26 minute read
Running the 20-Legged Race
JENNIFER CHANG + BRIAN KITE IN CONVERSATION
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.
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 12 th 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 site-responsive 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 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.
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.
"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 | 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 Asian-American 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 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 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 fast-paced 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 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 heart-centric 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.
"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
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 financially and who’s involved, and what are the goals of that artmaking?
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 | 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 we can’t do the same with our local theatre artists.
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.
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...
BRIAN | Good, let’s make it complicated.
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 | Yes.
JENNIFER | How do we develop that live work in America? We don’t. There’s work 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.
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.
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?
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 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.
"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
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?
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 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.
