SDC Journal Winter 2024

WINTER 2024

MICHEL HAUSMANN + MOISÉS KAUFMAN

IN CONVERSATION WITH

JARED MEZZOCCHI + PAULA VOGEL

ANNE BOGART + NEW COLUMNS

JENNIFER CHANG + BRIAN KITE

MUSES & MUSINGS INNOVATIONS HOW WE MET THAT CHALLENGE THEATRICAL PASSPORTS

SDC EXECUTIVE BOARD OFFICERS

MEMBERS OF BOARD

Evan Yionoulis

Saheem Ali Christopher Ashley Jo Bonney Shelley Butler Donald Byrd Rachel Chavkin Desdemona Chiang Valerie Curtis-Newton Liz Diamond Justin Emeka Lydia Fort Leah C. Gardiner Christopher Gattelli Kathleen Marshall Michael Mayer Robert O’Hara Annie-B Parson Lisa Portes Lonny Price Jon Lawrence Rivera Bartlett Sher Katie Spelman Susan Stroman Seema Sueko Maria Torres 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

Joshua Bergasse THIRD VICE PRESIDENT

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Laura Penn HONORARY ADVISORY COMMITTEE

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

SDC JOURNAL EDITOR

SDCJ-PRS PEER REVIEWERS

Stephanie Coen

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

MANAGING EDITOR

Kate Chisholm COLUMNS EDITOR

Lucy Gram GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Adam Hitt EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Melia Bensussen Joshua Bergasse Terry Berliner Noah Brody Liz Diamond Justin Emeka Sheldon Epps Lydia Fort Annie-B Parson Ann M. Shanahan Seema Sueko Annie Yee

WINTER 2024 CONTRIBUTORS

SDCJ-PRS CO-EDITORS

Lileana Blain-Cruz Anne Bogart Jennifer Chang Michel Hausmann Garry Hynes Moisés Kaufman Dominique Kelley Brian Kite Jared Mezzocchi Seema Sueko Mark Valdez Paula Vogel

Emily A. Rollie Ann M. Shanahan

WINTER 2024 SDCJ-PRS CONTRIBUTORS

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Emily A. Rollie

SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION EDITORIAL BOARD

Kathleen M. McGeever SDCJ-PRS ASSOCIATE BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

CENTRAL WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

Shadow Zimmerman NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY

Ruth Pe Palileo SDCJ-PRS SENIOR ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Anne Bogart Joan Herrington James Peck

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 © 2024 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.

COVER Michel Hausmann + Moisés Kaufman

2 SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2024

PHOTO FURIOSA PRODUCTIONS

WINTER 2024 CONTENTS Volume 12 | No. 1

4

FROM THE PRESIDENT

5

FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

BY EVAN YIONOULIS

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW EATURES F 47 The Directors Lab: 14 Speaking to the Audience Techniques, Methods, MICHEL HAUSMANN + MOISÉS KAUFMAN IN CONVERSATION WITH

BY LAURA PENN

OLUMNS NEW! C 6 Muses & Musings

ANNE BOGART

24 Shards, Time,

Resonance, Risk

JARED MEZZOCCHI + PAULA VOGEL

WITH DOMINIQUE KELLEY

8 Innovations

BY MARK VALDEZ

IN CONVERSATION

33 Running the

20-Legged Race

10 How We Met

JENNIFER CHANG + BRIAN KITE

That Challenge

IN CONVERSATION

BY LILEANA BLAIN-CRUZ

12 Theatrical Passports WITH GARRY HYNES

PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

42

EDITED + INTRODUCED BY

ANN M. SHANAHAN + EMILY A. ROLLIE

SPECIAL SDCJ-PRS ESSAY 42 Consent in/as

Collaboration: Teaching Consent and Intimacy Practices in the Directing Classroom

BY EMILY A. ROLLIE

and Conversations About All Things Theatre EDITED BY EVAN TSITSIAS

REVIEW BY SHADOW ZIMMERMAN

SDC FOUNDATION 49 From the SDCF President

BY SEEMA SUEKO

50 Try It Like This 53 2022–23 SDCF

Awardees + Finalists, Residency + Fellowship, + Professional Development Program Participants

55 SDCF Annual Support

DC LEGACY S 57 Frank Galati Edward Payson Call Peggy Hickey Robert Brustein Adrian Hall Shirley Jo Finney

Marty Rea + Rory Nolan in The Shadow of a Gunman as part of DruidO’Casey, directed by Garry Hynes PHOTO ROS KAVANAGH WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL

3

FROM THE

PRESIDENT One of the joys of SDC Executive Board and at-large committee service is that you get to spend time with other directors and choreographers, thoughtful and passionate folks working for the SDC Membership in a variety of ways. At the Board level, we are charged with seeing that the contractual and artistic rights of directors and choreographers remain protected and that their leadership in the field continues to advance. We’re perpetually examining the current theatrical terrain for what might impact our Members’ lives and livelihoods with the goal of being prepared for what’s to come.

As artists ourselves, we look, as do our colleagues across the country, for what can ensure the health of the field. We consider how, through our work, we can make a difference in the cultural and political landscape and how the vitality of our storytelling can address the present moment in ways that are truthful, provocative, astonishing, nourishing, mind-blowing, heart-expanding, relevant, community-building.

I find a similarly critical sense of connection and inspiration each time I pick up SDC Journal.

From Anne Bogart’s riveting conversation with directors Moisés Kaufman and Michel Hausmann—both of whom were born in Venezuela—on the occasion of the world-premiere stage adaptation of Las Aventuras de Juan Planchard (written and directed by Kaufman from the novel by Jonathan Jakubowicz), to Jennifer Chang’s conversation with Brian Kite and playwright Paula Vogel’s with Jared Mezzocchi, this issue of the Journal features articles in which directors and choreographers ponder the state of the theatre and how we might better forge meaningful relationships with our audiences by engaging them with stories in which they can find themselves or challenging them to bring their imaginations to complete a theatrical event. These artists bring their inquiry and insights to aesthetic and societal questions. As Hausmann states: “It’s not just the idea that theatre needs to have a space at the table, it’s that theatre should help lead the conversation.”

This issue also marks the debut of four new columns in the Journal: MUSES & MUSINGS — Members share their current sources of inspiration.

INNOVATIONS — Members working on the leading edge of production, process, and technology share their experiences.

HOW WE MET THAT CHALLENGE — Members share their approach to creative problem-solving in the rehearsal or production process.

THEATRICAL PASSPORTS — Members reflect on working internationally/interculturally.

At the current moment, when theatres face daunting economic and existential challenges and we struggle to find potential remedies—even as there is no clear agreement as to the cause— it’s more important than ever for individual artists to sharpen their purpose. The stimulating discussions in these pages reveal directors and choreographers—and writers, artistic directors, and academics—grappling with necessity and authenticity, responsibility and inclusivity, with aspiration and with craft. Through these accounts of personal artistic exploration, we find common threads and continuities with our own journeys and a sense of hopeful solidarity. We find a bit of cheer to see us through these chilly and uncertain winter months.

In Solidarity,

Evan Yionoulis Executive Board President

4 SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2024

FROM THE

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR In the fall of 2020, SDC + SDCF published On the Edge: The Lives and Livelihoods of Stage Directors and Choreographers, A Next Stage Report.

Next Stage set out to investigate the lives of directors and choreographers and to articulate the findings of that investigation so that we might find ways to enrich your lives as you play a central role in the American theatre. Over a two-year period, 2019–20, through three phases, this data-driven study looked at the artistic aspirations and financial insecurities of professional directors and choreographers across the country, both pre-pandemic and during the industry shutdown. Throughout the process and publication of the study, we sought to demonstrate why an investigation and articulation of the lives of directors and choreographers has meaning—not simply for the world of these artists individually and collectively, but for our theatres and our communities across the country. Yes, fall 2020—that fall.

PHOTO HERVÉ HÔTE

Later this spring, we will roll out On the Edge 2.0, A Next Stage Report. The study will continue to focus on hiring practices and employment trends, as well as the network of support available (or not available) to directors and choreographers at all stages of their careers. The goal of the current project is to deepen our understanding of the state of the industry for directors and choreographers across different demographics—and to produce a data set useful for comparison with the 2019–20 findings. We have partnered with the Network for Culture & Arts Policy (NCAP) once again to conduct and oversee the necessary research.

As I write this, we are deep into the analysis of the data we have received from more than 600 Members, who took on average 45 minutes to complete the anonymous survey. The survey data in isolation has limited meaning. Our work in the months ahead will include the compilation of hiring stats from SDC sources that will serve as an overlay, as well as a hard look at recommendations we made to the field in 2020 and the commitments we made to you.

I read the final proof of this issue of SDC Journal in tandem with charts and graphs and dense footnotes. As much as we need research and studies and strategy and infrastructure, the conversations contained within these pages of the Journal are the truest testament to the lives of directors and choreographers and the mission of SDC. In this issue, I see what happens when inspiration meets collaboration. Your visions, aspirations, ambitions are the inspiration; at times you are collaborators with one another, at times with other humans, and at times your collaborator is an object, or technology, or an idea, or a need.

You are the provocateurs; you are the nurturers of something bigger. There is joy in these pages.

Lots of laughter—even as you carefully, thoughtfully work to create something new by pulling threads of past practice into new ways of working. How astounding it is that the stories contained within this issue are even possible, given how under-resourced the field is at this time, how unsure many of you are of what tomorrow will bring. Still, this confusing time has brought clarity, a sense of renewed purpose. You continue to lead rooms in the field, and this issue is an example of that. The breadth and depth and vibrancy and love of the form shines through.

This issue inspires me to be your collaborator, in the service of this form, theatre—live and otherwise. In the spring, the new Next Stage report will be shared with the Membership. I look forward to discovering together how SDC, SDCF, and the field can better support your careers—and all those moments where inspiration meets collaboration.

In Solidarity,

Laura Penn Executive Director WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL

5

MUSES & MUSINGS there to work. And if anybody knows me, they know I like to do the work.

Where do you get your inspiration in general? Is it books, movies, visual art?

Fashion. I’m an avid Project Runway fan.

Vogue. Fashion dictates how you move in the clothes. And I like to use fabric because not only do bodies dance but clothes dance on our bodies. I’m into Architectural Digest, too; they make spaces beautiful and that is the same thing I try to do as a choreographer—make the space beautiful and make the vibe warm.

PHOTO KRISTI GRIFFITH

WITH DOMINIQUE KELLEY

Who or what inspired your career as a choreographer?

I always wanted to be a choreographer; I wanted to move bodies in space from a young age. My mother was one of my biggest supporters. I was dancing everywhere—in grocery stores, dancing on basketball courts, you name it— and she said, “I think this is probably something you should pursue.”

Other people who inspire me are the muses in the room. A lot of times dancers just parrot your movement, and that’s a beautiful thing and a lot of dancers are great at that, but if you can be a muse and ingest the movements, I am completely inspired. You can literally walk across the room, and I have so many ideas. Inversely, non-dancers inspire me too because they just move how they feel. There is no training, there’s no pedagogy, there are no parameters or limitations. The best is wedding dancing. If you go to a wedding and you just put on the beat, and you see how people actually move, it is one of the purest forms of movement and joy and exuberance.

Who are some of the performers that have been most inspiring in terms of being the muse in the room?

Meryl Streep. Casey Nicholaw brought me in to The Prom movie and I movement coached her. Momma is a consummate professional. She’s Meryl Streep, but she’s

6 SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2024

Another thing that inspires me is audiences. African American culture is a call-and-response culture; there’s a lot of talking to the side and whispering and cheering, whether you see a movie or a show or play. It’s the choreography in the seats that is really inspiring.

I will say, of course, music. Instrumental music, especially in LA, when you’re driving for a long time; it’s great when music has words, but if I can create my own scenario… Snarky Puppy is lifechanging for me. It’s like a jazz collective.

Literally, they can do no wrong.

The last thing that inspires me, and it’s going to sound nuts, is work that doesn’t speak to me. I try to figure out a way that I would like it by using my life. If there’s a song or a dance or a TV show that doesn’t speak to me, if I rewrite a little bit of it to make it applicable to me, my life, or my lifestyle, that’s what inspires me. Because then I have a fingerprint on it. Then I can ingest it and make it mine so then it can filter through me and become new art. It’s like I do a remix of sorts.

Tell us about preparing for The Great Gatsby, which is set in the 1920s, and working on that project at Paper Mill Playhouse in fall 2023. What were your inspirations for working on that particular time period?

The Harlem Renaissance is my favorite time period. My first show was all about the Harlem Renaissance, and it turned into my guidepost. That is my end-all be-all.

When I approached Gatsby, not only the movement, I tried to ask, “Who are these people?” Because if I can’t relate to these people, then what am I adding to this

noise? Then I thought, “Oh, the Great Gatsby. Would he be Elon Musk? Who would he be?” Or Daisy. Would she be Kim Kardashian? Would she be Meghan Markle? Would Jordan be Serena Williams or Janelle Monáe? Who would these people be?

And when I did that, I also said, “Oh, what were the famous dances of the time?”

The Charleston or the Shimmy. I thought back to what the popular dances were when I was younger—the Butterfly. The Electric Slide. The Chicken Head. There were certain dances that were just social dances—before we had social media, we had social dances. I just thought, “Oh, the Charleston. What did that remind me of?

The Kid ’N Play back in the day.” That’s all it was. I approached the movement by asking, “What would that dance be? How can I remix it so it’s something that is still indicative of the past, but something that our 2023 eyes would be able to land on and realize, that’s a social dance?” There’s nothing new under the sun. I mean, a lot of the dance that we’ve seen from back in the day, we still see it years and years later.

So, you might as well just pull from what you know, add a little bit of 2023 sauce, and keep it pushing.

You’ve talked about how important research is to you. When you are looking at particular eras like the 1920s for The Great Gatsby, do you do a lot of visual research?

Oh, my gosh. Every kind of research. I’m a millennial, so I remember the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Not only do I actually go to the library, but I also need tactile things.

Being a science nerd and a history nerd, I love diving into the little things. What kind of champagne would they have been drinking? What kind of materials did they have on? Not their backstory, necessarily, but literally, what was there? Tell me exactly what was there. I would like to zoom in and see the brand and who made the brand. I mean a deep dive, a severe deep dive.

What’s a great play or musical that you love that you feel people don’t talk about much or you don’t think people have heard of?

There are two of them. My first one is Black and Blue: A Musical Revue, which was the first show that I did in ’95, ’96.

It’s a revue of songs by Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, and all that genre of dance and music and fashion. It’s akin to Sophisticated Ladies, After Midnight, Ain’t Misbehavin’. I feel like a show like that

always needs to be around because there’s a lot of people out there who don’t like musical theatre, so if you have something that a) can teleport to another time and b) is literally just singing and dancing, it’s a great night all the way around. And it’s a way of showing Black culture without showing the trauma. I like to call it “the silent why,” where you’re seeing the effects of the turmoil and the strife, but you’re also seeing the joy and the opulence.

The second one is Falsettos, which I fell in love with during the pandemic. During the pandemic, I watched one musical every other day and took notes. I did not want to be the choreographer where a director would reference something and I had no idea what they were talking about. I tried to watch all the things, but there was something about Falsettos and James Lapine’s work [in the 2016 revival].

And also, shout-out to Spencer Liff

because he really did a great job on that choreography. It seemed so abiding and fresh and funny. Those two shows, I would love to get more of in my life and other people’s lives.

If you could have people see one thing that could tell them something about your career, and your inspiration for your work, what would it be?

Seeing rhythm in all aspects of life. My mother used to work at a special-needs school, so I was always aware of people who were differently abled, and a lot of my work—especially when I did Noise/ Funk—a lot of the people who were hearing impaired brought balloons so

they could feel the rhythm even though they couldn’t hear it.

I always want people to see the rhythm of the piece. A lot of times you might not be able to hear what I’m doing, but I want you to be able to see and feel the rhythm of the piece all the way around.

Dominique Kelley, a multi-hyphenate creative, has produced work for television, film, musical theatre, recording artists, professional sports teams, circus acts, and immersive installations.

Noah J. Ricketts, Samantha Pauly + company in The Great Gatsby at Paper Mill Playhouse, choreographed by Dominique Kelley PHOTO JEREMY DANIEL

WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL

7

INNOVATIONS

Hannah Pepper Cuningham + Bruce Young in The Most Beautiful Home...Maybe at REDCAT, co-created, written + directed by Mark Valdez + ashley sparks PHOTO ALONSO LLOSA

BY MARK VALDEZ

In 2021, in partnership with longtime collaborator ashley sparks, Mark Valdez co-created, wrote, and directed The Most Beautiful Home…Maybe, about housing insecurity. In addition to an online version/ performance, the show was performed at Mixed Blood in Minneapolis (where Valdez became Artistic Director in 2022), Syracuse Stage, REDCAT in Los Angeles, and inaugurated the new Mix Center at Arizona State University in Mesa, AZ. Right now, home ownership for Black Americans is 30 percent less than it is for white Americans. This rate is only four points higher now than it was 30 years ago. There is no state in the country where a minimum-wage earner can afford to rent or buy a two-bedroom home. Eviction filings have increased by 78 percent since 2021. Our cities and our nation are facing a housing crisis.

So, what can we do?

Make a play about housing policy, of course.

A Crisis of Faith During the years 2016–2020, I encountered a crisis of faith. As the country seemed to be falling apart, I looked back at my 20+ years of making social justice theatre and I asked myself, “What difference has it made?” It didn’t seem to matter. It hit me—hard—that making a play in the hope that someone would see it and be so moved that they

8 SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2024

would change is no way to bring about sustained change. They may have a profound experience, but I don’t believe their behavior and motivations will change. At least not in the long term and not in the way this moment called for.

Then I remembered: seeing a performance may not change people but making a performance can. That I knew to be true. That I had seen multiple times, throughout my work. So, a new question emerged: how do we include the people with the power to make change in the process of making art?

A Crisis of Imagination Over the course of 18 months, ashley and I built relationships with housing activists, advocates, government workers, elected officials, service providers, developers, and directly impacted individuals. We created relationships on the national and local levels, from Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and Enterprise Community Partners, to the Mesa Housing Department and Abundant Housing LA. When we asked partners about the challenges they faced, of course they responded with things like, “Not enough money, too little time, divisive politics,” etc. But as we probed, we were surprised by what emerged: the ability to imagine.

Many talked about the pressure to get a legislative victory, which requires getting a wide range of politicians to agree.

Consequently, policies are often narrowly drafted, to get the most people on board.

The fallout from this practice is the loss of

the ability to imagine new solutions. The reality is that the housing crisis is so big that only an act of audacious imagination might solve it. Our partners understood that, and they wanted our help.

The Most Beautiful Home…Maybe Working with our partners, we crafted a process that involved them and invited their participation in parts of the creation.

We held monthly virtual workshops where we shared scenes, gathered research, and made art (including acting, writing poetry, and on-screen hand dances). We definitely nudged them out of their comfort zones, and to their credit, they brought a lot of curiosity, grace, and some rightful skepticism.

The result was a new immersive, participatory performance called The Most Beautiful Home…Maybe. We grounded the show in the following principles:

•

You have to get unsettled to get unstuck. It’s in the moments of discomfort and disorientation that you have to stop and reconsider how to move forward. The play begins with a zebra singing a German torch song, so audiences step away from their expectations of a play and adjust to a new setting and rules.

•

If you can do one thing, you can do another. This is a basic principle of organizing. Throughout the show we asked audiences to do things—these were very simple things, often done as a group so that no one was singled out. For

•

instance, we taught the audience the home-building shuffle, a line dance that we all did together.

To achieve this, rehearsals were as much about facilitation training as they were character building.

now, and we regularly offer art-based facilitation workshops for advocates, which fill up to capacity.

How did we get here? Where are we? Where do we want to go? The show was structured into three parts: root causes, current conditions, and a beautiful future. This mirrors a structure for policymaking/ policy change. You first have to understand what happened in the past that created the conditions and policies that are in place. Next, you have to look at current policies and practices, hearing from impacted individuals about their needs and experiences. Lastly, we issued an invitation to imagine, to see a future with widespread mixed-income housing, multi-generational housing, and guaranteed housing.

The actors became skilled facilitators, maintaining the guardrails to keep the audience safe and comfortable enough to stay in the show.

What Next?

For our next project we are developing a new play, The Pasture, a queer senior sex farce about affordable housing with a guiding question: “Where will you live when you get old?” This project will use humor to broach the uncomfortable topics of aging, care needs, and affordable housing.

While this all may sound heady, the reality was a fun, playful, silly show with moments of deep emotion. Besides the line dance, audiences played a board game to imagine the future of housing, were invited to share their housing stories, and role-played eviction court… and all of this was hosted by a dazzle of zebras.

Some Indications of Hope Policy change does not adhere to a production calendar. It’s going to take time to know if/what our impact was.

But here are some early indications that, maybe, something might be shifting: At a housing teach-in event, a woman learned about community land trusts and asked if she could leave her house to the land trust in her will.

The Housing Department for the City of Mesa, AZ, now utilizes our engagement tools as part of their ongoing work and strategies.

The Mayors of Mesa and Bethlehem, PA, want to propose sessions on the project for the U.S. Conference of Mayors so that other cities can learn about the project.

We will also create new works that address housing for climate refugees, indigenous housing, and unhoused youth.

Our guiding principle for this work: To change policy, you have to first change culture. Through a sustained effort, art can do that.

Mark Valdez is the Artistic Director of Mixed Blood and Co-director of Mark-nSparks.

Housing advocates report using creative facilitation methods in their work

The Most Beautiful Home...Maybe at REDCAT, co-created, written + directed by Mark Valdez + ashley sparks PHOTO ALONSO LLOSA

WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL

9

HOW WE MET THAT CHALLENGE characters on the team really needed to know how to play. We had an audition process that tested their skills in the room: taking shots, dribbling, etc. We had an amazing coach, Amber Batchelor, who ran drills and heightened the rigor of the ensemble’s relationship to basketball itself—from footwork to the way you have to communicate as a team. From the start, I was dedicated to building the authenticity of the game on stage.

BY LILEANA BLAIN-CRUZ

For the debut of “How We Met That Challenge,” SDC Journal invited director Lileana Blain-Cruz to discuss Candrice Jones’s Flex, which was performed at Lincoln Center Theater in the summer of 2023. The play focuses on a girls’ basketball team and includes the possibility of the team winning or losing their final game.

So, Flex is truly about young women playing basketball. The incredible actresses who played the high school

The final scene—the championships— needed to feel like the ultimate game-ofall-games for this team. Some context: “Flex” is the actual name of a basketball play that involves a series of passes among a team to get past another team’s defense. After a certain number of passes, it concludes in a shot—usually a layup close to the basket. It emphasizes a trust between every single player on the team.

Throughout the entire show, we have been watching this team from Arkansas, The Lady Train, struggle with “flex”— particularly because Starra (the team’s captain and VIP) not only wants to be the star of the show, she also needs to be. She has invested her entire life in basketball. If she doesn’t make it here, she doesn’t know how she will make it at all. In this world, “Basketball Is Life” is not just a metaphor.

So the first step in getting to this pivotal final moment was teaching the actors

how to “flex,” how to truly be a team. We practiced “flex” every day, sometimes in our rehearsal room and sometimes on an actual court. It’s a kind of choreography in itself. The next step was to then make it feel like the team and the audience were at a real game. But we are in the theatre— hah!—we don’t actually have an entire other team to play against. So as a director, my work was a combination of two goals: getting the company to believably play against this invisible team, and then setting up the theatrical environment to match the reality of that game.

I love designers, and they became my greatest allies in setting up that reality.

Matt Saunders, the set designer, created a reveal of a space for the championships that actually matched the regulations of a high-school court. Costume designer Mika Eubanks crafted elevated championship team looks. Adam Honoré (lighting designer) and Palmer Hefferan (sound designer) helped articulate through design the time lapse of a game—when the invisible team would score, an unexpected foul, the Lady Train crossing to the other side of the court, the sounds of the crowd in a large space, the intense internal pressure felt by a team when time slows down. With the help of the designers, both the team and the audience could feel all the twists and turns of an hour-long

Christiana Clark + company in Flex at Lincoln Center Theater, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz PHOTO MARC J. FRANKLIN

10 SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2024

Flex at Lincoln Center Theater, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz PHOTO MARC J. FRANKLIN

If Starra made the shot, the staging and design was celebratory—loud cheers, a flourish of lights, loud music, an actual trophy and the final team chant. If Starra missed—and our SM, Chuck Turner, had to be ready to go either way!—the entire world faded away. It felt like the crowded gymnasium departed and the team was alone, lifted out of their devastation by the strength and wisdom of their coach.

Candrice wrote hope into both endings— because these women have played their hearts out. The loss can be devastating, but it cannot negate what the team has been through—their work together, their strength, their trust in each other and themselves.

Erica Matthews + Renita Lewis in Flex at Lincoln Center Theater, directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz PHOTO MARC J. FRANKLIN

game, condensed into the most intense five minutes of stage time.

In those breathless last five seconds of the game, the event was seeing Starra receive the pass that leads her to take the final shot....

(Side story: in rehearsal, I thought, wait, maybe Starra’s final shot should be a jump shot! We would get to watch the ball float through the air before sinking dramatically though the net—or devastatingly bouncing off the rim. Erica Matthews was so generous in entertaining that idea, but the shot itself is already an insane amount of pressure, so we went back to the layup,

which I soon discovered had the same kind of slow-motion effect if you set it up right.)

So, much of the feeling of hit or miss is based on the context. I realized my biggest challenge wasn’t in staging the multiple endings—it was building up the reality that the game could go either way.

I needed to craft this reality in order for it to read as the central truth of the play: that sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Through our articulation of very real circumstances, the cast and audience were able to feel genuine anticipation of the possibility of winning or losing in real time.

And so, as with most processes, I realized that the challenge is always reaching for truth in whatever way that manifests. In this play, it was the truth of the body— what it actually takes to play the game, the blending between basketball and life, the way we have to reckon with ourselves as we try to navigate and understand others, the pressure of a crowd, putting our best shot forward without knowing what might come next. I think this team met that challenge!

Lileana Blain-Cruz is a director from New York City and Miami. She is the recipient of the Drama League’s 2022 Founders Award for Excellence in Directing and is currently the Resident Director of Lincoln Center Theater.

WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL

11

THEATRICAL PASSPORTS were written. While audiences were able to see individual plays on separate nights, the project was conceived and designed as one marathon production, to be experienced as one play in three parts.

While O’Casey’s plays, now considered Irish classics, are often treated naturalistically, Druid’s production design leaned into the theatricality of both the marathon event and O’Casey’s language and sensibility.

Hynes’s direction highlighted moments that felt heightened, performative, and sometimes surreal.

PHOTO STE MURRAY

WITH GARRY HYNES

Druid Theatre’s DruidO’Casey project included three Sean O’Casey plays—The Plough and the Stars, The Shadow of a Gunman, and Juno and the Paycock—in marathon performances in New York City and Michigan in fall 2023. The plays, commonly known as the Dublin Trilogy, were originally written separately and staged individually in the 1920s at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Garry Hynes, Druid Theatre’s Co-Founder and Artistic Director and the director of DruidO’Casey, chose to stage them chronologically, in order of the dramatic events depicted—which span 1915–1922 and encompass Ireland’s Easter Rising, War of Independence, and Civil War—rather than in the sequence that they

Marty Rea, Aaron Monaghan, Sophie Lenglinger + Hilda Fay in The Plough and the Stars as part of DruidO’Casey, directed

by Garry Hynes PHOTO ROS KAVANAGH

12 SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2024

What did the decision to stage the plays in chronological order teach you about them?

I’ve done two O’Casey productions in my career before this, and one of the things that’s always worried me a bit about the plays is that unless one does a very modern production or a production totally removed from O’Casey’s ground plans or the period, then you’re forced back into this world of the Georgian tenement or the Georgian House. Knowledge of it has slipped away with time and as a result, the signaling has gone very wrong, because living in a distressed Georgian room would

now be only the recourse of the wealthy.

I think that because we were doing the three plays together, I felt able to take the decision to set them in a world that didn’t have to go for those set of references because we had a better chance of creating our own world.

A number of things became clear as we really got into rehearsals. Because the plays—to our knowledge, and as much as we could research—have never been seen together, one after the other, they tend to be swapped out one for the other, or certainly Juno and Plough do. And it became very clear as we worked on them how detailed O’Casey’s use of the historic detail of the time was, to distinguish each play. The detail of the historic events fed

Caitríona Ennis, Marty Rea + Rory Nolan in The Shadow of a Gunman as part of DruidO’Casey, directed by Garry Hynes PHOTO ROS KAVANAGH

into the domestic events in a way that I just was in awe of: the craftsmanship of that. A suspicion that I had—that the plays were first, haunted plays, and second of all, plays that haunted each other—very much affected me in the making of it.

How did you and your design team approach the monumental task of designing three separate plays into one marathon production?

I knew that we were going to more or less follow O’Casey’s ground plan, and I knew we were going to use the profile of the costumes. So then it became really a question of what material to use, what was the nature of the room?

O’Casey is often called naturalistic, but more and more, I don’t find that word useful to describe his work. His work is so performative, so it started to make sense to consciously acknowledge its performativeness by using flats, stage weights, and those kinds of references.

The use of color in the costume pieces (by set and costume designer Francis O’Connor and co-costume designer Clíodhna Hallissey) was striking.

We knew that we weren’t going to go for documentary realism, and I talked a lot about the need to be able to completely embrace the performative aspects: the music hall, the broad comedy, the ability to go from tragedy one second—I mean, [the character of] Bessie Burgess [in Plough], also our Juno, has to die at the end of the play—but I didn’t want that to stop us from absolutely bringing the characters to vivid life. Some of that thinking influenced us to go for a color range that would not necessarily have

Aaron Monaghan + Hilda Fay in Juno and the Paycock as part of DruidO’Casey, directed

by Garry Hynes PHOTO ROS KAVANAGH

been available at that time. Say something like Nora’s yellow dress [in Plough]. It’s stunning. She would not have worn something like that. But that’s part of the conscious sense of “this is going to be as theatrical as we think O’Casey was in creating these plays.”

O’Casey wrote such beautiful female characters, who you clearly also have such respect for.

When I think of it, all I can think of is O’Casey’s dedication, I think it’s in Plough, to his mother, where he says, ”To the gay laugh of my mother at the gate of the grave.” which I think is rather beautiful and wonderful and sums it up... It’s a wonderful celebration.

I think some of his celebration of women comes from the fact that—I don’t know if he ever said it—but that he was so aware of the awfulness of individuals’ lives and that in some way the women, while they

worked incredibly hard and were so poor and so on, they still had a central place in life as mothers of their children, as rearers of a family. Whereas the men, as victims of the capitalist economy, really had so little of anything to give them dignity or a sense of purpose. Somehow I tend to feel that O’Casey felt that too.

How do you think O’Casey’s legacy reverberates in modern Irish literature and theatre? Are there playwrights that you feel are working in O’Casey’s vein?

Let’s put it like this, I don’t think they are, unless they’ve been influenced by O’Casey.

Writers who write about Dublin or write urban plays and/or use a Dublin accent can easily be referenced to O’Casey. But what O’Casey does—and working on the plays like this made feel this even more—his influences were extraordinary.

He was very much influenced by the music hall. He was influenced by the Irish theatre that he saw, and then the use of music, the use of language—obviously J.M. Synge would’ve been an influence of some kind. Then there was his work at the Abbey Theatre and whatever sort of influence that was to work with those actors on a consistent basis. I just think what he came up with, which has become—people use the word “O’Caseylike” or whatever, which can seem very hackneyed—I think he was extraordinary, extraordinary as a writer.

Garry Hynes is the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Druid Theatre in Ireland and was previously Artistic Director of the Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s national theatre.

In 1998, she became the first woman to win the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play, for Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane.

WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL

13

SPEAKING

TO THE

AUDIENCE MICHEL HAUSMANN + MOISÉS KAUFMAN IN CONVERSATION WITH

ANNE BOGART In September, over Zoom, Anne Bogart spoke with Moisés Kaufman, the founder of Tectonic Theater Project, and Michel Hausmann, Artistic Director of Miami New Drama and Bogart’s former student at Columbia University School of the Arts, where she runs the Graduate Directing Concentration. The occasion for this interview was a new play: the world-premiere stage adaptation, in Spanish with English subtitles, of Las Aventuras de Juan Planchard, written and directed by Kaufman from Jonathan Jakubowicz’s acclaimed 2016 novel; the play began performances at the Colony Theatre in Miami Beach in October as a co-production between Tectonic Theater Project and Miami New Drama. (Founded by Hausmann and Kaufman, Miami New Drama develops and produces new works both in English and Spanish; Bogart has called it “the most exciting young theatre company in the South.”) Before the conversation turned to theatre, they talked about political events in Venezuela, where both men were born and raised.

14 SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2024

Moisés Kaufman + Michel Hausmann with the cast + crew of Las Aventuras de Juan Planchard at Miami New Drama, directed by Moisés Kaufman PHOTO C/O MIAMI NEW DRAMA

ANNE BOGART | It’s appropriate to start with Venezuela because it has a lot to do with why the two of you are sitting there in Miami right now. Moisés, I’d like to ask you to tell us a little bit about the genesis of this play, your first play in Spanish, and what you hope it might achieve, if you know what I mean. Obviously, a play doesn’t “achieve” something, but I think you’re on a mission a little bit.

MOISÉS KAUFMAN | I hope this will be a bilingual play that will be done all over the country. It’s a play about the rise of authoritarianism in a democratic country.

(Something I fear we can all relate to right now.) And it has subtitles when the characters speak in Spanish, so it’ll be accessible to everyone. If we’re serious about diversity, equity, and inclusion, shouldn’t we be creating work that speaks in the language of the people we’re trying to reach? Isn’t it time we have more bilingual plays in the repertory?

I left Venezuela and came to New York in 1987, and Chávez came into power in 1999.

And when Chávez came to power, for many of us here, we could see that underneath all of his so-called “socialist idealism” lurked a violent dictator. Sure enough, from 1999 until he died, we saw Venezuela’s democracy slowly perish. Crime and corruption ran rampant; inflation skyrocketed, democratic institutions were taken over by Chávez’s cronies, and in the previously wealthy country people starved to death. Also, Venezuela reached the highest murder index in the world.

ANNE | Who was killing whom in those days?

MOISÉS | Chavez let crime flourish in order to keep control of the populace. By creating havoc in the streets, people were afraid to leave their houses after 6 p.m. My sister was kidnapped, and they asked for a ransom.

ANNE | Did your family pay the ransom?

MOISÉS | They did. Over the years it felt like I was in a production of The Cherry Orchard watching my native country just vanish in front of my eyes.

And for me personally, it was doubly hard.

The plays I create often take place at the intersection of the personal and the political.

So when I started witnessing what was happening, I felt this incredible responsibility to write a play about Venezuela. I wanted to join the international outcry against the crimes that were being committed to silence the opposition. But how could I write a play about Venezuela when I hadn’t lived there in 20 years? This weighed heavily on my conscience. I went to marches and I did whatever I could from New York—I spoke against the government in the press, and I was always very vocal. But it always weighed on me that I wasn’t using my craft to speak out against Chávez and his band of criminals.

Then a mutual friend, Jonathan Jakubowicz, wrote this novel called Las Aventuras de Juan Planchard, and it became one of the WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL

15

Las Aventuras de Juan Planchard at Miami New Drama, written + directed by Moisés Kaufman LEFT Mariaca Semprún + Christian McGaffney RIGHT Orlando Urdaneta, Carlos Fabián Medina, Patrick Ball, Roberto Jaramillo + Christian McGaffney PHOTOS MORGAN SOPHIA PHOTOGRAPHY

highest-selling novels in Latin American history. It tells the story of Juan Planchard, an everyman who joins Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution and becomes obscenely wealthy through corrupt dealings. It’s a brilliant novel that portrays what happened to the people of Venezuela, and the way Jakubowicz writes it echoes Richard III’s story. The first words of the play are, “My name is Juan Planchard. I’m 29 years old. I have $50 million in my bank account. I have an apartment in Madrid, an apartment in New York, a house in Caracas, a private plane, and I am convinced that everything that I did for the Bolivarian Venezuelan Revolution was correct, and that my children will thank me for it.”

ANNE | Have you been working from that novel in conference with the writer?

MOISÉS | I got the rights, and I wrote the play based on the novel. Then I had the writer come in and he’s been giving me notes.

MICHEL HAUSMANN | I just want to interrupt you for a second. This all feels like it’s such an easy translation from a novel to a play. Any mortal would read the novel and say, “Oh, this is a big Hollywood movie.”

Nobody in their right mind would say, “Oh, this novel that takes place in private jets, in

16 SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2024

Caracas, in the Barrios, on helicopters”— nobody in their right mind would say, “Oh, this is a play. It’s Richard III.” No one, no one…except Moisés Kaufman.

But Moisés saw the theatricality of it, and he saw how this is somebody talking to the audience, talking to a jury, and that’s why you fall in love with theatre over and over again—because you can do all of that in theatre. And the work of the director really in this case is where the genius happens.

How do you tell a story that starts in an opera and then it moves into a taxi cab where there’s some fellatio going on, and then arrives at the Statue of Liberty? The way Moisés created that sequence really speaks about the director as an artist, the director as creating a layer of storytelling that is genius.

ANNE | Moisés, how do you achieve that?

MOISÉS | The novel is written in the firstperson singular. And I could immediately hear Juan speaking to the audience. Juan Planchard can come and say, “Hello, my name is Juan Planchard. Let me tell you this story. I was in Vegas with a Brazilian actress….” Then the Brazilian actress comes onstage, and Juan joins her in the reenactment of a scene. Then he steps out of the scene and goes back to being the kind

of Shakespearean narrator of the play. By doing it this way, the actor/narrator can take us from one location to another with a few sentences. It’s very theatrical and economic.

We workshopped it at Tectonic Theater Project before coming to Miami and saw that it worked really well.

But then, we found that in the second act, when Juan begins to lose control of the situation, other characters in the play take over the narration. They become a sort of Greek Chorus. So he’s losing his power by losing the narration. Imagine if in the third act of Richard III, Lady Anne begins to narrate the story….

ANNE | That’s structurally really interesting, Moisés.

MOISÉS | Well, who gets to tell whose story?

Especially in a story about a dictatorship?

What’s exciting to me is that seven of the nine actors are Venezuelan expats: artists who had to leave the country because they were vocal against the government. Five of them are unable to return to Venezuela because they would be imprisoned by the government. So here’s a group of exiled actors in the U.S., creating a play of resistance against the Venezuelan government. I love that they are the ones

who get to tell this story. But also…the actors periodically burst into tears because it’s so painful for them.

MICHEL | Some of the actors in this cast were the biggest actors of Venezuela, people who spent 40 years making a career. Elba Escobar and Orlando Urdaneta, they acted in 40 movies in— MOISÉS | They were the equivalent to Meryl Streep and Robert DeNiro in Venezuela.

MICHEL | That’s right.

ANNE | That’s amazing. Moisés, did you write the play knowing you were going to do it at Miami New Drama, and did you write for specific actors?

MOISÉS | When I first had the idea, I went to Michel and I said, “I love this novel. I want to do it with Tectonic. I would love to do a coproduction with Miami New Drama…”

Let’s backtrack a little bit and talk about Miami New Drama because it’s a very strange story that I think will contextualize Juan Planchard. A few years back, Michel had this idea of creating a theatre company in Miami. Michel, why don’t you tell that story?

ANNE | Oh, I have to say I saw the idea born when he was at Columbia in grad school.

Especially after visiting artist classes, Michel would always come up and say, “Well, I don’t like this because that’s not how a theatre should start. I’m going to start a theatre.” I remember, Michel, you were very clear about what you wanted to do.

MICHEL | I knew I didn’t want to be a director-for-hire; running a theatre company, which is what I used to do in Venezuela, is what excited me. The first conversation I had was with Moisés. I said, “Moisés, listen, I have this idea,” and Moisés looked me in the eye and said, “That’s a really stupid idea.

Miami, there’s not a lot of theatre in Miami.

I don’t think it’s going to work.” And three hours later he called me and said, “You know what? I’ve been thinking about it. It’s actually a great idea and let’s do it together.” That’s really how it happened.

ANNE | What year was that, Michel?

MICHEL | Maybe 2014, 2015. The first show we produced in Miami was in 2016, which was my thesis at Columbia, The Golem of Havana. I rented this theatre, the one I’m in now—there was a for-profit company running it. The play became such a big hit that I went to City Hall of Miami Beach, and I said, “Hey, you have this amazing

That notion of making a connection with the audience feels completely necessary right now, otherwise why are we here?

ANNE BOGART

Anne Bogart + Moisés Kaufman PHOTO LUCY GRAM

WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL

17

theatre, almost empty. Give it to us and we’ll turn it into a world-class regional theatre.”

The commissioners voted on it, and they voted unanimously to give us the keys to the building. After living in a place where democracy doesn’t work, seeing democracy work….

What we feel like we do correctly is listen.

Miami is a diverse community and we let that community tell their stories. We had a show about Elián Gonzalez [Elián], we had a show about the Miami mayoral race [The Cuban Vote], we did a show on the cocaine era of the 1980s [Confessions of a Cocaine Cowboy]. We’re doing a show about the race riots that changed the face of Miami in 1980 [Dangerous Days, based on the book The Year of Dangerous Days by Edna Buchanan]. We just had a wonderful show, Create Dangerously [based on the book by Edwidge Danticat]; Liliana Blain-Cruz wrote it about the Haitian community, and she came to direct it. When you do work that looks like the community, the community comes.

We take the word “regional” in regional theatre very seriously. If you look at our season and I ask you, where do you think this season takes place? Miami. There’s just no other way. We are regional theatres. We have a responsibility to tell stories about us.

18 SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2024

ANNE | Two things strike me. One is from the beginning, when you first came to Miami, you did a show that spoke directly to people who are in your neighborhood, in the best sense of the word neighborhood, and who it makes sense to, and I think that’s why you were given the key to the theatre, because it felt necessary. Secondly, postCOVID, it seems like in the culture we’re living in where, as you describe, Michel, so many regional theatres are so lost, there’s something about the relationship to the audience that has become clarified to me.

I was talking with my friend Leon Ingulsrud shortly after the theatre started opening after COVID; he went to see a show and I said, “How was the show, Leon?” He said, “Not so good.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Well, first of all, they never said hello to the audience.”

I’m thinking of the first line of your play, Moisés. What is it again?

MOISÉS | “My name is Juan Planchard and everything I did for the Bolivarian Revolution was right and I will be thanked by my children.”

ANNE | That notion of making a connection with the audience feels completely necessary right now, otherwise why are we here? It

seems like you are in the right place at the right time for the cultural necessity that we’re in now. Does that come from both of you understanding where we’re at or what we’re feeling?

MOISÉS | Michel and I co-founded Miami New Drama together. But this is his vision.

Not only is it his vision, the reason why it’s having so much success is because it’s a very, very daring vision. I am running Tectonic Theater Project, so I am not in on the dayto-day. Michel is running it day-to-day, and Michel has an incredible vision.

One of the first plays he did was Our Town; with permission from the estate, one of the families spoke Spanish, another one spoke English, and the other one spoke Haitian.

There were subtitles so that everybody in the audience could understand. To me, there is a daring in Michel’s vision that is really, at this moment in 2023 in America, what’s going to be needed if the theatre is going to survive.

Meaning, how do we speak immediately, viscerally to our contemporary audiences? In all their diversity? In their own language?

One of the four slots of his current season is going to be in a museum where actors tell stories about the paintings there. Whether it’s The Golem of Havana, which is a musical

that spoke to the Cuban population here in Miami, or that Our Town, he’s directly addressing his audience. In 2020 during the pandemic—he was walking to the theatre, he saw that all the stores around the theatre were empty, so he called the store owners and said, “Can I put a play on to remind people of your store?” He commissioned seven playwrights to write seven short plays and made an evening entitled Seven Deadly Sins. The audience would sit outside the store and the play would happen behind the window—and the audience could hear with headphones what the actors were saying. The idea was so good that I asked for permission to do it in New York, and Tectonic brought it in, and it was a gigantic success in New York too. [Seven Deadly Sins was produced in empty storefronts in New York’s Meatpacking District in July 2021, produced

by Tectonic Theater Project and Madison Wells Live.]

ANNE | Michel, tell us about the second space.

ANNE | Well, you already are an ambassador.

You’re an ambassador for the arts.

MICHEL | It’s the first floor of a garage, but it’s sort of a fancy Miami garage. It has high ceilings and it’s 17,000 square feet. We’re going to have a restaurant, a lobby gallery, a rehearsal space larger than the footprint of our stage, a 200-seat black box, and our office space.

MICHEL | It’s so easy to be an ambassador when I talk about Moisés. My job is so easy.

What Moisés is doing now with this show is sublime. It’s what theatre should be. It’s not just the idea that theatre needs to have a space at the table, it’s that theatre should help lead the conversation. The Laramie Project helped lead a conversation that we’re still having. It wasn’t just an asterisk, it propelled something.

MICHEL | Actually having a co-production with Tectonic Theater on something like Juan Planchard is a dream come true, because Moisés is a big artist, with big ideas. We got to a point where we can now collaborate hopefully on a yearly basis, where Tectonic has a South Florida partner. Tectonic is an amazing company without a physical theatre, which is something we have [the Colony Theatre], and now we’re going to have a second space.

MICHEL | Oh yes, absolutely. We lobbied; we created a campaign. We did all that fun stuff. And 65 percent of the voters—that’s a landslide.

ANNE | Brilliant.

MICHEL | The brilliant part of it is that you know who decided we are not only going to have $7.5 million for that space but also $7.5 million dollars to refurbish the Colony Theatre? The voters of Miami Beach. It was a ballot initiative. Voters decided by 65 percent to pay more taxes in order for culture to be at the forefront of the future of the city.

ANNE | Did you have to lobby for that?

MOISÉS | I have a terrible fear that we’re going to lose Michel to politics.

MICHEL | Zero chance. Myerav, my wife, will never let me.

To a certain degree, you walk now out in Manhattan, and you see all those Venezuelan migrants, over 100,000 of them who are overwhelming the capacities of New York City shelters. These are people who walked and crossed a very dangerous jungle between Colombia and Panama, and they walked all the way to New York and people have no idea who they are. Why? We are having all these conversations about what to do with those migrants. Here’s a story about how all of this happened, how we all let it happen, in a way. So I think that this play [Juan Planchard] is going to start the conversation from a different perspective.

ANNE | I’m so curious about what Michel is seeing when he comes to your rehearsals, Moisés. Michel, when you walk into rehearsal, what do you see that’s

Miami New Drama productions, directed by Michel Hausmann: LEFT Mia Matthews + Gerald McCullouch in Seven Deadly Sins PHOTO ERNESTO SEMPOLL MIDDLE Our Town PHOTO STIAN ROENNING RIGHT Liba Vaynberg in The Golem

of Havana PHOTO JENNY ABREU

WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL

19

blowing you away in terms of what he’s doing as a director?

them together, and that’s where the magic of theatre happens.

communities across the country but to everyone.

MICHEL | I’m a director, so I read something, and I imagine it. I don’t do it on purpose. I read something and I imagine it happening. We’ve been workshopping this play with Tectonic for four or five years.

How long, Moisés?

ANNE | That’s beautifully said. I’m curious, Moisés, you’ve got your playwright hat and you’ve got your director hat. Do they get confused or how do you manage to—

MOISÉS | We were going to do it before the pandemic and then the pandemic happened. So we workshopped it for two years, and then the pandemic happened and now we’re back.

ANNE | Do they? In rehearsal?

ANNE | Can I insert something? The fact that you said that the main character is actually blamed for so much of people’s misery is very Greek. It’s the wisdom of the Greeks, in the sense of The Persians portraying the enemies, and that’s where it’s not agitprop.

You create a dialectic between what you believe in and the confusion of misled individuals. I think that’s brilliant.

MICHEL | So it’s been four or five years that this play has also lived in my mind. The fact that I am surprised by what I’m seeing is shocking because I have thought about this play so much. And I always wonder, how is Moisés going to do this? What I’m always very shocked about Moisés’s work is just how simple it is, but behind that simplicity, there’s a ton of hours and genius behind it. It’s both so simple and kind of the only way to do it, and I would’ve never thought of it. I don’t want to be that artistic director who hangs out too long, but for me it’s a joy to go to rehearsal, and every time I go, it’s just to see what Moisés understands the audience can do in their own minds. Moisés knows how to put the elements so that the audience brings Las Aventuras de Juan Planchard at Miami New Drama, written + directed by Moisés Kaufman PHOTO MORGAN SOPHIA PHOTOGRAPHY

20 SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2024

MOISÉS | They fight all the time.

MOISÉS | Less in rehearsal. I don’t want the actors to see them fight, but they do some.

Sometimes the playwright wins, sometimes the director wins.

The thing that interests me theatrically about this play is that every major city in America has a Latinx population. Right now what happened in Venezuela—the rise of a strongman, of a dictator, an authoritarian figure—is happening in so many other countries in Latin America. In Mexico, in Peru, in Argentina. There is this wave; when Obrador was elected, basically one of the things that the people in Mexico said is, “How is it possible that we elected this man? Haven’t we seen what’s happened in Venezuela?” Around the world there is a fascination with authoritarian figures at the moment. We see it here with Trump. So I think the play speaks not only to Latinx

MOISÉS | You gave me chills, Anne, but that’s exactly right. The first act of the play is Shakespearean, one man guiding the audience: I’m going to seduce Lady Anne, and you’re going to watch it, and then after you watch it, I’m going to tell you what I think. But then in the second act, I wanted to fracture that and make it into a Greek play with a Chorus, where the Chorus is the people. In the first act he’s saying, “I’m going through this.” In the second act, people say, “Juan entered this room, and nobody wanted to look at him because we all felt he was responsible for this debacle.” All of a sudden, the audience is hearing from the people affected by Juan’s decisions. They take control of the narrative.

So I think that formally, what we’re trying to do is daring. It’s a play that poses questions

It’s not just the idea that theatre needs to have a space at the table, it’s that theatre should help lead the conversation.

MICHEL HAUSMANN

about ethics and about morality and about what compromises do we make? Juan Planchard was a middle-class guy and all of a sudden, he has the ability to make millions of dollars with one phone call to a government agent. And he says, “Why would I be the only idiot in Venezuela who’s not taking advantage of this bonanza?” He begins to make moral (or immoral) decisions that eventually in the play lead to a tragic outcome for him, but until then, it’s a very complicated ritual. I think it’s the best novel that has been written in Latin America in the last 20 years.

ANNE | As you’re speaking, Moisés, I’m thinking this would speak to people all around the United States, not to mention Latin America. I don’t know what I’m asking you, but it seems like that might be true.

MOISÉS | Yes, definitely. Look, it’s my first bilingual play in Spanish/English, so it’s a very emotional thing for me. But I believe this play should be done in theatres all over America! Because it speaks to the threat of authoritarianism, it speaks to the moral compromises we make to get ahead.

And I think after the pandemic, American audiences are very used to watching films with subtitles. I think as a culture, we’re ready to have bilingual plays done in the regional theatre circuit.

One of the things that happened to me when I came to New York, as a native Spanish speaker, I remember waking up one day after five months living here, and thinking, “Oh my God, I was dreaming in English,” and there was sorrow because I felt like I had just lost something. Working with these Venezuelan actors being in the rehearsal room speaking Spanish—I think this is a kind of homecoming for me. I grew up seeing these actors’ work on film and on stage, and now I’m working with them. It’s been very emotional. One of the actors said to

me the other day, “Yes, they exiled us, but they were not able to exile our imagination, or our desire to tell our story.”

The actor I mentioned Michel Hausmann PHOTO MORGAN SOPHIA PHOTOGRAPHY before who was a big star there told me, “Moisés, I’m loving every minute of this, but there is such was the outsider. Now when I’m making sorrow because I’m now in my seventies. this, even though I wasn’t in Venezuela, I This is the time in Venezuela where I would understand them viscerally. get a theatre named after me or a street ANNE | And do you think you have a named after me. And it’s not that I want a different sense of humor, your Venezuelan theatre named after me, but I would get that sense of humor? kind of recognition after having spent my life devoted to this art form, and instead, I MOISÉS | Definitely. am in exile trying to make ends meet, doing commercials for soap. This is something else ANNE | Can you describe what that that the so-called ‘revolution’ took from me.” difference is?

But yes, the idea is to take it to other countries in Latin America, and to bring it to New York. Then tour it around the U.S. ANNE | Moisés, you usually are in rehearsal as a director speaking English, and now you’re in rehearsal speaking Spanish. Are you a different person or different director in each language?

MOISÉS | I’m a different person, and also what I found is that a lot of my technical language in directing, I acquired in English.

So when I’m trying to direct in Spanish, the first week I felt like a pretzel. I didn’t know what language I was speaking at any given moment.

ANNE | Do you feel freer in one or the other? And this is also a question for Michel.

MOISÉS | I feel a kinship with these actors that is very unusual, very deep. When I was making The Laramie Project, the American actors had a much greater experience of what we were talking about than I did; I

MOISÉS | It is more picaro, mischievous. I think I’m more mischievous in Spanish than I am in English.

ANNE | Do you agree with that, Michel?

MICHEL | I definitely see. It’s a joy to see Moisés directing in Spanish. Actually, 15 years ago or more, we did a show together in Venezuela, which I do believe was your real first Spanish directing experience.

MOISÉS | But you directed that.

MICHEL | With you, but yes.

ANNE | What was that?

MICHEL | We did Gross Indecency in Venezuela. [Michel and Moisés codirected the Venezuelan premiere of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde in 2010.] All through my first semester at Columbia, the show was playing in Venezuela with great success.

WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL

21

Las Aventuras de Juan Planchard at Miami New Drama, written + directed by Moisés Kaufman PHOTO MORGAN SOPHIA PHOTOGRAPHY

ANNE | I’m remembering that now.

MICHEL | Yeah, yeah. There’s also a lot of, what do they say, code switching.

Venezuelans, when we’re working with Venezuelans, it’s a more relaxed environment. The actors have their own way of operating, and sometimes it can be a little frustrating. The Venezuelan rehearsal process is longer, so it’s also a matter of putting them in shape because they might believe that they have more time than they really have. And so the process, trying to inhabit both worlds at the same time, could be quite challenging, but I think to a certain degree it is also freeing. There’s a shorthand with the Venezuelan actors that might be not as easy with American actors.

ANNE | Moisés, you have to go back into rehearsal in 10 minutes. But I want to ask you, Michel, you have this new space opening, which sounds amazing. When is that going to open?

MICHEL | Well, we hope that by the fall of 2025 we will be operating.

ANNE | That’s pretty quick. That’s great. And can you describe, Michel, your dreams for the future?

MICHEL | Well, I think that before we can get to dream of the future, we have to figure out how to deal with the present. I think that we are in the midst of a really big crisis. The Mark Taper Forum, Williamstown Theatre Festival…how many theatres are cutting in half their seasons, et cetera? There’s a real reason behind it. Production costs have gone up a lot. When we started, our shows would be $350,000 per show. Now they are at least a half million, but we didn’t see that increase in audience. I think that what’s happening throughout the country is production costs are going up and the audiences are not there to make up for that gap. We also have to refocus on what it is that we care about as storytellers and go back to that, because we don’t have the money to do what we used to do. Part of the reason for me going into a museum and trying to do a play there, between you and me, is that it’s not going to cost $500,000; it’s going to cost $200,000.

MOISÉS | Between you, me, and the readers of SDC Journal.

MICHEL | It’s also out of necessity, but I’m not ashamed of saying that we’re doing it out of necessity. Some of the greatest things come out of necessity.

ANNE | Which museum are you going into?

22 SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2024

MICHEL | You know the Rubell Museum? It’s really beautiful, I think it’s the best collection of contemporary art in America.

They have two museums, one in Miami and one in Washington, DC. They’re privately owned. In the spirit of what we learned from Seven Deadly Sins, we’re commissioning six playwrights to write plays that could only take place in front of specific works of art.

If you do that play anywhere else, it doesn’t work; it creates a conversation between the museum world and the theatre world.

MOISÉS | Miami is such an event-oriented city. People there want to go to Art Basel; they want to go to a club that has a new thing. What Michel is trying to do is reach those audiences and tell them, “Hey, wait a minute. You want a real event? Come see this.” He’s done it in several different ways; during COVID he took it to the street.

Audiences that had never gone to see a show at Miami New Drama came because all of a sudden, they were hungry to see something. “Oh, what? I’m going to be sitting on the street looking inside the store window and the actors are going to be inside the store, and I’m going to be listening through the window? That sounds kind of cool.” He’s doing this thing with

the museum, where people go out into the museum. Similarly, I think Juan Planchard is going to bring a lot of Venezuelans who don’t go to the theatre because this is going to speak directly to their experience, and they’ve been longing for somebody to join the outcry against the horror that has happened.

MICHEL | Juan Planchard starts, “I am this guy, and I did this,” and he’s talking directly to the audience. That’s the one thing Netflix cannot do. They now have our playwrights because all of our playwrights are working there, but they don’t have that. In a way, that’s what Moisés for 30 years has mastered, this idea that we are in a room talking to an

audience and engaging you. His plays are using the elements that we have in theatre that Netflix doesn’t have. They can tell square stories, rectangular stories better than we can, they cannot tell 3D stories.

MOISÉS | Film is a literal medium. Theatre uses the imagination of the audience. An actor turns to the right and says, “Oh my God, I don’t want to go into that lake,” and the audience sees the lake. We don’t need to have the water. In this kind of dramatic literary form, the possibility of having an actor look at the audience’s eye and say, “I stole money from you. I was with the government. We stole money from Venezuela, but you know what? My children

will thank me for it.” All of the people who are in that theatre are going to be outraged by that speech, and then he’s going to tell you, “Well, wouldn’t you have done the same?” And all of a sudden, they’re going to go, “Wait a minute, I didn’t do the same.

That’s why I’m here.”

I believe, as I think all three of us believe, that the stage is the place where we can be having the most crucial and the most visceral and the most intimate conversations about ourselves as social beings and as members of a society.

I believe...that the stage is the place where we can be having the most crucial and the most visceral and the most intimate conversations about ourselves as social beings and as members of a society.

MOISÉS KAUFMAN

Las Aventuras de Juan Planchard at Miami New Drama, written + directed by Moisés Kaufman PHOTO MORGAN SOPHIA PHOTOGRAPHY

WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL

23

24 SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2024

Jared Mezzocchi is a two-time Obie Awardwinning theatre artist who works as a director, multimedia designer, playwright, and actor. During the pandemic, Mezzocchi was a perspicacious advocate for the creation of multimedia productions for online audiences, many of which he created with his team at Virtual Design Collective (ViDCo). His credits include co-directing, with Elizabeth Williamson, Sarah Gancher’s Russian Troll Farm, a 2020 site-specific play for the internet; and writing and performing Someone Else’s House, which was directed by Margot Bordelon at Geffen Playhouse in 2021, about his family’s true-life haunting inside a 200-year-old New England house (audiences were sent “haunting kits” with items related to the house’s history in advance of the performance to help set the scene). During the 2021–22 and 2022–23 seasons, Mezzocchi and his team filmed and edited eight readings for Paula Vogel’s Bard at the Gate series of overlooked or never-produced plays that deserve a wider audience.

This conversation took place not long after Mezzocchi returned from his most recent season at Andy’s Summer Playhouse (a youth theatre in New Hampshire that produces original works by professional artists from across the country, where he is Producing Artistic Director), and shortly before a workshop for Vogel’s newest work, Mother Play, which will open at Second Stage’s Hayes Theater in the spring.

JARED | At the end of the day, I’m a storyteller. Everyone has their tools.

Some people have pencils, some people have fabrics; my tools, very intentionally, live inside the gaps between forms. I believe that when you live between disciplines, you are forced to make your own process—you can’t fall into the systems that are in place, and that is both exhausting and also so rewarding. At the end of the day, people say, “How did you do it?” and I can’t really answer with a standard sentence. I have to actually walk through the whole process of how I did it. Russian Troll Farm is a perfect example; there was no way to explain it except to go frame by frame, because it’s the only way I can explain the organic thing that was in front of us.

greatly privileged to be launched into 3-Legged Dog in downtown New York and a club, Santos Party House in Soho, and HERE Arts Center, all of which demanded that everyone be in the room all the time and make the decisions. I’m immensely influenced by that joy, and I don’t think I can let go of that.

To the point of organic, it’s also that I was an actor first and foremost, and so the stage is the canvas. As I jumped into digital art and multimedia, specifically design, the process really dictated that we were in front of computers and then presented the work on a stage. I was

PAULA | I love that.

For me, the organic nature is in front of us. It’s never compartmentalized in different design and production meetings or in rehearsal reports. It’s always best discovered when all eyes are in the room chasing the ghosts together. We have to respond; we’re all barometers. Does this move us? And then also having started as an actor, to me, technology as character as opposed to as tool—

JARED | —now makes me say, “Well, what does the media want? How does it get what it wants? What is its super-objective?

What are its objectives in every scene?

What are its tactics? Does it change to

PAULA VOGEL | When I think of you and your work, I feel like I know you as a digital storyteller, a director, a performer, an actor, a writer, a designer, an artistic director, an educator—both as Associate Professor at University of Maryland, where you teach the MFA Design program’s projection and multimedia tracks, as well as running Andy’s Summer Playhouse. That’s a lot of hyphens for work that comes out and feels totally one-of-a-kind and, as we like to say in the trade, organic. Which is interesting because one thinks of organic as organism, and yet you’re using technological tools to produce this sense of wholeness. Does this make sense?

JARED MEZZOCCHI | It does.

PAULA | All of the hats are present, but I don’t detect voices behind the voice; rather the thing in itself has a voice, has the sense of organic wholeness. In this present moment in time, how do you describe yourself?

Paula Vogel + Jared Mezzocchi PHOTO SHOSHANAH TARKOW

WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL

25

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time at Round House Theatre, directed by Jared Mezzocchi + Ryan Rilette, with projection design by Jared Mezzocchi PHOTO COLIN HOVDE

saturation because it got something out of the character on stage?” Somebody read the note that Iago left and now everything becomes saturated, because maybe the media is corruption and paranoia and is Iago’s sidekick. Saturation is no longer an aesthetic choice, that’s a character-driven choice. At that point, I’m not making the decisions. The stage is making the decisions, the actors’ impulses are making the decisions. In class and in professional collaboration, I call this “Mediaturgy.” It’s a process that, to me, demands being in dialogue with the technology as a scene partner in an acting class. And to be honest, that leads me to hop very organically between design and directing because I feel like I’m doing the same, I’m listening and responding to the stage in front of me with the characters telling their stories, and I just add technology as a character, as part of the cast. It’s all character analysis to me.

PAULA | It seems to me that in this present moment, you are making art with other people and technology in a room, and it demands that everyone be makers.

JARED | Yes. PAULA | It feels to me that institutional theatre has demanded that we not make art, but that we specialize in one facet of

26 SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2024

artmaking. So there’s a kind of separation of our artistic impulses as storytellers, performers, designers, when we go into a more hierarchical institutional process.

JARED | For me, everything I’ve done is actually me building a sandbox, teaching everyone in the room how to play in that sandbox, and then improvising through the text and being surprised. And suddenly, the word organic comes to the foreground.

It’s about building the sandbox and then teaching everyone how to be completely comfortable. Yes, there’s a wire over there, but let’s get comfortable with it and mess around so that the actor feels really good with the technology as prop or as costume or as set in the way that they do a couch from the rehearsal room, where we all know that’s not going to be the couch on stage, but we know how to use it.

I realized in the pandemic when I started building things that were formally digital, where everything had to be through technology, that the ego sits to the side at that point because you’re all just truly players. I have such confidence in technology because it’s what I’ve used my whole life, and I feel a need to lower the anxiety in others so that we all know, “Oh, it’s just a metal box that can do things.”

Then it is just so joyful. The joy is there. That

is why I’m not a filmmaker. That is why I don’t choose to go alone in a room to make work, and I make it this way.

PAULA | Right. So basically, every room becomes a company that you’re entering. I feel very nostalgic. Once upon a time—when we did theatre in the Elizabethan Age or even the Medieval Age—we pulled a wagon into the center of the town square, and we had to be everything. We had to do it all: props, performance, selling the tickets, doing promotion, directing it, all of it. There’s a similar excitement that I feel watching you making every room into a company, where everybody is bringing all the skills that we have been taught to isolate, it seems to me, in the name of professionalism.

I watched the TED Talk about the death of your father that you did in 2014, and one of the things that really struck me, and I think it’s your presence as a performer, is that within the first five minutes, the camera showed people in the audience weeping.

They were already so hooked simply by the presence of your body and the power of the words that you were creating. Talking about the death of your father and how in that moment in time, it created a sense in you of the storytelling you needed to do.

And we watched that moment in time—45 seconds where you did not know, and

everyone else in the family knew that your father was dead. And what we see is images of your mother’s face, silent, about to have to tell you at the end of 45 seconds that he’s not alive. You just drove down through a blizzard to get to the hospital where he is, and you capture something visually through the camera with the immediacy of your body. Can you describe the epiphany of that performance?

JARED | When I close my eyes and remember that moment in the hospital, I don’t remember a full body in front of me.

I don’t even remember holding the phone when my brother-in-law called. I remember his goatee, even though he was halfway across the country calling me. In reality, I did not see the goatee, but I could feel it scratching his phone. All these different sensorial moments occur as if flipping through the memory in a non-sequential way, as if there is an emotional linearity to it.

It makes sense as emotional landscape, it’s very close up and time stops and starts; it’s like scrolling through footage and adding filters while editing a movie. And that’s grief to me. I think to overcome grief is to figure out how to press play and not feel the anxiety of it moving at a normal speed again.

I wanted to have the audience not track the seconds and minutes that I was going through but clock the jigsaw puzzle that I was trying to put together in that moment, in which you will never see the full event. It is up to you to put it together.

The power of theatre is imagination and the uncanny tapping into the uncanny valley.

The power of film is something else. For me to be standing on that stage in the TED Talk, I have to think of how to order the story I am trying to tell. I need those images to

Some people have pencils, some people have fabrics; my tools, very intentionally, live inside the gaps between forms.

JARED MEZZOCCHI pop up in response to my emotional cue, not cause an emotional cue. When my emotional status on stage cues the video, I want you to understand that you are watching refractions of what’s going on inside of me, as opposed to watching a movie behind me.

There’s something about control, there’s something about puppet-puppeteer there.

There’s something about the jigsaw puzzle of the emotional landscape. Those to me are the epiphanies that I have as a maker in multimedia because it’s not making a film and it’s not making theatre, it is actually taking the strength of both and making sure that neither are compromised.

PAULA | It feels to me that not just that TED Talk, but all your subsequent work achieves what German expressionists always aspired to, which is how can we see the emotional reality and not just the objective physical

The National Players production of Around the World in 80 Days, directed + projections designed by Jared Mezzocchi

reality? There is a warping of time and a fragmentation of what looks like a solid exterior, but it becomes fragmented in a great way.

JARED | I appreciate that, Paula, because to me, that’s why the actor’s journey is important when talking about technology on a stage, because the director doesn’t say, “I need you to cry here.” We actually need to jigsaw puzzle something that will evoke that amount of intensity inside the storyteller, so even if they don’t cry that night, that truth is still there, and they know how to navigate that. Similarly with technology, we have to piece something together to make the audience…it’s like those old Magic Eye books where you have to ask the audience to cross their eyes when they’re looking at the thing and then they achieve the completion of the image or thought. That to me is expressionism, the thing you’re talking about. You’re examining the threads underneath the carpet, and how they are woven together, so that the audience is the one who is asked to complete the overall design of the carpet or whatever the analogy is, the metaphor is. I don’t want to complete the picture for you, that’s your job. And if multimedia design starts to look more like a film, well, then I’m giving you the full idea on a screen. I don’t want to deliver that to you because then you’re passive and you’re not going to feel the same things as the actor on stage is feeling. The total theatrical event is an audience combining three things: the fractured images projected, the live actors and actions onstage, and whatever is being glued together in an audience’s imagination to complete the idea. If there isn’t activity between those three things, I just don’t find it as compelling.

PAULA | Yes, yes. Let’s see if we can come at this from a different angle. It seems to me that another really important facet of the work that you’re making is that it kind of slices in different ways what I perceive as time, so that there is the present moment in time in which I am watching, say, Someone Else’s House. The present moment in time is the act of me as an audience member watching. What happens then when you start giving me the fragmentation of images that are specifically about the past in the present moment? How does that morph time? What is the difference between me watching your body on a stage, in that presentation of time, versus having me go through a house where the 19th century is very much present and the uncanny, the unseen?

JARED | It’s a great question and it’s a really complicated one. I actually think I don’t really know the answer to that on a macro level. It’s sort of what I ask myself in WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL

27

every show. I’ve rewatched Someone Else’s House and there are certain moments where I’m like, “How did we get to that decision?” And that to me is the product of a group of people being in a room with chisels and just getting at the thing, being like, “I don’t know, on paper this should be working right now, but it’s not.”

And then I tinker and suddenly a kind of mishap happens with the technology and someone else looks at that and says, “That. Wait, that thing. Hold, hold,” and then we’re there. I just don’t think those discoveries can happen in silos, in different rooms, separated from the entire team of collaborators on and off stage.

Someone Else’s House, written + performed by Jared Mezzocchi, directed by Margot Bordelon PHOTO PATRICK BROWN, GEFFEN PLAYHOUSE

Shapeshifter, produced by Bard at the Gate + McCarter Theatre Center, directed by Halena S. Kays; digital filming + editing by ViDCo

PAULA | It seems to me that cinema is the American art form because it’s on an endless loop. And I feel that we as Americans are terrified of death, terrified of the past. We want everything to be not just in the present moment, but an ongoing, glorious future. And therefore, theatre belongs to much older cultures that are still around fireplaces, knowing that the dead are still here and that we have to embrace death, the past, and keep retelling it so it relives, if this makes any sense at all.

JARED | It makes total sense to me because I am constantly interrogating the state of grief that I’ve been in ever since my dad died 20 years ago. When you lose people who are deeply close to you, you will never un-grieve. In Someone Else’s House I talk about my dad, and yet that’s not the moment in the piece where I get smacked with his presence when I’m making it. It’s somewhere else that in the rehearsal room felt so innocuous, but as I watch, I’m like, “Oh my God, that’s my 19-year-old self, scratching at that thing again.”

PAULA | Yes. JARED | And there’s an addiction to that.

I like feeling those shards, and I said this in the TED Talk. It thrusts myself back into that moment right before my mom told me, “Actually, the last eight hours of your life were a lie. He passed yesterday.” And in that moment, I think that’s the last time in my life I was purely unadulteratedly present, and I haven’t ever been able to be that raw in my life. I don’t wish that moment upon anyone, and yet that’s the most human I’ve ever felt.

Russian Troll Farm, co-directed by Jared Mezzocchi + Elizabeth Williamson

28 SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2024

Maybe it’s what you’re saying right now; we run from that thing our whole life so when it confronts you, you are the rawest you can be. Theatre is the closest thing to that in the world for me, and so every project I do slips time because

actually my intent is truly to slice time and create a mosaic, a quilt that allows me to slide however I need to in this moment, to examine grief and mortality, life and death, in new ways through time and space. That’s why I love making the work that I make, whether it’s directing, designing, writing, performing; they’re all with that intent.

PAULA | Right. Whenever I sit down to write a work or create a work or be present in the making of a work, I’m sending a message to my brother. For those of us who’ve experienced that loss, time is forever wounded going forward. There’s a huge rupture in the notion of time.

The thing that I think is extraordinary about your work is the way it makes me aware that time is broken in some way, it’s not linear.

The past is never going away. The past is with us, our ghosts are with us.

One of the things that was extraordinary to me watching Someone Else’s House is that your work defamiliarizes my present self in an amazing way. I was sitting around my dining room table with friends from the neighborhood during the pandemic with the candles that you’d sent me in my little kit, and we were all looking at the computer. As I turned off the computer, I realized that sitting in my dining room, I was in someone else’s house. That I was already gone, that this was already a historic site.

That generations yet born were going to come through this space and I was going to become the ghost, like the ghost you had just shown me. You present fragments so that the audience makes the wholeness, and I think that’s why your work resonates.

So many works complete it for me, they cut up my steak into bite-sized pieces, but as I withdraw from your frame, I’m the one that basically has to complete it, and that causes a huge and lasting resonance.

JARED | Thank you, Paula. That means the world to me. Whether I’m conscious about doing that or not, I love that and I want that.

I want people to walk away not chewing on the complete deliverable I gave them but chewing on a thing that’s going to mean something different to them because maybe they’re going to digest it tomorrow slightly differently. I want that choice in my students with what I teach them. I want that choice for the kids at Andy’s, I want that choice for audience members. You know—where the receiver of the fragmented information has a sense of autonomy and agency to walk through their life differently after consuming the thing I gave. That’s so important to me.

PAULA | It seems to me that laypeople think of digital work and film work as giving us a

completed picture that is already consumed for us, and your work is showing us—no, it’s not, it’s exactly the opposite of that. I’m wondering if some of the resistance we’re feeling in terms of the theatrical process, and those of us who consider ourselves theatre artists, is that we have a static idea of what media gives us, that it’s complete and chewed for us and processed instead of, to use your words, shards to interrupt us as we’re trying to complete the picture.

JARED | Totally, totally, totally. I think a lot of audience members thought I made a huge pivot in my work during the last three years. But I used the same software, I used the same thought process, I used the same tactics—I was just taking the screens, which are usually upstage, and putting them in front of the stage! But making them scrim-like and something that is porous.

You’d think it’s a movie screen now, but it’s not; it’s actually still a three-dimensional thought process with live performances and live multimedia in a new site-specific configuration.

The resistance is not only from the audience, but also from makers. Some makers I think went into this moment thinking, “I guess I’m a filmmaker now,” and I just want to shake all of them. I want to

The thing that I think is extraordinary about your work is the way it makes me aware that time is broken in some way, it’s not linear....

The past is with us, our ghosts are with us.

PAULA VOGEL shake their shoulders and say, “No, you’re still a theatre artist. Use the things that you are good at and use these tools in the same way as when you get a new prop on stage that you’ve never used before.” Know that in your heart and at your core, you’re a theatre artist. I’m a theatre artist. I haven’t WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL

29

ABOVE LEFT The BFG at Andy’s Summer Playhouse, written + directed by Jared Mezzocchi PHOTO MICHAEL PORTRIE ABOVE RIGHT The Kid of Billy the Kid at Andy’s Summer Playhouse, written, directed + media designed by Jared Mezzocchi PHOTO KENDAL J. BUSH

changed one bit. And to me, theatre artists can embody writing, directing, designing, performing. I just want stories to be told in new ways on a stage in front of people.

Even now, as we pivot back to in-person performance, I’m still making work with the same tools and using all the discoveries of the last few years to inform why I make what I make no matter what stage it is on.

PAULA | If we can take a little bit of time here, I want you to talk about the impact and the influence of Andy’s Summer Playhouse.

What age were you when you first went?

JARED | I was 11 to 18, and then I came back as a staff member, as a director, and then as a playwright-director when I was 22 or 23, and I’ve been there ever since. It has been a part of my life for 22 years; it’s an incredible place where professional artists from all over the country come and make new work, working eye to eye with children ages eight to 18 to generate new types of performance for audiences of all ages. I say it that way because many people call it a children’s theatre, and all of a sudden that stigmatizes the thing. It’s not that. It is actually removing age range from the vocational access points and saying, “We all can learn from each other.” But the key is that it’s new work, so it demands trust in the room.

I need to look at that eight-year-old and say, “Why isn’t this working? Is it my text?

Is it the action I’m asking you to do? Is it the way you are saying it?” And sometimes

30 SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2024

the actor will be like, “Actually, I would say it this way,” and the playwright’s like, “That sounds so much better. Let’s do it that way.” It creates a space where, if you read a transcript of what was spoken, I don’t know that you could tell the difference between the eight-year-olds and the 40-year-olds.

And I think that reminds the older artists what playfulness actually means and reminds the younger ones of the capabilities that they have when they’re looked at as an accountable citizen in the room, and everyone is better because of that.

PAULA | The thing that always excites me is that you take terms that I feel have been static—theatre educator, education—and that we see as a divide between ourselves as artists versus theatre educators, and you make a fluidity that’s always been there.

There’s a fluidity to playfulness that we forget and have forgotten, and part of the problem is that we put it in a category where if you’re an educator, you’re not an artist. I don’t see how we could be an artist without being an educator. I don’t see how that’s possible.

JARED | I would add to that, “Oh, you’re a student, therefore you’re not an artist.

Oh, you’re a teacher, therefore….” There’s the siloing of that. I’ve seen a slip in the definition of what we are doing at a school to a kind of “SAT prep” to become an employer in the industry, as opposed to the true research and development for our industry.

I worry when we start to, as educators, fall back on our laurels and say, “Well, I just need

to teach them what to do to get the job,” as opposed to, “There’s someone, there are many people in this room who will take over the American theatre with a new idea. Who is it? And how can I facilitate that?”

You know what’s really magical? Having 20 children on stage singing gorgeous new music in front of you in a musical about dementia. That’s what we did in 2018 in our Summer of Legacy—we had a whole rap about the hippocampus; it was educational, and it was arresting. It rocked me to watch children talk about their great-greatgrandfathers not remembering their names and holding the same amount of memories in their 100-year-old heads as the eightyear-olds have in their heads, so what’s so different between us? Having an eight-yearold ask that, that’s magic, so let’s not talk about children’s theatre just opening up the kid’s head and dumping information in.

PAULA | What you’re describing is making us responsible for our own making of art, and that involves finding joyfulness and being uncomfortable. I’m seeing an eight-year-old’s point of view and it’s really shaking me to the core of what I thought I knew. That doesn’t exist anymore. So that sense of discomfort that I feel whenever I’m exposed to younger artists is a precursor to creating something completely new.

JARED | My dad, who was a behavioral management consultant for special-ed needs, always used to say, “Take what you are

pointing at and say, maybe that’s not the diagnosis, but that’s the symptom of a much-larger diagnosis.

So therefore, what is that symptom?” To me, it is a symptom of the fact that we don’t trust that our adults are able to deliver solutions to kids that are in the best interest of that community, and we don’t trust that if we give a blank slate to kids, that they will make a good decision. So therefore to me, how do we build not the work, but the environment to play so that then when the work happens, everyone in the room can say, “Oops, I don’t know how this got here. Interesting.”

What is exciting across the board for all ages is how do we build a risky, uncomfortable room that is safe for everybody in the room to arrive at new thoughts that could be transformational to everyone who takes them in? That’s scary for the leader, too, because it might not be what the leader wants. And so therefore, again, it goes back to the actor’s journey. Let’s not walk into a room and say, “How do we make everybody laugh or how do we make everybody cry?” How do we name the tactics so that our intentionality is clear, and we can arrive anywhere?

Andy’s has been the place that has been my calisthenics. It’s a community that trusts me, I grew up in it. I know its impact for kids because I was a kid there. Now I’m the theatre educator and I’m the leader of artists who are dealing with scary moments of wondering, is my work going to be good?

And so I have to help guide them through those thoughts, I have to guide the kids through environments where adults are also scared. It’s not me holding their hands; it’s just me protecting the space so that they can do whatever the hell they want.

That’s a great calisthenics to then go into a much larger academic institution, to go into an Off-Broadway theatre, to go into a commissioned work and pitch an idea.

PAULA | Yes. Gorgeous. I would hope that you might take me by the hand and guide me through a specific project that you’re already in the act of making with your collaborator on Russian Troll Farm, Sarah Gancher.

JARED | Totally. Sarah Gancher is one of my favorite people to work with, and she too is a multihyphenate. She’s a musician, she’s a writer, she’s a thinker, she’s a creator.

Annie Hamburger of En Garde Arts came to each of us individually and said, “I want to give you the opportunity to make a dream project. What would you want? We both, without talking to each other, said, “I don’t know what it is, but I want to be with”—and I said Sarah and Sarah said me. And so it was like, “Well, let’s do it!” [According to the En Garde Arts website, the Untitled Red Hook History Project, co-commissioned with Vineyard Theatre, is a multimedia site-specific piece inspired by the history of the Red Hook watering hole and music venue Sunny’s; it will be produced in the Fall of 2024.]

Sunny’s Bar means a tremendous amount to Sarah—and through Sarah, means a tremendous amount to me. Sarah uses a term called “deep time,” which I love. We are looking at a building on a piece of land, and really slicing that piece of space on

We’re terrified of technology. My little sliver of making work is to say, “What would it take to not be afraid of that? What would it take to wield that in the most human of ways?”

JARED MEZZOCCHI

Earth through hundreds if not thousands of years, and we are inviting an audience to meet us at a space down the street where they learn the history of it. We have cameras and we’re recording each of them taking on slices, fragments, shards of the history of the place. Then we’re taking those files and when we walk, we almost parade to the bar. We will be doing outdoor projections and once you walk in, miniature projections all over the bar that are remixing the things we just filmed of the audience so that they

see themselves as refractions of time inside a space, and then we have a drink, and we play some music.

The goal of it is to understand a very beautiful, challenging, deep story of the bar, of the family that owned the bar, of the new owner of the bar, of the people in that area, of the communities that that bar stitches together and weaves together. But also— going back to everything we’re talking about—hopefully it will ask you to say, “Boy, I’m now inside this history. I’m now a thing that has placed a flag down here. I exist.”

I’m curious what that will do to a participant when they leave. Does that happen to them back at their house as well? Can we reverberate the thing to be like, “What is time?” I read Slaughterhouse 5 right after my dad died and the idea that time is like the Rocky Mountains where every peak is always there, it’s just that humans can only climb one at a time—that to me helps me grieve my dad. I’m still hugging him then, it’s on a different peak.

And so in a way, that kind of epiphany is very resonant in this idea that Sarah and I are working on with Sunny’s. But we also talk about how we could go anywhere in the world and use this rubric almost like creating loop pedals as a musician would of different strands of music, and then when you reach the event, which is entering the bar, the loop station is totally activated and you’re seeing all of time. And perhaps someone from 1920 is doing something that almost looks uncannily like they’re interacting with someone from 2021, that you’re starting to see time in a very different way.

PAULA | Right. You’re seeing it in a synthetic fragment rather than stretched out in a linear way. I can’t wait to go and experience this, and how sensational to be in the flesh.

What questions do you want to be asked in this moment of time, or what question do you want to answer or pose in this moment of time?

JARED | I think we are in a risk-reward-fear cycle in the theatre. It’s interesting being a creator—particularly in the role of director— that is investing time in technology and new work. I’m a fairly new entity in the directorial landscape and so there is a large amount of unknowns with the work I’m exploring, but I absolutely love pitching it and finding collaborators who say yes to it. It’s a very interesting thing to confront, though, within the current state of theatre. As I’m finding with all of my playwright collaborators, creating exciting new multimedia works— with Crystal Skillman, with Sarah Gancher, WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL

31

The Lost World at University of Maryland, written + directed

by Jared Mezzocchi PHOTO JARED SCHAUBERT

with Sona Tatoyan, with Jen Tullock and Frank Winters, Jen Barclay and Hannah Khalil—I get to witness them for the first time be confronted by theatres with the tension of, “What do you mean all this technology is going to be used? We want an organic story.” And I’m like, “Oh, I’ve been answering that for about 15 years now. Let me show you how organic this can get!”

I now understand that this is a new question that is being confronted right now. What is most compelling to me as to why I like using technology is—well, I walk outside, and people are almost getting hit by cars because they’re on their phones. So if we are truly the art of holding a mirror up to society, then look at us! We are abusers of this thing, and we are afraid of it. Look at the AI. conversation. We’re terrified of technology. My little sliver of making work is to say, “What would it take to not be afraid of that? What would it take to wield that in the most human of ways?” That may not mean that we have to write work about technology, but using technology in the piece in an unwieldy and organic way can remind us, like socks can become puppets, that we can make magic with these things.

That’s the topic that I want to confront as we are exiting a two-year hiatus of being back in-person and everyone saying, “Screw

32 SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2024

digital,” because—you and I, Paula, we talk about this a lot—quite a lot of new audience members are coming to the digital platform because they are unable to make it for various reasons to the space. I’m wondering whose stories we’re missing because we aren’t making the room to make work that is using technology as a conduit to the stage.

Bard at the Gate is doing that. The shows you are picking are not about technology, but we’re using technology to shine a light.

So let’s just take a moment every morning and say, “What if we were able to have full control of the thing? What would that look like?”

PAULA | Yes. And you basically just answered the last question that I had for you, which is how can technology play a role in reducing our physical and spiritual isolation?

JARED | Here’s a little anecdote. My dad bought me my first guitar—I don’t play it publicly, but it is a form of therapy for me—and I remember when I first learned it, I played him a song and he said, “Jared, get your voice ahead of the strings.” And I asked, “What do you mean?” He said, “Just get your voice. Don’t worry about the rhythm, don’t worry about that. Just sing.” I sang and all of a sudden, the guitar kept up, and I’m feeling that with technology right now. Just sing. Get over it.

When we did Russian Troll Farm, Sarah’s first question was, “What do we need to remove from the script so that it can be a digital piece? Let’s remove the make-out scene.

Let’s remove the sex scene.” And I said, “Well, no. That’s really good in the story.

That is the moment of collusion between two of these people. What if—?” And we solved it. That is getting your voice ahead of the instrument. So that’s what it’ll take—it will take a leap. Let’s do it, and let’s show everyone what we could do when our voices get ahead of the technology instead of the other way.

PAULA | I need to thank you for blowing my mind by working with me and creating the last two seasons of Bard at the Gate. I’m completely convinced that we have to use technology, which is the most democratic, accessible form we can use to bring new life to a form that has been all about a patron and the aristocrats having the best seats while the peasants can’t afford the price of tickets, and that is the American theatre.

There is a way that you are reinvigorating the form, and I absolutely think of you as a theatre artist, and I can’t thank you enough for how your voice has reinvigorated my imagination.

RUNNING

20 THE

Ashley D. Nguyen in King of the Yees at Signature Theatre, directed by Jennifer Chang PHOTO CHRISTOPHER MUELLER

—LEGGED

RACE

JENNIFER CHANG + BRIAN KITE IN CONVERSATION WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL

33

SDC Journal invited Brian Kite, Dean of UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, to speak with his friend and colleague Jennifer Chang about directing, teaching, and making theatre in Los Angeles. Their conversation took place at UCLA just after Chang returned to California from Arlington, VA, where she directed Lauren Yee’s King of the Yees at Signature Theatre.

ABOVE Brian Kite +

Jennifer Chang CENTER Katherine Sigismund + Joel Gelman in Chalk Rep’s production of Gallery Secrets at the Natural History Museum of LA, directed by Andrew Borba PHOTO REBECCA BONEBRAKE RIGHT Amin El-Gamal, Brian

Slaten + Feodor Chin in Chalk Rep’s production of Lady Windermere’s Fan at UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, directed by Jennifer Chang PHOTO REBECCA BONEBRAKE

34 SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2024

Jennifer Chang is a multihyphenate storyteller and educator. The recipient of LADCC and APAFT Awards for Direction, she was a finalist for the SDCF Fichandler Award. She has participated in Directors Lab West, received a Drama League New York Fellowship, and was a Classical Directing Fellow at The Old Globe. She is an Associate Professor at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television and a Member of SDC, AGMA, SAG-AFTRA, and AEA. Her upcoming directing projects include The Far Country by Lloyd Suh at Berkeley Rep and What Became of Us by Shayan Lotfi at Atlantic Theater Company.

Brian Kite is an award-winning director, a professor, and the Dean of UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television. He’s the former producing artistic director at La Mirada Theatre. Honored with an LA Ovation Award for best direction of a musical, he also pioneered U.S. performances in Beijing and across China. He holds a visiting professor appointment at Shanghai Theatre Academy and recently directed the premiere of the new musical, Irena, in Warsaw, Poland.

BRIAN KITE | I’d like to start by asking you about your company, Chalk Repertory Theatre, which you established with your classmates from the MFA program at the University of California, San Diego. Chalk Rep is now in its 12th season of creating site-specific work in Los Angeles. Are you still officially the Artistic Director?

JENNIFER CHANG | No. We rotated and my dear friend and colleague, Amy Ellenberger is currently the Artistic Producing Director, but I was up until the past year, a Co-artistic Producing Director. I know, it’s a mouthful.

BRIAN | The period of COVID is a tough time to have been the artistic director.

JENNIFER | The benefit of being a siteresponsive theatre company is that we have always been committed to not having our own brick-and-mortar space. We were always looking for found spaces—part of “necessity being the mother of invention.”

In the middle of the recession in 2008, when we were all arriving in Los Angeles, we were craving work. We didn’t know who to go to. Here we were, these folks with a lot of training, not knowing a lot of people except each other, and we thought—why not create work with one another? When we were looking at the existing ecosystem, we saw that a lot of money was being spent on set building and on stuff, and not as many resources were being devoted to the people

who made the art. In a film town, we could embrace the idea of location scouting and finding locations that would make sense to illuminate the storytelling.

And thus, Chalk Rep was born out of a couple ideas. One of my co-founders was directing Family Planning—a play by another UCSD alum, Julia Edwards—about a couple trying to conceive; they were taking that play into people’s houses, and there was a bit of a Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? aspect in that there was a younger couple and a slightly older couple

all in childbearing years, and the audience would divvy up and follow the two couples through the house.

We also formed an association with Hollywood Forever Cemetery because we wanted to do Three Sisters there.

[Three Sisters, the company’s first show, was produced in the Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in January 2009.] We had a vision for casting that was identity-conscious casting before we even knew what that word was; we wanted to reflect the world as we understood it. We grew up with diverse student bodies in our training, but we were still not yet seeing that diversity reflected on the stage. It was very much, “Here’s the Asian show, here’s the Black show, here’s the Latinx show.” But where was the crossroads for folks coming

from different identities and still making sense to the storytelling? That was the challenge for the founding of the company.

BRIAN | When you ended up running a company, did you have to spend most of your time focused on business and keeping it afloat?

JENNIFER | We were lucky in that it really started off with a bang and a lot of solid support; and it was a bit more ad hoc in terms of our staffing, so we saved money there. Slowly but surely, we have built up

what the company is; even in the pandemic, we created site-responsive programming, with five short plays that were set on locations along the Expo Metro Line. We had audio engineers go to those locations and do sound mapping in their recording so that when you went and listened to these plays, you could have a three-dimensional experience even if you were stuck at home.

BRIAN | You mentioned that part of the mission was to use these locations to illuminate the stories. Were you also focused on illuminating the locations, the city itself?

JENNIFER | Yes. I think there is, in Los Angeles, a feeling that we are not always focused on LA talent and LA stories, and we definitely wanted to showcase not just the LA talent, but also introduce LA to fellow Los WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL

35

TOP Ashley D. Nguyen, Sylvia Kwan, Grant Chang + Jacob Yeh in

King of the Yees at Signature Theatre, directed by Jennifer Chang PHOTO DJ COREY PHOTOGRAPHY BOTTOM LEFT Paul Yen + Scott Ly in Vietgone at East West Players,

directed by Jennifer Chang PHOTO MICHAEL LAMONT BOTTOM RIGHT Brooke Iva Lohman + Zhengyi Bai in On Gold

Mountain at LA Opera, directed by Jennifer Chang PHOTO TASO PAPADAKIS

36 SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2024

Angelinos. We had productions at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, the La Brea Tar Pits, the Natural History Museum, in a luxury high rise, and homes throughout the greater Los Angeles area.

We got lucky and were able to produce at Hollywood Forever Cemetery at a time when it was just starting its cultural programming and wanted to become a cultural hub. It was a wonderful connection to bringing people into locations they wouldn’t otherwise have gone to.

I sometimes say I am a bit of a locksmith, where I’m trying to listen to the pings and ticks in a lock to see, what does the play want to be, or how does it want to get unlocked?

JENNIFER CHANG

BRIAN | It says on the Chalk Rep website, the theatre’s focus—and you just talked about this—is being expansive, inclusive, non-traditional, and rule-breaking. You were thinking about identity-conscious casting long ago, before we all started talking about it, so let’s fast-forward to now. You’ve been exploring this a lot longer than just a more recent part of your career. How does that influence who you are as a director now, and do you take those lessons forward?

JENNIFER | If I’m directing a play today that is dealing with specifics in terms of the culture, I think that I have a responsibility to be as specific and authentic as possible, as authentic as I can make it from what I have come to learn about that culture.

According to skills that are necessary for the production, what are the skills that are needed from the collaborators to tell as authentic and specific a story as possible?

That, I think, is my general approach.

I think there’s been an increasing trend toward becoming more and more specific in casting and in descriptions from writers, but backtracking from where we are today—to when roles were described by personality types—I think I’ve always been very much of the opinion of challenging, well, what does that mean? We can’t just immediately go to this dominant hegemonic point of view about what’s normal or standard or whatever it is. Asking who can play those parts, and how can we challenge our ideas of who can play those parts, has always been a real passion of mine. And because of my own identity—I’m a petite person who identifies as femme and Asian and presents as Asian. I have black hair; I have brown eyes. In terms of training and my history as an actor, what have been the limitations that the world has set up and where can I challenge those expectations?

BRIAN | Do you want to talk about those limitations? Is there any movement that’s going in any positive direction at all?

Because sometimes I wonder.

JENNIFER | Sometimes I wonder. I think as a director, I am very much aware of how my identity plays out in terms of leadership spaces. I’m not somebody who can just— and not to say that this should be a thing anyway—but you can’t just bray at people to get results. That might be acceptable behavior from people with different physical attributes, but I think for me to be able to get what I need to have happen in a room, I have had to really lean into the ideals of collaboration and the emotional labor that goes with inclusion. How do I get everybody who’s on my team to play along and do what I think the production needs to tell the story the best that I possibly can, as the leader of the team? And sometimes that means pretending it’s not my idea.

BRIAN | Yes. JENNIFER | But again, it’s really about leaning into the spirit of collaboration and feeling like I am hearing every single idea and giving it the credence it needs, so that everyone can feel heard and seen and appreciated for being in the collaborative process.

BRIAN | I do think a director’s job is often to inspire the artists around them to do their very best work, but what you’re describing is something that’s more expansive. We’re struggling in the field right now to figure out the role of the director in the room, and where that fits with everybody else, and how leadership of art and companies works— even how our rehearsal rooms work. Have

you been forced to actually work through some of these issues that you’re describing?

JENNIFER | What I have embraced in this pandemic—because we’ve all experienced this collective trauma of COVID—is that time is my most precious commodity and I cannot waste any of it doing something that isn’t joyful and filled with kindness. So, I have made a commitment to myself and every company that I’m a part of that the time spent has to be full of joy, and I have to lead with kindness because that’s what we all deserve in the limited time we have.

BRIAN | On your website, you say, “I love language and believe in the fundamental need for fun and joy.” I think that’s maybe what you’re talking about. On the website you also say, “My aspirations and responsibilities do not exist in my AAPI community and identity alone.”

JENNIFER | Yes. BRIAN | Do you want to say more about that?

JENNIFER | What does that mean? Well, I think one of the A’s is American, and in that identity of being American, it includes all of the history of what is in this land mass whose borders have been created, the history that has happened here, and the storytelling that’s happened here on this land that were unceded territories of indigenous people, where enslaved people were brought, where folks from the Asian American community came over for various reasons and experienced hardships like the Chinese Exclusion Act. What is the complexity of this experiment called America? I don’t think that I’m supposed to, as a storyteller, just tell AsianAmerican stories. I think I’m supposed to tell and challenge the conversation of what it means to be an American.

BRIAN | Thank you. Let’s talk about craft.

Let’s talk about your directorial process, strategies, techniques you’ve found particularly effective when you’re trying to bring a script to life. Who are you as a director, how do you like to work?

JENNIFER | Well, I think my directing career found me. Maybe if I’d ever seen anyone who looked like me model that for me as I was coming up in training, or even as a kid watching things and seeing interviews, maybe I would’ve come to directing sooner, because I do feel like there’s something about the process that feels very much like a duck to water. I feel very at home being able to steer the ship. I always joke when I’m introducing myself at the meet-and-greets WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL

37

Jennifer Chang rehearsing with students at UCLA PHOTO BEN YAWN

that I’m the cruise director because I’m here to make sure that everyone’s having a good time and that we’re also all going in the right direction.

BRIAN | You get a better production if you do that. It’s true. What’s happening in a rehearsal room for sure is reflected on the stage when you get to opening night.

JENNIFER | Absolutely. That’s my MO in terms of how a process even begins; I am committed to having a good time. It might be a challenging time, it might be a lot of hard work, but that doesn’t mean that we also aren’t going to have a lot of laughs and jokes.

BRIAN | Do you find that sometimes concerns the stage managers in the room with you? My stage manager’s always like, “Are you going to do any work? Because I only see us goofing around.” Me: “I’m doing work. This is the work.”

JENNIFER | Every now and then somebody— usually not the stage manager, because I think I’m pretty good at time management— but every now and then someone else like the music director says, “This is a very giggly room of people.”

But back to directing. As a kid, I played the piano, I did ballet. These skills—musicality, rhythm, movement, space—all play into

38 SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2024

being a director. Part of where I start is close readings of a text and listening for the musicality. I sometimes say I am a bit of a locksmith, where I’m trying to listen to the pings and ticks in a lock to see, what does the play want to be, or how does it want to get unlocked? What is the musical phrasing?

How then does spacing and the acting support that musicality? I definitely start there. Also, because I had such an imposter syndrome of having trained as an actor, not as a director, I completely nerd out on visual compositions. What do you see, how does it make you feel, and how to make mise-enscène with different objects and different people, and what is the visual storytelling that’s happening on stage in combination with the musicality of the language?

BRIAN | You’re moving your hands a lot while you’re describing that, and I wish we could get that somehow in this article. But trust me, she’s really visualizing it as she’s describing her process.

DAVID McKENNA | Can I ask a question?

BRIAN | Absolutely! This is coming from our sound engineer for the day, David McKenna.

DAVID | You were talking about craft and that you indicate that you look for elements of tempo and pacing and rhythm. I would love to hear some examples of that because that sounds like a very specific tool.

JENNIFER | I’m happy to talk about that.

Having gone to the MFA program at UC San Diego, a major component of my training as an actor was studying classical text. “Classical,” of course, is a word that is very challenging right now, so I should say, because I also use it for my own work, “heightened language.” How do you work with heightened language and how do you make sense of it?

You have to use the musicality of the text, the tempo, rhythm, how you use ideas, how you express ideas with consonants, and how you express feelings with vowels. How do you phrase meaning within the phrase? The first scene of King of the Yees is really tricky because we’re teaching the audience how to consume the story, right? In the first 20 minutes, you have to set up the rules of the world, which is that it’s going to be a fastpaced world, but you also have to lay all of the plot breadcrumbs because it all comes into play in Act Two. We’re planting seeds for mayhem and setting up the rhythm of how jokes are going to be set up—the rules of three, we have to move through this text, there’s no space in between these lines. There might be a pause right here that we’ve earned because we’ve moved through this text with this rhythm, and a pause here so that she can take in the room and then have a reaction, and then

Where are we, how do we move forward, and what leaders and systems need to emerge from all this to bring us forward?

BRIAN KITE

you’ll be able to have a laugh from the audience. I don’t know if that answers the question?

DAVID | It actually segues perfectly into another question, which is specifically going with actor rhythm. Invariably you’ve come across individuals that didn’t quite sync with the tempo that you had in your mind for the piece. How do you get them to sync back up?

JENNIFER | Invariably, you’ll be in a room with actors who have different experiences of training, whether they’ve just come out of school, whether they’ve had lots of training, whether they’ve been in the school of hard knocks and have all their training from being in shows.

King of the Yees was really interesting. For the father-daughter relationship, why they had so much chemistry together was also the reason why we had to work on their rhythm. The actors are very much heartcentric artists who are very emotionally available, but the characters they’re playing are not necessarily emotionally available to one another and therefore they have to be in rhythm with the text because they’re idea people.

These actors would both want to feel and then say the line, have a response, and then say the next line—but actually what they had to keep in mind about the characters was to act on the line, which is interesting, because you say, “Well, acting is actually listening, and then reacting.”

The challenge was to take the timing of their listening in the time that they started getting an impulse from the other person of the information they’re receiving, and

make sure that they then act on the line in time. Finding that rhythm of the text was a challenge, but it ended up being something that delivered at the end of the play, when they have a scene where the two of them can be much more vulnerable with one another; they’ve earned that because of how they’ve approached the rhythm of the play.

BRIAN | What’s the most challenging piece that you’ve directed?

JENNIFER | Oh my God, isn’t it every single one of them?

BRIAN | I feel that every time. I think, “Why do I do this? What a terrible choice,” each time I’m in the middle of it. Not when I start, but in the middle of each process, I wonder, “Why did I choose this career?”

JENNIFER | There’s always a moment as we’re getting closer and closer to taking your hands off the cake, so to speak, in the Great British Baking Show analogy of this.

I’m like, “Have I served my collaborators enough? Have I given them all the tools they’ve needed? Have I been able to whisper to them the things that they need to hear to be able to unlock the best possible performances?” There’s always a day where I feel like, “I have made a terrible mistake, I’m in the wrong field.”

BRIAN | Yes, absolutely, that day—there’s been a mistake, everybody.

JENNIFER | King of the Yees was healing in its themes and story but also so hard. The tone of the play is everything. There is great heart, there’s great joy, there’s great comedy, and the comedy is so hard. Fine-tuning the comedy with the various characters that all the actors had to play—it’s only a company of five, but three of them have to play a cast of thousands, and so every moment offstage is a quick-change or a run-around to a totally different entrance.

I think every show has its challenges and you think, “Oh God, how are we going to run this 20-legged race?” Because that’s what it is: you strap yourself to these strangers who you’ve not trained with to run this multi-legged race up a hill under a certain amount of time. If you think about it, theatre is absolutely impossible, and yet it gets done— BRIAN | Over and over.

JENNIFER | Over and over and over again.

BRIAN | So, let’s talk about it getting done.

The field right now is struggling. You just did a show at Signature Theatre, an established,

well-known working theatre that seems to be surviving through really difficult times. Many theatres are not.

We just had a convening here in Los Angeles of all theatremakers in LA that I think were available. We all came together, thanks to Center Theatre Group and the work that Snehal Desai’s doing there to bring us together. It’s been a long time since I felt that sense of community. I remembered, “Oh, there is a community here, we are focused on a goal.” But there was also a lot of apprehension and fear and concern and talk about the basic finance of how we keep doing what we’re doing. Not to mention getting into the actual work itself and how we need to look at the way we’ve been doing things and everything that needs to change. Where are we, how do we move forward, and what leaders and systems need to emerge from all this to bring us forward?

JENNIFER | I think it really does start with community. I was at Milwaukee Rep earlier this year, and they’re one of the few LORT theatres that are actually in the black. I was really impressed with the way that they are engaged in their community. Are they perfect? No. Are they working on things? Yes. They know their community and they know what their community wants, but they’re also bringing in material that’s challenging, and they’re invested in local artists in a way that I don’t think we are here in Los Angeles.

I got picked up at the airport on the way to the theatre and my Lyft driver and I struck up a conversation and he asked me what I was doing in town. I said I was directing a play at Milwaukee Rep, and the Lyft driver is a subscriber to the theatre and was excited to check out the play. They have volunteers—very dedicated volunteers— who help out and who build relationships with the artists who come in. The theatre seems to have made personal investments in the volunteers to bring them into the artistic community, and we just don’t do that here in LA. There’s no reason why, in a town with this much talent, why there needs to be talent brought in from anywhere else. I get that we want to be part of a national network of artmakers and artmaking, but it hasn’t felt like there’s been as strong a focus on Los Angeles talent. How do we grow talent?

Reviews are potentially ways to grow as an artist, but who’s reviewing, through what lens? How do we build a pipeline for BIPOC reviewers? How are we distinguishing between reviews of for-profit theatre and not-for-profit theatre, and acknowledging how those different projects get made WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL

39

financially and who’s involved, and what are the goals of that artmaking?

we can’t do the same with our local theatre artists.

I know that in visual art, there are studio invites for visual artists to invite reviewers and friends and gallery owners to come get a glimpse of their process, and that really makes sense to me. I also spoke to somebody who reviews visual art and says, “Oh, we know as an industry that a Jasper Johns retrospective can handle being critiqued in one way and an up-and-coming artist can’t be critiqued in the same way because their financial livelihood and their artistic voice can’t take that kind of hit.”

Where’s that acknowledgement in our field?

I don’t think that we have an investment in artists in this way.

BRIAN | What about audiences? Are we losing audiences? How do we make sure that they’re still staying engaged in the work?

And I’m speaking to you with maybe your artistic director’s hat on.

BRIAN | When you say that, who are you speaking to? Who can fix this problem— because that’s actually a mystery now, too?

JENNIFER | Good question, who can? But I also don’t think that in-person experiences are dead or dying, because look at the amount of money that we’re willing to spend on sports and concerts. But again, that’s because people have a vested interest in the artists or entities, and I don’t see why

40 SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2024

JENNIFER | This is complicated in terms of the finances. Is the ticket price so out of reach for somebody to be able to come in on an introductory level? Partly it’s capitalism. I mean, this is where our conversation is going to be difficult to unpack. There’s capitalism...

that gets produced across the Atlantic that gets supported by the government in a very different way than how we support work in the United States.

BRIAN | Yes, as you know, I often find work overseas and internationally. It’s very different.

BRIAN | Good, let’s make it complicated.

JENNIFER | The way that government subsidizes work for individual artists, the artistic freedom that artists have—it’s the reason why so many folks are in academia like you and I, so that we can have this kind of support to help us do the work that we want to do. That’s difficult for your average freelance artist.

JENNIFER | Where do we even start with this? Okay, so the studio system can develop work and give it as much money as it needs to get developed for streaming at home, and now we’ve acclimated an audience of people to experience that storytelling at home. That means that whatever they’re experiencing live has to be different.

BRIAN | I don’t know if people realize that in a research university, we’re required to do our academics and also keep our creative professional careers going at a national or international level. How do you find your time in academia intersecting with your professional life? Do they complement each other in some way?

BRIAN | Yes.

JENNIFER | Oh, 100 percent. I could not be the teacher I am if my work was not honest.

The knowledge and experience that I have to bring to the classroom are things that I am

JENNIFER | How do we develop that live work in America? We don’t. There’s work

utilizing in a rehearsal room out in the field, so I’m not making anything up. In the time that we spend in the classroom, which isn’t very much time, I want to make sure that my students get some real skills from me and that they can develop into the artists that they’re meant to become with lessons or exercises that I found to be incredibly helpful for my own work.

I think being out in the field, being vulnerable, struggling with story or grappling in the dark with how a story wants to be told, and being in that very vulnerable place, keeps me very honest as an educator of what I think is important for students to take away from the classroom into their own professional lives.

BRIAN | For me, being forced to say something out loud in the classroom makes me better when I’m in the professional rehearsal room, because I’ve had to call out what I’m actually doing.

JENNIFER | Yes, and to also have that experience of being in the classroom and viewing something through new eyes is so illuminating and illustrative of how to approach it, even in the field.

BRIAN | What advice would you give to young directors, up-and-coming directors, particularly directors of color, about working and making their mark in this business?

already started a family, and I live in the “wrong city” for being a theatre director.

And I am not a freelancer full-time, but that’s okay because I do want to be home raising my children most of the time.

BRIAN | Which is really hard to do as a director. I think every director thinks, “Can I even have a family?” That’s part of the decision-making that you go through when you’re going down this path.

JENNIFER | Which is why I have a job, a fulltime job here with you.

BRIAN | It’s not just because you love what you do.

JENNIFER | I love what I do. The question of what you want to do with the time you have on this Earth is really a driving force for me. Where would you want to live, how do you want to live it to lead a happy life? I feel very lucky that I have a great job where I am supported in my research and the UCLA community wants me to be out in the field furthering my profile, my research, so that I can also excel within academia. And I love teaching. I love being able to stay honest and vulnerable. There’s nothing more vulnerable than being in the classroom in front of people and having to stand up for what you’re trying to tell them or teach them.

There’s nothing more vulnerable than being in the classroom in front of people and having to stand up for what you’re trying to tell them or teach them.

JENNIFER CHANG

OPPOSITE Jacob Yeh + Ashley D.

Nguyen in King of the Yees at Signature Theatre PHOTO DJ COREY PHOTOGRAPHY ABOVE On Gold Mountain at LA

Opera, directed by Jennifer Chang PHOTO TASO PAPADAKIS

JENNIFER | I’d say that I did everything wrong! My MFA is in acting, my directing career really didn’t get started until I’d WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL

41

SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

In this issue of the SDC Journal Peer-Reviewed Section (PRS), we focus on training for directors and choreographers, both in institutions of higher learning and as ongoing professional development at any stage of one’s career. This interest in training is central to the PRS mission, which was founded to build and fortify bridges between scholarship and practice, the academy and the professions. The book review and essay in this issue center on this mission.

In the past five years, widespread cultural changes during the pandemic and powerful movements for racial justice, equity, and ethics have inspired shifts in awareness that radically impacted the field of theatre as well as directors’ and choreographers’ roles within it. Training to develop new skills and to refine cultural competencies is increasingly necessary. The changing field and professions require new ways of working and collaborating to foster more equitable and ethical spaces, to build racial justice and gender equity, and to include diversity of ability, amongst other vital areas of growth in theatre.

In a special editorial essay, PRS Co-editor Emily A. Rollie draws on her combined expertise as a director, scholar of directing, intimacy director, and teacher to contextualize the value of intimacy training as a key part of directing training. Dr. Rollie emphasizes the value and impact of intimacy training as a foundational value to building inclusive artistic spaces and as a natural connection to directing curricula. In the book review, Shadow Zimmerman reviews The Directors Lab: Techniques, Methods, and Conversations About All Things Theatre, curated and edited by Evan Tsitsias. Considering the Directors Labs in New York, Chicago, and Toronto, the book mirrors the components of the lab gatherings and offers a glimpse into the professional development opportunities fostered by the labs for directors in many stages of their careers. We hope both pieces will build advance interest in SDC readers for an upcoming issue of the Journal that focuses on the academy, examining the rich interplay between higher education and the profession.

EDITED + INTRODUCED BY

ANN M. SHANAHAN + EMILY A. ROLLIE

SDCJ-PRS SPECIAL EDITORIAL ESSAY

CONSENT IN/AS COLLABORATION: TEACHING CONSENT AND INTIMACY PRACTICES IN THE DIRECTING CLASSROOM

BY EMILY A. ROLLIE, CENTRAL WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

Last winter, in a Directing II class, the students and I utilized case studies—an active learning approach to discussing best practices and strategies for working with actors and other collaborators. Once each week to start class, a student drew a scenario from an envelope, read it to the class, and offered their initial assessment and response, followed by a group discussion. Based on real life examples that are often complicated with no singular answer, the case studies were a class favorite and often resulted in lively discussion (such that it usually required use of a timer to ensure we had time for other class work). One day, a student drew the following: You’re directing a play that features two characters who are teenagers and, in the play’s action, are supposed to have an ‘immediate physical attraction’ to each other. They also share what your producer keeps calling a ‘steamy’ scene together. One actor comes to you and tells you that they are having a hard time acting opposite the other actor because they are not ‘giving as much’ emotionally as the actor thinks their scene partner could, making it hard for them to create the passion needed for the scene. You, too, have noticed that the actor seems to be holding back or hesitating. What do you do?

42

SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION | WINTER 2024

After reading the scenario aloud, the student quickly and matter-offactly stated, “Well, that’s why there’s intimacy choreography, right?”

Their comment was immediately echoed by their classmates, who nodded in agreement. “Yep, set the intimacy and then it doesn’t have to be an emotions thing.” “Totally. Intimacy choreography. Then it can work within both actors’ boundaries.” “For sure. And then as directors, we can remind them that they have the self-care cue if they need it anytime, too.”

That moment characterizes many conversations in my classroom, particularly the directing classroom where I aim to model the creation of a space in which to grapple with the “uncomfortable” and engage in collaborative conversation and creation methods that are inclusive of collaborators and their diverse backgrounds, identities, and abilities.1 In the words of Anne Bogart, as a director and teacher of directing, “my job is to cultivate the kind of spaciousness where permission is possible. I try to create the room in which everyone is both participating and responsible” (26). As such, over the last five years, I have revised my directing curriculum to embed elements of intimacy training and consent-based directorial practices within conversations about collaboration and the director’s work. I believe directors are particularly well-poised to

FIG. 1. Rollie works with student directors. PHOTO SEQUOIA GOOD

introduce consent-forward and consent-based tools in the rehearsal space, and having specific training in intimacy and consent-based or consent-forward practices can enable directors to do that, whether they have the skills and competencies to stage actual moments of intimacy themselves or not.

In Theatrical Intimacy Education trainings and the book Staging Sex, Chelsea Pace and Laura Rikard link the emergence of the modern director to (at least part of) the development of and reliance on our “yes and…” expectations for actors. While a beneficial tool for building scenes in improv, the “yes and…” mentality leaves little to no room for actors to articulate their boundaries, often historically forcing them to enact moments, in this context intimate moments, beyond their boundaries that become potentially dangerous physically, mentally, and/or emotionally. Directors such as Edward Gordon Craig, who is famous (or perhaps infamous) for musings about the actor as “über-marionette”2 and as the “obedient” actor, as well as some auteur directors, further reinforced this perspective, emphasizing—perhaps unwittingly—the director-actor hierarchy and creating a power dynamic that divides the director and actor.

Additionally, this hierarchy was and is fed by structures of patriarchy and white privilege, creating systemic inequalities that further complicate and minimize artists’ agency in the room.

While directing practice has thankfully evolved and moved increasingly toward more collaborative and less hierarchical models and methods, it is important to recognize the position and power directors and choreographers continue to hold in the room. Chelsea Pace writes in Staging Sex, “no matter how egalitarian, consensusbased, and all-around awesome and approachable you may be, you are still the director, the authority in the room…the cast has been conditioned into certain attitudes through years of training to see you and your requests in a certain way” (7). For those who are also teachers, the institutional power of grading structures and requirements as well as mentorship relationships further amplify power inequalities in the rehearsal and classroom space. Because of these social, institutional, and other structures that surround and

inform our learning and creative spaces, we cannot entirely give that power away, and as artistic leaders in the spaces, directors perhaps should not entirely divest themselves of the responsibilities associated with artistic leadership that is important to a unified production approach. However, as directors, choreographers, teachers, and leaders, we can be aware of the power and position we hold, and, even more importantly, we can incorporate practices, tools, and techniques to decentralize the power and to honor and support collaborators’ boundaries and contributions.

Adding to this conversation are movements such as #MeToo, #NotInOurHouse, and #TimesUp, which all point to the need to reexamine conversations of consent in theatrical practice. The conversations resulting from these movements, coupled with efforts to incorporate antiracist practices into classrooms and theatre programs as a way to redistribute power and recognize voices that have long been silenced and ignored, also prompts directors to re-consider how young directors are trained to negotiate power structures in and around rehearsal and learning spaces.3 By incorporating intimacy training into directing pedagogies and curricula, I, as a teacher of directing, strive to support young and emerging directors in developing and utilizing tools to have productive conversations about boundaries and consent in their own artistic work—thus furthering the use of consent-based culture in the field and, I argue, helping them become stronger collaborators overall.

Indeed, many directing books consider collaboration and discuss “how to work with actors” with most contemporary texts foregrounding collaborative, inclusive working practices. Robert Knopf’s The Director as Collaborator (2017) and Robert Cohen’s Working Together in Theatre: Collaboration and Leadership (2011) both center collaboration as it relates to directing and artistic leadership. Additionally, Jean Burgess’s Collaborative Stage Directing: A Guide to Creating and Managing a Positive Theatre Environment (2019) specifically takes up the question of collaboration and creating a community of care in rehearsal. Burgess writes, “When WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

43

FIG. 2. Rollie (R) in rehearsal with assistant director Marcus Wolf. PHOTO SEQUOIA GOOD

the ensemble feels respected and safe, they are more willing to take creative risks” and further offers that “when the ensemble experience ownership in the project, productivity will increase as well” (21-22).

To support the collaborative, inclusive environment, Burgess urges directors to consider actors’ mental safety alongside physical safety, and she suggests using open-ended questions—questions that do not simply have a yes/no answer and offer dialogue rather than an assumed yes (also a frequent tool of the intimacy director). While Burgess does briefly mention hiring an “intimacy expert,” there is no mention of consent or boundaries or training in intimacy techniques for directors (66).

At this juncture, few directing texts specifically discuss how directors might create a space or utilize strategies for actors to articulate boundaries or consent. However, even the most collaborative, well-intentioned directors might say to an actor, “You can tell me no,” but the fact remains that the power structures embedded into many creative practices and rehearsal rooms—and that are further reinforced and exacerbated by white supremacy, heteronormative patriarchy, ableism, capitalism—can, for some actors and collaborators, render that option challenging and, in some instances, non-existent.

In the profession, directors and choreographers—especially in recent years and supported by SDC—are having more conversations about intimacy and best practices for staging intimacy. For instance, the Summer 2019 SDC Journal offered a “glimpse into some of the wide-ranging approaches and responses to this rapidly evolving movement” of intimacy direction (Penn 6), and included a “What I Learned” feature by Robert O’Hara about collaborating with intimacy director Claire Warden on Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play, as well as an article by Stephanie Coen that incorporated interviews with directors, intimacy directors, and educators, including Theatrical Intimacy Education co-founder Chelsea Pace and Adam Noble, a member of what was then Intimacy Directors International. Around the same time, SDC sent a booklet to its members. Titled “Staging Intimacy,” the pocket-sized text drew from workshops and conversations between SDC and intimacy organizations such as TIE and IDI/IDC

44

SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION | WINTER 2024

and offered directors and choreographers basic terminology in intimacy choreography. While not comprehensive and, notably, largely uncredited, its publication made a statement about SDC’s recognition that directors and choreographers should be aware of this conversation and field.4 As an associate faculty member with Theatrical Intimacy Education and a founding member of Pacific Northwest Theatrical Intimacy Collective, I regularly teach weekend workshops and conference sessions in intimacy practices and tools. Looking around the rooms at those workshops as well as when I participate in workshops with organizations such as Intimacy Directors and Coordinators (IDC), Intimacy Coordinators of Color (ICOC), and National Society of Intimacy Professionals (NSIP, Canada), I notice many artists in the room are directors and choreographers who recognize the need to change the conversation in our fields surrounding consent and intimacy and who seek to include more consent-based practices in their work. Further, many of the contributors to publications such as the Journal of Consent-Based Performance are directors, working in both the profession and higher education.

Clearly, directorial interest in intimacy exists, but why wait until directors are working in the field or want more “specialized” training?

Why not include it in undergraduate directing curricula?

At the institution where I work, I teach intimacy techniques such as boundary practices and consent-based tools in the classroom at multiple levels. In the first days of Acting I, a class composed of first year BFA Performance and BFA Musical Theatre students, I introduce the self-care cue (a de-loaded word that is known by the ensemble and that someone might use to indicate that they have a need to be addressed that will enable them to consent to what is being asked of them) as well as different types of boundaries and language they can use to clearly and efficiently communicate their physical boundaries to their scene partners. With the Directing I students, I review these tools and continue to build upon them, offering the directors the practice of open-ended questions (such as “how would it work for you if…” or “what would you think about…”) and discussing with

them the ways that directors can incorporate de-loaded language when working with actors as well as craft audition calls that offer as much information as possible to actors as a way to embed consentbased processes from the very beginning. Directing II students hone these skills further while also learning and applying more specific language such as TIE’s “ingredients” (i.e. de-loaded, de-sexualized language used to choreograph intimacy and specifically describe the movement techniques used to stage the intimacy), which then not only allows the actions to be repeatable and documented but also ensures the actors are not being asked to bring their own lived, intimate experiences on stage but can instead rely on their technique and the choreographed movement.

While I do similar exercises with casts in rehearsal, incorporating this work into the classroom offers me more time to teach it and allows for a multi-pronged approach of exercises, application, and discussion, which gives students an opportunity to work with the concepts in multiple ways, offering greater synthesis of the ideas.

Much like interdisciplinary learning that carries understanding across contexts and thus provides deeper learning, incorporating intimacy practices in the classroom allows students to see how it unfolds on multiple levels and in diverse practices. For student directors in particular, it allows them to experience and actually practice how they incorporate the tools into their work and ways of thinking.

Certainly, the importance of qualification and competency is key to note. We want to have qualified people in the space, particularly when it comes to staging intimacy, and part of those qualifications should also be competency in the needs of the stories being told on stage. Thus, incorporating intimacy training into directing curricula allows new directors not only to practice creating a consent-based space and utilizing the tools but also to recognize when they need someone more qualified in the room to support the work.

Ideally, even a director trained in consent-based and consentforward tools can and would hire an intimacy choreographer. This offers yet another point of contact throughout the rehearsal process and support for actors in the collaborative space as well as an artistic collaborator in the room with an eye specifically focused on supporting the stories of intimacy throughout the production (which I call the “dramaturgy of touch”). Kimberly Senior in her essay “Director to Director: Why Intimacy Direction is a Necessity” echoes this idea, positing that “it is our job, the Director’s job, to give the actors everything possible to make sure they feel emotionally and physically safe” and “it is our job to make sure their work in every stunning moment of this play we are safeguarding is repeatable performance to performance while maintaining the illusion of spontaneity” (16)— which, for Senior, is collaborating with an intimacy choreographer who can stand outside of the director-actor relationship and has an eye for the nuanced, intimate storytelling of the play. As Chelsea Pace writes, intimacy choreography “is not about empowering actors at the expense of directors, but rather actors and directors alike gaining a vocabulary to meet the demands of the art they are creating together” (7). And what director wouldn’t want that?

Along with having more time in a classroom scenario to teach intimacy practices and consent and boundaries tools, I also can tie intimacy and consent-based practices to directing classes’ regular use of Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process (CRP) as a method for the students and me to provide artist-centered feedback that enhances the creator’s agency. Lerman’s approach ties well into intimacy training, which similarly seeks to enhance actors’ agency when staging intimate scenes and articulating their boundaries. By linking the CRP to intimacy tools, student directors see and experience firsthand the ways that supporting the agency of all artists in the room can be beneficial to the larger creative process. They also begin to

see that intimacy isn’t a standalone tool but an undergirding concept that infuses the collaborative process overall.

Incorporating consent-based tools and the lens of intimacy choreography in the directing classroom also helps student directors become more aware of power structures at play in the entire creative process and how they navigate them. For instance, discussing physical boundaries and open-ended questions with student directors helps them consider more carefully when and/ or if they need to make contact with performers when staging or working on moments outside of intimacy. (It is important to note that, when staging moments of intimacy, best practice is that the intimacy choreographer doesn’t step in or demonstrate the intimacy, as that can drastically impact the power dynamics in the space and undermines the goal to support the actors’ work and individual boundaries.) Additionally, discussing different types of boundaries and considering techniques of intimacy choreography helps student directors consider more carefully how the intimacy of a play contributes to the overall storytelling and, by extension, realize the myriad of ways one could tell the physical story of “a kiss,” which then can offer greater flexibility in casting and actors’ boundaries as well as more creative visual storytelling options overall. Further, open-ended questions and considering their positionality also helps student directors consider how to engage in truly collaborative conversations with designers and facilitate design conversations rather than simply making demands.

While the aforementioned class discussion provides an anecdotal glimpse of how student directors have embraced intimacy practices in their directorial perspectives, I have witnessed other benefits to including intimacy training and consent and boundaries tools into my directing curriculum and pedagogy.

I see student directors becoming more specific in their process and their language when working with actors. Intimacy choreography is about making repeatable actions that are specific and clear, and convey the same impact for audience without putting actors in the muddy place of living in the emotion or having to draw on lived intimate experience, which they may or may not have. After all, as one of my favorite Theatrical Intimacy Education shirts reads, “Passion fades. Choreography remains.” When I introduce student directors to intimacy training such as the de-loaded language of choreographic ingredients, they begin to employ this same specificity in the rest of their direction, working with the actors’ boundaries and artistic ideas but making the moments consistent, repeatable, and—most importantly—specific. It also seems to translate into their work with designers. They become more aware of how they collaborate with designers and offer specific directorial ideas but also support and listen to designers’ expertise and ideas. Also, by using the self-care cue and then asking the collaborator, “what do you need?”, student directors learn how to listen and be specific in attending to their collaborator’s needs or questions, without justifying or over-talking (as many directors, including myself, are admittedly prone to do). This specificity also works in tandem with Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process, which also requires students to be specific in their feedback by framing suggestions beginning with “I have a suggestion about , how do you feel about hearing it?”—an approach that helps reinforce the ways that clarity and consent can positively influence the productivity of rehearsal and a greater sense of ensemble.

I see student directors planning ahead and being more conscious of how the play and their vision might impact actors and their collaborators. They also are more cognizant of and intentional in considering when they might require additional help or resources.

In our recent Student Short Works Festival, several student directors WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

45

voice, “That would have made all the difference for me. I was always so confused when my director called me by my character’s name.”

I see student directors realizing how the communication of boundaries is an opportunity rather than a limitation. Occasionally, when introducing the term “boundaries,” some people bristle, concerned that opening the space to articulate boundaries will limit the creative risks taken in the space. However, in my experience, the effect is quite the opposite. When artists can articulate their boundaries to their collaborators and know those boundaries will be heard and honored, they are then able to create more fully. Rather than moving through the creative space with a constant fear their boundaries will be overstepped or needs ignored—an experience that can prompt actors to hold back or exist solely in survival mode— they know they and their collaborators have tools to communicate effectively and that their boundaries can help shape the project. After all, “limits are a necessary partner in the creative act as well as in the crafting of a successful life” (Bogart 54). Even if an actor never utters the self-care cue, the simple fact that they know they have the tool in their proverbial toolbox can be game changing, both for the artist and the overall culture of the rehearsal space.

FIG. 3. Rollie leads a workshop in consent-based practices for

directors. PHOTO SEQUOIA GOOD

reached out to me for help in choreographing specific moments of intimacy, which in the past they said they “just would have said to the actors ‘just go for it’.” Student directors also have initiated conversations with student playwrights about what story the intimate moment is telling rather than what the specific intimacy is.

Meanwhile, the student actors, when they feel like they have voices heard by their colleagues and director-collaborators, are willing to take larger creative risks because they know they have tools to communicate any needs and that they are supported.

I see student directors more clearly understanding the difference between professional and personal boundaries as well as incorporating de-roleing techniques (i.e. techniques often used by actors to step out of character and recognize the distinction between actor and character) for themselves—especially important when directing fellow students and moving between, for instance, the personal relationship of being roommates and the working relationship of actor and director in the rehearsal space. This practice also prepares students for the professional field, where directors navigate a variety of personal and professional relationships regularly.

I see student directors considering the ways their work supports actors’ work as technique. Rather than referring to “the sexy scene” which could activate some actors, or at least make the work of staging the intimacy even more awkward than it already is, for instance, student directors use the intimacy protocols discussed in class to instead simply refer to the scene as “scene 4” or “the end of act 1,” which is a subtle yet powerful shift in language that can make the space more inclusive for all. Similarly, when giving notes and working with actors, I have seen student directors making the distinction between actor and character—a line that can, as many studies and the history of many acting methodologies have demonstrated, often become blurred and sometimes prove dangerous for actors, particularly young actors. As such, they might refer to the actor’s technique or artistic choice using the actor’s name and then asking the actor about the character’s motivation—a clear, simple distinction between the actor as a human/artist and the character as the fictional entity. In one class session after I offered this strategy, one student director commented, a note of relief in their

46

SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION | WINTER 2024

I see student directors thinking about their positionality in the rehearsal room, considering how they might hold power, even and perhaps especially with their peers, and how their actions, in addition to their language, can create spaces where their collaborators can create more fully. Just as Laura Rikard and Amanda Rose Villareal prompt leaders in artistic spaces to “pause and reflect” and ask themselves if they have “been unintentionally relying on the words ‘safe’ or ‘brave’ to do the work of characterizing your processes and spaces, rather than relying upon action to do so?” (9), I strive to encourage directing students to consider the ways they can lead while also using, offering, and supporting the tools of consent and boundaries with their teams throughout the process.

Certainly, this is not to say that we have been miseducating student directors or setting them loose on the field without ethical education; however, the emergence of intimacy choreography and related practices as well as the field’s increased awareness of inequity and need for creating a consent-based culture provide an opportune moment to re-think how to talk with student directors about collaboration and the director’s role therein. Just as the professional field of intimacy direction expands, grows, and evolves, and collaborations between directors/choreographers and intimacy choreographers increase, there is need and opportunity to reflect and support the change happening in the field in the classroom, equipping students with tools to go into the field and continue to change it for the better.

In the article, “Education in Theatrical Intimacy as Ethical Practice for University Theatre,” published in an intimacy-focused issue of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Susanne Shawyer and Kim Shively examine the use of boundary establishment protocols as an ethical practice, ultimately arguing that including training in theatrical intimacy techniques can create an ethical and cultural shift in educational and university theatre programs. In addition to fostering a culture of ethics, as undergraduate student Kaila Roach so clearly outlines, “Educating students on consent-based practices is not a want; it is a need” (3).

Much like Shawyer, Shively, Roach, and others, I am interested and invested in changing the culture and conversation about consent in the field by training students in consent, boundaries, and intimacy practices in the classroom as well as in rehearsal spaces. Particularly when it comes to creating a consent-based rehearsal culture, not only actors should be educated about the tools that can benefit their

agency and advocacy for their boundaries but also directors. In fact, if we focus predominantly on cultivating these tools with actors but not directors, is it possible that the historical divide between actordirector that intimacy practices intend to bridge only increases?

As intimacy choreographer Claire Warden notes in a 2018 American Theatre article by Carey Purcell, “My hope, my intention, and my dream is that the next generation of actors, writers, and directors come out with a very different understanding of respect and consent with their bodies and each other’s bodies…And that leads us into an even more free and safe way to create deep, authentic, risky stories.”

Ultimately, by training directing students in intimacy techniques and consent-based practices, we, as teachers and mentors, better support students’ development as artists and humans, creating more empathy and understanding in the work and interactions as well as building opportunities for deeply collaborative, truly inclusive artistic spaces.

NOTES

1. Often the term “brave space” is used. While that often is a more accurate term than “safe space” in regard to inhabiting and staging the often-uncomfortable moments of theatrical conflict and drama, there has been significant conversation around the complexities of the term “brave spaces” as it relates to inclusion, safety, and artistic practice. See Arao and Clemens, Zheng, and Rikard and Villareal.

in the Classroom and Beyond, edited by Ayshia Mackie-Stephenson, Routledge, 2024.

Shawyer, Susanne and Kim Shively. “Education in Theatrical Intimacy as Ethical Practice for University Theatre.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, vol. 1, no. 34, Fall 2019, pp. 87-104.

Villareal, Amanda Rose. “The Evolution of Consent-Based Performance: A Literature Review.” Journal of Consent-Based Performance, issue 1, vol. 1, Spring 2022, pp. 5-25, https://doi.org/10.46787/jcbp.v1i1.2811.

Zheng, Lily. “Why Your Brave Space Sucks.” The Stanford Daily, 15 May 2016, https://stanforddaily.com/2016/05/15/why-your-brave-space-sucks/.

Emily A. Rollie (PhD, she/her) is a director, intimacy choreographer, and associate professor of theatre at Central Washington University. As a director and intimacy choreographer, Emily has worked in venues around the country, with emphasis on new play development and intersectional feminist and queer performance. She is associate faculty for Theatrical Intimacy Education (TIE), a founding member of the PNW Theatrical Intimacy Collective, a registered yoga instructor who leads Yoga for Artists workshops, and co-editor of the SDC Journal Peer-Reviewed Section.

2. For a discussion of the evolution of Craig’s ideas about the actor’s role in artistic creation, see Lyons.

3. For more on the overlap between consent-based practices and antiracist theatre practices, see Lindsey and Rollie.

4. It should be noted that while the named and recognized field of intimacy direction (including intimacy choreography in live performance and intimacy coordination in film/tv) is relatively new, many theatre artists—particularly many artists of the global majority as well as women, trans, queer, and disabled artists—often have historically worked to create communities of care and consent in artistic spaces. See Villareal.

WORKS CITED

Arao, Brad and Kristi Clemens. “From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces: A New Way to Frame Dialogue Around Diversity and Social Justice.” The Art of Effective Facilitation, Stylus Publishing, 2013, pp. 135-150.

Bogart, Anne. What’s the Story?: Essays about Art, Theatre, and Storytelling.

Routledge, 2014.

Burgess, Jean. Collaborative Stage Directing: A Guide to Creating and Managing a Positive Theatre Environment. Routledge, 2019.

Lindsey, Natashia and Emily A. Rollie. “Beyond ‘Yes, and…’: Consent in the Theatre Arts Curriculum, On-stage and Off.” Consent: Legacies, Representations, and Frameworks for the Future, edited by Sophie Franklin, Hannah Piercy, Arya Thampuran and Rebecca White, Routledge, 2024.

Lyons, Charles R. “Gordon Craig’s Concept of the Actor.” Educational Theatre Journal, vol. 16, no. 3, October 1964, pp. 258-269.

Pace, Chelsea with Laura Rikard. Staging Sex. Routledge, 2020.

Penn, Laura. “From the Executive Director.” SDC Journal, vol. 7, no. 3, Summer 2019, p. 6.

Purcell, Carey. “Intimate Exchanges.” American Theatre, 23 October 2018, https://www.americantheatre.org/2018/10/23/intimate-exchanges/.

Rikard, Laura and Amanda Rose Villareal. “Focus on Impact, not Intention: Moving from ‘Safe’ Spaces to Spaces of Acceptable Risk.” Journal of Consent-Based Performance, issue 2, vol. 1, 14 February 2023, pp. 1-16, https://journals.calstate.edu/jcbp/article/view/3646/3171.

Roach, Kaila. “The Impact of Intimacy Choreography and Consent-Based Practices in Undergraduate Actor Training.” Journal of Consent-Based Performance, Fall 2022, pp. 1-14.

Senior, Kimberly. “Director to Director: Why Intimacy Direction is a Necessity.” Intimacy Directing for Theatre: Creating a Culture of Consent

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW The Directors Lab: Techniques, Methods, and Conversations About All Things Theatre Edited by Evan Tsitsias Playwrights Canada Press, 2020.

440 PP. $24.95 Paperback Evan Tsitsias, professional multi-hyphenate artist (director, artistic director, playwright, and musical theatre educator) and associate of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab and Chicago Directors Lab as well as co-founder of Directors Lab North in Toronto, curated and edited The Directors Lab before the COVID-19 pandemic, publishing the collection in April 2020. However, the text’s value has only increased in the past three years. After the difficulties of collaboration in a post-COVID world, Tsitsias’s collection helps directors develop the skills necessary to face and overcome these challenges. Anne Cattaneo, resident dramaturg at Lincoln Center Theater and creator of the Directors Lab, prefaces the book with a beautifully and succinctly written history of the organization, highlighting the theme of space which resonates throughout the collection. She notes that the Directors Lab originated in New York City when “space was cheap, shows could be put up for very little money, and a thousand flowers bloomed” (XI). Inexpensive, accessible space facilitated the meaningful connection between directors and playwrights which is at the heart of the Directors Lab. However, a physical space can only hold so many people, no matter how large, inexpensive, and accessible, so the Directors Lab blossomed into

an organization that deliberately fostered multiple spaces for these collaborations. Mirroring the goals of the organization,

WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

47

Tsitsias’s text shapes an intellectual space inviting artists, especially directors, across the country to find collaborators to pair with in the still-thriving new works scene.

The methodology of the collection matches the emphasis of its content on collaboration, with each section crowd-sourced through interviews with multiple directors, including playwrightdirectors, artistic directors, and musical theatre directors. The book is divided into four sections: “Master Classes,” “Breakout Sessions,” “Conversations,” and the closing practical guide aptly titled “The Manual.” “Conversations” includes interviews with directors and serves as the spine of the collection. Directors reading the text are likely to be inspired by the detailed advice interviewees provide regarding their success directing new works. Each “Conversation” is paired with a relevant “Master Class” and “Breakout Session” to trace relevant topics such as new play development or accessibility in more depth. For instance, conversations with directors Peter Hinton and Akram Khan (both interviewed by Elif Işıközlü) and Yvette Nolan (interviewed by Nancy McAlear) connect to premieres of the featured director’s work in 2016 or 2017. These productions and the corresponding interviews tackle issues of adaptation and nonverbal expression across multiple genres and styles—from dance opera to experimental play. The Master Class and Breakout Sessions paired with conversations concern heightened language and tablework, both relevant to the adaptations and nontraditional productions headed by Hinton, Khan, and Nolan.

In the first two (of four) Breakout Sessions and opening Master Class, Tsitsias mirrors successful sessions from the Directors Lab. In the first Breakout Session, Tsitsias gives the readers three vital questions for a director: “What does a director do?”; “What is the role of theatre and the theatre artist?”; and “What is the role of the audience and how do you include them in the work?” Tsitsias’s second Breakout Session discusses the objectives of tablework to help directors decide whether to include it in their rehearsal process or not. Jeannette Lambermont-Morey’s Master Class on heightened language encourages directors to coach actors in actively listening, both to the characters they play—the words coming out of their own mouths— and others. Each section of Conversation, Master Class, and Breakout Session effectively guides directors at all levels of experience through tackling difficult and/or nontraditional works.

The next Conversations section features playwright-directors: Daniel MacIvor (interviewed by Briana Brown); Judith Thompson and Kat Sandler (interviewed by Richard Beaune); Morris Panych and Ken MacDonald (interviewed by Heather Cant); and Brad Fraser (interviewed by Peter Pasyk). These Conversations are more holistic in scope, addressing larger themes and comparisons between works across artists’ careers. They address collaboration with artists working in other mediums and/or disciplines, effective organization of the directing process, and the successful development of new works.

The Master Class paired with this Conversation, “Dramaturgy and New Play Development” by Andrea Romaldi, is especially productive and interdisciplinary in examining directing in conversation with dramaturgy, as both dramaturgs and directors are equally concerned with staging plays which impact their audiences profoundly.

The remaining Conversations feature interviews with artistic directors—Josephine Ridge and Naomi Campbell (interviewed by Allegra Fulton and Heather Cant) and Richard Rose (interviewed

by Allegra Fulton)—and with a musical theatre director, Vincent de Tourdonnet (interviewed by Shelly Meichenbaum and Tracy Michailidis). Ridge and Campbell’s discussion of “Curating Festivals” is particularly pragmatic. The singular focus of this and de Tourdonnet’s interview make these two arguably the most valuable reads in the book. Notably, the Master Class “Retreating to/Re-treating from

48

SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION | WINTER 2024

‘Irreconcilable Space’” by Jill Carter offers an important interrogation of the concept of space central to the collection. Carter, an Anishinaabe/Ashkenazi theatre practitioner and researcher at the University of Toronto, argues for a “relational shift” between settler theatre-makers and Indigenous peoples and encourages us to remember the contested history of the spaces we occupy and which house our work. Together, these Conversations, Master Classes, and Breakout Sessions make (interrogated) space for creators and their collaboration and inspire acts of creation and collaboration.

Toward the end of the collection, Tsitsias writes that when he started directing, he “read every book [he] could find on the subject,” before realizing that the process of directing is deeply individual (283). The Directors Lab is clearly the product of this perspective; it does not prescribe so much as it offers a multitude of opinions and opportunities to spark directorial creativity. As Tsitsias describes in his opening remarks, “I don’t want this book to be a ‘how-to’ manual.

I want it to serve as an inspiration” (4). Truly, even its Manual is simply a collection of reflections on questions directors experience throughout the production process. After hosting more than 1,500 directors, the brick-and-mortar Directors Lab at Lincoln Center Theater closed in 2022, demonstrating the limitations of physical spaces. Despite the loss of the Lincoln Center physical space, The Directors Lab continues to inspire creation metaphysically. The voices included in the text testify to the ability of aspiring directors to succeed, giving fledgling creators the support and affirmation required by artists to survive in an increasingly demanding financial paradigm. New works by new directors can be successful, both artistically and economically. The Directors Lab reminds us that, just as Lincoln Center Theater did for twenty-five years, theatres across the country need to support more directors collaborating on and producing works by new playwrights. Thankfully, the collection also gives us the tools necessary to do so.

SHADOW ZIMMERMAN NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY

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 JOURNAL’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. The SDC JOURNAL Peer-Reviewed Section seeks essays with clear 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/sdc-journal/sdc-journal-peer-review/

SDC FOUNDATION

FROM THE

SDCF PRESIDENT One of the most joyful and meaningful activities in my life currently is volunteering as Board President of Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF). SDCF is the nonprofit organization that works alongside our robust Union and offers a suite of transformational programs ranging from professional development opportunities, to awards that uplift artists, to programs that serve the broader public, and a vital Emergency Assistance Fund that helps with basic needs at those times in an artist’s career when the well is dry.

I serve in this capacity with fellow SDCF Trustees Mark Brokaw (Vice President and Secretary), Sharon Ott (Treasurer), Maggie Burrows, Justin Emeka, Laura Penn, Ellenore Scott, Maria Torres, and Victoria Traube, and a mighty staff of two at the Foundation, Foundation Director Dani Barlow and Program Associate Hannah Kutten.

The concept of solidarity underpins our work.

Solidarity recognizes that we are in this together. At any time in our lives, any of us may have surplus funds, time, expertise; and at any time in our lives any of us might experience need. By sharing resources and nourishing one another, we build healthier artists, and healthier artists build healthier communities.

On the following pages, please find some of the folks engaging in our solidarity economy: event and program participants, awardees, and donors. We thank each and every one of them for their involvement.

SDCF is here for you. Please visit our website www.sdcfoundation.org to explore our programs and opportunities.

Thank you for your creativity, imagination, and artistry.

SDCF President Seema Sueko (center front) with SDCF Director Dani Barlow (left) and SDCF Trustees (clockwise, from bottom left) Maria Torres, Mark Brokaw, Laura Penn, Ellenore Scott + Victoria Traube PHOTO MICHAEL HULL

Seema Sueko President, SDCF

WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL FOUNDATION SECTION

49

On October 16, 2023, SDCF’s Try It Like This benefit event turned the spotlight on some of the theatre’s finest directors and choreographers, who took the stage at 54 Below in New York City alongside special guest artists for an evening of joyful performances. The evening featured Saheem Ali, Mark Brokaw, Jeff Calhoun, Sammi Cannold, JoAnn M. Hunter, James Lapine, Jerry Mitchell (who also hosted and directed), Will Nunziata, John Rando, Bartlett Sher, Leigh Silverman, and SDCF President Seema Sueko.

SDCF is grateful to the Try It Like This donors, whose generous support benefits the programs of SDCF, the only service organization in the U.S. with the sole focus of providing resources to directors and choreographers.

Contributors $10,000 or More

Jujamcyn Theaters & Ambassador Theatre Group

Judith & Douglas Krupp

Ostar The Shubert Organization

$5,000 – $9,999 Spivak Lipton

Seema Sueko

Victoria Traube

$2,500 – $4,999 IATSE

$1,000 – $2,499 Actors’ Equity Association Gould, Kobrick & Schlapp, P.C.

Colleen JenningsRoggensack Junkyard Dog Productions

James Lapine

Segal

Beth Williams

Paige Price & Nevin Steinberg

Stage Directors and Choreographers Society

Evan Yionoulis & Donald Holder

Susan Schulman

Barbara Whitman

$500 – $999 Mark Brokaw

Ted Chapin

Stephen & Ruth Hendel

Sharon Ott

Marc Bruni

Rachel Chavkin

Anne Kauffman

Ellenore Scott

Maggie Burrows

FourthWall Theatrical

MSA Agency

Susan Stroman

Theatre Devlopment Fund Theatrical Wardrobe Union, Local 764

Up to $499

50

Anonymous

Jo Bonney

Melia Bensussen

Desdemona Chiang

SDC JOURNAL FOUNDATION SECTION | WINTER 2024

Kristy & Tim Cummings

Lorraine Fisher

Dan Knechtges

Patrice Donnell

Maureen Fox William Irwin

Bill Rauch & Christopher Moore

Ruben SantiagoHudson Maria Torres

Try It Like This at 54 Below CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP

Alvin Vincent Jr., Laura Penn, Calandra Hackney, Hope Pordy + Robert Osmond | Patrick O’Neill, JoAnn M. Hunter + Liz Ramos | Seema Sueko PHOTOS MICHAEL HULL

WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL FOUNDATION SECTION

51

Try It Like This at 54 Below CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP LEFT

Jonalyn Saxer + John Rando | Will Nunziata | Phillip Huber + Jeff Calhoun | Ruthie Ann Miles + Bartlett Sher PHOTOS MICHAEL HULL

52

SDC JOURNAL FOUNDATION SECTION | WINTER 2024

2022–2023

SDCF AWARDEES & FINALISTS JOE A. CALLAWAY AWARD

2022 RECIPIENTS

The Joe A. Callaway Awards recognize excellence in directing and choreography in New York City.

They are the only awards given by peer directors and choreographers for work on a single production.

FINALISTS Knud Adams, David Cromer, Rebecca Frecknall (Direction); Danny Mefford, Sergio Mejia (Choreography)

GORDON DAVIDSON AWARD

Saheem Ali

Direction, for Fat Ham at The Public Theater

Josh Prince

Choreography, for Trevor: The Musical at Stage 42

2022 RECIPIENT

Donald Byrd

The Gordon Davidson Award recognizes a director or choreographer for lifetime achievement and distinguished service in the regional theatre nationally.

ZELDA FICHANDLER AWARD

2022 RECIPIENT

Ron OJ Parson

The Zelda Fichandler Award is SDCF’s first award devoted to the regional theatre and is given to a director or choreographer who has made, and who continues to make, a significant contribution to their community through extraordinary work in theatre.

FINALIST Lili-Anne Brown

BARBARA WHITMAN AWARD

2023 RECIPIENT

Elena Velasco

The Barbara Whitman Award recognizes a woman, trans, or non-binary early-career director who has developed a clear and distinctive artistic voice and demonstrated unique vision in their theatrical work.

FINALISTS Carlton V. Bell, Kimille Howard, Sarah Hughes, SB Tennent, Emma Rosa Went WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL FOUNDATION SECTION

53

2022–2023

RESIDENCY & FELLOWSHIP LLOYD RICHARDS NEW FUTURES RESIDENCY The Lloyd Richards New Futures Residency is a yearlong residency for mid-career BIPOC directors and choreographers interested in artistic leadership.

DENHAM FELLOWSHIP The Denham Fellowship recognizes an early- or mid-career woman director each year to further her directing skills.

2022 RECIPIENT Kendra Ware with Executive Artistic Director Robert Barry Fleming at Actors Theatre of Louisville

2022 RECIPIENT Colette Robert for her production of The Cotillion

2022–2023 SDCF PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM PARTICIPANTS Each year, SDCF’s Professional Development Program provides opportunities for early-career directors and choreographers to observe and/or support experienced directors and choreographers during the production process. The goals of this program are to provide access to directors and/or choreographers who have not seen the work of an experienced director/ choreographer (Mentor) or have not previously worked on a certain type of production or at a certain level, as well as provide mentorship from experienced directors and choreographers to newer directors and choreographers. Below are the 2022–2023 participants who received such opportunities, along with their mentors and the production they worked on.

Jean Carlo Yunén Aróstegui with Thomas Kail, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Lunt-Fontanne Theatre Gabbie Ballesteros with Annie-B Parson and Elizabeth DeMent, Here Lies Love, Broadway Theatre Mayah Lourdes Burke with Anne Kauffman, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, Brooklyn Academy of Music Felichia Chivaughn with Patricia McGregor, The Mountaintop, Geffen Playhouse Niani Feelings with JoAnn M. Hunter, Bad Cinderella, Imperial Theatre Eric Gelb with Hannah Ryan, Hamilton: An American Musical, Richard Rodgers Theatre Alexandra Haddad with Amanda Dehnert, Love’s Labor’s Lost, Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival Tianding He with Stephen Burdman, Richard III, New York Classical Theatre Maria Huey with JoAnn M. Hunter, Bad Cinderella, Imperial Theatre Ashley Malafronte with KJ Sanchez, Private Lives, Arizona Theatre Company Makenna Masenheimer with Hannah Ryan, Hamilton: An American Musical, Richard Rodgers Theatre Irvin Mason Jr. with Maggie Burrows, Little Shop of Horrors, The MUNY Melory Mirashrafi with Desdemona Chiang, Young Americans, Portland Center Stage & Pittsburgh Public Theatre Claudia Mulet with Susan Stroman, New York, New York, St. James Theatre Kunal Prasad with Sam Pinkleton, The Wizard of Oz, American Conservatory Theatre Sarah Shin with Thomas Kail, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Lunt-Fontanne Theatre 54

SDC JOURNAL FOUNDATION SECTION | WINTER 2024

S DCF ANN 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. At this moment in time, when our field faces great challenges, SDCF will be of even greater service to our community. We sincerely appreciate and value your loyal support. Every gift makes a difference.

Seema Sueko President

SDCF CONTRIBUTORS

$10,000 or More James and Deborah Burrows Foundation Jujamcyn Theaters T. Kail

Miranda Family Fund National Endowment for the Arts The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs

The Charles & Lucille King Family Foundation

New York State Council on the Arts The Shubert Organization Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC) Barbara Whitman

$5,000 – $9,999 Concord Theatricals Diana DiMenna

Grove Entertainment & La Jolla Playhouse The Oki Foundation

Spivak Lipton Seema Sueko Julie Taymor

$2,500 – $4,999 Abrams Artists Agency

Junkyard Dog Productions

Susan Stroman

Rachel Chavkin

Judith & Douglas Krupp

Robyn Goodman & Anna Louizos

Andrew Masanto

Theatrical Wardrobe Union, Local 764

Linda Hartzell

Michael Moore Agency

Doug Hughes

Eleanor & Charlie Nolan

IATSE

Segal

Allison Thomas Victoria Traube Evan Yionoulis & Donald Holder

WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL FOUNDATION SECTION

55

$1,000 – $2,499 Eve Alvord

Justin Emeka

David Levy

Bethann Blickers

Gould, Kobrick & Schlapp, P.C.

Pam MacKinnon

Mark Brokaw

Joseph Haj

Michael Maso

Caplin Foundation

Stephen & Ruth Hendel

John Curtin

Anne Kauffman

McDonald Selznik Associates Inc.

Ronald Shechtman

Sharon Ott

Frank & Eliza Ventura

Laura Penn

Tamilla Woodard

Elizabeth Diamond

Brian Kite

Peter S. Ehrlichman

James Lapine

Daryl and Steven Roth Foundation Peter Schneider Kara Unterberg

$500 – $999 101 Productions, Ltd. Charles Abbott Peter Askin Pun Bandhu André De Shields

Gregg Edelman Sheldon Epps & Lesley Brander-Epps Gregory Franklin Leah C. Gardiner & Seth Gilliam

Barry Grove David Hammond Miral Kotb Emily Mann Michael Mayer

Sarah F. McMahon Barbara & John Norton Matt Ross Roche Schulfer

Casey Stangl & John Spokes Maria Torres

Paige Price & Nevin Steinberg Sanford Robbins Molly Smith

Suzan Zeder & Jim Hancock

$250 – $499 Karen Azenberg Melia Bensussen Jo Bonney Marc Bruni

Ida Cole Anthony Davis Paul Lazarus Irene Lewis

Charles Newell Carey Elizabeth Perloff Lonny Price

Up to $249 Rick & Terry Anderson

Kerry Casserly

Tom Ferriter

Jessica Kubzansky

Ron OJ Parson

Mark Armstrong

Ellen Charlebois

Sue Lawless

Anthony Powell

Danielle Barlow

Karen Case Cook

Andréa Burns & Peter Flynn

Keith Baxter

Yvonne Curry

Elizabeth Rubyline Bell-Haynes

Elina de Santos

Martin & Wendy Benson Jesse Berger Pam Berlin Anne Bogart Tim Bond George Boyd Julianne Boyd Gavin Cameron-Webb Robert Caprio

Michael Frale, MAOL Denise Gillman

Rick Davis

Susan Einhorn John C. Eisner David H. Epstein David Esbjornson Susan E. Evans John & Mary Everson Joel Ferrell

Charles Richter Marcia Ringel

Michael Lilly

Steven Robman

Caitlin Higgins

Carl Marcus & Karin Marcus

Blake Robison

Nagle Jackson

Kenneth Marini

Lavina Jadhwani

Dale McCausland

Ruben Santiago-Hudson

Gus Kaikkonen

Dianne McIntyre

Steve Karp

Sergio Mejia

John Kiffel

D. Lynn Meyers

Richard Hamburger

Marcia Milgrom Dodge

Mark Lerman Jay David Lesenger

Rhonda Kohl

Tom Moore

Deborah Kondelik

Mustafa Evren Odcikin

Sybil Kramer

Annie-B Parson

KJ Sanchez Wendy Short-Hayes Patricia Snyder JR Sullivan John Tartaglia Michelle Tattenbaum Annette Thornton

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

This list reflects gifts made to SDCF between July 2022 and June 2023. We apologize for any errors and request that you contact Hannah Kutten at hkutten@sdcfoundation.org so that we can correct our donor lists moving forward.

56

SDC JOURNAL FOUNDATION SECTION | WINTER 2024

SDC LEGACY FRANK GALATI 1943–2023 Frank Galati was a towering figure in the Chicago theatre community, beloved and highly influential as a director, writer, and actor. “He was the greatest reader of text, performance, and people I’ve ever known,” said Mary Zimmerman, his former student and, later, his colleague. “His work was in equal parts an act of devotion and liberation. In his later years, especially, his work had a wild freedom to it: experimental, profound.” Galati joined the Steppenwolf Theatre ensemble in 1985; for his adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, which he wrote and directed for Steppenwolf in 1988, he was awarded two Joseph Jefferson Awards and won two 1990 Tony Awards for Best Play and Best Direction. He was also nominated for a Tony Award in 1998 for directing the musical Ragtime. He was an associate director at the Goodman Theatre, where he worked for nearly 50 years and directed 12 productions, including She Always Said, Pablo, which brought together words by Gertrude Stein, works by Pablo Picasso, and music by Igor Stravinsky. He was most recently an Artistic

Associate at Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Florida, where he directed the theatre’s 2022 world-premiere musical Knoxville, which he adapted from James Agee’s novel A Death in the Family.

Galati earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from Northwestern University; he began teaching at Northwestern in 1973 and was named a professor emeritus in the Department of Performance Studies upon his retirement in 2006. He was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2022.

Frank Galati as Prospero in The Tempest at Steppenwolf, directed

by Tina Landau PHOTO MICHAEL BROSILOW

PHOTO JOEL MOORMAN

EDWARD PAYSON CALL 1928–2023 “I have always loved the rhythm of my chosen profession—that long arc of increasing tension building to the climax of opening night,” Edward Payson Call wrote in Theatre Stories, his posthumously published memoir.

“I find its varying and often irrational demands extremely congenial.

They seem to suit my personality.” In 1963, Call was part of the inaugural artistic staff of The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, working with director Sir Tyrone Guthrie, Oliver Rea, and Peter Zeisler. After directing at The Guthrie (where his 1965 production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, starring Zoe Caldwell, received national acclaim), American Conservatory Theater, and other regional companies, he was hired by Donald R. Seawell as the first official Artistic Director of the Denver Center Theatre Company.

He launched the first season with a 40-member acting company and led DCTC from 1979–1983. In the 1990s, he settled in Seattle, while continuing to direct and teach in theatres and universities across the country. Passionate about introducing young people to Shakespeare, he founded Seattle’s Young Shakespeare Workshop for teens to study sonnets, speeches, and scenes.

Edward Payson Call addressing the company in the early days of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts Theatre Company PHOTO C/O DCPA

PHOTO DENVER POST VIA GETTY IMAGES WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL

57

SDC LEGACY PEGGY HICKEY 1961–2023 Peggy Hickey began her professional career as a dancer after graduating from Sacramento State University, performing in theatres across the country. As a choreographer, Hickey was known for the Broadway musicals A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder (for which she received Outer Critics Circle and Astaire Award nominations for her choreography) and Anastasia. She directed and choreographed the National Tour of A Gentleman’s Guide, and her career spanned regional theatres across the country, extensive work in opera houses and concert halls, television, and film. “I’m a storyteller first and a choreographer second,” she said. “I tell my stories with movement. If I have a story line and a situation, then I can make up some steps, but I never come from the steps first.” Hickey was a four-time recipient of the Connecticut Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Choreography, honored for Brigadoon and On the Twentieth Century for Goodspeed Opera House (now Goodspeed Musicals), and Anastasia and Kiss Me, Kate for Hartford Stage. She won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Choreography for her work on Beck’s “The New Pollution”

ROBERT BRUSTEIN 1927–2023 Robert Brustein was the Founding Director of both the Yale Repertory Theatre and the American Repertory Theater at Harvard. He was dean of the Yale School of Drama from 1966–1979 and served for 20 years as director of Harvard’s Loeb Drama Center, establishing the American Repertory Theater Institute for Advanced Theater Training. As director Joe Grifasi, Brustein’s mentee, colleague, and friend, said of his legacy, “Robert Brustein’s dream of theatre was a space that is self-sustaining, diverse, and of the moment: where an artist could think critically and perform physically. For many of us it was an infectious vision—a lasting gift from Bob.” The drama critic for The New Republic for more than 40 years, he was the author of more than a dozen books. Among his many honors, he was inducted as a member of the American Theater Hall of Fame and American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he received the National Medal of the Arts in 2010. At A.R.T., his production of Six Characters in

and she was nominated for an MTV Movie Award for Best Dance Sequence in a Feature Film for The Brady Bunch Movie. Since 2015, she served as an adjunct professor at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, where she began her tenure in 2002 as a visiting assistant professor.

The Broadway At Music Circus 2022 production of Carousel, choreographed by Peggy Hickey PHOTO KEVIN GRAFT

Search of an Author, which he directed as part of a Pirandello trilogy, won the Boston Theatre Award for Best Production of 1996; he also directed Right You Are (If You Think You Are) and Tonight We Improvise, as well as Ibsen’s Ghosts, Strindberg’s The Father, and Thomas Middleton’s The Changeling.

Robert Brustein rehearsing Six Characters in Search of an Author at the American Repertory Theater PHOTOS C/O AMERICAN REPERTORY THEATER

58 SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2024

SDC LEGACY ADRIAN HALL 1927–2023 Adrian Hall was the Founding Artistic Director of Trinity Repertory Company, leading the company from 1964 through 1989; during the last six years of his tenure he also served as Artistic Director of Dallas Theater Center.

Among many accomplishments under his leadership, Trinity created the Project Discovery program in 1966, funded by the thennewly founded National Endowment for the Arts, which allowed every high school student in the state to attend three Trinity Rep shows in each year of high school for free. The theatre also launched the Trinity Rep Conservatory in 1977, which would later evolve into the current Brown/Trinity Rep MFA program. His notable productions as a director include many projects with longtime collaborator Eugene Lee; his own adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, which premiered in Dallas; and Trinity Rep’s A Christmas Carol, which continues to be produced by the company with a new director, cast, and design team each year. “Adrian Hall was a visionary artist, not only in the way he challenged the aesthetic limits of the

stage, but also in the challenging subject matter he produced as artistic director,” current Artistic Director Curt Columbus said. “His boundary-breaking vision for the theatre as a public square is the greatest legacy that he left us, one that we will continue to carry forward.”

Adrian Hall leading a talk-back with students in the late 1960s PHOTOS C/O TRINITY REP

SHIRLEY JO FINNEY 1949–2023 “I am an actor’s director who creates spaces and environments for writers, actors, and the creative team to produce inspired storytelling,” Shirley Jo Finney said. After beginning her career as an actor (her notable performances included the TV movie Wilma, in which she played the Olympic gold medalist Wilma Rudolph), she became a prolific director for the stage, working in California and regional theatres around the country for more than 40 years. She directed eight plays for the Foundation Theatre in Los Angeles, which was her artistic home, including Endesha Ida Mae Holland’s From the Mississippi Delta; Dael Orlandersmith’s Yellowman; Ifa Bayeza’s The Ballad of Emmett Till; and Citizen: An American Lyric, adapted by Stephen Sachs from Claudia Rankine’s book. Her most recent project was directing Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s at the Ensemble Theatre in Houston. She received numerous honors including the SDCF 2017 Denham Fellowship for her production of Runaway Home by Jeremy Kamps, the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Milton Katselas Distinguished Career Award, and LA Stage Alliance Ovation, Los Angeles Drama Critics, LA Weekly, and Beverly Hills/Hollywood NAACP Theatre Awards.

Shirley Jo Finney (right) + Imani Alis in rehearsal for A Medusa Thread at UC Santa Barbara PHOTO JEFF LIANG

WINTER 2024 | SDC JOURNAL

59

SDC MEMBER S + A SSOC I ATES continue d... Lise

Bruneau Sara Bruner • Marc Bruni • Rosemar y Bucher Kate Buckley • Stephen Buescher • Samuel Buggeln Dexter Bullard • Rick Bumgardner • James Bundy Sam Buntrock • Stephen Burdman • Bill Burford Ashley DeLane Burger • Terry Burgler • Sidney J Burgoyne 321 W. 44TH STREET | STE 804 | NY, NY | 10036 Brendan Burke • Chelsea E Burke • Mary Catherine Burke Mayah L Burke • Mikael Burke • Tom Burmester Kelly F Burnette • Kent D Burnham • Alexander Burns Bill Burns • T Fulton Burns • Theresa Burns James Burrows • Maggie Burrows • Linda Burson Nefertiti Burton • Barry Busby • David Bushman Victoria Bussert • Billy Bustamante • E. Faye Butler Michael Butler • Oliver Butler • Shelley Butler Jonathan Butterell • Sarah Butts • Jason McConnell Buzas Donald Byrd • Jesse E Byron • Evan F Caccioppoli Andrew D Cadiff • John Newport Caird • Joe Calarco Scott Calcagno • David Hemsley Caldwel Raymond O Caldwell • Jeffrey Calhoun • David Callaghan Simon Callow • Alice Camarota • Gavin Cameron-Webb • Anne Marie Cammarato • Karma S Camp • Christopher K Campbell • Clinton D Campbell Matthew Scott S Campbell • Tor Campbell • Adrienne Campbell-Holt • Emma V Canalese • Val Caniparoli • Casy Cann • Sammi Cannold • Jason Cannon Carolyn Cantor • Laura Caparrotti • Cate J Caplin • Beatrice Capote • Robert Caprio • Stuart Carden • William Carden • Luis Cardenas • Edward Carignan • Len Cariou Nancy Carlin • Tatyana-Marie Carlo • Allan Carlsen • Andrew I Carlson • Elizabeth J Carlson-Guerin • Warren Carlyle • Megan Carney • Cristin Carole • Karen Carpenter Larry Carpenter • Terrone D Carpenter • Anderson Carr • Geno Carr • John Carrafa • Roxane M Carrasco • Jose Carrasquillo • Donald Carrier • Juliette Carrillo Brad Carroll • Jade King Carroll • Dan Carter • Elizabeth Carter • Katherine M Carter • Chrissie Cartwright • NATALIE CARUNCHO • Thomas Caruso • Glenn Casale Karen Case Cook • Delvyn Case, Jr • Ayodele Casel • Tony Caselli • Yo-EL A Cassell • Kerry Casserly • Jaime Castaneda • Liam Castellan • Roger Castellano Teo Castellanos • Bill Castellino • Elowyn Castle • Pilar Castro Kiltz • Adam Cates • Nancy Cates • David Catlin • Arturo Catricala • Jo Cattell • Emma A Cavage MaryBeth Cavanaugh • Erin M Cawley • Ron Celona • Justin Cerne • Jonathan Stuart Cerullo • Martin Cespedes • Michael Chamberlin • David Chambers Jennifer Chambers • Kristy Chambrelli • Michelle Chan • Jennifer Chang • Tisa Chang • Lisa E Channer • Andi Chapman • Crystal M Chapman • Maeve A Chapman Fred Chappell • Wallace K Chappell • David Charles • Jorden Charley Whatley • Meredith J Charlson • Amanda Charlton • Peter Charney • Emily Chase • Rachel Chavkin Walid Chaya • Jess Chayes • Nicole Lawson Chelly • Jessica Chen • Josh Chenard • Brian A Cheslik • Tracey Elaine Chessum • Joey Chevres • Desdemona Chiang Casey Childs • Sean M Chin • Jay Scott Chipman • Joyce Chittick • Linda R Cholodenko • Marie Chong • James C Christian • Gary N Chryst • Shawn Churchman Joe Chvala • Greg Cicchino • Wayne Cilento • Anthony J Cimino-Johnson • A C Ciulla • Ian Claar • Sarah M Clack • Kelsey Claire • Coleman Ray Clark • Dennis Clark Victoria J Clark • Hope Clarke • Martha Clarke • Robert Clater • Chris Clavelli • Douglas R Clayton • Mark Clements • JC Clementz • Kristin Clippard • Ste Clough Trey Coates-Mitchell • William A Coats • Diane Coburn Bruning • Kevin Cochran • Peet Cocke • Sandy Cockrell • Carl Jay Cofield • Eli S Cohen • Elliot J Cohen Jeremy B Cohen • Nate Cohen • Charlotte Cohn • Niyi Coker, Jr • Kay Cole • Monty M Cole • Shalee M Cole Mauleón • Chris Coleman • Phil Colgan • Victoria Collado Ashley Wren Collins • Evelyn Collins • John Collins • Rives Collins • Patti Colombo • Tammy Colucci • Curt Columbus • Bill Condon • Frank Condon • Kevin Confoy Brittany D Conigatti • Kathleen F Conlin • Kevin Connell • Christopher B Connelly • Laurence Connor • Amanda Connors • Lucy Smith Conroy • Fabrice Conte-Williamson Yvonne Conybeare • Ann Cooley • Jim Cooney • Ray Cooney • Karin Coonrod • Linda Nell Cooper • Mindy Cooper • Shana Cooper • Shelley M Cooper Andrew R Coopman • David Copeland • Frank Coppola • Amy Anders Corcoran • Matt Corica • Nick Corley • Richard E Corley • Dennis Corsi • Jim Corti • Alicia B Corts Steven Cosson • Josh Costello • Tom Costello • Dennis Courtney • Tome Cousin • Della M Cowall • Edie Cowan • Matt Cowart • Adam Coy • Chuck Coyl Katherine Coyl • Kyle Craig • Lyn Cramer • Beth Crandall • Stephen Crandall • Sarah E Crane • Jerry Jay Cranford • Kim Craven • Melissa Crespo • Genie S Croft David Cromer • Keith Cromwell • Courtney R Crouse • Lee Crouse • Matt Crowle • John Crowley • Elizabeth Crowll • Holly Cruz • Andrew Cucci • Robert Cuccioli Mark Cuddy • Trip Cullman • Evan T Cummings • Jack Cummings III • Jennifer Curfman • Sean Curran • Yvonne P Curry • Liz Curtis • Valerie Curtis-Newton Mari Nobles Da Silva • Gabriella da Silva Carr • Paul Daigneault • Jeff S Dailey • Zach Dailey • Nana Dakin • Stephen Daldry • Paula D’Alessandris • Ronald E Daley Howard V Dallin • Dave Dalton • Barbara Damashek • Kelly d’Amboise • Vic D’Amore • Al D’Andrea • Sharon Dane • Roger T Danforth • Tim Dang • Sarah dAngelo Anthony C. C Daniel • Gregg T Daniel • Lenny Daniel • Graciela Daniele • Gregory Daniels • Sean Daniels • Sheila Daniels • Wendy Dann • David Dannenfelser Mark Danni • Domenick Danza • Dennis W Darling • Peter Darling • Rachel Dart • Anita Dashiell-Sparks • Chanel DaSilva • Wendy Davidson • Caitlin Davies Matthew Radford Davies • Anderson Davis • Catie Davis • Chloe Davis • Clinton T Davis • John Henry Davis • Josiah Davis • Kaitlin Davis • Matthew J Davis • Rick Davis Scout Davis • Will Davis • Natasha Davison • Jeffrey Davolt • Sonia Dawkins • Patti D’Beck • Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker • Paul De Luca • Devon de Mayo Robert De Niro • Elina L de Santos • Andre R De Shields • David H de Vries • Benita de Wit • Stephen DeAngelis • Lear deBessonet • Sheldon Deckelbaum Ryan M Decker • Drew DeCorleto • Sophia G Deery • Ty Defoe • Thomas DeFrantz • Vincent DeGeorge • Tucker Tab DeGregory • Nicholas DeGruccio • Hamid Dehghaani Amanda Dehnert • Kevin Del Aguila • Raymond Del Barrio • Jennifer C Delac • Muffie Delgado-Connelly • Suzanne Delle • Bart DeLorenzo • John DeLuca Ray DeMattis • Anne DeMelo • Lizzie DeMent • David Demke • Mark Dendy • Margaret Denithorne • Jeffry Denman • Paul Dennhardt • Anthony J DePoto Marguerite Derricks • Sean J Derry • caryn f desai • Parijat Desai • Snehal Desai • Tom P DeTrinis • Kelly P Devine • Holly-Anne Devlin • Liz Diamond • Matthew Diamond Patrick Diamond • Zac S Diamond • Matt R DiCarlo • Matt Dickson • Rachel H Dickson • Diane DiCroce • Motl Didner • Steven Dietz • Rick Dildine • Abigail F Dillard John Dillon • David DiLullo-Cini • Stephen DiMenna • Dawn DiPasquale • Antoinette DiPietropolo • John Michael DiResta • Joseph Discher • Jada S Dixon James R Dixon • Jerry Dixon • Alex Dmitriev • Jennifer Dobby • Ryan Dobrin • Jeremy Dobrish • Tyler Dobrowsky • Leslie Dockery • Marcia Milgrom Dodge Kristy Dodson • Catherine M Doherty • Geoffrey Doig-Marx • Judith Dolan • Rachel Leigh Dolan • Chesray Dolpha • Melissa S Dombrowski • Colman Domingo C. Ryanne Domingues • Mike Donahue • J Kevin Doolen • Toni Dorfman • Michelle Dorrance • nicHi douglas • Reginald L Douglas • Timothy Douglas • Nike Doukas Kirven J Douthit-Boyd • Joe Dowling • Deanna L Downes • Jeremiah Downes • John Doyle • Megan Doyle • Tammis Doyle • Donna Drake • Danielle Drakes Ricky D Drummond • Wes E Drummond • Cristina Duarte • Peter DuBois • Terry Dudley • Seth Duerr • Jay Duffer • Tom Dugdale • Randy L Duncan • Carol Dunne Matthew Dunster • Mary Jo DuPrey • Beverly Durand • Drina Durazo • Erma Duricko • Bob Durkin • Reena Dutt • Frank Dwyer • Troy Dwyer • Clint Dyer • Anne D’Zmura Matthew Earnest • Byron Easley • Siouxsie Easter • Mykai Eastman • Danny Eaton • Christopher Eaves • Therrin J Eber • Scott Ebersold • Stephen M Eckert Gregg Edelman • Ari Edelson • Barry Edelstein • Dane Figueroa Edidi • Stephen Edlund • James Edmondson • David Edwards • Dwight Edwards • Emily Edwards Michael D Edwards • Sara Edwards • Shate L Edwards • Sidney M Edwards • Robert H Egan • Samantha A Egle • Susan Einhorn • Noah Eisenberg • John C Eisner Bethany Christine Elkin • Michelle Elkin • Zachary Elkind • David Ellenstein • Peter Ellenstein • Trey Ellett • Mercedes Ellington • Kenneth Elliott • Marianne Elliott Scott Elliott • Daniel Ellis • Hersh Ellis • Roger Ellis • Scott L Ellis • Justin Emeka • Roberta C Emerson • David Emmes • Ryan Emmons • Michael Engler • Jon Engstrom Evan Ensign • Sheldon Epps • Sabin Epstein • Daniel Erdberg • Melody Erfani • David J Esbjornson • Mark Esposito • Parker Esse • Ellyn L Essig • Carol Estey Cody Estle • Tony R Estrella • Miriam Eusebio • Nelson Eusebio III • Oskar Eustis • Christopher Evans • Lee Sunday Evans • Scott Evans • Shannon Denise Evans Susan E Evans • Jeanne Everton • Richard Eyre • Daniel D Ezralow • Estefanía Fadul • Kip Fagan • Kareem Fahmy • Marjorie Failoni • Joy Brooke B Fairfield George W Faison • Briana Fallon • Robert Falls • Chongren Fan • Scott Faris • Megan Farley • Michael J Fatica • Rick Faugno • Leland Faulkner • Meagen Fay Phillip Fazio • Raja Feather Kelly • Charles Fee • Niani S Feelings • Jordan Fein • Amy Feinberg • Talia Feldberg • Susan B Feldman • Bill Fennelly • Donna Feore Ben Ferber • Lisa Cesnik Ferguson • Michael Ferman • Frank Ferrante • Joel Ferrell • Tom C Ferriter • Kenneth Ferrone • Christopher Fessenden • Jessica F Fichter Andy J Fickman • Jeremy Fiebig • Ernest A Figueroa • Gabe Figueroa • Anna Filippo • Howard L Fine • Dann Fink • Barry Finkel • Douglas Finlayson • Hayley Finn Melissa Firlit • Linsay Firman • Jessica Fisch • Daniel Fish • Daniel Fishbach • Laurence Fishburne • Liz Fisher • Nancy Fisher • Robert E Fitch • Sharon FitzHenry...