31 minute read
Finding the Nuance
A CONVERSATION BETWEEN NICOLE BREWER + VALERIE CURTIS-NEWTON
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.
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.
VALERIE CURTIS- NEWTON 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.
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? 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Brandi Threatt + Dwayne McCowan in MILK LIKE SUGAR at St. Louis Black Rep, directed by Nicole Brewer
PHOTO Phil Hamer
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
The Hansberry Project’s WINE IN THE WILDERNESS at ACT Theatre, directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton
PHOTO Chris Bennion
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.
JONKONNU in rehearsal at Howard University, directed by Nicole Brewer
PHOTO Cardi Williams
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, 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.
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 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 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?”
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?
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.
Samuel Ray Gates in SKELETON CREW at PlayMakers Rep, directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton
PHOTO HuthPhoto c/o PlayMakers Repertory Company
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.
Margo Moorer + Cleavant Derricks in TROUBLE IN MIND at the Guthrie Theater, directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton
PHOTO Keri Pickett
