SDC Journal Summer 2017

JOURNAL SUMMER 2017

KJ SANCHEZ IN CONVERSATION WITH LIZ ENGELMAN

THE CALL OF DUTY AN SDC ROUNDTABLE THEATRE IS BUILT ON HUMAN CONNECTION

BARTLETT SHER + J.T. ROGERS

PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

AGA COLLABORATIVE: WALKING IN THE ACADEMY + MORE

SUMMER 2017 | SDC JOURNAL

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OFFICERS

Pam MacKinnon PRESIDENT

John Rando EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

Leigh Silverman VICE PRESIDENT

Oz Scott SECRETARY

Michael Wilson TREASURER

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Laura Penn COUNSEL

Ronald H. Shechtman HONORARY ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Karen Azenberg Pamela Berlin Julianne Boyd Danny Daniels Marshall W. Mason Ted Pappas Susan H. Schulman

SDC EXECUTIVE BOARD MEMBERS OF BOARD

Christopher Ashley Walter Bobbie Anne Bogart Jo Bonney Mark Brokaw Joe Calarco Rachel Chavkin Liz Diamond Marcia Milgrom Dodge Sheldon Epps Michael John Garcés Liza Gennaro Wendy C. Goldberg Linda Hartzell Anne Kauffman Mark Lamos Kathleen Marshall Meredith McDonough Ethan McSweeny Robert Moss Robert O’Hara Sharon Ott Ruben Santiago-Hudson­ Seret Scott Bartlett Sher Casey Stangl Eric Ting Chay Yew Evan Yionoulis

SDC JOURNAL

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MANAGING EDITORS

SDCJ-PRS PEER REVIEWERS

Kate Chisholm Marella Martin Koch FEATURES EDITOR

Elizabeth Bennett GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Elizabeth Nelson EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Jo Bonney Graciela Daniele Liz Diamond Sheldon Epps Liza Gennaro Thomas Kail Robert O'Hara Ann M. Shanahan Leigh Silverman Evan Yionoulis SDC JOURNAL PEERREVIEWED SECTION EDITORIAL BOARD SDCJ-PRS CO-EDITORS

Anne Fliotsos Ann M. Shanahan SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Travis Malone SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW ASSOCIATE

Kathleen M. McGeever SDCJ-PRS SENIOR ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Anne Bogart Joan Herrington James Peck

Donald Byrd David Callaghan Kathryn Ervin Liza Gennaro Ruth Pe Palileo Scot Reese Stephen A. Schrum

S Lorin Latarro CHOREOGRAPHER

Travis Malone VIRGINIA WESLEYAN COLLEGE

Rebecca Martinez DIRECTOR + CHOREOGRAPHER

SDCJ-PRS ASSISTANT EDITORS +

Lisa Peterson

PEER REVIEWERS

WRITER + DIRECTOR

Thomas Costello Emily A. Rollie

Sam Pinkleton

SUMMER 2017 CONTRIBUTORS

Kenneth L. Roberson

Saheem Ali DIRECTOR

Sammi Cannold

DIRECTOR + CHOREOGRAPHER

DIRECTOR + CHOREOGRAPHER

Emily A. Rollie CENTRAL WASHINGTON

DIRECTOR

UNIVERSITY

Rachel Chavkin

Seret Scott

DIRECTOR

DIRECTOR

Stephanie Coen

Leigh Silverman

WRITER

DIRECTOR

Lear deBessonet

Ted Sod

DIRECTOR

ACTOR + DIRECTOR

Timothy Douglas

Michael Wilson

DIRECTOR

DIRECTOR

Liz Engelman DRAMATURG

Jeanmarie Higgins PENN STATE UNIVERSITY

Moisés Kaufman DIRECTOR + PLAYWRIGHT

Jenny Koons DIRECTOR

Tina Landau DIRECTOR

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

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Sterling Printing SDC JOURNAL

| SUMMER 2017

KJ Sanchez in rehearsal for Jane Eyre at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park PHOTO Mikki Schaffner

SUMMER CONTENTS Volume 5 | No. 4

FEATURES 16

The Call of Duty AN SDC JOURNAL ROUNDTABLE

BY SDC

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JOURNAL

Stop + Listen AN INTERVIEW WITH THOMAS KAIL + KENNETH L. ROBERSON

BY KENNETH

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L. ROBERSON

COVER

KJ Sanchez Is Listening A CONVERSATION BETWEEN KJ SANCHEZ + LIZ ENGELMAN

BY SDC

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JOURNAL

Theatre Is Built on Human Connection AN INTERVIEW WITH BARTLETT SHER + J.T. ROGERS

BY STEPHANIE

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COEN

PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

AGA Collaborative: Walking in the Academy

BY JEANMARIE EDITED BY ANNE

HIGGINS

FLIOTSOS

+ ANN M. SHANAHAN

SUMMER 2017 | SDC JOURNAL

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Othello at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival PHOTO William Marsh

5 FROM THE PRESIDENT

BY PAM

MACKINNON

39 SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW

Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices

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FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

BY LAURA PENN

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IN YOUR WORDS

What I Learned...Timothy Douglas

CURATED BY SERET

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Pre-Show / Post-Show Emily A. Rollie

SCOTT

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hy I Make That Choice W Saheem Ali, Sammi Cannold, Lear deBessonet, Moisés Kaufman, Jenny Koons, Tina Landau, Lorin Latarro, Rebecca Martinez, Lisa Peterson + Sam Pinkleton

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COVER PHOTO

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Political Engagement in 20 Questions Rachel Chavkin + Leigh Silverman

KJ Sanchez Mikki Schaffner

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THE SOCIETY PAGES

National Directors Fellowship

By Charles Ney REVIEW BY TRAVIS MALONE

Yale MFA Directing Program

SDC Foundation One-on-One

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SDC FOUNDATION

The 2017 “Mr. Abbott” Award

Initiating Action of the Ghostlight Project

The “Mr. Abbott” Award Leadership Circle

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IN MEMORIAM

Remembering Edwin Sherin

Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival Samuel J. Friedman Health Center for the Performing Arts Disgraced 2017 Kennedy Center American College Theater National Festival

LORT Negotiations

Happy Birthday SDC

+

SDC Founder John Houseman

2017 LORT Negotiating Committee

This edition of SDC Journal is largely focused on activism and what we as leaders and citizens do in addition to our work as playmakers. I am a little more than 100 days into my presidency—also a benchmark for that other president—so I thought I would reflect on what this new job has recently demanded of me.

Every substantive conversation I’ve had has circled around wanting to build and better the field. (That being said, there are also a lot of laughs in the SDC halls!)

FROM THE PRESIDENT

We just wrapped up LORT negotiations: four days of voicing Members’ needs, pitching new ideas, sharing information about the state of the field among ourselves and with managing directors from around the country, demanding compensation, and clarifying intent. Backed by our amazing staff, co-chairs Ruben SantiagoHudson and John Rando—along with their deep bench of a committee comprised of, among others, Daniel Pelzig, Marcia Milgrom Dodge, Sharyl Kaller, Seret Scott, Carolyn Cantor, Ethan McSweeny, Peter Pucci, Lisa Rothe, Pam Berlin, Moritz von Stuelpnagel, Michael Wilson, and Shelley Butler—were on point, respectful, persistent, and true.

Hats off to everyone! I honestly think that the committee’s optimism and steely passion (only two swear words were uttered in anger the entire week), combined with a sensitivity to the uncertainty of these times for institutions and individuals alike, was infectious. The LORT managing directors gradually became part of a conversation that was less the typical zero-sum game that most negotiations fall into, and felt more like consensus building to better the field.

Negotiations ended Saturday, April 22, at 12:37 a.m., with a five-year deal that has no zeros in its financial plan. Our pension now has a new funding source, tied to a media plan proposed

by LORT for audience building and education

outreach. And perhaps most importantly, for the first time in the Union’s 58-year history, we have expanded coverage to include fight choreographers. We went in with the mantra, “movement is movement” and that it deserved recognition. Fight directors Chuck Coyl and Robert Westley attended the entire span of negotiations to see themselves and their colleagues recognized as the movement professionals that they are—finally!—with property right protections, health and pension contributions, and credit for their work. It was an extremely emotional moment, a long time in the making.

My first interaction with the Union was about twelve years ago at a LORT negotiation. I remember being struck by how nice the managers’ shoes were. I remember having the “gung-gung” of Law and Order ring in my ears when small groups were called out of the room to caucus. This time around I was proudly part of those small room meetings. Onward in solidarity!

I also want to take this opportunity to mention the passing of Martha Lavey, who was my three-time artistic director and one-time leading lady at Steppenwolf Theatre. She too was all about building and bettering the field.

She loved to push people beyond the ways they thought of themselves. She loved to talk and provoke. She loved actors and writers, and made a director really work. She loved Chicago and Chicago theatre. Her legacy is great.

Onward.

In solidarity,

Pam MacKinnon, Executive Board President SUMMER 2017 | SDC JOURNAL

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FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Everything goes in cycles, right?

There was a time, in the early years of my career, when a “community theatre” was considered by many to be something “less”: less than professional, less important. This was after the powerful, impactful years of theatre of protest, including Bread and Puppet, San Francisco Mime Troupe, and many others. Even though the great work continued, we found ourselves in a time when communitybased artists struggled for recognition from peers, funders, and audiences.

I experienced this moment firsthand as the communications manager for Living Stage, the community outreach company of Arena Stage. As neither Founder/Artistic Director Robert Alexander nor the leadership of Arena wanted to lose the “community outreach company” from the tag line, my work was to align community and professionalism. It should have been ridiculously simple when you consider the extraordinary talent that burst from the company’s home on the corner of 14th and T Street NW in Washington, DC, and their mission of welcoming disabled children and teenage moms, and traveling to maximum security prisons, nursing homes, and the streets. And yet, it wasn’t always easy.

Today, when we think of the words “community,” “community engaged,” and “community-based,” we think about vitality, purpose, strength. Even in the profit center of the American theatre, Broadway shows and stakeholders pride themselves on connecting with their communities. Theatre makers continue to reach forward, and their visions explode and scatter across stages, taking infinite forms. And then we find ourselves back where we started, in the essence of theatre. Whether telling a story around a fire or an epic tale at the Acropolis, the goal has always been simple: to make sense of the world or a moment in time by opening the hearts and minds of audiences—through whatever form or composition it might take.

At times, the stages across the country cannot contain the aspirations of our Members. The events of the world compel them to push beyond or explore a different muscle. A moment with a friend leads to another moment, and then to another room and a different circle of collaborators and audiences. Directors and choreographers create makeshift rehearsal halls and fabricate theatres out of whole cloth in an effort to build community, to connect. Sometimes they are making theatre as we traditionally think about it; sometimes they mentor and support by sharing their time. And sometimes, while giving of themselves, they become the learners, the receivers.

As President Pam MacKinnon shared in the Spring issue of SDC Journal, after 50+ years of modest involvement in political affairs, SDC has begun to find its way in the worlds of local and national politics. A newly established Executive Board Committee—the Political Engagement Committee, chaired by Rachel Chavkin—

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will take the lead on prioritizing legislative issues for the Union while we find ways to increase our support to our Membership as they themselves increase their engagement. While the artists featured in this issue have been doing the work they are doing for a very long time, it seems to resonate differently today.

In this issue, we explore the work of a diverse collection of SDC Members who are attempting to make sense of the world through their craft. From West to East, Randall Arney and Davis McCallum share their thoughts on the work their companies are doing to support veterans through funding from the MetLife Foundation and with support from the TCG/Blue Star Theatres Grants. These artists take us through their very distinctive approaches to impacting the lives of veterans and, in turn, the artists who work with them. Seeing work at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Company with West Point in view is quite an experience and completely different from witnessing the Geffen Playhouse’s work with veterans.

KJ Sanchez has an insatiable appetite for inquiry. The audiences and communities who have interacted with her documentary theatre work have been transformed. That a new generation of SDC Members and their collaborators will have the benefit of her expertise as they train at the University of Texas at Austin is thrilling.

Speaking of impact, consider the powerful interplay of breadth and depth that energizes the collaborations of director Bartlett Sher and playwright J.T. Rogers. Oslo and Blood and Gifts are both stories of substance and scale—stories of events that changed the world. They take us deep into the hearts and minds of the individuals who found themselves at the center of historic events.

Kenneth Roberson and Thomas Kail were drawn to the work of SAY: The Stuttering Association for the Young for very different reasons, but both chose to share their talents and time to make a difference. Similarly, Saheem Ali, Sammi Cannold, Rachel Chavkin, Lear deBessonet, Moisés Kaufman, Jenny Koons, Tina Landau, Lorin Latarro, Rebecca Martinez, Lisa Peterson, Sam Pinkleton, Leigh Silverman, and Liesl Tommy all found themselves around a table creating connective tissue in the form of the Ghostlight Project, a means for theatre artists to respond individually and collectively to last fall’s election through a commitment to social justice.

This issue, when I think of SDC Founder John Houseman and the Federal Theatre Project, I think about its mission as a jobs program to employ artists who otherwise might literally have starved during a very dark time in our country. I wish there was a federal theatre project now. Jobs—living wage jobs—would be critical. What I wish for is a federal theatre program that would place the most pressing issues of our time into the hands of extraordinary artists such as those in these pages and on the rolls of SDC Membership.

In solidarity,

Laura Penn Executive Director

IN YOUR WORDS What I Learned...

Pre-Show / Post-Show Why I Made That Choice 20 Questions

8 CONTRIBUTE If you wish to contribute to IN YOUR WORDS, would like to respond to any of the articles, opinions, or views expressed in SDC Journal, or have an idea for an article, please email Letters@SDCweb.org. Include your full name, city + state.

We regret that we are unable to respond to every letter.

THIS PAGE

Danny Johnson, Stephanie Berry, André De Shields, Rachel Leslie, Billy Eugene Jones + Wayne T. Carr in Seven Guitars at Yale Repertory Theatre PHOTO Joan Marcus

WHAT I LEARNED…

BY TIMOTHY

DOUGLAS

CURATED BY SERET

SCOTT

“The director works as an interpretive artist, but he’s still an artist, so you also have to give him room to create and to put his vision of the play or his translation or interpretation of the material on the stage…” —August Wilson While still at the crossroads of making my transition from acting toward fully claiming the moniker of “director,” I had the good fortune to spend several months in Germany. I was on that TCG/NEA Early Career Directing Grant and got to be an observing assistant to James Lapine on the first incarnation— in German—of the stage version of Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame/Der Glöckner von Notre Dame. It was truly a remarkable production— costumes by Sue Blane, lights by Rick Fisher, scenic

by Heidi Ettinger, fights by B. H. Barry. Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz were there (the three of us attended The Flying Dutchman at Deutsche Oper), and I had lots of run-ins with Stuart Oken (famed Disney and Hollywood producer) and Michael Eisner.

While assisting on this very American mega-musical, I was afforded the opportunity to attend a plethora of visceral, insightful, and muscular theatre and opera productions throughout Berlin. Before this adventure, I would have believed myself to possess a decent awareness of German theatrical literature and performance philosophy, but what I learned fast and fully is that I didn’t understand jack until I sat in with a German audience.

My next revelation lay in how I absorbed the thenprevailing post-modern theatrical design aesthetic that permeated all the productions I attended. I was blown away by how expansive and sometimes (seemingly) anachronistic the physical designs were, and yet they could somehow still fully support the story’s narrative, and actually unearth insights and deeper truths that might have remained elusive and untapped if played within more conventional designs.

With my newfound awareness of such infinite visual possibilities, I set about the task of challenging my own preconceived parameters of what stage design needed to be, and over the next several years—by way of the many productions of mostly realistic plays

I’d directed—I found great liberation in my “style” as I partnered with scenic designers willing to expand the vision way beyond the fourth wall.

The culturally specific trajectory of my freelance career dictates that the primary source of my experimentation is with the plays from August Wilson’s American Century Cycle. I’ve directed all but one of them multiple times (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom somehow continues to elude me), and over the years, I’ve chipped away at their mostly realistic Pittsburgh settings so that I might give the characters augmented breathing and speaking room toward the greater realization of their ever-expanding arias. In doing so, the scripts’ (seemingly) hidden chambers of deeper and profound truths about black lives—in response to the proverbial American dream and its double standard when it comes to black folks—have continued to conjure increasingly clarifying visual metaphors that are at once ephemeral and mathematically exact in their physical representations.

With my perpetual gazing through August Wilson’s unique prism, it was with my recent production of Seven Guitars at Yale Rep that I was finally able to fully upend the playing space while simultaneously providing a terra firma for the characters to fully dig in. Along with my scenic designer, Fufan Zhang, we were able to distill down to the essence of the Great Migration’s collision with the dis-ease of the 1940s’ urban assimilation for Wilson’s characters to navigate.

Where to go from here? Dig even deeper!

TIMOTHY DOUGLAS has directed internationally and counts among his many credits the world premieres of August Wilson’s Radio Golf for Yale Rep, Rajiv Joseph’s The Lake Effect for Silk Road Rising (2013 Jeff Award for Best New Work), and Keith Josef Adkins’ Safe House for Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, where he currently serves as an Associate Artist. Other credits include Disgraced and King Hedley II for Arena Stage; Father Comes Home from the Wars Parts 1, 2, & 3 for Roundhouse Theatre; Richard II for Shakespeare & Company; Brontë: A Portrait of Charlotte Off-Broadway; Mourning Becomes Electra for Remy Bumppo Theatre Company, where he served for a time as Artistic Director; and the Associate Artistic Director at Actors Theatre of Louisville 2001–2004, where he directed 16 productions, including three Humana Festival premieres. This spring, his Disgraced toured China. MFA: Yale School of Drama. www.timothydouglas.org

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1 My morning ritual…I am fortunate to live in a beautiful place, nestled at the edge of the Cascade mountains, and my third-floor bedroom window provides a fabulous view of the towering pine trees that surround my house. It feels like I am waking up in a treehouse every morning, so on most mornings, I take an extra moment or two to soak in the view before climbing out of bed. Then, depending on the day and the weather, I usually step onto my yoga mat or lace up my running shoes. Either way, I like to start the day with what I call my “moving meditations,” as I have discovered that they help me segue into the day with more focus and intention, and inevitably weave their way into my artistic and pedagogical work for the day. Once I finish my savasana or four to six miles, I shower, feed Bogart the cat, and eat breakfast—by far my favorite meal and one that almost always includes a banana. Over breakfast, I usually take stock of what is on my calendar for that day and sometimes sneak in a bit of prep work for the class I am teaching or rehearsal.

2 PRE-SHOW / POST-SHOW WITH

EMILY A. ROLLIE CENTRAL WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

“

One of the most wonderful things about art and live theatre is that there is always room for change and growth...”

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On my commute, I read/listen to…Myself think. I find my commute to be a wonderful time to think, plan, scheme, brainstorm, and create. In addition to my treehouse bedroom view, I am lucky to have a gorgeous 30-minute commute down the mountain into the lower Kittitas Valley, a drive that normally includes seeing the snowcapped peaks of the Stewart mountain range in my rearview mirror—a view that I find particularly inspiring and almost always makes me smile. Some days, I won’t listen to anything at all, instead allowing my thoughts and ideas about an upcoming creative project to carry me through the commute.

On other days, I rotate between SiriusXM’s Coffee House station, Pandora’s U2 station, or the playlist on my phone that I’ve fondly titled “Soundtrack of Life” and that includes songs from some of my favorite artists, such as Frank Sinatra, the Indigo Girls, U2, Dave Matthews Band, Adele, and Aretha Franklin. As a director, I also am strongly influenced by the soundscape and musical world of a play, so when working on a production, I often use my commute to find musical inspirations and explore the aural world of the show.

3 If I could, I’d go back to…Admittedly, I am a theatre history nerd, so my answer to this question varies daily. However, if I had to pinpoint one time (at least for today), I would go back to 1937. Not only is this an era in history that intrigues me, but also it would afford me the opportunity to see firsthand Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock and the dramatic events surrounding the provocative, “too radical” play. To be one of the audience members who walked the 21 blocks from the padlocked Maxine Elliott Theatre to the Venice Theatre and watched the actors bravely continue the performance in the face of censorship would be an incredibly powerful experience. An added appeal to going back to 1937 would be watching Amelia Earhart’s final flight unfold. I have long been fascinated by Earhart and have thought more than once about creating a play or performance project about her, so to watch the drama unfold around her final flight might prove inspiring.

4 A performance I wish I could see again…One of the most wonderful things about art and live theatre is that there is always room for change and growth, so, of course, as a performer and director, there are many moments in past productions that I would love to revisit and see or work on again. However, if I limit my response to my experiences as an audience member, there are two performances I would love to see again. First is the very first professional production I saw: Annie. Now, my mother would tell you that I have always been performing and directing; growing up, my best friend and I would stage plays in my basement and charge our families admission to see them. With that in mind, it was quite momentous for me to go to a professional theatre production, and, as I recall, one had to be five years old to attend this particular dinner theatre company’s performances. So on the day of my fifth birthday, my parents—ever supportive of their theatrically inclined daughter—took me to see Annie. While I don’t remember many of the details of the show, I do remember the surprise, joy, and excitement that I felt when Annie opened a trunk and a real dog jumped out. I would love to relive that moment and feel the magic of theatre take hold of my heart and soul.

Interestingly, the second performance I wish I could revisit involves young audiences as well. Several years ago, I directed A Year with Frog and Toad, and some of my favorite moments were witnessing our youngest audience members respond so actively and invest so fully in the world and magic of the show. Thoreau wrote that “the world is but a canvas to the imagination,” and I think that theatre, especially theatre for and with young audiences, reminds us to access that imagination and find renewed faith in the magical, transformative capabilities of theatre.

5 Guilty pleasure…My annual tradition of watching all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I didn’t watch the series when it originally aired and only discovered it after watching another of Joss Whedon’s TV series, Firefly. However, there’s something about Buffy and her Scooby gang that resonated with me. Many of the films and television shows I watched as a young girl featured male protagonists, so to see a strong young woman kick some vampire butt and deal with the complex realities of the contemporary world was refreshing. So every year, my guilty pleasure is to watch the series again, from start to finish—all seven seasons.

6 My Netflix queue says I would love…A really eclectic mix of shows, to be honest. However, one of the first categories Netflix points me toward are films and shows with a “strong female lead.” (Is it any wonder that my guilty pleasure is Buffy the Vampire Slayer?) As a feminist artist and someone deeply invested in supporting women’s and other diverse voices, I am deeply drawn to films, shows, and plays that bring those stories from the margins to the center.

A closer look still at my Netflix queue would also reveal an interest in television series such as Homeland, Stranger Things, and The Crown.

I think this is true for several reasons: one, I don’t have cable, so any and all of my television viewing comes in the form of online streaming services like Netflix. More importantly, as theatre artists and directors, I believe we are consummate storytellers, and what I appreciate about

a well-written television series are the ways the form allows long-term story and deep character development, especially if the series unfolds over multiple seasons. Yes, I fall prey to the binge-watching impulse more often than I’d like to admit, but I think that is also one of the benefits of Netflix—the ability to watch multiple episodes in succession allows us to track the overall development of a theatrical world, and I love watching that story unfold, drawing me more deeply into the world.

7 I am actually watching…This Is Us. I have had several colleagues recommend it to me, and while I was initially a little hesitant, thinking it would be too melodramatic and sentimental for my tastes, I have found the characters, the overlapping storylines, and the larger social issues addressed in the series quite compelling.

8 I’m reading or I want to read…Walden by Henry David Thoreau.

As an English major in college, I read Walden in one of my lit survey courses, but I don’t recall really digging into it too much. However, over the past few months, several references, political moments, and conversations with people very dear to me all brought Thoreau and Walden to my attention. As a result, I am currently renewing my acquaintance with Mr. Thoreau and his wilderness experiment.

Right next to Walden on my coffee table is a hefty stack of new plays and manuscripts, as I am also incredibly interested in new plays—so much so that whenever I find a new play that piques my interest, I’ll add it to the stack, and I regularly stash one in my bag to read during any unexpected free moments in the day.

9 To wind down, I…Do yoga. Again. In addition to my work as an artist and teacher, I practice Ashtanga yoga and am a part-time yoga instructor, so doing yoga typically frames my day. I particularly love practicing at the end of the day. There’s something soothing and complete about coming back to the breath (prana) and moving through the familiar postures (asanas) after a busy day and rehearsal. It is said that “to do every action artfully is yoga,” and yoga does indeed inspire my creative spirit. In fact, the more I practice yoga, the more overlaps I find between yogic philosophy and theatre—being present and in the moment, recognizing and appreciating that each day or each performance is different, the dedication to regular practice of your craft—all of which inspire me further as a yogi and an artist.

A freelance actor/director and SDC Associate Member, EMILY ROLLIE has worked on productions in Minnesota, Washington, Oregon, New York, California, Missouri, and Illinois. She spent five years as the artistic director of Independent Actors Theatre, a “purposefully nomadic” company, and producer of the “short Women’s Play Festival” (the plays are short, not the women). Emily also is an assistant professor of Theatre Arts at Central Washington University. Her scholarly work investigates the intersections between directing practice and theory, focusing on feminist theatre and Canadian theatre, and it has been published in Theatre Annual, Canadian Theatre Review, Theatre Survey, and several edited volumes.

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Jenny K oons Sam Pin kleton +

WHY I MADE THAT CHOICE SDC staff stand with the Ghostlight Project on January 19, 2017.

Moisés Kaufman

On January 19, 2017, at 5:30 PM in each time zone across the country, the Ghostlight Project gathered outside theatres to create a “light” for dark times ahead, and to make, or renew, a pledge to stand for and protect the values of inclusion, participation, and compassion for everyone, regardless of race, class, religion, country of origin, immigration status, (dis)ability, age, gender identity, or sexual orientation.

The Ghostlight Project is: Claudia Alick, Saheem Ali, Daniel Beaty, Alexandra Billings, Sammi Cannold, P. Carl, Rachel Chavkin, Lear deBessonet, Sarah Flamm, Rachel Hauck, David Henry Hwang, Christine Jones, Moisés Kaufman, Mia Katigbak, Jenny Koons, Lisa Kron, Tina Landau, Lorin Latarro, Zhailon Livingston, Rebecca Martinez, Jennifer McGrath, Okieriete Onaodowan, Lisa Peterson, Sam Pinkleton, Clint Ramos, Randy Reyes, Leigh Silverman, Kristyn Smith, Rachel Sussman, Jeanine Tesori, Liesl Tommy, Stephanie Ybarra, David Zinn, and YOU. SDC Journal asked some of the Members + Associates on the Ghostlight Project Steering Committee why they chose to participate in the January 19 initiating action and/or what choices they have made since. Next, Board Members Rachel Chavkin and Leigh Silverman discuss SDC’s new Political Engagement Committee in 20 Questions (page 12).

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The Ghostlight Project started as just a group of about 10 designers and directors, all friends of David Zinn; he wrote an email to us immediately after the election. This was also just after VP-elect Mike Pence had visited Hamilton, and the cast read a statement at curtain call, and Trump put out a scolding tweet saying theatre should be a “safe space.”

We all quickly agreed that we needed to unite and reclaim the meaning of “safe space” in the theatre. We all believe that theatre should be a safe space for opposition, safe for argument, safe for diversity, safe for people from communities that are otherwise endangered or marginalized. At first, we thought it would only be an action on Broadway, but the miracle was that by the time we came to the event on January 19, we had involved theatres and theatre folk from all over the nation, all 50 states, more than 800 organizations—including theatres and schools and ad hoc gatherings of theatre people. It was all completely grassroots.

And it started me off on a longer activist journey. I call, I write—I show up and make noise these days!

—Lisa Peterson As a proud, staunch immigrant, the days after the election felt worrisome. I wanted to channel my fear and despair into action. The Ghostlight Project offered the opportunity to do something tangible, compelling the artist in me to activate a more engaged and conscientious citizen in myself.

—Saheem Ali I became involved in the Ghostlight Project when Rachel Chavkin looped me into an early steering committee conversation. The decision to come on board was easy; first, I was honored to be included. Second, when Rachel suggests you do something, you do it. And most importantly, joining a nationwide theatrical effort working toward inclusion was—and remains—a no-brainer.

—Sammi Cannold

This moment in history has given us an opportunity to take a stand for inclusivity and pledge our values as a field. We know that theatre in the past has not always been inclusive or welcoming to all, but this galvanizing moment of saying we want it to be and will work for that could be the start of a sea change in the industry.

—Lear deBessonet When David Zinn’s email arrived at my inbox, I was thrilled to read it. Since the election, I had been experiencing a pervasive feeling

of panic and dread. As an immigrant, a Jew, and a gay person, I really wanted to do something immediately about the debacle we’re witnessing, and David’s ideas made sense from the start. He wanted to articulate the role of the theatre in these horrid times— and to create an action that would send a loud message of inclusion and sanctuary to the world at large. Theatre is a place that has historically welcomed everybody. And by reiterating theatre’s role in the larger culture, we could send a message of inclusion and solidarity to all communities at risk.

—Moisés Kaufman I was invited to join the Ghostlight Project by Rachel Chavkin. Our relationship is equal parts art and activism, so when Ghostlight was looking for support, I was contacted. Since January, I’ve blocked out space in my weekly schedule to engage in activism as a part of my routine by making phone calls to Congress, organizing Ghostlight's next steps, and educating myself about policy proposals and changes. I want to ensure that my commitment is ongoing as a habit rather than a single moment of protest or involvement.

I wanted to be a part of the Ghostlight Project because I strongly believe theatre artists are uniquely positioned to address challenges our country faces. In a time when more empathy, understanding, generosity of spirit, and deep listening are critical for our nation, we artists versed in these skills can create real impact, both inside the theatre and in our communities.

—Rebecca Martinez

—Jenny Koons Because I lost my innocence on November 8.

Because, as I mourned and raged, I had TO DO something. The morning my father passed away, my mom spent hours cleaning the blinds. Because she had TO DO something. The Ghostlight Project came to me as a gift, a lifesaver, an ACTION. And in the process of DOING something, I found a family larger than I knew possible to do it with (in all 50 states). To act— the basis of all theatre.

—Tina Landau Putting energy into a positive event helped me manage the barrage of bad news, as much as it helped educate and activate our community.

I already knew from my grassroots work with Art=Ammo, how willing our theatre community is to stand together for something in which we believe. At Times Square alone, Ghostlight brought together over 2,000 artists pledging solidarity to protect civil rights. As a result, my free time now is about continued artists’ action and education. My creative interest has also moved toward the literary and political theatre.

—Lorin Latarro

First, blame David Zinn for everything. Second, the most important part to me right now is about accountability moving forward. How can we all make sure that we are taking ACTION to make the change we “fight for” (or so we claimed on some signs a few months ago)? I’m proud of the companies that are already working together to create specific weekly actions, and to create a network of accountability. And now I want to make sure we—as individuals and throughout our networks—are asking specifically who are we calling, rallying for, campaigning for, donating to—not just posting about—and how often?

And, in our work, how are we “fighting” to assemble seasons, collaborators, and audiences that move this tricky, tricky moment forward and all together? They say the proof is in the pudding.

—Sam Pinkleton

Theatre is a place that has historically welcomed everybody. —Moisés Kaufman SUMMER 2017 | SDC JOURNAL

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POLITCAL ENGAGEMENT IN 20 QUESTIONS

Describe the new Political Engagement Committee in two words.

RACHEL CHAVKIN | Strengthening Union.

LEIGH SILVERMAN | Bold beginning.

Who serves on the Political Engagement Committee?

RACHEL | Leigh and I, Michael John Garcés, Meredith McDonough, [SDC Board Secretary] Oz Scott, and Casey Stangl. [SDC President] Pam MacKinnon and [SDC Executive Director] Laura Penn have certainly been present for all the work we’ve been doing as well.

What led to its establishment?

RACHEL | It actually started at the Annual Membership Meeting in November, with [Former SDC President] Susan H. Schulman encouraging us to consider the Union becoming more politically engaged. This was a week after the election, though she said this was something she’d been thinking about for a long time. And while I think it’s really important to us on the Committee that we represent and speak for Members, some of whom may be conservative or have voted for the current president, it is impossible to deny that this committee was founded in the wake of the 2016 election, and feeling like the arts and labor in general, as well as some of the values that, I think, as artists, we hold dear, were going to be endangered.

LEIGH | We have as a Union always been apolitical. Given the current threats that many of us feel on wide-ranging issues, from healthcare to labor to civil rights, we decided as a Board it was time to change that policy.

So the Board considered ways that SDC could exist and resist during this administration and this Committee was our answer. We are here to advocate for SDC’s core values, which are sadly already under attack.

What are some of those values?

LEIGH | The health and well-being of our Union. The physical and emotional health of our Membership. Gender parity. Diversity.

Giving voices to the underrepresented. If you are a Member of SDC, then no matter who you voted for, I believe you care about the longevity and success of the Union.

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Because we want to be successful, we’re not interested in taking on every issue. We’re looking for where these new governmental policies and legislation pose a threat to the Membership or affect our Union. For example, our first action was to release the letter about [former Secretary of Labor nominee Andrew] Puzder. That candidate was a union-buster. We had a very clear directive to come out against him.

It sounds like you’re talking about a legislative focus.

RACHEL | That was one of the very first conversations that we had— are we pursuing direct action, and that kind of organizing, or more a legislative focus? And the initial emphasis has definitely been on a legislative focus. This partially was in response to the number of direct action tools that are already available, like Michael Skolnik’s e-blast, and feeling like we didn’t need to reinvent the wheel. But also, this focus came from asking what we as a Union could do that others might not be able to; non-profit theatres are forbidden from direct lobbying, whereas we can do that. But we’re also continuing to discuss direct action. For example, in thinking about the fight to save the NEA, we began talking about the role that boards will play, considering that boards very often are, by their nature, deeply moneyed people, often deeply civically engaged people, and include many more conservative members than necessarily artists and our Membership themselves. So helping to equip our Members to see how they can leverage their board contacts.

SDC has a number of other committees.

How do you envision the Political Engagement Committee will interact with some of those?

LEIGH | There’s a lot of opportunity for different committees at SDC to be part of this Political Engagement Committee. We want many people involved and excited, so that we have the kind of strength to really enact change, and have our voices be heard—so this isn’t about six people, this is about our entire Membership.

RACHEL | This is a time where—and I’m not sure this isn’t always the case—everything is political.

What are some of the next steps for this Committee?

RACHEL | The Political Engagement Committee has been talking through what the mission statement and mandate of this group is, and came up with a very basic rubric that all action must be about strengthening the Union in some way. This keeps our focus on issues that concern our Members. I think it’s likely we’re going to be increasingly involved in the health care debate and the increasingly vibrant “Medicare for All” movements in California and New York. And of course, we’ll be tracking efforts to undermine labor via right-to-work legislation.

What is SDC’s relationship to the Department for Professional Employees?

LEIGH | We became an affiliate of a division of the AFL-CIO called the DPE, the Department for Professional Employees which works with many of the other entertainment unions— Equity, the DGA, SAG-AFTRA—everybody who’s associated with film, TV, or theatre in New York. We’ve now joined that table, and have attended our first meeting.

How will SDC Members benefit from this new affiliation?

LEIGH | In very practical terms, the DPE keeps us informed about upcoming legislative changes and what pressing changes to our healthcare, taxes, or city might affect our industry. So now we’re part of that communication tree.

At that first meeting [I attended], one of the topics that they were talking about was that in film and TV that’s shot in New York, there’s incentivizing happening. Producers get a tax break for putting women and people of color in important creative or management positions.

And Laura [Penn] and I looked at each other, and we were like, how can we make that happen in theatre? How can we make that happen on the national level so that more women and more people of color are writing and directing, and theatres are incentivized to hire them? So there is a kind of instant spark of, oh, we can learn some things from our brother and sister unions around this table, about what they are doing and how they are doing it.

We talked about some upcoming possible issues affecting COBRA and health plans, and just knowing that there are other artists like us, other organizations with members like us, who

11 entertainment unions joined to advocate on behalf of the NEA.

are going to be very affected by this, is useful, so that we can all come together and figure out how to help our Members help themselves in the best possible way. It’s going to be crucial that we have that kind of information sharing.

Does this mean SDC joined the AFL-CIO? RACHEL | Fundamentally, it does not, in the sense that we are not subject to all of the different rules by which the AFL-CIO operates.

This might be a terrible way to put it, but the DPE is sort of a “light” version of [the AFL-CIO], where we are in a consortium with many other members, many of whom are quite like-minded in terms of the entertainment unions that Leigh was talking about, and definitely other unions as well. There are also people at the table who we would not necessarily immediately think of SDC as being in league with. But fundamentally we are not subject to all of the understandably stringent ways that the AFL-CIO operates.

Is SDC still an independent labor union?

LEIGH | Yes. We are still an independent labor union. We are affiliated with a trade department of the AFL-CIO and as such have access to a wider community of labor colleagues, but we are not bound by AFL-CIO policy.

What are some of the Committee’s current projects?

RACHEL | Through the DPE, and through individual Members, we’re going to be getting more involved in the fight to save the NEA. And who knows what state that fight will be in by the time this Journal comes out, but one of the things that we’ll be curious about is hearing stories from Members, particularly Members in red states where the NEA does some of its most important work for geographically underserved communities, and hearing about the real impact of that funding, as experienced by our Members.

Laura Penn met with [N.Y. Senator] Chuck Schumer through the DPE, and began discussing the NEA as part of a triumvirate of culture, along with the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). These three massive funders essentially support, facilitate, and distribute culture throughout the country. So that’s definitely an area where the Committee has identified a focus.

And, again, it’s hard to say what will be relevant when this Journal comes out, since things are moving so fast (in terms of Executive Orders), but we’ve discussed trying to get to know our Membership better through a substantial survey. We need to know how our Members are going to be affected by potential reforms to the ACA, for example. We see our job as trying to draw the link between policy that is being made by this government, both threatened and actualized policy, and the lives of our Members. And so this survey would be making sure we really understand the lives of our Members.

LEIGH | I am also looking to the Dramatists Guild for partnership and solidarity on some of the issues that we feel affect both their membership and ours, and we’re looking for ways to join forces with them for some of our most important issues.

Can you talk a little bit about “Right to Work”?

RACHEL | Yes…(the ellipses is an acknowledgement of the degree of bias in the answer I’ll provide). In short, “right to work” is an ironically named state-by-state movement that has been around a LONG time, primarily in the Sun Belt, to enact policy that says, “No one can make you join a union.” It says that no shop can require someone working there to join a union, though unions are still technically permitted to operate. And, of course, this is profoundly damaging to unions, because if you don’t have to join, you don’t have to pay dues, but you STILL of course reap the benefits that organized labor has procured, such as safe working conditions or wages. It’s become an increasingly potent threat to the health of unions amidst the larger country’s continual slide to the right, as demonstrated by the fact that it used to really only be southern states where unions were historically weak, but now we’ve got some MAJOR organized labor states passing this legislation. It’s a back-door way to achieving an ideological pursuit, namely slowly draining unions to death.

What is your involvement with the Ghostlight Project?

RACHEL | Leigh and I are both members of the Steering Committee of the Ghostlight Project.

The Ghostlight Project is in an interesting stage of development—as with any group that pops up to make a very specific statement. We’ve been having all sorts of conversations about long-term purpose and mode of operating, SUMMER 2017 | SDC JOURNAL

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particularly in the context of so many different movements and systems already supporting direct progressive action (wall-of-us, and Action Group Network, to name a couple).

Ghostlight has thus far purposefully kept quite loose in its mission, and is most interested in the civic engagement of artists, primarily through building and fostering deeper relationships with non-arts community partners, which is ultimately a very local process, but also through examining the institutional practices that undermine progressive values—such as parity in hiring artistic and administrative staff. We’re planning a summer of service, and we're now trying to create space for and serve as a platform for much more locally engaged actions—we’ve talked about the TedX model. Because, actually, that’s sort of what it’s all about now, both in terms of direct action, in terms of calling your representatives in Congress—that’s a very local action—and the community partnerships.

So I’m working with Rebecca Martinez, who is a really incredible choreographer, director, and artist with a long history of civil practice, on trying to make a map that a theatre that hasn’t had a strong engagement practice thus far could use to begin approaching the thorny world of community engagement, to build the relationship in a genuine and ethical way.

So that’s one of the things that Ghostlight is doing, and that I’m particularly involved with.

LEIGH | I’m also involved with Ghostlight, was on the steering committee and now (with Thom Weaver) keep the New York/Northeast regional theatres engaged and active as part of our involvement with the regional committee.

I am also currently working with a great organization called the Center for Popular Democracy.

Rachel, you mentioned the idea of “ethical” community engagement.

RACHEL | Oh, boy. Well, I want to preface it by saying I am a zygote in terms of this kind of work. I’ve had the real pleasure of collaborating with Sojourn Theatre (a company founded by Michael Rohd, of which Rebecca Martinez is a core member), one of the nation’s leaders in this work. Also, tracking the work of a dear friend and colleague, Lear deBessonet. And Lear and Stephanie Ybarra from the Public Theater are both members of the Ghostlight Steering Committee.

You can talk about this either in one word or 10,000 words. The short answer is slowness, truly listening to and being led by the non-arts partner. All too often community engagement looks like “Here, we have these free tickets for you. Why aren’t you coming and using your free tickets?”

It’s a partnership being led by the non-arts partner. Often we are the limits of our own imagination, but don’t have the self-awareness or humility to see that; it can be very vulnerable to start a conversation with the question,

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“How might we artists support what you do?”

Particularly because these are all organizations that are likely overworked, underpaid (sound familiar?), and may or may not have much immediate interest in an arts partnership— depending on how much these artists and/or theatrical institutions have previously been of use. It takes an enormous amount of time and serious commitment to being led.

LEIGH | I would add that, just like Rachel, I had been someone who thought I was engaged politically and now realize just how much of a wrong assumption that was. And so this moment is about taking what we know how to do—organize and lead—but learning how to do it in the political arena from the people who have been doing it for a very long time.

It’s time for humility and learning how to be effective in this tricky political landscape. It’s also about sustainability and knowing we are in this long-term—not getting too burned or bummed out.

Do you find it challenging to be politically engaged artists, or do art and politics go hand in hand for you?

RACHEL | I just have no idea what it would mean to be a non-politically-engaged artist. I think everything in life is politics. I come from a family where every small and large choice you make, for better and, often annoyingly, for worse, is a reflection of how engaged/ rigorous you have time to be on a daily basis.

It’s present when shopping, and of course, more to the question, when deciding what projects to work on, who my creative team is, the make-up of the cast, and what institutions I want to work for.

LEIGH | Every artistic decision that gets made—who you staff your show with, what the composition of your show looks like, who is in your room, what shows you work on, how you work on them, where—there’s no way to separate our work from what’s happening in the world. We are all asking ourselves who we are and what we stand for. It’s the question SDC asked and was the origin point for this Committee.

If everybody, in all the rehearsal rooms, everywhere, made a commitment to more diversity, more curiosity about their wider community, deeper engagement with local politics, and was willing to stand in solidarity with other like-minded people, we'd have a chance for real impact.

Leigh, do you have a question for Rachel?

LEIGH | Rachel, you grew up in such a political family. I’m wondering, right now, what are your parents most afraid of happening?

RACHEL | My mom’s biggest fear immediately after the election was that they would try to take apart the entire Medicaid system, that they would just literally stop the program. You know, as she talks about it, it’s all different grades of shocking cruelty, because it’s deciding how overtly you are going to screw those citizens who are most vulnerable. The fear changes on a daily basis, but I can say the total deconstruction of Medicaid was her original fear, as that’s the area of policy she works in.

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My dad has done a lot of work both in Israel and Palestine, and has many close friends there on both sides, and across the political spectrum. So the appointment of David Friedman, an aggressive hawk, to Israeli ambassador, and the policies his appointment signifies, is probably one of his biggest fears.

Rachel, do you have a question for Leigh?

RACHEL | How much do you feel like you are satiating your political desires through your work right now? And I should say your professional life, maybe not necessarily specifically your work.

LEIGH | I feel very lucky, because the projects that I have been working on since the election explored pressing political issues. One was Madeleine George’s play Hurricane Diane, which was a retelling of The Bacchae in relationship to climate change. Her play was essentially [a comedy] about how our desire for a nice yard is really bringing about the end of the world. And On the Exhale, which I directed at Roundabout, dealt with gun control.

Not everything we work on can be issue driven, nor should be, but I did feel a certain amount of relief that at this moment these plays made very strong political statements about the way we live. I feel hungry for it, and have felt our audiences have also been hungry for it.

What is something you wish you had been asked, and what would you have answered?

RACHEL | The only thing that pops into my mind—this is not a question—I would just say that nothing can serve everything. I’m saying that, thinking about this new Political Engagement Committee, because I can imagine, being an SDC Member and being so excited that SDC has a Political Engagement Committee, and then being like, “But why aren’t they organizing protests in the streets?” or whatnot.

I think there’s a big sea change happening in terms of consciousness, particularly for people of privilege (white privilege obviously included in that), and there are so many avenues for action as part of this shift—and so many yet to be created. It’s important that we provide our Members with access to other things, like links to Indivisible and Michael Skolnik’s mailing list, if they want more direct action.

LEIGH | Anybody who wants to get involved, there’s a place for you.

People are looking for actionable items and ways to make a difference, and SDC is a place where you can make a difference. People say, “What do I do? What do I do? I’m too depressed.” Well, there’s a lot of work to do, and there’s a lot of ways to do it, and engaging more deeply with the Union around this issue or other issues is a form of resistance.

WAYS TO GET INVOLVED Rachel + Leigh recommend the following resources: The Ghostlight Project | theghostlightproject.com 2 Hours a Week | 2hoursaweek.org Tanya Turns Up | tanyaturnsup.com Indivisible Guide | indivisibleguide.com Action Group Network | actiongroups.net Michael Skolnik’s Newsletter | http://bit.ly/2f55HNs Wall of Us | wall-of-us.org Project 1461 | project1461.org SUMMER 2017 | SDC JOURNAL

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Othello at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival PHOTO William Marsh

THE CALL OF DUTY AN SDC JOURNAL ROUNDTABLE

In 2012, theatre service organization Theatre Communications Group formed a partnership with Blue Star Families, the nonprofit organization supporting members of the American military and their families. Blue Star Theatres helps theatres connect with military personnel and their families, particularly as veterans reintegrate into the civilian community. Since the program’s inception, participation has grown from 22 theatres around the country to more than 152 that provide ticket discounts, education programs, and a variety of engagement activities.

In recognition of the success of the program, TCG has expanded its support through a grant program enabling participating theatres to deepen their relationships with their local military communities. On behalf of SDC JOURNAL, actor and director TED SOD spoke recently with the artistic directors of two theatres that have received TCG/Blue Star Theatres Grants: RANDALL ARNEY from the Geffen Playhouse and DAVIS McCALLUM from Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival.

TED SOD | I want to start by having you both describe your respective theatre's participation with the Blue Star Families and the programs you provide, which are made available through funding from Theatre Communications Group.

RANDALL ARNEY | The Geffen Playhouse has been interested in finding ways to enhance the well-being of veterans for a long time. As a Blue Star Theatre, we provide tickets to our shows at no charge to veterans and their families. For several seasons, we had a program bringing veterans to the dress rehearsals of shows. We partnered with the Gary Sinise Foundation and provided a meal before those events.

Ultimately, we became interested in finding a way to serve veterans in a more impactful

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way. We piloted a writing and performance project for veterans in the fall of 2015 and implemented a refined version in the fall of 2016. We worked intensively with the participating veterans who created monologues based on their various experiences and produced an evening performance at the end of that process for the community.

TED | How did you find the veterans? Was it through the Gary Sinise Foundation? Or did you go to the service organization for injured veterans and their families Wounded Warriors?

RANDY | We reached out to several groups that serve veterans here in Los Angeles, including New Directions and Veterans in Film and Television, and invited those interested to apply. The program’s artistic director and

manager went through the applications to select participants whom they believed would benefit the most from the program. We also wanted the group to include a range of ethnicities, ages, and branches of the military, and reflect the service of women as well as men.

TED | Davis, I believe your theatre works with cadets at West Point, which is a neighbor of yours, and also with the middle school located nearby.

DAVIS McCALLUM | Yes, that’s exactly right.

Our theatre is located in Garrison, New York, on one side of the river. It’s a purpose-built tent theatre that looks out at the Hudson River and at the fortress of West Point. In a certain way, the United States Military Academy at

West Point is the backdrop for all the plays that we’ve produced.

Our program is multi-pronged. We’re doing workshops; we’re bringing a show to the middle school; we’re bringing a show to the cadets; we have West Point Night at our theatre, where cadets, faculty members, and their families come to see productions in our repertory season.

It’s natural that, over the last decade, we’ve increasingly partnered with the academy. The cadets are involved in all different aspects of our work as a theatre company. Since 2013, our teaching artists have done a workshop with the entire first-year class of cadets, which comprises 1,100 plebes, which is the term for a first-year cadet at West Point. In 2014, we did a production of Othello that was set in a modern military context, and we had a number of April Fitzsimmons military advisers from (center) directs at the academy come and Geffen Playhouse’s Veterans Writing + work with our actors.

Performance Project.

The production started PHOTO Jeff Lorch with the company Photography marching across the field in formation, which is a practice that is part of the transformation from incoming students to the core of cadets that happens in the first year at West Point.

And, in 2015, we produced the oneperson adaptation of The Iliad—entitled An Iliad—by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare. It was an unforgettable experience. There’s a room at West Point called Cullum Hall, which has a portrait of General Sherman, and around the top of the room are the names of famous, and sometimes infamous, American military engagements. The play is an investigation of why we go to war.

Where does it live in the human heart? And why is it a practice that continues? The climax of the play is a list of wars, starting with the Trojan War, and it was just absolutely electric to be performing that in front of cadets.

The workshops are composed of veterans who have left the military. The goal is to empower them to have a voice through theatre and support their reintegration into the community at large. The participants identify and explore ideas for their stories, write and memorize their stories, learn how to present their monologues, and perform them in culminating performances on the main stage of our theatre.

Because we’re based in Los Angeles, there are veterans who want to be artists, and, in fact, some have trained in the arts before going into the service. We provide access to quality learning in theatre to those veterans with artistic aspirations by guiding them to write for the stage and developing their physical, vocal, and expressive skills. All are invited to attend Geffen productions, which we hope serve as sources of inspiration. We create a show that is

The scope of their stories ranges from hilarious to profound to moving.

This program impacts not only the veterans but their families and friends who come to see the shows. Oftentimes, veterans’ programs are described as useful and helpful only to the veterans themselves. But we’ve also been amazed by the profound influence on everyone who takes part. Audiences of fellow veterans, other community groups the Geffen serves, and Geffen subscribers have testified to how much they have learned about veterans and how they have been inspired to listen to the stories of the veterans in their lives.

TED | Davis, tell us about the middle school aspect of your program. How does that connect with the West Point cadets?

DAVIS | The Blue Star program is about engaging the entire military community, including families.

Part of our grant went to support a spring tour of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was performed at West Point Middle School in Highland Falls, NY. Every spring, we have a smaller cast production of Shakespeare that plays to a lot of different schools, and that show went at no cost to West Point Middle School.

TED | Did you do workshops as well, or did the students see the show and then have their teachers discuss it with them?

composed of both veterans with artistic aims and those without them.

TED | Randy, will you talk about the time frame of your project? It sounds like it went on over a number of years.

We have found it useful for participants to work with a theme as a jumping-off point. In both seasons, many explored the heroes— impactful figures—in their own lives. In one case, a hero was an Iraqi translator who became a close comrade to a soldier. There was a civilian coworker who stood up for a Marine in an office setting. One described how his father had encouraged him to “get back on it” whenever he faced challenges.

RANDY | The Veterans Writing and Performance Project will be going into its third year. Once we select the participants, the project usually spans 14 weeks with weekly four-hour workshops on Saturdays.

What’s fascinating and what we’ve learned is that people seem to have a monochromatic view of veterans. We work with veterans from all of the branches of the service, including veterans who didn’t necessarily see combat.

DAVIS | Our teaching artists are always in the classroom accompanying the show that they see, both before and after the productions.

TED | Can you both talk about the artists working with the vets and cadets? Give us some insight into who is behind the work with your respective communities.

RANDY | In our case, our Geffen Director of Education and Community Engagement, Jennifer Zakkai, worked with our consulting Artistic Director, April Fitzsimmons—herself a veteran and writer—and they collaborated on the design of the program. The artistic director guided the learning process and directed the

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performances with the assistance of Carolyn Marie Wright, our Manager of Education and Community Engagement.

DAVIS | The Othello we produced was directed

by Chris Edwards, who is now the Artistic Director of Nevada Conservatory Theatre in Las Vegas, and was formerly the Associate Artistic Director at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. And the teaching artist work is led by our Director of Education, Sean McNall. A lot of credit goes to those two for establishing and developing this relationship.

TED | How did you both function in this program?

DAVIS | Personally, I have a different involvement in each aspect of what’s happening under our Blue Star grant. And it’s continuing to evolve.

This coming summer, we’re producing a play

by Richard Nelson, The General from America, which is a play about Benedict Arnold and his attempt in 1780 to betray the fortress of West Point to the British at the height of the Revolutionary War. I am helping to curate the additional programming that will surround that play. We’ll be engaging in a partnership with the West Point Museum, and we’re having military scholars from West Point come over and speak before the show on a given night. We’re hoping to bring the show to the cadets on post. It’s going to be thrilling to engage with the community at West Point about this particular chapter in military history and West Point’s role in this pivotal moment in the American Revolution.

TED | Do you feel your role with the project is mostly about quality control?

DAVIS | Yes, and—how should I put it?—the nature of the partnership. I have a genuine desire to learn from the military community and to integrate them into the fabric of the theatre company. I wonder if you’ve ever been to West Point? It’s an inspiring place to be. The students that it attracts are interested in the same things that make a theatre company great: leadership, imagination, teamwork, and integrity.

TED | I’ve never been to West Point proper. But the cadets have come to Roundabout Theatre,

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where I facilitate post-play discussions, and they always ask questions. Their presence is often acknowledged by the actors who participate in the discussions.

Randy, will you talk about your role in these programs that you described?

RANDY | I’ve got to give full credit to Jennifer, April, and Carolyn Marie. Those three ladies have passionately created this. My involvement has been in talking about how it might evolve during the coming years. I function very much as an administrator for these three women, who are really doing the work on the ground.

TED | Randy, you mentioned that some of the veterans’ monologues that were written and performed were very moving. Can you give us a sense of the stories that stayed with you?

tragedy, were incredibly moving and inspiring.

Another participant talked about a Dear John letter that he received while he was in combat.

I already mentioned the powerful story about the Marine who became close friends with an Iraqi translator. Though he cared deeply about his people, the translator was killed by local combatants because he was helping American soldiers. Our shows, in the two years we’ve done them, couldn’t be more different because the tone is really shaped by the participants.

TED | Davis, do you have a story you want to share about the programming at your theatre?

Anything that hit you in an emotional or intellectual way?

DAVIS | I would say it was the experience of seeing the cadets watch this terrific actor, Kurt Rhoads, perform that one-person Iliad underneath the names of battles where generations of previous cadets had sacrificed their lives. Seeing them engage with the themes of that play and relate it to their own chosen path as future officers in the U.S. Army.

I will confess to having some trepidation about how the argument of the play would be received on post, but I really shouldn’t have had it. The Iliad is the original war story, in the Western literary tradition, at least. So, it just seemed to resonate in a very personal and natural way in that room in front of that audience.

RANDY | There are so many. A lot of the writing describes their day-to-day lives, and sometimes they can be really funny or they can be excruciating.

One that sticks out in my mind was written by a woman who came on stage and clearly was disabled in her hands and feet. She talked about how, before going into the service, she had worked in a beauty salon doing nails, and there was a profound irony when she spoke of her work making other people’s nails beautiful. She worked around some chemicals when she was in the service and, unbeknownst to anyone, including the service members themselves, these chemicals were having a negative impact on the people who were working near them. The chemicals had a debilitating effect on her, and yet her strength, energy, and optimism, in the wake of this

TED | I’m curious if either of you served in the military.

RANDY | The year I turned 18, they were still doing the draft, but Vietnam was winding down, so I didn’t serve as a result of a draft. I went on to college and never did serve in the military.

TED | Would you say because you never served, you have a heightened interest or awareness of what’s going on at your theatre, or am I just projecting that onto you?

RANDY | I grew up in Chicago, at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Gary Sinise, who was one of our founders, has long had an interest in working with veterans. In 1984, Steppenwolf initiated a program bringing veterans to dress rehearsals. I was the artistic director from ’87 to ’95, so I got to witness the impact that theatre can have on veterans and

how much the civilian community can learn from them. After I moved out to Los Angeles and became the artistic director at the Geffen, it was the memories of those years of veterans’ programs in Chicago that really prompted me to get involved.

TED | Davis, did you serve as a military person?

DAVIS | I’ve never served in the military.

Before I worked here, my work was as a freelance director of new plays, mostly in New York City. One of my formative experiences as a director was working on the original production of Quiara Hudes’ play Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue, which is about a military family.

It is about a young Marine who was one of the first to cross into Iraq. I remember that experience so vividly. We partnered with Veterans Against the War and had talkbacks after the show, which was only 80 minutes long. That was my first experience with the military community through making theatre. It had a real impact on me.

supports their reintegration into those communities.

According to our outside evaluator’s 2016 report, our participants felt they grew significantly in their physical and verbal performance, and communication skills.

And, to a participant, they now feel more empowered to express their life experiences.

We’re heartened by the impact that we feel we’re having, and we know that they are having a profound impact on us.

TED | I want to know if you would be able to continue a program like this without the funding that you’re currently getting from TCG. Is it something that can be funded outside of Blue Star?

RANDY | A TCG/Blue Star grant helped launch the pilot for the project in 2015. In 2016, it

described are engaging people we don’t normally think of as a traditional theatre audience.

DAVIS | We often are entrenched in different camps on a political spectrum. And you might expect that theatre people would be more on the left, and the military community might be more on the right. But when you really engage in conversation, sometimes these easy dichotomies fall away, as they should.

One of my passions for Hudson Valley Shakespeare is that it can be a place where people can meet and have a meaningful dialogue with people who might see the world differently than they do. It’s crucial that we engage in that dialogue without pandering or condescension, and without compromising our core values of diversity, inclusiveness, generosity, courage, and tolerance.

This program gives our theatre a chance to really walk the walk, and that’s why I’m excited about it.

RANDY | That’s so well said, Davis. I’ve learned how multi-hued the veterans are. We’ve found our veterans run the gamut, from the most liberal to the most conservative. They represent absolutely all of us—my eyes have been opened to how broad and diverse military personnel are.

TED | I’m wondering what you would like the participants to take away from these programs.

DAVIS | I feel it is a twoway street. It seems like it’s a symbiotic relationship. I feel our artists, audiences, and staff are learning a lot from our engagement with the military community. In terms of what I hope the cadets at West Point take from this collaboration, I think the values that permeate Shakespeare’s plays are deeply humanist. I like knowing that the future leaders of our military are in direct conversation with Mr. Shakespeare, and that skills that all great theatre engenders— imagination, empathy, and the ability to see both sides of a question—will continue to inform them as leaders.

was supported by grants from foundations and the generosity of individual donors. All of those folks are incredibly passionate and committed to this program. There has been less dependency on our end on the NEA or on government programming for this.

TED | Randy?

TED | Davis, is that true for you too?

RANDY | We too have been amazed at what a two-way street it is and how much the veteran’s program is impacting our theatre staff and audiences.

DAVIS | I know we’re hoping to continue. But we’re very concerned about the future of the NEA and that funding is critical to the program.

That said, our relationship with West Point has become so important that some kind of presence at West Point is a fundamental aspect of what we do as a theatre company.

The primary goals of our program are to help veterans find their voices and become visible in ways that are authentic to them. We also want to help them build communities among their colleagues and fellow citizens. Sharing their humanity—as theatre can so powerfully—

DAVIS | The cadets we work with are from all 50 states and they represent really the best of who we are. It’s inspiring to think of them as a reflection of what the future of our country is going to be.

LEFT

An Iliad at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival PHOTO Richard Termine RIGHT

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Tour PHOTO Gabe Palacio

TED | I get the sense from both of you that sometimes our world can feel a bit insular.

I love that both these programs you’ve SUMMER 2017 | SDC JOURNAL

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Stop&Listen AN INTERVIEW WITH THOMAS KAIL + KENNETH L. ROBERSON

BY KENNETH

L. ROBERSON

Director/choreographer Kenneth L. Roberson and director Thomas Kail have helmed two Tony Award-winning shows that upended the definition of the American musical—Kenneth as the choreographer on Avenue Q and Thomas as the director of Hamilton. But that’s not all that the two artists have in common. Both have long associations with New York City-based theatre company SAY, the Stuttering Association for the Young. Originally founded in 2001 by director Taro Alexander as Our Time Theatre Company, SAY’s work with young artists who stutter has grown to include speech therapy, a camp, and online resources—including a blog—in addition to its core programs encouraging young people to write and tell their stories theatrically and musically.

As SAY approached a milestone anniversary, SDC Journal brought Roberson and Kail together for a phone conversation about their work with the company—Roberson as a board member and Kail as a mentor. They found many experiences—including a shared artistic spirit—in common.

KENNETH L. ROBERSON | Thomas, when I last saw you, I think it was the closing party of Avenue Q. THOMAS KAIL | That sounds right. The first closing, because it will never close otherwise, right?

KENNETH | I love that—from your mouth to God’s ears.

I’m glad you were able to join us. I’m excited; this is a great opportunity for us to talk about what we’ve done in the past, to remind us of giving back, of sharing and receiving. You know this marks the 15th anniversary of SAY? Which you and I first knew as Our Time, but we’re going to use the organization’s new name from here on: SAY. THOMAS | I did know that.

KENNETH | How did you first get involved with this group?

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Camp SAY PHOTOS c/o SAY

THOMAS | It was rather random, which is how many good things happen. In 2012 or 2013, I was walking down a street in Manhattan and bumped into Noah Cornman, who was working for the organization. I knew him from his previous job when he was working making cast albums. He started talking about his new job, which I thought sounded wonderful.

Noah and I had a mutual friend in common, Anika Chapin. A few days after I ran into Noah, I was talking to Anika, and she started telling me more about the [SAY] program: she had gone down to their summer camp and spent a lot of time there. It just seemed like something that I wanted to continue to investigate. I loved the idea of using the power of theatre to bring people together. It’s something that I believe in deeply.

So I got in touch with Noah and asked how I could participate in some small way. And that’s how it began—a chance encounter on a Manhattan street.

KENNETH | Wow, that’s great. Had you had prior experience with actors who stutter?

THOMAS | I certainly have. And my job as a director and as a human being is to make sure anyone—and whatever they might struggle with—feels comfortable to do the work. That’s it. That’s all I care about.

When Noah started talking about the organization, when I talked to Anika, and then, eventually, when I got to meet Taro Alexander and some of the other folks at SAY, I realized that was at the core of this organization. And I was amazed that I had not found them earlier; it felt like they were so in sync with many of the things that I thought were necessary and powerful about being a part of the theatre community.

KENNETH | Can you describe your work with the company?

THOMAS | Sure. My function with the group, I think, was one where I wanted to just be a support or a ballast in any way that I could.

When I went to meet with them, I just said, “How can I be useful?” There are certain things I can do. I’m happy to find some sort of support role in a rehearsal process.

So that’s where it began. I worked with one of the young students who was in the graduating year of the program, before he left high school and went to college, and who had written and directed a show.

That’s where I initially found myself: going through the process and working to develop the script, helping set up a rehearsal, having conversations about what it meant to run the room, or being around a bit as he was

staging the play. To me, that was how I could contribute in a way that could be a little bit meaningful.

a way to help someone actualize it. It was enormously edifying for me to be there. I’m sure that what I was able to absorb was greater than [what] I was able to give out.

But also, part of my job in my life outside of that building was trying to do something very similar, which is to support an artist so that they can stand and do the work themselves.

I’ve always felt that if a director makes a show and they need to be there every day the show is running, then they haven’t necessarily done their job well. It needs to run without them.

It needs to be able to function without them.

That’s how I approached it when I was working with [SAY] on that first project.

KENNETH | So this experience was a reminder to you of what the word “time” can really mean—how long things would take and/or the length of time that we assume a certain idea would take to develop. So it’s very interesting that you mention time. With me, it seems to manifest in having the time to speak my words.

But it seems that you found the time to listen.

[Do] you think your listening was enhanced by this experience?

KENNETH | This is great, Thomas. You used the word “support,” which I like. You support them.

In which unique ways were you supported by these actors who had a unique way of speaking? What did you take away from the work you did with them?

THOMAS | Absolutely, without question. And understanding that the ability to communicate and the space that needed to exist to make sure that someone was able to communicate an idea needed to be preserved, no matter the time. That’s what one should do.

THOMAS | There’s an insistence and movement in this city and in the theatre—we’re always moving—hurtling quickly, trying to get some kind of results. We have to finish a task.

We have to stage the show. We have to get the script to this place. We have to keep on meeting these deadlines and these structures of time that in some way are real and other ways are arbitrary. We have to be ready here, because the theatre is ready. That feels like a real thing that we’re moving towards. But we often manufacture this feeling.

KENNETH | Did you have an opportunity to coach any of them in the form of rap? Did this happen often?

I think that because my job as a director is to try to communicate one idea to a disparate group of people and make sure we all know what story we’re telling, and [that] we’re all moving in the same direction, I think I took for granted that speed and acceleration was necessary for that. That it had to be done quickly. [Working with SAY actors] caused me to just stop and listen and realize that things take the time they need to take. That’s something that, early on, some very smart people told me, which is that these things we think we have to achieve—we have to get here, we have to do this—that sometimes the best thing to do is just slow down and investigate. I can always find more opportunity to incorporate this idea. I found myself really struck by that.

THOMAS | Yes, I’m certain that it has. A lot of the things that I find myself working on are about folks who in some way don’t feel heard, whether that’s a group living in upper Manhattan that is not often represented on stage or it’s a group of upstarts starting a revolution. When I did a play about a football coach, same thing: a football coach is someone who is trying to communicate, who is trying to find a way to reach his players.

I was working on the programs where the students were both writing and directing the work. I was moved by the stories that the students decided to tell. Each of them, in some way, was about being heard. Each of them was about the feeling of isolation when they weren’t able to express themselves in the way that they wanted. I was genuinely opened up by this idea of what it meant to be a 17- or 18-year-old and write with such clarity and precision and specificity. As I do with any other piece of writing that I admire, I wanted to find

THOMAS | It didn’t for me. Most of the work, if not all of the work I did, was in plays without musical form. It was almost exclusively dialogue.

KENNETH | Did this experience with the kids carry over directly to your work with fluent people?

Hamilton is about someone who is trying to find the right words to express an idea. It’s the exact same thing. I find that the experience of working at SAY reframed and refocused so much of the work I had already been doing and allowed me see it in a new way.

KENNETH | Have you had experiences during auditions [when] you suspected that the actor was a stutterer?

THOMAS | Yes. The audition process is one where I’m always trying to, in some way, work against the strange situation we find ourselves in. There are some people sitting on one side of a table and someone else who has worked their whole life and now has to come in and has two minutes and 30 seconds to do something, SUMMER 2017 | SDC JOURNAL

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to prove their ability. I find that slightly ridiculous and unfair to everybody involved.

In those auditions, I try, as best I can, to create an environment where there is room to play because that’s actually closer to what the optimal relationship is in the rehearsal room.

for their theatre workshop and rehearsal time when they were preparing for a production.

Some would even get to go into the studio to record their original songs with Musical Director Everett Bradley, who was recently the musical director and house bandleader for The Meredith Vieira Show.

KENNETH | Right. And do you remember any specific auditions where it was obvious an actor was working through a stutter, or that he had a severe stutter and needed more time with the text to finish the audition? Have you had any of those experiences yet?

I found myself tearing up during this segment on Taro; I knew how defeating it could be for a young person when struggling just to get out one syllable. I obviously felt a connection to these youths. The feature on NY1 left me wanting to find Taro Alexander and lend a hand in any way that I could.

THOMAS | Yes, a few. I would say that I’m more aware of it happening after I had spent my time with SAY. KENNETH | Wow, you just answered my next question for me. One last question, Thomas. What are your hopes for the young people with this organization?

THOMAS | That they understand how important their voice is. That they know they will be heard. That they can find people in their lives and communities who understand that it just takes them a little more time, but that what they have to say is of equal value to anybody else.

KENNETH | Great. I’m glad to have this opportunity with you. On behalf of people who stutter, I very much appreciate that you felt the need to share your wealth of knowledge with us. You’re making me realize that words are time, and vice versa, and you were able to use your time and your words to help us with our growth.

I really appreciate that.

THOMAS | Well, the same was done for me.

That’s how I know that whatever that chance encounter was I had with Noah was meant to be. And I think very fondly on the first Broadway opening I was ever invited to. It was your show—the opening of Avenue Q on July 31, 2003. I’ve admired your work, and I have such vivid memories of seeing it on that stage. Getting to know you a little bit back then made it feel like it was right in front of me. That it was possible. And if you worked hard, something like that could be attainable.

So I’ve always felt connected to you and appreciative of your work. I’m honored to have spent the time I have with SAY.

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SDC JOURNAL

| SUMMER 2017

They Wait, You Finish

BY KENNETH

L. ROBERSON

“They’ll just have to wait until you finish saying what you got to say,” my mother would exclaim every Easter and Christmas season during my grade school years, when it was mandatory that I recite a speech for the church program.

I stuttered then—as I do now—and since that time, I have had people wait for me to finish saying what I had to say. My family and school teachers were my major support during those important years of development, years that, even as a child with fluent speech, are challenging enough. So I survived these formative years somewhat intact. There was no place in my tiny agrarian town of Thomson, Georgia, for me to go to speech therapy. If there was, it was a secret to me—and the segregated South was expert at keeping things under wraps. However, in 1972, while a junior in high school, after schools finally integrated (yes, I know Brown vs. The Board of Education was 1954; my State of Georgia took its sweet time in upholding the law), I was able to see a speech pathologist for one summer. It was better late than never. Because of my experience of finally having speech therapy and knowing its importance, I became eager to help young stutterers avoid such late attention. Decades later, the opportunity to do just that shows up.

In walked Our Time (now known as SAY—the Stuttering Association for the Young), an organization that gives formalized support through arts programs to young people who stutter. I could not help but give an enthusiastic reply of “Yes!” when asked to be a part of the SAY family. I was eager to serve and sat on the board of trustees for four years—time well spent.

I think it was around 2004 when I’d caught an interview with fellow stutterer Taro Alexander, founder and president of SAY, speaking about the organization on NY1, a 24-hour news show unique to New York City. These lucky young people have the opportunity to gain confidence and character via the performing arts (acting, writing, singing, and dance) under the curriculum of such an institution as SAY. The youth had after-school and weekend programs

Be happy about what you ask. Not long after that item aired, I was on a break from choreographing an event for the Actors Fund when a young man approached me; he produced CDs featuring theatre music. He knew Taro and thought that I should, also, because he saw that I stuttered. It was like an angel tapping me on the shoulder. My reply was, “Yes and yes!” He set up a meeting for Taro and me, and we clicked instantly. I was so impressed with this man, his passion, and his vision for this young organization.

For Our Time’s annual gala, Taro honors adult stutterers who have made a positive difference in their professions. These high-profile adults show the kids just what one can accomplish in spite of issues with speech, in turn serving as role models. Some of the honorees have been national conservationist Dr. Alan Rabinowitz, David Seidler (best known for his screenplay of The King’s Speech), and former Chicago Bulls forward Bob Love. And, in 2005, yours truly.

I was the third recipient of the Hero Award.

Obviously, I have a special affinity for those honorees who are in the same profession as me, Bill Withers and Austin Pendleton, to name a few. Director/actor Mr. Pendleton was the first person to be honored, and this annual event has been going strong ever since. Spring 2017 marks the 15-year anniversary of the gala.

Speaking of performers who also stutter, there are forms of performance that are easier for us to express in than others; sports, dance, and (for some reason) singing on stage can be lumped into this group, but acting is another story. The actor who stutters has to come up with tailor-made tools that will aid in getting through the already inherently stressful audition. I would walk into the audition room and state right off the bat, “I stutter.”

Just reciting these two words relaxed me into fluency of speech. This can be compared to swinging that closet door wide open and outing oneself into truthfulness.

I was blessed to work with directors who were not put off by actors like myself, and on some occasions, I would get offered roles without

even having to audition. For instance, I was called in to the Public Theater to pick up a script for a showcase production of The House of Lear, an adaption of King Lear. I got my package and called Reggie Jackson, director of the play, to mention that I was missing a copy of the music to use to choreograph to. After two beats, he said, “Doll, you in the play.” I was cast as Cornwall. My stomach turned with fear as my ego jumped up and down with joy! I was a bumbling bag of mixed emotions.

I had begun to have nightmares about acting in this play. This was not a job where I would have a few lines and dive into a tap routine. Oh, no—this is the holy William Shakespeare. Don’t mess with Bill. Now, again: the director knew how to deal with me as an actor with unique qualities, and he proved this during the first table read. I can still see the look of disbelief on the faces of the other actors when they heard me stutter for the first time, while the director remained unruffled. He and I knew that in less than an hour, my nerves would befriend me again as I progressively got better.

On another occasion, I was cast as an understudy in the Broadway musical Oh, Kay! Legendary producer David Merrick agreed for me to cover the non-dancing, non-singing role of the detective. The show was in previews and, as is so often the case, they had not gotten to rehearse the understudies. One night, before I could say “kick ball change,” I was literally snatched from the wings after the opening dance number and tossed into a Theoni V. Aldredge custom three-piece suit, resplendent with wide-brimmed fedora. The detective looked better than this actor felt. I cocked the hat to one side, for this was the only control I had in this scenario. All went well, and I was on for two nights. The stuttering was minimal and, by the second night, had dissolved into the land of mundane fluency.

My career as a Broadway thespian was shortlived. Acting-spacting! Deep inside, I knew that I would be on the creative side of things in theatre, though it took me a while to accept it. In the early 1980s, record producer Tony Valor—who produced a disco act I was in—told me that I would become a choreographer.

What? Was he crazy? I had not been in New York City for a good year, yet I knew that I would have my first Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical by the age of 27 (27 just sounded like a good age), so what in the world was he talking about? Did not anyone tell him that he was in the presence of Ben Vereen, the Sequel? Well, of course, Tony was right in his prediction about my future. The truth shall set you free.

I did indeed end up as a Broadway choreographer on the Tony Award-winning musical Avenue Q and on All Shook Up. I

have also directed and/or choreographed at many regional theatres—Alliance Theatre, Arena Stage, Baltimore Center Stage, and Pasadena Playhouse, to name a few—and have choreographed for film and television too; John Leguizamo’s Fox TV series House of Buggin’ immediately comes to mind. In addition, I am a professor of practice in the Department of Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance at Indiana University. The department gives me time off to continue my career in commercial theatre—the best of both worlds.

Intense speech challenges do arise in the midst of my self-proclaimed stance of “make them hear you.” One has downs with the ups.

About three years ago, as part of a series of talks for National Public Radio, actor and director Ruben Santiago-Hudson called me in to participate on a panel discussing music and movement in August Wilson’s plays. That evening, while being interviewed during the panel, my tongue, breath, and mouth chose not to cooperate. Fluency had flown out the door. It was like an out-of-body experience.

Shocking! I could not take control of the reins; the horse was out of the barn and would not come back. No fedora or Shakespeare text to save me, except for the fact that what I had to say trumped my delivery. Knowledge is always a friend.

I am happy to have had my parents’ voices in my ear, saying, “This too shall pass.” Well, it did—kind of. Who would have thought that National Public Radio—operative word, “radio”—is often podcasted and available to a wider audience? Lord, the world got tricks!

Looking back, I have to truly embrace what was authentic for me. At that time, it was not the best speech available, but it was all I had.

Taro is reminding his kids that good enough is just that: good enough. The youth of SAY are given a place to retreat during such times of discomfort. A safe space to discuss, cry, and reboot. This is just another reminder of how important this organization’s work is.

As I write this piece, I think about my contribution to how others relate to people who stutter. I think of my actions, especially while in a rehearsal or a class setting. To ease my feeling, too often I exhibit a cavalier reaction to my stuttering. Most pressing is that I may have, via these actions, caused harm to others with the same speech issues who may be less thick-skinned than I am. The inherent “ham” gene that I carry as a performer did not attach itself to everyone’s DNA. This I must remember.

and the kids at SAY have a chance to raise those arms much higher than others like them have had a chance to.

I took part in a performance workshop for SAY some years back, teaching dance and improvisation. The workshop ended with a Q&A. The kids mostly wanted to know about my experiences as a performer who stutters.

One young man, about to burst from the confines of impatience, brought this profound day I’d had with the kids back down to basics.

He said, “Excuse me, but how long did it take you to grow facial hair?” There we were, just like everyone else.

Being in a room filled with stutterers was awesome. It was my first time in such a homogeneous environment. There was a real sense of family: looking into each other’s eyes and seeing a shared need, a common desire to speak without self-interruption. I also noticed such a diverse group of kids in that room.

Speech disfluency does not discriminate. SAY does not turn any kid away. Hence, those who can’t afford the services are as welcome as anyone else.

Since my first involvement with SAY, many other services have been added by the organization: Camp SAY—an American Camp Associationaccredited program—is a summer camp for kids and teens who stutter. Camp SAY not only gives attendees a break from the outside world; they are changing and building confidence through community and empowering activities.

The bucolic surroundings don’t hurt, either.

Individual and group speech therapy have been added since my first introduction to SAY. Also, their latest addition is the innovative Storytellers Program, where teens write and share their unique stories with others. At other SAY events, I have gotten to catch up with some of the youth that I worked with hands-on, and I am pleased to note that they and many other alumni are thriving after aging out of SAY, working in fields that span theatre, journalism, law, and science, for a short list.

Writing this recollection of my life experiences through the lens of speech, egged on by my connection with SAY, is a reminder of the fortitude of the human spirit. With volunteers, board and staff members, instructors, and the like, youths who stutter can call SAY that wise old friend with a mother’s wit: you speak, they wait, you finish.

PHOTO

SneakPeek

The downs and ups of our unique way of speaking is riding a roller coaster in and out of fluent speech. For the younger me, it was about trying to keep my arms in the car. Taro SUMMER 2017 | SDC JOURNAL

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COVER

KJ Sanchez + choreographer Peter Kyle in rehearsal for Jane Eyre at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park PHOTOS Mikki Schaffner

KJ SANCHEZ

IS LISTENING

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN KJ SANCHEZ + LIZ ENGELMAN In February 2017, days after President Trump imposed a ban on Muslims traveling to the United States, director/playwright/producer/actor KJ Sanchez had some thinking to recalibrate. For the past year, Sanchez has been working on a documentary play about refugees and immigrants in the Twin Cities, commissioned by the Guthrie Theater. This dilemma is one Sanchez has encountered a lot in the past few years, as her work has increasingly addressed some of the most pressing social and political issues of our age.

In the tumultuous days after the Muslim ban, Sanchez spoke with dramaturg Liz Engelman about the evolution of her work and the role that identity and politics have played for her. The two became friends nearly 25 years ago, when Engelman was an intern at Actors Theatre of Louisville and KJ was playing Millie in Anne Bogart’s production of Picnic. They are now colleagues in the Playwriting and Directing Program at the University of Texas at Austin. Their conversation, conducted on behalf of SDC Journal, is shared in these pages.

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LIZ ENGELMAN | KJ, you are a Latina theatre artist with deep family roots in New Mexico. How has this history, landscape, and culture influenced your interests, your curiosities, obsessions, and the lenses for your work?

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KJ SANCHEZ | Who I am and where I come from has definitely influenced everything that I do, but not in terms easy to define. Almost everybody who comes from New Mexico has this predicament.

My ancestors settled Tome, my hometown in New Mexico, in 1734. And no one has ever left.

Tome was one of the oldest and most well-documented land grants in the history of New Spain.

KJ | Everyone else thought, “Thank god, now we get to do what we were born to do, which is act,” and I was heartbroken that we weren’t in rehearsal anymore. It was Les who said, “Darling, you’ve got to face the facts. You’re a director.” One day, I said to Carolyn Baeumler, “I think I’m a director.” She said, in the most loving way, “That’s a really good idea because you’re a bossy actor.”

Steve Cosson, who was Les’s assistant on Big Love, said, “I’m My ancestors were Sephardic starting a theatre company.

Jews fleeing persecution in You ought to come to the Spain and Genizaros, who were first meeting. It’s called The Pueblo Indians taken as slaves Civilians.” He had learned by the Comanches, sold to Emily Berman, Jonathan Gillard Daly, Larry Neumann, Jr., J. Alexander Coe, interview techniques from Les, Spanish and French priests, and Deborah Staples, Lee E. Ernst, Laura Gordon + Lauren Hirte in Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s Quadracci Powerhouse production of The Diary of Anne Frank who had worked with [the given their freedom if they were PHOTO Michael Brosilow British theatre company] Joint baptized and adopted Spanish Stock, and it was Steve who shared those with surnames. So my ancestors were Sephardic had trepidations and I think I even apologized me and set me on the path of documentary Jews and Pueblo Indians—all pretending to be at some point to somebody about not being playmaking.

Spanish Catholic. To get property. a “real” Latino. That community in particular welcomed me with open arms. I was moved to LIZ | What did you learn about directing?

People ask me what I am, and when I say tears.

“New Mexican,” it’s confusing for them. They KJ | From Anne, I learned that it’s not about her. think I’m a new kind of Mexican. Only New That said, I think that there will be some It’s about how she facilitates a room where the Mexicans know what I mean when I say I’m individuals in the academy and also in the field company can actually have the brilliant idea.

New Mexican because politically, for so long, who take a little umbrage with me identifying She, better than anybody else I’ve ever worked culturally we said “Hispanic.” We were so used as a Latino theatremaker because, with the with, is absolutely egoless when it comes to to calling ourselves “Hispanic” until we learned exception of a few works, I don’t make plays following whoever has the pulse. She doesn’t from other communities that that was a very that are about that identity alone. need to be the smartest person in the room. non-PC thing to say, and we obviously must’ve She needs to have done just enough of the been subjugated if we’ve convinced ourselves LIZ | You’re more than a “triple threat;” you’re heavy lifting before everything happens—to that we’re only Spanish. Which is true, but also a director, a playwright, an actor, a producer, a put the right people in the room, to ask the complicated.

CEO of American Records, and a teacher. How right questions. What I learned from her is, did you come to wear so many hats? if you empower people, they will ultimately Then I fell in love with the Chicano movement and far surpass what you could bring in the room I wanted to be Chicano. I fell in love with Ballet KJ | I like learning new systems. Every one of yourself.

Folklorico dancing and was taking guitar classes these silos is a new system for me to learn. because I wanted to be in a mariachi band.

That’s why I make my own work: it is really Les is able to give the one note that addresses just an excuse to dive into a couple of years of 72 micromanaging notes. We’ve all worked with Now I’m understanding the subtleties of what research about something. the directors that go line by line, note by note, it means to be a Sephardic Jew and Indian and thinking that the actor is some sophisticated Spanish and Mexican—New Mexico was part Also, I was very, very lucky to have incredible software program, and as long as you plug in of Mexico, though only for 34 years—and all mentors. Being a young actor, moving to New all of the right “ifs, thens, equals,” you’ll get the of that goes into the stew of who I am when I York at 25, being able to work with Anne right results. move through the world.

Bogart, and to get the invitation as an actor to think of the big picture…it was a natural In a notes session when Big Love was at Long LIZ | Did you feel that the Chicano movement progression to be a director.

Wharf, Les said, “Right now, the piece is just was where you got hooked into politics? a bit over-inhabited.” And we knew what that Another significant mentor of mine was one of meant: that we, as actors, had gotten greedy KJ | Yeah, I really fell for the pride of the the finest living directors today: Les Waters. I about wanting to feel every moment. He keeps movement, and for the rudimentary ways a was in the Humana Festival production of Big things so simple. He gets to the bone. political gesture can be theatrical and bold Love. That production went to several theatres without needing to be complicated. It felt like a over a year and a half. Every time we got to a Steve taught me the nuts and bolts of a good really good place to begin. new theatre, the other actors would run to the interview. There are questions that elicit stage, and I would sit in the house with Les. I opinion, questions that elicit a “yes” or “no” The thing I love about the majority of the would get so sad when we would open. answer, and questions that elicit a mission Latina/o/x community is that folks are so statement—and none of that is very interesting. welcoming. I went to Chicago as part of Yo LIZ | And you had to go on stage.

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Jonathan Gillard Daly in Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s 2014/15 Quadracci Powerhouse production of Harvey PHOTO Michael Brosilow

ReEntry at Urban Stages PHOTO Michael Portantierre

The best questions are the ones that invite a tangent, a story. Steve is very practical. What’s wonderful is that he has built this really clear system that allows for very clear structure and, at the same time, plenty of room to play.

Structure allows...

But if I make sure you understand that I have compassion for your situation, I’ll say, “Oh no, I’m so sorry to hear that, tell me about your cat,” but I don’t tell you about my cat, you might say, “Actually, I hated that cat. Actually, I poisoned that cat.” It is so not about you.

to do?” If you’re not afraid to ask yourself, “Is this really honest?” then you’re not going to hear the answer, right?

LIZ | …the room.

LIZ | Do you feel like listening is an undervalued skill in directing?

KJ | If I had an autobiography, it’d be called Too Dumb to Know Better. Every time I’ve had a success, it’s been from literally running into a wall. I decided I was a biologist—and then overnight decided to be an actor. The first play I saw was the play I was in. The director said, ‘Do it sotto voce.” And I said, “Sort of what?”

Everybody laughed, and I decided to laugh too.

KJ | Allows the room, right. Allows it to have a sophomoric approach. Just to be clear: that’s a virtue, to be sophomoric. Now that we’re at UT Austin, I understand what’s so beautiful about a sophomore: you know enough to understand what drives you, you’re hungry to learn, you haven’t been beaten down by the world yet, so you’re still feisty.

KJ | Absolutely. It’s undervalued; it’s underpracticed; the muscles have atrophied.

LIZ | And if you don’t listen, then you don’t get to the discovery that they hated their cat and killed it. You cut that off because you’re waiting to say your next good idea.

LIZ | You’re not an expert yet.

KJ | You can’t be afraid of asking questions.

KJ | You’re not an expert, and you’re not afraid to be goofy.

I was just at Milwaukee Rep this weekend. We want to make a play about Latinx immigrants in Milwaukee. Instead of making it a “Dear audience, please take your medicine and hear these terrible stories” play, our design is to make it about empanadas. We’re going to have chefs serve empanadas, and everybody drinks, and the characters are going to tell us their favorite recipes. Through those recipes, they will tell the stories of their families and their lives.

LIZ | You’re still exploring.

As a documentary theatremaker, you have interviewed generals, you’ve interviewed refugees. How do you begin an interview, and what makes a really good question?

KJ | What makes a good interview is for the person I’m interviewing to know that I am a compassionate, nonjudgmental listener.

That can happen in subtle ways. If you were to tell me, “Oh, I’m sorry I’m late getting here, my cat got sick and died, and I had to take care of that,” and I said, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry. I love cats. Let me show you pictures of my cats...” The impulse is “Let’s have something in common," then you know exactly how I feel about cats.

Not good. Because it will limit what you say to me, because you know I love cats.

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Brent Hazelton, the Associate Artistic Director, went with me on these interviews, and he said, “Jeez, [the] first five minutes and you were asking people, ‘Tell me about your divorce,’ ‘Tell me about when your mom died.’” If you’re not afraid of the answer, people will tell you anything.

I think that can translate in every way to directing. If you’re not afraid to ask your designers, “Is this really a bad idea?” If you’re not afraid to ask your artistic director, “Is the audience going to understand what I’m trying

LIZ | You do ask fearless questions. How did you learn that skill?

LIZ | Why did you choose live theatre for the documentary work that you make?

KJ | I’m still learning from documentary film.

Films like Touching the Void, a lot of Werner Herzog’s films, Joshua Oppenheimer, obviously Errol Morris—they’re really pushing the form all of the time. I watch documentaries late at night in my bed, when I’m on the road, alone.

I want to make documentary theatre to have people from different walks of life, shoulder to shoulder, listening to the story together.

And theatricality of the stage, the visceral experience, the spectacle can put all of us in an altered state to hear these stories together.

That’s why I choose the stage rather than film.

LIZ | Your company, American Records, has a short and sweet two-sentence mission, which is to make theatre that chronicles our time, work that serves as a bridge between people.

Why was that important to you in founding the company?

KJ | I actually didn’t start with the mission. I was the Associate Artistic Director at Two River Theater, where Aaron Posner commissioned

Project Theatre's production of Unity (1918) PHOTO c/o Project Theatre

ReEntry. That theatre switched artistic leaderships; Aaron and I left, and I was an itinerant director.

(Editor’s note: In 2009, with Emily Ackerman, Sanchez co-wrote and directed ReEntry, a docudrama about Marines preparing for, and then returning from, combat. It premiered at Two River Theater, and was then produced at Urban Stages in New York City. The play has been performed in conventional theatre spaces as well as at VA hospitals and military bases all around the United States.)

this? What is it?” I record; I make a record of a time, place, and people.

LIZ | You mentioned these snapshots of our time, and so many of your works have been well-timed in relationship to our country’s pressing issues. With ReEntry, what was your impetus in focusing on the community of returning veterans?

KJ | Jon Jory told me to.

LIZ | Always listen to Jon Jory.

Then ReEntry started to gain traction. When we were Off-Broadway, somebody from the military saw it and said, “I have this conference with over a thousand military leaders in San Diego.

Can you get your company there?” Too dumb to know better, I said yes.

KJ | He actually walked up to me and told me.

He said, “I know you have five brothers who were in the military during Vietnam. I know you’ve been doing documentary plays. If you don’t interview people coming back from war, you’d be nuts.” And I didn’t want to be nuts.

They were going to provide transportation, but I needed at least $10,000 to pay the actors and do the set. So I thought, “Okay, how am I going to do this?” So, the producing part of American Records happened and ReEntry started to tour.

That led to another project that led to another project that led to another project—and I realized that I needed a mission statement.

LIZ | What were the most important things you learned from those interviewees and their families?

I looked at the body of my work from the last 10 years, and the two things they all had in common was they were all taking a snapshot of our time, and they were all in one way saying to the people that the story was about, “We see you, we hear you, you matter,” and saying to the people [who] didn’t know anything about it, “Here’s a bridge to this story.”

I think it was Maria Goyanes who helped me find the name American Records. I was going to call it something really pretentious, like the National Institute of Interstitial Awareness.

Maria said, “What exactly are you doing with

KJ | That they had something that I/we didn’t, which was a real community. They had identity.

They had the ability to do something that they all believed was bigger than themselves.

Making the play made me feel lonely for a lot of things that I felt were missing in my life.

I learned a lot of things, such as “Thank you for your service” is more complicated than I think.

When we first did the show in 2009, not a lot of people knew that “Thank you for your service” was hard for some people to hear. I learned it’s just as stressful to be a 25-year-old woman on an aircraft carrier and you’re responsible for all of the nuclear material, and if you make one mistake in math, or if you doze off for a minute, a lot of people die.

ReEntry tended to work best when it was an audience of both civilians and military. If you’ve ever spent time with Marines, you know most have an incredibly irreverent sense of humor about their jobs and who they are. That’s in the play. But the audiences that came in expecting a sad and somber war play…well, those jokes would never play. Dead silence. But…when we had active duty or veterans in the audience, they would teach the civilian audience that it was okay to laugh. They gave the audience permission to breathe. And for the veterans, well, I had several come to me and tell me how much it meant to them to see how many civilians actually wanted to know what their lives were like, actually wanted to hear their stories.

There’s that bridge.

We’re now aware that we send people to war, on deployments away from their families for 12 months at a time, even if they’re not going to war. We all get that that has an impact on a person, and we get that there’s a moral injury.

You know, the military leaders are actually talking about moral injury. They use the term “moral injury.” Which is phenomenal.

LIZ | You talk about moral injuries, and you’ve also written a play about football and brain injuries. Other than Jon Jory telling you what to write about, how do your subjects or issues come to you?

KJ | I try to avoid pieces that I have a strong opinion about; I know they’ll become agitprop.

What kept me invested in X’s and O’s—the football play—was that I had a really complicated relationship with football. I loved it, and I could see the personal damage it was doing. With this piece that I’m making for the Guthrie, how I feel about it has drastically changed in the last few days. Right now, I’m at a moment of crisis with it.

With this Executive Order.

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The impetus at the beginning was, “Can we have a clear-eyed conversation about what is right about accepting refugees into our country? Not only accepting them but giving them money to resettle, paying for their rent for a couple of months until they get a job, helping them get a job.” I didn’t want to get involved in the knee-jerk, right-wing responses, but I was interested in “What is at the heart of that?” We know that there were some second-generation Somalis who were leaving Minneapolis, wanting to sign up with terrorist organizations. So I wanted to get under it. But now that the Federal Refugee Resettlement Funding program is frozen, I’m furious, and this play is going to change dramatically.

We didn’t have a curtain, so we had to figure out how to let time pass. We used the exact same square footage as the real space. We didn’t allow a foot more than the real space. It made it so hard to stage with that little space.

Because the theatre is so large, Dan Conway built a moat around the space between them and the audience.

LIZ | Your process for plays such as ReEntry and X’s and O’s is obviously different from working on a new play, and also from working on a wellknown, often-told classic.

The actors never left the space, even during intermission, so the audience then had to decide: were they going to get up and go get a drink, or were they going to sit with them?

KJ | Sometimes. With Lydia Blaisdell’s play The Silent Woman, which I directed for UT New Theatre, I could use a lot of the same skill set because directing a documentary play is mostly about how you stitch the monologues together in three dimensions. You have to write a physical narrative to go with the talking heads. Tony Taccone, who directed X’s and O’s, did that masterfully well. He’d built a whole vocabulary of physicality that gave wonderful breaks between the talking heads.

LIZ | When you’re given a play like Anne Frank or Harvey, how do you find your way in?

I’m a firm believer that a director is not a midwife of a new play but is in many ways a co-writer. The playwright has obviously written the dramatic action, the story, the language, and the characters, but it’s our responsibility to direct the narrative.

When I’m a playwright, I can say anything. And then, as a director, I always fantasize writing a letter: “Dear playwrights, please remember that directors have to obey the laws of gravity.” We have to figure out how to get a table on stage.

I think I used my good old 25-year-old Viewpoints training while directing The Diary of Anne Frank. The Powerhouse Theater in Milwaukee is one of those huge spaces that everybody loved to build in the ’70s and ’80s.

There’s a proscenium, but it’s not really a proscenium—it’s a thrust. The play is meant to have a curtain drop because you need to be able to see the space transform over time; that’s an important part of understanding how people live in such close proximity [to] each other for so long. The play is not about the characters hiding and eventually being caught and being murdered by the Nazis; it’s about how they live together. That’s what makes it such a great play; it’s so funny, and they get so mad [at] each other, and we forget that they’re going to die at the end because we’re so invested in how they live together.

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I used all of my Viewpoints training and everything that I learned from Anne, Tina [Landau], and all the SITI kids. Every transition from one scene to another had a vista, and we choreographed it. If somebody has to get to the bathroom, somebody has to step back, somebody has to reach around.

KJ | ReEntry really informed what I did with Harvey. Jon Daly played Elwood P. Dowd, and Jon Daly had been lobbying to play Elwood P. Dowd for 20 years. And 20 years ago, Jon Daly would have been at the age that most productions would have cast him.

The secret between Jon and me was that Elwood P. Dowd was a veteran of the First World War. Because it takes place in 1943. It explained things for us. I would guess 99.9 percent of the audience would’ve never thought that. But for us, it allowed him to have such a deep core, and a reason to keep everything light. And it also helps the bond between Harvey and Veta, his sister, who is usually played only as a villain. But Veta, knowing Elwood’s past and his moral injuries from the war…well, every action she takes is from a place of profound love and need to protect him. It completely makes sense why she fights so hard to deny everything. I call this kind of choice—making Elwood a WWI veteran—my “secret cause.” The audience will never know, but it helps us give depth to the characters and action.

LIZ | Do you feel like you find that secret in every play, or most, to give a kind of foundational context for intimate relationships?

KJ | When I’m doing it right. When I fail—and I do all the time—I haven’t found the secret cause or the right cohesion. Sometimes “cause” comes from a practical need. That’s what happened with Kevin Kerr’s Unity (1918), which Project Theatre in New York produced. It’s about the 1918 flu epidemic, in Unity, a little town in Saskatchewan. The town quarantines itself to try to contain the flu. Almost everybody dies, and it’s really funny. It’s heartbreaking, it’s so dark, it’s so funny, and it takes place in 17 different locations. It’s episodic, epic, and big.

We had no money. I got Kenton Yeager, who is one of the best lighting designers in the country.

I called him and said, “We have no money to give you. There are 12 lights to hang, and you might get electrocuted by one of them.” So the “secret cause” [for that production] was how we used every inch of the space to tell the story. It came out of the fact that we had nothing, and we had a big story.

There weren’t even really good speakers in the space, so we decided to make the sound score ourselves. Things such as, “We need to be at a train station. How do we make a train station?”

Someone brought in a box of wooden matches, and when you shake them, it sounds just like a train station. It gave us the kind of intimacy that we needed for the whole group to fall in love with that play.

LIZ | This is what I love about you. You have these extremes of this scrappy, inventive, creative spirit, and then you direct at these big regional theatres. Is the process different in any way?

KJ | It is different, though I try to keep the same spirit. God bless production managers; obviously, they need information so many months ahead of time, because they have to build things and because the things they’re building are very large. What I try to do, when it works, is find a landscape that I know we can transform in a lot of ways when we need to.

And I’m going into Jane Eyre now at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park.

LIZ | The most political of all.

KJ | Actually, it absolutely is. On election night, we were at this party and, thinking Hillary [Clinton] was going to win, I asked everybody to write on a piece of paper their greatest fears.

And my expectation was at the end of the night we were going to go outside, build a bonfire, and burn them. And say to ourselves, “We made it. We did it. The fear is done.” I went home that night carrying those in a bag, and I walked around with them and wondered what I was going to do. For a minute, I thought of pinning all of those notes to my white suit and wearing it. But I didn’t do that.

What I realized—I don’t know if it was that night or the next morning, in between the Cheerios and the weeping—was that Jane Eyre was an earlier version of a young Hillary Rodham. She is not charming. She doesn’t know how to please people. She’s not cute. She’s plain. She’s awkward. She’s so socially inept. But she’s brave. She’s a hard worker. She’s a good soldier. And everyone despised her for it.

LIZ | A lot of your work engages with issues of the time—sometimes more timely than you even realize they’re going to be. Would you call yourself a politically driven artist?

KJ | I don’t think so. I don’t know. I don’t understand enough about how I would define political theatre to say I was.

KJ | Don’t wait until somebody gives you a production. Work, make things, make things all the time.

those jobs, but if they all come from the same experiences, that’s not helping open up this need for diversity and inclusion.

LIZ | You and I are reading applications for the graduate program at UT Austin right now, and we were noticing how many emerging directors cite the importance of social justice in their work. It’s become a buzzword, in some ways.

If there’s a café in your neighborhood that you notice doesn’t have a lot of foot traffic, go in and pitch doing Jose Rivera’s Sonnets for an Old Century monologues.

LIZ | Can you talk about what you’re trying to do at UT to recruit a diverse directing population?

KJ | Oh, the self-importance and the overblown credit we want to give ourselves, that theatre saves the world.

Just throw as much as you can against the wall and see what sticks. If you wait for when everybody’s ready to give you a space, the time, permission—it ain’t going to happen. You’ve just got to keep yourself creative.

To be honest, though, theatre did, in fact, save my life. I bet I would be in some sort of trouble without theatre. I found a place where I fit, being a weirdo, and it’s my home. I’ve seen theatre have an impact, help people talk about things, and help people rethink things. But I get itchy when people say that theatre can do what no other form can do. That’s a lie.

I’m surprised at how often my students want to meet in my office. “Dear students, when you read this article, which I will ask you all to do, make fewer appointments with me.” I joke, but really, when they want to get advice, I do encourage them to just risk totally screwing up.

LIZ | As a director in theatre, are you directing an audience experience? A narrative? What are you directing?

KJ | That’s such a good question...I’m trying to figure that out.

Another one of my favorite directors—and a super-decent, dear human being—is Anne Kauffman. I’ve heard Anne say, “I’m not directing the play for anybody but me.” I love that; I want to steal it and I want to adopt it, but I’m not necessarily sure it’s true for me.

I am directing theatre because I want to solve puzzles. I think I’m directing for—cheeseball alert—that 13-year-old self who felt lonely and didn’t have a place. If there’s somebody that goes either “That’s me” or “I see that.”

Recently, I heard Bill O’Brien, who is an innovation advisor with the NEA, say that catharsis is the intellectual understanding of chaos. I think this is true to my impulse to want to direct theatre. There’s so much chaos in the world, chaos that I came from, and chaos in my life. I need to create an intellectual and cathartic frame around it. When I was a kid, I always wanted to be a research biologist. I always dreamed of having a laboratory. And for me, that’s what directing theatre is about: creating a laboratory to find a cathartic way of understanding chaos.

LIZ | They say the things that we do now are sometimes things that we take with us from our childhood interests, and the idea of research and biology in a lab…you still have a research lab. It’s called directing.

What advice do you offer young theatre practitioners today?

LIZ | What surprises you most about the field today? Or excites you, or pisses you off?

KJ | What excites me is how many theatres are moving away from this need to own world premieres. Theatres are sharing premieres.

I know that there are a lot of very specific economic reasons for co-productions, but I like the idea of theatres playing together.

What excites me are things like Joe Haj at the Guthrie. We need more people of color in executive positions. And what makes me furious is that, in general, theatre HR hiring practices are at least 20—if not 50—years behind general corporate hiring practices. Especially in executive leadership roles.

We see all the metrics of gender parity and racial diversity. But in leadership roles, how many women are managing, producing, and artistic directors? How many people of color are managing directors, producing directors, or artistic directors? In an art form that wants to be so feel-good about making us a better society, I would level a decent bet that ExxonMobil has more progressive hiring practices than any number of theatres.

LIZ | Do you bring that conversation to the theatres you work in?

KJ | They’re the ones that are heading in that direction.

KJ | Just the other day, I heard a student say what it meant for him to see Tarell McCraney’s In the Red and Brown Water. He was weeping when he talked about how important it was for him to see those black bodies on stage at UT. Austin is such a diverse place. And the mission of the institution is about inclusivity and diversity. We’ve got to go the extra miles.

When you are looking at a diverse student population, you’re saying we want those perspectives, we want those stories. That circles back to the work you make. What are your stories?

Stories that we haven’t heard. How do we find common ground? How do we learn something new about ourselves through your story?

LIZ | Is there any parting thought that you would like to reflect on, share?

KJ | I’m glad I’m at UT. Young directors are spending more money to study to be a director.

They’re not only giving us their time—they’re giving us their money and the time that they could be earning money.

They’re obviously the future, and I, on a daily basis, feel a responsibility to serve them. I’m trying to share as much as I know as a producer, director, actor, and writer. The mantra of the program is there are no acolytes. I want them to make their own Harvey. I’m just going to throw as much [as I can] towards them and see what sticks, and if I can give them some Viewpoints, if I can give them some transactional analysis, if I can help them to understand the language that a Method actor uses…if we could just pile on as many skills as possible.

If I hadn’t had a couple of mentors who showed me the way, I would not have known that it was a possibility to have a viable, happy, middleclass career in the theatre. Every undergraduate directing class that I have, I start with, “You’re going to hear it’s hard, you’re going to hear, ‘Oh, being an artist is a struggle.’” I am living proof that you can have a middle-class normal life being a theatremaker.

The thing that nobody talks about when we talk about diversity and inclusion is the interesting dilemma we have: so many of the top-tier theatres use research firms, search firms, and head hunters to fill those positions. Those people are good people, fighting the good fight, but there are only a few of them and they in and of themselves are not diverse. Which is not to say that they don’t have a right to have SUMMER 2017 | SDC JOURNAL

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Playwright J. T. ROGERS and director BARTLETT SHER were first brought together by producer André Bishop for Blood and Gifts, a play about the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan in the 1980s that Lincoln Center Theater produced in 2011. Their next collaboration, Oslo, became one of the improbable successes of the New York theatre season in 2016: a new play, running three hours, with 14 actors playing multiple characters. (A third play, still in the planning stages, is yet to be announced.)

Oslo is a beautifully crafted and remarkably even-handed play. An “intellectual thriller,” in Bart’s words, it culminates with footage from an iconic moment in 20th-century world politics: the 1993 Rose Garden Ceremony marking the signing of the Oslo Accords, when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat shook hands—Israel recognizing the PLO as Palestine’s official representative, and the PLO recognizing Israel’s right to exist— with President Bill Clinton standing between them. Oslo isn’t about these three instantly recognizable, larger-than-life figures, however; rather, it tracks the secret backroom negotiations

by Norwegian diplomats Terje Rød-Larsen and his wife, Mona Juul (played by Tony Award winners Jefferson Mays and Jennifer Ehle) that led to the signing of the Accords.

In some ways, the backstory to the play is as improbable as the events it dramatizes. Rød-Larsen and Juul happened to have a daughter who went to school with Bart’s daughter. Bart brought in Rød-Larsen, an expert on the Middle East and Central Asia, to talk to the cast during rehearsals for Blood and Gifts, and urged J. T. to have a drink with his friend, the diplomat—who revealed that he had covertly organized the backchannel talks. “I think I probably knew this was a play the moment I was hearing the story from Terje,” J. T. says. “The protagonists are not Israeli or Palestinian or American. And that became a clear path to write a play, as opposed to giving a lecture to the audience about it.”

On the eve of Oslo’s move to Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, a Broadway house, J. T. and Bart sat down to talk about their collaboration.

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Bartlett Sher J.T. Rogers

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PHOTO

Rebecca Ashley

THIS PAGE Daniel Oreskes, Daniel Jenkins, Jefferson Mays, Anthony Azizi + Dariush Kashani in Oslo at Lincoln Center Theater PHOTO T. Charles Erickson

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Theatre Is Built on Human Connection BARTLETT SHER + J.T. ROGERS

BY STEPHANIE

COEN

BARTLETT SHER | J. T. writes my favorite kind of theatre. He’s a very agile writer. I love the politics, I love the ideas, I like the theatricality, I like the complexity. And when it comes to politics, I like his politics with a small ’p.’ Politics at the highest level, for me, deals with historical conditions, as Brecht would’ve asked, forces the audience into a relationship to a conflict or situation, and asks them to make their own decisions.

J. T. ROGERS | And deals with the polis, you know, from the root of the word, which is: what are you watching, and how are you part of the larger question?

BART | I’m always interested in looking back after the fact. The history play is very attractive to me, because it has that distancing effect.

What’s the phrase? Art, like light, needs distance. Oslo is about political ideas, it’s about engagement, it’s about history, and it allows you to enter those conversations with real ideas, real language that conveys complex thoughts, and find your way toward your position in relationship to that history and your decisions about where you fall in those politics.

Not in the confines of Netflix, but in the public space of a theatre in New York City.

J. T. | There are subjects that I’m really fascinated by politically, as a citizen. As a writer, you always want stories that are big and have complexity. And one of the three or four that has always been there for me is—in quotation marks—“Israel/Palestine.” It was like trying to find a way to write about Rwanda [in The Overwhelming, his 2007 play about the genocide in Rwanda in 1994]. You have to find the way. And for me, it was like, oh, the protagonists are not Israeli or Palestinian or American. And that became a clear path to write a play, as opposed to giving a lecture to the audience about it.

From The Overwhelming to Blood and Gifts to Oslo, I was working on continually moving up the ladder of power. I wanted to see if I could write a play at the level of power where people were actually in the room altering things.

That was the engine for the writing of it. But there was also the Shakespearean model of the history plays, where things are constantly elevated; as the drama increases and the play gets deeper into itself, characters begin to arrive who have more power.

BART | You go from this couple, who have an idea about trying something, and in each stage it keeps expanding in its possibilities until you’re at the White House. We call the play an intellectual thriller; it’s a thriller of ideas, not an action thriller. There is an actual pressure, there are people’s lives on the line—they could die as a result of the circumstances involved.

The risks are incredibly high, but they must be solved with the mind. It’s one in which you

have to watch people go through something very pressurized.

J. T. | The struggle in writing any kind of larger political play is to make it a personal story set against larger events, as opposed to a play about larger events. Can you whittle the gaze of the audience as tight as you can, and then expand, and then whittle again? That’s what Bart visually does as a director. I’m going to mix metaphors, but what he does is open the iris and close the iris, and open the iris and close the iris.

I’ve worked with many talented directors, but with Bart, the thing that’s so fruitful is that he approaches text—both staging it, and dramaturgically with the actors—the way I approach text. Which is, how do the language and the ideas lift? After we worked on Blood and Gifts, we made a conscious choice to do a bunch of projects together. And then André came and said, “I want to commission you to write another play,” which is not always the norm and why I’m really grateful. But I knew what Bart could do.

BART | This went through many workshops and unfolded in a slow and complex way. It was a lot of material.

J. T. | But there were moments where I could say, I don’t have to worry about that, I know that he can make that work. And that allowed for swiftness in the final writing because I didn’t have worry about, well, how would a director do that? I just knew that it was going to get done.

We started working on the play when I wrote what is now 40 pages of act one and was then about 80 pages. I just had a reading with actors I put together and obviously had Bart come just to hear it. I didn’t want to give him anything till I was in a place where I knew where I was going. As with a lot of good directors, there’s that sort of “shark circling blood in the water” thing; as the writer, you have to be like, “Yeah, not yet. You can’t see it yet.” You’ve got to figure it out yourself, before you’re ready to have somebody pushing back on it, which is his role. From there, we did a number of workshops together, the next big one without even a finished script, and I kept writing. And as I was writing it, Bart was putting it on its feet so he could understand what the play actually is as a thing, and then he would ask why this and why that?

BART | The first thing I did was a kind of classical version, which is the version you have to treat as though you don’t have any opinion just so you can see what’s there. Because the opinion can short-circuit the subconscious level at which he’s developing his own ideas.

Because once I start to get in there saying, no, it needs to do this, and the scene isn’t doing

this—then I’m basically shaping the structure.

Which is not what I should be doing. Once we get past a certain point, I will say, I can’t do this.

J. T. | Again, having a working relationship, the connective tissue between the author and the writer—intellectually as well as aesthetically— becomes really useful. When that director comes to you and says, “I can’t stage this scene,” you’re like, “Oh, well, it’s got to go.”

Instinctively, you know that it’s a textual issue. It doesn’t matter if it’s well written.

BART | “I can’t stage a scene” may not mean I can’t physically stage it. It may mean that I can’t make sense of what to tell this actor to do right now. And we have great actors. But when you get to a certain point, and you know you have nothing to say and it’s not making sense, you start to go, okay, let’s think about this.

J. T. | There are distinct moments in the play where there are scenes that came directly out of the rehearsal process of Bart and me talking, or the actors and Bart coming to me and saying, “I don’t understand what I’m doing here.” So I would literally write a scene—and this is the toughest thing for a playwright—that would explain something for the character and the audience. Some of these scenes were created as Band-Aids, but then later become crucial to the play. And then there were other scenes that felt so important in the rehearsal process; they were the “Eureka” moments for the actors and for Bart. But when we went into previews, Bart would say, “Well, now that they’re saying it in front of an audience, we don’t need this scene anymore.”

BART | The distinction between the interpretive artist and the creative artist is very critical here.

As the interpretive artist, I have to know the boundary and the job I have in relationship to his job. He gives me this preexisting reality out of his subconscious and out of his research and out of his ideas for what it is.

My first responsibility is to realize what that is. I should never give creative solutions, like creative writing solutions, to solve interpretive problems. So I can say things like, “The more I’ve worked on [the scene], the more I think the real question here is about recognizing the existence of the State of Israel.” I can’t say, “We need a scene that does this.” I can talk in general terms about where we’re heading, as the interpreter. Then he takes that information, and if I’m lucky, he’s going to go somewhere I don’t expect. Because he’s a creative and interesting and brilliant artist. But if I tell him to go somewhere, then I’ve crossed the boundary around how this very delicate relationship operates between the interpreter and the creator. And in my interpreting it, I may go places he’d have never expected.

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Oslo at Lincoln Center Theater PHOTO T. Charles Erickson

J. T. | I’m just doing the galleys for the book right now, and I’m very spare with stage directions. Just philosophically, because when I read them in a play, I can’t hold them in my head, so I try to never have stage directions.

BART | And I automatically ignore them anyway.

J. T. | It’s the opposite of screenwriting. In screenwriting, the playwright gets to write all that stuff, and it’s wonderful. But it’s interesting because there’s one scene where I have quite a bit of stage direction, and Bart did it a completely different way. And so now I have the challenge as I sit here with the script, getting ready to go to galleys, of: do I keep the original stage direction? Do I put in what he did? Or do I cut it completely?

And I say that because it’s an example of having the working relationship. The joy for an author is always when the director and/ or the actor comes up with a solution or an interpretation that’s better than yours, because then the play is something larger than yourself.

As the author, you have to train yourself to speak as infrequently as you can, because when you speak, it has weight.

BART | Right. And also what’s happening in the rehearsal room is you have a layer of text or a scene that he has worked on consciously or subconsciously. I have the job of talking to

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Jennifer Ehle + Jefferson Mays in Oslo at Lincoln Center Theater PHOTO T. Charles Erickson

actors and explaining the subtext that’s going on in the scenes. Some of which I can consult with him about, and some of which I can’t.

So, for example, there’s a scene [in Oslo] that gets out of control in the first act where Abu Ala begins by telling these stories, and they’re all telling jokes, and then it incredibly quickly erupts because somebody says the wrong thing.

I remember thinking, the very first time we did it, “This isn’t working. I think there’s more here in the scene.” Because I had to really push the actors to understand what each side didn’t trust about the other, as to why it could go on a dime. And so there’s a weird interpretive thing going on, which has so much to do with the kind of Chekhovian part where you’re just asking all the questions that aren’t on the surface of the writing but which are all underneath. But to get the actor to do what he actually intends, how a director communicates that is maybe totally different than what the playwright thinks it is.

J. T. | An analogy is that all I’m obsessed about is the sock. It’s all about the sock. And then Bart comes along and says, so, the sleeve, what is the sleeve? And I’m like, why are you talking about the sleeve? But then that is the thing that actually unlocks it for the actor.

Even though we did three or four workshops, the rehearsal process was insane. I had never bothered to count the scenes of the play; all of a sudden, we’re like, holy fuck, there are 64

scenes. We were literally running the play for the first time one or two days before the first preview. But again, because of the relationship, sometimes Bart would be staging scene A, and I knew that I was free to run over to the actors who were in scene B and just start giving them changes, and running lines and changing things, because he didn’t need to be worried about that. He just is going to interpret. We don’t have to waste time with “Can we get together and can we all read the new stuff?”

Let me just give it to them. Then he can just look at it and go, “Yes, no, yes, no.”

BART | One advantage of Lincoln Center is that long preview periods really matter. Because you get that really important time to develop and shape and shape. Some of the biggest choices you make you don’t know to make until you get all the way to previews.

Theatre is built on human connection. The audience gets to do the thing that can happen only in theatre, which is transfer into the events, assign their politics to whatever it is, experience it on a human level, and then change. So they’re transformed by what they learn through the conflict of the dramatic situation, not through the intellectual reading of information or anything else. It’s actually through the drama. And it’s through the experience of the historical events, like the Greek plays. It’s about learning. That was always important in Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, too: what does the main character learn?

Anthony Azizi, Dariush Kashani, Michael Aronov, Joseph Siravo + Jennifer Ehle in Oslo at Lincoln Center Theater PHOTO T. Charles Erickson

J. T. | I think the reason the story initially interested me is it’s about people who are constantly having to learn new information.

I was interested in what kind of story I could tell where the people in the play have to learn information, and have to impose their ideas on other people, even at the cost of their own lives. The intellectual ideas are blood and sinew, and the characters will die for them. And so sometimes you find yourself finding stories set outside of the normal American storytelling character set, because we’ve shied so far away from that in our day-to-day culture.

If you had told me that “You’re going to have to bet on your own body of work, J. T.,” and predict which play is going to go to Broadway, it would not be this play. So I’m delighted and surprised [to be moving to the Beaumont]. But my own excitement as an author aside, I feel like I’m constantly struggling against this idea that there’s only one kind of play that can be successful in the U.S.: a domestic play about a family with four people at max, and one set, maybe with a turntable. And some of those plays are amazing. But it seems like the menu is small. And so it’s exciting to think, wow, people are going to get to see this the way I got to see a number of large, sweeping historical plays as a young person that were really influential to me. And it just feels rather thrilling to be part of that.

BART | The Beaumont is a really good social intellectual space; it’s a place where people have to listen to words, it’s a space of language, and it’s a space where ideas have to be shared within a community. It’s not “us and them”; it’s a community space. And it’s required for a play like this to have the impact it needs to have.

J. T. | In many ways, I wrote the play for the Beaumont, in the sense that I knew what the Mitzi was, and I was like, I want to write a play—and I knew it was going to get done—so I wanted to write a play that could barely be held by the Mitzi. So it was a challenge, like, all right, now, Rogers, let’s see if you can get better.

BART | One of the things about the play is that it’s about impossible foes being forced into a room to talk to each other. We’re in an era where that is a very complicated question, as much as with the Israelis and Palestinians. So I think that will resonate. I think that you want to have a show in which, no matter what your point of view is politically, you feel you should see it and weigh in so that we could create the illusion of a shared understanding of what our republic means. Because that is really critical right now. And so that conversation is worth having.

J. T. | In the making of a piece of theatre like this, it’s almost like I don’t allow myself to think about what effect it will have on people and what conversations [it will] start. Because A, I’m too busy trying to make it, and B, it’s hard enough to write—you don’t need to add those voices yourself. Looking back now, I was sort of naïve in my thoughts. Oslo had more of an effect than I thought and created far more conversations about now—as opposed to just what the play’s about—than I anticipated, which has been affirming as well. Like, really affirming. And, also, that age-old thing that we all pay lip service to, but you have to be reminded of in your own work, is you can only do the work that you really want to do, and that’s the only work that’s ever going to get a conversation in a larger way in the community.

BART | You know, I think that the entire experience of doing this has created in me a greater faith in theatre than I had before.

Which is always reassuring, I guess. It’s a complicated story. It demands a lot of its audience. And audiences never once, from the very first preview, were anything but deeply engaged from beginning to end. There was an enormous amount of thirst for the ideas. Thirst for the conversation. Thirst for the truthfulness of the engagement itself. And that, you know, that’s pretty great.

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FIG. 1. Right to left Hamp, Alterowitz + Bory PHOTO c/o Davidson College

Artists/scholars working in higher education face unique challenges meeting research requirements for tenure and promotion, particularly in universities that cling to traditional models of sole-scholarship. In this issue, Jeanmarie Higgins, currently an associate professor at Penn State University, examines the work of AGA Collaborative, a performance group composed of three dancers at universities that are geographically dispersed; she offers their long-distance collaborative work as a model of creative research that is not only tenure-worthy, but expands both academic and artistic norms in important ways. By applying Marxist and feminist dramaturgical strategies, Higgins positions rigorous, theoretically based creative research as a practice of resistance—one that positions artists in the academy to “make a new path" which values collaboration and collegiality, and thereby enhances definitions of research in and out of the performing arts. We hope this study will provoke development of additional models for artists working collaboratively over distance, in addition to those seeking to expand conceptions of research as creative endeavor within the academy.

INTRODUCED + EDITED BY ANNE

FLIOTSOS + ANN M. SHANAHAN

AGA Collaborative: Walking in the Academy JEANMARIE HIGGINS PENN STATE UNIVERSITY

AGA Collaborative is a trio of choreographer-scholars who hold appointments in dance departments at universities that place considerable value on faculty research: Gretchen Alterowitz and Dr. Alison Bory at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and nearby Davidson College, respectively, and Amanda Hamp at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque (Fig. 1). This essay discusses Alterowitz, Bory, and Hamp’s collaborative dance practice as both an example and an exploration of academic research expectations for artists. Collegiality and inclusion drive AGA’s research: they plan projects collaboratively and inter-institutionally across geographical distance; decentralize power in order to create productive studio experiences; and develop engaged, critical audiences. As such, AGA tests the academy’s tendency to prize single authorship and expertise, while working productively within its terms. Along the way, AGA creates new dances that are a product of a research process that fellow dancers and choreographers can adapt to their own artist-scholar practices. This essay begins a conversation about how performing artists provoke the tenure system in ways that can help a range of junior faculty members to position their research outside of the expertise model. Most importantly, AGA Collaborative’s work invites discussion about integrating collaboration and collegiality into tenure discussions, assessing performing artists’ working methods alongside their peer-reviewed dance and theatre pieces.

As dramaturg for AGA, I introduce them within discourses of critical theory, much as I might respond in rehearsal to one of their dance works in progress. Specifically, I propose that AGA are “tacticians,” in Marxist theorist Michel de Certeau’s sense of the term, who navigate the “strategy” of the academy. In a celebrated essay, “Walking in the City,” de Certeau describes looking down

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at New York City from the top of its tallest building. From this vantage point, the city appears frozen in time, a map of itself.

Although they are unseen to the viewer, millions of people down below are in motion, walking through the streets in a tangle of intersecting paths, activating the city with their footsteps. Imagining these vantage points reminds us that we cannot understand a city by knowing its map. To know a city, you have to walk it. “Walking in the city” is a metaphor that reinforces that everyday living, though invisible, is mighty in its multiplicity, and that activities like cooking, shopping, and artmaking are ways to understand society that have nothing to do with the maps and plans made by the powers that be. Further, although walkers cannot change the map itself, they do give back to the city by navigating its spaces in beautiful and unexpected ways. Likewise, AGA activates the academy’s guidelines for institutional success, revealing how performing artists interpret research in ways that the founders and keepers of universities could not have imagined.

FIG. 3. and how to be in two places at once (2013) PHOTO Chris Record

FIG. 2. like a turtle without a shell, or crow’s feet (2012) PHOTO Gordon W. Olson FIG. 4. hours, lawns, and in between (2014) Chris Record

FIG. 5. placed (2015) PHOTO Chris Record

PHOTO

In contrast to striving to establish individual expertise, AGA commits to a feminist studio practice. I use the word “feminist” not only to describe the trio as a group of three women, but also to call to mind feminisms’ ongoing critique of traditional notions of progress and arrival, a critique that offers fluidity and process in place of these terms (Kristeva). Further, AGA’s dance works engage the effects of the academy’s expectations of progress on the physical, thinking, and creating lives of women.

Within this framework, they make dances with a variety of subjects: the effect of aging on a dancer’s practice; the interrelationship of technology and intimacy; women and sports.

The subjects AGA takes on—time constraints, competition, and the (often maddening) whims of technology—address pressures that all performing arts scholar-practitioners face in the academy, particularly the role that collaboration plays in our successes.

I position my own collaboration with AGA as dramaturg as a site of resistance to these pressures, particularly single-authorship. Along with Bory and Hamp, I am currently pursuing

tenure. (Alterowitz was awarded tenure in 2015.) Elsewhere I have written about the skills needed to practice dramaturgy—from the archival research skills needed for dance reconstruction (“Iconicity”), to the critical theory skills needed to integrate university productions into department curricula (“Rehearsal Skirts”), and on the dramaturg’s facility with integrating theory into studio practice. My role with AGA calls on the dramaturg’s skills of rigorous listening and reflection, generative skills that do not technically generate, emulating a key characteristic of arts-based research: “to raise significant questions and engender conversations rather than to proffer final meanings” (Barone and Eisner 166). The following section introduces the body of AGA’s work to date as a series of conversations about subjects familiar to researchers both inside and outside of performing arts disciplines.

AGA: Works

An emblematic AGA moment occurs at the close of their 2013 piece, and how to be in two places at once. The three dancers crouch/ walk from upstage to downstage, each

dancer forming a discrete column, shuffling toward the audience in a crouch, their arms encircling their heads. They speak to each other at jagged intervals, “I can’t see you.”

“Are you there?” “Wait, you’re frozen.” “Oh, that’s better, I can see you now!,” all the while peering into the audience as if searching for each other. We sense that the dance is winding down; the lights are fading and the dancers are running out of space to travel. Will they be able to see each other in time to connect?

This moment encapsulates the trio’s praxis, both their working method as collaborators across distance, and the themes of their dance works, including time pressures, the uses of technology, and the challenges of collaboration.

Since 2012, AGA has made five dances: like a turtle without a shell, or crow’s feet (2012); and how to be in two places at once; hours, lawns, and in-between (2014); placed (2015); and win. place. show. (2016), all of which engage time as a compositional component both as an abstract concept worthy of open exploration, and as a real, material force that governs dancers’ (and others’) lives.

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To make these dances, AGA FIG. 6. placed (2015) collaborates across distances PHOTO Chris Record over the course of an academic year, gathers for several weeks in the summer at one of their home institutions to compose a dance, holds showings for invited audiences, hosts talkbacks, revises, and holds more showings. They return to their home institutions, continue to rehearse over video chat, and then present their works-in-progress at one or more of their universities.

They also tour, present works in performance venues and at academic conferences, and have used the audience; we are bored at the sameness of their methods and works as springboards for the movement—when will the piece “start?”— college residencies. This is to say that about half but disarmed by the aura the bench develops of AGA’s collaboration happens outside of the under the dancers’ gazes (Fig. 2). studio, sometimes together and sometimes with each choreographer in a different geographical Because AGA is founded on the productive location. Internet tools like Google Hangout, realities of its group members living in different Vimeo, and Skype make their research possible, geographical locations, the effects of these but more than this, technologies have come to distances have become a key analytic for their shape their research. dance research. And how to be in two places at once engages this idea directly, exploring the The thematic concerns of the delights and intersections of technology and intimacy. As its frustrations of geography and technology title suggests, this thirty-minute piece directly (among others) have built over the four dances engages time, but it also builds on the iconic they have created since 2012. Turtle/crow is a “bench-staring” opening moment of turtle/ thirty-minute piece in twelve parts. A major crow. Two places employs a mise-en-scène of theme is the effect of time on a dancer’s body; technological devices and screens whose auras in an early sequence, each of the three dancers are just as crucial to meaning-making as their falls to the floor and stands up again, quickly ability to hold cameras and project images. and continuously, while reciting the years from Throughout the dance, the “thing-ness” of the their birth to the present day, as in “1978” technological devices is maintained; dancers (fall) (recover), “1979,” (fall) (recover), et cetera. must pick them up and move them from place The cumulative effect is the pain that dancers to place. Electrical cords must be avoided by incorporate into their practices as they age. In the dancers’ feet; buttons must get pushed a later sequence, Hamp asks, “What would a else the stage lose its lighting, and if the laptop greeting card say?” Alterowitz and Bory speak fails (which, of course, it often does), then the a range of answers, from sense to absurdity projected images will not be there. Each thing (“Forty is the new thirty.” “Don’t worry about on stage begins to develop a personality; we getting old—It’s too late for that.” “Fifty-two begin to experience the tripod, for example, is the new twenty-nine.” . . . ) as they repeat as a well-meaning but faulted collaborator a sequence built from movements seemingly whose triumphs and mistakes create the piece’s drawn from dance classes—balletic turns, most poignant moments. In a dance made modern stomps—that have etched their way up of processions from one place to another, into their dancing and thinking bodies. punctuated by scenes of aching intimacy—in one sequence, Bory and Hamp use their bodies In a body of works that always address to compose family portraits on a projection the passing of time, AGA has developed a screen that meanwhile shows a four-foot high contrapuntal theme of “stopping to notice.” To image of the inside of Alterowitz’s mouth—the wit, a complementary interest of turtle/crow is failure of technology is a shared experience that “thingness,” in Bill Brown’s sense of the term, strengthens the dancers’ relationship (Fig. 3). the idea that objects turn into things through our attention to them. The dance opens Although time and its pressures are themes with a still three-and-a-half minute moment that run through all of AGA’s works, 2014’s underscored by Clem Snide’s twangy 2001 althours, lawns, and in between takes time as rock song, “No One’s More Happy Than You,” its primary subject. In hours, lawns, AGA’s the three dancers downstage, all looking at a engagement of time is at once more abstract simple piano bench. Those three-and-a-half and more concrete than in previous dances, as minutes develop both boredom and interest in the trio explores the extremes of mechanical

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timekeeping and the ways that nostalgia pulls past times into the present through the body. The mise-en-scène signifies a relentless succession of days.

The dancers measure time with lighting that appears to move from sunrise to sunset many times during the ten-minute piece; their feet mark time in taps and slides. Twice in the dance, Bory runs around Hamp and Alterowitz in imitation of a second hand; and several movement sections are accompanied by nostalgic ways of recording time, underscoring, as they had in turtle/crow, the uses of boredom—“Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” “One-Mississippi, Two-Mississippi, Three-Mississippi”—in a short meditation on the dual productivity of pastime as nostalgia, and timekeeping as a strategy of power (Fig. 4).

AGA’s 2015 piece, placed, is in direct relationship to what de Certeau might term the “strategy” of tenure. More than in previous works, placed introduces the idea of competition and achievement directly. This is most apparent in the dance’s set and costumes—the stage holds 150 four-inch trophies in a grid that resembles swimming pool lanes or a sprinting track. The dancers wear matching tracksuits that recall athletes of early 1980s (and in a retro way, of today). Interspersed with short compositions the dancers perform separately, in pairs, or together, are scenes of “winning”: in big ways, as in Hamp running down and up one column of trophies, fists in the air in a looping “victory lap,” and in quotidian ways, each dancer on the floor overturning trophies one by one while recounting everyday wins from the present, “I ate fruit for breakfast,” and the past, “I was named Barn Steward of the Day” (Fig. 5; Fig. 6).

AGA: Working

AGA’s working methods are driven by their dancemaking values—which include a democratic decision-making process, and working slowly in order to generate, process, and incorporate ongoing dramaturgical, personal, and audience responses. As AGA describes itself: Our choreographic collaboration emphasizes the process of dancemaking and the other possibilities of creating a shared space…. Our work presents multiple perspectives, layers of meaning, and a range of experience that are beyond the reach of a single choreographer. (AGA)

I would characterize the method that proceeds from these values as a sort of “dialectical flow.” In a typical working day, this process of composition asks each member to form questions, create prompts (movement scores), improvise from these prompts, discuss responses with the group, and reflect on these discussions in writing. In turn, this writing—one endpoint in a “leg” of this composing process— begins another cycle of questions, prompts, compositions, discussion, and writing. What one would normally call “composing” usually happens at the end of this cycle (and typically at the end of a day), AGA building phrases from movements generated from movement scores. Individual dancers’ movements are strung together to form a phrase. That phrase could be included in a variety of groupings and tempos in the final dance—infrequently, as a unison sequence or, more frequently, as a phrase performed by one or two members in staggered fashion, in counterpoint to a task of the third member.

Of course, AGA’s process is like many others’; all dance composition is in some way movement that answers a question. Yet some principles and practices distinguish AGA. First, AGA’s initial work in forming the research question and composing pieces to bring into residencies happens in separate locations, thus AGA has specifically theorized their working method given the choreographers’ academic context. Next, the trio’s egalitarian way of working privileges silence over speaking, stillness over movement, and listening over argument. As a result, their studio work is meditative. Conversations give each member an opportunity not to advance an idea but to consider the ideas of others.

Ensuing discussions consistently open further possibilities rather than foreclose on possible meanings. It follows that the trio holds off on composing anything that might be called a phrase for as long as possible. This type of care the group shows toward the process and each other as artists translates into their works. How else could gazing at a bench read as empathy, or staring at a giant image of the inside of someone’s mouth feel intimate?

Patience and a productive resistance to assigning meaning continue from the composing process to showings and performances. At an audience talkback of a Summer 2015 showing of a draft of placed, a student remarked on a sequence in which all three dancers formed a pyramid reminiscent of an Olympics awards ceremony. In turn, each dancer pushed another up to first or second place, or else pulled another dancer down to second or third, placing and displacing each other upon an implied dais. When asked what idea it communicated, this student said, “It made me think that there can only be one” (Williams). Rather than ask the student to

explain this comment, AGA chose to sit with it.

This comment cut to the soul of the piece and perhaps to AGA, who spent several weeks in residence at Davidson College in Summer 2016, building on the questions posed by placed. The resulting new work, win. place. show., builds on the possibilities for rigorous collaboration that questions the idea that “there can only be one”—one dancer, one winner, one way of making dances. It is not unlike the set of questions many junior faculty form about their paths toward tenure. How can I win? If others win, can I win as well? What would a rigorous but collaborative form of winning look like?

Tenure, Past and Future

Tenure, a system codified by the American Association of University Professors in 1940, is designed to protect academic freedom by bestowing permanent employment on high performing faculty through a rigorous peer review (Hutcheson). Although what constitutes peer review varies by institution, all tenure guidelines emphasize disciplinary expertise as a marker of impact. This discussion about the relationship of artistic practice to succeeding in the academy is particularly important in the current climate of doubt about the role of the fine and performing arts in universities, and the survival of tenure as an institutional practice (Lewin). During the past several months alone, two states, Missouri and Iowa, have introduced legislation to abolish tenure at state colleges and universities, emboldened, perhaps, by Wisconsin’s changes to tenure in 2015 (Flaherty).

Regardless of recent and perhaps impending changes to tenure policies, many studies predict that universities’ research agendas will be guided increasingly by market forces, that administrators will continue to become more powerful than faculty, and that students will suffer under these conditions (Ginsberg).

Alongside these narratives of doom are books geared toward graduate students and junior faculty with the word “surviving” in their titles (Lenning). More relevant to a discussion of AGA Collaborative are books like humanities professors Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber’s Slow Professor that imagine a day-to-day faculty life that includes fruitful (and friendly) relationships with colleagues, noting that competition among faculty for shrinking resources and administrators’ praise discourages collaboration, keeping the hallways of academic departments empty (72-85).

The Academy’s Collegial Context

Although it is tempting to state that the deck is stacked against artists, who must adapt their studio practices to fit traditional publishing research models, it is nonetheless true that academia offers artists the kind of support that they would rarely find in a not-for-profit arts organization setting. These resources can

include funding, studio space and publicity, but even more valuable, perhaps, are colleagues.

For performing artists, collaborators are necessary. As dance theorist Susan Kozel writes, the academy provides not only colleagues but a context for collaboration to succeed: What the academy provides for artists, performers and musicians can be answered in many ways but I prefer a simple response: the academy provides the opportunity to develop methodological rigour, conceptual depth, a refinement of practice, and community.

A corpus of knowledge and a corps of colleagues. (205) AGA is certainly an inter-institutional “corps of colleagues” in Kozel’s sense of the phrase, a group of artist/scholars who share the pursuit of rigorously theorized artistic research. But AGA has also developed a corps of collaborators and audiences—from peer and student co-investigators, to audiences at talkbacks, to dance and performance studies scholars. Moreover, each member publishes essays on contemporary dance—queer ballet (Alterowitz), autobiographical performance (Bory), and experiential aesthetics (Hamp).

Thus, as is true of many if not all performing artists in the academy, AGA’s “corps” extends to their teaching, service, and scholarly research.

This is an obvious point to anyone who engages in performance as research—actors, directors, choreographers, dancers, playwrights, dramaturgs—but it is worth stating directly and frequently: it is not possible to achieve singular expertise in the performing arts without a corps of collaborators. AGA’s works and process make this idea legible.

Conclusion

In a construction that can resonate with performing artists in academic settings— particularly those whose primary modality is moving and movement—de Certeau proposes walking as a metaphor for creative subversion within an official system. The figure of the walker illustrates that top-down power relationships are not always so self-evident.

Walkers’ power is in the “writing” they do within the organizations they navigate— writing that points to alternative ways to read society. Although this relationship might seem adversarial, the relationship between walkers and the strategies they navigate is actually one of interdependence: “The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign to them (it can take place only within them) nor in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them)” (101). Just as AGA does not take its artistic identity from the academy, then, neither do they live outside of it. In other words, as liberating as it might be to view the artist as resisting the notion of SUMMER 2017 | SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

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society as a set of powerful institutions that police the body, it is important to stress that central to walking is the “fact” of the map that gives rise to it; in order to manipulate a system, de Certeau argues, the system must first exist.

Likewise, despite and due to the existence of the tenure system, artists offer alternative ways of doing and sharing research that question what it means to know something. In some cases, this means that through pursuing their own research questions, artists’ work will make the academy’s vulnerabilities, limitations, and potentials legible.

AGA’s allegiance to interdependence, collaboration, and a dialectical composing process contrasts the discourses of independence, hierarchy, singular authorship, and expertise under which artists are expected to flourish in the academy. With their focus on listening, patience, and reflection as methods of creation, AGA reimagines what is possible for the academy to count as distinction and expertise. Specifically, AGA’s work opens ways to discuss performance as research in the academy, giving artists in the collaborative arts a way to talk about collaboration in rigorously theorized ways. Talking about research can change how we think about research. As Berg and Seeber write: Because research is what gains most visibility in the current university, it offers a particularly fertile site for resistance. We can choose how we talk about our scholarship to each other and more publicly....Instead of “I am producing...,” we might say to ourselves and others, “I am contemplating…,” or “I am conversing with…” or even “I am in joyful pursuit of...” (56-7) In addition to creating new dance pieces, AGA creates relationships, questions, and conversations, as so many artists within and outside of the academy do. Should relationships, questions, and conversations count toward tenure? AGA works within the academic system using “tactics” to point to how this system can support a wider range of goals than it perhaps says it does. As we have seen, a key feature of the tactic is that it does not, as much as our Romantic selves might desire it, actually subvert the system it works within.

Rather, the tactician uses the system itself— think of a city map—to arrive at a destination via a different path, one that is not on the map.

A tactician, one might say, makes a new path. It

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

might be up to artists in the academy to trace these paths, and what better place to start than with a set of artists—choreographers—who are primarily concerned with the shapes and gestures and topographies a dancer makes on the floor.

WORKS CITED

AGA Collaborative. “About.” AGA Collaborative.

2016, agacollaborative.org/about/.

Barone, Tom, and Elliot W. Eisner. Arts Based Research. SAGE, 2012.

Berg, Maggie and Barbara K. Seeber. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. U of Toronto P, 2016.

Borgdorff, Henk. “The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research.” The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, edited by Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson, Routledge, 2012, pp. 44-63.

Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1, Autumn 2001, pp. 1-22.

Certeau, Michel de. Translated by Steven Rendall. The Practice of Everyday Life. U of California P, 1984.

Flaherty, Colleen. “Killing Tenure: Legislation in Two States Seeks to End Tenure at Public Colleges and Universities.” Inside Higher Ed, 13 Jan. 2017, insidehighered.com/ news/2017/01/13/legislation-two-statesseeks-eliminate-tenure-public-highereducation/.

Ginsberg, Benjamin. The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. Oxford UP, 2011.

Higgins, Jeanmarie. “Iconicity and the Archive: Martha Graham’s Imperial Gesture 1935/2013.” Review: Journal of Dramaturgy, vol. 24, no. 1, 2015, pp. 8-18.

- - - . “Rehearsal Skirts: Undergraduate Research and Hamletmachine’s Chorus of Dead Ophelias.” PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research, Vol. 1, Iss. 1, Article 5, 2016, scholar.colorado.edu/ partake/vol1/iss1/5/.

Hutcheson, Philo. “Academic Freedom and Tenure.” Encyclopedia of Education, edited by James W. Guthrie, 2nd ed., vol. 1, Macmillan Reference USA, 2003, pp. 14-16. Gale Virtual Reference Library, go.galegroup.com/ps/i. do?p=GVRL&sw=w&u=purdue_main&v= 2.1&id=GALE%7CCX3403200006&it=r&as id=f3089bc8a08f1135eb6696114cb28800.

Kozel, Susan. “The Virtual and Physical: A Phenomenological Approach to Performance Research.” The Routledge

Companion to Research in the Arts, edited

by Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson, Routledge, 2011, pp. 204-22.

Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language.

Columbia UP, 1984.

Lenning, Emily. A Guide to Surviving a Career in Academia: Navigating the Rites of Passage.

Routledge, 2011.

Lewin, Tamar. “Tenure Firmly in Place, but Colleges Grow Wary of Lasting Commitments.” The New York Times, 6 Jun. 2016, nytimes.com/2015/06/07/ education/tenure-firmly-in-placebut-colleges-grow-wary-of-lastingcommitments.html/.

Williams, Ashley S. AGA Collaborative Postshow Talkback for placed. U of North Carolina at Charlotte, Dept. of Dance, summer 2015.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

AGA’s work has been supported by grants and in-kind support from Colby College, Davidson College, Luther College, the University of New Mexico, and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The author wishes to thank AGA Collaborative, the UNC Charlotte College of Arts + Architecture, Dr. Ann Dils, Dr. Lynne Conner, Meg Whalen, and the UNC Charlotte Faculty Research Grants program.

VIDEO OF AGA COLLABORATIVE

http://www.agacollaborative.org/hours-lawnsand-in-between/2014/10/30/hours-lawns-andin-between-excerpts http://www.agacollaborative.org/and-how-tobe-in-two-places-at-once/2014/10/30/andhow-to-be-in-two-places-at-once-excerpts http://www.agacollaborative.org/like-a-turtlewithout-a-shell-or-crows-feet/2014/10/30/ like-a-turtle-without-a-shell-or-crows-feet2012-excerpts JEANMARIE HIGGINS publishes widely on the intersections of theatre theory and dramaturgy practice in such publications as Review: Journal of Dramaturgy, Theatre Topics, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. She is an associate professor in the School of Theatre at Penn State University.

Published quarterly by Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), the peer-reviewed section of SDC Journal serves directors and choreographers working in the profession and in institutions of higher learning. SDC’s mission is to give voice to an empowered collective of directors and choreographers working in all jurisdictions and venues across the country, encourage advocacy, and highlight artistic achievement. SDC Journal seeks essays with accessible language that focus on practice and practical application and that exemplify the sorts of fruitful intersections that can occur between the academic/scholarly and the profession/craft. For more information, visit: http://sdcweb.org/community/sdc-journal/sdc-journal-peer-review/

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Gaines, Des McAnuff, Timothy Douglas, Lisa Wolpe, and Stephanie Shine. While the assembled directors show gender diversity, there is very little racial or ethnic diversity, though the shortage of directors of color may have more to say about the current pool of professional American directors of Shakespeare than Ney’s selection of interviewees. The book often reads like a roundtable discussion on directing, with Ney deftly leading the discussion.

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices

By Charles Ney

BLOOMSBURY, 2016; 376PP. $29.95 PAPERBACK.

From the performances of Shakespeare in early Colonial America, to the Astor Place riots, to the large collection of professional regional theatre companies whose primary mission is to present the works of Shakespeare, the Bard has found a home on stages across the United States. Yet, the field of Shakespeare Studies has, historically, privileged British interpretations and international productions of the Bard’s work over the productions originating outside of the United Kingdom.

Charles Ney’s Directing Shakespeare in America explores American approaches to staging Shakespeare’s plays in the United States while seeking to claim a legitimate place for American productions in Shakespeare Studies.

Directing Shakespeare is as much a tribute to prominent American directors of Shakespeare as a presentation of critical approaches to staging Shakespeare’s plays. The book is largely a compilation of interviews, personally conducted by Ney, with more than sixty prominent American directors who specialize in directing Shakespeare’s works. Instead of simply reprinting the interviews, Ney meticulously edited selections from the interviews and arranged them into four parts that mirror the director’s creative process, from “Developing an Approach” to “After the Opening.” The directors involved in the conversation include artistic directors and freelance directors such as Bill Rauch, Barbara

In “Part One – Core Beliefs about Directing Shakespeare,” Ney lays out his premise that directing Shakespeare relies heavily on a combination of the director’s aesthetic values, the producing organization, and the audience for which the work is produced. Ney’s ability to introduce each chapter and draw connections between directors and approaches is clearly visible. Throughout “The Directors and their Aesthetic Values,” he categorizes interviewees based on their approaches to directing by grouping their comments together under subtitles such as “The Interpretive Director” and “Complexity.” Rather than using comments from every director for every aspect of the book, Ney arranges the interviews by selecting representative comments from directors who share similar views. Throughout this early section, readers will often find themselves challenged, affirmed, and inspired by the American directors’ reverence and passion for Shakespeare.

In “Part Two – Preparations for Rehearsal and Production,” the topic of cutting and adapting Shakespeare’s work rightfully garners a larger diversity of voices than the subject of early rehearsal staging. This section also includes an entire chapter devoted to collaboration between the director and the design team.

The only noticeably absent approach is in the use of dramaturgs in the preparation and rehearsal process. Given the number of dramaturgs employed by the nation’s top Shakespeare theatres and festivals, this omission is substantive and may lead the reader to wonder if it is an oversight or something cut from the editing process. The section makes up for this drawback with a frank discussion of casting that expresses an industry-wide move towards multicultural and gender diverse casting. All the interview excerpts call for diversity in casting that mirrors that of American audiences. Ney has chosen comments from directors who advocate for more roles for women in Shakespeare, even if it means cross-gender casting less pivotal roles. Other directors advise openness towards cross-gender casting, especially when a casting opportunity presents itself or such choices support the directorial concept.

Ney has deftly edited “Part Three – Rehearsing the Production” so that the reader will feel at home in the directing process managing the “artistic” weight of the Bard’s plays. It is clear from all the edited excerpts how integral tablework is to the production process.

Directors reading the book will be reassured by the interviewees’ passions for planning and working out the complexities of the Elizabethan language prior to rehearsal. Throughout the book, readers will find pragmatic advice, amusing anecdotal examples, humor, and brutal honesty. Beginning directors will find Ney’s approach especially helpful because they can read the book from cover to cover for guidance through the directing process.

It is likely that other directors will turn to the book for valuable insight while they are in the process of directing their own Shakespearean productions.

The final and shortest part of the book is “Part Four – Finishing the Production.” This section mirrors the professional production process, in which strong planning and preparation give way to the incorporation of teams of other professionals. Just as directors begin to put the pieces together, the interviewees express feelings about technical rehearsals that run the gamut from sheer torture to love and acceptance. The final chapter addresses the inclusion of audiences and provides perspectives on subjects such as the appropriate number of previews, dealing with “test audiences,” and opening nights. While some directors may not encounter these professional experiences in their productions, directors in higher education can draw upon the information to better prepare their students for work in professional theatre.

Directing Shakespeare in America is at home in the Arden Shakespeare catalog. It adds valuable insight and specific geographic perspective that is often absent in Elizabethan theatre studies. Throughout the book, Ney purposely avoids the scholarly impetus to draw singular “truth(s)” from the collection of interviews. This lack of central argument may frustrate some scholars because it reduces the opportunity to “contest” the author’s findings or the directorial approaches. Instead, Ney uses the thoughts, reflections, and opinions of this broad group of directors and companies to create a wide-ranging, thoughtful, and inspiring conversation on the directing process and the purpose of theatre. Charles Ney proves that the “picture of the current US landscape for directing Shakespeare” (329) is as limitless and full of potential as the Bard’s writing.

TRAVIS MALONE VIRGINIA WESLEYAN COLLEGE

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SDC FOUNDATION

THE “MR. ABBOTT” AWARD

O

n Monday, March 27, 2017, the New York theatre community gathered to honor 2017

TOP

Kenny Leon + Phylicia Rashad

“Mr. Abbott” Award honoree Kenny Leon at Espace on Manhattan’s Far West Side, just

a stone’s throw away from where Leon’s award-winning productions (A Raisin in the Sun, ABOVE

Kenny Leon + Joy Abbott MIDDLE

Constanza Romero + Pam MacKinnon

The Mountaintop, Stick Fly, Fences, Gem of the Ocean, Radio Golf, Holler If Ya Hear Me) have lit up Broadway. The gala, under the leadership of co-chairs Michael Wilson and Oz Scott, broke attendance and fundraising records, raising over $100,000 for the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation. These vital funds will support SDC Foundation’s 2017–2018 programming, including its flagship Observership Program.

RIGHT

Condola Rashad OPPOSITE LEFT

Kenny Leon + Julius "Dr. J" Erving OPPOSITE RIGHT

Oz Scott, David Roberts, Kenny Leon + Michael Wilson

Kenny Leon’s far-reaching influence was demonstrated by the many community leaders who attended the event to celebrate him as he received the “Mr. Abbott” Award. During the cocktail hour, New York City’s First Lady Chirlane McCray presented Leon with a New York City Mayoral Proclamation declaring March 27th to be Kenny Leon Day. Also in attendance was Mayor of Atlanta Kasim Reed, who honored Leon with a mayoral letter congratulating him on over 40 years of “commitment to directing award-winning productions that are vital to the art of stage direction and choreography.”

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The “Mr. Abbott” Award, named in honor of the late renowned director George Abbott, is presented by the SDC Foundation on behalf of directors and choreographers to one of their peers, in recognition of extraordinary contributions to the field. Past recipients represent the best of the profession and include Michael Bennett, Arvin Brown, Graciela Daniele, Gordon Davidson, Agnes de Mille, Bob Fosse, Garson Kanin, Kathleen Marshall, Rob Marshall, Lynne Meadow, Jerry Mitchell, Mike Nichols, Trevor Nunn, Jack O’Brien, Harold Prince, Lloyd Richards, Donald Saddler, Gene Saks, Susan Stroman, Daniel Sullivan, Tommy Tune, George C. Wolfe, Jerry Zaks, and 2016 honoree James Lapine.

The evening, directed by the Apollo Theatre’s Kamilah Forbes, took the form of a Dean Martin-era roast, with Leon and a select group of close friends and collaborators seated behind a long table on the dais.

The humorous, clever script, written by playwright and co-host Lydia R. Diamond (Stickfly, Smart People), teased Leon for his honest leadership, candor in the rehearsal room, and penchant for playing drill sergeant, often making his casts do pushups together (members of Hairspray Live! were on hand to corroborate). Guests were especially delighted when co-host Jerry Mitchell gave them carte blanche to make Leon do pushups throughout the evening simply by tapping on their water glasses. Lucky for Leon—dressed in white tie—very few guests chose to exercise this privilege. Before dinner, actor Stephen McKinley Henderson offered an eloquent and inclusive blessing of the meal.

After dinner, Ruben Santiago-Hudson and Bill Sims, Jr., had guests swaying in their seats with a soulful blues tribute played on guitar and

harmonica. Brittney Lopez represented the August Wilson Monologue Competition (founded in 2017 by Leon and Todd Kreidler at True Colors Theatre Company) with a riveting performance from King Hedley II. Several tributes followed. NBA legend Julius “Dr. J” Erving spoke of his respect and admiration for Leon’s many accomplishments, as well as their decades-long friendship. NBC Entertainment Chairman Robert Greenblatt commended Leon for his vision and leadership bringing live musicals back to television with The Wiz Live! and Hairspray Live! Actress Condola Rashad shared a touching memory of being a young girl and sneaking onto the stage during scene changes at the Alliance Theatre when her mother was performing in a show directed by Leon. After sharing many personal stories of their collaborations, legendary actress Phylicia Rashad presented her friend and director with the 2017 “Mr. Abbott” Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre. To conclude an evening full of congratulations, benign mischief, and much laughter, Shanice Williams (The Wiz Live!) got everyone to their feet with her rendition of Home from The Wiz. Attendees spent the rest of the gala celebrating the incomparable Kenny Leon on the dance floor—a fitting end to an evening spent celebrating a man who has so much joy to share.

“

REMARKS BY KENNY

LEON

They said I should speak for three minutes, and I’m going to try to hold to that. But I’m going to attempt to speak directly to you. Usually when you speak to other humans, you will find something meaningful that matters to them. I know that the first thing I tell actors is, “There’s nothing more valuable than your time and your talent.”

I look around this room, and just for one second, I want us to forget our titles. I mean, I am so impressed with [Shubert Organization President] Bob Wankel. I am so impressed with my agent, Joe Mahota, and the Hall of Famer Dr. J, and Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Phylicia Rashad, and Condola Rashad. But for a moment, I want us to forget the titles and just look at the truth. The truth is that we’re all human beings.

We’re all on this journey. We all will pass away. No one is going to get out of here alive.

Ultimately, it’s about how we treat each other, how we collaborate together, and how we leave the planet when we’re gone. August Wilson said, “We’re not owed the awards, we’re owed the work.” So we have to ask, what work are we doing? Granted, this is like speaking at my own funeral. But I get the opportunity to give my eulogy, and I thank you for that. George Abbott lived to be 107—that means I’ve got 60-some odd years left. I didn’t know George, but I did know Mike Nichols. And I know George C. Wolfe, and Jerry Mitchell—all great directors. And it is great to be in that army of directors, who are all past “Abbott” Award honorees.

Certainly, I want to direct two Broadway shows a year. Certainly, I want to do two live musicals a year. I really do. But I want to remind all of us in this room—those of you I know well, like Woodie King, and those of you I don’t know well—I want to remind us how many people there are on this planet. And for some reason, we have crossed each other’s paths, and we’re in that same army. So we have to remind ourselves why we are doing this work.

Why are we doing it? What are we going to leave behind? What are we going to leave our young people? How are we going to leave our institutions? What do we think about diversity? You strip us down to the core, and what’s left is our intention—why we do what we do. Everything I have done in my life I’ve done because I really want to effect change. I want to empower people. I want to leave the planet better than it was before I arrived. I saw a quote this morning that I want to share with you. While I’m looking it up, I want to say a few words to some people here tonight.

SDC Foundation focuses on mentorship, and I want to talk about Jennings Hertz, whose son Doug is here with his wife Lila. Doug’s father SUMMER 2017 | SDC JOURNAL FOUNDATION SECTION

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was a good Jewish Southern gentleman. He was head of the board at the Alliance Theatre when I was there. He fought for excellence. He fought for diversity. He fought for inclusion when he didn’t even understand it.

This was a man who mentored me without knowing that he mentored me. So I want to say to Doug and Lila, your father is no longer with us, but I want you to know that he meant everything to me and my life and my growth as an artist. Too often we don’t take the time to tell people what they mean to us. We are all going to die, but that’s not a sad thing.

The important thing is what we do with the time we are given, and I want to thank you and your family for your father. He meant the world to me, and I never got the chance to tell him.

I also want to say to the head of NBC, Bob Greenblatt: a lot of times when you producers give us artists a chance, you don’t really know how things are going to turn out.

Sometimes you pretend you know all the answers, but you don’t really know. You’re hiring people on trust and faith, and I’m just asking you to do that more often than not. When Bob hired me to do The Wiz Live!, I knew how to direct a musical. I knew how to tell stories. But I did not know how to do a live musical event, shooting it like a film for television. No one had ever done that. But Bob trusted me, the artist, to deliver. When producers trust you to discover together, that’s a real blessing. So, I thank you.

For some reason, God won’t let me get to this quote. So while I’m looking, I’m going to talk about my friend Dr. J. This is a Hall-of-Famer not in the arts, but in professional basketball, and he chooses to be with us tonight because of our friendship. He and I will not see each other for a year, and we will pick up like it was yesterday. So I really thank you for being here.

A lot of times we don’t say what we need to say to our families.

Sometimes people go 20 years without speaking to family. It’s silly. I talk to my brother every few days. He’s not in the arts; he’s an engineer in Tampa. My family has been supportive of everything I’ve done, so I told them not to come tonight. I said, “Don’t come to New York. It’ll be all right. It’s no big deal. I’m just doing this thing raising money for this foundation.” So I come out the elevator at my hotel yesterday, and I see this guy in a cowboy hat and boots standing near the elevator. And I’m thinking, that guy looks like he could be in my family. That guy looks like my brother. And then I’m like, “Oh shit! Tony Leon, what the…?!!” Then I broke down in tears because that’s…family. That’s what’s important to us.

The arts remind us how important that is.

Ruben [Santiago-Hudson], I thank you for being here. We are two different directors stylistically, but we’ve always had respect for each other as artists. And what you did with the blues tonight—you called August Wilson’s spirit back, and I appreciate you for giving us that.

I’m getting to this quote, I’m telling you!

I also wanted to thank Denzel Washington, who I talked to last night.

And Sam Jackson. I’ve never said this to Sam, but Sam has inspired me from day one. I knew Sam before he was famous, and he’s exactly the same way now that he was then. That teaches me about being myself.

Like my grandmother says, “Take you wherever you go,” which is why I wear tennis shoes wherever I go.

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I also want to thank Mayor of New York Bill de Blasio and his wife Chirlane for being here tonight. And the Mayor of Atlanta, Kasim Reed.

It’s significant to me that he found time to come to New York to visit and be with me, and it’s because of our relationship that he’s here. So I thank you, Mayor.

Sometimes we don’t understand how everything is connected. (I’m almost through—almost at three minutes.) I want to remind us that education is important, professional theatre is important, academic theatre is important, commercial theatre is important, regional theatre is important. Thank you, True Colors Theatre Board. It’s all connected. It all is tied together. We need a healthy academic community, we need a healthy regional theatre, and we need a healthy commercial theatre. And TV, too.

Nelle Nugent, I love you. Hal Luftig, I love you. Scott Rudin, I love you.

Lydia Diamond…Laura Penn…Michael Wilson, I love you. Jennifer, you know I love you.

Finally, here is the quote. It’s by Katherine Anne Porter. It’s to remind us of the times that we live in. So listen to this and take this with you. Take this with you tomorrow, because I want you to leave here and say, “You know what, that was different. I got something from that. It didn’t abuse my time.” So here we go. Think about it. Think about the times we live in.

The arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilization that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away.

That’s all that matters. And that’s all we can control.

”

Condola, I love you. Amanda, Valerie, Bob, Hairspray table, Temple University, Joy Abbott, CAA table—even the William Morris table—I love all of you. And I say from this day forward as artists, producers, lovers of the arts, onwards. Onwards! They can’t take our society. They can’t take our art. I appreciate you, and I thank you.

OPPOSITE TOP

Kenny Leon, Robert Greenblatt + Jerry Mitchell OPPOSITE OFFSET LEFT

Phylicia Rashad + Stephen McKinley Henderson OPPOSITE MIDDLE

Brittney Lopez, Lydia R. Diamond, Kamilah Forbes + Michael Wilson OPPOSITE BOTTOM LEFT

Mark Brokaw + Leigh Silverman OPPOSITE BOTTOM RIGHT

Derek McLane + Kenny Leon TOP

Jerry Mitchell + members of the cast of Hairspray 2ND TO TOP

Kenny Leon + Ben Vereen MIDDLE

Kenny Leon + Robert E. Wankel BOTTOM

Bill Sims, Jr., Ruben Santiago-Hudson + Condola Rashad OFFSET ABOVE

Chirlane McCray + Kenny Leon with Proclamation

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THE “MR. ABBOTT” AWARD LEADERSHIP CIRCLE Under the leadership of Executive Board Members Sheldon Epps, Pam MacKinnon, Sharon Ott, John Rando, Oz Scott, and Michael Wilson, SDCF established the “Mr. Abbott” Award Leadership Circle as part of the 2017 celebration.

The “Mr. Abbott” Award Leadership Circle consists of SDC Members who generously contributed $500 or more to the event.

ROB ASHFORD CHRISTOPHER ASHLEY WALTER BOBBIE ANNE BOGART MARK BROKAW MARC BRUNI LARRY CARPENTER MICHAEL JOHN GARCÉS SHELDON EPPS

2017 “MR. ABBOTT” AWARD DONOR LIST $15,000 + NBC Entertainment The Shubert Organization $10,000 – $14,999 Anonymous Robert Greenblatt Scott Rudin Productions $5,000 – $9,999 Jerry Mitchell Michael Wilson and Jeff Cowie Jujamcyn Theatres Stage Directors and Choreographers Society True Colors Theatre Company $2,500 – $4,999 Mrs. George Abbott Freddie and Myrna Gershon Oz Scott The Broadway League Creative Artists Agency Kenny’s Martha’s Vineyard Cocktail Crew!

Luftig Haffner Chapman Theatrical Fund Penn State University School of Theatre Pryor Cashman LLP Temple University University of Rochester

LINDA HARTZELL DOUG HUGHES JOANN M. HUNTER ANNE KAUFFMAN JACK O’BRIEN ROBERT O’HARA SHARON OTT PAM MacKINNON JOE MANTELLO B.T. McNICHOLL LYNNE MEADOW MARCIA MILGROM DODGE JERRY MITCHELL JOHN RANDO SCOTT SCHWARTZ OZ SCOTT SERET SCOTT BARTLETT SHER CASEY STANGL MICHAEL WILSON EVAN YIONOULIS

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$1,000 – $2,499 Martin H. Borell Dr. Indira Etwaroo Derek McLane Nelle Nugent Christina Ripple Jennifer Thompson Steve Traxler Gould, Koubrick, & Schlapp, P.C. IATSE John Gore Organization Segal Consulting Theatre Development Fund $500 – $999 Melinda Atwood Sharon A. Carr Sue Ann Collins Judy Eng Sylvia Golden Alia Jones Harvey Travis Moore Laura Penn + Martin Pavloff ATPAM Jane Harmon Associates Local 751 Local 764 Proskauer Rose LLP

$250 – $499 Karen Azenberg Jo Bonney Julianne Boyd Stephen Byrd Joe Calarco Ted Chapin Rachel Chavkin Liz Diamond Liza Gennaro Anita Gillette Sam Godfrey Wendy C. Goldberg Mara Isaacs Mark Lamos Kathleen Marshall Meredith McDonough Ethan McSweeny Ahli Moore Robert Moss Constanza Romero Leigh Silverman Townsend Teague Eric Ting Vicki Traube Chay Yew AFM Up to $249 Heather Aronson Elizabeth Ashley Arvin Brown Jonathan Cerullo Will Falk MaryMartha E. Ford-Dieng Frankel Magidson Family Trust Amy Fritz John Hassan Robert Hupp Cole Jordan LaChanze Kate Maguire Katrina McCann Joey Parnes Lance Roberts Hana Sharif Judine Somerville

Remembering EDWIN SHERIN

SDC Founding Member Edwin Sherin died on May 4 at the age of 87. He was a Tony Award winning stage director, actor, television director, and Emmy Award winning executive producer. Sherin started out in the mid-1950s as an actor, appearing on stage at the Phoenix Theatre (where John Houseman was the producing director) and the New York Shakespeare Festival, as well as on television. He made his Broadway debut in Measure for Measure in 1957 and appeared in seven more Broadway plays.

He turned to directing in the 1960s, and was associate producing director at Arena Stage from 1964 to 1969. There, he directed The Great White Hope, which transferred to the Alvin Theatre in 1968, marking his Broadway debut as a director. His other Broadway directing credits include An Evening with Richard Nixon and... (1972), 6 Rms Riv Vu (1972), Find Your Way Home (1974), Of Mice and Men (1975), Sweet Bird of Youth (1976), Rex (1976), The Eccentricities of a Nightingale (1976), Do You Turn Somersaults? (1978), First Monday in October (1978), Goodbye Fidel (1980), The Visit (1992), and Prymate (2004). In the 1980s, Sherin shifted his focus to television, directing episodes of L.A. Law, Tour of Duty, Homicide, and 36 episodes of the hit series Law & Order, where he helped to establish its vérité style and served as executive producer for 151 episodes.

ABOVE Ed Sherin + Jane Alexander at the SDC 50th Anniversary Gala in 2009 PHOTO Bruce Gilkas INSET The Arena Stage program for The Great White Hope PHOTO c/o Arena Stage RIGHT James Earl Jones, Jane Alexander + ensemble in The Great White Hope at Arena Stage in 1967 PHOTO Fletcher Drake

SDC MEMBER JAMES EARL JONES EDWIN SHERIN

remembers

In December 1967, Howard Sackler’s The Great White Hope premiered at Arena Stage. The play was directed by Ed Sherin, starring his soon-to-be wife Jane Alexander and James Earl Jones. The play opened on Broadway the following fall, marking the first time the cast of a regional theatre production was brought to Broadway.

Sackler won the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and Tony Award for Best Play. In addition, Alexander received a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress; Sherin a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Direction; and Jones his first Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play.

Jones recently spoke with the Journal: “When I first heard that Ed had passed, I remembered him after a long grueling tech at the end of our last rehearsal for Great White Hope in Washington. Ed addressed each member of the company individually—all 60 of us—yes, there were 60 actors in The Great White Hope. And Ed, his voice growing hoarser and hoarser, spoke directly to each one of us, looking right in our eyes, as he reattached us to our characters, grounding us once more into the tough, quicksilver boxing world of Howard’s play, reminding each of us who we were to be on stage that night.”

“What struck me then and now about Ed, was that if he could, after a process that had been so unrelenting, unmerciful on us all, if he could at that moment give his whole heart—as Ed always did—making a fierce last bid for each of us to reestablish our own visceral contact with the play, then we owed it to him—and the play—to give our very best. Which is, I think, what we did— every day, every night the play ran. We achieved that thanks to Ed.” “I trusted him totally. Ed taught me to believe in myself more deeply, and helped me to discover the power I needed on stage.”

“Fifty years ago, Ed and Zelda Fichandler gave me my big chance. I am so grateful.”

The Great White Hope opened at the Alvin Theatre on October 3, 1968, and ran for 546 performances. It was subsequently made into a film starring Jones and Alexander. Each received Best Actor Academy Award nominations for their performances.

Jones will receive a special Tony Award—his third—for Lifetime Achievement at the 71st annual awards ceremony at Radio City Music Hall on Sunday, June 11, 2017.

SUMMER 2017 | SDC JOURNAL FOUNDATION SECTION

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THE SOCIETY PAGES SDC MEMBERS @ WORK + PLAY

TOP SDC Executive Director Laura Penn + SDC Foundation Director David Roberts traveled to the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center on January 5 to speak with the current class of the National Directors Fellowship.

ABOVE On January 9, Executive Director Laura Penn spoke with students in the Yale MFA Directing Program, including Elizabeth Dinkova, Kevin Hourigan + Jesse Rasmussen. Professor May Adrales Skyped in due to the snowstorm.

LEFT Later that evening, Foundation Director David Roberts moderated an SDC Foundation One-on-One with Kwame Kwei-Armah + Patricia McGregor.

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ABOVE January 19, 2017, brought the Initiating Action of the Ghostlight Project, in which SDC Members across the country pledged to be beacons of light and stand for inclusion, participation, and compassion. In New York, participants gathered outside the Public Theater and in Times Square.

LEFT Ghostlight Project Steering Committee member Lorin Latarro attended the rally in Times Square.

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In February, the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival was underway with regional events held across the country. In Las Vegas, SDC Members responded to the work of young directors. Pictured left to right are Marcelle Morrissey, Matthew Lundergan, Ruth Pe Palileo, Jonathan Warman, Rebecca Desch, Zack Georgian + Francis X. Norton. Congratulations to Zack Georgian, who was named the SDC National Fellowship Program Award Recipient.

ABOVE

BELOW On March 2, SDC celebrated the opening of the Samuel J. Friedman Health Center for the Performing Arts at a special ribbon-cutting ceremony with Brian Stokes Mitchell.

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Ivy Vahanian + Ariel Shafir

Fajer al-Kaisi, Rachel Leslie, Timothy Douglas + Ivy Vahanian

Ariel Shafir

In April, Timothy Douglas directed Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced as part of a month-long education outreach program in China. The touring staged reading was presented in universities, high schools, and cultural venues, followed by panel discussions and workshops. On April 9, the project was performed at the U.S. Embassy in China.

ABOVE

BELOW SDC Director of Member Services Barbara Wolkoff and Member Services Coordinator Marisa Levy presented the student directing fellowships at the 2017 Kennedy Center American College Theater National Festival in Washington, DC, to winners Zachary Georgian of Salem State University and Nathan Ray Maxwell of Troy University. PICTURED David Lee-Painter, Chair KCACTF National Committee, Zachary Georgian, Nathan Ray Maxwell, Barbara Wolkoff + Marisa Levy

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ABOVE LORT

negotiations were held in New York over four days, beginning April 18 and ending in the wee hours of the morning on April 22.

RIGHT Happy Birthday to the Union that unites, empowers, and protects stage directors and choreographers!

Fifty-eight years ago on April 24, the incorporation documents establishing SDC as a national independent labor union were signed by Judge Saul Streit (seated), the Presiding Justice of the New York Supreme Court. Looking over his shoulder from left to right are Founding Members Hanya Holm, Ezra Stone, Shepard Traube + Agnes De Mille, along with legal counsel Erwin Feldman.

(We gave them the hats!)

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c/o Getty Images/Bettman

SDC FOUNDER

Over the course of a long and impressive career, JOHN HOUSEMAN found success as a director, producer, and actor in theatre, film, and television. Born in Romania in 1902 and educated in England, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1925 and worked as a speculator in the grain market until the Stock Market Crash of 1929 prompted him to change careers.

In 1933, he directed Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts. His first collaboration with Orson Welles came in 1934, when Houseman poached Welles from another production to star in his own, Panic.

Over the next several years, he and Welles were frequent collaborators.

When the Works Progress Administration created jobs for artists through the Federal Theatre Project, Houseman and Rose McLendon were made the leaders of the Negro Theatre Unit. Houseman brought on Welles to direct Macbeth, which led to the sold-out hit “Voodoo Macbeth.”

Also through the FTP, Houseman and Welles ran the Classical Theatre, or Project 891. In 1937, their infamous production of Marc Blitztein’s pro-union musical The Cradle Will Rock was essentially censored when the FTP first delayed the opening and then instructed the actors not to perform. On opening night, the actors and audience walked 20 blocks to another theatre and performed from the audience.

After Houseman was fired and Welles resigned from Project 891, they co-founded the Mercury Theatre, where subsequent collaborations included a groundbreaking modern-dress production of Julius Caesar and a radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds so convincing that it led to widespread hysteria.

Houseman directed star-studded productions on Broadway (Lute Song with Mary Martin, King Lear with Louis Calhern), Off-Broadway (Coriolanus with Robert Ryan at the Phoenix Theatre), and regionally (Galileo with Charles Laughton, Anna Christie with Ingrid Bergman).

“

On the broad wings of the Federal eagle, we had risen to success and fame beyond ourselves as America’s youngest, cleverest, most creative and audacious producers to whom none of the ordinary rules of the theatre applied.

”

During WWII, he worked for the Office of War Information despite his status as an enemy alien, due to Romania’s affiliation with the Axis. He became a U.S. citizen in 1943.

From 1956–1959, Houseman was the artistic director of the American Shakespeare Festival. In 1960, he became the artistic director of UCLA’s Professional Theatre Group (later part of the Mark Taper Forum). He served as the founding director of the Drama Division of the Juilliard School, the co-founder and artistic director of The Acting Company. He also directed Otello and Tosca for the Dallas Opera Company, and served as Juilliard Opera Theater’s resident director. In 1974, he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Professor Kingsfield in The Paper Chase.

As a producer, he won three Emmy Awards for his work in television and also produced 18 films for Paramount, including The Blue Dahlia and The Bad and the Beautiful.

Houseman published four volumes of memoirs, including Run Through, Front and Center, Final Dress, and Entertainers and the Entertained. His last book was Unfinished Business: Memoirs, 1902 to 1988, released just after his death in 1988.

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