sara Holdren, who also built the bear puppet PHOTO Buck Lewis

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Sara Holdren is a director, teacher, and writer-about-theatre.

She lives in Richmond, VA, with her partner Beau (a writer), their cat companion Masha, several bikes, a boatload of books, and a sourdough starter named Serafina Pekkala.

NOTE: I wrote this essay in November of 2021. Now, it’s nearly March. One might say only three months have passed, but in that “only”—as has been the way with time for a good stretch of it now—what a long, cold winter. In that “only,” what tumult, what continued ripples and ravages, what flows of grief.

Here, in my small and relatively sheltered and fortunate corner of the world, I’m writing this note three hours after losing my cat to cancer, six weeks after crossing the line that brings me closer to 40 than 30, and two months since the show I was in the process of directing became a casualty of Omicron. (Postponed, not canceled, but still, like so many others, we left our rehearsal room unable to touch each other and uncertain of when or how or if we’ll all be able to return.) It’s a play I’ve been dreaming of for over a decade, a play from a place whose mad dictator has finally started a new war. It’s about frustrated hopes, existential grief, and vast uncertainty—about people trying to figure out how to live in a country that’s vast and lonely and unjust and fucked up and dangerous and ashamed and aggressive and full of suffering and full of joy and susceptible to fascistic hubris and capable of immense, astonishing beauty.

Being a theatremaker in November felt fraught with the infuriating shortcomings of a partial return to the status quo—especially after a long period with nothing to devote ourselves to but the dream. (We’d all been Vershinins for 18 months, philosophizing towards a brighter future, only to return to a version of “normal” with more sanctimony and fewer resources.) But being a theatremaker now feels, once again, chaotic, laden with soul-ache, and embattled to the point of near-impossibility. “How are we going to survive our lives?” says Masha to Irina.

“What is going to become of us?”

Who’s to say? And who can say whether this piece of writing feels, at this point, a bit like a time capsule. Perhaps, perhaps not. But whatever the case, I offer it as a letter from a moment not so long ago to anyone who might have use for it in the hard, protean now. As Olga says: “We’re not done yet, my loves. We’re alive now, and we’re going to keep on living.”

February 25, 2022

You Have to Get the Stories

OUT

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN

LEAH C. GARDINER + ROBERT O’HARA

Paul Alexander Nolan + Antoinette Crowe-Legacy in Slave Play on Broadway, directed

by Robert O’Hara PHOTO Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade

Late last September, Leah C. Gardiner and Robert O’Hara logged onto their respective Zoom screens for a conversation about the theme of this issue: “How have we changed?” That conversation took place two days after the long-delayed 74th annual Tony Award ceremony was finally held to celebrate the COVID-19-abbreviated season. And during that ceremony, Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play, which Robert directed, and which had received 12 nominations—the most nominations ever for a single play—was shut out in all categories. Not surprisingly, the awards were the first thing Leah and Robert discussed—but hardly the last. In a powerful and expansive conversation, the two longtime friends and collaborators shared their thoughts about changing the narrative, creating a pipeline, and navigating the new.

LEAH C. GARDINER is an Obie Award-winning director known for the “incisive clarity” (New York Times) of her work with physicality and text.

Her work has been seen across the US, in Europe, and Japan. She recently returned from stints on two TV shows, and is in development on two new musicals.

ROBERT O’HARA is the Tony-nominated director of Slave Play and is currently working on several film, television, and theatre projects. He’s a two-time Obie Award and two-time NAACP Award winner whose work has been seen around the country.

LEAH C. GARDINER | After the 12 Tony snubs, I thought to myself, “How have we changed?” Well, after those snubs it’s clear we are right back where we were before all this talk about “change”—where we have to write our narrative, make space for ourselves, and not expect the old guard to do more than invite us in, as guests in their house.

They invite us to sit at the table, but if the other guests who come don’t like our food, they dismiss us and tell us we’re not good enough. Unless we can figure out how to change the narrative, we are going to be right here…right here…again. I do want to recognize that we have more allies now, which is of course an important change. But it’s going to take more than a few allies to get things past this toxic environment

where Slave Play is nominated for 12 Tonys and doesn’t get one award.

ROBERT O’HARA | We got no Obies, no Drama Desks, no Lortels, no Outer or Inner Critics Circle. We got Nuthing. And this is the same pool of voters that vote on the Tonys. So while I was happy for the recognition, I never expected us to get a bunch of awards.

LEAH | That’s what’s so sad. The truth of the matter is that the narrative is not changing, as much as we would all like to believe it is—or, let’s say, not changing fast enough. And it won’t change until those at the heads of the tables become educated and more open to change.

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many shifts that are occurring, and the older generation isn’t moving as swiftly, because they don’t have to—because, inevitably, they still have the power. I think replacing people who are in positions of power as artistic directors with folks who look like you and me is one thing, but what do their boards look like? And who leads their boards? It’s the same thing in the commercial theatre world.

You and I are dealing with it all the time, which is why I’ve spent the last year working on my television career.

ROBERT | Yeah, me too.

LEAH | I love the theatre, and I love so much about it. When I first went to Yale Drama, I actually went because I planned to learn how to work with actors and then move into TV and film. But here I am, 20-plus years later, loving the American theatre as much as I do and have. The importance of trying to make space for voices like yours and mine has kept me here. And when I’m in the rehearsal room, where I do have the power to create a space of shared understanding and respect with my collaborators, it’s magical. My decision to broaden my opportunities into screen work isn’t to abandon theatre forever—I love it too much—but I have learned to lean into where my voice is appreciated unconditionally.

ROBERT | Racism has taught me not to expect anything based on merit, not to expect anything based on my humor or my intelligence. In a way, this has kept my heart safe, to not go into places and believe that somehow things are going to come my way simply because I have talent.

I think that being in the theatre requires a constant evaluation as to why we are still in the theatre. So much theatre is made up of small kingdoms, people who are hanging on to power by the seat of their pants, and now everybody’s hoping that they can get their budget back again, hoping they can get their audiences back again. We’ve always been trying to get new audiences, been trying to get bigger budgets. For the director, the moment you get a gig, the next word is no and then no and— LEAH | And then no again.

ROBERT | The problem is that people like you and I have had to make “no” work. And then people begin to believe that “no” actually works. That you don’t need all these resources because, look, you made it work without them. You made a bunch of “no’s” work.

That’s the irony of it all. Because we have made a career and we have made stuff work, people have looked at us and said, “Oh, see, ‘No’ can work. They did it.”

LEAH | That’s right. “They made ‘no’ work, and so we will continue to perpetuate the system so that others who look like them can do it that way too.”

I do not think the change in the American theatre has been as extreme as some would like for us to believe—because of what we have had to navigate and how we have had to navigate as artists throughout this pandemic. But navigating roadblocks and extremes is nothing new for folks who look like us.

ROBERT | Oh, this is just Tuesday. Only people who’ve never had to have this conversation think it’s difficult. To me, this is just a Tuesday conversation about race and gender and sexuality and making a safe space.

It’s very important that we are conscious of what we bring into a space. We all have to be conscious of the level of toxicity, even in the minute toxicity that we all bring into a space—our biases, our prejudices, our favoritisms. All those things that we, as human beings, bring into any space, now we have to be hyper-aware. But when I see, especially white artistic directors or white people tell me, “Well, now we have to do this because we’re now focused on this,”

Rachael Holmes, Tim Daly + Orlagh Cassidy in The Ruins of Civilization at Manhattan Theatre Club, directed by Leah C. Gardiner PHOTO Joan Marcus

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Thaddeus Fitzpatrick, Kim Fischer + Joe Goldammer in Macbeth at DCPA Theatre Company, directed by Robert O’Hara PHOTO Adams VisCom

I’m like, “Well, I’ve been focused on that my entire career. You don’t have talk to me about diversity.”

LEAH | Change and approaches to change are generational. How we examine our own biases is learned behavior over time.

Recalibrating and rethinking where we are—as an industry—is a necessity, more than just the individual implicit bias work we’re all doing and being asked to do.

It’s a much deeper systemic problem that has to be cracked open. Unfortunately, because the change is much slower than in other industries, it makes people like you and me, and colleagues of ours who will remain nameless, flee. As much as we’re keeping our foot in, as much as we love it and will continue to do theatre, we’re also thinking about other paths—out of necessity. We still have to ask ourselves, on every level, how can we re-navigate our own livelihood so that we can survive? What is it that we can do? How can my brand serve me artistically but also financially?

I am encouraged that a lot of us—especially the younger generation of theatre artists of color—have been thinking more about this. I did a master class for Anne Bogart at Columbia a couple of days ago. I explained to the students that for our generation, and for

me as a Black woman coming up, there was Seret Scott and then there was me. I realized very early on, after having told an artistic director I would love one designer of color for a show I was working on, and finding that I couldn’t have any, because “they only really use people who know their theatre.” I realized then, “Wow, so this is what it’s going to be like...I’ll work when they need someone to do ‘The February Play.’ So…I’m going to have to figure out other ways to survive if I’m going to be a theatre artist in this country.”

Thank God the company that my husband and I started has done well. There’s a scarcity mentality in this industry to begin with, but especially for people like you and me. The talent of BIPOC artists should be cultivated as much as our white allies. But as you said earlier, we’ve been focused on race, gender, and sexuality our entire careers—hell, our entire lives. It’s really unfortunate that this discrepancy exists and we’re not really addressing the heart of it.

ROBERT | In terms of being a person of color, we can never just be mediocre. White people can be mediocre and succeed and succeed over and over and over again. For the most part, people of color don’t have that luxury of succeeding and being mediocre. We see constant examples where a white director can direct a show that was a flop. No one saw it.

It got horrible reviews. And yet this director has nine more shows lined up. You know what I mean? Not only that, they’re directing plays by Black people, plays by other people of color, plays by women, plays by white people. So there seems to be a pipeline for white directors but not so much for directors of color.

LEAH | That’s right. That’s right. I have producers calling my agents and they’ll say, “Well, we know she’s booked until….But we’d love to see if she’s available for….” It’s like, “Finally.” How many years has that taken?

How many years has it taken for me to be booked two and three years in advance? It’s taken a very long time. And it’s taken a long time for me to say, “No, I’m not going to do this project. You know what? This project with a different director would better serve this play.”

ROBERT | I don’t have to direct every play that’s offered to me. So many directing gigs in our early career are treated as if we should be lucky that they offered us a job.

I had a major artistic director look at me and say, “I heard that you took this job for the money.” And I felt like, “Well, hell, what do you do your goddamn job for? A bouquet of flowers? A pocketful of roses?” Yes, I took this SPRING 2022 | SDC JOURNAL

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Ato Blankson-Wood, Bill Camp, Jason Bowen + Elizabeth Marvel in Audible Theater’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night at Minetta Lane Theatre, directed by Robert O’Hara PHOTO Joan Marcus

goddamn job for money. Why do I have to do it for the love of the art? They make you feel like, “Oh, you should just be grateful that we allowed you in the building.” I’m like, “No, you should be grateful that I’m here, because I add value to you. I’m the artist. This is just a room with raked seats.”

LEAH | “And if you can’t see the importance of making a safe space for everyone, valuing me as an artist, we need to have a different conversation.”

I’m packing to fly out to work on a TV show tomorrow and I’m like, “Oh my goodness, I’ve got to go up to storage to get the big bags because our apartment is so small, my closets can only fit carry-ons.” I’m excited to do this, but it brought back really painful memories of my mid years in the theatre—after I got past doing only the “February plays” and started getting asked to do Shakespeare, British world premieres, musicals—how I would repeat the cycle of coming home on Sunday after having opened a show on Saturday, repacked on Monday, and was on the road again that day for another Tuesday morning, 10 a.m. start…and so on and so on. It was constant and consistent, and I was grateful because we could eat, but that way of life took a toll on my body. It took a toll on my family. And it took a toll on our financial life. As a mother, I would lose money doing shows—bringing babysitters with me or having them come daily to the apartment to help my husband when he was

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at home with the baby. Being a mother in the theatre was hard. And to find the theatres who supported directors who were mothers made all the difference. But to walk into some toxic institutions where my being a mother was seen as an irritation, to not be allowed to have more than one designer of color, to be treated by leadership and staff both in ways no white man would ever be treated…? Thank God we have made some progress.

I often go back to what George [George C. Wolfe, Producer of The Public Theater, 1993– 2004, where Leah was Director-in-Residence and Robert was an Associate Artist] told us when we were younger: nobody can take your ability to tell stories away from you.

Nobody, no matter how hard they try. You have to get the stories out. If there’s one thing we can say to the younger people, it’s that.

ROBERT | We both were witness to the first African American, openly gay artistic director of one of the biggest institutions in the world.

What I love about George is that he is a very interesting character and a very interesting mentor. Everyone would ask, “Well, how was it working with him?” I’m like, “This was not a patting-on-the-back and a ‘let me lead you down the aisle of my knowledge.’” You had to get what you could get, as much as you could get it, because he was going to be him 100 percent of the day. And if you got caught in that vortex, you got it that day.

Something about that kept me on point in a way. He was not going to pretend that there was no stress in this job, that there was no racism or homophobia in this job, or that he was perfect, and that everybody would be treated with kid gloves and told their worth.

There was a lot of stuff that I would see. I would go, “I have to learn from this, because there is a time where I’m going to be tested as he was being tested.” That was quite exciting. He was brutally honest to me.

LEAH | You were not alone. He was brutally honest to me too! He still is!

ROBERT | I value that tough love. I didn’t want to go out into the real theatre world with rose-colored glasses. I think a lot of institutions, especially acting institutions, teach kids that everybody’s going to be equal, you’re going to get as many opportunities as the next person, and you’re going to be doing Shakespeare, you’re going to be doing Wilson, you’re going to be doing Edward Albee, you’re going to be doing Suzan-Lori Parks and all these amazing people. You get out there and you just see a barrage of rejection and “no” and “no,” and then—guess what?—“no” again.

Teaching someone how to make “no” into an everyday relationship is important, and how to contextualize that so that the toxicity inside “no” doesn’t fully poison you to the profession. That’s something that we have to do: it’s an everyday struggle still for me to

make “no” into a relationship that I can go to bed with.

LEAH | As you know, I’m married to an actor and we got together around 10 years into his career. He would go out and audition for something, and when he came home, he would rip up the sides. That was his metaphorical way of saying, “It’s over.

Whether I get it or not, it’s done.” It was a beautiful lesson for me, as we continued to grow in our own relationship—artistically but also as a couple—about what it means to deal with rejection and how they don’t have to have the power when they tell you “no.” That’s one thing about George that I love implicitly, that he worked so hard and continues to this day to teach us they don’t have to have the power. They cannot take your power from you. That is the greatest lesson, as a mentor and as a teacher, he has ever given me.

I think I told you my father died recently.

We had his memorial over the weekend and my eldest brother said, “Dad, you were an amazing father. If I could only be half the father you were.” His statement made me think about how we can serve as mentors for the next generation, thinking about which assistants and associates we’re going to bring into the rooms with us and how we are going

to empower and educate in the way that George did with us. It makes being at this place in our lives and careers very profound.

Ruben Santiago-Hudson talks a lot about navigating the system to make certain that we can go in and say, “I want to make sure that my designers have an associate of color.

Let’s build the pipeline, because you all are clearly not going to build it for us.” He’s right.

We’re going to need to build this pipeline. I think that’s an encouraging part of how this narrative has shifted and changed. It’s about that empowerment. About recognizing our own power, even if—especially if—others don’t.

ROBERT | No one wanted me to be a writer and a director. The only person I saw doing that was George C. Wolfe. Theatres just want to know exactly who you are so they can put you in this box and say, “Oh, that’s what you do? We don’t need that right now.

We’re going to wait until we need that. Then we’ll call you.” It’s really important, I think, especially for young people, to know that you can’t allow someone to take away your joy, just because they said you can’t participate in their playpen.

LEAH | I think part of what you’re talking about is the historical relationship America

has had to the codification of its people in order for a certain sector to maintain power.

The American theatre is an exhibit of this great experiment. They are so used to having us historically coming in through the back door. Like paying us less. Of course, they’re not going to tell us where that door, that other door is…that we could use…no. Because they’re used to us going through the back door.

ROBERT | And making it look like it’s the front door.

LEAH | Right. You talk about the different hats that you wear in the American theatre. In my case, I’ve produced film, I’ve acted in film, I’m writing. I’m going to continue to tell the stories. If you’re going to tell me that I have to continue going in through the back door, I don’t need that kind of toxicity. Because that’s not where, as an artist, I plan to live. I’ll find another house, with a bigger table.

ROBERT | Asking us to create from toxicity is difficult. I remember having to jump through so many hoops to get the damn job that when I got in the room I was already exhausted. It takes much more labor than other people, who are welcomed and ask to simply create from their imagination and respect.

If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka at Playwrights Horizons, directed by Leah C. Gardiner PHOTO Joan Marcus

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LEAH | Yes! Because they can, because they’re not given the same kind of ugly that we are given. It is real. “How have we changed?” It’s clear how you and I have changed. “How has American theatre changed?”…

How are we communicating in rehearsal halls now? Now that we’re moving from a less hierarchical way of working into more of what people call a collaborative way of working?

Ironically, that’s how I have worked for a long time and people have judged it, doubted my leadership or ability because of the openness of my process. I know a lot of my fellow women directors have experienced the same.

It’s just a different approach to how you run a hall. There again, it’s the interesting inbetween: where we were, where we are, what will change…What are the expectations of us, and the expectations that we’re bringing into a room?

institutions. Now, in this day of reckoning, some of us have begun to believe that certain female leaders are the problem, because of what white men have gotten away with at their institutions and that women now have to clean it up or deal with it or justify it. Many women have been thrown under the bus of white supremacy that had been left to run amok for decades of toxic male leadership.

a sense of grace, a sense of honoring the sacred space of a room and also being able to fail, to make a mistake, to say the wrong thing, to get it wrong. And where we can all collectively give a moment of grace to the people who are making the mistake and making the wrong step and saying the wrong thing and having them acknowledge it, be accountable for it and move forward.

We’re storytellers, and we tell the stories from a sacred, artistic space and bring others along with us to collectively make change.

LEAH | It’s become very individualistic.

How does a collaborative art with a very individualistic and self-motivated group of people come together and make art? There’s a shift. It’s a kind of ambition. There’s a difference between making art for art’s sake, for those who just love it, and then those who are making it for the sake of ambition. “I will do whatever it is that I need to do in order to make sure that I get enough followers, to get the check mark next to my name.”

—LEAH C. GARDINER

We see it on our streets and our stages.

It’s happening everywhere. America is really facing a generational reckoning that is painful.

LEAH | It’s like being a Black woman Democrat. That’s exactly what you’re describing.

ROBERT | I see also a lot of people of color and women being held responsible for what white men have institutionalized. In the last decade or so, a lot of women have taken over

ROBERT | Every problem, every misstep is now a reason for your cancellation. There’s no nuance. There’s no irony. Some people should be brought into the light and shown their problems. But there also needs to be

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ROBERT | And who is taking care of the director? Because the director somehow has to be responsible for everybody in the room, everybody backstage, and everybody in the audience. Take Slave Play, for example. I had a young person ask me, “How do you feel about the harm that you’ve done to people in the audience?” I’m like, I can’t take care of everyone. I walk through life as a queer man of color and ain’t nobody taking care of me. I

Insurrection: Holding History at The Public Theater, written + directed by Robert O’Hara PHOTO Michal Daniel

working from a lens of white supremacy—or if we’re talking about gender, race, ageism, you name it—have they been educated?

Are they the person that we go to call on?

Sheldon Best in The Loneliness of the LongDistance Runner at Atlantic Theater Company, directed

by Leah C. Gardiner PHOTO Ahron Foster

can’t take care of every single living individual that walks into a space in which I’ve created. I have this motto I’ve been using for decades: “Everybody Is Welcome, No One Is Safe.”

Because we’ve begun to equate safe with comfortable. And my work makes people uncomfortable. My body makes people uncomfortable. And just by being alive and 51 years old and a homosexual and Black. I can’t make you comfortable with that. And because you are uncomfortable somehow you believe I’ve harmed you. But in the case of Slave Play I refused to make the audience comfortable. There is nothing comfortable about slavery and it shouldn’t be. Therefore some folks took that to mean the play is harmful.

And this whole idea of triggering—that’s part of my job as a director, to embed little triggers around, to make you laugh, to make you cry, to make you scared, to make you repulsed, to make you angry, to make you want to fight, to make you want to jump up and protect or denounce or snap your fingers or simply shout. Those little triggers are part of the job of taking you on the ride. Triggers are part of directing. Comfort is not. I want every person I work with to feel safe. But if we’re dealing with uncomfortable issues, I don’t want to make those issues comfortable for an audience. It should cost the audience something, just as it cost me something to direct it and it cost everyone creating it something to create it.

LEAH | Exactly. We’re storytellers, and we tell the stories from a sacred, artistic space and bring others along with us to collectively make change. Really, that’s why we signed on. But I think that what

you’re saying about “who is taking care of the director” [is important], especially now that there are a number of conversations happening about looking at a less hierarchical system. At the Union, we can say to directors, “Take this implicit bias course, and understand what your own explicit and implicit biases are to help better educate you when you get into the room.” But then we’re going to get into the room with people who maybe haven’t taken the courses, don’t have the awareness, or don’t understand what that is. When someone asks you about harming them, and you say, “By asking me that, you just harmed me”—in some ways that’s necessary in order for both of you to get to the next step. But if there isn’t a conversation about it, then we’re in trouble. There are how many theatres in this country? How many theatres in New York? I don’t care how many DEI folks there are in this country—there are not enough to be in every one of these rooms.

This is America. The work is hard. Making this country work is hard. And making art here is hard, especially when we’re carrying and leaning into our historical trauma.

We have intimacy choreographers coming in now, which is fantastic. It seems like a new microcosm of how we might look at what it means to reassess the idea of hierarchy.

How do we navigate safety and identity and trauma in the room? Who leads the conversations and processes? What does that mean for the role of the director and their need to ensure the whole picture still comes together in a way that’s inclusive, and also cohesive? And then, at the end of the day, who’s helping the director navigate all of this “new”? Is the producer? Has the producer been educated? Well, if the producer is

ROBERT | Part of the job, the real big job, of the director is to bring the people in the room that can create the space that you want to create. People always say to me, “Well, did you do that or did the choreographer or did the intimacy director or did the designer?”

I’m like, “Well, I brought them into the room.”

That is directing. Bringing them into the room and giving them agency is directing.

I don’t have to direct your every moment and footstep of where to go. I brought you in here to do your job, and that’s part of directing. So its important to get people in there that you actually trust and that are engaged and that inspire you. I try to make a very loose and very fun and exciting room.

We tell jokes, we rib each other. That sort of thing is necessary for me, especially when we’re dealing with very difficult subject matter.

LEAH | Let me ask you a question: the kind of jokes or ribbing or play—what we see as play, and do so successfully in our rehearsal halls, and we both agree one needs to create a sandbox environment in order to play—what is that going to be now?

I want every person I work with to feel safe. But if we’re dealing with uncomfortable issues, I don’t want to make those issues comfortable for an audience.

—ROBERT O’HARA ROBERT | I’m hoping that people who want to work with me, or think of working with me, do their research. I can only work at the level that I can work at. Because if I’m not engaged, then why am I here? If I’m here to be disengaged, I can do that at home. I can just turn on Netflix. But if I’m going to be engaged, there has to be a level of tension, an idea of getting into “good trouble” in the room that’s exciting for us to navigate and create a world, because that’s what we want in the play. I say often that I’m not interested in healthy characters. Who wants to sit around and watch folks who have their shit together and making every right choice and living their best life? I like getting into the nitty-gritty messiness of life. And maybe that’s just me. There are plenty of people invested in providing audiences with joy. I am SPRING 2022 | SDC JOURNAL

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not. I don’t even know what that looks like.

I live my life investing in my joy. But I try to provide an audience with truth. And the truth is oftentimes stone-cold ugly. Sometimes it’s painful and laughable at the same time. Most times the truth is absolutely batshit crazy.

The relationship that you have to creating a play is the relationship that the audience will have to watching it. If you sit at a table talking for four and a half weeks and discussing every book and watching every documentary, then your production is going to look like that experience. Sometimes, you have to disrupt, as Anne Bogart says, the narrative in how you are creating, so that you can actually illuminate something that you didn’t even know was there.

LEAH | You and I and Anne Bogart and George Wolfe are familiar with that disruption, so that kind of shift in many ways is familiar. Pre-COVID-19, we were beginning to make a shift, and now post-COVID-19, what does that mean? Does that mean we have a conversation first, and say, “Now I am about to ask you to try this,” in a very gentle and kind way? “Are you okay with trying this?”

Or, as you’re saying, when you’re in it and you’re excited by it and it’s thrilling and you go to an actor and you say, “Okay, do me a favor. Just try this. Let’s just play. Let’s just try this. Are you good with that?” Those are two very different ways of approaching a moment now.

ROBERT | That’s why I think it’s important that you have the conversation at the beginning of it, even in the audition, that you allow them to understand the type of experience that you’re hoping to have. If this experience is not something that one wants, that’s totally okay.

LEAH | That’s right. After all, one hopes we have gotten to a point where actors can tell their agents, “I’d rather not take this job.”

ROBERT | You don’t have to participate, because this is also my audition. You’re auditioning me to see if I’m the person that you want to spend four and a half weeks with.

I did a show where I knew it was going to be outrageous and crazy and people were going to be creating their own movements, with a ton of men and lot of sexuality. [The all-male production was of Shakespeare’s Macbeth at the Denver Center Theatre Company in 2017.]

At the callbacks, I said, “Look, this is the ‘get out’ conversation. I’m going to lay out all this madness that we’re going to be doing here.

You should feel free, at the end of this, to say, ‘You know what? I’m getting out.’ But those who do want to take the journey, you can come back after the break.”

I want everyone to live inside that space where this may be uncomfortable, because it should be. That’s what we’re saying about this moment. This reckoning is uncomfortable and it SHOULD BE. That’s a conversation that we have to have as directors.

LEAH | I think it’s slightly different now. It’s important to periodically come back to the conversation to check in and just remind our collaborators that this is the conversation that we had at the beginning. Now that we’re moving into our [third] week, it’s going to get deep and it’s going to get harder.

Let’s just reactivate that conversation so we’re reminded that we were all aware this is where we were going. Because there’s a reason so many people can’t communicate well, because people are afraid. There’s fear.

They’re afraid to tell stories. We’ve taken on a profession that is basically, in many ways, the result of a paradoxical need to tell stories while possessing the fear to tell the stories.

Hopefully we’re able, over the course of years, to learn how to not let that fear be the thing that drives you. But that’s not always the case with everyone who gets in the room with you.

And you don’t learn that until you’re in the room.

ROBERT | I love that idea of always going back and making sure that the conversation is still being had, because the conversation is going to change and grow.

LEAH | That’s right. It’s going to change as you create and as you grow, but it must begin somewhere just like the grain of the mustard seed. There is a reason why the Bible talks about that grain of a mustard seed. Because that’s what it is at the end of the day: to plant that small seed each time we make art, in order to effect change and grow.

Elain Graham, Michael Rogers, Heather Alicia Simms (seated on floor) + Crystal A. Dickinson in Born Bad at Soho Rep, directed by Leah C. Gardiner PHOTO Carol Rosegg

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A CONVERSATION WITH JOANN M. HUNTER + LORIN LATARRO MODERATED BY

DANI BARLOW In late January, SDC Foundation Director Dani Barlow moderated a conversation, over Zoom, between choreographers JoAnn M. Hunter and Lorin Latarro. The longtime friends met when they were both dancers; their overlapping credits include the exuberant, much-loved 1999 Broadway revival of Kiss Me, Kate, directed by Michael Blakemore and choreographed

by Kathleen Marshall. (JoAnn started in the show as an Ensemble member and was then a replacement Lois Lane/ Bianca; Lorin later took over JoAnn’s track in the Ensemble and as understudy for Lois/Bianca.) In a photo shoot for the cover of this magazine, JoAnn and Lorin laughed, danced, and generally lit up the room. In conversation, they were engagingly forthright about their creative processes during COVID-19, the challenges they have faced, and their optimism for the future.

JOANN M. HUNTER has been lucky enough to have a career in the theatre for all of her adult life.

She is lucky to have worked and learned from, and continue to learn from, so many talented people. Credits include over 25 shows on Broadway and the West End, as well as Japan, China, South Korea, and Australia.

ABOVE

JoAnn M. Hunter + Lorin Latarro Amanda Crommett

PHOTOS

LORIN LATARRO choreographed Broadway’s Waitress, Mrs. Doubtfire, Les Liaisons Dangereuses with Janet McTeer and Liev Schreiber, and Waiting for Godot with Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Patrick Stuart. Other credits include Merrily We Roll Along (Roundabout), La Traviata (Met Opera), Twelfth Night (The Public), Chess (Kennedy Center), 21 Chump Street (BAM), Queen of the Night (Paramount). She directed Is There Still Sex in the City? (Daryl Roth Theatre, NY Times Critic’s Pick). Juilliard BFA, NYU MA.

DANI BARLOW serves as the SDC Foundation Director.

She has held positions at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Yale Repertory Theatre, Studio Theatre, and Round House Theatre. Dani holds an MFA in Theater Management from Yale School of Drama and a BA in Theater and Business Administration from Muhlenberg College.

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Sara Bareilles in the Broadway production of Waitress, choreographed by Lorin Latarro PHOTO Jeremy Daniel

DANI BARLOW | I’d love to start by hearing from both of you about a process that you did pre-pandemic that was particularly exciting for you.

LORIN LATARRO | A pre-pandemic process?

DANI | Yes. JOANN M. HUNTER | A pre-pandemic rehearsal, what we were doing?

LORIN | I don’t know. I don’t remember. (laughing) DANI | I know. It feels like so long ago, but I’m curious.

JOANN | The last thing I was doing prepandemic, and the most vivid to me right now, was rehearsing Love Life for City Center Encores! It was a show that I didn’t know, a challenging show, but the more we worked on it, the more I started falling in love with it. When the pandemic hit, when it was clear that we were not going to even get to tech and get on stage, it was heartbreaking.

It was such a phenomenal, fun group of people. I was working with Victoria Clark, who was directing the project, Brian Stokes Mitchell, and Kate Baldwin. We were having a blast. And the company was, oh, full out with feeling! It was so great to be in a room

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with Vicki; we had only worked together as performers. It was really exciting to play and work with her.

DANI | Thank you, JoAnn. What were you working on, Lorin?

LORIN | Just prior to the pandemic, we were in previews for Mrs. Doubtfire [directed by Jerry Zaks, on Broadway] and we were about to go into tech for The Visitor [directed by Daniel Sullivan, at The Public Theater], we just had our sitzprobe, and Waitress was just closing. Mrs. Doubtfire was in its first week of previews then shut down on that infamous Thursday afternoon—I left with sneakers, notes, and a pencil still laid out on the tech table. We walked into rehearsal on Friday for The Visitor and it too shut down; we closed off with a drum circle. And then I picked up with the same shows post-pandemic.

Waitress was first back, with a room full of alumni. The process was a joy bomb.

COVID-19 seemed to be waning last July, so there was an air of relief and excitement opening Broadway back up. Mask protocols were less stringent. No cases. We changed some work inside the show to combine our favorite script and physical finds from London, the tour, and Broadway. Mrs. Doubtfire essentially picked up right where we

left off. COVID numbers began creeping back up as we were in rehearsals and the zeitgeist shifted again toward trepidation and stricter protocols, and eventually positive cases in our cast.

With The Visitor, many of the actors in the room were telling a story about places they personally came from, left from, in the Middle East. Creatively, we went back to the drawing board devising some of the dances, for the actors to bring new parts of themselves into the choreography. We had some really exciting moments happen in the dance rehearsals, and there was one particular song that was aggressive and rhythmic, about how detainees felt locked in these de facto prisons. We visited with detainees, spoke to people who experienced encounters with ICE, and these actors really took this experience on with vigor and personalized the emotion in the dance in a really visceral way. It was quite cathartic for everybody.

DANI | And JoAnn, your first show back was Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella?

JOANN | Yes. I first went to London for final callbacks, in-person callbacks, in August 2020.

We were still in full pandemic mode, but the first in-person live auditions that they had in London were for Cinderella. Andrew owns

several theatres, which is very convenient, so we held auditions at the Palladium. I mean, come on, how lucky am I? The protocols that we had were spectacular.

I asked for 10- to 12-feet-wide boxes, six- or seven-feet deep. And that allowed me to get seven people on stage. The dancers came in and were assigned their boxes. I gave them 15 minutes to warm up. We did a half hour of movement. Boom. They left. Wiped down the stage. Fifteen minutes later, the next group came in. It took a while because we could only see so many people at a time. I too was on the stage with the dancers in a huge wide box at the lip of the deck. I could go all the way lengthwise, but I couldn’t go over a certain line. Crazy but we did it.

DANI | And did you do any work on Zoom at the same time?

JOANN I did not teach any Cinderella auditions on Zoom, but I watched on Zoom when my associate held the first set of calls. I would watch the little boxes and say, “Who’s that over there?” So challenging. It’s just not the same as being in the room. The energy is different. It’s flat. Humans are energy, so it’s really tricky. I also knew that nobody was working on anything. The classes that they were taking, they were probably taking in their living room or in their garage or their apartment. So I was also very cognizant, careful, of how much I gave them, how long the audition material was. For instance, I didn’t want a lot of jumping. I thought, “Who’s really been able to jump and work those muscles?”

LORIN | I didn’t do much Zoom work, but I did one event via Zoom. I was one of the

choreographers for “Broadway for Biden”; 90 percent of that event was over Zoom. We went into a dance studio, filmed ourselves teaching the choreography front and back, full out, and then breaking it down very slowly and then sent that out via email to the dancers—over 80 dancers participated. They all learned the choreography in their living rooms and came in knowing it!

I thought, “How is this going to work?” but they did it; dancers are really extraordinary!

But I know, at the moment, dancers are very frustrated auditioning on Zoom, because in the room, they walk in and bring their energy and who they are. You are able to see how they dance in space, and, technically, how they plié. You can’t really get that muscularity on Zoom. So they’re getting frustrated. But it’s better than nothing.

Choreographers are real arbiters of fear.

—LORIN LATARRO JOANN | I think that’s what we all do. We do what we can do at the moment. When the road curves, we’ve got to curve with it. There was no other choice because of this particular situation.

DANI | Were there things that you did to adjust, to accommodate for the fact that there were certain things they hadn’t done in a while? Did you make things slower? Did you give them more time? Did you give them more space?

“The Ball” from Cinderella at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in London, choreographed by JoAnn M. Hunter PHOTO Tristram Kenton

LORIN | Mrs. Doubtfire is a lot of high-energy dancing, a lot of jumping, very cardiovascular.

We worked very slowly when we came back, because I didn’t want anyone to get injured jumping back in. We probably worked at halfpace, under tempo, marking it twice as many times as I would mark it in pre-COVID-19 times. I was hesitant to push people in a way that would have felt normal pre-COVID. It just wasn’t worth some getting injured over, so we were all really cognizant of that in the room.

JOANN | I was nervous for the dancers in auditions because I wanted everyone to feel comfortable. I tried to figure out, how could they move? I didn’t want them traveling too far because they couldn’t. The first call I had was a group of men. I remember they walked in and most likely it was the first time they were sharing space together. I’m talking to them about the show and the subtext of what this particular moment is, and it looked to me like they were just staring at me. And I asked, “Does everyone understand what I’m saying?”

And they said, “We just have not been in a room [in a long time].” And I think they were thrilled, excited, nervous, all those emotions, and their brains were not working the way they normally work. Picking up material, remembering, using those muscles. So, exactly as Lorin said, I did have to go a little slower, take a little bit more time. I would say, “Mark it, mark, mark, mark, mark,” because I was petrified of their stamina not being up to par, up to what they’re used to.

LORIN | Choreographers are real arbiters of fear. I’m always asking an actor to do something outside their comfort zone, asking a dancer to just try and push one more pirouette, asking an actor to drop to the

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floor or move in an unfamiliar way. Especially when working with actors who are movers and not dancers, I spend a great deal of time navigating what feels safe for all parties.

And part of what I think choreographers really understand inherently is when to say, “You’re going to be fine. I’m going to take you through this lift. We’ll do it first small, and then we’ll do it medium. And then we’ll do it big. I’m going to hold your hand the first three times and when you’re ready, you give the thumbs-up and we’ll do it without my hand.”

We have a sixth sense about when to push and when to stop. And, look, it’s scary for actors to lift people in the air who aren’t used to being lifted, like when [composer and lyricist] Sara Bareilles played Jenna in Waitress. She’s not used to being thrown from one boy to the next. She’s not JoAnn Hunter with 12 Broadway shows getting thrown around Broadway stages her whole career.

So we have developed an understanding and language with performers to help make work safe eight shows a week and build confidence and communication.

Now we are all also the arbiters of figuring out…a new kind of fear. There’s science of COVID-19, but there’s fear of COVID, and everybody’s fear level is different. And we

know that their experience of fear is real.

For instance, partner dancing is fine; we’ve learned that if you wash your hands prior to partnering and after partnering, you have no higher risk of getting COVID. But even if that’s the science, the fear might still be present in the room and you have to navigate it. And that meant, for me, in one instance, cutting the partnering. If somebody is just so uncomfortable touching someone else in this pandemic, it’s a split-second decision: “I’m just going to put these actors first. We’re going to cut the partnering.” There are a million ways to make this moment. It’s gone.

Let’s do something else. Navigating those moments became a whole other level of understanding the safety of dancer and actor.

I firmly believe that people can do way more than they think they can.

—JOANN M. HUNTER DANI | I’m curious: when you all were back in the room, and as things continued to change—how serious COVID-19 is, the rates, the levels, all that kind of thing—you found yourselves in situations where you couldn’t

engage the artists anymore through touch. Is that difficult?

LORIN | I’m used to being very tactile. These days, I use language before I touch anybody.

“Are you comfortable with me touching you? I’m going to touch you on your thigh.

Is that okay?” And everybody appreciates it.

It’s simple. It’s an easy shift. And it works for everybody.

JOANN | I agree. And that’s because of the times we’re in and the shift, and this damned COVID. I am a touchy person. It was hard for me because I had to ask our COVID safety supervisor, what’s the protocol here? Every theatre, every company, every production has a different protocol.

For Cinderella, we rehearsed on the stage; they built a deck out over the audience, so that we were on the same level. We tried to make it like you were not in a theatre rehearsing, but the reality was we were in a theatre rehearsing. Not my ideal space. At first I did think it was fantastic, but for me—it was tricky. I was in a theatre, and somewhere in the back of my head I was thinking… finished product…NO, not a finished product.

It was tough on the creative process.

Linzi Hateley + ensemble in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the London Palladium, choreographed by JoAnn M. Hunter PHOTO Tristram Kenton

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But we did what we had to do. And we had a huge safe space to rehearse in, which was brilliant. So I asked, “What’s the protocol?”

We don’t have to wear masks when we’re rehearsing. But we had to wear a mask if the actors went out to the house or anywhere else out of the workspace. Anyone who wasn’t part of the production, they all had to wear masks. All designers had to stay in masks. We did not, but Laurence Connor, the director, did say to me, “JoAnn, you can’t go over that line.” I said, “I can’t go on stage?” Next to impossible for me. I need to be near the dancers and actors. Oh, it was kooky.

Now, the COVID-19 protocol for ALW theatres is that you have to be masked when you do go on stage. At least I can go up there and communicate. Sometimes I want to have an intimate conversation with a few people or one dancer or an actor and I don’t want to do it over the God mic.

DANI | It sounds like there’s a required flexibility and adaptability, depending on COVID-19, the moment, how people are feeling. Do you feel like you’ve gotten better at rolling with the punches than maybe you were in the past?

LORIN | Absolutely. Beyond COVID protocols that keep shifting weekly, there is flexibility in content. There was a moment in Waitress where we do this one big swing around and one of the actresses just said, “I know I used to do this swing, but it always scared me. And now, for some reason, I’m doubly scared.” And Diane [director Diane Paulus] and I looked at each other, and I said, “Let’s change the moment.” And we just came up with something in the room, and you know what? It’s better. It ended up being better than what was originally there.

And now we’ve changed all the companies to this new idea. COVID made us all move at a tiny bit of a slower pace, and that slower pace worked out to be really conducive to creating art.

JOANN | Lorin said this earlier, but dancers and choreographers and those of us who work physically—we are used to solving problems. “I’ll make it work. I’ll make it work.

We’ll make it work.” I can’t even tell you how many times it comes out of the mouth of probably every choreographer that we know: “I’ll make it work.” It’s just what we do. And I’m not saying just us. I think that’s part of our community, in that everyone has to do it together for it to get to a certain place. But dancers—dancers do it all the time.

DANI | I am curious how the industry has changed for you over the past two years. Do you feel like you have more agency than you

Manu Narayan, Jessie Austrian + Ben Steinfeld in the Fiasco Theater/ Roundabout Theatre production of Merrily We Roll Along, choreographed

by Lorin Latarro PHOTO Joan Marcus

did before? Do creative teams feel like they’re more on a level playing field?

LORIN | All of the shows did one, two, three, or four days of work on what is an equitable rehearsal room, community values, company principles, diversity training, anti-bias work— and each show did it a little differently. And it was really wonderful. The process brought the whole room together. In those moments you are asked not to be the director, not to be the choreographer, not to be the actor. So you start the rehearsal process off simply as individual people. And that definitely changes the dynamic, in a good way.

JOANN | I firmly believe that people can do way more than they think they can. I will push people, but I also think, because Lorin and I both were performers, that we have an advantage. We understand what it’s like to

do a show eight times a week, what it takes.

When we turn the picture around, we have a better understanding. Our communication, I think, I hope, is better, is more open. My guess is, even prior to the last few years, most choreographers were already doing a lot of that.

We are physical beings ourselves, so we understand what it takes for the body to perform. We understand what it takes to keep up. We understand the upkeep and what it takes to get yourself ready every single day to do that show at night.

LORIN | Yes! My whole life, I kept hearing about this stereotype of a choreographer— angry, relentless, masochistic: “Do it again, again, again, five, six, seven, eight!” JoAnn, you worked with Jerome Robbins. I didn’t.

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The Broadway production of School of Rock, choreographed by JoAnn M. Hunter PHOTO Matthew Murphy

telling you, I have worked with the Martha Graham Company, with Twyla Tharp, with MOMIX, in 14 Broadway shows—with any choreographer I have been lucky enough to work with, I have never come across this false archetype of a choreographer. I never saw it. Never experienced that thing. I only saw it in the movies. I have heard people joke about this stereotype, but it has not been my experience. Ever.

The question of agency is an interesting thing. As a choreographer, I understand the responsibility of leading a room and the responsibility of collaborating closely with the director and writers and the music team and, of course, pushing the narrative and physical energy. But I feel very purposefully invisible.

In other words, I try and recede and see pictures, focus on story, and make sure that the performers are the center of attention and the ones being taken care of. I never feel like I use this position in a sort of swordwielding way. In fact, I feel like the more I remain an architect—making pictures and creating, and in certain instances, devising together—the more they shine. The more the story shines.

JOANN | I agree with you, Lorin. I would also say that 99 percent of the time, in my experience, dancers want to come in, they want to do it, they want to be phenomenal.

They want to shine for you. They want to

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work for you. As I was saying before, I was worried about, “Oh my God, they haven’t jumped. They haven’t done anything. Is there stamina?” And I said, “Mark it, mark it.” They did not mark it. They were full-out.

They wanted to be because, first of all, they haven’t done it in so long, and this is their love. Dancers are athletes—and you have got to love it to want to do it because it is not easy. It’s physically exhausting. It’s mentally exhausting. And the lifespan is short. So, to be a dancer, you’re an athlete. And there’s a discipline aspect that dancers have, no matter what. It’s ingrained in them. The fact that I give them a voice to say, “Is it possible that we can do this instead, because I’m having trouble?” That’s fantastic. But 99 percent of the time they’ll go, “Okay, I’ll make it work.”

COVID made us all move at a tiny bit of a slower pace, and that slower pace worked out to be really conducive to creating art.

—LORIN LATARRO

LORIN | Right. It’s making the space for it to be okay, to change something. And also holding onto the room to allow for breakthroughs, because what’s better for an artist than “I’m not going to do it. I can’t do it. I just did it!” Sara Bareilles was up there eight shows a week getting lifted and thrown around, and she loved it. And she was great at it! That part of being an artist—having a breakthrough—is a cherished and unique experience that makes us grow. So it’s a space for all of these things simultaneously.

DANI | The theme of this issue is “How have we changed?” For each of you personally, do you feel like something has changed and shifted in your philosophy, in how you work?

I know we’re not out of it yet, but is there something that you’re going to take from this time moving forward? And then, if you zoom out, do you feel like there are certain things in the industry that have changed that are good, that are positive, and you’re excited to move forward with them?

JOANN | There are a couple things for me, personally. One is being able to walk into a room or see a show and not count how many people of color are on the stage. They’re just people. I want the best talent in the room. When we’re casting, this is the kind of work we’re going to be doing. This is the style, the style we’re going to live in. This is the movement I want to work with. I want

longer. The “why” of the story has to feel strong now. I am taking on shows that feel important and relevant to me personally. I find myself asking the question, “Why this?

Why now?”

Oh, here’s a tiny work change example: pre-pandemic, I would never ask for time for notes with the company. I always deferred that time to the director, but now I just ask, “May I have 15 minutes to do group notes?”

It’s easy to make mistakes and not have a thoughtful response when you’re trying to do something catch-as-catch-can, or have an associate run and catch somebody before their dinner break. That didn’t work for anybody. No one wants to get a note while they’re putting their makeup on before the show.

JOANN | I feel the same way as Lorin, and I think, for me, asking to have your own voice, to have your voice in the room—I don’t necessarily think it’s just because of the last moments we’ve been in, but also because of experience. Because with experience comes more knowledge, comes more confidence. So when you’re first starting out, you’re thinking, “I’m just this peon—what do I have to say?”

whoever can do it. That’s who I want. I don’t look at the facade. I want the talent. I want the human.

I’m not saying I would’ve gotten the role. I’m not saying that. I’m saying it would’ve been nice to be up for Charlie’s Angels.

And I’m hoping that that’s where we’re going to go. That we don’t say, “Oh, okay. We’re ticking a box right now. We’ve got, let’s see, so many Black artists, so many Asian artists, so many female artists, so many trans artists.”

I want to look up on stage and see talented people working together, coming together, and loving it! The original young actors of School of Rock—when you looked up onto that stage at the Winter Garden, it was like the streets of New York City. Eclectic, unique, special, diverse. Fabulous!

DANI | When you are chosen because you are what folks believe to be the best talent and not just checking a box, doesn’t that feel so much better? You can feel the difference between, “It feels like there was some box checking that had happened here” versus “I was the best person to be in this space for this opportunity.”

Not every show has to be that. There are some shows that are going to be very specific to a region, to a culture, to a demographic, to a situation that can’t do that. And that’s okay, too, depending on the story you’re telling.

JOANN | I agree. I don’t want to be hired just because I have to fill a quota. I don’t want to be hired as a choreographer because I have to fill a quota. I want to be hired because I am right for the job. I don’t want to not be hired or not even get thought of because of what I look like or what my identity is. But don’t hire me just to tick your box; hire me because, you know what, I’m right for this gig.

On a personal note, I was fortunate enough to work in dance as much as I did, but there were many jobs I didn’t get because of what I look like. And I remember watching the movie Charlie’s Angels, the remake with Drew Barrymore. I wanted to be a Charlie’s Angel. Let me tell you, when that movie came out and Lucy Liu was a Charlie’s Angel….I went, “Oh, my God.” To see other people in television, on stage, doing more, seeing more of that, for me, personally, is quite thrilling.

LORIN | I agree wholeheartedly. I’m very optimistic about the way things are moving. It seems like everybody has taken responsibility in a personal way, and everyone is having more honest conversations and asking more difficult questions. And we’re already seeing exciting work come out of this moment. For me, philosophically, it’s really about slowing down the process, having laser focus, and asking nuanced questions with directors and writers; sitting and marinating in material

I think also being women is layered on top of it. We always say we’re sorry. It’s like, “No, no, you go first.” I mean, I still do it and I’m like, “Oh God, JoAnn, stop it.” But, with age, hopefully comes a little bit more knowledge and confidence, and unfortunately age is happening. No, fortunately. I should say fortunately.

DANI | Is there any advice you’d give to other choreographers right now, in this moment?

JOANN | People have asked me that when I was a performer, and I always had an answer.

As a choreographer, as a creator, I think maybe it’s the same answer. I used to say to aspiring dancers and performers—you have to love it. Because it’s not easy, as I said.

And you have to do it because you love it, not because you want an accolade. Because accolades are far and few between. You have to do it because you want to be in the room. Because you want to banter with other people. Because you want to see how the roads intersect and then they go apart and then they intersect again.

LORIN | I always remind myself how lucky we are to be surrounded by music all day long.

And that’s just one reason to love the work.

SPRING 2022 | SDC JOURNAL

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WE CAN

GET THERE BY

LUIS SALGADO

I was watching the new musical The Magician’s Elephant at the Royal Shakespeare Company in London when, near the end of the show, a character asked: “DO YOU BELIEVE ME?” And a child in the audience screamed, “NO!” The audience laughed, but my mind began to wonder…

Did the child say no because they had an expectation of Magic and hoped that their impulsive skepticism would trigger a final magic trick? Or did they say no because they truly didn’t believe a single thing from the actor who asked the question?

Of course, I don’t know the answer. But the case of this child and this actor gives me clues into the questions at hand in my own life and in our collective artistic future.

How have WE changed in the last two years, and what do we expect of theatre and of our own work?

It’s been such an intense time for us all. A pandemic, the fight for Black Lives Matter

and gender equality, government changes, economic imbalance, and on and on… The types of theatre and the potential stories we can tell have multiplied. But questions remain: How do we tell these new stories? Who do we tell them with? How do they resonate in our waves of modern thinking? Do the hearts and spirits of the audience welcome the political resistance in the theatre, and mirror a reflection of today’s issues, as seen in director Charles Randolph-Wright’s fantastic production of Trouble in Mind, by Alice Childress, for Roundabout? On the other hand, maybe people are only ready for a little escapism. I think we need both. Is the Broadway League ready to take us forward with all producers working as one, for a collective, solid comeback, or will the growth and contributions that theatre can make continue to be undermined by individualistic greed and games of “Who can get there first?” Are we planting our feet and speaking from our place of truth?

SDC JOURNAL | SPRING 2022

Can I still sing? Can I dance? Is my body in the right shape? Should I be singing this song? Should I audition for this? Should they be auditioning for a role that should be mine? Ours?

There are more questions than answers, yet there is so much to be grateful for. We are MOVING FORWARD! I often quote Anne Bogart and the team at SITI Company: “Our job is not so much to give the answers as it IS ABOUT ASKING A GREAT QUESTION.” A great question to our audiences, our company, and ourselves.

The art of the possible and the overcoming of fear is in our hands; we need each other’s truth, vulnerability, awareness, and talent more than ever before. For me, the question has shifted from “How have we changed?” to “What kind of artist/leader can I be to expand on how we change and what changes we can continue to make?” Theatre is the greatest tool we have to achieve this evolution, to attain this growth, to support the UPCOMING.

We need to ask questions, frequently and deeply, in the most conscious way possible.

How have we changed? That query itself is a quest of self-reflection…

Words, music, images, movement, gesture, silence—all play an integral part of the way we touch the spirit, the minds, and the hearts of our audiences and each other.

Yesmith Lantigua + Brian Charles Rooney in Matilda at the Axelrod PAC, directed + choreographed by Luis Salgado PHOTO Rich Kowalski

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In the last four months, I have been able to return to work and direct a few projects back-to-back: a production in Sonoma, CA; a show in Times Square; another two shows in boroughs of NYC. There is so much I have taken from this new time in the studio with humans/artists and from this “comeback” that requires a new process. I’ve seen the industry affected and evolving from many angles, both as it takes a step back in some ways and HUGE STEPS forward in many others. Obviously, we’d all like to move forward in our artistic passions, but the common denominator in every room I have seen is fear.

Matthew Oster, Mariana Herrera Jury, Jacob Louchheim + Grace Sweeney in Ragtime at Axelrod Performing Arts Center, directed + choreographed by Luis Salgado PHOTO Rich Kowalski

Luis Salgado rehearsing In the Heights at GALA Hispanic Theatre PHOTO c/o GALA Hispanic Theatre

As we continue the steps of change, I’m seeing interest and awareness of mentorship—people creating space for others to expand their knowledge and experience, widening the table and who gets to sit at it.

The art of the possible and the overcoming of fear is in our hands; we need each other’s truth, vulnerability, awareness, and talent more than ever before.

More mentorships will manifest, new ways of making theatre and supporting artists will take flight, a community of upcoming producers and investors are on the rise because we all crave new stories that resonate with our own truths, purposes, and needs.

In the process of rehearsal and creation, artists these days will not just imitate but also propose and come ready to speak the truth of the piece and contribute greater perspective—then we might work in a more horizontal plane. Let the potential answers to this question of “how have we changed” be an added catalyst of action toward our individual and collective change!

A lot has changed—and, yet, very little has changed.

When we think about the future of how we tell stories, we need to be sure that actual representation (rather than quotas) are at the heart of our motivation. Personally, I

have been called for creative jobs as a token much more than ever before. I am also one of the people who are called to be asked for advice or recommendations for Latin(E) assistant directors, Latin(E) writers, Latin(E) stage managers to hire. Yet in the end, I’ve seen no commitment to actually hiring and/ or making space for new Latin(E) artists and providing opportunities. Rather, oftentimes they are exploiting our goodwill and desire to support and contribute. Still, I believe we are in the perfect place to make impactful changes to put art and stories in the front of the conversation on what is possible.

Legendary playwright Larry Kramer once said: “I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Tennessee Williams, Byron, E.M. Forster, Lorca, Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Harry Stack Sullivan, John Maynard Keynes, Dag Hammarskjold… These are not invisible men.”

Now, I know “I belong to a culture that includes…” Mathew Lopez, Priscilla Lopez, LinManuel Miranda, Sergio Trujillo, Karen Olivo, Cody Renard, Maria Torres, Jordan Roth, Robin de Jesús, Joshua Henry, Javier Muñoz, Emilio Sosa, Chita Rivera, Rita Moreno, Raul Esparza, Raul Julia, Antonio Banderas, Nilo Cruz, Moisés Kaufman, Quiara Alegría Hudes…. The world has evolved. We see names evolve such as Eric Ulloa, Marcos Santana, Jesse Sanchez, Jaime Lozano, names that are now resonating with more weight than before this crazy pandemic. These are not invisible people.

Bianca Marroquín—sang in the Broadway musical Chicago: IT’S GOOD, ISN’T IT? GRAND, ISN’T IT? GREAT, ISN’T IT? SWELL, ISN’T IT? FUN, ISN’T IT? Hearing them both sing these words today is part of the change we wish to see and continue to hope for. Change IS on the way…

As Katori Hall wrote in her fantastic play The Mountaintop, in the mouth of a great leader: “What is this vision I see before me? Could this be my wildest dream? There it is. There…

It…Is…A land where hunger is no more. A land where war is no more. A land where richness is no more, poverty is no more, color is…no more. Destruction…is no more. Only love.

Radical, fierce love. The Promised Land here on Earth.” “The baton passes on.”

We can get there...

“DO YOU BELIEVE ME?” Luis Salgado is an international director, choreographer, and educator from Puerto Rico based in New York City, who has worked on Cirque du Soleil, Broadway, and film.

The acknowledgment of this legacy and its use as a foundation for the future gives me hope. As two Latina stars—Ana Villafañe and SPRING 2022 | SDC JOURNAL

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COLLECTIVE

EFFORT BY

GABRIEL VEGA WEISSMAN

How have we changed? It is tempting to think enough time has elapsed since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic for us to recognize meaningful differences in our attitudes and actions. But this is a dangerous question because fast answers can lead us to unwarranted positive conclusions about ourselves.

The most meaningful experience in my forced time “off” from being a theatre artist was the weeks I spent canvassing (with fellow SDC Member Rachel Dart) for President Biden in Pennsylvania and for Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in the Georgia runoff election. During the 2016 election cycle, I kept my head down and avoided calls to volunteer or get involved. In 2020, I made the decision to dive in headfirst and do everything I possibly could to encourage voter turnout.

I am proud of this choice and all our work.

Curing the ballots of disenfranchised voters all over southern Georgia impacted us and enlightened us in ways we could never have imagined. But did I change? Hard to tell. In 2016, I was very aware of voter suppression and the high stakes of that election, and, out of ignorance for the candidates and their platforms, I chose to do nothing and hope

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Brendan Dooling + John Clarence Stewart in Must at Theatre at St. Clements, directed by Gabriel Vega Weissman PHOTO Michael Kushner

for the best. I am embarrassed by that. In 2020, with no work and virtually nothing else to do, I set out on an adventure to tackle the issue headlong. Did I really change? Or was it my circumstances that changed? Perhaps we can recognize the germ of “change,” but the question becomes, “What choices will I make next time? And the time after that? And the time after that?”

We did canvass, however, with the intention of effecting change—specifically, the change of our government’s leadership. We learned a few valuable lessons in doing so. First, the effort required is relentless and neverending. For weeks on end, we knocked on hundreds of doors and drove hundreds of miles, keenly aware that any break we took could negatively impact our cause.

Second, that it takes the collective efforts of individuals to make anything happen, with serious organization and coordination to boot. We were reminded, repeatedly, that we were small cogs in a big machine that encompassed us, the field organizers for the various campaigns, the lawyers who volunteered their time to challenge county registrars who refused to accept perfectly legal ballots, and many others, all the way up to Stacy Abrams, arguably the face of our cause.

I have come to understand that “change” is being willing to be that cog for the rest of your life. I don’t know if I will have that strength of character. We will have to wait and see.

I have tried to apply some of these acquired principles concerning collective effort to my work in theatre. Recently, I negotiated a contract for a production at a not-for-profit theatre, on which I was the associate director.

The initial offer required me to be available fulltime but compensated me only for the hours I worked. This meant that I would not be paid for hours that went unused. The play featured only one actor, which often meant we would not rehearse full days.

Because of this, and because everyone else in the room was being paid according to their SDC or AEA agreement, I would be the only person impacted financially by the daily schedule. I was familiar with the wages offered to assistants and associates at this institution, having worked there on another production two years ago. I accepted that offer due to a variety of factors: the director is a valued mentor, I had a lot of other work that year, and, at the end of the day, I am a member of a dual-income household and could therefore afford it. However, in the end, I felt undervalued. This time around, I

expressed my concern to the theatre, who understood my position and consented to pay me a weekly fee. The agreement to this enhanced payment was in the form of an email and it would not be reflected in my actual contract. I accepted the terms, and because that language was not in the boilerplate contract, I found out who the next two associates were at that theatre and called them directly explaining what I had secured, and encouraged them to ask for the same wage, as it would not appear in their initial agreement. I am proud of this—but these days, I am invigorated by the fight for fair wages and equity, diversity, and inclusion in our industry.

Harsh J. Gagoomal + Jacob Oommen Athyal in Guards at the Taj at Underground Railway Theatre, directed

by Gabriel Vega Weissman PHOTO Grace Laubacher

Will I continue to research and contact every associate who comes through those doors until the boilerplate contract is changed?

I honestly don’t know. Perhaps this comes across as hyperbole—but to the skeptics I ask: what’s the alternative? In Georgia, I visited the homes of voters whose ballots have been rejected for several elections running. I am perpetually haunted by the thought that if I don’t go back to those voters in 2022 and then 2024 and so on, who will?

Will anyone catch these votes?

In considering our ability to change, I am reminded of my favorite book, A Christmas Carol. I like to believe that people can change; that a man can at one point suggest that the hungry and poor should die “and decrease the surplus population” and later see the error of his ways when his own words are thrown back at him. That the same man can find redemption after having witnessed the fragility of one child.

I have loved this book since I was young, and its themes have only deepened for me as I’ve grown older. At the end of the story, Dickens leaves us with a dilemma. He has illuminated the suffering of his people: poverty, illness, starvation. Sure, Scrooge has changed, and his big-hearted philanthropy will go a long way (because, at the end of the day, no matter how we’d like things to be, money is one obvious solution to people’s problems), but no one man’s philanthropy—or group of men’s philanthropies—will save a society. The system itself must be changed.

I appreciate whenever we at SDC stand up for our Members, whether it be addressing inequality in our workplaces, exposing unfair work practices, or especially, critically, reminding ourselves (as SDC newsletters continually do) that we have a civic responsibility to vote—both in our best interest and in the best interest of our Union and industry. To me, our stimulus payments, extended unemployment benefits, and ultimately, safe return to work are the result

of the razor-thin victories of our current senators from Georgia, both making history as the first Black and first Jewish senators from their state. Unfortunately, I would call that luck more than change. Not because I’m cynical but because the forces of evil are strong. Our votes were counted more than they were rejected. That is anything but assured in the upcoming midterms when voting rights will face newer, harsher challenges. I hope we are able to continue the path to true and sustainable change.

To do that we must allow ourselves to be cogs—often the smallest cogs. But will we?

Will I? I think the moment of true change can only come when we recognize that we are working alongside and in cooperation with one another to benefit our futures: environmentally, socially, and economically.

I don’t think we’re there yet, and I am frustrated because too many people have claimed redemption without effecting enough change.

them in their work practices. Sometimes it disappoints me, but I understand it because we’re all human. I am definitely human.

I care deeply about our community, and I’m not afraid to speak up when I witness inequity. But I am also ambitious, work-life imbalanced, and a new parent, and those parts of me will almost certainly tempt me to stray from the path of true change. Perhaps there’s someone reading this who will do me the favor of checking in in several years and asking me what I’ve been up to.

Gabriel Vega Weissman is a New York City-based director and playwright. He is currently the associate director of Hangmen on Broadway.

Every day, I see folks declare their values on social media and then directly contradict SPRING 2022 | SDC JOURNAL

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Jonathan Furedy + Nathan Dobson in Octopus at Stray Cat Theatre, directed by Ron May PHOTO John Groseclose

THERE HAS EMERGED AN ADDITIONAL

TIDAL WAVE OF CHANGE BY

RON MAY

“Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes” goes the David Bowie song.

Change has really been the buzzword for our industry these past 18 months.

Out here in Arizona, you can say things are slow to change.

Glacially so.

The changes here as we emerge from the zombie plague have in large part been across-the-board cosmetic.

Necessary, for sure, but primarily things to ensure artist and audience safety.

The hope, though, is to kick these temporary adjustments and “return to normal” once all is said and done.

Go BACK to what was familiar.

Change where doors previously shut to marginalized communities have suddenly been flung open.

representation. Here. Let me help you. I’ll remove my play to make room for a play by a female playwright.”

Change where the guardians of the gates that have been installed for decades have stepped aside to allow new blood—who may not think or look like they do—to take the reins.

This isn’t a theatrical world of “no new taxes” anymore.

Change where plays that may have been sadly overlooked are getting their day in the sun.

There is a willful shift toward parity, equality, diversity—things that have been buzzwords for a while in our industry—and it feels like this time we may have finally hit that critical tipping point where actions are starting to speak louder than the political lip service of previous years.

And NOW, if action ISN’T taken, we’ve moved into an age of accountability.

Fortunately, though, there has emerged an additional tidal wave of change.

Before, if you produced a season with predominantly white males, you’d likely get a collective eye roll and a handful of vocal online dissenters.

And even Arizona has been affected.

Now?

Not three years after the rest of the country.

We’ve reached an exciting new place where—as we recently saw—playwright Jeremy O. Harris used his stature to simply say, “I noticed your season was lacking female

Which—for some things—is fine.

But simultaneously.

Change that is long overdue.

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It’s one where those moving the art form forward are invested in shifting the landscape toward a NEW normal.

One that has room for more stories.

One that has room for new ideas.

One that has room for new ways of working.

Stray Cat—the company I helped found and my home base for the last two decades—has always positioned itself as an indie theatre.

One that was built on embracing those very tenets.

We have proudly cultivated an environment for young professionals that, while arguably as good as anything anywhere else in the nation, is decidedly only Arizona’s.

But we know we have work to do.

Years ago, we made sure we worked to shift programming to at least 50 percent female playwrights as well as at least 50 percent female staff.

We also have tried to fit in at least one show each season that is not white-centric, making sure we have representation by a non-white playwright wherever possible.

That was before.

Moving forward, we will never produce a season centering all-white stories.

Moving forward, we dig further and open our doors to assistant directorships, a new initiative to fold in artists interested in directing who are asking the question I wish I had someone help ME answer: “How the hell do you even get started?”

We are specifically putting people behind the table who normally don’t get the opportunity.

Of course, with change comes inevitable growing pains.

For us, change is comparatively easy.

While our product is entirely professional, our operating model is entirely community.

We’re an organization that has long punched up and outside our actual budget because we’re in large part a collective of professional artists doing that thing we love and doing it for the love of the art and not “for the money.”

Not because we don’t WANT or NEED the money.

But because sustainability—in Arizona— ANYwhere—is, as we all know, the trickiest of propositions.

Do I hope these seismic shifts also come with a shift in priorities from our local government?

Shifts in corporate giving with increased investment in the local future of the art form?

Corporations ready to infuse money into theatres to help ensure all the changes we’re

American Idiot at Stray Cat Theatre, directed by Ron May PHOTO John Groseclose

all looking to make stick and to ensure better, more stable lives for artists living in their own communities?

By taking a deeper dive examining the narratives and impulses behind the work we produce.

A shift where funds and infrastructure are available to help subsidize making our art more accessible to populations who may not be able to join us in person?

By getting new voices in the door.

Yes, yes, infinity times yes.

By striving to get to the marrow of what makes Arizona the great contradiction it is.

But who knows.

What I do know is even without those shifts, we can no longer use their absence as an excuse to not make the changes necessary.

And every community will be different.

In any community, though, it’s the stories we tell—the stories we share—that are the most effective, immediate, and powerful ways to create cultural shifts.

Arizona is a place of wild contradictions.

Notoriously wildly conservative, sometimes coming off even a little...backwards? Its own worst enemy?

In any community, though, it’s the stories we tell—the stories we share—that are the most effective, immediate, and powerful ways to create cultural shifts.

Here, we’ve nudged the needle a little bit in 20 seasons.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll remain in my current position.

And behind the table.

And in front of the table.

By better learning who makes up our everevolving community.

And how, in the next 20 seasons, we can best serve that community.

Something we should all do.

Serve the community that lets us make art.

And the people in our communities who join us to scream-laugh, or cry, or get the wind knocked out of them, or be rendered speechless by stories ripe with questions worth asking that are not being asked anywhere else.

The possibilities are really infinite.

We all just have to allow it.

Here’s to the future…

Ron May was a 2018 finalist for the SDCF Zelda Fichandler Award and is the Founding Artistic Director of Stray Cat Theatre in Phoenix, AZ, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this season.

Twenty years is a good run.

But while I am still here, I’m committed to seeing if we can’t nudge it further.

Micah Jondel DeShazer + Alan Johnson in Native Son at Stray Cat Theatre, directed

by Ron May PHOTO John Groseclose

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READY

LET’S BY

GO

ANNIE YEE

During the start of the pandemic, my husband Stan Egi and I sheltered in place, taking care of our health and that of family and friends. We waited for the world to heal from COVID and much racial division. As an Asian American I feared daily for my safety with the continued anti-Asian violence. I also missed theatre—seeing and doing shows, collaborating with the director and creatives, creating choreography, working with actors and dancers in rehearsals—all of it so much.

I’m the choreographer who loves tech and brings lots of snacks to share. To keep up my skills I continued my ballet classes every Sunday on Zoom, watched plays from around the country on Zoom, researched theatres, and read plays I wanted to choreograph and came up with ideas for them. I have my dance bag ready!

After a year and a half, I was so excited when theatres began to open up again, and we were getting closer to a return. I was concerned because of COVID-19, yet I really wanted to get to work and be back in the theatre, where I love to be and feel most at home. Then it happened: I was blessed when I was asked to choreograph a show at the Fountain Theatre—a theatre that is dedicated to racial equity and moving onward with its Cultural Equity and Inclusion Statement— which was producing An Octoroon, directed

by Judith Moreland, on a brand-new outdoor stage created for COVID-19 safety.

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Annie Yee dancing with her mother Nancy Yee in Lighten Up with Cornerstone Theatre at the Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles PHOTO c/o Annie Yee

The entire company and staff followed AEA rules and were all fully vaccinated and tested weekly. The theatre’s safety protocols were also approved by SDC before I was to start work. I had the AGMA/SDC Return to Stage and Performing Arts Playbook, created by a panel of scientists, that I could refer to, and I attended the “COVID-19: A Collective Response” webinars about returning to work safely.

This feeling of getting an opportunity for any type of show is something many don’t always get to be a part of. I am optimistic these flashes of shimmering hope will continue.

In the dance studio I wore two masks during rehearsals, with windows and doors open, air conditioning and air filters on. I felt safe and ready to start. A wonderful part of the production was that the creative team and cast reflected my hometown of Los Angeles in its diversity and heritages. This company made me feel included, invigorated, and proud. It felt great to be back.

I am feeling more hopeful as more theatres commit to diversity, inclusion, and equity

plans, which will give me and others more opportunities for work on a variety of shows—shows that will be open to all. I had this hopeful feeling when I was asked to choreograph An Octoroon, a show I may not have been seen as a typical candidate for.

I love my culture immensely and feel fortunate when I can continue to share this passion in productions such as M. Butterfly, King of the Yees, and The World of Extreme Happiness, all directed by Desdemona Chiang; The Golden Dragon, directed by Michael Michetti; and Made in Bangkok, directed by Robert Egan. Yet I feel I have been seen primarily as a Chinese/Asian choreographer who specializes in Chinese dance/movement and Chinese opera. My training and dance performance background are also in Western dance, with additional work in circus skills and puppetry. For An Octoroon, I got the chance—a dream chance—to use my knowledge of many different forms of dance and go even further with new ideas and styles. I got to create dance and movement for popular culture, the Indigenous Peoples Fancy Dance with coup sticks, vogue fem, hula, and tap. I loved it and was excited at each rehearsal to share each of these dance forms.

This feeling of getting an opportunity for any type of show is something many don’t always get to be a part of. I am optimistic that these flashes of shimmering hope will continue, grow stronger, and be the “new normal.” A

chance for all to be seen, to be heard, and to be a part of the American theatre—which is an actual part of my history, starting with my mom.

Vanessa Claire Stewart, Leea Ayers + Hazel Lozano in An Octoroon at The Fountain Theatre, choreographed by Annie Yee PHOTO Jenny Graham

My mom, Nancy Yee, was a theatre and radio actress in Hong Kong. After my parents raised our family in Los Angeles, she returned to acting in film and television, and was a company member of Cornerstone Theater Company, performing in shows at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles Theatre Center, and John Anson Ford Theatre. She took me to my first show at the Music Center when I was nine, and that’s when I fell in love with theatre and dance. Our family went to a variety of theatrical productions, including opera, dance performances, and cultural shows. My mom enrolled me in ballet, jazz, tap, hula, and Chinese dance. She told me to learn all styles of dance and dances of all cultures. My mom was fearless and encouraged me to always try and go for it because, she said, “What have you got to lose?” I’m trying my best to have her courage and strength. Her inspiration and love are my driving force and super power.

I feel encouraged that in the future my dream of equitable opportunities of work will continue this way, with me being seen as a choreographer of anything. I love to pull from all my experiences, training, and research to create dance and movement that is true and authentic to each character and to the story, and moves everything forward.

In the past, I would look at all the theatres and their seasons, hoping there was a show that I could be a part of. Now, as I look at new future seasons, I am encouraged by the diversity of stories, playwrights, and creatives, where many more will be included in the conversation. This is exciting to me—I have a lot of ideas!

I’m pulling for a future that will be bright. I look forward to seeing theatres fully execute plans that will create space for all, beginning with their general staff, artistic staff, and boards of directors—for an inclusive community to come together and tell all stories. I can’t wait for more audiences to come to the theatre and see representations of themselves on stage and through their stories and, most of all, to feel welcomed.

Annie Yee performing a Thai dance that she choreographed for Made in Bangkok at Mark Taper Forum PHOTO Jay Thompson

Annie Yee is an award-winning choreographer, performer, and daughter of Tommy and Nancy Yee. Her choreography can currently be seen in Detained at The Fountain Theatre.

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FINDING

THE

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN NICOLE BREWER + VALERIE CURTIS-NEWTON

NUANCE

Margo Moorer + Cleavant Derricks in Trouble in Mind at the Guthrie Theater, directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton PHOTO Keri Pickett

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In late November, SDC Journal brought together Nicole Brewer and Valerie Curtis-Newton for a Zoom conversation from New York and Seattle. Their warm and lively conversation reflected their mutual admiration—and their respectful differences of opinion—as they discussed art and activism.

VALERIE CURTIS-NEWTON | I’m excited that the people that I am in community with are interested in changing how they talk and think. But then there’s this other part of it that’s like, “And I’ve been telling them this shit for a really long time.”

NICOLE BREWER | For a long time, Val. For a long time.

VALERIE | I’m glad that folks are listening now; that’s exciting.

NICOLE | That’s one way of putting it.

Because I have to say, now that I am back to doing some in-person work, what I’m finding for some of these larger institutions is that they’re—and this is what you already know—really not interested in being undone.

“Here’s this recipe that I think is going to work for anti-racist theatre. Oh, you don’t want that? How do I now negotiate being in a relationship with you? To be present for people who are part of my beloved community, or communities, and keep speaking truth to power.”

VALERIE | I think that there is an inherent need to hold these institutions accountable to what they said they wanted to do. Are you afraid to do the thing that you dreamed of?

Did you not mean it when you said it in the first place? Are you unable to ask for help?

NICOLE BREWER is a passionate advocate for anti-racist theatre, authoring four articles about the need for the theatre industry to shift from racist and oppressive models to anti-racist. Nicole is a Board member of Parent Artist Advocacy League (PAAL). She’s currently full-time faculty in the Acting program at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale.

She earned her MFA in Acting from Northern Illinois University and her BFA from Howard University.

What exactly is the problem from getting where you are to where you say you want to be?

The integrity of the word is so important in our world in general and in our personal lives as human beings. What is the integrity of your word? If your revised mission statement says inclusive and accessible, show me three things that you’re doing differently to increase inclusivity and open access. If you’re not doing three things, then you don’t believe what you said and you should change your mission. If you state that as your mission and you’re not doing it, then you’re not about your business. And I get to stand out here and say, “They’re not about their business.”

They’re calling it a reckoning. There were a whole lot of the global majority who took the opportunity to assume leadership of these predominantly white institutions. And I was getting a lot of, “So are you going to run one?

If we step down, will you step up?” And I’m like, “No.” They’re not ready for me. The allies have not done their work.

When the allies have begun to do their work, then I can enter into conversations with them about how to make it ready for global majority folks to take over. And then I took the controversial step of saying, “I don’t want to run one of those. I want the money in one of those to tell my stories.” I don’t need the machine, I need the money. And again, it makes me a certain kind of person in my community to talk in that way.

I’m finding it more and more difficult for all of us to actually be accountable. Though the global majority folks also have to be accountable. Because we do not have our shit together exactly.

VALERIE CURTISNEWTON is currently Head of Directing and Playwriting at the University of Washington’s School of Drama, and the cofounding Artistic Director of The Hansberry Project. Her national credits include work with The Guthrie Theater, Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Intiman Theatre, A Contemporary Theatre, Center Theatre Group, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Seattle Children’s Theatre, and Seattle Repertory Theatre.

NICOLE | Yes. But this isn’t a moment of— for me anyway—us/them, better/worse.

This is a moment of individual reflection.

And to your point, what adjusts as we have these learnings? You can’t say that you’re in a space of learning or understanding or reaching past your own edges and stay stagnant. So there’s that for me as well.

What is the transformation that’s necessary for my various communities? What is the transformation that is necessary for the industry?

And for me, Val, it is unnatural for things not to have a sunset. I’ve been thinking a lot about this for the last couple of months.

How much of this needs to be sunset and the resources applied differently? It doesn’t mean everything, but it does mean a lot of how we do what we do has reached beyond its natural conclusion. I feel like we are— even more so now in this pandemic—trying to seek a future that is different and being beholden to nostalgia.

...now that I am back to doing some in-person work, what I’m finding for some of these larger institutions is that they’re—and this is what you already know—really not interested in being undone.

—NICOLE BREWER VALERIE | I could totally hear that. I guess that I suffer from the other side, which is, I feel that there’s a generation of activist/artists like you who are really good on “Let’s burn it all down and start over.” Which means also that people of my generation, and older than I am, are cut off from the journey, cut off from the struggle, because younger people are questioning everything that we have built.

“That’s not good enough, so it all needs to go away.” All of our wisdom is questioned because we didn’t succeed at taking the power away from predominantly white institutions. But we do know some things about how to get stuff done that younger artists can learn from.

I also recognize that as you were talking about sunsetting. There is a time and a place in our lives as artists when we have to make room. I just don’t want us all to be put on ice and left to die in the Arctic.

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Shontina Vernon in Nina Simone: Four Women at Seattle Rep, directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton PHOTO Nate Watters

I’m trying to lean into change, but there are definitely some changes that I resist.

The advent of the dramaturg and the intimacy choreographer/director is not a comfortable bifurcation of the role of the director for me. It’s like a previous generation of predominantly white men abused their power, and now we have to put in all of these supports to ensure that everyone’s protected from their abuse of power.

I’ve directed at a couple of places where the requirement is that I have an intimacy director because of the question of power.

And I literally said to this company, “I’m a queer Black woman. No one has accused me of having too much power in any situation.”

I’m willing to have conversations about the health of the company, the physical and mental health of the company. But what I’m not willing to do is to give up all of the most intense moments of the storytelling to someone else. Because then you’re just asking me to be a traffic cop.

NICOLE | As I think back on it, I don’t think I’ve ever directed anything that either could afford an intimacy choreographer, or it was just in the “before” times, when there wasn’t that position. And oftentimes, because of the

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identities I hold in my body and the spaces in which I’ve been made to feel radically unsafe, as a norm, I have endeavored to always create the space where people can have consent to how they show up in space.

VALERIE | I think that there is definitely a role for explicit choreography, particularly around sexual content in live theatre. I think there’s a role for that. But I think that right now, a number of companies are using that position to shield themselves from potential liability.

It’s more preemptive than preventative in a number of situations. And when people say it’s just like a fight choreographer, that’s just not true; they are two completely different things.

I believe in a culture of consent. And I believe that the company, inclusive of the director, can shape that culture of consent, can apply the rules of consent, can navigate and negotiate. I think the question for me becomes: are we all to live inside our comfort zones? How do we navigate safely telling stories that push us, that provoke us, even in the same way we ultimately want them to be provoking to the audience? And how much of it is everyone running for safety of a certain sort? It’s like the conversation you and I had

a while ago about my not really believing in safe space. I believe in brave people in every space. Honest people in every space.

People who know their core values in every space and [are] courageous enough to defend those boundaries fiercely. And then take whatever consequences come from that defense.

NICOLE | We have alignment there. Absofucking-lutely.

VALERIE | I think that that’s the hard part about this language that we’re beginning to evolve around safety. And also around the destruction of everything that came before.

NICOLE | I don’t believe in the destruction of everything that came before. I’ll just speak from the “I”—I won’t speak for other folks.

I will say there is a lot to be said for: What does it mean to learn from the perspective of those who have been out here doing it longer and who’ve developed strategies for survival?

Some of these things I think need to go, or need to be held to account, or need to be sunset, are institutions where the very way in which they were built up was wrong.

VALERIE | I do believe that things can run past their season, which is why I’m always trying to end everything I belong to. I was trying to kill the directing program at the university where I teach, the University of Washington, for the longest time. I was like, if we’re going to divide up the role of the director to all these mini-fiefdoms, do we actually need to have a directing program?

I run an organization called The Hansberry Project. Now, because of this movement, there’s a lot of folks doing what we were doing. I’m having this moment: should I be ending The Hansberry Project? There’s something about that moment of checking in and being honest with myself about the places where I’m involved and the places where I have power, if, in fact, my work is necessary. The other part of that is to recognize that there needs to be a moment that we seek transformation versus ending and destruction.

So when I say, “I don’t want to run that organization, I want the money out of it,” I think that there’s a community that still needs that organization. It needs to be challenged.

It needs to be transformed. And we need some of the money out, but they don’t have to be nuked and go to dust and be blown off into the wind. I’m more interested in the transformation than the destruction to rebuild. I was on a panel with a young artist and he was very much about the scorched earth—“it all needs to go.” And I was like, “Well, you have fun with that. I’m interested in transforming.” It’s like looking at the toolbox and recognizing that even in a failed institution there can be a useful tool.

I also think that this “scorched earth” shit is from a place of severe privilege and disconnect with reality. One, it’s not possible.

It’s easy for that to be the hill that you’re going to die on, because it’s never going to happen. The nuance of this time and of this work that’s being asked of people is where we’re going to create sustainability. And how we’re going to do it intergenerationally, and how we’re going to do it with two big, huge, heaping spoonfuls of humility. And then how we are going to listen to how our elders have survived.

VALERIE | If we get better at setting real goals, we’ll know when our work is done or if our work is done. And then we have to ask questions about why we’re staying in it—the vehicle that brought us there, when the vehicle’s not outfitted for the new terrain we find ourselves on. As the gas stations go away, we need to stop driving gas-powered cars.

NICOLE | Get the electric model.

Are we all to live inside our comfort zones? How do we navigate safely telling stories that push us, that provoke us, even in the same way we ultimately want them to be provoking to the audience?

—VALERIE CURTIS-NEWTON VALERIE | At least get the hybrid during

the transition. You don’t have to go straight electric just yet.

NICOLE | How do you find your people? How do you continue to build community where you are and where you go?

VALERIE | That’s a really hard question, Nicole. When I was 20 years old, I met Ntozake Shange. I had gone to the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

There were 608 people in my class—eight of them were Black. I was finding myself as a young Black artist. So when I got my copy of for colored girls and I took it up to her to get it signed, I said, “This meant so much to me when I discovered this play because I saw myself in this place where I was doing this work. But it’s very lonely now that I’m out of college, I’m trying to find the same thing, but it’s very lonely work.” And in my book, she inscribed, “To Valerie, to be an artist is sometimes to be outside the people but closer to God.” I have held onto that lesson. There are times when I’m super celebrated and I’m the one, and isn’t that great and isn’t that lovely. But that’s just as isolating as being alone. To the extent that I’m in rooms that other people can’t get into, I think my role in community is to hold the door open. Sometimes people pass by me on their way into the room, and then they find their new path. I think that that’s ultimately, for me, how community functions. I’m a waymaker and a door holder.

It’s also part of being a director. I’m not one of those directors who’s going to go with the cast every day for drinks after. I’m like, “No, they need to be able to bitch about me.” So

NICOLE | That’s right.

VALERIE | So I think that there’s an element of that—that we have to be more nuanced as we’re talking about this revolution. We don’t want to line up everybody else and shoot them all in front of a firing squad. We do want to make an attempt to win hearts and minds. Because long-lasting change is going to require that. White people are not going away.

NICOLE | How do we have the nuance? What about the places that are not going to get it right? There are some institutions that I’ve been working with where I’m just like, “This needs to end. It’s so deeply embedded in how you all show up.”

I’m saying it’s the institution that needs to end. Not the individual who takes their relationships, knowledge, learning, creativity, and your artistry. Anti-racism is your work.

This is your work to do with this particular community. So do the work.

Brandi Threatt + Dwayne McCowan in Milk Like Sugar at St. Louis Black Rep, directed by Nicole Brewer PHOTO Phil Hamer

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I need to not go all the time. I need to go sometimes to be invested and interested and share stories and history with them, but they need to bitch about me. They need to have their own thing. When the designers come, we talk about other things. I have a different relationship with them. And in terms of institutions, I’m looking around now and I’ve been on faculty at the University of Washington for 24 years. I’ve been there 27 years total because I was a student in the same program that I now teach in.

When you look around and there’s nobody that you grew up with around, you start to think, what’s your role? How do you fit in to the new landscape? Is the field changing such that I shouldn’t be teaching, that someone else should be teaching for the new landscape? One of the things for me, Nicole, is this question of whether we want to do social justice theatre.

NICOLE | I don’t know what that is.

VALERIE | I don’t know what that is either.

Yesterday I saw Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind on Broadway. You don’t get to do more social justice work than Childress did in her writing. You don’t get to do more. So when people are talking about, now we have to do social justice work, I’m like, no, we have to tell good stories and land them artfully

The Hansberry Project’s Wine in the Wilderness at ACT Theatre, directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton PHOTO Chris Bennion

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for an audience. We need to be impeccable in what we attempt to deliver to the people who come. So I think that there’s something in that, where again, I’m starting to feel more and more out of step with the generation or two generations behind me. I don’t want to see another mission statement that talks about social justice work. I want to talk more about the fullness of our humanity.

NICOLE | I want to talk about it with you.

Because I don’t know what that label means.

And I am scared that if people label [the work], they will lose the opportunity, as you say, to explore the fullness of their own personhood and how they may want to be made whole. So I don’t know what social justice theatre is.

I don’t go out with the cast every night either, Val. But I don’t know that I ever thought about them bitching about me.

We have created an industry that requires people to be multi-hyphenates.

—NICOLE BREWER VALERIE | When you were an actor and you went out with the cast, tell me it didn’t

come up. Why is she got me doing this? Did you hear when she said that? She’s got me standing over here. And the famous one, the famous cast bitch: she doesn’t know what she wants.

NICOLE | It’s true. I was out in these streets, saying what I had to say.

VALERIE | I know it. Do I want to be more involved socially with the cast? Absolutely.

Which is why I typically host a dinner at some point and invite them into my space and all of that. But I recognize I’m not supposed to be in every room where the cast is.

NICOLE | I took a position working as an anti-racist coordinator in support of another director, and essentially that position was one that was helping the director lead the space. I think it’s really interesting when you talked about intimacy direction earlier, and how I imagine the work of an anti-racist coordinator, a new position that has emerged during the pandemic, supports the call for, how do we center anti-racism if what we have been taught is destructive, or racist, or oppressive, or whatever language we want to use?

What’s interesting is that in my development of that role, and working alongside that particular director, I created a situation where I wasn’t in the space a lot. I was there

every week, but I wasn’t there a lot. I told the director it’s because I don’t want you to develop a swivel-head situation, where you’re swiveling over here to the “magic Negro” to solve your problems around anti-racism. It is your creative practice. It’s your room. I’m here to support how you think about your anti-racist theatre ethos being a part of your practice. And that is in the doing of it.

And to your point, Val, of what does it mean to support? What does it mean to create or design a position that is about amplifying how each person uniquely holds space, facilitates space, creates space, moves through space, in their role as director?

VALERIE | I can hear the desire to support and to minimize harm. I think that where it gets sticky is the notion that trying to reduce harm implies that we can eliminate harm. And that we can eliminate the consequences that come from having done harm. In our process, we want the actors and the designers to try things that we know are not going to work so that we can figure out what does work and why it works. But in the creation of the safe space, we’re undercutting the need, quite frankly, to create systems that actually allow us all to take care of ourselves. Each one of us speaking from the “I” to let each one of us speak from the “I.” We’re creating systems to eliminate the possibility that there will be harm. The expectation that there might be harm. And we can be creating in the people that we’re working with a kind of learned helplessness.

I’m finding in young people, in my students, very often I don’t have to take this attitude that keeps them from actually trying to do any part of the work. They don’t want to hear the word nigger in a rehearsal. Okay. So then how do we rehearse the scene where nigger is said 17 times? And if we’re going to use a word in substitute, we’re absolutely still not actually rehearsing the thing. We need to have a conversation about the word. If it’s used 27 times what does it mean each of those 27 times? Because the word itself is not monolithic. It’s got multiple purposes, right?

NICOLE | Yes. VALERIE | The presence of the word shouldn’t frighten any Black person away from doing the work of interrogating the word, of resisting it, of accepting it, of embracing it, of combating it. There are all these active actions that can take place in a response to the word. But if you’re saying another word, you’re having to work extra hard to fake an emotional response rather than actually practicing how to take it and survive. How to hear it and create a self-care regimen,

Jonkonnu in rehearsal at Howard University, directed by Nicole Brewer PHOTO Cardi Williams

whatever it is you need in the run of this show to take care of yourself.

If we begin with, we can’t even say the word in your presence, what are you going to do for eight shows a week? If the company decides we actually need to have a therapist to help us process this, that’s the company’s decision, it’s not a structure that’s laid on every play where the N-word appears. We struggle to deal. We learn the things that work for us. And we learn the things that don’t work for us by struggling to deal.

Removing the struggle, I think, really throws away one of the gifts of our ancestors.

We know how to struggle to get what we need. We know how to stand up for what is important to us. We have a toolkit for emotional and psychological survival.

NICOLE | Val, I understand so deeply what you’re talking about. The thing that comes up for me is how many people are not you? How many people aren’t creating those conditions for this space?

I’m saying this as I’m having a light bulb about myself. Because part of my directing aesthetic, part of how I’m in a space with someone, is also exactly what you said— relying on or offering or creating the space for us to have those conversations. To be able to say, “Here are the kind of things that I think are going to activate blood memory.

How are we discussing that? How are we moving through that with sound?” So I set up a space where we are first engaged in an embodied way; I don’t do table work, so

to speak, as much as we’re moving through with one another to create the space for all of that. So people could better understand where their boundaries are and what they might need to feel supported and sustained.

But every time people work with me, they go, “I’ve never been in a space like this before.”

And so I take it for granted that I do it.

VALERIE | How many of those people actually have also worked with Black directors?

That’s the other part of it. I’m someone who goes back and forth between the table and our feet. I’m very, very interested in the intellectual dramaturgical discussion about why this metaphor is in the play. And in this period, what are the activities that are happening that come out of our Blackness and our being alive in this place and time?

Now let’s get up, and let’s move it here, and let’s see what happens. And now we’ll talk about improvising and moving through the space in slow motion imagining the spirits in the space. All of those things are things that I can do.

And I want very much to have the talk. I want very much for us to unpack the dramaturgy of our history. You talk about blood memory—I think there’s also that we have this amazing common book of wisdom that we get to unpack. There are so few spaces where we actually gather intergenerationally to share wisdom. And also for young people to reignite our passion and call on us to serve as elder warriors, as opposed to just elders on the sidelines.

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for what this play can do, it needs you to do this thing.” And he said, “Well, why didn’t you just tell me that?”

Just tell me that. What if you shifted your thinking to believe that people were giving you their best, but maybe their best doesn’t suit your vision? This is where craft comes in.

If you are a phenomenal actor, I don’t have to do shit with you—just set you loose in the circumstance and you will fly, right? When you hit a moment where you can’t quite make the bridge from this to that, my craft will help you get there—by where I put you on stage, how close I put the other people to you, where you’re facing, what you’re wearing, how you’re lit. We can lift you over the place where your craft can’t necessarily take you. I can help there if I applied my craft.

But if I don’t even know my craft and you don’t get it, and I’ve given you that note five times and you still don’t get it, I’m not doing well by you and you’re not doing well by me. We’re creating the situation for harm to happen because we’re frustrated and we’re miscommunicating. But if I believe that you have it in you to do the thing that is required and I can support you in that work by lifting your craft and implementing my craft as a scaffolding for you to stand on, we can do fucking amazing things.

Khanisha Foster in Fires in the Mirror at Baltimore Center Stage, directed by Nicole Brewer PHOTO J Fannon

NICOLE | If you’re on the sideline, I don’t even know that you could have such a title as elder. To be an elder is to be revered, to be respected.

VALERIE | I have a question for you now that you’re on faculty teaching. Does it make you more hopeful for what comes next or more concerned?

NICOLE | I’m definitely at the point of really thinking about the trajectory of academia and training, and the next generation and the generation after that. We have created an industry that requires people to be multihyphenates. It is a rare amount of folks who can do one thing and earn a living wage.

When you layer on the fact that I’m a woman, the fact that I’m Black—that I’m darkskinned—when we layer in all of those things, it makes the possibility of me creating a living wage off one thing smaller and smaller. And so to train someone for one discipline, or to think that three years is enough, seems like it just needs some interrogation.

VALERIE | I agree with you. And I’m questioning as we become more multihyphenated, what happens to the questions of craft? And in this new more inclusive idea

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of a world, is craft devalued in service of other elements of our professions?

NICOLE | I wonder about that. I really do, because I feel like there are people with degrees who are out here doing crap work when we talk about craft, and people who don’t have degrees who are out here doing incredible things because they haven’t had their audaciousness beat out of them.

VALERIE | Yes. And there are some critical elements of craft that you may stumble on intuitively. When I came to grad school, one of the first things I recognized was, “Oh, I do that already.” But I didn’t know what I was doing. Now I know what I’m doing and why it works. And when something’s not working, I know how to diagnose that in a way that I didn’t when I was just audacious.

I knew how to make the thing in my head. But I’ll be honest with you, Nicole, I was a terror as a director. Because I had a vision, and the actors were going to do my vision. And if they didn’t do it fast enough, I had a razor tongue. I would just cut them every which way and then expect them to get it. And then a really good friend of mine said, “When you yell at me, I really cannot hear you. I can’t hear a word you say when you yell at me.”

And I was like, “Yes, but this idea that I have

NICOLE | My heart so wants to sing with this, Val. My question for you is what happens when energetically you just don’t jive? When, energetically, who I am, no matter what my craft is, is never going to be able to fit or flow with who the other person is?

I think that there is an inherent need to hold these institutions accountable to what they said they wanted to do. Are you afraid to do the thing that you dreamed of?

—VALERIE CURTIS-NEWTON VALERIE | I think that that’s actually a moment as a director that you have to accept the consequences of your decision to hire that person. Artists make choices and then we live with the consequences of our choices.

I picked that actor who was wrong. I picked that actor who gave me that thing in their audition but had nothing more to give.

I’m not a huge fan of callbacks. Because I feel like that’s a little bit like me looking for a safe place. I’ve already seen that you can do

it, but I’m going to do a mini-bootcamp so you can really confirm to me that you can do it. Rather than, you know what, I got a good hit off of you on this line, let’s just go with it.

And together we will craft a thing that will serve the play beautifully. You’ll feel good about your work. I’ll feel good about the production. And my brain is just double-Virgo enough that too much information paralyzes me.

In the world of multi-hyphenates, what are yours?

NICOLE | I just was telling an actor in a show that I’m directing right now—I have to maybe stop calling myself an actor because I have not received a paycheck for acting in quite some time. The things that I receive money for, that people hire me to do, would be directing, teaching, offering my approach to anti-racist theatre and creative practice throughout the industry, and writing. Those are it for me. What about for you?

VALERIE | Director, educator, and activist are all true for me. In the last four or five years, I’ve started to write. And quiet as I’ve kept it, a couple of weeks ago I actually performed a piece that I wrote. I did a solo show. I have no desire to do it again. I enjoyed the process, but it was very, very, very stressful.

I got the chance to put a lot of the things that I’m teaching to artists and actors and directors and designers at the University of Washington into practice. I’m teaching a course on resilience, which is a lot about the optimism and confidence that go with

humility and compassion—teaching people to expect the best rather than be primarily focused on preparing for the worst. Because we’ll deal with the bad outcome. Most of the time we have the skills already to deal with the bad outcome. If I spend my time planning for the worst, I have the resources to deal with the worst. But I’m not always planning for the best. I’m hoping for the best, but I don’t plan for it the way that I plan for the worst. That shift in language is really profound. Going into it with, “What can I do?

How are we going to do this?” is different than, “Let’s do this if it doesn’t work.”

I think cultivating resilience is the thing. Make resilience a goal. We are capable of so much more than the world will let us remember.

That’s the thing that I want to teach. I want to teach my students that they’re going to fail. That failure is a part of life. And without failure, there is no innovation. There is no discovery without failing. And it’s not just about persevering, it’s not just about continuing to bang your head on the wall.

It’s about looking for new ways over, under, around, or through the wall, but keep going.

I think of the director’s job as a holistic job, that it is about taking care with everything.

It’s literally the leadership of service. To be in service of the playwright and the story, to be in service of the audience, to be in service of the actors’ best performances, to be in service of the cohesion of a design aesthetic.

I think that that’s the heart of directing. And I think that with that posture of service, some power is required. I have to be able to make choices. I have to be able to edit. I have to

be able to say, “No, we’re doing this today. I can tell you why, but I shouldn’t have to. But I could tell you why we’re doing it this way.

And because I’m in service, not just to you, but to the whole company. Collaboration doesn’t mean doing what you tell me you want to do.

Collaboration means listening to your desire and the reasons behind your desire and figuring out how to make it work. One of my big notes to my directors as I’m teaching them is one of the most powerful things that happened to me is the result of that conversation with my friend, who said, “When you yell at me, I can’t hear you.” I learned to say to the actors, “I hadn’t thought about that. My initial response to everything is no.

So give me some moments to get to yes.

Give me some moments to get to yes.” As a director, one of our most powerful tools is learning how to get to yes.

NICOLE | What you just said here is medicine.

It truly is. You’re operating from a healthy way what it means to have power and not abuse it. What it means to be a connector of many things, and to truly be in service to all of those things. There are a lot of people who don’t do that.

VALERIE | I, like you, love our people. And I believe that our art form actually is about the love of people. It’s about how do we elevate our humanity and show each other how we can be our best selves and the dangers of what happens when we deliver less than our best. And how we stay resilient and find new ways.

Samuel Ray Gates in Skeleton Crew at PlayMakers Rep, directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton PHOTO HuthPhoto c/o PlayMakers Repertory Company

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HOW DO WE HONOR DIANE RODRIGUEZ?

E N D T H E W E AT H E R I N G O F

BIPOC THEATRE ARTISTS

BY LESLIE

ISHII

An invitation: breathe with me now as Diane joins her Ancestors and, I’m sure, whispers in our ears as I write this offering.

As I write this, it is Día de los Muertos, November 1, 2021, and I have just returned from the Celebration of Life for our dear colleague, mentor, and friend, Diane Rodriguez, who was a brilliant theatre director/actor/playwright/producer. I am dedicating this Journal article to Diane and her legacy.

Through this ongoing pandemic, Team Diane—a group that lent loving support to Diane throughout her battle with lung cancer—and the beloved Latinx theatre and artist community of Los Angeles planned and hosted this celebration at Center Theatre Group and Grand Park. It was a deeply personal celebration so authentic to who Diane was, and it manifested a tremendous in-person intergenerational reunion of Diane’s familia and us BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) theatremakers.

As I grieve, I can’t help but think of Diane’s trailblazing work and how it contributed to formative change in the Latinx and BIPOC and BITOC (Black/Indigenous/Theatre of Color) Theatre Movement from the 1970s right up to her passing.

Diane carried the legacy of her family, who were farm and cannery workers and journalists for the underground newspaper during the formation of the United Farmworkers Union. She began her career and long relationship with the preeminent El Teatro Campesino playing “actos” in fields on the back of farm trucks for Latinx and Asian/Pacific Islander immigrant farmworkers.

She co-founded and brilliantly performed with the Latins Anonymous Comedy Troupe, performed with Culture Clash, and was a beloved collaborator with artistic homes Latino Theatre Company and Teatro Luna, where, in recent years, she directed her own new works, The Sweetheart Deal and Living Large, respectively. Diane’s national presence was impactful in the founding of the Latinx Theatre Commons and strongly felt as she

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Diane Rodriguez pictured at the Center Theatre Group, where she worked as Associate Artistic Director, Producer, and Director of New Play Production, 2005–2019 PHOTO c/o Center Theatre Group

directed at East West Players, Mixed Blood, and other theatres across the US. Diane was of service, advocating at national and federal levels as Theatre Communications Group’s board president and as an appointee to the National Council on the Arts during the Obama administration. Hers was a life well lived in right-purpose and in service of the entire American theatre ecology.

With all my love and respect for Diane, her life, and her familia, I must share my learnings and my deep concerns. My grief has led me to the subject of weathering. The term “weathering” was coined in 1992 by Dr. Arline Geronimus, who at the time was a researcher in the Department of Public Health Policy and Administration at the University of Michigan.

Dr. Geronimus’s medical research illuminated Black female-identified humans who were disproportionately impacted by the effects of historical trauma combined with the perpetual stress of contemporary trauma and racial discrimination, hate, and violence. This research revealed that weathering supports explanations for congenital health conditions in BIPOC patients, connecting these chronic illnesses/conditions to the historical and contemporary traumas in our families and our communities.

Diane’s career was a model of resistance of systemic racism, colonial/capitalism, and patriarchy. She modeled speaking truth to power and building access and therefore resources for BIPOC artists inside of and interfacing with PWIs (predominately white institutions) throughout the American theatre for the majority of her life, 24 years based at Center Theatre Group. She held the door open for so many of us until she couldn’t any longer. Although we do not know if there was a direct correlation between Diane’s illness and stressors that she faced day-to-day, one can assume that such a constant struggle for equity bears a heavy cost. It costs our most devoted and trusted leaders their health and, in many cases, their lives.

Many of us BIPOC/BITOC-identified directors/ artistic directors utilize our positional power to advance the Movement for our liberation—but with new paradigms so as not to replicate the white colonial/capitalistic, racist patriarchal models so embedded in the theatre field. It is imperative that these leaders are fully supported and resourced as they create new models of workforce development in equitable and just structures with health and retirement benefits to increase life expectancy to increase our thrive-ability.

Our collective future is at stake. Others have screamed this and I can’t shout it loud enough now: WEATHERING is impacting our BIPOC bodies, minds, and spirits. It is taking our health and shortening our lives.

I am calling you all in to END SYSTEMIC RACISM and OPERATIONALIZE ANTIRACISM, DECOLONIZATION, AND ANTIOPPRESSION NOW! We need your advocacy and direct action to resource and implement transformative justice in our organizations, to breathe life into our BIPOC artists, BITOCs, and communities.

You honor Diane Rodriguez by taking up this call to action to do your part from your vantage point to end oppression, which will extend the lives of your BIPOC colleagues.

Receive this call to action so her life and the powerful work of other BIPOC theatre leaders before her will continue. In collaboration, we must all powerfully and strategically build new paradigms upon the crucial work of these/our BIPOC Ancestors.

My passion to decolonize and support our collective liberation by healing our historical/ contemporary traumas comes from my lack of tolerance of seeing others suffer.

Colleagues encourage me to focus on the art. How can I focus on the art when I know our colleagues can’t retire with dignity or cannot afford to go to the doctor or buy the

Diane Rodriguez (second from right) performing with El Teatro Campesino in the 1970s PHOTO Jesús Garza

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medicines they need or afford their rent? Am I leading a social services organization?

I say, yes! I am called to lead a nonprofit organization, and that means my mandate is to be of service for public good through theatre. However, we know now that the nonprofit structure is deeply flawed and actually benefits the highly privileged. So, how can I be of service to make sure that our BIPOC theatremakers can garner health insurance and retirement benefits? How can I operationalize an organizational culture where our systems end weathering and innovate new models that center solutions for our BIPOC staff members and artists?

For so many of us BIPOC/BITOC femaleidentified directors/leaders, our love and nurturing of community is not only our calling but also our culturally condoned role.

I find of all the skills-building that I have needed to develop throughout my career, self-care is only a recent priority. I must be honest and share that the word “priority” brings tears. Why? Until I accepted this artistic director position, I was a freelance theatremaker for my entire career. Much of the time, I struggled to work enough to garner health insurance or the ability to be vested in union retirement programs. I never saw myself holding an artistic directorship.

Now, as Artistic Director of Perseverance Theatre, I am passionate to utilize this positional power and privilege to create a healthy and abundant ecology for our staff members and artists.

As I learn and support the liberation of others, I must face how weathering impacts

my life. My research and learnings from Dr. Satsuki Ina, a licensed psychotherapist specializing in community trauma and community healing, have revealed that the heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, liver and kidney disease, and cancer that has plagued multiple generations of my family is largely due to weathering the unrelenting racism that is orientalism/anti-Asian hate/ violence directly targeting me, my brothers, parents, cousins, my Elders, and Ancestors being Japanese/Asian Americans, immigrants, WWII concentration camp survivors and nonsurvivors, and descendants of this legacy.

In the Japanese American community, through Dr. Ina’s leadership, we have learned to create healing of historical traumas by also working to organize and participate at the front lines in direct action on behalf of immigrant/refugees who are imprisoned/ detained and held like animals in stalls as our families were during WWII. I can’t live with knowing that other disproportionately impacted BIPOC artists and community members are still devalued, dehumanized, and treated like animals, while the systemic racism, the weathering they are experiencing is shortening and taking their lives. To reclaim my humanity from internalized oppression, I must exercise my agency to advocate and support change for others more vulnerable.

As my dear sister and Founder/Executive Director of artEquity Carmen Morgan says, “There is no neutral.” If we are not actively working against racism and oppression to decolonize and re-Indigenize to liberate our spaces and communities, we are complicit with anti-Blackness, anti-Indigenous,

anti-Latinx, anti-Asian/Pacific Islander/ Native/MENA and anti-immigrant/refugee normativism.

So, to my non-BIPOC colleagues, because of systemic racism, I have learned not to ask for help. However, I am courageously calling you in now. I must know from you that the work is deepening so I can effectively work in solidarity with you. You know enough and/ or there are plenty of resources to find out, commit to, and get the education you need to activate now.

Adopt the language “We don’t do white supremacy culture here—let it go and let’s change it!” In theatre, we learn by doing with repetition. Flex this muscle! Build and grow the stamina, and your long game will unfold productively and profoundly. Know that by doing so, you are not a white savior, but you are ending systemic racism and weathering, and extending the lives of your BIPOC colleagues.

I invite you to notice language that references animals and dehumanizing terms when communicating to or about BIPOC peoples.

Create other language that humanizes.

I invite you to notice the emotional and physical labor that is assumed a BIPOC staff or colleague will take on that protects white comfort/fragility to avoid conflict that would mean liberatory change. Collaborate with BIPOC staff and colleagues to change the structure and actions. Notice male and white bonding, a spoken and unspoken endorsement to protect the status quo that is weathering to BIPOC. If you are not uncomfortable, be suspect and disrupt the status quo. This all reflects how exploitive patterns of white supremacy culture replicate on BIPOC peoples and communities.

Disrupt systemic patterns. We can change structures and policies: interrogations and actions at Perseverance Theatre inspire me to invite you to join our Movement, where we are learning to transform organizational culture to end racism and weathering, and to foster mental and physical well-being. Here are some of our learnings and actions. I hope this encourages an exchange of ideas and support between us all.

• Check yourself: utilize Tema Okun’s White Supremacy Culture handout. Are you complicit with white supremacy culture?

• Decolonize/re-Indigenize: support staff and/or artists’ ways of life that might include subsistence living.

Leslie Ishii + Diane Rodriguez (center left + right), with Mariana Sanchez + Miranda Gonzalez at the Latinx Theatre Commons’ Carnaval of New Latinx Work at the Theatre Department, DePaul University in 2018. PHOTO c/o Leslie Ishii

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• Season planning: how are you to/ will you utilize your main stage(s) for marginalized artists/voices to have their voices? How are you amplifying BIPOC

Erin Tripp in Voyager One at Perseverance Theatre, directed by Leslie Ishii PHOTO Joshua Lowman

and marginalized groups’ voices and supporting their ways of working? Does the organizational and rehearsal culture set these artists up for success, which also means support by, with, and for them from the start?

•

Do your seasons program at least 50-66 percent BIPOC plays/theatre projects and artists? If not, why? Interrogate your analysis and processes.

•

Rehearsal period: five-day work weeks— no more six-day work weeks.

•

Implement JEDI (Justice, equity, diversity, inclusion) training to open your rehearsals—it sets the tone, and never sets back schedules by adding this session. The work deepens, and it sets the foundation for everyone to be treated as fully human 100 percent of the time.

• Therefore, operationalize JEDI, accessibility, and decolonizing/reindigenizing practices in all processes and models of your company. Go beyond optics—BIPOC artists’ lives and longevity depend on it.

•

Company management: do your BIPOC staff and artists feel safe? If not, listen and support them to feel safe and return to their housing safely after rehearsals and shows. Create a buddy and/or check-in process, if requested/suggested.

(Reference: https://www.csvanw.org/ mmiw)

•

Technical rehearsals: eight out of 10s, NO MORE 10 out of 12s.

•

Provide at least one meal during the technical rehearsal period. Always provide healthy snacks and clean, drinkable water.

•

Support staff members when they say they need a mental health day. Deepen your candor with work relationships for transparency so there’s trust and support when these requests are made. This also puts people first, which is at the heart of community building.

•

As a staff, consider what days will be “holidays” and it’s okay if they are different for colleagues.

•

This also means that all should have off Indigenous Peoples’ Day to learn and honor the Native/Indigenous upon whose land you are set.

•

Honoring all Native/Indigenous Peoples as an everyday practice. We are learning to keep decolonizing and Native Elder wisdom and responses at the forefront of every conversation and process. Out of basic respect, introduce yourself and meet the Native/Indigenous Elders and BIPOC leaders and Elders where you live and work.

•

Community building now attracts an inclusive board and artist roster.

•

Offer paid time off the last week of December, unless you are in production.

Renewal during this time of year is critical.

•

Encourage your staff to take time off and to use their vacation days if they have accrued them.

•

Grant flexibility to work from home or at the office/theatre, and support parents and their childcare and family needs.

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•

•

•

•

When fiscally possible, offer raises and look at what will make retention attractive to staff and artists. Share candidly what is possible with an estimated timeline.

Interrogate current health insurance policies and do the necessary research to afford good health insurance for your entire staff. Work to establish a pension plan.

Bigger is not necessarily better. Rightsize the processes, models, season planning, and production with your budget and staff and crew capacities to relieve strain, resentment, and burn out.

Ask: does the process bring joy to all?

It can and should bring joy!

Humbly, this is a start—we are finding messy conflict and joy in changing structures and conscientiously increasing our life expectancy. Don’t just “survive” or “live with”—instead, strive to thrive and create a process that brings joy!

Please keep whispering to us, dear Diane.

It is an honor to continue your work and legacy. I’m committed to ending the weathering of our BIPOC colleagues. Rest in Peace and Power~ Dear colleagues, join me now in this Movement to end weathering!

My deepest gratitude to Patricia Garza, Alex Meda, and Irene Martinko for their support in my writing this article.

Leslie Ishii, Artistic Director of Alaska’s Perseverance Theatre, is a descendant of WWII US concentration camp survivors/ non-survivors who carries legacies of weathering from anti-AAPII hate/violence; her calling to support BIPOC/BITOC well-being and retirement informs all she does.

Perseverance Theatre is located on the sacred territories of the Áak’w Kwáan and Dena’ina Peoples of Alaska.

Some Recent Research on the Impact of COVID-19 on BIPOC Communities Recent survey research conducted by the National BIPOC/BITOC Theatre Coalition/ Commons, housed at Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists and in partnership with the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, has brought forth findings regarding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on BIPOC theatre practitioners and BITOCs. We found a majority of those who participated in the survey cannot receive and have not been able to achieve enough work to qualify for health insurance and/or retirement benefits.

Elizabeth Arias, the lead author of a new study with the National Center for Health Statistics, a Division of Vital Statistics, admits: The Asian American Performers Action Coalition’s (AAPAC) most recent Visibility Report regarding racial representation on New York City Stages is a perfect cousin report that has documented the enormous marginalization of BIPOC artists. This report is a microcosm that mirrors the gross lack of racial representation throughout the US in the American Theatre. *Lack of representation=No jobs, no pay, no health or retirement benefits. *Visibility Report: Of all roles on NYC stages, 29% Black, 6.3% Asian American, 4.8% Latinx, 1.3% MENA, 0% Indigenous actors were employed during the 2018-2019 season.

I must also name that this was a grave preCOVID-19 condition, and now many are even more pressed to risk working on the front lines as essential workers outside of the theatre field and at PWIs and corporate chain/companies to afford health insurance, in fact—reported from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (PNAS): Potential explanations for the disproportionate burden of deaths among Black and Latino individuals reflect underlying social disparities that have been documented for decades and amplified during the current pandemic.

Our industry, one of the first to shutter and last to reopen, contributed to high-unemployment and the likely loss of health insurance. This report discusses the cost of working on the front lines in essential industries, means low-paying jobs and facing high exposure to COVID-19 transmission that is injurious, and as we know now, shortens lives and life expectancy according to this report by the PNAS: We project that COVID-19 will reduce US life expectancy in 2020 by 1.13 y. Estimated reductions [of life expectancy] for the Black and Latino populations are 3 to 4 times that

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[than] for Whites….Of the deaths for which race and ethnicity have been reported to the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), 21% were Black and 22% were Latino….A plethora of factors likely contribute to these disparities, many of which reflect enduring structural inequalities for the Black and Latino populations that increase both risk of exposure to COVID-19 and risk of death for those infected.

Also, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, October 11, 2021, launched new data and maps tracking the pandemic’s impact across American Indian and Alaska Native communities: The gap in data was recognized by Indian Country Today editors, who began tracking publicly available data…The new maps of Tribal Nations streamline data collection efforts and provide visualizations to display the pandemic’s disparate impact in areas not typically monitored by mainstream media sources. COVID-19 has amplified health inequities in American Indian communities because of underfunded and under-resourced health systems, limited access to health services, poor infrastructure, and underlying health disparities. For example, American Indian or Alaska Native individuals were 3.5 times more likely to be hospitalized for the virus.

I offer this not as “oppression Olympics” but to end erasure of vital BIPOC information. Why are Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders not included in COVID-19 reports? An article in Hawai’i Journal of Health & Social Welfare in May 2020 reported on the number of COVID cases per 100,000 for NHPI (Native Hawaiian/ Pacific Islander) compared to statewide rates within five states: California data show NHPI have the highest rate of all racial and ethnic groups, with 217.7 cases per 100,000 NHPI, while the statewide overall rate is 62.43 per 100,000.

Data from King County, Washington also indicate NHPI as having the highest rate, at 189.5 cases per 100,000.... Oregon too shows that COVID-19 cases are higher among NHPI, at 154 cases per 100,000 while the statewide rate is 55 cases per 100,000 residents. In Utah, the COVID-19 positive cases among NHPI are 197.6 per 100,000, compared to 142.2 cases per 100,000 for the entire state. In Salt Lake County, Utah, the rate for NHPI is 287.8 per 100,000. The rates of COVID-19 positive cases among NHPI within these states are greater than those reported for African Americans and American Indians, two racial/ethnic groups receiving much national attention regarding COVID-19 risk.

— Leslie Ishii

TAKING OFF THE

BY

LAURA RIKARD

“The way we lead is a reflection of who we are.”

—Brené Brown I’m a professional director, actor, and professor of theatre, but in the past few years, I’ve become known for my work as an intimacy choreographer, intimacy coordinator, and educator. I co-founded Theatrical Intimacy Education (TIE) with Chelsea Pace.

I have had the honor to train thousands of people in better practices for staging intimacy, but what we do at TIE is more than that. Our mission is to train everyone already in the room. We work to help the leaders in our industry learn how to support the vulnerable people in the spaces beyond just a moment of physical intimacy. Encouraging leaders to incorporate new tools into their

ARMOR process means asking them to be vulnerable as well.

Directors are already in a vulnerable position.

The privilege and burden of the final creative decision-making falls upon their shoulders.

It’s a vulnerable leadership position to take on and some cope with it by armoring up.

When a leader decides, “I’m just going to keep doing things the way I always have because I know that leads to success,” this is one way people in leadership armor up. The amazing change I am seeing is artists with a wealth of experience who are now working to remove this armor. I see directors working to incorporate new tools into their process and discovering how it changes their spaces for the better. That can feel vulnerable. Brené Brown states that leaders armor up to avoid feeling vulnerable. For experienced directors, bringing in new tools in order to have a more consent-based space with clear boundaries

can feel vulnerable because these are not practices that have been conventionally modeled in our industry.

In workshops, I often ask the question, “What is theatrical intimacy?” The responses vary. The following are some examples: “A moment of physical intimacy,” “A quiet emotional moment,” and “All of it.” There is no definitive answer because intimacy is subjective. Personally, I feel that all of it is intimate. The nature of walking into a space to create a living product with other people, like a production, is intimate. In our field that production must become a repeatable performance for audience consumption.

Needing to create a production that will be well-received and sell tickets can put a lot of pressure on the leaders in our spaces. And when there is pressure, it can be difficult to incorporate new tools in the process, especially when millions of dollars

Ainsley Seiger + Trey Fitts in Spring Awakening at North Carolina School of the Arts, for which Laura Rikard was the intimacy choreographer PHOTO Peter Mueller

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of investments are relying on the director’s creative leadership. In my role as an intimacy choreographer and educator, I’ve been asked, “How do you deal with people who are resistant to change in their processes?”

But I don’t see resistance. I see people sorting out how to incorporate tools that have rarely, if ever, been modeled for them.

It is understandable that for the experienced craftsperson in our field, it may take time to incorporate new tools. They are being asked to be even more exposed in what is already an intimate and vulnerable process. Taking time to understand new tools is different than refusal. In most cases, I see people needing time to build trust in these new tools so they can build courage to use them.

Why does it take some folks more time than others? One major reason is the confusion around the idea of being “easy to work with.” Let’s define it. Being easy to work with is being prompt, having prepared effectively, treating others with respect and kindness, and being clear about boundaries.

But for far too long there has been a grave misunderstanding about what it means to be “easy to work with.” For many theatre artists, to be easy to work with means to “say yes to anything.” This led some folks with power in our industry to use this idea to gain a feeling of control over the marginalized and vulnerable people in our spaces. This also led to confusion about what it means to say “yes” to a creative choice while also being able to set boundaries. Read more about this in Staging Sex: Best Practices Tools and

Techniques for Staging Theatrical Intimacy by Chelsea Pace, with contributions by me.

education they got during lockdown into their practices.

During lockdown, many, many theatremakers took time to breathe, learn, and reflect on how we can make our processes healthier.

Chelsea and I transferred the in-person TIE intimacy workshops to shorter online workshops that immediately sold out. They have consistently sold well since. Every month, I have the pleasure of teaching theatre artists from all over the world how to create a consent-based space in their rehearsal process, production process, and training room.

Theatre asks us to create stories that center around loaded circumstances while characters are living in the most uncomfortable moments of their lives. The instruments that tell these stories are the bodies and minds of actors. Our processes are vulnerable and uncomfortable, but we can create a loaded story in a consensual way as long as we have a consent-based space where establishing and respecting boundaries is normal. So how have we changed? How are we changing?

Leaders in rehearsal rooms are trying to sort out how we create space for care of the instrument (the body and mind) in a way that we have never really seen modeled. I see people trying their best to sort out how to integrate new and better approaches into lifelong practices. I see people taking time to handle concerns when they immediately arise rather than letting the pressure of the “time is money” concept lead them to avoidance.

How do we have boundaries in a field that for so long has made us feel like boundaries were a hindrance to the creative process?

The first step in a good intimacy practice is to establish a consent-based space. Theatre artists are coming to the realization that we must have consent-based spaces all the time, not just when staging a moment of physical intimacy. I see people trying their best to establish consent-based spaces for the entire process. This is hopeful as we come back and learn how to navigate making theatre in the pandemic world. I see people integrating the

When I meet directors who welcome me in the space as an intimacy choreographer, and who want to learn about what I’m doing, I recognize that takes vulnerability and courage. They are willing to use new tools, model them, and encourage the actors to use them as well, having no idea how that’s going to shift or change the space. This is the first time many have had consentbased practices modeled for them, and that is brave leadership. When there’s a lot of money on the line, when there are people’s jobs on the line, and you are the leader who must make this collaboration successful and marketable, being vulnerable is hard. Being willing to bring something into the space that is different from the way you’ve always done things is scary.

Establishing and respecting boundaries is all part of this process. But what this looks like in practice can feel vulnerable. How do we have boundaries in a field that for so long has made us feel like boundaries were a hindrance to the creative process?

Boundaries actually give us the parameters through which we can be boundlessly creative. Boundaries support the creative process. Setting up a system and vocabulary for establishing boundaries can feel odd when it’s new. Bringing a new tool, like a self-care cue, into the room so we can all get what we need in a consensual way to meet our contractual obligations is odd the first time it happens (Pace, 2020). But once the productivity of it is understood it becomes normal.

Laura Rikard, right, teaching a workshop with Chelsea Pace PHOTO Kiirstn Pagan

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These tools are helping us focus on creating drama without causing trauma to the artist.

When it comes to moments of physical

Joell Weil + Malik Childs in Skeleton Crew at the Bristol Riverside Theatre, with intimacy choreography by Laura Rikard PHOTO Mark Garvin

intimacy, we now have some structure where there was none and a movement vocabulary for moments where, in the past, actors were asked to “Just figure it out” or “Just kiss each other.” It’s not complicated, it’s not hard, and if you’re willing to be vulnerable and try it, there will be lots of positive results. Educational theatre has provided us with anecdotal evidence that shows incorporating these tools is helping to make our spaces braver.

Educational theatre has taken the charge in integrating these practices. The industry changes by training the people who go into the industry. Educational theatre does not have the pressures of pleasing producers and investors. Thank goodness! What we’re learning in the educational laboratory is that teaching consent-based practices and boundary-setting tools while in training is normalizing these ideas as part of the process. Student theatre artists are being empowered to acknowledge when they’re unsure about what’s being asked of them and to ask for more clarification without fearing retaliation. We’re seeing that it doesn’t take long to problem solve. If people can speak up early in the process without fear of being labeled “a problem

to work with,” everyone is having a more consensual, collaborative process.

Relying on educational theatre and intimacy choreographers is one step in helping remove the armor that creates resistance, but this is not enough. I see directors coming to the table eager to learn. They are trying to build trust in this discipline so they can remove their armor. Now it’s time for the folks with the purse strings to join us at the table as well. When everyone is engaging in understanding how to practically apply new techniques in our spaces, that is when a cultural change occurs.

There is no checkbox that guarantees everything is going to go perfectly in any process. Human beings are messy, we are all imperfect, and we all come into spaces with the history of our own journeys. We are going to make mistakes. Acknowledging this is part of removing the armor, and it is time for the armor to come off. Like all change, it sometimes happens slower than we wish it would. Armor is heavy and it takes time to remove, yet I see directors doing it and seeking out support from people like me to help them. I consistently remind myself that there is a reason people put on their

armor. And no one can remove it on their own—it takes support. Folks are seeking that support; folks are removing it one plate at a time. There is a relief that comes with its removal, but it takes some time before one can feel secure in living without it.

WORKS CITED

Pace, Chelsea, et al. Staging Sex: Best Practices, Tools, and Techniques for Theatrical Intimacy. Routledge, 2020.

Laura Rikard is an intimacy choreographer, intimacy coordinator, director, and Co-Founder and Head Faculty of Theatrical Intimacy Education (TIE), as well as an Assistant Professor of Theatre at USC Upstate.

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THE LENS THROUGH WHICH I VIEW THE WORLD

BY DAVID

ANZUELO

Taking in the events of the past 17 months, I was asked, “How have we changed? And how do I think my work will change?”

Well, I can only speak for myself. So I will.

During the shutdown, I turned inward and allowed myself to rest and eat as much as I wanted, to finally read all those books I had been putting off, and watch the many films I’d never had the time for. It became a time of replenishing “the well” for me, filling my internal reservoir with the beautiful writings of Isabel Allende, Zadie Smith, James Baldwin, Rudolfo Anaya, and Elie Wiesel. I also meditated daily and set up a schedule with my mom and we practiced qi gong twice a week on FaceTime. It was nourishing.

taught for both LAByrinth Theater Company and the University of San Diego Graduate Theatre Program for five weeks, where I gave a workshop I called “The Artist’s Shamanic Journey: A Reclamation of Personal Energy during COVID-19.” Basically, I just shared my self-care program with others. It was well received and it felt good to help others.

For the few in-person jobs that came in, I worked from a distance and wore a mask and gloves. In the past, I could have physically demonstrated with actors, but I now focused almost exclusively on words to communicate choreography. I talked of the proximity of bodies, extension of limbs, line of energy, duration of motion, rhythm, repetition, and quality of touch, and I referred to what I called “corporeal knowledge,” which is what I call the wisdom gleaned through the body’s experience in the world. I used musical terms more and spoke about the “rest” moments in the choreography, the space between action, even the space between breaths. Restful moments in both life and art are important.

But the biggest and most important change for me came with the social reckoning that erupted in our country in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the attack on our nation’s capital. I began to reexamine the social and racial context of my fight/intimacy direction. As a queer Chicanx male-identifying fight/intimacy director, this was always the lens through which I viewed the world and worked, but now it became more intentional.

I decided to make a more active effort to

help tell stories by and for Black, Indigenous, Latine/x, Asian, and LGBTQ theatremakers. As theatres reopened in the wake of the vaccine rollout, I declined work that did not center people of the world majority or LGBTQA people. It became increasingly important for me to help BIPOC and LGBTQA theatremakers navigate what are often the most emotionally dangerous and physically challenging parts of a play. I now strive to work more consciously in my approach to choreographing violence on the bodies of actors of color and queer bodies, working to be sensitive about how the events of the world may have subtle yet profound influence on these artists and on myself. I am working to do better to balance the Queer/Latinidad/Indigenousness within myself and know that it does not exempt me from having blindspots that must be continuously worked on.

These are some of the most apparent personal, artistic, and procedural ways that I can see how I’ve changed and how it’s affected my work. The changes are still happening. I can feel it. Overall, I think it’s good.

David Anzuelo is an actor, fight/intimacy director, playwright, and founder of UnkleDave’s Fight-House.

And speaking of nourishing, my husband and I made sure our lockdown days started off with a hearty breakfast and laughter, watching the comedic antics of Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, and The Munsters. Laughter is the best medicine, right? Since the gyms were closed, we did body weight exercises and constructed homemade weights with bamboo sticks and milk jugs filled with water—until we realized the shutdown was going to last much longer than anyone realized and we ordered adjustable dumbbells and a stationary bike online.

Evenings were spent watching the films of Fosse, Kurosawa, Kubrick, and David Lynch.

I wanted to flood my mind with powerful images and visions of ecstatic human bodies cutting through space. It was a customized program of self-care.

Gradually, work appeared online, and I made the pivot to act and teach. I participated in several Zoom readings and workshops, and

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Bradley James Tejeda + Gabriel Diego Hernández in El Coquí Espectacular and the Bottle of Doom at Two River Theater, fight direction by David Anzuelo PHOTO Richard Termine

RUPTURING

THE VEIL

BY DIANA

WYENN

“I have only one rule in my room: protect yourself and one another. I mean this physically, emotionally, and spiritually. If you follow this one rule, everything else is fair game!”

This is what I’ve said on day one of rehearsal, and repeated several times throughout the rehearsal process, to hundreds of artists at this point: actors, designers, producers, and crew. It’s been my “one rule” for nearly a decade and has served the work well.

Performers are empowered to proactively tell me when staging or a dance move might throw out their knee, or designers share that

they need a moment to collect themselves after receiving a phone call while on break from a family member with difficult news.

On one level, it’s an invitation for folx to share their logistical access needs with me privately or publicly. On another, it allows everyone to be honest about what they need in order to do their best work and serve the play. By naming that it is our responsibility to take care of ourselves and one another, my teams recognize they have agency and that I welcome their full, messy, raw selves into the space. And in return, they bring more of themselves to the work, unearthing deeper relationships to the text and more creative and collaborative staging opportunities.

I put the rule in place for many reasons, but the major one was so I could break a theatre taboo—eating and drinking in the rehearsal room. Having Type 1 diabetes, I’m responsible for keeping my blood sugar balanced, and too far in either direction means severe consequences. Too low, and I’m dead in hours. Too high, and I’m damaging my organs, nerves, and blood vessels. A pretty dramatic situation to wrestle with 24/7, but in actuality, it simply means sometimes I eat dried fruit or a banana in the middle of rehearsing a scene.

So, in early March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread in the US, and as I finished casting and prepared to start rehearsals for the Los Angeles premiere of Lia Romeo’s The Lucky Ones with Ammunition Theatre Company, I knew I couldn’t keep my own rule; I couldn’t protect my team or myself. I called the producers, and we postponed the start of rehearsals one week. One day later, Los Angeles County let us know we would be on hold indefinitely.

I then watched as all of my upcoming productions and tour dates were canceled or indefinitely postponed. I watched as the number of infections and deaths rose. I watched as diabetes was put on the CDC’s list for those most vulnerable. With science revealing that COVID-19 patients with

Still from live digital production of Diana Wyenn’s Blood/Sugar PHOTO c/o Diana Wyenn

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restaged her “breakdown” for her kitchen floor, and exploited every functionality Zoom had to offer when Center Theatre Group asked if we wanted to film the production at their Kirk Douglas Theatre and share it with audiences on their brand-new Digital Stage platform. It was thrilling...and terrifying. I was caught between my need to stay safe and my desire to reimagine and share a theatre project that started at Kristina’s and my kitchen tables as a film.

Diana Wyenn’s Blood/Sugar at Bootleg Theater PHOTO Mae Koo

diabetes have a significantly higher risk of death than COVID-19 patients without diabetes, it became clear it was going to be a long time before I set foot in a theatre again.

But the art of theatre doesn’t need a conventional theatre space and, being a disabled artist, I was already well versed in how to utilize my given circumstances as a driving force for creativity and innovation.

I might have had to stay home, but I didn’t have to stop delivering compelling robust theatrical experiences to audiences all over the country—all while still honoring my rule.

Here are three productions reflecting three ways the pandemic changed me and my work for the better:

1

First up, knowing the diabetes community was particularly vulnerable, I didn’t want to put on indefinite hold the upcoming tour dates for Blood/Sugar, my solo show that cuts through the commonly held myths, misconceptions, and stigma surrounding diabetes in all its forms and shares how, together, we can collectively put a stop to the escalating diabetes pandemic. I called my video designer, Jason H. Thompson; he dropped off A/V equipment at my back gate, and we set to work without ever seeing one another in person—he in his studio downtown using vMix, the same live broadcasting software used by megachurches and high school sports, and me in my home surrounded by every laptop, iPhone, and iPad I owned. As we began adapting the

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hundreds of sound, video, and lighting cues of the stage production for a 2D cinematic live experience, we dug back into the text and staging and uncovered new opportunities, cuts, and additions to make it speak to this moment and let people at home know we were one audience separated physically but united in time and experience.

Now, Blood/Sugar, a stage production I thought was complete, is also a livebroadcasted play/film hybrid using nearly every room of my house with surprise guest appearances from my dog. Presented over the course of the pandemic by Caltech Live!, Boston Court Pasadena, and, most recently, as part of Healing Arts New York, an initiative of the World Health Organization, this is undoubtedly the most intimate and accessible iteration of the project to date.

2

Until I was fully vaccinated, I only left my home to walk my dog twice a day with two exceptions: to get tested for COVID-19 and to remount and film a play I co-devised and directed, Kristina Wong for Public Office. Since early 2018, Kristina Wong—a performance-artist-turnedactual-elected-representative for Koreatown, Los Angeles—and I had been creating the raucous and interactive performance art campaign/rally to tour alongside the 2020 presidential campaign. We had already rescheduled our national tour for Zoom, transformed Kristina’s home into a broadcast studio, rewritten the jokes and gags that would only work in person to work remotely,

Pre-pandemic, I was told by colleagues to continue hiding my invisible disability if I wanted to ‘get ahead.’ Today, I’m pushing against my own internalized ableism to share this article with you.

Knowing that fear doesn’t cultivate creativity—it dampens and even extinguishes it—I did something I had never really done before: I spoke up and shared my concerns and access needs with Center Theatre Group’s Line Producer of Special Artistic Projects Patricia Garza and Associate Artistic Director Neel Keller. This is where I sing their praises because not only did they listen, but also days later they came back with an extremely thorough plan for how I, and the whole team, could stay safe throughout the tech and filming. They provided me with simple things like KN95 masks, a separate bathroom, and an isolated place to eat lunch outside. Center Theatre Group made me feel welcome and made it very clear they would meet my access needs, which provided me the equity to do my job. For that, I am beyond grateful.

3

“Don’t isolate,” was the most important piece of advice writer and performer Michael Shutt got from his doctor after his first stroke in 2015. Now, the pandemic was forcing the three-time stroke survivor to isolate. We were weeks away from heading into production with Moving Arts for the world premiere of his play A Lesson in Swimming, after spending two years developing the script and workshopping the staging and design to accommodate his access needs. We were both devastated, but more important to me than premiering the show was making sure Michael wasn’t isolated. This project had become an integral part of his post-stroke journey. Typing the script keystroke by keystroke, Michael regained more use of his left hand and arm.

Memorizing the 15,000+ words, he built and rebuilt neurological pathways. Stopping our work could negatively impact his brain injury, so we applied for a small grant for disabled artists and enlisted our sound designer, John Zalewski, to help us record A Lesson in Swimming as an audio production.

While remaining physically distant, Michael and I stayed creatively connected, honing the script and Michael’s performance via phone calls, Google docs, Zoom rehearsals, and Zencastr sessions with John. Michael even covered his home office with blankets for soundproofing, something I’m still impressed by because post-strokes, he has roughly 25 percent of his sight, and it’s doubled. About 65 percent of stroke survivors are left with changes to their vision, and while we had never thought to do it before, what emerged out of our pandemic recording sessions is an optimized version of his story for the stroke, brain injury, blind, and low-sighted communities. Eventually, Michael, John, and I will get back to a theatre and share A Lesson in Swimming in person, but until then I’m humbled to know Cedars-Sinai Medical Center is offering it as part of their resource guide for those who are just starting their own post-stroke journey.

Theatre never stopped happening because of the pandemic, but, like us, it changed.

For some, it felt thrilling, and for others, it seemed unrecognizable. Pre-pandemic, I was told by theatre colleagues to continue hiding my invisible disability if I wanted to “get ahead.” Today, I’m pushing against my own internalized ableism to share this article with you.

It’s no secret ableism runs rampant in our community—from someone telling me in private they finished a show with a broken foot because “the show must go on” to another sharing they don’t feel comfortable requesting a script in a larger font from a different director. It is my hope the pandemic has ruptured the veil we put over this problem.

It did for me. I acquired my disability when I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes a month before finishing my training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, so I’ve been disabled just about as long as I’ve been a professional theatre artist. However, stigma and bias led me to hide my disability for more than a decade. As disability justice advocate Tiffany Yu and many others state, “disability” is not a bad word.

It’s time to let go of the aspects of our process steeped in ableism and embrace that, while the show will go on, it doesn’t need to do so at the expense of anyone’s health or sanity. It’s time to not only invite disabled artists into your rooms but also welcome us back. It’s time to recognize that the disability community makes up more than 20 percent of the US population, and we are not a monolith.

We are a diverse community with an extraordinary range of stories, experiences, perspectives, and knowledge to share. We have our own dynamic culture, a culture perpetually called to creativity and innovation in order to navigate today’s ableist systems and structures. When you welcome us and our artistry, together we can create great theatre, take care of ourselves and each other while doing so, and change the very fabric of our field and our society for the better.

Diana Wyenn is a Los Angeles-born and -based director, choreographer, and Co-Founder of Plain Wood Productions.

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Camera rehearsal for Kristina Wong for Public Office at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, directed by Diana Wyenn PHOTO c/o Center Theatre Group

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OF

BY ZI

OPTIMISM ADRENALINE AND

ALIKHAN

Nothing can really prepare you for a phone call from your artistic director, 20 minutes before opening-night curtain, saying, “Zi, we have to cancel the show tonight”—unless you’ve been making your play through the birth and height of Omicron. Then, dear reader, you are prepared for anything.

Rehearsal started on December 21. The meet-and-greet was a joyous gathering of staff and makers from Portland Center Stage and Artists Repertory Theatre, the two institutions collaborating on our production of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap, the first play “back” for both theatres that’d had no work or considerations made for it prior to the start of the pandemic. The room felt electric: 60 or so teammates in a rehearsal hall again, christening this play for its voyage with speeches and well wishes, optimism hanging in the air, and the adrenaline of the “first day of school” in the veins of the artists who were about to embark.

It feels important to mention that this optimism and adrenaline didn’t just magically appear in our room that day, that they were not there by accident or happenstance, that they were the product of process. The moment I knew this was going to be a project that would be a major barometer for how I lead a company of makers into the future was my very first conversation with PCS’s Artistic Director Marissa Wolf and Production Manager Katie Nguyen. In several experiences before this one, before the pandemic, I found myself in meetings with artistic leaders where it became very clear that my hiring was more about creating a “diverse narrative” on a grant application than my experience, skills, or story. I found myself fighting to be heard, fighting to be seen, sometimes even just fighting to be looked at instead of the older, white colleague sitting next to me in the production meeting. With Marissa and Katie, our first conversation started with “How do you see the world of the play? What do you need,” without caveat, their eyes looking into mine, separated only by the mechanics of Zoom. The care of this simple moment opened the doors to such radical honesty in our early conversations. This emboldened me to approach each subsequent conversation, interaction, meeting, and moment of

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rehearsal starting from that care, starting from their deeply collaborative approach and reaching into my own, always beginning with “How do you, my colleague, see this world?

What do you need?”

One of the first doors this honesty opened was around my desire to hire an all APIidentifying team to collaborate on this play.

Curating teams with intention in a way that considers the players beyond actors and writers is a major tenet of my directorial ethos, and one that is shockingly hard to get supported when the considerations of money and prior relationships to an institution come into play. When I brought this up for Great Leap, what I was not expecting was an immediate “Of course”—but that’s exactly what I got. From here, we hired a dream team of makers to bring our story to life with: Chika Shimizu (scenic), Cha See (lights), Fan Zhang (sound), Nicole Wee (costumes), Sunny Hitt (movement), Barbie Wu (associate direction), Kristen Mun (stage management), and Andrea Zee (casting). This team was already unlike any I’d ever known assembled: we are all API-identifying, I am the only maleidentifying member of the team, and half of the group was born outside the United States.

Redefining a mold simply in our coming together, all made possible by the simplicity of a “Yes” from an institution, our process was off to a start full of support and engagement, a start that asked each of us to continue considering our own methods of care as we began collaborating with each other and our teams over the next several months.

And now—flash-forward to December 21 again, the electric room, the artists and the optimism and the adrenaline. Our first two days of rehearsal springboarded from this energy into every word of our tablework, every breath of our early movement exploration. And then, on the morning of December 23, we all woke up to the thing we had been dreading all along, the one email we didn’t want to get after the two years we’d spent waiting for this week: the PCR test results from our first day of rehearsal had come back and half our cast had tested positive for COVID-19. We quickly pivoted to a Zoom rehearsal that morning, and my mind started spinning through the Rolodex of ways I knew how to lead (or, at the very least, cope). Then, something flashed clearly across

my brain: that this process had started with someone asking me “What do you need?” and I was currently meeting the ultimate opportunity to pay this energy forward.

Our Zoom rehearsal started with making space for us all to breathe, to talk, and to be together, no expectations, just people first; the care the institution had embraced me with was something I endeavored to pass on to the whole company that day. You could feel in the Zoom that even though we’d only known each other for three days, by the way we voiced our fears and sadness in those

hours, we were going to forge something close in these tenuous moments of making together. I knew from that day that our collective honesty and mutual embrace would see us through to a bright beyond.

Two days of Zoom felt like agony at the time, but today, knowing what would come to pass over the next five weeks, I can indulge myself in a hearty LOL about it. In short, as a team, our process weathered: • Those two positive COVID-19 tests on day three.

• Spending the next two days rehearsing on Zoom as we figured out our plan.

• Three federal holidays during our process spent in quarantine.

• Returning to work the week after our Zoom time to have one of our remaining actors sprain and strain his ankle playing

basketball at the top of our first rehearsal day; Sunny and I subsequently spent the afternoon with him in the emergency room.

• Staging our entire first act with said actor in a boot because of said ankle (here’s where I’d like to remind us all that this actor was playing a basketball prodigy in the play).

• Finally having one of our COVID-19positive actors return 10 days after his last rehearsal; the second would return three days before our designer run.

• The flight carrying half our design team getting canceled the night before our designer run.

• Coming down with a fever immediately following paper tech, causing me to lead

our first tech rehearsal from Zoom (ZOOM TECH OH MY GOD).

• Making it through tech and previews to have, as previously mentioned, our opening night canceled at 20 minutes to curtain due to six positive COVID-19 tests in our production group. Nothing is more bizarre than seeing a bunch of artists in opening night outfits swabbing for rapid tests in an empty theatre.

• Coming back to rehearse two days the following week.

• Officially opening five days after our scheduled opening only to close down again the next day when another PCR test came back positive in a role we were yet unable to fulfill without a rehearsal.

• Rehearsing one last time, exactly a week after our scheduled opening, to train

Sami Ma in The Great Leap, a co-production between Portland Center Stage and Artists Repertory Theatre, directed by Zi Alikhan PHOTO Owen Carey

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Zi Alikhan rehearsing The Great Leap, a joint production of Artists Repertory Theatre + Portland Center Stage, over Zoom PHOTO c/o Zi Alikhan

someone in that role. Seeing the show with my mom that night and then saying goodbye to our play and to Portland.

And yet bizarrely, impossibly even, through all this, I’ve never seen so many people show up to work every day and really, really show up. I’ve never seen a company that came to work optimistic about what was ahead and tenaciously endeavoring to conquer the obstacles that were seemingly falling out of the sky on an hourly basis. The care that had blanketed all of us, that trickled through every person, every exchange, every moment of eye contact, every shared breath, seemingly bolstered us to weather whatever making in this time might throw in our way, because we knew we were doing it together, for ourselves, and for each other, always. It became hard to keep count of the moments where someone’s words or their eyes or their embrace or the way they made me laugh or the way they validated my thoughts were the thing that kept me going that afternoon, and every time I felt this moment happen, I would endeavor to be that moment for someone else in return.

What would come out of the woodwork of our process was that a large percentage of folks involved in this production (actors, designers, artisans, crew members, even this director) had seriously considered pivoting away from the industry during the pandemic, unsure of how we’d find ourselves in work that was already so hard to find ourselves

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in before. What also came out was that the community we’d built making The Great Leap was, for many of us, reassuring that there was still so much work to do and that we’d find ourselves in the work in finding each other, our communities, in the rooms we’d walk into. In the darkness of a preview rehearsal, Chika leaned over to me to tell me how much she was enjoying our process, how it was the first time she felt surrounded by peers in the room, and how completely safe she felt making and making mistakes and finding successes together. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

You could feel in the Zoom that even though we’d only known each other for three days, by the way we voiced our fears and sadness in those hours, we were going to forge something close in these tenuous moments of making together.

A week after our “opening-not-opening,” I found myself in that last unexpected rehearsal, putting in a crew member after that

last positive COVID-19 test I was in town for, sharing a house of 600 seats with just Katie Nguyen one last time. As I heard her laugh at a joke she’d heard at least 50 times before, I realized how much I still loved making this play and, really, how unending the joy felt being part of the care of this community. The embrace I’ve felt embraced by since that very first conversation, through the electric room, through our Zoom rehearsals, through both of our opening nights, through this one final put-in, through and through and through and through is an embrace I can’t wait to keep leading with, an embrace I can’t wait to keep putting into rooms as I walk into them in the future. So, yes, Omicron taught me how to not freak out when opening night is canceled 20 minutes before curtain, but this project taught me about the transitive property of care and humanity in our rooms and in our work, and both lessons will continue to grow and have value as I hopefully get to keep making theatre in community for weeks and months and years to come.

Zi Alikhan is a queer, first-generation South Asian-American, culturally Muslim theatre director, educator, and leader.

Next, he’ll be directing Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s Snow in Midsummer at Classic Stage Company.

MOTHERS AT

WORK

BY CHLOE

TREAT

In the fall before the pandemic, which also happened to be the fall I got pregnant, I directed and choreographed six musicals in six months.

This breakneck pace was not necessarily something I would have chosen, but rather a necessity of trying to make a living freelance directing at whatever rung on the career ladder I’m on now. That said, I genuinely loved every minute of my jam-packed season. And when a pregnancy test came back positive, I sat in the back of many dark theatres watching a run of a show I directed, feeling wildly full with all the things I was making.

The plan was always to be a working mom.

I was going to be an associate director on a show at Encores! that opened two weeks before my due date, and then fly to Austria with my newborn six weeks postpartum to direct a show there. And then, early in my second trimester, there was news out of Wuhan about a new virus. A few weeks later, I lost all of my work for the next six months and, well, you know the rest…

For the first year and a half of my daughter’s life, I was given a gift that I never asked for.

The pandemic allowed me to take time with Cora without giving up a single job. Don’t get me wrong—being a full-time mother was neither intuitive nor easy for me. So much of my identity is tied to my work as a director, and I often felt unmoored without that anchor. But having made it through that season, I am so very grateful for it.

As this new year begins, I am standing on the precipice of my first big jobs back, both postpartum and post-pandemic. Before me are, once again, six months of pretty much nonstop work, with some of the biggest and most exciting jobs I’ve ever had. Before Cora was born, I would have been so thrilled about my coming season, and I am—but truth be told, I’m also terrified. I do not know if I’m capable of giving my daughter the attention and energy that I want her to receive, while also juggling my professional ambitions and responsibilities.

But I have reason to hope.

Chloe Treat nursing her three-month-old daughter, Cora, during a Zoom production meeting PHOTO c/o Chloe Treat

The thing that prompted me to write about directing and motherhood in the first place is an anecdote involving two of my mentors.

This past fall I was running auditions at Manhattan School of Music, where Liza Gennaro is the Associate Dean and Director of Musical Theatre. We hadn’t seen each other since I’d had Cora, and we were catching up before auditions began. She mentioned that she’d just read an article in the New York Times about Broadway’s reopening, and had seen a picture of Rachel Chavkin wearing her son, Sam, in a baby carrier while working on Hadestown.

The idea that being “caught in the act” of motherhood will make you ineligible for work can only be shifted by seeing, all around us, mothers at work.

Liza was moved by that photo because when her daughter, Fiona (now my age-ish), was small, she remembers how important it felt to conceal her. “I was always trying to hide the fact that I had a child in tow,” she said.

Liza recalls being torn between motherhood and professional responsibilities during the early months of Fiona’s life, a strain I suspect could be echoed by most mothers across most industries. However, unique to theatre are the often long and erratic hours which make finding reliable childcare difficult. One breaking point occurred when, after childcare fell through while working on a Broadway show in which tensions were already high, Liza had no choice but to bring her twoyear-old to the theatre during tech. She remembers the urgency she felt to get Fiona out of there as fast as she could. This incident served as a message to Liza, encouraging her to limit her freelance career and find more stable work where she felt she could do justice by both her daughter and her professional responsibilities. And it must be said that she has done so brilliantly and has built an extraordinary life and career for herself. But still, it was a choice she felt she had to make.

So when Liza saw our industry celebrating Rachel for wearing her baby while working on a Broadway show, she felt hopeful for the next generation of working mothers. That’s what she told me as we waited for auditions to begin, and I spent the rest of the day thinking about it. I have since spoken more with both women. Here’s what I learned:

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Rachel is quick to acknowledge that having two lead producers who are both mothers— Mara Isaacs and Dale Franzen—has played a role in facilitating the ease with which her newborn has been incorporated into her professional life. Because of COVID-19 and Sam’s unvaccinated status as a newborn, he couldn’t join her in the rehearsal room, but the producers got Sam and a childminder an adjacent studio at Open Jar Studios so Rachel could visit him on breaks, and Rachel suspected that in a COVID-less world, Sam would have been welcome by her side through the entire process. Of course, Rachel is at the top of her field and not everyone has that kind of access and support. But as directors and choreographers, we know the importance of visual symbols and metaphors.

If only in that regard, Rachel wearing her baby in the pages of the Times is a radical and hopeful symbol of what could come.

AND ALSO. There is so much more to do.

So what can we, as a community, do to help?

The big thing, or at least the easiest thing, is to do like Rachel, and “wear your baby.” Not literally (though perhaps, if that feels right to you), but in intention.

I have just reached an age where for the first time in my life I have friends and peers who are either pregnant or new mothers. And a

conversation I’ve had with so many of them is whether or not we will try to hide this news. Many a congratulatory phone call has been buffered with, “Please keep this quiet—I still want to be up for jobs.”

Though decades have passed since Liza quietly ushered Fiona out of a Broadway house during tech, the idea that being “caught in the act” of motherhood will make you ineligible for work can only be shifted by seeing, all around us, mothers at work. This is already happening! But there is still work to be done to solidify it as the rule and not the exception. For my part—though a deep, welltrained part of my brain continues to ask, “Will they still want to hire me if I bring this up?”—I vow to be obnoxiously consistent in asking for accommodations for my family and child when I negotiate contracts, to bring Cora to rehearsal when it’s safe to do so, and to have both evidence of my career and my child on my social media and other Googleable accounts. The goal here feels clear: 10 years from now, I want my current students to take these same actions without the whisper of “Will I risk my job for this?” in their ear.

The second, bigger ask is for an industry that makes allowances for all the ways in which our society at large fails us as mothers. There will be moments when our childcare falls through or our babies are sick (or, for that matter, when any other number of human needs that don’t have to do with child bearing or rearing interfere with rehearsal).

Our theatres, producers, and creative teams need to plan for this. That means covering workers on both sides of the table with swings and understudies and associates who are ready to step in when people have to step out. It also means genuinely not judging a person’s professional ability or commitment when they, for example, need to bring their child to tech. We can and should have plans in place to support these inevitable human needs when they arise.

The final ask is not of the industry—it is my own, but I couldn’t write this piece without giving it voice.

Rachel Chavkin with her infant son, Sam, during a rehearsal of Hadestown PHOTO Amber Gray c/o Rachel Chavkin

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Will I be able to make meaningful work as a director and have a meaningful relationship with my daughter? I’m just not sure.

“Meaningful” looks different for different people but for me, that commitment is large.

I don’t know how I would choose between the two. The fulfillment and joy I feel while running a room are paralleled only by the fulfillment and joy I feel while I’m with my daughter. Both have come to feel like nonnegotiable aspects of my identity. But while love isn’t finite, time is. And I haven’t even broached the subject of money. In

Liza Gennaro with her daughter, Fiona, on a lunch break from rehearsing The Secret Garden at Pittsburgh CLO PHOTO c/o Liza Gennaro

short, there’s a lot to contend with and I just don’t know if it’s possible.

I am full of fear right now. Fear of who I will let down or what I will give up. But I am comforted by the thinking of Virginia Woolf when she said, “The future is dark, which is on the whole the best thing the future can be, I think.” Which is to say, I don’t know how any of this will play out. And that means there is the possibility, however unlikely, that it might play out splendidly. For myself, for my Cora, and for all the other parents who may attempt this down the line, that is the world I am working toward.

Chloe Treat is a director and choreographer of big-ass musicals.

THE NEED FOR

CHANGE A CONVERSATION BETWEEN LONNY PRICE + MORITZ VON STUELPNAGEL

Cobie Smulders + Kevin Kline in a Broadway revival of Present Laughter, directed

by Moritz von Stuelpnagel PHOTO Joan Marcus

In the most recent of our series of conversations for this issue of SDC Journal, we brought directors Lonny Price and Moritz von Stuelpnagel together in February for a Zoom conversation. We began the conversation by reframing the theme of this issue, and asking them, “Have we changed?” Both Lonny and Moritz spoke with candor about what they have learned, and where they hope we will go.

Lonny Price’s credits include Sunset Boulevard (Broadway, English National Opera), Sweeney Todd (ENO, Lincoln Center), Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill (Broadway, HBO, West End), and many others. He directed television captures of his Sweeney Todd (Emmy Award), Company, and others. His documentary Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened premiered at the New York Film Festival and was named one of New York Times’s Top 10 Films of 2016.

Moritz von Stuelpnagel has directed Broadway productions of Bernhardt/Hamlet, Present Laughter, and Hand to God (Tony nomination). West End: Hand to God. OffBroadway: MCC, Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Theatre Club, Public Theater, LCT3, Ma-Yi, Ensemble Studio Theatre. He is the former artistic director of Studio 42, NYC’s producer of “unproducible” plays.

LONNY PRICE | We definitely have changed, and, I think, a lot. It’s not so much the COVID-19 of it, because it’s a fact of life right now, so, honestly, I don’t spend a lot of time bemoaning it. But I do have a new kind of consciousness of my behavior and my words in the rehearsal room (and, everywhere else, for that matter), due to the Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movements. For instance, I was guilty of saying a lot of “honey” and “sweetheart” in the room, and I honestly didn’t realize how insulting it may have been. I know better now.

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And I won’t even mention hugging—just assuming it was welcome and I was being friendly.

In terms of setting up a team, I grew up with Harold Prince as my mentor, and Hal traveled with pretty much the same design team for decades, and I emulated his point of view. If you were a talented designer, you weren’t pigeonholed into one kind of show; you could do anything. His team consisted of Boris Aronson, Florence Klotz, and Tharon Musser, all of whom followed him for decades. (All white, I probably don’t have to add.) My teams in the past were pretty much all white, and are never going to be that way again. I can do better, and I am determined to.

I had a very interesting experience recently, directing a production of the musical Kismet, which was written in the ’50s. The production was a gift for an investor of mine who was turning 80 years old; this was her favorite show, and she produced a three-night version of it, with costumes and sets [with and for the benefit of the Santa Barbara Symphony, and State Street Ballet]. We hired an entirely MENASA cast of actors—all Middle Eastern, North African, Southeast Asian. I met the most extraordinary group of people I never would have worked with had I not felt like

Bryn Terfel in the New York Philharmonic concert of Sweeney Todd, directed by Lonny Price PHOTO Chris Lee

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that was the only way to properly present the show. The actor playing the young lover said to me, “It’s so nice not to be playing a terrorist.” That really moved me; I was not that conscious of orientalism before, and how we have portrayed these cultures so disrespectfully and so marginally. I’m learning.

MORITZ VON STUELPNAGEL | I share your sentiment that the need for change is certainly awake. It’s hard in some ways to speak to whether we have met the moment or not, certainly for us to be the final adjudicators of whether we have, as two white men who are, in that way, people of privilege. It is really for us to listen to whether the change has been sufficient. I believe there’s certainly more work to be done there.

COVID-19, and working with people who may have different comfort levels or may even be immunocompromised, has highlighted the power dynamic—or the imbalance of power—that we have in the room. As directors or choreographers, we don’t necessarily have to address it if we don’t want to. In some ways, the immediacy of “We’ve got to get the show on” is a convenient way not to take into account other people’s needs or feelings. And, of course, that’s not going to be the way we get the best work done.

That’s not going to be the way we make everyone feel safe and included, and fully contributing themselves and their voices.

COVID protocols have brought that to light as much as anything. Having just worked with several actors with disabilities on Mike Lew’s Teenage Dick, I’m thinking a lot about ableism in the room and how accessible our spaces are, especially in the middle of a pandemic.

It’s somewhat uncomfortable to work with a mask on, and yet the level of comfort or security or safety that provides for everyone else comes to bear on this conversation, of what do we need to do to create safe spaces for everybody in the room.

Lonny, you’re both an actor and a director, so you’re probably aware of the power dynamic in a unique way. Is that something that you think about when you are working with actors?

LONNY | The truth is, I consider myself an actor in recovery; I have not really acted for 20 years. That said, I think I probably do identify a little more with the actors in the room, because I know what it feels like to be one of them, to feel like the low man on the totem pole, to feel somewhat marginalized.

As an actor, oftentimes nobody wants to listen to you, nobody wants to hear your

Shannon DeVido, Gregg Mozgala, and Portland Thomas in Teenage Dick, directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel in a co-production for Woolly Mammoth, Huntington, and Pasadena Playhouse PHOTO Teresa Castracane

thoughts—they just want you to do what they want you to do. When I first directed— and this was very eye-opening to me—there was the dress parade of the costumes. I turned to the costume designer and I said, “Gee, I’m not nuts about that dress.” And the next day there was another one. And I thought, “Oh, I could get used to this.”

Because I spent my entire career going up to a costume designer saying, “This is itchy” or “It’s tight,” and I heard, “You’ll be fine, don’t worry about it.” And, many times, nothing was done. But as a director, there was a designer listening to me who actually was going to do something about it and not just give ear or lip service to it.

As a director, you might be the final arbiter, but as you say, Moritz, you need to listen to everyone in the room. And make it comfortable for them to speak. It’s hard for me in any way to feel we’ve lost anything. If anything, we’ve gained perspectives of other people, and I’m grateful for that. I know it

will enrich whatever we’re working on. I’ve learned how to listen better, and without opinions or judgments. I’ve learned that my perspective is unique to me and limited in scope, and I need to open myself up to different perspectives and not solely impose mine on others.

I was in a room with the Kismet company; we were looking at a line, and someone said, “I think it’s offensive.” And I started to say, “I don’t know, I don’t really think it’s offensive,” and I caught myself and thought, “Shut up, and listen, Lonny. This doesn’t have anything to do with you. This a person of that culture who says they find this offensive. So it is offensive (impact, not intent), and you have to figure out how to get what you need from this moment in the show some other way.”

We ended up with something vastly better and utterly satisfying to all. I am so grateful to that actress.

MORITZ | It’s why establishing the possibility of having an open conversation in the room

is so important. It’s not so long ago that I remember moving from the place in my career where I had to do a lot of convincing and trying to prove that I maybe had an idea to a place where actors (especially younger actors) would take anything I said as gospel, which to me felt suddenly very dangerous. I don’t like to work that way. I like to work from a place of, let’s discover it together; I’m going to have an instinct, but I don’t know for sure.

And I’d much rather have a room in which collaborators can tell me, “I don’t know that I see it that way,” or, “I don’t know that I agree.”

And I can say, “Great, let’s get into it. Why?” It’s going to make for richer work.

It’s valuable to set that tone from the beginning and to make sure not only the things that we say, but also the way that we foster conversation among the cast or with the institution, can keep open pathways. I’m definitely getting it wrong as much as I’m getting it right. I can only humble myself and say, “I need to keep doing the work.” But I’m SPRING 2022 | SDC JOURNAL

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grateful that we are talking about how we can have a more honest room. How we can name the unspoken power dynamics, or points of privilege, that exist and might be convenient to take for granted if you’re the person in that position of privilege, but that if you do take them for granted, it’s detrimental to the company.

couldn’t say we’re too busy to deal with ethics, with looking at what’s right and what’s wrong. “Too busy” and “We’ll deal with it when things are less hectic” was no longer an excuse. We had the time to think. What are we doing? How are we treating our fellow actors and collaborators, and can we do better?

LONNY | I couldn’t agree with you more, Moritz. With everything you just said.

As directors, we have to acknowledge the power structure and try to keep it in mind as we go forward, and yet not stand on it. But there also has to be a leader. Putting on a show is not a democracy. It can’t be; there’s got to be a vision that everybody gets in line with. I believe that, but everybody has to get in line in a way that makes them comfortable, seen and heard, and does not make them feel compromised. The synthesis of everybody’s input will make the project richer.

Very famously, Jerome Robbins (whom I worship creatively) was cruel and a bully. And there were other brilliant men who behaved badly, especially with women, like Elia Kazan (another hero). They behaved badly, and were given license to, because people thought of them as “geniuses” and looked the other way.

No matter who you are, it’s not acceptable for anyone to behave like that anymore.

(And it never should have been.) And amen. I wonder how those men would’ve functioned in a more kind and democratic environment.

I don’t think it would have hindered their creativity, and if it would have, maybe a little less brilliance is worth the sacrifice when you’re sacrificing other people’s safety for it.

The only good thing to come out of the pandemic is it helped the Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movements in a profound way. We were all stopped in our tracks. We

Audra McDonald in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill at London’s Wyndham Theatre, directed by Lonny Price PHOTO Marc Brenner

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MORITZ | There’s also something about establishing right from the get-go how the openness of communication can work.

And not only, “Here’s who you report to,” or, “Here’s how you register a complaint,” but actively making space for anybody in the room who would not otherwise feel empowered to be the first person to speak.

I’ll take COVID-19 as an example. We could sort of march in the first day and say, “Aren’t we sick of this? Aren’t we done with this?

We have total COVID fatigue and let’s just

all pretend like nothing’s wrong.” And there are a lot of people who, for convenience or frustration or just wanting to get back to some kind of normalcy, would be very happy to do that.

I have no judgment about that impulse, except for the fact that that point of view may not represent everybody in the room.

The people who don’t yet feel comfortable, who feel COVID as a point of anxiety about coming back to work. Who may feel, “Gosh, there are some days I might even want to work with my mask on, or there are times where seeing you as the director with your mask on gives me such comfort, and I don’t have to make a fuss about asking you”—is really significant. The first couple of shows that I was working on, we spent a lot of time opening with a conversation about how everybody was feeling—knowing that today people might feel completely different than they do tomorrow, and so one check-in wasn’t going to cut it. Today, you may feel like it’s not a thing. And tomorrow you may feel completely unnerved. “How are we going to do this in front of people? And what do I do if I see the person in the second row with their mask down, and I’m thrown for a second?

What do I do?” It’s an example of all of the many ways in which being an actor, when we are on the “safe” side of the room in the back

Raúl Esparza and W. Tré Davis in Seared at MCC Theater, directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel PHOTO Joan Marcus

row, in the dark, and they’re the ones in front of everybody on stage, is really vulnerable.

There’s a lot of care that we could and should take for others in the room, anybody who doesn’t necessarily feel like this is their place to say something.

What do we really want the room to be? And what can we do to live by those values? I would much rather be given the opportunity to say, let’s see if we can figure this out.

Yes—time is tight. And the audience is on their way. The stress of that, of course, is real.

But everyone performing at their best is also critical to doing the best work we can.

LONNY | We actually have less time now, because we’re talking a lot more—and it’s right that we should be. We do need extra time to make people comfortable and to be able to hear them. I think one thing that producers could do in regionals and the commercial theatre is build in another week of rehearsal.

MORITZ | We never get to opening night and feel like 100 percent of the things on our to-do lists are accomplished. How do we prioritize the things we need to see accomplished? So that transition isn’t my best

transition in the world, but my actors feel excited to come to work.

There’s never enough time, and I think that the last several decades have been a compression of like, could we do it in fewer weeks? There’s a larger conversation to be had there, about how to facilitate our process, especially if we want to be humane about how we’re structuring our tech periods.

LONNY | It’s hard not to make that transition better if you think you can. But at what cost?

That’s why I still want that extra week!

A good friend of mine, an actress, said something that I thought was interesting.

“I would prefer to be paid 1/8 less a week and have an extra week of rehearsal and have Saturday off. I would like a weekend.

We deserve a weekend. Amortize that money over one more week.” I think it’s an interesting idea. It’s hard to rest when you have one day off in terms of being healthy and having lives, which is also something that is necessary. I think we’ve all made a sort of pact with each other. We’re sacrificing our lives so that we can do this to one degree or another. And I wonder if that’s necessary.

Is there a way in which we can make our 10-out-of-12s humane? If they gave you

another week, maybe we wouldn’t have to do that—or would we just want more time to make it even better?

MORITZ | I think the latter. But in the middle of escalating inflation, and when our compensation hasn’t necessarily kept up with the cost of living, I don’t know that amortizing our fee is a concession we should make.

There’s a great conversation happening— led by folks like Be An Arts Hero—about changing the way that we talk about the arts, talking about it as the creative economy. This isn’t community service that we’re doing, nor is it singularly some kind of self-fulfilling endeavor. It is a business; it’s show business.

It’s an industry that clearly still has demand, and it boosts the real estate values and ancillary businesses all around it. And so we should be paid a living wage, and we should be given humane conditions that do include a weekend and not necessarily submit to the notion that personal sacrifice is required in order to make it happen. This is a larger conversation—and it’s a hard conversation to have when institutions are facing real financial hardships in the face of the pandemic, and the economy as well. It’s a challenge, but it’s sometimes the artists that end up getting SPRING 2022 | SDC JOURNAL

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squeezed the most to keep the doors of the institutions open. The people who feel that the most are the freelance artists in our community who are the most vulnerable, who have the least safety net to fall back on.

Glenn Close in Sunset Boulevard on Broadway, directed by Lonny Price PHOTO Joan Marcus

There’s more reckoning to come, and it may be that seeing the continued hardship of some of our arts organizations may wake up more of our politicians—local, state, national—to say the arts are a vital part of our economy, a larger sector than agriculture and transportation combined. That should be part of the national conversation.

LONNY | Moritz, what are you excited for?

It doesn’t have to be a particular project, but do you have a vision for what the future of theatre might look like or a wish of what it could be?

MORITZ | I’m excited to continue hearing about stories that aren’t my own, that I can continue to learn from about our world and the people around me, and not necessarily see the same regurgitated narratives. There’s some exciting experimentation of “What makes a play? What is a play?” And also, the continued exploration of leaving our buildings and seeing other ways that we can reach people or share the work. There’s so much to look forward to that I feel grateful— not necessarily to be able to articulate a vision for what it will be, but I think an optimism for what I might possibly get to experience, watch, support, or even be part of. What do you want the future to look like?

Steven Boyer in the Broadway production of Hand to God, directed

by Moritz von Stuelpnagel PHOTO Joan Marcus

Gabriel Byrne in Walking with Ghosts at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, directed by Lonny Price PHOTO Jerome De Perlinghi

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LONNY | What I’m excited about is that I don’t think the future will be anything I’ve seen before. I don’t know what it’s going to be, but it’s not going to be more of the same.

And having been around a long time, I’m a little over what’s been—I’m looking forward to a revolution. I think it’s time. I think it’s just time to throw it all up in the air, and reinvent the whole thing. And I’m excited to be a part of it, and to see all the creativity from all the different voices out there.

I think as we are becoming more inclusive, we always have to remember the other side of the footlights, who’s coming and how do we interest them in coming? And what can we provide for them that is meaningful, where they feel that they are being truthfully reflected on the stage, their own lives and journeys? I think that’s going to take a while, partially because we haven’t developed an audience base that is broad. It’s a long-term project—I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but I believe it will happen, and as that audience develops, we’re going to see theatre unlike any we’ve ever known. And, that’s exciting!

WILLING TO

BY MACEY

MOTT

If the past year and a half has taught me anything, it’s the resounding proof that those of us willing to bend will not break.

Like many people, my life was derailed by the pandemic. Luckier than many coworkers, I remained in my day job as a travel agent. However, my hours were cut from full time to 20 hours per week with very slow days at the office. Just days before the United States began to shut down due to COVID-19, a production of A Streetcar Named Desire that I had directed closed. My company—Riot Act, Inc.—was lucky to see the conclusion of this large project before the pandemic shut it down.

The rest of our season was canceled.

My world immediately shrunk. Coming off the high of working on a big show and working in a busy office full time, I felt lost. Uncertainty reigned in the middle of winter. There were so many unknowns: how is the illness transmitted, should masks be worn in public or not, can it be caught from surfaces, etc. When will it end? As a person who always stays busy, I found too much time on my hands. My depression began to rise and take hold. I knew I had to do something.

When I had moved home to Teton County, WY, in the summer of 2001, I found a dying theatre community. The existing companies had not produced shows in a long time and none were scheduled.

The only theatre happening was by the local playhouse focused on western-themed summer musicals for tourists and the high school.

By winter, I was feeling the itch to do something and I decided to direct A Midsummer Night’s Dream on my own in January 2002.

An overwhelming number of people showed up for auditions, and I ended up with a cast of 25. Every performance sold out. Clearly, the community craved participating in and attending live theatre performances. In December 2002, I, along with four other women, set out to found Riot Act, Inc. Our goal was to create a company utilizing our local talent while providing theatre that challenged artists and audiences alike intellectually, artistically, physically, and emotionally.

I am proud that Riot Act continues to flourish, evolve, and meet the ABOVE Chicago

modern world. In the last 19 years, Riot Act has produced dozens of shows, including producing new work of local and regional playwrights. We have involved hundreds of artists and thousands of audience members over the years.

Jackson Hole holds its claim to fame as the gateway to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. It is also the keeper of the worldrenowned Teton Village Ski Resort. The area sees millions of tourists roll through every high season. The valley turns back into a sleepy community in the spring and fall. Since Wyoming has no state income tax, over the past few decades the ultra-wealthy have been taking over, creating the wealthiest and most inequitable county in the US. The county claims the most nonprofits per capita of anywhere in the US. With the amount of money flowing through, this makes sense.

Residing in a rural yet cultured part of the country has allowed me to grow and evolve as a theatre director. I prefer shows that start conversations. When directing a play, I focus on the themes that are relevant in today’s world. I have worked to strike a balance between being deeply engaged in my local community and pursuing opportunities to grow and learn in the broader theatre community.

For me, theatre and artistic creation are as essential as eating or breathing. I cannot imagine life without them. I am a strong woman who believes all theatre experiences change our perception of ourselves and the world around us. Sometimes it’s just as simple as elevating a mood; other times, it completely changes our view of a particular issue or person. One of the reasons I love theatre so much is because I am consistently learning more about myself and this wonderful planet we live on. Theatre is a wonderful tool to tell stories, make statements, teach a community, and entertain. It challenges me creatively, emotionally, physically, and intellectually. Needless to say, when COVID-19 shut it all down I needed to find an outlet. I found ways to not only keep busy but also help others.

I started at home. In the beginning of the pandemic, there was a shortage of medical masks. Our local hospital and county health

at Riot Act, Inc., directed by Macey Mott PHOTO c/o Macey Mott

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department put out a call to ask for people to make cloth masks and donate them. They posted patterns in a couple of styles. I got to work. As a costume designer, I often sew and have tons of scrap and other fabric on hand. I ended up making over 100 masks and donating them to our community, using fabric left over from costumes and other projects. As the pandemic goes on, I think we have all used our masks to show a little bit of our personalities.

Through Riot Act, Inc., I launched a series of online play readings. Public-domain plays were chosen to be read by a group of actors every week over Zoom. They were recorded and put on the website for anyone to watch.

Actors from all over the country joined and all said that the experience helped boost their mental state. Branching off from the readings, Riot Act joined forces with the local community radio, KHOL, to produce War of the Worlds. It was prerecorded over Zoom, edited, and played on the air several times over the course of a week. As the collaboration grew, so did our creative ideas.

In the summer of 2020, we wrote a dumbed down version of Macbeth and performed it on Zoom using puppets that each performer created themselves. That was recorded, edited together, and presented to the public on the Riot Act, Inc. website. This was such a fun, silly project, with puppets made with paper plates, socks, twigs, and stuffed animals. For our annual fundraiser in the spring of 2021, we moved online, creating a silly performance piece about speed dating on Zoom. The characters are all caricatures of types of Jackson locals. Most of this is still available to watch on our website, www.riotactinc.org.

As the Executive Artistic Director of Riot Act, Inc., I joined forces with other leaders

of the other 21 resident arts organizations in The Center for the Arts In Jackson Hole.

We worked together to make sure we’d all survive. We worked together to secure donations and other funding to cover rent for all the organizations from July through December 2020. This inspired a local philanthropist to give more and lower all our rents to a third of what we normally pay. This collaboration allowed every one of our organizations to pull through. We are continuing to work together to make our home a harmonious place to create and present art.

I truly believe those of us willing to bend, change, and evolve will survive.

I worked with Riot Act’s board of directors to evolve the company. We invested in supplies to make our space safer to work in including masks, hand sanitizer, cleaning products, thermometers, and HEPA/UV filter machines.

We adopted COVID-19 protocols and posted them. We learned about and invested in equipment to livestream our work. Living in a small community, we were able to produce some small live productions starting in fall 2020. We had a maximum of 20 audience members all spread out and masked. We then also livestreamed the productions, bringing theatre into people’s homes.

Vaccinations hit the scene in late 2020, and by the beginning of 2021, the general public began to receive them. I quickly signed up to volunteer and help with the local vaccination clinics.

A Streetcar Named Desire at Riot Act, Inc., directed by Macey Mott PHOTO c/o Macey Mott

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As violence against people of color once again ramped up, I thought about what I could do. I adapted and adopted the Chicago Theatre Standards to Riot Act and our community. I took many online classes regarding anti-racism and what part racism plays in American theatre. I choose to continue to learn and grow in this regard. I passed on the information I learned to others, and I continue to learn and work toward antiracism.

As all the issues of the past year and a half continue to shape our lives, I truly believe those of us willing to bend, change, and evolve will survive. I plan to continue educating myself, taking precautions to keep myself and others safe, and volunteering in my community. Working together to keep the arts alive is one of the most important things we can all do. Share information. Educate each other. Be open-minded and willing to learn. Help others when you can.

Macey Mott is a founder/Executive Artistic Director of Riot Act, Inc. in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

HOW ARE WE

RESPONDING TO THE

MOMENT?

BY RALPH

B. PEÑA

I write this from New Haven, Connecticut, in the early morning hours of our first day of tech for Lloyd Suh’s The Chinese Lady. We were in the exact same place on March 12, 2020, when the same show was canceled shortly before we began to build the first cue, and we were all sent home. Nearly 19 months later, it seems appropriate to ask what has changed, if anything, during this unprecedented disruption. How have I changed?

THE CULTURE SHIFT First, it’s important to acknowledge that this desire to adopt a more ethical company culture that is happening at some theatres was given greater urgency by the Black Lives Matter movement; the We See You, White American Theater collective demands; and the rise in anti-Asian violence. People died to make all of us reconsider our priorities. It did not happen overnight.

Long Wharf Theatre embarked on a recentering process when Jacob Padrón took over as Artistic Director. They’re focused on partnering with their communities and committed to radical inclusion in their programming. The entire team of The Chinese Lady is one of the beneficiaries of this shift.

We are constantly asked how we’re doing, and whether we have what we need to take care of ourselves. We were connected to a third-party advocate from Yale-China and offered an affinity space with fellow Asian Americans. Our creative voices were centered, and we were given full agency in the telling of our story. These are the same changes we are looking to implement at Ma-Yi Theater, where I am Artistic Director, so I am grateful to Long Wharf for allowing me to go to school and learn firsthand how to implement a just and equitable practice.

Unless we go out of our way to embrace this idea of radical inclusion, we will stay isolated from each other.

Even a culturally specific theatre like MaYi has its share of blind spots, and this pause gave us time to recognize our own deficiencies, particularly around issues of accessibility and gender. It’s an ongoing process of asking who’s not in the room, and why? The answers are often uneasy; this requires an honest assessment of your priorities. Like most nonprofit theatres, we were always trying to find the equilibrium between service and survival. When the pandemic started, we decided that being of use to our communities was more important than longevity. For me, personally, this rubbed against what I considered to be a big part of my job as artistic director—keeping the company alive. At the time, we had no inkling about what kinds of remedies might be available to us, like PPP loans and government grants, but we went ahead anyway. For us, it was more important to be useful. This is another shift from which there is no going back. As an arts organization centered on communities of color, our actions must be guided by the question: “How are we responding to the moment?”

WHAT KEEPS US APART?

Shannon Tyo in The Chinese Lady at Long Wharf Theatre, directed by Ralph B. Peña PHOTO T. Charles Erickson

When the pandemic began, I received an invitation to join a group of artistic directors (many of whom I had never met before) for weekly meetings to talk about how each of our theatres was responding to the crises.

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Alan Ariano, Francesca Muñoz + Nacho Tambunting in Felix Starro, directed by Ralph B. Peña for Ma-Yi Theater Company PHOTO Richard Termine

learned to accept as givens. We have been complicit in perpetuating a value system that elevates one group while marginalizing another. You don’t have to dig too deep to see a direct correlation between budget size and ethnic makeup. We all know these barriers exist, but what are we doing about it? Change is tough, but that often becomes an excuse to keep things as they are. Unless we go out of our way to embrace this idea of radical inclusion, we will stay isolated from each other.

I was lucky enough to attend the 2007 World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya. There, I first heard the term “radical inclusion” defined as inclusion to the point of discomfort. That’s probably a good place to start.

Will Dagger, Mickey Theis + Julienne Hanzelka Kim in Among the Dead, directed by Ralph B. Peña for Ma-Yi Theater Company PHOTO Hunter Canning

were all grappling with the same questions, but also for the sense of community it fostered. It felt like something new: artistic directors of nonprofit theatres coming together organically to figure out what we can do together.

Our organizations varied in sizes, with Ma-Yi being one of the smallest. When we began considering how to work together, the concept of an Off-Broadway passport was floated; it would allow audiences to see multiple plays at each of our theatres.

It was an exciting idea until scale became a consideration. If one theatre charged $70

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for a ticket, and another sold it for $35, how would revenue and expenses be shared equitably? The conversation went on for months, and it became apparent that there are systemic inequities that have historically siloed each of our organizations: we operate on different contracts, some have real estate while others are itinerants, one theatre has a staff of 50, the other has four. How do we work together? There are ways to do this, of course, but the challenges brought up by this concept became a major sticking point.

This is just one example of how our theatre community is fractured by divisions we have

Ralph B. Peña is a founding member and the current Producing Artistic Director of Ma-Yi Theater Company, a leading professional Off-Broadway theatre based in New York City focused on developing and producing new works by Asian American playwrights.

SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

Directors and choreographers are arguably always exploring ways to innovate practices. However, since March 2020, we have seen increased need for innovation and creative thinking. The necessary calls for racial justice and anti-racist practice in the theatrical industry, and advocacy by organizations such as We See You, White American Theater, require transforming practices to find more equitable, inclusive, authentic ways of engaging in work and collaborative processes. Moreover, the honest reckoning with the injustices in theatre practices demands fostering greater physical and mental health in work and teaching. Likewise, the trauma and the personal and professional disruption of living through an ongoing pandemic and witnessing its significant impact on the fields have taken their toll individually and collectively. Indeed, at this point in 2022, despite the inspiration of artistic innovations, many directors and choreographers are in need of enhanced methods for self-nourishment and care.

The featured essay in this issue of the SDC Journal Peer-Reviewed Section addresses and offers a rich intersection of innovation and inspiration.

As a certified Alexander Technique teacher, Jennifer Schulz offers directors and choreographers strategies for approaching work with actors through a holistic lens. Schulz advocates for the ways that the inclusion of Alexander Technique (AT) into rehearsal processes can aid directors and choreographers to support a more holistic approach to creative collaboration with performers, even outlining specific AT exercises directors and choreographers might incorporate into rehearsals and classrooms.

Even for those doing this or similar work already, it is beneficial to be reminded of and perhaps gain inspiration from the ways some are bringing expertise in other areas into their work. It is a goal of the PRS to offer a sense of extended community to Members who are teaching, directing, and choreographing in the hopes that it will encourage new modes of directorial and pedagogical innovation as well as sustainable, healthy work practices.

INTRODUCED + EDITED BY

EMILY A. ROLLIE + ANN M. SHANAHAN

RISK, RESILIENCE, AND THE ESSENTIAL EXPERIENCE OF BEING SEEN: HELPING ACTORS MOVE FROM SELF-CARE TO DEEP FREEDOM WITH THE ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE

BY JENNIFER

SCHULZ, POMONA COLLEGE AND CAL STATE SAN BERNARDINO

In actor training, Alexander Technique (AT) encourages release of tension, ease, efficiency of movement, and greater expressivity. It evokes deep transition into character, and helps the actor avoid injury.

While AT often transpires in quiet spaces between an AT teacher and student, it can also be utilized as a practical tool by the director in group experiences, both in the classroom and in rehearsals, in order to restore expansiveness and brighten the creative inner life of the actor for the audience. Its principles are flexible and comprehensive, fostering freedom and play. While a certified AT teacher is required for full effectiveness and to impart the operational ideas in their entirety, the principles Alexander Technique is built upon support nearly all performance-based methodologies. It is my wish that this essay will present tools that will empower directors to build AT into their rehearsal and teaching practices in order to help performers more easily take risks—to “fail better” and spring back in their work (Beckett 101).

Actors are tasked with stepping into the world of another in front of an audience. This imaginative process can be thrilling and nourishing, but for some actors, the performative component of the work, the experience of being seen, activates the fight/flight/freeze response and dims inner life. Fear, the desire to be good, and the desperate need to get it “right,” overshadows the ability to freely explore within the world of the play. The Alexander Technique is uniquely positioned to help actors explore their habitual response to being seen while fostering self-awareness and availability. Because AT foregrounds

actors’ safety and well-being, it can be a powerful aid in positively contributing to classroom and rehearsal practices for the directors that guide them.

Developed by F. Matthias Alexander (1869–1955), an actor suffering from chronic laryngitis, AT is taught not only in performing arts programs around the world, but as an alternative way to support injury and alleviate pain. Most recently it has been found “to change functional patterns, reduce rigidity, and improve balance” in patients suffering from Parkinson’s Disease (The Poise Project). AT is considered an educational modality, often referred to as psychophysical reeducation¹—a restoration of the physical expansiveness, openness, and present moment awareness that we possessed as children. Unlike other movement modalities, it isn’t a set of exercises, but a process of negation and of undoing, a method by which to experience the art of letting go. For the actor, AT provides a process to strip away what isn’t necessary so that they may rediscover what is more authentic.

Stanislavski understood that excessive and unnecessary tension interferes with creating the spiritual life of the character in performance…[Actors] may not be aware of excessive or unnecessary tensions, or they may sense it but not understand how to change what is going on...Actors and non-actors have the capacity to self-direct themselves and change habits of misuse to improve their performance. Through self-direction the actor SPRING 2022 | SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

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creates new ways of performing so as to not impede actions...

What is unique about the practice of the Alexander work is that it offers the actor the opportunity to assess what is happening during the performance and improve it. Understanding how you do what you are doing in an Alexander way is what Stanislavski spent his life’s work exploring. (Vasiliades) Most exceptionally, Alexander Technique is an ideal tool to address the common experience of contraction and fear in the face of presentation and performance: If your response [to an audience] is to shrink and become smaller, you block off parts of yourself, both muscularly and energetically.

Then these parts cannot participate in the performance, either mentally or physically. If you can inhibit your response to close down, and instead stay open to your expanded self, you may be pleasantly surprised by what you find or finds you. (Polatin 235) Cultivating practices that celebrate missteps, are supportive of process over product, and encourage actors to remain easy and mindful in performance not only boost wellness, resilience, and honor personal boundaries, but also often opens creative pathways and enriches the performative experience for both actor and audience.

AT can be a means of maintaining and reclaiming spontaneity in a performance. “Mistakes and slip-ups, which can lead to happily playful performances, are not flaws but rather opportunities to discover the present moment where surprising artistic insights can emerge.

Audiences relish moments when they can watch performers regain their balance, remember a line they lost, or find the notes they forgot,” offers Alexander Technique teacher, director, and teaching artist Kathleen Juhl (212). By employing elements of AT in the rehearsal process, directors can help support actors and build an environment of authenticity and brave creativity.

I offer here some of the AT principles in action through a partial sequence of rehearsal games and exercises repurposed to encourage risk, foster resilience, and examine the interfering patterns performers have around the experience of being in front of an audience. The offerings below are grounded in only some of the operational ideas of AT (several are left out for brevity); they also pull from other fields of study that can inform and drive the work of artists and directors forward.

RESILIENCE: GROUP ACTIVE REST Active rest is an opportunity for the performer’s system to be at rest, but with conscious attention placed on self and surroundings simultaneously.² Alexander Technique practitioners call this the unified field of attention.³ Using this concept, actors engage in the act of un-doing, of putting their attention on the whole self, and then actively releasing unnecessary tension while being in relation to three-dimensional space. Active rest is best practiced to answer the questions “what do I notice?” and “where can I do less?” both physically and mentally. Through this activity, we introduce the first principle of the AT: Awareness. When actors become aware of previously unconscious habits—excess tensions, negative thinking patterns, or limiting beliefs—they have the opportunity to choose to let them go. This impacts not only their performance experience, but also their artistic journey, and the ways in which they live their lives and connect to the people around them. As Thich Nhat Hanh states, “Awareness is like the sun. When it shines on things, they are transformed” (qtd. in Aitken 95). Without awareness, nothing can change.

There is flexibility in when and how a director might lead an active rest session, depending on the production or class, the makeup of the ensemble, or the goals of the rehearsal. Sessions can simply be

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reflection time the actor takes for themselves to invite release and ease. They can be as short as ten minutes and still provide significant benefits. Some guided offerings are as follows:

What ‘should be’ vs. what is Direct the ensemble to begin to notice first themselves, and then any sensations, thoughts, or feelings that arise. Ask them to see if they can release tension at the very top of the spine. This place is right between their ears—actually higher and deeper than most actors realize.

Suggest they begin to include their whole neck in the invitation, gently asking for ease out to the tips of their shoulders, through their throat. When they think “freedom” at the top of their spine, what do they notice happening throughout their whole system?

Follow up by asking participants to become aware of any judgments attached to their observations. If actors find they are talking to themselves in “always” or “never” statements such as “I’m always a mess when I get off book” or “I never feel good at this point in the rehearsal process,” they can note those and the director can offer the idea that perhaps this was true in the past, but will it be true now?

Also something to notice is if the actor is using words like “should” and “shouldn’t.” In doing so they tend to subtly tighten their neck and contract their head down onto their spine. They are misusing⁴ themselves the moment they feel something should be other than what it is, and in this moment, they are cutting themselves off from the source of their creativity. When these thoughts arise, the director can suggest they consider pausing and reframing the observation: “Isn’t that interesting? I’m thinking that again.”

Exploration of the senses In this offering, the director begins by asking the question, “What do you see?” When Lilly Cabot Perry reminisces about the French painter Claude Monet, she writes, “Monet’s philosophy of painting was to paint what you really see, not what you want to see” (120). Also attributed to Monet, and perhaps gleaned from Perry’s observations, is the statement, “To see, we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at” (Claude Monet Quotes). Thus, what might change if the actor lets go of the name of the thing they are looking at? What does a water stain on the ceiling become? Or light scattered across a blue wall? What is now actually in front of them if it remains unnamed and uncategorized? What do they hear? If they let go of the name of that thing—a car driving by or the heater turning on—what is the texture and the movement of the sound? Again, we are encouraging actors to ground themselves in the reality of what is to support coordination within the honesty of the present moment. Move through all the senses in this way. The final step in this offering is inviting the participants to see, hear, smell, taste, or feel with their skin in this new way while simultaneously letting go of tension and accepting feelings that surface. In this way, the participants can practice marrying physical release to their experiences of sensation, thoughts, and feelings that arise in the moment.

Active rest is a wonderful tool for promoting ensemble and fostering self-care. It offers a moment for pressure to be taken off the intervertebral discs of the spine and allows the discs time to rehydrate, promoting decompression and physical resilience. Restorative in nature, it can be a gift after a tough rehearsal or during the first part of a daily warm up, providing the actor time to be present in the room before or after the demands of the creative work are upon them.

RISK: GROUP JUGGLING WITH “PERFECT!”⁵ Games foster ensemble. They create space for big “aha” moments due to their low stakes and playful nature. They can be used as a way to bring everyone into the same creative and energetic space, or for inspiration and breath when creative blocks or safe choices crop up.

This game begins with the director or teaching artist holding up a ball. The ball is typically a significant stimulus. The thought of a group throwing and catching game is enough to prompt many actors into a fight/flight/freeze response.

In support of creating what Juhl above refers to as “playful performance” (212), the object of the first round of the game is to not catch the ball. First, the director may ask actors to again invite some freedom and release, or even play with a little bit of silliness at the top of their spines in order to release, soften, and breathe. The beauty of silliness is that you can’t get it “right.” This invitation is a precursor to the Alexander Technique principle of direction, with the primary direction being to let the neck be free so that the head may move forward and up. Direction is a vital component in the work, but in lieu of a deeper exploration can be misleading or promote new habitual patterns. The director then asks one actor to throw the ball to another across the room. The receiving participant can do anything except catch the ball. When they take action, or conversely take no action and allow the ball to hit them, the whole circle yells, “Perfect!”

This continues until everyone has had a chance to miss the ball. In the next round, participants have the option to catch the ball, not catch the ball, or do something else entirely. Actors in the circle continue to yell “perfect!” with every interaction. The game progresses so that many balls are thrown in patterns and/or objects are passed around the perimeter with actors yelling “perfect!” for themselves, the person next to them, or to someone in their peripheral vision, until the game is punctuated with the “perfects.” With each round of the game, we renew the silliness at the tops of our spines and our commitment to letting go of getting it “right,” as well as perhaps even adding the intention to expand our unified field of attention.

In her book, The Upside of Stress, Kelly McGonigal discusses psychologist Alia Crum’s work, stating that there is a “single idea that motivates of all of [Crum’s] research: How you think about something can transform its effect on you” (4). If we can change the way we think about the ball and how we feel about the action of missing it, we can then begin to translate this experience into our creative work. For the rest of the rehearsal period, the director has the ball toss experience to refer to when encouraging the actor to let go of a memorized or safe acting choice.

RISK AND RESILIENCE: “YES” In the moments of not knowing and in the breath between choices, fear arises. Yet poised in this moment of uncertainty is where the magic of our creative work lives. Actors can learn to lean into that stretch of the unknown with the mantra: I have time. In AT, we call this principle inhibition, or the creation of space between stimulus and response. We often habitually react to uncertainty by freezing and tightening our necks, which in turns pulls our heads back and down onto our spine. But what if instead of reacting in our habitual way, we learn to respond in a new way? Reaction is knee-jerk. It offers a foothold for the safe and customary choice to repeatedly manifest.

Response is flexible, inspired, nuanced, often surprising. It comes when actors give themselves space, time, or freedom psychophysically.

Tommy Thompson, Alexander Technique teacher, director, and teacher trainer, speaks about the principle of inhibition in this way: The joy of support, then, lies waiting to be recognized, listened to, acknowledged. Its presentation is elusive, existing in the space between things known and not known: at the still point of being—being in relationship where all is potential, not yet defined—within moments like those just before sunrise and sunset, within the time between inhalation and exhalation.

The joy lies potent in the space created by withholding the accustomed and habitual reaction to life: between the stimulus and the response.

“Yes” is a popular theatre game repurposed here to explore the principle of inhibition. To begin: Player A makes eye contact with someone (B) in the circle. This eye contact is the “ask,” and what player A is asking is, “May I have your spot in the circle?” Player B has one line, and that is, “Yes.” Once player B says “yes,” player A crosses to B and takes their spot in the circle. However, A must wait for B to vacate their spot. Before B can move, B must secure a new spot. To secure a new spot, B makes eye contact with someone else in the circle and “asks” another participant (C) if they may have their spot. Player B cannot move until C has yielded their spot to player B. The game continues in this way.

At the heart of this game lies moments of uncertainty. The actor must ask something of another, which is a very vulnerable place to be— even when the outcome is all but certain. Declan Donnellan describes this quandary as one of the “uncomfortable choices” the actor must make (29). “An obsession with certainty destroys faith. We cannot have certainty and faith; we can have either one or the other” (158).

In this exercise, we are challenging our actors to ask: What if I release into the deep freedom that is waiting for me and allow my whole self to live in that moment of I don’t know? What doors to new parts of myself open when I have faith I will find a place to land? As the game progresses, I ask actors to remain in the unknown for longer than what is comfortable. Silences stretch, the room begins to crackle with energy.

For round two, actors can now say “no.” In fact, actors can respond to eye contact in any way they want. They can say “sure” or “later.”

They can sit down, opt out, spin around, or steal another spot at any point and in any manner. I ask actors to surprise themselves in this moment—to trust that if they don’t preplan a response then they might find the gift of the present moment, trusting that something will occur. In The Body Keeps the Score, trauma research author Bessel van der Kolk writes: “Children and adults alike need to experience how rewarding it is to work at the edge of their abilities. Resilience is the product of agency: knowing that what you do can make a difference” (357). The beauty of this experience is how much agency it affords the performer. They choose to say yes or no; they choose if and how they will move and how long it will take.

One student actor wrote about their experience of the game and its effect on their work in this way: I realized while we were playing this game that I really just didn’t want to be in other people’s way once I had given them permission to take my spot. Once I made this realization, it really struck me emotionally. It was as if I had realized something about the way I interact with people in real life that limits what I am able to attain…And this could include failing, because failure can be a surprise, but I think it puts it in a positive light that makes me feel excited about trying new things. (Intermediate Acting, Pomona College) Another reflected on their new relationship to the statement “I have time” by observing “suddenly I feel like I have control over the things I usually let control me. It gives me a chance to breathe and recognize that I have freedom, it stops me from making assumptions and rash decisions. This sentence alone has helped me find a stronger peace in my daily routine” (Advanced Voice and Movement, Cal State San Bernardino).

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seemed to have gone fine, but they can’t remember anything specific. A common experience is that they felt they didn’t know what to do with their hands, a direct effect of the tightening throughout their head/neck/back that leads to misuse throughout the whole system.

FIG. 1 Schulz (left) utilizing “hands-on” work as an actor explores text. PHOTO Brett Hershey

from old ideas, patterns, and fixations. By carving out time for moments of play, the director has the power to encourage inhibition, to embolden their actors to work on the edge of their abilities, and to embrace moments of uncertainty when they arise.

BEING SEEN: THE INTRODUCTION For this exercise, the ensemble gathers in the front of the rehearsal space as audience. One actor enters the space, walks to the center of the room, says, “Hi my name is _____,” and then walks back out the way they came in. I find it helpful to let the actor know beforehand that I will be asking the question “what did you notice?” and that they will have to repeat the experience at least one more time.

This exercise incites the fight/flight/freeze response in nearly all performers. The easy, smiling, coordinated artist exits, and in their place enters another slightly more rigid and less vibrant version of themselves. In experienced actors, the new version that emerges is often poised, glossy, confident, but this shine appears more of an overlay, rather than authenticity.

This moment offers an effective opportunity for actors to recognize that excitement and performance anxiety are chemically quite similar.

In fact, it’s how we view the revving up of our system that determines if we are able to utilize this burst of stress hormones, or allow it to derail us. Alia Crum notes, “Viewing stress as enhancing made it so— not in some subjective self-reported way, but in the ratio of stress hormones produced by the participants’ adrenal glands. Viewing stress as helpful created a different biological reality” (McGonigal 10).

Changing actors’ perceptions of their stress can create changes in the growth index, the ratio of DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone) to cortisol, which according to McGonigal is considered a measure of resilience.

What did you notice? In response to this question, some actors will admit how surprised they were that they were nervous. Sometimes they report specific moments that occurred or thoughts that went through their head. Often actors report that they really don’t know—it

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Actors have been conditioned to tell themselves in this moment that they need to relax; however, “associating the word ‘relax’ with high performance is disturbing.

Performers, who are expected to execute all of their skills for their art and for communication, are asked to do a second, wholly incompatible task. Perform and relax. Relax and perform. Highly skilled excitation and relaxation together are not possible” (Madden 73). What AT can afford the actor is a more effective tool: release. Release is dynamic, energized, and expansive. We need excitation in our systems to propel us into the “service of the extraordinary” (74). However, we need excitation without excess tension. We need release.

Before the actor’s second attempt, I exit with the actor and sometimes do some “hands-on” work,⁶ which often leads to dynamic release and more coordinated movement overall. Although incredibly useful, hands-on work is not recommended without proper training and certification. I find each actor needs something different depending on what has happened in the first round and what I have learned about them as individuals. Communicating “I have time,” reminding them to reconnect to their senses in the moment before walking in, or inviting them to think about letting their necks soften are useful verbal cues. Ultimately, by reminding them of and building on the skills acquired in the previous offerings, this moment allows the actor to tune into themselves and to feel themselves in space, which often leads to an immediate experience of grounding and support.

A dialogue with the company to find out what they observed during the second attempt is paramount for the performer. I often hear “I saw more of you,” or “you looked like you weren’t nervous at all.” One actor reflected on the experience profoundly: he felt like he was a radio station and the dial got tuned perfectly to himself—all the static was gone. When we strip away unnecessary tension, we tune back into our whole selves so that more of us can show up for the creative work.

We are cultivating tools for managing excitation and infusing them directly into the work of being seen.

This exercise can also be useful as an early character exploration.

The actor enters and introduces themselves as the character. This experience helps to uncover where their habitual emotional/vocal/ physical responses might differ from the character’s. What does actoras-character notice? What can the actor-as-character let go of? How does the actor-as-character deal with the experience of being seen?

CONCLUSION Each actor has a different relationship to performance anxiety, being in front of an audience, their desire to be “good” or “right,” and their kinesthetic sense of self in space. In these unprecedented times, the need for awareness of self and others, an invitation to have time, and hold space for meaningful connection is more important than ever.

One student actor explained how they used this work to navigate uncertainty at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic: When I was evicted from the college and moved to the other side of the country in two days with my partner, I was exhausted and sad, confused and livid, heartbroken and somehow apathetic.

But somehow I was able to access all the tools that we had built in both A.T. and acting…I attribute so much of my wellness during those first few weeks of COVID-19 to the moments of vulnerability, truth, and wondering that we created in class.

My focus then was not what I needed to produce, or how I should have felt–– what sustained my wellbeing then, was my commitment to being as human and kind as possible. I did not want to lose my humanity, my empathy. (Intermediate Acting, Pomona College) Opportunities that directors can take to foster bravery within a safe and nurturing space while honoring the ways in which the performers in the room understand themselves is essential. Freedom to hold space for each performer, to encourage exploration while being seen, and allow for time to get it “wrong,” can help actors feel freer to take artistic risk and nurture resilience. Carving out space to cultivate selfcare and deep freedom promotes vision and innovation. Using the principles and exercises of AT can help directors create brave, creative, resilient, and vibrant rehearsal spaces, offering an impactful way to impart and support the work of artistic creation.

NOTES

1. F. M. Alexander, the founder of the technique, frequently used the term ‘psychophysical’ to describe his work. “F. M. Alexander believed the relationship of mind and body was such that they act as one unit, so that the human organism functions and responds to situations as a whole.

He believed that we ‘translate everything, whether physical, mental or spiritual, into muscular tension’ and, as Alexander developed his eponymous Technique, he saw it as a form of psychophysical re-education” (King).

2. In active rest practice, eyes remain open. For most bodies, having a few soft-covered books behind the head is recommended. Directing knees to float toward the ceiling while feet remain flat on the floor will encourage ease through the lower back. However, honoring where the actor’s system is in the moment is vital. Standing, stretching, sitting, fetal position are all welcome.

3. This term was first coined by AT teacher Frank Pierce Jones, a professor of classics and pupil of F. M. Alexander.

4. Alexander adopted the word use in order to describe how we exist in the world. When we are balanced, easy, coordinated we use ourselves well.

When we are pulling head down on top of spine, creating excess tension, or engaging in unhelpful thinking patterns we misuse ourselves. “Good use allows us to use ourselves in empowering ways that open and expand channels of expression, so that each movement and gesture becomes a conscious manifestation of full spirit, mind, and body. Misuse blocks, constricts, and confuses expression” (Polatin 17).

5. This exercise is a combination of various ball toss games commonly practiced in actor training with the addition of “perfect!” which I learned in a Michael Chekhov workshop presented by Lisa Dalton during the 2020 KCACTF Region 8, California State University Fullerton.

6. Alexander Technique teachers are trained in a specialized way to use their hands to facilitate changes within the student’s nervous system.

WORKS CITED

Aitken, Robert. The Mind of Clover: Essays in Zen Buddhist Ethics. North Point Press, 1984.

Beckett, Samuel. Nohow on / Samuel Beckett. Calder, 1989.

“Claude Monet Quotes.” A-Z Quotes. www.azquotes.com/author/10263Claude_Monet. Accessed 15 August 2020.

Crum, Alia. “Change Your Mindset, Change the Game,” TEDx Traverse City, 15 Oct. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tqq66zwa7g.

Accessed 5 July 2020.

Donnellan, Declan. The Actor and the Target. New ed., Theatre Communications Group: Distributed by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, 2005.

Juhl, Kathleen. “Mindfulness Bananas and the Alexander Technique.”

Galvanizing Performance: The Alexander Technique as a Catalyst for Excellence, edited by Cathy Madden and Kathleen Juhl, Singing Dragon, 2017, pp. 202–219.

Keysers, Christian, and Valeria Gazzola. “Hebbian Learning and Predictive Mirror Neurons for Actions, Sensations and Emotions.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, vol. 369, no.

1644, 2014, p. 20130175., doi:10.1098/rstb.2013.0175.

King, Hilary. Psychophysical Re-Education. www.hilaryking.net/glossary/ psychophysical. Accessed 6 Apr. 2020, Madden, Cathy. Integrative Alexander Technique Practice for Performing Artists: Onstage Synergy. U of Chicago Press, 2014.

McGonigal, Kelly. The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It. Avery, 2016.

Perry, Lilla Cabot. “Reminiscences of Claude Monet from 1889 to 1909.” The American Magazine of Art, vol. 18, no. 3, 1927, pp. 119– 126. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23931183. Accessed 3 Mar. 2021 The Poise Project. www.thepoiseproject.org/alexander-technique-forparkinsons-research. Accessed 19 January 2022.

Polatin, Betsy. The Actor’s Secret: Techniques for Transforming Habitual Patterns and Improving Performance. North Atlantic Books, 2013.

Thompson, Tommy. Moving from the Still Point of Support. www. easeofbeing.com/moving-from-the-still-point-of-support. Accessed 20 July 2020. Originally published in Exchange, Vol 2. No. 2, 1995.

Van der Kolk, Bessel A. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books, 2015.

Vasiliades, Tom. “The Alexander Technique: An Acting Approach.” www. alexandertechnique.com/articles/acting3/. Accessed 19 January 2022.

Originally published in Soul of the American Actor, Volume 7. No. 3, 2004.

JENNIFER SCHULZ is an AmSAT certified Alexander Technique teacher and acting coach in Los Angeles. She is an adjunct faculty member at Pomona College where she teaches Alexander Technique, and at Cal State San Bernardino where she teaches Acting, Movement, and Criticism of Plays in Performance. Schulz melds acting pedagogy with Alexander Technique to foster emotional resilience, move actors towards psychophysical action with full freedom, and promote wellbeing in actor training.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS Published by Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), the Peer-Reviewed Section of SDC JOURNAL serves directors and choreographers working in the profession and in institutions of higher learning. SDC’s mission is to give voice to an empowered collective of directors and choreographers working in all jurisdictions and venues across the country, encourage advocacy, and highlight artistic achievement. SDC JOURNAL seeks essays with accessible language that focus on practice and practical application and that exemplify the sorts of fruitful intersections that can occur between the academic/scholarly and the profession/ craft. For more information, visit: http://sdcweb.org/sdcjournal/sdc-journal-peer-review/

SPRING 2022 | SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

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SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW Milton: a performance & community engagement experiment

by PearlDamour 53rd State Press, 2019.

158 PP. $16 PAPERBACK. PearlDamour’s Milton: a performance & community engagement experiment is a beautifully documented portrait of collaborative theatremaking in action, and an essential text for the field as we move further into the 21st century. It offers practitioners a roadmap for conceiving and creating community-engaged performance, that somehow manages to be both poetic and practical. It offers academics an excellent foundation for discussions of socially engaged, devised, and/or site-specific theatremaking, as well as a rich guide for considering the unique impact of building live performances together in an increasingly virtual world.

A brief introduction lays out the project at hand: in 2012, collaborative team Lisa D’Amour and Katie Pearl—known collectively as PearlDamour—were feeling restless with their routine of creating within a small, urban network of theatre enthusiasts interested in aesthetics and form. Watching the presidential election year of 2016 unfold, they began to think about “being an American” and what it meant to them. “If the US flag is a symbol of our country, why does it seem to belong to conservatives and not liberals?” they asked. “What is our relationship to this land? How can we claim it as home?” (8). These questions led them to begin visiting small American towns named Milton (the 18th most popular town name in the country in 2012)—from Louisiana to North Carolina to Oregon to Wisconsin to Massachusetts. Over the course of the next five years, the collaborators worked with the citizens of these towns to develop a series of performances, each focused on a particular Milton, but connected to the others, resulting in a kind of national-portrait-inMiltons. The book documents their process.

The book is divided into three parts: “The Play,” “The Process,” and appendices. In “The Play,” we get the script of the play as performed in Milton, NC, in 2013. It is funny, moving, and lyrical, including evocative descriptions of one performance which make it easy to imagine what it might have been like to be in the audience. Woven throughout is expansive and powerful “sky” imagery, reminding us of what connects all the Miltons—and, indeed, all our American communities.

The “Process” section is an eclectic and engaging collection of microessays on how the performance came to be. Topics include how the authors met and interviewed Miltonians, how relationships were built and sustained, and how hard conversations about race unfolded in the various communities. Throughout, PearlDamour provide honest assessments of where they feel they were successful—or not. They describe interview questions that did not work, moments where their work angered or alienated community members, and what elements of their original plan fell away to make room for new ideas. In the section grappling with race and identity, they describe how, as white women, they were in constant dialogue about their own privilege and their approach to making Miltonians of color feel welcome and invited into the process. Attendance and participation from communities of color was often low. “We often felt like failures,” they write, “and just

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as often, locals would tell us that even with the relatively low turnout it was a success, and the first time anything like this had happened in their town” (91). The section ends with actionable advice to artists wishing to make performance with communities.

The “Appendices” include sheet music for the play’s songs, as well as excerpts from the Oregon and Massachusetts scripts displayed alongside the same page from the North Carolina script, artfully demonstrating the adaptation process and the ways threads were lifted and/or pulled back to create the unique tapestry for each location. The Oregon script is in both English and Spanish and offers a valuable look at a model for multilingual adaptation. Another appendix chronicles the community projects undertaken in each town, many of which continued beyond the life of the play. A quick Google search showed me that “Courageous Conversations,” a series of community dialogues about racism and privilege begun as part of PearlDamour’s process in Milton, MA, continues to this day, and has even grown to encompass nearby communities. A final appendix offers an unusually frank look at the funding for the project, providing students and practitioners with a rare look at the scope and variety of support necessary for this kind of work.

Milton manages to capture the experience of devising a play in community, not only in content but in form. From its exterior appearance—the book is square, smooth, and feels inviting in the hand—to its eye-catching and spacious interior design—it includes color photos, charts, and lots of white space alongside the play text and descriptive prose—the book constantly reminds us that a project like this is unpredictable, nonlinear, and full of surprises. Milton also includes a link to the accompanying Sky Over Milton website, giving a wonderful sense of how collaborative performance making can live naturally in the digital space without being about the digital space.

Like the work of community performance, the book unfolds slowly and requires patience. Its delights are best experienced by returning to the text repeatedly and non-sequentially, allowing a picture of the whole to come slowly into view, like the shifting constellations in the night sky that covers all the Miltons.

Working on this project during a complex span of American history— beginning amid the Obama years and finishing in the early Trump years—often placed the authors in close collaboration with citizens on both sides of an increasingly widening political divide. They listened to everyone they met but did not pursue heated discussions or debates.

“Instead,” they write, “we focused on something everyone we met cared about: the desire to make their town a better place to live” (11). Throughout the text, the authors emphasize how releasing preconceived ideas of who Miltonians were, and what they might “get” from them to make a show, opened up surprising, rich possibilities for art-making.

The Milton project was clearly relevant and resonant at the time it was undertaken; if possible, it feels even more so now. It gives us a clear example of how plays and theatremakers can move out of liberal and urban bubbles, how small and rural communities respond to and benefit from creative practice, how we can all participate in and value theatre that is truly compassionate, that manages to be about what connects us without erasing what divides us.

MEGAN SANDBERG-ZAKIAN FREELANCE DIRECTOR + AUTHOR NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY

SDC FOUNDATION

FROM THE SDCF PRESIDENT The last time I wrote, near the start of the pandemic, I observed that the world was unimaginably different for all of us, as directors and choreographers, and as citizens. I thought the situation was sure to transform continually over the coming months and next few years—and that our primary goal at that moment as Trustees of the Foundation was to do all we could to make sure it, along with the Union, not only survives, but thrives. Now, two years later, the pandemic is indeed still with us, but I’m happy to report that the Foundation is thriving and may be more active than at any point in its existence.

While the pandemic may have shut down our industry in ways we hadn’t imagined possible, it also gave us as Trustees the time and opportunity to really take a deep dive and thoroughly interrogate just who the Foundation is and what it does. As our country and industry confronted the racial reckoning precipitated by George Floyd’s death, we at the Foundation formed an accountability committee to investigate all aspects of the way we operate and the programming and opportunities we offer. We rigorously examined how accessible and equitable all our offerings are and found ourselves lacking on some points. We have expended great energy and effort to correct those shortcomings and have made great progress. That examination also led to an adjustment and refinement of our mission statement, as I reported in my last letter. We went back to the Next Stage findings and made sure that we are on track to fulfill all the commitments we made as a result of that landmark study.

In addition to our ongoing public programming, the Lloyd Richards New Futures Residency for BIPOC directors and choreographers interested in pursuing institutional leadership was established and is halfway through its inaugural year. Also, the Barbara Whitman Award has been established. This award of $10,000 is given annually to a female, trans, or non-binary earlycareer director. Our Observership program, on hiatus since the beginning of the pandemic while undergoing a top-to-bottom reexamination, will be fully back in the fall—more accessible to all directors and choreographers and more attuned to how work happens today. And in the past 24 months, SDCF’s Emergency Assistance Fund has provided more than $200,000 in financial assistance to SDC Members and Associate Members.

We’re deeply grateful to all who have contributed, and those who continue to contribute to the Emergency Assistance Fund—as well as donations towards all the other programming and work SDCF offers. Without your help and support none of the work we do would be possible. We pledge consistent evaluation and self-interrogation in service of the Foundation’s mission to celebrate, develop, and support stage directors and choreographers as we all navigate our permanently altered—for the better—industry.

Mark Brokaw President, SDCF SPRING 2022 | SDC JOURNAL FOUNDATION SECTION

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S DCF AN N UAL S UP P O RT

A MESSAGE FROM THE SDCF BOARD OF TRUSTEES The full range of SDCF programs rely on the generous support of individuals, government agencies, foundations, and corporations. We want to thank each and every donor who has already contributed this year. Every gift makes a difference.

At this moment in time, when our field faces great challenges, and also potentially valuable possibilities and opportunities for SDCF to be of even greater service to our community, we sincerely appreciate and value your loyal support.

Mark Brokaw President

Linda Hartzell Fundraising Chair

SDCF CONTRIBUTORS

$10,000 or More James & Deborah Burrows Foundation*

The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs*

Judi & Douglas Krupp

New York State Council on the Arts

National Endowment for the Arts*

The Hargrove Pierce Foundation*

The Purple Plume Foundation Rockstar Games Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC) Barbara Whitman

$5,000 – $9,999 Eve Alvord

Doug Hughes

Laurie B. Oki

The American Gift Fund

T. Kail*

The Oki Foundation

Concord Theatricals

$2,500 – $4,999 Sheldon Epps & Lesley Brander-Epps*

Rachel Chavkin* Linda Hartzell*

Evan Yionoulis & Donald Holder

Eleanor & Charlie Nolan

$1,000 – $2,499 Andres Bello

Justin Emeka

Kenny Leon

Seema Sueko

The Sherle and Michael Berger Charitable Foundation of the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Pittsburgh

Joseph & Jami Hanreddy

Pam MacKinnon*

Jana Tift

Lisa Heinz

Sarah F. McMahon

Maria Torres

John-Charles Kelly

Bari Newport

Victoria Traube*

Brian Kite

Laura Penn*

Kara Unterberg

Caplin Foundation

Dan Knechtges

Liz Diamond*

KRN Mosaic Charitable Foundation

The Philip and Myn Rootberg Foundation

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SDC JOURNAL FOUNDATION SECTION | SPRING 2022

Susan Stroman

$500 – $999 Anonymous

Marc Bruni

Lisa de Ribere

Dr. Steve Baldwin

Maggie Burrows

André De Shields*

Michael H. Blakemore*

Bob Evans & Steve Davis*

Barbara Gaines

Mark Brokaw

Leah C. Gardiner & Seth Gilliam

Anne Kauffman Pfizer Annual Giving Campaign through Blackbaud

Sheila Grether-Marion David Hammond

David Hyde Pierce

Casey Stangl & John Spokes* Frank & Eliza Ventura Tamilla Woodard

$250 – $499 Karen Azenberg* Vivienne Benesch* Melia Bensussen

Michael H. Blakemore* Chris Coleman

Tom Gibbons in memory of Phyllis Somerville

Susan Zeder & Jim Hancock

Tara Jung Grabel

Irene Lewis

Paul Lazarus

Emily Mann

Steven Robman

Penny Metropulos

Steve Scott

Hope Pordy*

Molly Smith*

Sanford Robbins

Austin Squire

Gus Kaikkonen & Kraig Swartz Jonathan Wilson*

Up to $249 Anonymous (2)

Judy Braha*

caryn desai

Susan Greenberg

John Kiffel

Dianne McIntyre*

Steven Robman

Charles Abbott*

Wayne Brinda

Elina de Santos*

Suzanne Grodner

Leslie Kincaid-Burby

Adrienne Meyer

Lori J. Adams

Noah Brody

Matthew Diamond

Barbara E. Gurchin

Robert Klein

D. Lynn Meyers*

Christopher Curry Root

Shawn Aebi

Camille A. Brown

Rick Dildine*

Luane Davis Haggerty

Peggy Koenig

Craig Miller

Rachel Alderman

Lee Buckley

Frank DiMaiolo

Rhonda Kohl

Kelly Miller

Stacy Alley Helen & Paul Anbinder

Stephen Burdman

Alex Dmitriev

Deborah Kondelik

John Miller-Stephany

Rick & Terry Anderson*

Sidney Burgoyne

Sybil Kramer

Bonnie J. Monte*

Michael Butler

Marcia Milgrom Dodge*

Richard Hamburger* in memory of Lloyd Richards

Anderson Family David Armstrong Geoffrey Arndt Victoria Bailey Samuel Barickman Keith Baxter

Andrew Cadiff David Callaghan Gavin Cameron-Webb David Caparelliotis Robert Caprio* Megan Carney

Elizabeth Rubyline Bell-Haynes*

Juliette Carrillo

Braylee Bennett

Charles R. Chamblee

Jesse Berger*

Ellen Charlebois

David S. Berlin, Esq.

Jay Scott Chipman*

Pam Berlin*

John Chong

Isaak Berliner

Hope Clark

Bill Berry

Bill Castellino

Ryan Clark

Robert Beseda in memory of Gerald Freedman

Carly Conklin

Melanie Blood

Karen Case Cook*

Staurt Hunegs Bloom

Thomas Cooke*

Ida Cole

Michael J. Bobbitt

Ray Cooney

Anne Bogart

Karin Coonrod*

Robert Dorfman Timothy Douglas

David Hammond Judith Haskell Jeffrey Hatcher

Mike Eagan

Brent Hazelton

Susan Einhorn*

Christopher Healy

John C. Eisner*

Lawrence Hecht

Mercedes Ellington*

Caitlin Higgins*

David Emmes

Maurice Hines

Linda Engler

Suzzane Hittman

David H Epstein

Steve Davis & Nina Hope

David Esbjornson* Oskar Eustis Susan E. Evans* John Everson Robert Falls Vicky Farr Myra Feeney Thomas Ferriter Virginia L. Fitzgerald Michael Frale Robert Frost

Richard Hopkins Charles & Ava Hoover Jane Horvath Edward Howard Elizabeth Huddle Lori Wolter Hudson Donna Inglima Richard David Israel Nagle Jackson

Jessica Kubzansky

Peter Moore

Peter J. Kuo

Rosemary Moore

Mark Lamos

Tom Moore

Julie Landau

Jeff Nahan

Sue Lawless*

Ron Nakahara

Dane CT Leasure

Mio Nakamura

Jay David Lesenger*

Rosemary Newcott

Michael Hunter Lilly*

Jim O’Connor

Gretchen Lilyholm

Sharon Ott

Pakin Liptawat

Laura Atlantas Pace

Marcela Lorca

Tanya Palmer

Richard Ludgin

Christian Parker

Larissa Lury

Tom Parrish

Neg Mahmoodzadegan

William Partlan

Carl Marcus & Karin Marcus Linda Mariani Kathleen Marshall*

Christopher Liam Moore & William Rauch

Amy Saltz* Krista Schwarting* Steve Scott Seret O. ScottWilliams* Arthur Seidelman* Hana S. Sharif Karen Sharp Stephen Sinclair Loukas N. Skipitaris Edward Smith* Bernard Solomon Robert Spencer* Ed Spitzberg Paige Price & Nevin Steinberg JR Sullivan* Anette Thornton John & Katherine Turturro* Jazmund Walker James Warwick

Cara Reichel

Brandon Weinbrenner

Barbara T. Martin

Namratha Ravikant Charles Rhyee

Donald Wesley*

Alex Richards Charles Richter*

Donald Stang & Helen Wickes

Jeremy Jones

Mastercard Impact Fund through Blackbaud

Hilary D. Johnson

Ellen Rusconi & Cory Rau

Pesha Rudnick Dr. Brian Sajko

Tim Bond*

Yvonne Curry*

Larry Freund & Gloria Berkenstat Freund

Amnon Kabatchnik

Yvonne Mavroleon

Jo Bonney

Paul Daigneault

Marcus Gardley

Brenda Kamen

Max Mayer*

Margaret Booker

Barb Davis

Adam Garth

Hester Kamin

Davis McCallum III

John Bowab

Raquel Davis

Ryan Gibbs

Steve Karp

Shami McCormick

Sanford (Sandy) Robbins

Tom Ridgely

Edward Wilhelms Eric Woodall Douglas G. Wright

Alvin Bowles

Rick Davis

Denise Gillman

John-David Keller*

Jonathan McCrory

Kenneth L. Roberson

Wesley Young

George Boyd

Thomas DeFrantz

Marcia Ginsberg

E. Allen Kent

Kathleen McGeever

Mary Robinson

Francesca Zambello

Julianne Boyd*

Raymond Del Barrio

Lynnie Godfrey**

Anita Khnzadian

Marty McGuire

Blake Robison

Wayne Zink

Endowment Funds The Charles Abbott Fellowship Fund, The Joe A. Callaway Fund, The Sir John Gielgud Fellowship Fund, The Mike Ockrent Fellowship Fund, The Shepherd and Mildred Traube Fellowship Fund, The Kurt Weill Fellowship Fund

* Reflects donor support to SDCF in both FY21 and FY22, through March 31, 2022.

This list reflects gifts made to SDCF between July 2020 and March 2022. Donations made to the Emergency Assistance Fund are reflected on the next page.

We apologize for any errors and request that you contact Hannah Kutten at hkutten@sdcfoundation.org so that we can make a prompt correction.

SPRING 2022 | SDC JOURNAL FOUNDATION SECTION

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S DC F E MERGENCY ASSISTANCE FUN D

We would like to take a moment to recognize all our incredible supporters of the Emergency Assistance Fund since March 2020. SDCF’s Emergency Assistance Fund has distributed over $200,000 to help more than 200 directors and choreographers in need pay for basic life necessities including rent, childcare, elder care, medical treatments, and more. To each and every person who has donated, we thank you.

SDCF EMERGENCY ASSISTANCE FUND CONTRIBUTORS

Leadership Gifts (over $1,000) Anonymous (2)

Jean & Louis Dreyfus Foundation

Marc Bruni James & Deborah Burrows Foundation

Howard Gilman Foundation Michael Greif

Rachel Chavkin

T. Kail David Lee

Joe Mantello

Susan Stroman

Miranda Family Fund

Julie Taymor

Jason Moore

David Trainer

Casey Nicholaw

Evan Yionoulis

Josh Lehrer & Jeffrey Seller Bartlett Sher

Additional Gifts (up to $1,000) Anonymous (6)

Sara Bennett

Robert G. Buckles

Shana Cooper

Laurie Duesing

Sheila A. Flanagan Andréa Burns & Peter Flynn

Charles Abbott

Melia Bensussen

Sara Buckley

Deborah Correa

Mary Dulka

Emily Abrahams

Ron Berger

Carole Bundy

Lisa Cox

Patrick Dwyer

John Achatz

Joan Bernard

Carol Burnes

Lee Cullum

Shelly Elliott

Dean Adams

Susan Bernofsky

Erin Burns

Celeste Curran

Kathleen Emerman

Eleanor Adcock

Jonathan Bernstein

Margaret Burrows

Steve Curry

Sheldon L. Epps

Sunny Almeyda

JoAnn Bertges

Karen A. Callaway

James Curtis

David H. Epstein

Stewart Alter

Elizabeth & Bill Fogarty Julie Frahar Elizabeth E. Frankel Rhona & Julian Frazin

Barbara Bevington

Christopher Caltieri

Kay Cynamon

Martha Erickson

Karl Lance Androes

Marge Blaine

Luke Camery

Sheila Daniels

Andrea Estepa

Helen & Paul Arbinder

Lisa L. Blake

Marian Caracciolo

Larry Freund & Gloria Berkenstat Freund

Rupa Datta

Patricia Estess

Barbara J. Friedman

Ofra Bloch

James Carnelia

Robert E. David

John Everson

Julia Cassetta

Lew Gantwerk

Randye Bloom

Karen DeMoss

Ellen Fader

Leslie Castay

Jean Garber

Marcia Blum

Diane Diamond

A. Scott Falk

Darlene A. Catello

Sherri Garber

Jean P. Bordewich

Elin Diamond

Maryann Chach

Michael John Garcés

Peggy & Joe Bracewell

Liz Diamond

Mary Dorothy Faucher

Debra Chaplan

Tonya Brito

Matthew Diamond

Ping Chong

James C. Brock

Charles Dillingham

Jack D. Cogen

Mark Brokaw

Robert M. Disch

Deborah J. Cohen

Bob Bronzo

Elsa Dixler

Elizabeth Cohen

Tricia Brouk

Chris Doherty

D’Vera Cohn

Leigh A. Brown

Alexander Domnitser

Diane Colasanto

Patrick Brown

Els Collins

W. Houston Dougharty

Vince Bruns

Patricia Conneen

Peter Buck

Ginnie Cooper

Barbara Orozco Armstrong David Atwood Nina Avedon Karen Bachman Linda Bacon Pat Baker Dennis Banks Elizabeth Banks Allison Barlow Christopher Barns Claire Basescu Behind the Curtain: Broadway’s Living Legends

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SDC JOURNAL FOUNDATION SECTION | SPRING 2022

Myra Feeney Kenneth Feiner Sandy Feinstein Judy Ferber Sarah Ferguson Marsha Feris

Adam Garth Jeremy Gerard Kay Gilcher Marcia Ginsberg Amy Glancy Joan Marlow Golan

Karen Fitzpatrick

Ronna S. TapperGoldman & Jim Goldman

Ann Siegle Drege

Lorraine Flaherty

Miguel A. Gonzalez

Golde Dudell

Marie T. Flanagan

Carol Gould

Jeffrey Fischer

Sue Greenberg Maggie & Steve Greif Max Haggblom Susan Harmon John Harney Lori Harris Allison Hart Jean Hartman Linda Hartzell Barbara Hauptman Phyllis Herman Susan Herman Patrick Herold Sandra Hess Caitlin Higgins Katrin Hilbe Susan Hilferty Barbara I. Hillman William Hillman Anne & Leon Hoffman

Lee Buckley & Robert A. Jud

Susan B. Whitlock & Earl Lewis

Rosemary Moore

Deborah Rogow

Donald Kalischer

Tom Moore

John Rohrkemper

Elissa Strauss

Irene Lewis

Seema Sueko

Brenda Kamen

Nancy Morgan

Elsa Rosenberg

Philip Lilienthal

Susan Sullivan

Arnold Kanter

Susan Munsinger

Steven M. Rosenberg

Lisa Lipton

Barbara Szudy

L & M Kaplan

Felice Nachbar

Susan Rosenstein

Lisa Liss

Susan Tabor

Sharon Karmazin

Beverly Nadel

Robert Roth

Adrianne Lobel

Amy Katz

Anita Nager

Brian Sands

Joan Lunoe

Barbara Kaufman

Cherrie Nanninga

Lydia Sangree

Joe Luttrell

Geoffrey Kent

Dominie Nash

David Sauer

Jennifer P. Lyman

Evan Kingsley

Benjamin Natelson

Claude M. Scales

John Lynch

Shira Nayman

David Schachter

Carolyn Terry Tom Tullius Francesca Turchiano Frances Unsell Melissa Vail Joan VanAntwerp

Brian Kite

John D. Mahoney

Robert Klein

Melissa Nelken

Peter Scherer

Katie Manglis Mara Manus

Judy Nobles

Michael Andrew Schield

Stephen Vaughan

John Klemme

Molly Noble

Faye Meken Schneier

Diana Von Fossen

Susan Schulman

Zelda Warner

Cheryl Kligler

Carl Marcus

Debra Kline

Alan Marcus

Dan Knechtges Donna Knipp Zosia & Jacek Kostyrko Dick Kraeuter

Cynthia Holden

Sybil Kramer

Joan S. Hollaner

Michael Kreyling

Elysa Marden

Marianne Novy Karen Oster Richard Pahl

Ted Marks

Janet Paist

Barbara T. Martin

Ted Pappas

Susan Vaneta Mason

Jonathan Parker

Judith Furash & Mark Mattucci

Friends of the Pasadena Playhouse Nicole Pearce

Stephanie Holmes

B. J. Krintzman

Dr. Jim Wilentz & Robin Maxwell

Nina Hope

Janet Kuech

Cary Mazer

Rick Horowitz

Judith Kunitz

Rick Pender

Des McAnuff

Elise Howard

Beth Lambdin

Carey Perloff

Davis McCallum

Cynthia Huffman

Mark N. Lance

Laura Porter

Mary McCorry

Andrew Hugos, CLU, ChFC

Neil Immerman & Susan Landau

Jonah Pregerson

Anna McDuff

Linda Quigley

Chisa Hutchinson

Sarah P. Lanning

Robert Mchugh

Bill Rauch

Adam Immerwahr

Michele LaRue

Naomi McLean

Rosemary Regan

James F. Ingalls

Suzanne M. Latham

Chris McNeil

Irina Irgon

Sue Lawless

Maxine Isaacs

Wayne Le Blanc

Ann Manikas & David Isaacson

Susan B. Leeming

Helen Pelletier

Lucia Schultz Alison Scott Seret O. ScottWilliams

Arline Vogel

Lyndsay Watson Janet Weaver Joel Weber

Judith Segall

Zarine Weil

Sylvan & Sandra Seidenman

Terry L. Weill MD

Frank M. Shanbacker Laura Shapiro Jane B. Sherwin

Ann & Richard Weiner Rebecca Weinstein Justin Weiss

Udi Shorr

Gabriel Vega Weissman

H. Claude Shostal

Lynne Whitman

Carol Sicherman Paula Siegel

Michael Wiener

M. Beatriz Silveira MD

Connie Grappo & Lee Wilkof

Patricia Reilly

Jim & Susan Phinney Silver

Sur Ellen Mehok

Carol Reisen

Nancy Simon

Anne Elizabeth Williams

Diane Meier

Susan Reiter

Laura Sirota

Gail Mellow

Mitchell Relin

Rima Sirota

Inga Fisher Williams Jaye Austin Williams Jane Wilson

Laurie Merel

Elizabeth Renomeron

Barbara M. Smith

Dana Ivey

David & Nancy LeePainter

Adrienne Meyer

J. Harrell Rentz

Bruce M. Smith

Frederick D. Jackes

Paul D. Lehrman

Larry Meyers

Marcia Ringel

Molly Smith

Edward A. Jacoby

Robin Leidner

Dean M. Michaels

Christie Robbins

P Smith

Eric J. Johnson

Jonathan Lerner

Erik Midelfort

Ilyse Robbins

Pamela Smith

Bill Young

Anne Kauffman & Jill Kauffman Johnson

Robert Leventer

Pamela Milam

Sanford Robbins

Ann Sochi

Judith Zaborowski

B. Levine

Tam Milton

Linda Robertson

Michelle Sokolowski

Barbara Zane

Karen F. Jones

Judy Levine

Douglas Mintz

Esther Robison

Stephen Spicehandler

Susan Zeder

Joy

Margo L. Levine

Phyllis Molle

Nancy Rogers

Craig Stockwell

Gil Zicklin

Peter Winkler Julie Wolkoff Carol Wood

This list reflects gifts made to SDCF’s Emergency Assistance Fund between March 24, 2020, and March 31, 2022. We apologize for any errors and request that you contact Hannah Kutten at hkutten@sdcfoundation.org so that we can make a prompt correction.

SPRING 2022 | SDC JOURNAL FOUNDATION SECTION

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IN MEMORIAM August 1, 2020 – March 31, 2022

Robert Allan Ackerman

David Gordon

Gideon Y. Schein

DIRECTOR Member since 1976

DIRECTOR-CHOREOGRAPHER Member since 1995

DIRECTOR Member since 1980

Lawrence Arrick

Yuriko Kikuchi

Joan Micklin Silver

DIRECTOR Member since 1967

DIRECTOR-CHOREOGRAPHER Member since 1977

DIRECTOR Member since 1980

Bob Avian

Kent Paul

Tony Tanner

CHOREOGRAPHER Member since 1991

DIRECTOR Member since 1964

DIRECTOR-CHOREOGRAPHER Member since 1968

Edward Berkeley

Tom Prewitt

Tony Walton

DIRECTOR Member since 1985

DIRECTOR Member since 1992

DIRECTOR Member since 2004

Lee Breuer

Victoria Racimo

Douglas Turner Ward

DIRECTOR Member since 1988

DIRECTOR Member since 1998

DIRECTOR Member since 1980

Marge Champion

Ann Reinking

Lewis Whitlock

DIRECTOR-CHOREOGRAPHER Member since 1988

CHOREOGRAPHER Member since 1992

DIRECTOR-CHOREOGRAPHER Member since 1981

Tony Charmoli

Calvin Remsberg

Halo Wines

DIRECTOR-CHOREOGRAPHER Member since 1980

DIRECTOR Member since 1999

DIRECTOR Member since 2003

George M. Ferencz

Louis Scheeder

Steven Woolf

DIRECTOR Member since 1975

DIRECTOR Member since 1973

DIRECTOR Member since 1987

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By studying and analyzing the traditional dance styles of the world, I discovered that the particular dance of each culture is the perfect expression of that culture’s worldview and is achieved by deliberate choices drawn from the unlimited possibilities of movement.

SDC LEGACY JEAN ERDMAN 1916–2020

Choreographer/ dancer Jean Erdman in Ophelia (1946) PHOTO Myron Tannenbaum ABOVE

Dancer, choreographer, and avant-garde theatre director Jean Erdman was a pioneer of modern dance who created performance art that championed world dance and gave a voice to women’s stories.

Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Erdman began dancing at an early age. A trip around the world with her family in 1937 exposed her to the traditional dance of many countries, which influenced her later study of world dance cultures. After relocating to the East Coast, she studied with Martha Graham and was a principal dancer with Graham’s company from 1938 to 1942. Erdman then founded and created more than 50 pieces for her own company.

One of her most celebrated works is The Coach with the Six Insides, a comic reworking of Finnegan’s Wake told from Finnegan’s wife’s perspective. The piece opened OffBroadway in 1962 and received both an Obie Award and the Vernon Rice Award (the predecessor of the Drama Desk Award).

Erdman went on to choreograph several shows for Broadway, including W. S. Merwin’s translation of Yerma in 1966 and Joseph Papp’s production of the rock musical Two Gentleman of Verona in 1971, for which she won a Drama Desk Award and was nominated for a Tony Award.

In 1972, Erdman founded the avant-garde Theater of the Open Eye with her husband, the scholar Joseph Campbell. She created experimental work following the concept

of “total theatre,” incorporating mythology and shining a light on the lives and stories of women.

As an educator, Erdman taught at universities across the country, including Bard College, Columbia University, and the University of Colorado. In 1966, she founded the dance theater program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. In 1993, Erdman was awarded the National Dance Association’s Heritage Award for her contributions to dance education.

Today, her repertory, technique, and philosophy are preserved and promoted through Jean Erdman Dance, founded by Nancy Allison in 2006.

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