SDC Journal Spring 2018

SPRING 2018

DESDEMONA CHIANG AS THE TIDE RISES, YOU ALL RISE TOGETHER + BRADEN ABRAHAM, GEOFFREY ALM, KURT BEATTIE, TIMOTHY BOND, SHEILA DANIELS, TAMMIS DOYLE, LINDA HARTZELL, JOSH HECHT, BRANDON IVIE, JANE JONES, ROSA JOSHI, MARK LUTWAK, MICHAEL MALEK NAJJAR, VICTOR PAPPAS, JOHN TIFFANY, KATJANA VADEBONCOEUR, KATHRYN VAN METER, TALVIN WILKS + MORE

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OFFICERS

Pam MacKinnon PRESIDENT

John Rando EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

Michael John Garcés VICE PRESIDENT

Michael Wilson TREASURER

Evan Yionoulis SECRETARY

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Laura Penn COUNSEL

Ronald H. Shechtman HONORARY ADVISORY COMMITTEE

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

SDC EXECUTIVE BOARD

SDC JOURNAL

MEMBERS OF BOARD

MANAGING EDITOR

Christopher Ashley Melia Bensussen Walter Bobbie Anne Bogart Jo Bonney Mark Brokaw Joe Calarco Rachel Chavkin Desdemona Chiang Liz Diamond Marcia Milgrom Dodge Sheldon Epps Liza Gennaro Wendy C. Goldberg Joseph Haj Linda Hartzell Anne Kauffman Dan Knechtges Mark Lamos Kathleen Marshall Meredith McDonough Sharon Ott Lonny Price Ruben Santiago-Hudson­ Seret Scott Bartlett Sher Leigh Silverman Casey Stangl Eric Ting

Kate Chisholm FEATURES EDITOR

Elizabeth Bennett GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Elizabeth Nelson EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Jo Bonney Graciela Daniele 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

David Callaghan Ann M. Shanahan SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Kathleen M. McGeever SDCJ-PRS ASSOCIATE BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Emily A. Rollie SDCJ-PRS SENIOR ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Anne Bogart Anne Fliotsos Joan Herrington James Peck

SDCJ-PRS PEER REVIEWERS

Donald Byrd Jonathan Cole Thomas Costello Kathryn Ervin Liza Gennaro Travis Malone Sam O'Connell Ruth Pe Palileo Scot Reese Stephen A. Schrum SPRING 2018 CONTRIBUTORS

Tammis Doyle BELLEVUE COLLEGE

Josh Hecht DIRECTOR

Sue Lawless DIRECTOR

Richard Masters VIRGINIA TECH

Michael Malek Najjar DIRECTOR

Allison Narver DIRECTOR

Amanda J. Nelson VIRGINIA TECH

Priscilla Page WRITER + DRAMATURG

Danny Pelzig DIRECTOR + CHOREOGRAPHER

Gina Pisasale DRAMATURG

Seret Scott DIRECTOR

Dennis Sloan BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY

Ted Sod ACTOR + DIRECTOR

John Tiffany DIRECTOR

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

ISSN 2576-6899 © 2018 Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. All rights reserved.

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Purchase online at www.SDCweb.org. Also available at the Drama Book Shop in New York, NY. POSTMASTER Send address changes to SDC JOURNAL, SDC, 321 W. 44th Street, Suite 804, New York, NY 10036.

PRINTED BY Sterling Printing

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SPRING CONTENTS Volume 6 | No. 3

FEATURES 12 An Unquiet Voice from the Left Coast AN INTERVIEW WITH KURT BEATTIE

BY TED

SOD

COVER 18

As the Tide Rises, You All Rise Together AN INTERVIEW WITH DESDEMONA CHIANG

BY GINA PISASALE

25 Keeping It Local: Making a Career + Life in Seattle AN SDC ROUNDTABLE MODERATED BY ALLISON EDITED BY KRISTY

NARVER

CUMMINGS

36 Talvin Wilks: Director, Dramaturg + Playwright of Images

BY PRISCILLA

PAGE

44 PEER-REVIEWED SECTION ethinking The College R Summer Intensive: A New Model for Collaboration EDITED BY ANN

M. SHANAHAN

+ DAVID CALLAGHAN

BY AMANDA

J. NELSON

+ RICHARD MASTERS

Angela DiMarco + Richard Nguyen Sloniker in Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train at ACT, directed by Desdemona Chiang PHOTO Jessica Martin

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5 FROM THE PRESIDENT

BY PAM

MACKINNON

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FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

BY LAURA PENN

7

IN YOUR WORDS

What I Learned...

BY MICHAEL

MALEK NAJJAR SCOTT

CURATED BY SERET

8

Why I Made That Choice

BY JOSH HECHT

9

Pre-Show / Post-Show

BY TAMMIS

10

arry Potter and the Cursed Child H in 20 Questions

BY JOHN

DOYLE

TIFFANY

49

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEWS

Stanislavsky and Yoga

How to Read a Play: Script Analysis for Directors

51

Remembering Bill Martin

BY SUE

52

Remembering Gemze de Lappe

BY DANNY

By Sergei Tcherkasski Translated by Vreneli Farber

By Damon Kiely REVIEWS BY DENNIS SLOAN

LAWLESS

PELZIG

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THE SOCIETY PAGES

Annual Membership Meeting

Chicago Member Meeting

Columbia College Chicago Visit

Theatrical Workforce Development Program BroadwayCon SDC Foundation Artistic Leadership Group Session

COVER Desdemona Chiang PHOTO Chris Bennion | TOP Kurt Beattie on the set of Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike at ACT PHOTO Chris Bennion | MIDDLE Ping Chong + Talvin Wilks PHOTO Adam Nadel BOTTOM Jane Jones, Sheila Daniels + Mark Lutwak

Names of SDC Members appear throughout SDC Journal in boldface.

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Los Angeles Member Meeting

Ovation Awards

Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF) Region 1 Festival

One-on-One Conversation

Philadelphia Member Meeting

+

ACT–A Contemporary Theatre Founder Gregory A. Falls

FROM THE PRESIDENT Our Union is on a roll, deepening our work on vital matters of political engagement and workplace conduct and furthering communication with other unions, educators in the field, and government officials, all while building on and expanding our regional presence across the country. With each expansion of jurisdiction, more artists become professionals who can apply their craft and realize their dreams while earning a living. This is the cornerstone of Union work for building and bettering the field.

A great deal has been accomplished around the country since last fall. I was fortunate to spend time in Los Angeles in January with an exciting wing of our fantastic SDC staff: Laura Penn, Randy Anderson, Barbara Wolkoff, and Kristy Cummings. It was my second L.A. Membership meeting since becoming President of the Board. Thirty-five directors and choreographers came out, energized and excited to talk about their scene—the challenges, ambitions, and camaraderie—as well as broader Union business. The L.A. Membership breakfasts continue to be places of active discussion and agenda setting. I also attended the SDC Foundation Artistic Leadership Group, curated by SDCF’s David Roberts, on the heels of being announced as a new California artistic director myself. The room was engaged in lively discussions about theatremaking and paths to greater leadership. That evening, Sheldon Epps and I announced the new Gordon Davidson Award and gave out the directing and choreography awards at the L.A. Ovation Awards; every winner was an SDC Member, and 74 percent of those nominated were Members. This is quite a change from even five years ago. The L.A. Steering Committee, led by Casey Stangl and Art Manke, has become a template for similar efforts in Boston and around the country.

We have been laying the groundwork to further expand SDC’s presence in the Pacific Northwest. Last September, staff traveled to Seattle and Portland for Membership events. In Portland, Laura Penn moderated a conversation with Chris Coleman (then of Portland Center Stage) and Dámaso Rodríguez (Artists Repertory Theatre). An edited transcript of their inspiring discussion was in the Winter issue of SDC Journal. Kristy Cummings and Laura Penn, along with SDC Members, attended an event in support of the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund, a cabaret marking banned books directed

by Allison Narver. Staff will be heading back to the Pacific Northwest later this year. Nothing beats actually showing up, gathering in literal rooms to listen and respond to what Members in specific communities are facing. This persistent and patient work is paying off. Membership numbers across the entire country are on the rise.

We also had a recent Membership meeting in Chicago with Laura Penn and Board Member Lonny Price, hosted

by Henry Wishcamper, a member of the Regional Presence Committee. There, Members and Associate Members discussed the use of intimacy directors in the Off-Loop theatres, electronic capture issues, and broader organizing efforts. Additionally, Barbara Wolkoff and Casey Stangl, who was directing in town, hosted a Membership gathering in Minneapolis/St. Paul, where 13 local choreographers and directors gathered to connect and socialize. A small meeting in Philadelphia took place in late February, led by Adam Levi, Maegan Morris, and Melia Bensussen (our Northeast Regional Rep), to discuss the NEAT Agreement and how efforts to organize are coming along in Philadelphia.

Randy Anderson recently returned from a productive trip to London, where he educated representatives of our Members and others in the theatrical community about the changes in the Broadway Agreement and Other Companies. Laura and I plan to follow up in early 2019.

Again, these rooms are filled with Members and Associate Members to discuss, celebrate, and better the state of the field. These meetings unite, empower, and can ultimately help the SDC staff and Executive Board better protect the entire Membership. I encourage you to come out, speak up, listen, and organize.

In Solidarity,

Pam MacKinnon Executive Board President

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Seattle’s influence as a theatrical leader has been constant since the founding of the regional theatre movement, erupting in the Northwest with the World’s Fair of 1962.

As Gregory Falls, founder of the University of Washington Professional Actor Training Program and ACT – A Contemporary Theatre once said, “Theatres, like grapes, grow best in bunches.”

One of the final refuges for the continent’s indigenous people, this is the sacred land of the great Northwest Indians, where in 1852 Chief Sealth welcomed the first “settlers” to the site that would become Seattle. Suddenly, when measured against the centuries, Chief Sealth finds “My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm swept plains.” As a way of life tragically vanishes, another begins. A gateway to the Alaska gold rush, a home to fur traders and trappers, then later, loggers.

Dams are built. World Wars brought the Boeing generations and with that the nuclear family, a largesse and commitment to community that melded with the wilderness character and funded great civic and cultural institutions.

Boeing gave way to Microsoft, Jeff Bezos came to town, biotech and medical research found a home, and when Bill and Melinda Gates created the world’s largest foundation, the region became synonymous with curing the most virulent of world diseases.

Through this spirit of the region, theatre artists weave their work, entertaining audiences while engaging citizens in civic discourse about the most important issues of the times.

Today, Seattle continues its tradition of bold and adventurous theatre. It’s home to nationally recognized companies, internationally acclaimed artists, and a thriving fringe scene, where artists of stature work side by side with emerging talent. In this issue of the Journal, you will read that for some, the community feels in flux as they navigate the rapidly shifting ecosystem born from extraordinary, unprecedented growth. Seattle is on the edge of opportunity once again, like so many times before, over in the left-hand corner.

The centerpiece of this issue is a roundtable hosted by Allison Narver, in which a dozen directors and choreographers wrestle

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with what has come and what’s possible.

Desdemona Chiang, newly elected to the SDC Executive Board and a leader of a new generation of Seattle artists, is developing new work by some of our nation’s best writers of color when she isn’t staging Shakespeare.

FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR You’ll find Portland and Eugene voices included as well. Then dive into the multifaceted, brilliant mind of Kurt Beattie, a joy on any topic, but as guided in an interview by Ted Sod, particularly revealing. Talvin Wilks, while best known today for his work in the Central and Northeast regions, was a Seattle regular. I first experienced the breadth of his brilliance in his collaborations with Ping Chong and when the legendary Seattle Group Theatre produced a shocking production of Tod, the boy, Tod, directed by Timothy Bond.

I spent much of my career in Seattle, and I miss Seattle, the artists I worked with side by side, the organizations they lead, and the audiences who partake. I am excited to learn about the artists who have emerged over the past decade and am committed to celebrating and shining a light on those who mentor the young and hold the legacy. I sometime notice it’s hard to find someone working regularly around the country who hasn’t passed through Seattle. It’s a great community for nurturing talent. Some stay, some go on, but all carry the influence of the region.

As I write this, I am just five days past the 10th anniversary of my first day of work at SDC. I was caught off guard by the news and taken aback by the kind words and spirited gifts from Board Members and colleagues. I have already made it clear to everyone that I will not be sharing my Pearl Jam nesting dolls with anyone.

So this issue, at this time, holds a synchronicity— entirely unplanned—with my anniversary that is not lost on me.

I can still remember vividly how unexpected it was a decade ago to find myself and my family considering leaving a job I loved in a city I loved to help guide the Union into its next 50 years. My career at that point had been built on hard work, good fortune, and a pretty good eye for an interesting opportunity. But nowhere in my thinking had I ever dreamed I would run the Union that represents stage directors and choreographers. In hindsight, I look back and wonder how much of my experience had actually neatly been leading up to my being at SDC. Over the course of my professional life, primarily in Seattle (with a few early years in DC), I had been in just the right places at the right time.

Those right moments invariably involved brilliant directors and choreographers. I had had the pleasure of being part of making the work possible for an exceptional group of SDC Members who led or landed in the handful of theatres I had dug into.

I am proud of what we have accomplished together. SDC sits as strong as ever on its founding promises to unite, empower, and protect. I look forward to the hard but exciting work ahead. There is much to be done, including planning for our 60th next spring. I’m happy to be here to be a part of it.

In solidarity,

Laura Penn Executive Director P.S. You are all welcome to come visit and play with my Pearl Jam matryoshka dolls anytime!

WHAT I LEARNED…

BY MICHAEL

MALEK NAJJAR

CURATED BY SERET

SCOTT

As a director, I have often sought plays that can reconcile my personal experience with stories that contain universal messages that I believe audiences should witness. Last year, I directed Wajdi Mouawad’s Scorched, a play about memory and trauma, which leads to the desire to transcend suffering and to find grace. The play is also the story of a Christian woman named Nawal befriending a Muslim woman named Sawda, and the unbreakable bond that develops between them. As the son of Lebanese immigrants who were forced to leave their native homeland in the 1940s and 1950s, I was drawn to the play because it was written by a Lebanese-Québécois son of immigrants who, themselves, were forced to emigrate during the horrific 1975–1991 civil war. Although I have never met him, Wajdi and I share a tragic and difficult history. Both of our families endured unimaginable trauma and, in many ways, that pain has driven us to create theatre.

IN YOUR WORDS What I Learned...

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

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.

Mouawad was born to a Lebanese Christian family in 1968, and I was born to a Lebanese Druze family in 1972. During the rehearsal process for Scorched, I realized that, had his parents and my parents remained in Lebanon, it was entirely possible that we might have fought in that civil war, pitted against one another. In his recollections, Mouawad writes that, after the Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt was assassinated in 1977, everyone in his village danced with joy. “I didn’t know the guy, but I danced on the occasion of the man’s death!” he says. “I was happy because we had been taught that the Druze were all evil.”1 Growing up, I heard similar hateful sentiments by some Druze directed against other Lebanese Christians and Muslims. Since that war ended, Lebanese everywhere are attempting to move past factionalism toward a new, pluralistic identity free from such hatred.

Can directing a play about such an overwhelming calamity do anything positive, or is it ultimately an obscenely futile gesture that changes nothing? In this time of rising prejudice, nativism, and demonization of refugees and immigrants, I found that a play like Scorched is more than just an absurd attempt to create art in the face of destruction. Scorched calls upon us to develop radical empathy for those who are suffering and dying in war zones worldwide. After all, what is theatre for if not to help us overcome ourselves? In the play, Nawal tells Nihad, “You and I come from the same land, the same language, the same history, and each land, each language, each history is responsible for its people, and each people is responsible for their traitors and their heroes. Responsible for their executioners and their victims, for their victories and their defeats. In this sense, I am responsible for you, and you are responsible for me.”2 Because we did not have to fight a war, Wajdi and I created theatre. In this way, we are connected artistically and spiritually. By complete coincidence, I am responsible for him and he is responsible for me. Ultimately, it is this shared responsibility for others that inspires me as a director to return to the theatre and makes plays like Scorched so necessary in these troubled times.

MICHAEL MALEK NAJJAR is an Associate Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Oregon. Before arriving in Eugene, he was the artistic director and co-founder of Riverside Repertory Theatre (now Tricklock Company) in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

His specialty is Arab American theatre and performance. He directed the world premiere of Jamil Khoury’s Precious Stones with Silk Road Rising and has directed other works with the company, including a staged reading of his own play, Talib, as well as serving as lead director of Semitic Commonwealth: A Staged Reading Series Comprised of Six Plays by Arab and Jewish Playwrights. He holds a Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance Studies from UCLA and an M.F.A. in Directing from York University.

He is the author of Arab American Drama, Film and Performance: A Critical Study, 1908 to the Present, and editor of The Selected Works of Yussef El Guindi (Bloomsbury) and Four Arab American Plays: Works by Leila Buck, Jamil Khoury, Yussef El Guindi, and Lameece Issaq & Jacob Kader (McFarland). He is currently a member of the advisory board for Arab Stages and New Arab American Theater Works. Michael will be directing Hannah Khalil’s Scenes from 70* Years for Golden Thread Productions in Spring 2019.

1. Celia Wren, “A Playwright’s Self-Imposed Exile,” Washington Post, Sept. 11, 2015.

2. Wajdi Mouawad, Scorched, 2nd ed., trans. Linda Gaboriau (Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2010), 102.

TOP Sawda

(Jessica Lee) embraces Nawal (Jerilyn Armstrong) in the University of Oregon production of Wajdi Mouawad’s Scorched PHOTO Ariel Ogden SPRING 2018 | SDC JOURNAL

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When people find out I’m a theatre director, they often ask, “How did you get into that?” I often reply, I don’t know, really, except that the desire to tell stories feels like the deepest, oldest part of me—and not just to tell them but to share them, to experience them together, to witness together our common humanity.

playwright Allison Moore the morning her play I directed opened at the Humana Festival. She leaned forward and said, “Well, it will never be like this again between us.” Heartbreaking!

And something else: I began to feel that there was something myopic about the freelance life.

My whole purview was always only the story. I never got to really engage with the communities When I was in my early twenties, the playwright of patrons who attend and support theatres Lucy Thurber told me she went into theatre to be across the country. I never got to understand less lonely. At the time, I thought she meant that why this particular community needed this the instant family of “theatre people” gave her a particular play just now. I never got to actually sense of belonging. And that’s part of it, I’m sure. have the conversations we dramatists talk so But now I understand something else. There’s often of inciting through our work. I something inescapably lonesome about also never got to have the bigger being alive, isn’t there? No matter how conversations about the meaning we try, no one is inside here with of art in our lives and in our us, feeling what we feel. But in I left my life as a New York cities, and what it is we want the theatre, a couple hundred people at a time breathe freelancer to be an artistic from our theatres and our artists. together, feel together, project themselves into a character director in...a city buzzing What I wanted, I realized, was together—a character that the with arts and culture a deeper sense of community, playwright wrote, that the actor and a more direct, more incarnates, and that contains a and a rich community firsthand experience of the piece of the director too. In that impact our work can make. As an moment, we inhabit the same soul. of theatre lovers. artistic director, I could have that It is one of the few transpersonal experience because for once I would not moments we can have. be leaving on a plane as soon the show opened.

I think, on some level, all of us who choose this Instead, I would stay. path sense this, in some inchoate way, at whatever So I began to look for an arts leadership early age we first feel the pull. position. In Profile Theatre, I found a company I spent the first half of my post-college decade at that believes deeply in community engagement, that has a history of investing significant human MCC Theater, running the Playwrights Coalition, resources in connecting authentically and the theatre’s play development wing. Later, when holistically with the city, that values embedding I started to be hired professionally, I left my job art in an enriching program of conversations, to pursue a freelance career. At the time, having that knows that art, empathy, and action go hand the freedom to follow the story anywhere it took in hand. So I left my life as a New York freelancer me was my highest priority. As a freelancer, I to be an artistic director in Portland, Oregon, got to work in cities all over the country, an eyea city buzzing with arts and culture and a rich opening experience for this native New Yorker. community of theatre lovers.

Who knew there were so many cities I would fall in love with, so many theatre communities And yeah, I still leave sometimes, for work and where patrons seemed to have a deeper for fun. But when I say “my community” these connection to their cultural organizations, so days, I’m not only speaking of an ephemeral and many collaborators with whom I would share the far-flung community of artists. I’m speaking of deepest parts of myself so quickly? people I see every month at the theatre and at theatres all over town. It is, for me, a less lonely But increasingly, there was something painful way of being in the world. I get to meet those to in forging these intimate theatre families only whom we are speaking. We share our lives with to leave them over and over and over again. I one another. And we stay. remember sitting across a diner breakfast from

“

PHOTO

Edwin Pabon

WHY I MADE THAT CHOICE

BY JOSH

PHOTO

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HECHT

David Kinder

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JOSH HECHT is the Artistic Director of Profile Theatre and a Drama Desk Award-winning director whose productions have been seen in New York at MCC Theater, Cherry Lane Theatre, The Duke on 42nd Street, the DR2, New World Stages, and Culture Project; regionally at the Guthrie Theater, Berkshire Theatre Group, the Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville, and Signature Theatre (VA); and internationally at the Dublin Arts Festival, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and elsewhere. His collaboration with Ping Chong + Company was commissioned by and premiered at The Kennedy Center before touring the Northeast. His writing has received the support of the Jerome Foundation.

He is formerly the Director of Playwright Development at MCC Theater and the Director of New Play Development at WET. He has served on the faculty of the New School for Drama MFA Directing program, the Fordham University MFA Playwriting program, and Purchase College SUNY’s BFA Dramatic Writing program and has been a guest artist at The Juilliard School, NYU’s Dramatic Writing MFA, Carnegie Mellon’s Playwriting MFA, University of Minnesota’s Acting BFA programs, and others.

What I love about theatre is... transformation. Theatre Magic. Changes in character or space or time right in front of us. That we all sit (or not) in the dark (or not).

That we all wait to be invited into a story told in our physical presence. And I believe that theatre is the art form that allows us to engage with a variety of settings, songs, characters simultaneously. By seeing and hearing a number of different things at the same time, we can come to a completely additional truth.

And sometimes that truth can change our minds. Or lives. I love that.

Someone who was instrumental in my artistic development was…I must answer with a trinity of brilliant theatre artists. When I got my B.A., I sought out the grad students I had stage managed for and found them (plus one) at the Eureka Theatre in San Francisco. I was lucky enough to spend the next four years there as Production Manager, learning from Richard White (Cornish College of the Arts), Tony Taccone (Berkeley Rep), and Oskar Eustis (The Public Theater). From them, I learned how to talk to actors, how to analyze and dissect a play, and, most importantly, how to combine a strong political ethic with good writing. I am so pleased to be able to recognize them in print.

PRE-SHOW / POST-SHOW WITH

TAMMIS DOYLE BELLEVUE COLLEGE

I became a director because…I see and hear plays and musicals when I read them.

And as an audience member or director, I am moved and shaped and changed by the shows I encounter. I hope others have that experience when they attend the plays I direct. When I was five, I asked my mom, “Who did that?” after a show. She started reading me the cast list, and I evidently interrupted, “No, who did the whole thing?” The director. I enjoy the entire process from my first read to casting and their first read and design meetings and staging and runs and then tech and performance—I really love it all.

The best thing about working on a campus is…choosing the season at our college and the plays and musicals I direct.

I do my best to choose collectively for our theatre students, our campus community, and our local community as well. Our students are passionate and engaged and challenge me daily, and I love that.

As a director, I am drawn to scripts that…have an aspect of storytelling, direct address, linear narrative told in a non-linear way. I love music in plays and often find ways to put music in plays. I love scripts that have a strong theme, most often about recognizing and fighting for oppressed people.

Some of the plays or musicals I would like to do are…Ragtime, Angels in America (both parts), Torch Song Trilogy, Fun Home, Come from Away, about everything by Steven Dietz (he loves direct address!).

A performance I wish I could see again…Come from Away—I saw it at Seattle Rep and I was moved as a human and educated as a director! Cyrano de Bergerac at A.C.T. in San Francisco with Peter Donat, Marsha Mason, Marc Singer, and Elizabeth Huddle in 1973, directed by William Ball. I still remember so much of it.

I think it is important for the American theatre to…“Comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable” (César Cruz). I just cannot say it better. To engage, encourage, educate, enthrall, enliven, energize…change the world, one audience member at a time. Yes. I really believe that.

I believe a good director must be able to…listen, accept, and embrace the ideas of others on the artistic and production staff while keeping their own clear and deep vision of the play or musical. Support the work of the playwright. Stay in tune with the local community of theatre artists and audience members.

TAMMIS DOYLE is Senior Associate Professor and Chair of the Theatre Arts Department (Drama/ Dance) at Bellevue College, where she directs and teaches acting, directing, and musical theatre and is active with the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. Tammis received her B.A. in History from UC Berkeley and her M.F.A. in Directing from the University of Washington.

She is the founder of Music Theatre Works (MTW), where she directed the musicals Assassins, Fahrenheit 451, and White Porcelain Christmas (book and lyrics). She is a professional director and produced playwright and is a Member of SDC and the Dramatists Guild. This summer Tammi will be directing a premiere of her comedy The Maltese Sparrow at Bellevue College.

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20 QUESTIONS ON HARRY POTTER AND THE CURSED CHILD As Tony Award-winning director JOHN TIFFANY prepared for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child to open on Broadway, SDC Journal asked him about the work and his experiences adapting the popular franchise for the stage.

Describe Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in three words.

How much of a Harry Potter fan were you before this project?

With such an iconic franchise, do you embrace it, ignore it, or reinvent it?

The eighth story.

I read the first few books with my nephews and godchildren, so I already had huge respect for Jo [J. K. Rowling] and what she had achieved.

Absolutely embrace it, then reinvent it for theatre.

What do you consider to be essential elements in a piece of theatre?

Acknowledge your audience, celebrate the form, and tell a great story that means something to you and your team.

How do you choose a production to get involved in?

If it offers the elements listed above, then it tends to choose me.

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How did you first get attached to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child?

For Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, you wear more than one hat as story writer and director. How did you balance these roles?

Producers Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender approached me with the idea. I then met Jo and brought writer Jack Thorne on board.

The director part of me was not welcome in the room where Jo, Jack, and I developed the story of the cursed child.

What excited you most about this project?

There is a large amount of magic that occurs in the script. Did you, J. K. Rowling, and Jack Thorne write the story with stage/ technical directions in mind? Or did you write the magic you wanted to see and solve staging challenges afterwards?

The opportunity for theatre to tell the next chapter of the most popular series of stories ever created.

We allowed the story to go wherever it needed to go—we didn’t set any limits on moments of magic and action sequences. Then, of course, we had to deliver this story, which was a daunting but hugely enjoyable challenge. I only had one nonnegotiable: no Quidditch.

What is the Friday Forty?

Every Friday at 1:00 p.m. Eastern, the production will release 40 tickets for every

performance the following week, for some of the very best seats in the theatre, at $20 per part ($40 total to see the two-part play).

How have audiences reacted to these efforts?

Audiences in London have reacted positively, and I hope it will be the same here in America.

Who were your key collaborators on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child?

What do you want audiences to take away from these plays?

Jack Thorne (writer), J. K. Rowling (co-creator), Steven Hoggett (movement), Christine Jones (set design), Katrina Lindsay (costume design), Gareth Fry (sound design), Neil Austin (lighting design), Imogen Heap (music and arrangements), Martin Lowe (music supervision and arrangements), and our producers, Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender.

I want them to take away whatever they want to take away.

Has Harry Potter and the Cursed Child presented you with any specific unique challenges as a director?

I doubt that I’ll ever have to put this much magic on stage again.

Where does the strength of your relationships with your collaborators come from?

What is the most important thing you have learned from this directing experience?

Our long history of working together, a desire to impress each other, a constant atmosphere of giddiness, and, above all, trust.

That there’s a huge untapped audience out there.

What are your hopes for the future of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child?

How has directing Harry Potter and the Cursed Child multiple times/for multiple productions informed your process?

That, over time, we are as accessible as possible to that audience.

They should always feel bespoke to the moment in time you’re working in and the group of people you’re working with whilst being true to the original production.

In other publications, you have discussed the importance of making theatre accessible, particularly regarding ticket costs. Why is this important to you?

Our productions should be as accessible as possible to as wide an audience as possible. At the end of the day, this comes down to the price of tickets.

What are some of the ways you and the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child team have made the show accessible?

Every performance at the Lyric Theatre has 300 seats throughout the theatre at $40 and under per part, with 150 of those seats priced at $20 per part. Then, there’s also the “Friday Forty”…

OPPOSITE The

Broadway company rehearses for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, directed by John Tiffany TOP John

MIDDLE John

Tiffany

Tiffany + producer Sonia Friedman

BOTTOM John Tiffany rehearses with Noma Dumezweni (Hermione Granger) + Jamie Parker (Harry Potter) PHOTOS

JOHN TIFFANY is the Olivier and Tony Award-winning director of Once and the Olivier Awardwinning director of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Along with Once, Tiffany has also directed Macbeth and The Glass Menagerie for Broadway. He won the Olivier and Critics’ Circle Best Director awards for Black Watch and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Director of a Musical for Once. Other credits include Road, The Twits, Hope, and The Pass for the Royal Court; Let the Right One In, Enquirer, Peter Pan, Nobody Will Ever Forgive Us, and The Bacchae for the National Theatre of Scotland; and The Ambassador at BAM. Tiffany was Associate Director of the National Theatre of Scotland from 2005 to 2012 and was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University for the 2010–2011 academic year. He is the current Associate Director of the Royal Court in London.

Manuel Harlan SPRING 2018 | SDC JOURNAL

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An Unquiet Voice from the Left Coast AN INTERVIEW WITH KURT BEATTIE

BY TED

The name Kurt Beattie has been synonymous with Seattle theatre for nearly 50 years.

Name a theatre in the Jet City, and you can be sure that Beattie has worked there as an actor, director, writer, literary manager, and/ or as a member of the administrative team.

In mid-February, SDC reunited Beattie with his former Seattle Rep colleague, actor/director Ted Sod, for a conversation about life as an artist in Seattle’s past, present, and future.

TED | Can you paint a picture of what Seattle was like when you were just starting out?

KURT | Seattle had already started down the road toward developing a dynamic theatrical community by then, though the scene was relatively small in terms of the number of companies. The Rep was mounting some wonderful productions under Allen Fletcher, and ACT [A Contemporary Theatre] had just started. It was already a town with a remarkable writing community, particularly when it came to poetry. And painting. The opera and symphony were getting better and better.

The audiences were excited, if remarkably provincial. In fits and starts, they grew.

Seattle was blue-collar, hard as nails in some ways. At least it seemed that way to the spindly kid I was, who occasionally needed ABOVE Kurt

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SOD

a job in a factory, or on a fishing boat, and had no family or union affiliation.

With the specter of the draft and the Vietnam War hanging over me, I had to support myself through some of my years as an undergraduate and, like a lot of actors, had many different jobs along the way while trying to keep my student deferment. At one point, I had a job at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer while acting in a student production of The Merchant of Venice.

I would take my lunch break at the newspaper, take the bus down to the Showboat Theatre, throw my costume on, run on stage, and do the Prince of Aragon, then run off stage and run back up to catch the bus and go back to my job. I lived a rather insane life then.

I went to the University of Washington as an undergraduate in 1966. I didn’t study theatre; I batted around in a bunch of departments and finally ended up in English. But I started acting in a lot of university productions. I got some secondhand training by being in shows with some wonderfully talented student actors in the professional acting training program at the university that was being run at the time by the excellent teachers Duncan Ross and Arne Zaslove. It was also where I met Burke Walker, who was soon to found the Empty Space Theatre. He was a graduate student there, and I acted in some of his projects.

Beattie directing Allen Fitzpatrick as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol at ACT PHOTO Chris Bennion

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Burke was a very good influence on me right at the beginning. He was interested in a great range of theatrical repertoire because he had been raised in Europe, Turkey, and North Africa, and was trilingual. He had an awareness of the world that I didn’t. It wasn’t just of Englishlanguage theatre. The classical repertoire of the continent, writers such as Molière and Courteline, as well as the work of Genet, Arrabal, the Absurdists, German and Spanish writers—these were all in his head. He also had a passion for new American writing and Americana. He invited me, along with some other young, very talented people, to help him start his theatre down in the Pike Place Market.

TED | Was it called the Empty Space then?

KURT | Its name was the Empty Space Association. This was in 1970. I helped him paint the place. It was a bit “Mickey and Judy” at the beginning. Lights in coffee and paint cans, and hoping the fire inspector didn’t show up. But it was good from the very beginning, and it pulled a lot of very talented people into its theatremaking right away. It also had the support of older theatre professionals, such as Duncan Ross and Gregory Falls, and some kind reviews from the occasional critic.

I owe the Space one of the most important moments artistically for me in my early

attempts at artmaking. I was cast there as Kaspar in Peter Handke’s Kaspar. That role is an amazing challenge for an actor. At the time, I was in a bad way psychologically and emotionally. I was stuck in a horrible day job and felt like there wasn’t any hope. After I did that role and had a success with it, I knew that I should be in the theatre. That changed me.

TED | Is that when you said, this is what I’m meant to do—be an actor?

KURT | Absolutely.

TED | Empty Space sounds as though it had a really interesting mission at that point.

KURT | It did. It was very interested in contemporary American work. If I’m not mistaken, it produced Megan Terry, early David Mamet, Lanford Wilson, and, of course, early Sam Shepard, as well as other important au courant writers from elsewhere, such as Harold Pinter.

Did you work at all those theatres ultimately?

KURT | Yes. Almost all of them, actually. It was enormously useful to me to be able to do a new, wonderfully goofy musical by Phil Shallat and John Engerman, then be in a play

by Ibsen or Noël Coward at Intiman, and then in a new Michael Weller play at the Rep. This journey was ideal for me as a young artist.

I didn’t discover myself as a playwright or dramaturg or director until a little later.

TED | Will you give us a sense of how you went from being primarily an actor to working as a literary manager?

Buffalo, New York. I’ve been an Equity actor for 60 years.

TED | Well, you must be getting a handsome pension, then!

KURT | I’m getting something, and I’m very grateful for it. But when I started working as a staff member at the Empty Space and then at the Seattle Rep, I didn’t do a lot of acting after that. I would dip in and out. I’m grateful to be acting in The Gin Game right now because it reminds me of how physically demanding it is to act. I’m 70 now, and, as you well know, to go out there and extend yourself in a major role is a lot.

Acting brings me back to the core theatrical experience in a way, the experience of the actor meeting with an audience. I know it may sound corny, but I’ll say it anyway: the sheer amount of energy and courage it actually takes to do it in front of an audience is astonishing and selfdevouring. If actors have fun doing it, as many say they do, they know there is a bit of chewing into oneself and taking something away from oneself as well.

A diminishment.

So all actors have implicitly, at least for me, tragic stature.

And are all very tall, whether they actually are or not.

But the interesting thing about the Empty Space is that there was also a great appreciation of the canon, too.

The Space did The Alchemist, and Piñero and Shakespeare, Molière, and Empty Space company actors, 1974: (seated) Megan Dean, Lori Larsen, Kathy Lichter, John Aylward, commedia. It Kurt Beattie; (standing) Martin LaPlatney + Tom Spiller PHOTO University of Washington Libraries, Special wasn’t about Collections, Don Wallen, photographer MPH1657 divorcing oneself I’ve always thought that, if you had to get KURT | Burke eventually asked me to join from the continuum of theatrical experience. down to it, if we had a terrible societal or the Empty Space as a literary manager and a A lot of the young actors who worked at environmental catastrophe, people would sort of “aesthetic dogsbody.” So I was acting that place were really interested in both continue to make theatre. And where would it in plays there, writing articles, trying to things. They were interested in doing the begin? With actors. Mr. Burns got this entirely read other people’s plays, and helping with most exciting new work and they were right. You have to have actors, performers, programming. That’s how I got involved in interested in doing classical work, too. to have theatre. It would have to be with being on a theatre staff. After that, I ended storytellers. They would generate their own up being Artistic Director of the Empty Space TED | I’m guessing that, at this point in time, texts, their own writing. You couldn’t begin briefly when Burke stepped down. And after Seattle Rep was the best-endowed theatre and the art form all over again only with people that—in about 1992—Doug Hughes recruited it could do lavish productions of these plays. wanting to direct. (Kind of a fun sketch, me to the Rep to be their literary manager.

A Contemporary Theatre [ACT] was doing come to think about it: Director One: “No, new work. Empty Space was doing things on you do this, and you do that!” Director Two: TED | I believe I read in an article that you said a shoestring that probably the Rep wouldn’t “NO. YOU do this, and YOU do that!”) your first love is acting. Do you still feel that do because they were afraid of offending their way? audience. I believe the Intiman Theatre had TED | How did you morph from acting into its roots in the desire to produce the plays of playwriting and doing adaptations? What gave KURT | Absolutely. It’s how I started. I got my Scandinavian authors such as Strindberg and you the confidence that you could do this?

Equity card when I was 10 years old, as a child Ibsen. And then Pioneer Square came along actor in musicals at Melody Fair outside of to do musicals or more irreverent work.

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Owen + Kurt Beattie in The Gin Game at Village Theatre PHOTO Tracy Martin Rapture at Empty Space, directed by Kurt Beattie PHOTO Chris Bennion

ABOVE LEFT Marianne ABOVE RIGHT Dark

KURT | When I was an undergraduate at the University of Washington, what really interested me was poetry, which continues to interest me and which I continue to read and write to this very day. I’ve always had a deep interest in all literary forms. Particularly in epic, because I’ve had a little bit of Latin and Greek in the course of my lifetime, so the literature of the ancient world is deeply interesting to me—and over the last 14 years, particularly the classical literature of Asia.

So it was always there. It’s probably one of the reasons why I’m equally interested in classical literature for the theatre as I am interested in the contemporary. I’ve always thought it was a needed symbiosis that is a bit at risk right now in the regional theatre.

Regional theatres aren’t producing as much of the so-called canon as they have in the past, partly because it’s expensive. A lot of those plays are pretty big. And also because of the great contemporary social concerns we have now, which are tremendously intense and need voicing in the theatre.

TED | Another factor could be the attenuation of the American audience’s attention span.

KURT | That’s a good observation. It’s harder for audiences today to grapple with the oldfashioned three-act, two-intermission play.

And it’s very hard—almost impossible—for theatres to find enough money to rehearse those plays; you can’t get enough repetitions of them in, in a three-week rehearsal process.

TED | I would love to see a production of The Time of Your Life now, but I don’t think I ever will again.

It seemed for a while that Seattle was a hotbed of new play development on the national level. When I was Artist-in-Residence at the Rep, Daniel Sullivan was bringing in writers

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who didn’t want to be close to New York while they were working on a new play. Do you feel that gave Seattle national recognition?

KURT | Dan generated premieres and workshops of plays by people such as Herb Gardner, Wendy Wasserstein, John Patrick Shanley, and Arthur Laurents, and a number of them ended up on Broadway as hits. August Wilson started many of his plays in their first productions at the Rep. Doug Hughes also brought wonderful writers such as Harry Kondoleon, Tony Giardina, and Mark O’Donnell to Seattle to work on their pieces. And others in town were developing plays that would have a national reach at the same time as well.

Warner Shook’s production of The Kentucky Cycle. Some of Steven Dietz’s plays at ACT. However, I still think there’s a lot of very good developmental work that gets done on new plays in Seattle, at ACT, the Rep, and the Fifth Avenue, as well as other venues. Perhaps the Broadway reach isn’t quite as strong as it once was, but the work continues to be of high quality.

TED | I’m interested in the directing aspect of your multiple talents. Did that happen while you were an artistic director or before?

KURT | I began directing plays at the Empty Space. Among other things, early on, I directed the premiere of an Eric Overmyer play, Dark Rapture. I simply lucked into the opportunity at the Seattle Rep. I was sitting in a meeting with Dan Sullivan. He had programmed True West and didn’t have anybody to direct it. I just raised my hand and said, “I’d like to direct it.” And he let me do it.

TED | I was there for that. It was a wonderful production. I didn’t realize that was one of the first major productions you directed.

What about when you took over at ACT in 2003? What made you decide to bear the responsibility of taking on that particular company at that point in time? Did you want the challenge?

KURT | I never had the typical ambition of somebody who wanted to be an artistic director. In fact, I worked for a number of them and so closely witnessed how stressful it was to be an artistic director that I think I didn’t really ever want the job.

What motivated me was that I couldn’t stand the thought of a theatre not existing anymore.

I knew what ACT meant to the community and particularly to the community of artists. I was directing a Steven Dietz play at the Milwaukee Rep at the time, and some ACT board members called me up and said, “Could you come to ACT and see if we can get this baby started again? We can’t pay you anything.”

It seemed to me a horrible thing for the community if ACT went under permanently.

Fortunately, a former managing director of ACT, the remarkable Susan Trapnell, was interested in coming back to help. She was really the key player in that process, and that’s another reason why I did it. If anybody could pull the theatre out of its financial fire, it was Susan. And she did.

TED | Once you were in that position, how did you decide what you were going to do and make it successful?

KURT | That’s a great question. For all my experience, I don’t think I had exceptional ideas about what the theatre needed to be until I was faced with the inevitable problem that any theatre in the position that ACT was in has to face: why do you really need to exist? What is so terribly exceptional about

ABOVE LEFT Kurt

Beattie (right) directing Sean Griffin, Jeanne Paulsen + John Procaccino in A Moon for the Misbegotten at ACT PHOTO Chris Bennion Arndt, R. Hamilton Wright + Matthew Floyd Miller in The Pillowman at ACT, directed by Kurt Beattie PHOTO Chris Bennion

ABOVE RIGHT Denis

you, other than giving actors and designers and directors and theatre workers work? And if you are going to exist, how are you going to exist in a way that’s truly meaningful, rather than doing the same old thing? And this questioning came to me in the middle of a year of chemotherapy for lung cancer.

And not all of them controlled by me. Let’s see if we can make this truly more organic.”

Another vertical metaphor kept occurring to me as well. I kept thinking in terms of the human body. You have a cerebral cortex; so a theatre needs intellect. It needs to be affective and redemptive and be able to tell

TED | Oh my goodness!

KURT | It was really quite a journey. I began to search for a metaphor, something deeper than these stupid mission statements that always end up saying the same crap— and usually with intolerable arrogance—whether the theatres are little or big, whether they are youthful or old.

I kept thinking about how different ACT’s building was. It was so unique: two theatres, one on top of the other, and a warren of rooms, besides. And so I thought, Kurt Beattie directing The Pillowman at ACT PHOTO Chris Bennion “Well, this place is like a reef.

A place of mutually sustaining the redemptive story. It has to have a heart. life-forms, a vertical ecosystem, and it And a belly laugh. And then, it has to have needs, like a reef, to get more porous.” genitals. It has to be a place where the unsayable gets said and the undoable gets done. It One of the things about all the theatres that I has to be a place for obscenity, conspiracy, had ever encountered intimately is that they and a challenge to conventional mores. were built along a corporate structure. You have an artistic director and then a staff underneath Now, this would be possible at a place such her or him, in relationship with a managing as ACT, but it wouldn’t be possible to be an director, who has the same relationship with artistic director of all those things and all the her or his staff. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, various forms they might take. A wonderful but its conventions seemed not reflective of the new colleague came into my life, Carlo potential of the building. I thought, “Why not Scandiuzzi, and together what we started to try to make this a more porous organization? do was think about the theatre more like a What we need is more life-forms in the building.

Venn diagram than a pyramid. Overlapping

domains. And then about getting allies in the building who could create aesthetic and artistic experiences for different audiences.

The idea was that they would pollinate one another, so that in aggregate they would create one connective tissue that fed itself with their differences. I also thought, obviously, that the theatre could be more representative of the community at large than it had been. I thought it would be interesting to see if I could blunt the sense of authority by having more artistic viewpoints in the building.

Now, the problem with that is the public. You’ll never escape the fact that in the theatre, you’re also a retailer. It doesn’t matter how high-minded you are—you have to put some shiny object in the window and hope that the pedestrian passing by finds it interesting and will come in and buy it.

Quality is important. You can’t just produce lousy work that has some sort of societal or exploratory value and think that the public ought to like it.

At the beginning of this process, I think we had some stuff in the building that wasn’t very good and actually didn’t deserve a public one way or the other. But in the end, I still thought that through trial and error we could bring all these rooms at ACT into a very meaningful and stimulating conversation with one another and their audiences.

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such as who should have power, for instance.

Their theatre was fashioned like a law court: people stood up and had different points of view. There’s a debate in Oedipus about who’s responsible for the catastrophe in Thebes, and this is essentially a political conversation.

But it happens in a neutral space, and that means it has to allow for different points of view. And that, of course, can also translate into different aesthetic points of view as well. It doesn’t just have to be about current events.

Institutions are a continuum. The ones that are really alive, that is. That’s why they exist: we have giant problems and experiences through history and the course of our lives, and the institution’s job is to keep that continuity of inquiry and creation flowing from generation to generation. That’s why I think it’s very important to do classical work.

You simply need the backboard of history.

more of a sense of adventure and possibility out here in some spiritual, if undefined, way.

Both Marianne and I are lovers of nature. The thing about Seattle is that you can still jump in your car and in 30 minutes—on a good day— can be in a remarkably beautiful place. We love to hike and study the world, particularly wild flowers and animals. And we both love the West. Not that there aren’t wonderful things to do and see of nature all over the country, and particularly back East. But the dimension of the environment—its richness—it’s so in us.

TED | Well, I think you’re talking about the famous Pacific Northwest quality of life. The mountains and lakes and the redwoods in Northern California.

Any connection between your work as a director, writer, or actor and how the city of Seattle itself inspires you?

To do Angels in America is supremely important. It’s also supremely important to do, say, something such as Tamburlaine. And to connect those two journeys in some way for an audience. To have a conversation with the past as well as the present.

TED | I want to ask you a personal question. You and your wife—the actress Marianne Owen—are both prominent people in the Seattle theatre community.

I believe you could have possibly made your careers in New York. But what kept you in Seattle?

KURT | Well, on one The Ramayana at ACT, directed by Kurt Beattie PHOTO Chris Bennion level, simply, we kept working here. A lot. And KURT | Not now. Seattle is an enormously being consumed by the work we did. wealthy corporate town now. It’s a hugely successful place because it represents dynamic I tried to leave Seattle a number of times, technological and scientific advances. Boeing and I never succeeded. Perhaps it’s because is still an enormous presence. Then you have I was fully immersed in New York as a young Amazon and Microsoft—two of the most person—my father was a professor of classical successful corporate entities in the world. music at Hofstra University and a muchrespected musician and singer at City Opera TED | Starbucks. and around the country—so much of my life was spent in the city at an early age immersed KURT | And Starbucks. And all sorts of exciting in the opera and theatre and ballet and the biotech companies and medical research, museums. I went to the Choir School of St. stoked by the remarkable energy of the John the Divine when it was a boarding school University of Washington as a research engine. and spent my middle school years singing But, culturally, it’s somehow lost a sense of the great Renaissance music. A magnificent thing suffering and truth of its history—which was for an adolescent boy to spend his time doing. definitely here when I came here. Seattle was So I never lacked for that cultural opportunity a blue-collar city and the edge of the country. that New York gives to so many coming from elsewhere in the country. But eventually I found Not very well known, but unique to itself.

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You know, what it’s lost is what I think is lost in New York now, too. When I was a kid in New York, blue-collar people—working-class people—lived in Manhattan. The characters in Arthur Miller’s A Memory of Two Mondays were instantly recognizable to me as people I ran into all the time in my young life in New York. Not so much anymore. Same with Seattle. New York and Seattle have the feeling to me of monocultures in that they are less and less diverse economically. The victims of a socioeconomic narrowing that isn’t expressive of the total range of life.

Both places are still very interesting. There is great work. I certainly don’t think that we’re in some kind of era going nowhere theatrically. But one of the things about older large plays such as You Can’t Take It with You is that they are plays full of old people, middle-aged people, and young people. They are about all of us.

However, now I will be a crabby old artist and say that Seattle remains resolutely and maddening provincial. At least in terms of its audiences. In a communication I had with the writer Jonathan Raban some years ago, he said that Seattle would have to grow by a million or two in population to become truly cosmopolitan. And, in a way, I think he’s right.

But at what cost? How many more farms and forests will have to come down for that to happen?

TED | What would you say are the challenges of making theatre in Seattle right now?

What, from your point of view of living through decades there, do you see as the biggest challenges?

KURT | There’s a lot of talent in the city, but not enough resources. And not enough cheap rent. It’s always been a common complaint. When have we ever had enough money in the theatre? I don’t remember a time when that wasn’t the case.

TED | No, no, you’re always begging.

We’re still beholden to the Medicis.

KURT | But I also think it’s a cultural thing. The idea of going to the theatre is just alien to a lot of younger people. And in Seattle, it’s extremely hard physically to get to the theatres if you live anywhere but close to downtown. Driving is so problematic. Seattle didn’t invest years ago— when it had the chance—in rapid transit.

Let’s just take the example of actors in Seattle today. There used to be enough opportunity in the community for you to piece a living together if you could get work. That held a lot of talented people here. Tacoma Actors Guild is gone; Intiman is a much smaller operation, and it isn’t the sort of player it once was in terms of the livelihood of actors. The Rep no longer employs as many actors as it used to and utilizes more co-productions. The Seattle Children’s Theatre, a very important part of the mosaic in terms of actor employment, doesn’t hire as much. Many of the mid-level Equity theatres, such as the Empty Space and the Pioneer Square Theatre, are gone. Both the 5th Avenue and the Village Theatre, on the other hand, have been great for the community, but for those of us not especially skilled at singing and dancing, not so much. Seattle Shakespeare Theatre, Book-It, and a number of others do fine work but pay very little.

I mean, I can’t think of myself as having had a better career than the one I have had. I’ve never cared much about anything except about the project that was in front of me. I never had the ambition to go to New York and be a famous person there. It didn’t seem like this thing I had to have. I don’t know why.

TED | I know exactly what you’re saying.

I would like to ask you what you think the Seattle theatre community will be like in 10 years. Can you look into your crystal ball? Do you have a sense of it?

KURT | I have to be honest with you: I have absolutely no idea.

TED | What would you like it to be?

KURT | I would like it to be able to grapple with bigger projects. Contemporary theatre

There are some very talented actors in Seattle who have opted to get jobs because they wanted families, and they couldn’t make enough to support them.

Being responsible parents, they had to find another way.

Then, on top of everything else, there are the cultural problems of some of our audience members. They like to have more agency in the kind of cultural and entertainment experiences they have. And they can do that online, because there they can control how they interact with the experience more than they can in live theatre.

TED | Well, it’s sad to me.

KURT | Yeah, it’s pretty frightening, actually.

TED | Would you say that Seattle is still nationally recognized?

KURT | I don’t know. I don’t think it’s quite as hot as it used to be. But what’s the ambition to go to Broadway about? I mean, what’s such a big deal about that?

Kurt Beattie as Scrooge and Chloë Forsyth as Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol at ACT PHOTO Chris Bennion

TED | Well, I think that’s why people want to climb Mt. Everest.

KURT | I agree. And certainly, who doesn’t secretly harbor that ambition in the American theatre? But I think original and great work can be made by communities that have absolutely no interest at all in a national reputation. And, in a way, possibly the way to finding your way to a national reputation is to not aspire to it.

If you work devotedly and determinedly to achieve something specific artistically, it has only to do with the work in front of you—take short views, as W. H. Auden put it.

has become very good at creating powerful small entanglements, but it’s the big canvases that compel me the most. I want more Angels in America. More productions of great classics not governed by small casts playing too many parts.

The problem of resource has to be addressed somehow because, bluntly, I want artists to make more money. I want the theatre to support its artists better than it’s doing now. I want theatres to pay actors more. Much more.

I want longer rehearsal periods. I want more interesting dramaturgical ideas and choices.

Theatres as institutions can sustain a continuity

of experiment, experience and conversation.

They should also be conservative in the sense that they willfully connect with the past. This is, of course, one of the things that is so interesting about Hamilton, for instance.

I’m very proud of helping to create and bring an adaptation of The Ramayana, the Indian epic, to the ACT stage. Seattle is a Pacific Rim city and has a tremendous connection to Asia historically. But Asia’s foundational stories, its epics and great classical literatures, its theatrical forms, are virtually unknown to American audiences. We’re currently working with Philip Kan Gotanda and Yussef El Guindi on an adaptation of the great Japanese epic The Tale of the Heike, which has never been attempted in the English-speaking theatre. It’s the Iliad of Japan and is pretty much unknown to most people in the States. And it has a great deal to say about everyone today, even though its history and the way it speaks from the 12th and 13th centuries is remarkably and profoundly Japanese.

The new themes and energies are coming from diverse writers right now. It’s coming from people outside the white experience. But these energies can also, in turn, be formed by something outside of themselves. One great example that comes to mind at the moment is in film.

One of Ozu’s greatest films, Tokyo Story, was inspired by Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow. And so it goes. Imitation has a profound place in many instances of great creativity and art.

Like many communities in this country, ACT has been producing a much beloved—and, I think, excellent—version of A Christmas Carol for many years.

I’ve played Scrooge numbers of times and directed it maybe five times. But for all that, something struck me like a thunderbolt, the last time I did it, in a completely surprising way. The now-iconic image of Tiny Tim on the shoulder of Scrooge runs powerfully deep into time.

Because, of course, it is another image of the New Year being carried in on the shoulders of the Old Year. Its paganism was somehow both intimidating and comforting to me. How deep the currents of our temporal being run! Eternal and ephemeral, like my life seems to me at 70 now, and no less mysterious!

When we had Alan Ayckbourn come to ACT four years ago, we met a great writer for the theatre who has constantly renewed himself and us. What more can anyone ask of themselves in this great old and new art form?

What theatre could do better than work for it again and again, this rebirth that comes in a language in which the present and past tense are somehow one?

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As the Tide Rises, You All Rise Together AN INTERVIEW WITH

DESDEMONA CHIANG

PHOTO

Chris Bennion

BY

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GINA PISASALE

Perhaps Desdemona Chiang's mother foretold her daughter’s life in theatre by naming her after Shakespeare’s heroine. Over the last 15 years, Chiang has built a career by directing works written not just by the author of her namesake but new plays by Lauren Yee, Naomi Iizuka, and Robert Schenkkan. Though her work takes her from coast to coast—and up and down the West Coast’s Interstate Route 5—Chiang has called Seattle home for many years. Her work there in the last year alone has been seen at Seattle Public Theatre, ACT, Seattle Children’s Theatre, Cornish College of the Arts, and Azeotrope, the company she co-founded with University of Washington (UW) classmate Richard Nguyen Sloniker in 2010.

For SDC Journal, Chiang spoke recently with her longtime friend and former Oregon Shakespeare Festival coworker Gina Pisasale (now Resident Dramaturg at People’s Light in Malvern, PA).

GINA | If you were in a room full of people that you just met, how would you identify yourself?

DESDEMONA | My leading edge is I’m a theatre director. My job is completely wrapped up in my identity. I can’t divorce what I do from how I move through the world, because my work is influenced by my life experiences. As I eat a particular food or watch a particular film, there’s an unconscious part of me that always wonders, “How is this food or film going to impact the next show I’m doing?” And so, I’m a theatre director.

GINA | If we shifted to a theatre context, how would you identify yourself?

DESDEMONA | I feel that I take on whatever chameleon identity serves the need of the moment. Whenever it’s useful, I will sometimes lead with “director of color,” “female director,” “Asian director,” “director of new plays,” or “director of classical plays.”

A lot of that has to do with what is necessary to create the community in that moment. When I went to the CAATA (Consortium of Asian American Theaters & Artists) conference last year, I was an Asian American director doing Shakespeare. Or an Asian American theatre director at the LORT level.

GINA | I keep thinking about how we enter the room. The context is so important.

DESDEMONA | Don’t you do that with an eye toward what the room is asking of you? That’s often how I think about it. What does the room need of me right now? Whenever I go into a conversation, I feel that there’s always an agenda in the room. We conduct community experiences with a sense of purpose. So how am I functional in that purpose?

GINA | Because all the people in the room matter. I would imagine that, as the director, orchestrating that is also part of that equation.

DESDEMONA | I think it may be because I’ve been conditioned by the ideology of new play development. It’s always about serving the higher purpose. What does the room need? What is this play asking? What is the community asking, and why are we doing this play? Every project is different. And sometimes you do a play because of the people in the room making the play, so it’s important that these folks get to tell the story.

GINA | That’s a generous mode of presenting and entering. When did you find yourself comfortable enough to enter with that kind of generosity without having to establish yourself first?

DESDEMONA | That was one of my shortcomings when I first started directing— that I had a hesitation to establish myself.

When I was in grad school at the University of Washington, Jon Jory was my mentor.

I remember when we were starting our first project, Jon turned to me and said, “Desdemona, when are you actually going to start directing the play? You’re in the room, but you’re just sitting there, and you’re letting the actors flounder.” I was mortified. I bluffed and said, “Well, I’m letting them figure it out. I’m being generous.” And his response was, “But you’re not leading.”

It took me three years to figure out how to lead a room while still honoring my own impulses to not barge into places. Even though, secretly, I have all these opinions. I want to say all these things. Even now, I still feel that hesitation.

I don’t know how much of that is deeply programmed in me as an Asian person. That’s some deep therapy stuff we may not need to get into.

GINA | No, this is exactly how I feel, but from a dramaturg’s perspective.

DESDEMONA | I also don’t know how much of that is about being a woman and how I’ve been socialized to behave. I would look at my male colleagues and think, “Wow, they have no problems coming in and telling people what to do.” But it never felt right for me to tell people what to do without listening to them first.

opposed to “This is a great idea. Let’s do all this.”

That’s probably why I enter with some caution.

GINA | What were your hopes and dreams as a biology major? What did you want to be when you grew up?

DESDEMONA | It sounds terrible, but I wasn’t from the kind of family that supported the idea of dreaming big. We’re in this country.

We’re going to need to make some money, and you’re smart and you like science. It never occurred to me to think of anything else other than science. It wasn’t like there was a Michelle Obama in my life and I wanted to be like her.

Once I got into high school, biology was the thing that I was really good at. And my mom said, “Oh, thank God. You can be a doctor.”

Whoops!

GINA | Do you feel as though you jumped ship and, having gone from pre-med to the theatre, are in a totally different mode of existence?

DESDEMONA | As far as my curiosities around why I chose either field, I don’t think they’re that different. Chemistry didn’t appeal to me—maybe because it wasn’t a living, cellular thing. There was something more interesting about biology. I used to think, “Oh, maybe it’s the fascination with life.” In any case, molecular cell biology was just a means of getting to med school, because what I really wanted to be at the time was a gynecologist.

I remember being a teenager and going to my first exam and, of course, it was a male doctor. I thought, “Oh, this is terrible. We need more women doing this.” So even then, in my teens, I was unknowingly thinking about representation, who gets to do what and why.

GINA | In the trajectory of your directing career, did you enter in that same kind of mode? Thinking, “There needs to be more representation?”

DESDEMONA | That’s something I didn’t intend until much later in my career. This idea of visibility and representation didn’t click for me until my first season at OSF (Oregon Shakespeare Festival) in 2010—where I met you!

GINA | Where do you think that came from?

I’m wondering about how your ideas of directing originated and then evolved. I know from past conversations that you came to theatre via molecular and cellular biology with an intent to enter medical school.

Prior to that year at OSF, I wasn’t thinking about the value of who does and doesn’t get to be on stage. But then I remember attending an artistic representation meeting one day where you read out loud from an article that you wrote about the invisibility of Asian people. And I thought, “Holy shit, that is profound.” That summer at OSF completely changed my mind about how curation happens on stage—who gets to choose it and who has to execute it.

DESDEMONA | Because science demands that you be a skeptic, I always go into the room asking, “Okay, what about this is a bad idea?” As

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deliberate and careful curation of who gets to play what role, and why we somehow always end up seeing certain folks relegated to certain roles? I never interrogated that part. I feel like the years since that season at OSF have led to more questions around why and how, and the value of and the way that I took these things for granted.

GINA | What were you directing in undergrad?

Was directing your focus then?

that the theatre was stirring up, medicine was saying, “No, no, no.”

DESDEMONA | Most people get their start in theatre with acting, right? Acting was the first thing I did, because it was the easy “A” class that lured me into the theatre department. I would audition for school plays and never get cast. And then I got involved with an improv troupe for a couple years. I was not good, but it was very liberating.

It was really hard for me to do these human dissections without wanting to cry. I was most successful in anatomy class when I shut the vulnerable part of myself off. Don’t think about the people. Don’t think about the life part of it.

Think about the functionality part of it. It made me realize that there are people out there who can manage to see the humanity and hold all the ugliness and suffering that comes with working in medicine. I applaud practitioners who can do that. I found it so hard. So, medical school was out.

Directing just kind of happened.

I took a class, and it all made so much more sense. This is the job where I read the paperwork and get to decide what this thing is about. Directing appealed to the science-oriented part of me because I realized that directors are problem solvers. Here’s this play, and it is full of problems. What does it look like? Who are the people in it? Who, what, when, where, why, how? All those questions are present in a play, and your job is to solve all of them while making it interesting and relevant and exciting to watch.

GINA | At that point, did you know that you were going to pursue theatre as a career? Or were you still applying to med schools?

DESDEMONA | By junior year of college, I had realized that med school was not for me. All the things that science was preparing me for theatre was undoing.

I had a pivotal moment in human anatomy class. I went to Berkeley, and in that human anatomy class, there were two cadavers in your lab that you get to—more or less— dissect. I remember walking in that Joseph Ngo + Khanh Doan in The King of the Yees at ACT, first day, and the first thing I see are directed by Desdemona Chiang PHOTO Chris Bennion these two body bags in the middle of the room. My first thought was, “Oh my God, there are humans in there.” They GINA | Do you think that’s because of your were nude and cut open, and you could see all own growth of awareness? Or do you think it’s their bits and pieces. Right next to the bodies because of a larger cultural conversation that were the death certificates. It was all very has been evolving? clinical. But for me, it was also very humanizing.

DESDEMONA | I’m not sure. It could be timing I stood there, looking at this death certificate. of both these things coming together—2010 This man was African American. He was 67 was two years into the Obama presidency, and years old, died of kidney failure. I started then a few years after, we would have Black constructing narratives in my mind about how Lives Matter. It could be one of those zeitgeist he got kidney failure. And that is not your job. things that happened. I feel we’re constantly Your job is to examine the kidneys and inspect in one of those at any given moment, where the renal cells and not think about this as a there is a thing we need to talk about. person who had a soul. It’s a specimen. It’s a Representation is the thing that is occupying a vessel. Meanwhile, in theatre, we’re talking lot of space in our conversations right now. But about hopes and dreams, and intimacy and life, it was so strange that I went through so many right? So all these feelings of vulnerability years not thinking about it, and now suddenly I’m constantly thinking about it.

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After undergrad, I got a job as a project manager at a company called Sparkart. At the time, it was the beginning of internet tracking technology, web 2.0, and the early stages of what would eventually become social networking. Our company’s job was to build websites for bands and track the number of clicked links or how long people listened to a song before closing a window. We would sell Warner Brothers the back-end data, and they would use it to figure out their next marketing strategies.

GINA | Was that job just a paycheck for you?

DESDEMONA | It was mostly just a job. But what I found interesting was the tracking of human behavior and social economics. Why people do things and how large amounts of data can reflect population behavior and social trends.

GINA | How did you get back into the theatre?

DESDEMONA | I did that tech job for a couple years and ended up being really miserable because people in that industry are not kind.

You and your design team work really hard on a concept, present the product to the client, and within five minutes they’re like, “This is shit. Do it over.” That taught me that I had to value collaborators. You have to value their time and the fact that they spent hours of their creative energy crafting an idea for you. When a designer gives you a design, it may not be right, but you have to figure out how they got there.

While I was working at Sparkart, I started doing a little self-reflecting and some therapy.

I remember thinking I was happiest and felt most productive, connected, and engaged when I was doing theatre. But I was afraid of changing paths because I didn’t think I could do it full time and still make a living. But then I thought, “Well, there is this guy down the street named Tony Taccone who is running Berkeley Rep, and he has a career doing it. So, I should be able to do it, right?”

I kept on with my day job. I joined Theatre Bay Area, which is the local support organization for theatre workers. I started to audition for plays again, but I couldn’t get cast in anything because I was a terrible actor. But I managed to get a tiny, tiny role at Impact Theatre in Berkeley. Melissa Hillman was directing Macbeth, and she gave me the part of Lady Macduff, who had about six lines and an incredible fight scene. And I was like, “Sweet!

I’m doing theatre again.”

I did that play in the basement of a pizza parlor, where we had strawberry jam and a lot of red syrup for blood and brains. There were machine guns and people wearing camo. It was the most exhilarating, crazy time. Looking back, I can’t remember if the show was any good. I just knew that I had such a great time working on it, and everyone was so generous. It was like being part of a big family, and I felt connected again after that.

GINA | One of the first things that impressed me when I was working with you in 2010 was that you had such clarity in owning your identity and your place in the world, and making things from there. Are you settled in your identity as a freelance director? Or are you interested in being a resident director or an artistic director?

DESDEMONA | An artistic director position is definitely something I’m looking toward. I know there’s a paradigm shift happening now. I can feel it—the shifting of leadership within the theatre landscape. I’m definitely interested.

But when I’m being emailed job postings that say, “This theatre is looking for an AD,” I think, “I’ve never been there. How could I run a theatre in a community that I’ve never lived in?” If you had said San Francisco or Seattle, or Chapel Hill, NC—places where I’ve worked, where I feel like I have some context and agency—I might feel more confident

GINA | Speaking of locales and cultures, do you feel more comfortable entering spaces in Seattle than you do in New York or elsewhere on the East Coast? Is there a sense of home in regional terms?

DESDEMONA | Seattle is the closest thing to an artistic home for me right now. I think that’s because I just happen to have spent, in the last 15 years, the most number of hours in Seattle area ZIP codes.

I enter a room in Seattle with more certainty than I do when I enter a space in a new city with a new theatre, a new ensemble, and a new staff. I have more anxiety and anticipation entering a new space because I’m encountering and mixing with unknown personalities. It’s like I found all these great little kittens and I’m going to put you all in the same box now.

Quick, let’s see how well you play together.

It’s about the right alchemy of assembling the

After Macbeth closed, I emailed Melissa and said, “I so loved working on this show. But really what I want to do is direct. So can I assist you on anything?” Melissa wrote back, said, “Well, I’m directing Othello next year. Do you want to assist me on that? I can’t pay you.” I said, “I’ll do it for free. I don’t care!”

So, I would do my new media day job and then run across town to work with Melissa.

The following season, she offered me my first directing gig in that theatre and I was a member of Impact for a number of years.

That was my first artistic home and my first understanding of company.

GINA | What did you learn from Melissa that you still hold in your own practice?

DESDEMONA | She was very much about accessibility from a financial perspective. I had never met an AD who was adamant about staying small. She would say, “Our place in the ecosystem is the small basement theatre. I don’t want to be like Cal Shakes. I want to be the small, gritty place where young folks go to cut their teeth.”

A large number of the Bay Area’s greatest talents had their start at Impact. The challenging part is that this model becomes financially unsustainable; you’re dealing with constant departure and turnover. People come, and then, when they get fancy, they leave.

So your return on investment is very low. I kept coming back for as long as I could until I moved to Seattle for grad school, and then I just couldn’t come back anymore. Eventually, after producing shows for 20 years, they had to close, and it was heartbreaking. But Melissa is such a force in the theatre community. She’s an insightful voice when it comes to what things are being talked about politically, socially.

Mi Kang + Mikko Juan in The Journal of Ben Uchida: Citizen 13559 at Seattle Children’s Theatre, directed

by Desdemona Chiang PHOTO Elise Bakketun

in applying. Agency is something you have to earn. And, granted, I may technically be qualified for the job, but part of what being qualified means for me is the ability to understand the community. At what point do you earn that ability?

I also need to take my quality of life into consideration. There are a variety of things that play a role in how I define my quality of life and career: location, salary, culture of the city, the nature and values of the institution. Then again, is my caution causing me to pass up opportunities that are actually good for me? I don’t know.

group dynamic. And it just so happens that in Seattle, I have more certainty around which kittens play well with other kittens.

GINA | When you’re looking for your team of designers and other collaborators, what kinds of characteristics or qualities have you found to be the most useful?

DESDEMONA | I like collaborators who aren’t afraid to contradict me. My preference is to have designers who—again—lead with skepticism as opposed to enthusiasm. Also, designers who are good dramaturgs who ask, “How does this fit, and in what ways does it not fit? And how does this complicate things?”

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We can always get behind an idea we’re all excited about. But where is it not working?

GINA | I know that there are directors who come with teams that they’ve worked with before, becaue there’s trust that you build over time. Do you have a team that you’ve developed over the years?

DESDEMONA | I don’t have a team, but I have people that I like. Christine Tschirgi, for example, is a designer in Seattle who is my “go-to” for costumes.

GINA | Is it because of that quality of questioning?

Eric Steinberg, James Ryen, Naomi Nelson + Amy Kim Waschke in The Winter’s Tale at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, directed by Desdemona Chiang PHOTO Jenny Graham

DESDEMONA | She’s the first person who will say to me, “I don’t understand why you’re doing that. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

She’s also all about the excitement of the story and not about the size of the paycheck. She has never turned down a project because of budget limitations. She designs critically, with a social justice edge and, as a queer designer, thinks a lot about representation. She’s also a teacher and a parent, so she cares about the narratives that we put on stage and whether they are helping or hurting what we teach our kids.

GINA | Thinking about how to hold the excitement and mission of the work first and foremost, I was thinking of how we met through the OSF FAIR program—Fellowships, Assistantships, Internships, and Residencies— and the value of those kinds of opportunities to meet people that are in the same place in terms of career.

DESDEMONA | I think cohort-building is huge. When I look around at various working partnerships, I see folks who went to undergrad together. Or folks who went to grad school together. Or folks who met as interns.

That’s kind of what happens. As the tide rises, you all rise together. When you’re in your twenties, it can be frustrating because you’re not getting the work you want. Then as you hit your thirties and forties, you suddenly realize, “Oh! All of my friends are at regional theatres, and I’m getting hired now.”

Elizabeth Daruthayan + Christian Ver in Ching Chong Chinaman, SIS Productions, directed by Desdemona Chiang PHOTO Rick Wong

I’m now seeing colleagues of mine who are women and people of color getting executivelevel jobs in the theatre. And this plays a key role in how my career continues to develop.

Because, at the end of the day, people hire their friends. That’s the thing we don’t really talk about, but I suspect that’s how it works.

We hire the folks we’re interested in, the folks who value what we value, and the folks who are our friends.

GINA | But in most cases, our friends become people that we respect artistically, too.

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DESDEMONA | They’re also the people I find intellectually curious and politically active.

They are the folks from whom you can ask hard things.

GINA | Was that part of your impulse when you founded Azeotrope, your company in Seattle?

DESDEMONA | Azeotrope started the year after I finished grad school at UW. One of my classmates, Richard Nguyen Sloniker, and I became friends because we were the two Asian people in the program together at the time. Of course, when you see another Asian person in the theatre, there’s a natural awareness and gravitation toward each other.

GINA | That’s crazy, but it’s true.

folks who came were largely friends, family, and a handful of strangers. We magically got the Seattle Times to come, and they gave us a great review, which I think helped launch our presence into the community. Critics and theatre bloggers in Seattle have a big impact on the consumers and makers that make up this contained ecosystem.

GINA | If we mark that as the beginning of your professional work in the theatre, where do you think you are in the arc of your career?

DESDEMONA | I feel that I’m now starting to take on some kind of national visibility.

Going up and down the West Coast between California and Washington has felt really easy.

But for some reason, getting across that Mississippi River over to the East Coast has been surprisingly challenging.

I feel that I’ve been swimming upstream.

DESDEMONA | It’s as though your radar goes off from across the room. “Asian person! We should talk!” So, Richard and I became pals GINA | What do you think over the course of our training Richard Nguyen Sloniker, Tim Gouran + Mariel Neto in Azeotrope’s production are the pros and cons of that there. One day, we were talking of Red Light Winter at ACT, directed by Desdemona Chiang PHOTO Benito Vasquez national reach? I was reading about graduation and fear DESDEMONA | I think so. People always some articles where you described Seattle of the real world. He tossed out this idea of have an eye toward the training programs as a really wonderful artistic city that allows starting a theatre company. I told him, “Ugh! to see who’s coming out. The training-topeople to go elsewhere and then come back I don’t want to run a theatre.” There’s a lot of professional-work pipeline, with UW and to reinfuse new energies into the artistic overhead work I was not interested in doing. I Cornish College, is pretty strong. There’s always community. Is that part of this current as well? wanted to direct. a new class of designers, directors, and actors who are ready to enter the field every year.

DESDEMONA | The Northwest is so proud Then he said, “I really want to find a way to But, inevitably, there’s always a number of of its localism. I feel that most of the theatre keep working together.” So we came to this people who don’t stay around for long. Some companies here want to support our own— agreement. We won’t call it a company. We’ll folks who feel like they’re not getting the which I completely applaud. But I also believe call it a kind of partnership/consortium. We work they want might go to L.A. or New York. in exchange. There has to be some kind of won’t have a season. We’ll only produce a play That can be a result of issues around diversity. balance. if we both find it compelling and necessary I’ve had conversations with artists of color enough. That’s how it started. who feel like they’re not being represented It’s like putting together a new design team: in the working opportunities here, so they’ve bring a person you know, and then meet a We said, “Okay, well, no one is hiring either of considered moving somewhere else. It’s all bunch of other people. I think that makes for a us yet. We’re fresh out of grad school, we’re those things that complicate whether people really useful collaboration. The problem is it’s both young and don’t have a whole lot of do or don’t stay in town. not reciprocal. We’ll shop in folks from New experience. We’ll hire ourselves! And as long as York, but I rarely hear a New York company say, it’s not an obligation to do an ongoing season, GINA | I was wondering about training “Oh hey, let’s shop in some Seattle people.” So we’ll figure it out.” audiences to come to see edgy work. Or is the I understand why Seattle is holding on and not audience the community that is coming out of making space for outside folk.

We decided to produce Adam Rapp’s Red those institutions?

Light Winter—a gritty, dangerous, sexy play However, I do see a desire for exchange (and looking back on it now, perhaps a bit DESDEMONA | I don’t know what the Seattle between Seattle and other regions. I’m seeing misogynistic and problematic). The show was a audience appetite is for work by emerging designers from Austin and Minneapolis—nonhuge success. companies. We did our first show at Theatre New York regional designers and directors— Off Jackson, a local presenting house, and working here. I feel optimistic that the artistic GINA | Is there an appetite for new work by a they already had a subscriber list to which we directors of regional theatres are willing to brand-new company in Seattle? had access. Richard was a known entity—he shop in directors from other regions. I get had local acting experience prior to grad shopped out: I’ve worked in Chapel Hill, New school—but I was a new director. A lot of the Haven, and the Bay Area. I’ll be doing shows SPRING 2018 | SDC JOURNAL

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next season in Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, and Baltimore.

That’s a healthy exchange, but it definitely does ask the question: why isn’t New York participating? Maybe because they don’t feel they have to? Or maybe they are, and I’m not seeing it.

GINA | Considering the conversations about people of color in the arts and representation, are you finding that you’re being increasingly asked to do Asian American projects? How do you feel about that kind of work or those opportunities?

GINA | So when you enter a room, especially as a person of color working on a Western classic, what does it feel like? Can you ever really drop that feeling?

attribute it to my Asian-ness or my immigrantness or feelings of foreign-ness. Those things are a part of it. And that’s for whatever play I do.

DESDEMONA | The Asian-ness feeling?

GINA | I’m curious about what it means to bring you into the room. What are institutions valuing when they see you as an Asian American female director, especially when we’re talking about expectations of how you’re engaging with the art? What kind of identity markers or communities do they assume you represent when you’re coming into the room? Does it matter that I’m a Korean adoptee and you’re a Taiwanese immigrant?

GINA | Yeah.

DESDEMONA | That makes us ask, “What are we talking about when we talk about Asian-

DESDEMONA | Fortunately, I don’t feel pigeonholed at all where I am. I think that’s largely because I had a foundation of non-Asian directing before I directed my first Asian American play, which was Ching Chong Chinaman by Lauren Yee in 2008. Prior to that, I had been assisting on Shakespeare and directing new plays by non-Asian playwrights.

DESDEMONA | It’s hard to get into the minds of institutions when it comes to questions like this, because I don’t ever truly know what a company’s intentions are when they hire me. I sometimes assume it’s about needing someone who has the optic markers of whatever they need to message out for a particular show (Asian American, female, or simply non-white). And even though I know identity markers are inescapable, I also fret about doing institutions a huge disservice by assuming that they have a reductive lens on me. It can become maddening and a bit ugly when I get into the mindset of gauging my value in the eyes of others. I try to make a point of distinguishing myself in whatever way I can, because we’re not all the same.

Initially, I was so touchy about that idea of being pigeonholed that I actually resisted taking Asian plays for a while.

Looking back, I think, “Ugh. That was not great.” Whenever an Asian play comes up, I’m usually on the shortlist to direct it—and that’s fine. But as companies are actively looking to diversify their hiring practices, I’m seeing more and more Asian directors enter the field, regardless of whether or not the play itself is Asian or Asian American.

For every King of the Yees that I get asked to direct, I’m also being asked to direct a Merchant of Venice. I’m doing The Journal of Ben Uchida at Seattle Children’s Theatre right now, which is an Asian American play about Japanese internment. But my next shows are Harvey, Pride and Prejudice, and The Comedy of Errors.

GINA | Because then we get to think about what stories we can tell versus what histories we each have access to.

Aisha Keita + Cindy Im in Measure for Measure at Seattle Shakespeare Company, directed by Desdemona Chiang PHOTO John Ullman

What’s interesting is how quickly I became known as a Shakespeare director. That’s fascinating, right?

GINA | Do you think that has anything to do with your perceived identity as an Asian American director? For me, that’s part of my anxiety. Yet I’m still fine entering through that threshold—that the reason I’m here is because I’m Asian American, and we’re working on Shakespeare.

DESDEMONA | There’s a tiny part of you that feels discomfited by your Asian-ness and the value of your perceived “interesting take” on the Shakespeare play. Yeah, I see that.

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ness?” Are we talking about the optics of Asian-ness? Because of this feeling of Otherness? For sure. That’s always with me.

My tendency when approaching a Shakespeare play is always from the contrary side of “the Other.” Which is why I completely sympathize with villains; I really sympathize with antagonists. Like Leontes from The Winter’s Tale. I remember very much thinking, “Why does everyone think he’s a bad person? He’s not a bad person, he’s misunderstood.” He does some really shitty things, but he is not in control of himself.

My tendency to see the less-represented is always with me in the room. Maybe you can

DESDEMONA | And also how we can support each other when we’re being asked to represent histories that we don’t have access to—which happens quite a lot! I’m also interested in what we are not seeing. What are the opportunities for different narratives? Because there’s more than what history has told us. There’s more than what personal experience tells us. What are the things that exist that we don’t have access to because of life circumstances, willful ignorance, or lack of exposure? It’s a really fascinating question.

Keeping It Local Making a Career + Life in Seattle AN SDC ROUNDTABLE MODERATED BY ALLISON EDITED BY KRISTY

T

NARVER CUMMINGS

his winter, a group of Seattle directors and choreographers gathered to discuss their craft and careers—and what makes this particular Northwest artistic community unique. The following contains highlights from the rich conversation moderated by Allison Narver that took place over a delicious home-cooked meal in her living room. The participants

included Braden Abraham, Geoffrey Alm, Timothy Bond, Sheila Daniels, Linda Hartzell, Brandon Ivie, Jane Jones, Rosa Joshi, Mark Lutwak, Victor Pappas, Katjana Vadeboncoeur, and Kathryn Van Meter.

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ALLISON | How did each of you find your way to Seattle? Did you come for work, or did you find work once you got here?

VICTOR | I’ve been here 25 years and two months. I came from L.A. to a job at Intiman Theatre in the Seattle Center. I was hired to be the Associate Artistic Director when Warner Shook was the Artistic Director.

TIM | I came here in 1981 to study at the University of Washington in the directing program, where the Group Theatre was the resident theatre. I had received what was then called the minority fellowship, and it allowed me to intern at the Group while I was getting my master’s. Eventually, I joined the staff of the Group and ended up running it for a while. I was in Seattle for 15 years, but then I left. I was gone for 20 years and just came back about a year and a half ago to teach at University of Washington.

GEOF | I was born here. I grew up in Shoreline, and attended Shoreline Community College and the Evergreen State College.

SHEILA | I first came in 1992. I moved up here to act and to get involved with the experimental theatre scene, such as the Fringe.

That is what drew me to Seattle. And, honestly, the music scene.

I worked here for about 10 years, then also moved away for about 17 years, and just moved back a couple years ago, primarily for the music.

KATJANA | I came up here with no job. I left California, where I was working at a children’s theatre, California Theatre Center. Seattle seemed like the place to be, and every place I worked at opened up to the next opportunity.

Seattle unfolded because I was rigorous about finding my way in here. I came just to create something and have been blessed to stay for the last 16 years.

BRADEN | I came in ’99 with a group of friends from Western Washington University, also for the Fringe scene. We got here just as the landscape was changing. I was interested in what was happening at Annex, Empty Space, and other theatres. We did that for about four years until we all flamed out or got interested in other things. Just when I was about to leave Seattle, I got a job at Seattle Repertory Theatre.

I thought I would be there for a year, but 16 years later, here I am.

ALLISON | Do you think there is such a thing as an artistic style that defines Seattle?

MARK | I came out here in the ’80s to housesit; my wife and I had a great deal to stay in a nice house in Mount Baker for a month every summer. My wife is a playwright, so she connected with a number of theatres in town.

Then we started doing workshops when we were here and we thought, “Boy, there’s a lot of work here. Let’s move here.”

LINDA | I saw, back when I began acting and then directing, a style of work I would call a new vaudevillian/modern-day commedia. A crisp, clean physical work I’ve seen people doing at all the different theatres from at least 1975. I think Seattle theatres are very good at staging work in a non-literal way. In Seattle, we used that style as an aesthetic choice before it later became more mainstream and before it was driven, perhaps, by tight budgets or lack of space.

We moved here in 1990 and then immediately stopped getting phone calls returned once we were no longer from New York.

ALLISON | I was a total geek when I was a kid.

I followed the Empty Space park shows around because I loved them so much. I saw them over

and over again. I was really fascinated by that style and how quick it was, and, in some cases, how clean, funny, and smart. That style, along with a number of other things, influenced everything I did. I think it influenced the industry here too.

BRANDON | My aesthetic and understanding of theatre is 1,000 percent because of Seattle theatre. I grew up here. My work has been deeply informed by what I saw at Seattle Children’s Theatre when I was in elementary school and the Empty Space when I was in high school. To me, it’s an industrious, non-showy focus on the people and the peaks. I mostly direct musicals, and often my approach seems to be somewhat antithetical to what a lot of people consider musicals. Frequently, musicals are about favoring scale and showiness over text or theme, or the kind of nitty-gritty stuff that I grew up on.

I didn’t realize how deeply Seattle informed how I make theatre myself until I left. Now that I’ve been splitting my time between here and New York for the last six or seven years, I have realized what we do in Seattle is not what everybody does. I just thought that’s what theatre was and that’s how it works.

SHEILA | I also feel that Seattle theatre is fairly actor-centric—and I mean that in the best way.

We trust our acting community. And not that it’s not our job to have the vision, but I think there is something about the relationships between the directors and actors in Seattle… there is a great deal of trust and a collaborative approach.

GEOF | When I came back from school, one of the first shows I saw was The Venetian Twins, an Empty Space park show. Going up to that lot on Pike Street…that was the theatre that we all went to. It’s a style that’s hard to describe.

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS Braden Abraham is Artistic Director at Seattle Repertory Theatre.

Sheila Daniels currently is directing Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves at ACT and teaches at Cornish College of the Arts. She formerly served as Associate Director to Bartlett Sher at Intiman.

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Geoffrey Alm is a Member/ Fight Choreographer with SDC, and a Fight Master with the Society of American Fight Directors. He has been fight directing professionally since 1988, with local, regional, and national credits.

Timothy Bond formerly served as Producing Artistic Director of Syracuse Stage, Associate Artistic Director of Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Artistic Director of Seattle Group Theatre, and currently heads the Professional Actor Training Program at University of Washington.

Linda Hartzell is the Northwest Regional Rep of the SDC Executive Board, a Trustee of the SDC Foundation Board, and Artistic Director Emerita of Seattle Children’s Theatre.

Issaquah, WA.

Brandon Ivie is a Seattle-/NYCbased director mainly focusing on developing new musicals and, as Associate Artistic Director, is head of the expansive new musicals program at Village Theatre in

BRADEN | There’s boldness and a kind of muscularity…a boldness of choices that I love, where actors just leap in. They don’t know where they’re going to get to, but they are going to go for it. I love that about those who’ve been here for a long time. This is not to say their approach is rough or uninformed; there is definitely a polish to it.

ALLISON | It’s specific.

BRADEN | Yes.

actor in a rehearsal room…that can’t be manufactured.

I was a military brat and moved around a lot as a kid. I’ve lived in Seattle for 18 years now.

When I was in college, I met people who had that friend that they’d known since they were two or three. I had such envy of that. I came to this community in 2000 and met people who had their version of acting together since they were three. And I thought, “What incredible art

ALLISON | Do you find that’s true with artists who have just arrived, or do you think that’s something that’s infused into people after they have been here a particular amount of time?

JANE | I think there’s a robustness to life now, to survive as an artist no matter what.

In my experiences of moving around the country and directing in many other cities, it feels as though everybody wants to galvanize to do the mission, do the job, and tell the story. I feel as though people would actually Kathryn Van Meter + Katjana Vadeboncoeur jump off big buildings to make could be created if I stay,” and that is one of the sure that we come together in a reasons why I have stayed. common way. That’s my experience in Seattle.

KATHRYN | There’s something in the community of actors that has been creating together, and bouncing ideas back and forth off of each other, for multiple decades. In a time where rehearsal periods get shorter and shorter but plays are potentially longer and longer, and more and more time has to be given to tech because the production values are getting higher…when you have the depth and breadth of community and hundreds of thousands of hours working with another

Jane Jones is a director, actor, and writer who is also the Founder of Book-It Repertory Theatre and Founding CoArtistic Director with Myra Platt.

Victor Pappas has been a theatre professional for upwards of four decades as a director, actor, educator, and administrator, and is a proud Union Member.

It also seems that the people that have come to Seattle have said, “I want to make art here.

I want to make ferocious, conversation-worthy art, and I want to raise my family, walk in the park, and swim in that lake.” There seems to be a life/art balance that is more possible in Seattle than in other markets in the country.

LINDA | I think we live and work here because we like the people and we like the place, and that’s really important to us, along with theatre.

BRANDON | I think the idea of the family you create hugely impacts the work that is done.

Steve Tomkins talks so dearly about his Empty Space days, and that group of people that have now led, at some point, essentially all of the large institutions in town. I find that so inspiring.

At the same time, I’m 32, but I’ve been working with some people for 15 years because we started in high school together and we stayed.

ALLISON | I would like to go back to the life/art balance again. I think you get to a point where you think, “Actually, I don’t want to pay rent on this shitty apartment. By 35 or 40, I actually want to grow up. I want to buy a house, or I want to have kids.”

I think that’s true in theatre in general, and I think it’s harder in Seattle now than it was in the past, just because there’s less work.

VICTOR | Well, it’s harder everywhere. In the ’70s, you could be itinerant, and it was easy because you didn’t have to pay thousands of dollars in rent. You didn’t have to earn the kind of money you have to earn now. Medical bills were not as high, food wasn’t as expensive, and, and, and, and.

If you were lucky, you ended up in an acting company, which is what I did.

The whole landscape is so different now. Even if you don’t have a family, you don’t have the mobility you used to have. I think it must be at least twice as hard for anybody who does have a family, and I think it’s compounded by the fact you just brought up: how much less work there is.

Rosa Joshi is Co-Founder of upstart crow collective, a company dedicated to producing classical works with all-female casts, and currently teaches (directing and theatre history) at Seattle University.

Katjana Vadeboncoeur is a theatre educator, event producer, and cabaret performer. She co-founded Revel Rouser Events and teaches directing and NeoBurlesque at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle.

Mark Lutwak has variously been Artistic Director of Honolulu Theatre for Youth, Director of Education for Cincinnati Playhouse, and a freelance director and musician.

Village Theatre.

Kathryn Van Meter is a multidisciplinary theatre artist who has been making work in Seattle for almost two decades.

She will be directing and choreographing the upcoming regional premiere of Matilda for SPRING 2018 | SDC JOURNAL

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Geof Alm, Braden Abraham, Victor Pappas, Allison Narver + Linda Hartzell

work here and make families here. Within five to seven years, about 10 theatres closed. Also, all the film and TV work left. When that dried up, people left.

Jane Jones + Sheila Daniels

LINDA | I always say that theatre is a jealous lover. It was hard to have a family when you were working. Earning money and finding time to take care not only of yourself but a little one who has to be picked up at a certain time was challenging.

SHEILA | Or taking care of your health.

LINDA | And theatre…even in the hardest of times, we always put it first.

VICTOR | I was not here in the glory days of the Empty Space and when all those people were creating the ethos of Seattle theatre.

When I was here, Daniel Sullivan was running the Rep, Warner Shook had Intiman, and Jeff Steitzer had ACT. The Group hadn’t yet moved to the Seattle Center. The 5th Avenue—which has now become a major creative force in Seattle—was a big roadhouse. Village Theatre was still developing. It was a wonderful community theatre that has now evolved. But as some things grew, other things changed because of the economy.

ALLISON | There was a healthy ecosystem in the late ’80s and the early to mid-’90s. There were all these actors who could actually get

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It’s tricky, because we have a lovely, nostalgic sense of what Seattle theatre was, and then there was a middle period where the dominoes fell. The Group, Empty Space, Alice B, Empire Square…all these places closed.

Now we’re looking at a different ecosystem.

LINDA | If you look at the seasons of the theatres that are still open, a lot of the places that were doing eight or nine shows are cutting back to the old days, which was five in a season.

ALLISON | I could have this conversation for the next seven years because I think it’s so important to think about the role theatre has played in Seattle and why, all of a sudden, it doesn’t feel at the center.

VICTOR | It always seemed to me that there is a vital core of theatre practitioners and lovers in Seattle, but the majority of the Seattle community has no idea that there’s theatre happening here, except what’s going on at the Paramount. And sometimes at the 5th Avenue.

ALLISON | Which is their New York experience.

VICTOR | Exactly. So it’s the commercial event that they are hungry for. Although I do think

the project you did at the Rep, Braden, directed

by Marya [Sea Kaminski], the community event— BRADEN | Public Works Seattle. The Odyssey.

VICTOR | That has probably opened a door to make a big difference in that regard. It’s thrilling that you did it. I think a lot of what’s missing in Seattle is the city at large doesn’t have the connection that the people who are making the work have. We think it’s the only thing in the world, of course, because it’s what we love.

LINDA | Art is not part of the public schools, and art is not part of our everyday life. Art education was eliminated in our schools here.

I think it has to start with the educators and then the organizations who are performing for young audiences. Theatre just has to be natural, necessary, and embedded in how parents raise their children.

MARK | I think there is some re-exploration and reinvention of touring theatre that needs to happen throughout this region. It needs to happen at a number of different levels, and schools are one. High schools are all still doing plays like crazy.

ALLISON | And doing them really well.

MARK | The work is exciting to kids in high school, and it would never occur to them to go see a play except for the commercial piece touring through town.

BRANDON | I do think sometimes we can get caught up doing theatre for the theatre people, for— ALLISON | Each other.

BRANDON | For us and for each other. But also doing the art for the artists and not necessarily for those that aren’t. I know that any time I self-produce something, the people most likely to see my shows are the people that make theatre.

GEOF | Is that the choice of material?

BRANDON | It could be any number of things.

Marketing is a huge barrier: sometimes you can’t afford to get the word out to people outside of the theatre community. If that’s where you do decide to spend your money, you’re taking a risk on people that don’t have a history of coming to the theatre.

the hands of people who have a beer and go with their neighbor to see live things happen on stage. It blows my mind that there are underground clubs where people are paying $35 a ticket to see something that they don’t know what it is. They don’t know it from television. They have never heard of it, but they went because their friends went there and they were told it was going to be fresh.

That’s still happening in Seattle. But I don’t want Seattle to become priced out; we need to find out how to become the working-class entertainment for the tens of thousands of tech people who show up, who have money to spend and want to be entertained. I don’t know exactly what it is they’re excited by, but I am hopeful because there are new people out there who want to see live performance.

ALLISON | What is most exciting to you about the work you’re doing right now? Also, is there work that you are dying to do?

SHEILA | I feel lucky and blessed that my teaching job allows me to make only work that I am excited about. I got to a very black place where I felt I was failing repeatedly, slamming into the same wall in my process, and I Mark Lutwak + Katjana Vadeboncoeur entered a deep depression.

Teaching at Cornish, I have the opportunity I took time away from directing and came to explore, experiment, and hear what young to the realization that this was due, in part, people are excited about. They experience and to me worrying more about keeping people tell stories about their world through brandhappy than listening to my instincts, but it also new forms of media, in ways I’m still trying had to do with agreeing to material I wasn’t to learn. They grew up wanting to sing their connected to, but that I felt like I “should” do. hearts out, and they had technology in their I felt that I had to make a choice: if I wanted hands from the day they were born. I want to to keep doing theatre, I needed to only do know how to make work for them. projects that I cared deeply about. If I couldn’t answer “Why this play now?” for myself and be LINDA | They want to gather, they want an turned on by it, I had to say no. It was killing event, and they want it to be surprising. my soul, otherwise. But I feel as though now I come from a place of extreme privilege to be KATJANA | They want ritual. They want to able to do that. come and have an experience.

ROSA | I’m the same. I’ve been teaching for 18 ALLISON | They want to breathe together. years, and I feel I have that privilege as well.

Because I haven’t had to chase the paycheck, BRADEN | As a producer, I’ve found the most I only make work that I really care about. I wanted to do experimental work, which is really satisfaction from doing the big events that bust up the model and expand the way we make interesting in Seattle, but it doesn’t pay. theatre and who we make theatre with, such as Public Works, where we had 150 people KATJANA | I’m excited about the resurgence on stage and were working with community in populist, working-class entertainment. And organizations. Or something like Here Lies Love.

I feel there’s a future in it because it’s taking We got 6,000 new people who have never been the capital A out of art and putting it back in

to Seattle Rep before. We had 17 Filipino actors on stage that people have never seen before in this community—even though we have one of the oldest Filipino communities in the country.

And now, on the scrappy level, taking what new work money we have and spreading it as far and wide as we possibly can…really trying to create a lab space where we can get new voices into the theatre and do as many readings and commissions as we can.

As a director, what’s really exciting for me is to think about plays for actors in this community.

For example, I wanted to do Ibsen in Chicago because it has great parts for Seattle character actors, who we don’t get to see as much anymore. But it’s that kind of approach—who are the people that we really want to showcase? Who do you want to work with?

JANE | After 30-plus years making the work that we do at Book-It [Repertory Theatre] and creating 130 world-premiere adaptations, we don’t make something that we don’t all support as a company.

ALLISON | One of the things I’ve tried to figure out as a freelance director is how to bring all of my beliefs to the table when I do a play. I’m hired by a theatre, and I obviously want to do the best job I can, but how do I bring my own spirit to the play so that it can somehow affect the audience? I feel that’s our job as directors: to bring ourselves fully to the work while also honoring it. But it is so easy to lose that beautiful sense of eccentricity, which makes us all artists. I think we forget that sometimes because we’re looking for the next gig.

SHEILA | I certainly went through a point where I realized I was forgetting to do all the things that made me want to be a director in the first place. Or I was worried about letting the producer down because then they wouldn’t hire me again.

ALLISON | Right. Yes. SHEILA | I went through such a terrible, dark night of the soul. I realized that because I was trying to please other people, I had stopped bringing the stuff that made me “me” and made my work unique. We can’t do that as artists. It’s not our job. We might think it’s how we get the next job, but it’s not our essential job.

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Clockwise, from foreground: Braden Abraham, Victor Pappas, Linda Hartzell, Jane Jones + Sheila Daniels

Linda Hartzell

ALLISON | Does the theatre community in Seattle feel connected?

KATHRYN | I have been really blessed in this community to be able to do a lot of different things. When I moved here, I danced in musicals at the 5th Avenue and the Village.

I had choreographed some shows before I got here, and I started moving into that world here as soon as I could. I also deeply wanted to act in plays, and I have gotten the opportunity to act in plays and dance in musicals and direct plays and direct musicals.

I think the opportunity is there to straddle as many worlds as you can. But I don’t know that people often want to do that. I have found this to be a city that has allowed me to spread my wings in a multitude of directions, for which I am very grateful.

LINDA | For me, it started feeling less connected when I was too old to go out to bars and stay out until 1:30 in the morning, which I did a lot. I chose to have a family and pets.

SHEILA | I think that’s just getting older too...I feel more connected to people in the work than I used to because I know that I’m only going to see them at work. There’s a point when you want your social life to be separate from your work. At first, it does feel as though you’re disconnecting from the theatre. But you’re not. We’re there to make the work with each other.

JANE | When it used to be that you could get anywhere in Seattle in eight to 12 minutes, life was very different. Now, when I leave the Seattle Center—and I live in the South End— it takes me 90 minutes to get home in the summer months. Life has changed so much. It does feel more disconnected.

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VICTOR | When you walk into a room of people in the Seattle theatre community that you haven’t worked with before, there doesn’t seem to be that sort of dog-sniffing-dog waste of time while people check you out. Everybody just says, “Okay, I’m happy to be here with you.” That’s the experience I have, even with people I’ve never met before. I hope it’s still so. When I moved to Seattle, everyone was so willing to say, “Hi, come on in.” It seems there is a willingness to be easy with each other here.

I have also felt that in New York, I have to say, and in L.A. People who make art want to share with each other.

I think there’s a difference between “How do you have community with people who do what you do?” and “How do you have community in the larger community that you live in?” Those things are not necessarily the same.

LINDA | Seattle theatre people are renaissance people. I don’t often work outside Seattle, but in the other places I’ve worked, I find theatre people are often just talking about theatre.

Here, we talk about pets, our kids, politics, gardening, sports…in all of the conversations, we switch in and out of theatre and other topics very easily because we’re interested, and we find it important and meaningful. I think that’s why Seattle’s a pretty civil place to work. And, as I said, lifestyle seems to be really important to all of us here.

KATJANA | Maybe it’s some of the pioneering spirit that seems to have been a part of Seattle since its get-go. We’re all talking about how we can’t afford to live here, and there aren’t any theatres left, there are no more jobs… and yet we’re here. There’s got to be some commonality about the people that choose to work and live in this city. Then the fact that we have a wealth of educational systems at UW, Cornish, Seattle U...our students choose

to stay here for decades. It’s a difficult place to make art, but everybody who stays values life as much as the art. There isn’t that sense of cutthroat-ness, because we all chose to be here together.

When I first moved here 16 years ago, I was astounded by how small and friendly this theatre community was. Everybody was a degree and a half of separation away from each other. And everyone had done five plays in the last year with everybody else. I wonder what will happen if we can’t continue to congregate in the same space or the population gets so big, to the point where we aren’t all folding back in on ourselves. That really does seem crucial to our choice to stay here, despite the obstacles.

ALLISON | I want to talk about diversity.

Seattle is perceived as being a white city, but it’s quite diverse. Ninety-seven languages are spoken in Seattle public schools, and South Seattle is considered one of the most diverse communities in the country. How does that play out in the theatre community?

LINDA | We see diversity in the audiences at Seattle Children’s Theatre. We see the socioeconomic, ethnic and cultural diversity in school audiences coming to the shows. Certain SCT plays attract specific audiences. The play running right now, The Journal of Ben Uchida: Citizen 13559, that Desdemona Chiang directed, is drawing a large Asian audience, many of whom are staying for post-play dinners and community discussions. When we produced Mysterious Gifts, our show from Iran, directed and performed by Yaser Khaseb, I was surprised to find out how many Persians there were living in the Seattle area. If people like the show and feel comfortable, they’ll come the first time and hopefully come again and again.

Brandon Ivie, Rosa Joshi, Tim Bond + Geof Alm

ALLISON | What about what happens on stage? The diversity we do or do not see, or the equity we do or do not see on stage in Seattle—I’d love to hear about that.

back in the day at the Group, and Northwest Asian American Theatre, and Alice B. But I feel it’s moving toward being valued in a different way than back then.

SHEILA | I think it’s different in the small theatres than it is in the larger institutions.

A lot of young people who are producing in small theatres right now are paying a huge amount of attention to diversity, and it’s a driving force for gender equity as well. There’s a diverse, young population of actors to fill those roles now. There wasn’t for a while because so many wonderful actors who are people of color left Seattle because there wasn’t enough work for them.

JANE | I think we’re trying really hard. And I think this community has embraced the idea for us to push forward to try to bring in the Equity/Diversity/Inclusion movement. It’s really penetrating into our consciousness, into our programming, and into our awareness of the best foot we can step forward with regarding cultural diversity in this great America, which is changing so, so quickly.

I think it’s changing, but there’s two different biospheres. We all know you’re way more malleable when you’re in a basement. You just have that flexibility. But I think that young people’s conversation about this is really different from ours.

ALLISON | I agree.

SHEILA | And it’s about gender. I’m around students all the time, so I think it’s interesting to think about where the divide is as well as what we can learn from them and how can we move forward.

GEOF | Tim, I’m interested in your perspective.

Since you left and then came back to Seattle, what have you noticed? Is it much different?

TIM | Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion efforts are more in the consciousness of the theatre scene in Seattle. I agree that I have seen more interest in diversity among the smaller theatres.

I think there are more gestures toward diversity in the larger theatres than were happening 20 years ago. There are a lot of ideas happening now that seem new that we were pursuing

We had a conversation today about a book that we’re pretty crazy about putting on the stage that involves the Cameroon culture. But it was asked whether there were any people from Cameroon in this town that could actually represent that culture. And I thought, “Can’t we just put it in the hands of very able African American artists and let them do the work to bring it forward? Why can’t we bring together a great community of artists and put it in their hands?”

Maybe we can’t. Maybe that culture is not actually represented here in the artistry in Seattle. I am trying to figure out how we try to do this kind of work if we’re not allowed to live in the footsteps of other human beings. There has to be some confluence of understanding, somewhere, that allows us to do the best we can possibly do.

LINDA | My question is not just about the actors playing the roles but also about the directors. What director can direct that story if that’s not been part of their experience?

JANE | And for Book-It Repertory, the adapters—who can adapt it? For 14 years, Myra Platt and I have been reaching up.

Now it’s said to us that maybe if we don’t understand the culture, we shouldn’t be adapting it either.

ALLISON | It’s tricky when you understand the work, you understand the passion, you understand the love of the language, but it’s not your culture...so maybe it doesn’t belong to you.

JANE | But I’m so happy that these stories are now so available.

BRADEN | I think the exciting thing that’s happening is that when you get into frustrating conversations about how we move forward, there are resources now that weren’t there even five years ago. Everybody, every theatre that I know of, is working on this at some level.

Both in Seattle and nationally. You don’t have to sit in a room, pound your head against the wall, and then give up. You can call people. You can figure it out. You can find those artists. You can gather those resources to do it.

I think the difference that I’m feeling within my own organization [Seattle Rep], having been there for 16 years, is that the equity and inclusion work used to be the fifth or sixth thing that was talked about, and now it’s first.

It used to be the thing you thought about after you had planned most of the season. Now we talk about it at the top, on every show we discuss and every artist we discuss. It’s the first conversation I have with directors when I call them about the projects we’re doing.

We’re really figuring out how to fold it into everything we do, at the staff level, at the board level, at the audience level. It’s taking a little more time with some of the larger institutions, but I feel as though we’re making progress.

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MARK | I think this ultimately has to go to this next generation. Who are the schools bringing up as an artistic community? Who is going to choose to live here and reflect this community? In particular—and it’s something I’ve grappled with a lot—the writers. Who are the writers who are going to write of and for this community? Who can write to reflect what the actual diverse experience of the Northwest is? Not an outside formula of diversity, but one that represents the Northwest.

LINDA | There have been a lot of writers who have been here but left. I think it’s more fluid than directors who come and stay here.

BRANDON | Although I don’t think anyone, especially the larger institutions, is happy with where they are on this, everyone is moving forward. I do believe Seattle is highly aware and is taking steps as it is able to address diversity.

The conversations I have in Seattle are much more conscious of this issue than many of the ones I have in New York.

I think part of it is that there’s so much commercialization in New York, so the conversations are about that—about making money—and not necessarily the social implications of the work. Not to say that it is nonexistent in the commercial theatre, but here, the artistic community is very conscious.

VICTOR | But are we making sure that there are more voices represented as writers, as designers, as producers, as everything? Not just actors?

GEOF | I see it reflected at Cornish and the University of Washington.

TIM | We’re working on it.

ALLISON | I think everybody’s working on it.

We’re looking for a diverse and exciting culture that makes theatre.

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SHEILA | That’s the switch I’ve seen. It used to be, “Oh, we should be diverse because it’s the right thing to do.” What I’m starting to see happen is, “No, diversity actually makes theatre better.” It’s not about the right thing to do. It’s about recognizing that theatre is better when it represents more people.

TIM | That was the point from way back.

Diversifying theatre not only reflects the world we live in, but it also makes the work better. When that gets into the bones of these organizations and the community, then it will stick and flower and grow. It’s still a little gestural, but it feels like it’s starting to move to a different place. I’m hopeful for that.

Otherwise, I can’t stay.

ALLISON | None of us should stay if it doesn’t grow and change. I want to shift to the tech industry in Seattle—Google and Amazon.

Kathryn Van Meter, Katjana Vadeboncoeur + Brandon Ivie

GEOF | I grew up in the North End, where there were no people of color. In my high school of 600 people, there was nobody. But I was at L.A. Fitness the other day, and I looked out over the floor, and I was the minority. And I was just like, oh, this is so cool. So I think the city itself has diversified all over the place. There’s no longer just distinct sections of people.

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Does it intersect with your work, or is it more about figuring out how to get funded by these industry giants?

JANE | It’s unbelievably frustrating that Amazon will not support the arts.

LINDA | Jeff Bezos’ family has subscribed to different theatres. Just like sports teams, if you say you’ll change it to Amazon Children’s Theatre, then maybe there would be movement. All the theatre boards are working to get board members from places such as Microsoft and Amazon. I think some of the obstacles are the age of people working there and that they’re either too busy or they haven’t learned to be philanthropic yet.

ALLISON | Another part of the question is about the actual work that people do. There is a huge future in virtual reality, in augmented reality. Does that ever intersect with your work?

Is there a way to partner with some of these companies?

TIM | Possibly. We’d probably need funding from the very people we’re talking about to do it. I had a vision some 35, 40 years ago about virtual reality theatre before virtual reality even existed. So it’s of great interest to me, as a science fiction geek and an artist. But it’s a “chicken or the egg” problem: where does the funding come to have the technology to use in productions that bring the people that are interested in technology but don’t see the connection to theatre?

BRANDON | We have a piece at Village that exists in virtual reality. And we don’t know what to do with it because the money it would take to truly develop the piece the way it needs to be done, in concert with some kind of virtual reality design, is astronomical compared to what you normally need for new work.

We’ve looked into technology grants, but even if we were successful, a couple thousand dollars is not going to cover designing virtual reality.

ALLISON | I think there is a huge possibility ahead for a way to tell stories.

Because we are all three-dimensional storytellers, right?

Recently, I went back East because my design teacher retired. I was talking to designers that I love, and they were all about 360, three-dimensional narrative. That’s what we do. It’s different than filmmakers.

When you talk about virtual reality or augmented reality, we already think and work in three dimensions. So there is a world there we can participate in. We must make the proposals to Microsoft, to Amazon, to all these people who are experimenting with this and say, “Here’s the thing: we can do this better than most people because we’re visual storytellers.”

SHEILA | I think it is about returning to the old-school “running a small theatre” mindset.

It’s not about making a formal proposal to the corporate giving department but instead reaching out on Facebook or combing through the company directory and making a call.

It’s that human connection. That is certainly the way we always used to get money in small theatres—by not going through official channels but finding the back way.

MARK | I tend to want to make theatre that has nothing to do with the tech world. There are a billion ways to tell stories, but theatre still has people passionately climbing the steps to be in the same room with other live people.

And we see time and again where people are moved by a bare person onstage because there’s a story that’s reaching them.

I thought, “Wow, how did you do so many things at once?”

ALLISON | I totally agree, and I would say never stop doing that work. Because it is about where we can breathe together and be in the same room. But I also think, “Let’s try this other thing too.”

KATJANA | I wouldn’t say I am recommending it, but I am saying that we have this technology and the younger generation still wants to be in the room where it is happening. But maybe there are these multiple ways, like what Here Lies Love did, that can create celebrity and attraction and more than one way to experience a space.

VICTOR | I think we have a funny tendency nowadays to throw the baby out with the bathwater. You get excited about what you’re trying to correct or what’s new and innovative, and you start to think that means we can’t ever do what people have been doing for 3,000 years. I think all of it can happen and should happen together.

JANE | That will ruin the whole human race eventually. That will completely put us in total isolationism. I truly believe that. I’m sorry—I worry about this all the time. Multitasking is not to be recommended.

BRADEN | But it’s really holding on to the truth of what you’re telling. The technology is just another theatrical language that we appropriate for our own means of expression.

It’s not something that we bend our work to.

ALLISON | I would assume there’s nobody in this room who doesn’t value that moment of complete connection with a live audience.

Because why else bother? So we keep that and love that, but maybe there’s something new too.

GEOF | Braden, there’s no show that I’ve ever seen that had as much tech support as Here Lies Love at the Rep. What do you think brought all the new people in initially? Was it the story, was it the happening in the place?

BRADEN | I think Here Lies Love is successful because it combines a Sheila Daniels + Mark Lutwak sensory experience with a narrative experience. It’s both a great story It’s something that we adopt to express the that’s well told and it’s using video, sound, full dimension of a story. In that way, it holds the sensory experience of the space, and the great possibility. As long as it doesn’t take over. music really effectively in terms of theatrical I think we’ve all been to shows where there’s so storytelling. It wouldn’t be as powerful if it much technology on stage, but it doesn’t add didn’t have the strong story element. up to anything.

LINDA | When I saw it, I was surrounded JANE | It does frighten me that by adding all by first-time Filipino theatregoers. It was an this technology, we’re not teaching young incredible experience to hear them talking people how to listen—authentic listening. about it. The story really involved them emotionally but also physically moved in and BRANDON | As the oldest of the generation around them so that they were constantly that has grown up with this new wave of surrounded. It was a version of a 360 technology, I grapple with this all the time. experience.

I have to balance my love of pure theatre— people existing in space with an acting cube KATJANA | Maybe the 360 works because and breathing together—with Snapchat, the younger generation multitasks their Instagram, virtual reality, and augmented experiences. They are having a breath-toreality. I am trying to figure out how to breath conversation with you, and then you combine the two, because I can see my look up, and they had posted on social media generation not coming to the theatre if it is not about it. They were talking to you and posting involved in the things that they are involved about you and writing about you and filming with every day. you. And you were still in the room with them.

BRADEN | The thing that drives me crazy about this conversation is not this part. It’s the part where people ask, “Why don’t you do a play about Facebook?” or “Why don’t you do a play about the internet?” Something like that, where it’s all content based. I don’t think that that’s what brings those folks in.

ALLISON | It’s about engaging the imagination, even if all of those extra tech elements are at play. For me, that’s the part we can never forget.

BRANDON | How do you get audiences to understand the importance of that? Of theatre, of the human connection?

KATJANA | Maybe it’s about accessibility in terms of where the younger generation sees theatre figured in their world. If they see it as separate, they might think it’s elitist. But if they see that it has Snapchat filters and a life online, and they can interact with it in multiple ways—but also that, when they do go, they experience the ritual of theatre and being together—it will bring them in.

ALLISON | Where do you see Seattle theatre going? What will be the state of it in 10 years?

JANE | I think Katjana is especially right. The keynote speaker at ArtsFund a few years ago said if the audience cannot participate, they will not come. I do worry: as it becomes more participatory, what is going to happen to the great art of listening, the great art of practice, re-hearing, which is what rehearsal is all about—to re-hear it over and over again? How will we include everybody while still preserving that?

KATJANA | I respond to that with Burning Man: 68,000 people show up in chaos, create the most chaotic scene ever, and then they sit in a circle on one night, and they are silent for the ritual of being together. There’s a place for those both to exist. I think that the chaos is what will engage the younger audiences. They are used to experiencing something in five levels, but they also crave that same sense of “Please, let’s breathe together.” Our students always ask, “Can we start with three breaths?” They want that moment of togetherness and silence.

TIM | I think people need theatre now more than ever. The more we get into technology and people are alienated from themselves and their neighbors, the more they’re going to crave and need storytelling in a circle with other people.

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I do think we’re going to have a new renaissance at some point where we get vibrant audiences coming back to the theatre again.

JANE | I believe in that hope.

BRANDON | I feel very hopeful and excited for my contemporaries and the people that are younger than me about what they’re making, and how and where they’re being trained. I’m excited for Justin Huertas, Eddie DeHais, and Sara Porkalob, and these amazing people who are finding very clear voices that are unique to this area, this town, and this culture.

ALLISON | They belong to them. They’re not taking somebody else’s voice.

BRANDON | They’re unapologetically themselves.

GEOF | And that doesn’t mean poor. Nor is that what I want to see in Seattle. Yeah, you’re scrappy when you’re in your twenties and maybe in your thirties. But when you’re getting into your fifties and sixties, it’s hard to be scrappy.

TIM | Generating work that is having an impact.

SHEILA | In 20 years, I would like Seattle to be a leader in the conversation about equity and our responsibility to our culture, to our country, and to our future. I would like us to be a game changer and a leader.

ALLISON | I would like Seattle to be subversive and transgressive, still bucking rules to figure stuff out.

SHEILA | They also know how to network and get people in to see their shows.

LINDA | But that’s “What’s old is new.” There were marketing studies done 10, 15 years ago. They discovered that, for some reason, in Seattle, you could have a full-page ad in the papers or on the backs of the buses, and nobody would come. It’s a word-ofmouth town. It used to be that you called somebody on the phone, so you didn’t get as many people so quickly.

But now, with social media, it happens faster. But it’s always Geof Alm, Braden Abraham, Victor Pappas + Allison Narver been a word-of-mouth town, which means you trust your LINDA | I believe in groupthink and group friends. It’s one degree of separation. energy. I believe smart people, like you in this room, are going to come up with little and BRANDON | The social media piece is huge. I big things so that making theatre won’t be so used to produce concerts called New Voices. frightening.

They were musical theatre showcases for young up-and-coming composers, writers, ALLISON | But I think it’s good to be and performers. We didn’t spend a cent frightened. If I could be somewhere like the on marketing. We made a Facebook event Annex years ago... and had Facebook profile photos for each performer. That’s how the word got out—and LINDA | How were you earning your money? we would sell out every single concert. There was never a worry that we wouldn’t make our ALLISON | We weren’t. ticket goal.

ALLISON | If you were to say, “In 20 years, I hope that Seattle theatre is ____,” is there a word or phrase that would come to mind quickly?

BRANDON | Still scrappy.

SHEILA | I’ll second that.

BRANDON | I don’t want it to lose that.

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LINDA | But you didn’t have the overhead that was so frightening.

ALLISON | No, I know. How do you grow up in theatre? How do you keep that beautiful, revolutionary, subversive set of ideals? I would love to hang on to that in Seattle.

LINDA | If people didn’t have to worry about whether they got paid to make theatre, it would be easier to do that.

ALLISON | How do we figure out a world in which that can be supported? I ran a theatre where I was constantly awake at night because of payroll. How do we keep that flame alive to create the big, scary art? To me, that is the bottom line. Theatre doesn’t mean anything unless we have that eccentricity and that rebellion.

JANE | But Allison, almost every theatre in America has to worry about payroll.

BRANDON | It’s the universal question.

ALLISON | I’m not saying that we’re not going to worry about payroll. I’m just asking: how do we keep going?

TIM | You just have to go all-in and be willing to let it go. You have to be willing to say, “If it’s not going to be revolutionary, or if it’s not going to be pushing the edge and moving me and everyone else out of their comfort zone, then it’s not worth doing.”

JANE | Well, I think that we should always do things that scare the shit out of us.

KATJANA | I want to see a Seattle that remains ensembledriven. Where the image and the image-maker are closer to each other. I think we all have experienced when that sense of the ensemble and the togetherness made art that was more unified, more community based, more local. That seems to be an important part of Seattle’s character to me.

MARK | I’d love to see writers take over more space. Those are the voices that drive. I would also like to see theatre move out of its theatre spaces. If a story speaks to an audience, they’re drawn into it. Period. All the other stuff is just tools.

ALLISON | I feel as though we don’t talk enough about what breaks us. Going back to payroll or getting work or worrying about being penalized for a failure—who doesn’t want time to fail?

SHEILA | I agree.

ALLISON | We should be going for something way bigger than ourselves or the room. Half the time, that’s not going to work.

SHEILA | I think this community is supportive in so many ways, but I don’t think we are supportive when we fail.

Brandon Ivie, Tim Bond, Geof Alm, Braden Abraham, Victor Pappas + Jane Jones

SHEILA | I don’t think we reach out to each other when we fail. I’m constantly telling my students, “You have to dare to fail.” I wish that we could find a way to say, “Allison, not your best. It wasn’t your best work, but you know what? It’s different than anything I’ve ever seen you try to do.”

BRANDON | I think some of the Seattle Nice does translate to the stage in that it is sometimes harder to be gutsy and messy in the work. Not to say that the controlled, contained work is bad, but I think it makes it harder to give that kind of visceral, gutsy, messy thing. Sometimes I wish there was more of that, risking to be bad or go too far or offend someone.

ALLISON | The beautiful part is that we’re a small community. We see each other’s work, but we don’t necessarily talk about it with each other. When you feel that you’ve failed in a big way, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and paralyzed afterward. I have a tendency to isolate myself and not talk to anyone about it.

KATJANA | I think it ties into that fear that failure means being ostracized. We talk about problems. We just don’t talk about them with the people who can actually respond to them.

We see someone’s work and think it missed the mark, and we tell everyone else about it except for them.

LINDA | Sadly, is there anybody in theatre that has not experienced that? Not anyone.

So there’s that fear of: if I fail, you won’t even tell me that I failed. I won’t know why I failed. I would rather we were a part of that conversation with each other, and that there was more safety to do that.

ALLISON | I couldn’t agree more.

SHEILA | How do we, for a community that claims to be such a tight community, take care of each other at these moments?

LINDA | First of all, find places like this, where you can talk about it. Call somebody.

ALLISON | But we worry about the “Seattle Nice.” It can be very passive-aggressive. To me, there’s a metaphorical thing, like you’re at a four-way stop and nobody moves. You’re just stuck. Does that affect anybody or their work?

SHEILA | The human condition is messy.

I’ve seen big, bloody messes that I love, but sometimes the neatness of Seattle Nice, the very style of it can sometimes get in the way of the mess that is the nature of human life. Not always, but I have definitely experienced it.

LINDA | We have to find people that we really trust. We trust them to be honest; we trust them to give an opinion. I don’t think, in theatre, we can get completely honest feedback. I don’t know how objective theatre people can be. We put our whole heart and soul into the work.

JANE | I sincerely believe that people do the best they can possibly do, and you don’t want to go to your friend and say, “I don’t think you did your best.” That’s challenging.

KATJANA | Honest critique is so helpful, though. The first time I directed at UW, it scared me that Jon Jory wrote me a handwritten letter delivered by U.S. mail to critique the show. I thought I did something terribly wrong. And everyone said, “No, that’s a tip. You got a tip! You got feedback.”

LINDA | Let me just say, there’s no famous actor or director in this town, as long as I can remember, that did not have a downturn—that did not have a time after being on top for four or five years, working at every theatre, seeing their names in the paper all of the time, where, all of a sudden, they weren’t working. So it makes me really sad to think that any of the people I know in this room feel as though they could do something that was so horrific that they’ll never get a chance to shine again.

GEOF | I think we all make up stories in our heads, too, when we are not asked back to a theatre. We need to do what we are talking about and ask for feedback. Nine times out of 10, you realize you created this whole narrative.

It was only based on your own insecurity because we are human beings.

ALLISON | When I do a show, I am hard on my own work. I would love artistic feedback.

I would love to hear from other directors...it would be solicited, of course.

All right, now that I have kept you here all night, we must wrap up.

LINDA | I’ll host the next one! It is so important, especially as directors and choreographers, that we continue to gather with one another for conversations like this one.

ALLISON | I couldn’t agree more. Thank you all for coming.

ABOUT THE MODERATOR Allison Narver was formerly artistic director of the Empty Space Theater in Seattle and is an award-winning director whose work has been seen both nationally and internationally.

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TALVIN WILKS Director, Dramaturg + Playwright of Images BY

PRISCILLA PAGE

Talvin Wilks is a master of many things; directing, dramaturgy, playwriting, and producing are just a few. He is also a thoughtful historian who has taken on the enormous task of documenting Black Theatre history in the United States. Through his interviews with three generations of significant Black theatre professionals from the 1960s forward, he has created a dynamic archive of Black theatrical traditions that he shares with budding artists so that they might understand the foundation that has been laid before them. Wilks’ commitment to history and tradition is not static. He carries it into the rehearsal hall whenever embarking on a new project, and requires his collaborators to commit to a sense of rootedness with their characters and asks them to contemplate the wider scope of history. Wilks spoke recently with Priscilla Page, a scholar and dramaturg who has been his collaborator through programs at University of Massachusetts Amherst and New WORLD Theater.

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OPPOSITE Talvin

Wilks ABOVE Ping Chong + Talvin Wilks PHOTOS Adam Nadel

PRISCILLA | Talvin, you regularly work as a playwright, director, and dramaturg. Do you see those labels as all being part of one artistic identity? Or do you separate out the different functions?

Joe Chaikin used the term “playmaking.” It is a collaborative process that uses improvisation as a base. It is where I first really discovered my movement-based exploration in practice. The idea is founded in that practice and exposure.

TALVIN | I see them as one identity. I live within the landscape of all three disciplines, whether I’m designated with a specific contractual function in the room or not. I always call upon my directorial skills, theatre history knowledge, my position as the outside eye, and my approach as a structuralist (meaning one who creates structural components) to serve me in a particular collaboration. All of the elements at any given time are at play—depending on the demand in the moment.

So, I’ve always had this hybrid vision. I’ve always moved through the process of playwriting, playmaking, and directing. My earlier works—outside of my own playwriting— were collaborative ones with poets such as Ntozake Shange and Carl Hancock Rux, who both work within a poetic, embodied, choreopoetic approach to performance.

PRISCILLA | How did this hyphenated artistic identity evolve? Which discipline were you drawn to first?

TALVIN | We could also say it’s a hybrid identity. It’s interdisciplinary. I think that I’ve always lived in that place.

I was greatly influenced by members of the Talking Band, who had been members of the Open Theater, during my undergraduate training at Princeton. My directing instructor, Steve Gomer, was an assistant and collaborative director with Joseph Chaikin. My playwriting instructor was Jean-Claude van Itallie, who was a major writer for the Open Theater. My acting instructor was Tina Shepherd. Paul Zimet was also there. Over the course of four years, whenever I engaged with theatre practice, I was mostly working from that history of the Open Theater and the Talking Band. My final thesis project—in which I wrote and directed an ensemble piece—would be considered a devised piece today. My mentor for that was Jean-Claude.

PRISCILLA | I want to know more about your exploration of Black Theatre history in America.

Would you talk about the Black artists and traditions that inspired you when you began your journey?

TALVIN | The connection inside of it all is thinking of the spiritual. I often go to ritual.

It goes back to even the earliest works that I created, coming out of undergrad, which were Incubus: An American Dream Play, which was very much a ritual addressing racism and sexism in America, leading into Tod, the boy, Tod, which was also a ritual expurgation of racism and assimilation at a particular time.

Or look at the next work, The Trial of Uncle S & M, which I developed with my collaborative Spin Lab. Again: ritual that’s trying to expose and explore issues of race, cultural assimilation, and identity.

This then led me to work on The Love Space Demands with Ntozake Shange, which in many ways utilizes aspects of a choreopoem but is also ritual again. Movement and music are also always there inside of these early explorations.

That’s my foundation. The artists I’m inspired by in that tradition are Adrienne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka, and Ntozake Shange. Their

forms and thinking about myth-based, ritualized explorations of identity, oftentimes in the vanguard of protest, were the things that excited me very early on and informed the work that I was doing at the time. From that early cauldron comes my understanding and my ongoing investigations as well as my ability to work with playwrights, musicians, choreographers, and dancers.

I spent my formative years out of college at Crossroads Theatre. When I arrived there, they premiered The Colored Museum with George C. Wolfe. I was present when [South African playwright and director] Mbongeni Ngema was there with Sheila’s Day. Vernel Bagneris was there with Further Mo’. I got this amazing tutelage by watching directors L. Kenneth Richardson, Ricardo Khan, Woodie King Jr., and Bette Howard, and playwrights Aisha Rahman and Leslie Lee. There was a wonderful array of artists at that time.

There was a new vanguard of writers then.

Anna Deavere Smith, Robbie McCauley, Laurie Carlos. All of these wonderful artists traveled through that building, and I was able to watch the development of their works firsthand.

Ultimately, my professional playwriting debut was there, and my professional directorial debut was there, thanks to Sydne Mahone, the Director of Play Development. It became a wonderful five-year investment in artistic craft.

PRISCILLA | You have described your dramaturgy process as “collaborative dramaturgy.” Sometimes people have trouble understanding what a dramaturg does in a rehearsal room. Can you describe your process or just give us a definition of collaborative dramaturgy?

TALVIN | I don’t want to give a definition. I’m really sick of people saying they don’t know what dramaturgy is in the room. They do SPRING 2018 | SDC JOURNAL

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ABOVE + RIGHT Collidescope PHOTOS

at UMass Amherst University of Massachusetts Amherst

know what dramaturgy is. Everyone engages in it. Everyone has a particular practice, and dramaturgs bring that all in-house.

My roles are multifaceted. I’m a structuralist.

Not in a pedagogical sense but as someone who builds image and theme and process.

You could say that when I’m working with choreographers, I create a type of script.

Maybe I’m the playwright of images.

I build an ongoing system and identify structure that is connected to movement vocabulary. It is connected to thematic ideas.

It helps to build the fundamental structural blocks for the way we see the piece.

I collaborate with the choreographer and the dancers to build vocabulary but also language that holds that movement vocabulary. That gives the choreographer, the dancers, and the dramaturg a way of talking about the components that they are making together.

To me, that is what engaged collaborative dramaturgy is all about.

When I’m working as a dramaturg on a new play, I do a text analysis, but what I am really doing is identifying the thematic building blocks of the piece. I look at how that piece is actually structured. I look at how the playwright or director understands those blocks and how they’re working inside of the piece.

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As a director, when I’m talking to designers, I always do what I call a dramaturgical production overview in which I write down all of the components of the piece. I talk about the thematic ideas, structural ideas, images, interpretations of major anchoring points inside of a particular play. I share that as a document for members of the design team to have a foundation to begin their work.

Dramaturgy is how I lead, no matter what. As a director, my first role is dramaturgical. As a playwright, I’m dealing with the dramaturgy of my own work. As a collaborative dramaturg engaged with choreographers, I am helping to build the work; I’m in the room from the very beginning. That’s what I like: to be there from concept to the actual realization on stage. So, for me, that’s why the term “collaborative” is essential to the way I engage as a dramaturg.

PRISCILLA | Your collaborators read like a who’s who of interdisciplinary or

multidisciplinary avant-garde artists: Ping Chong, Laurie Carlos, Bebe Miller, Camille A. Brown, Carmen de Lavallade, and Sekou Sundiata, to name a few.

You have worked with Ping Chong on a number of co-created pieces. How do you each approach playwriting, directing, and dramaturgy with, say, the work of Collidescope: Adventures in Pre- and Post-Racial America?

How is that similar and different from—in many ways very different from—Undesirable Elements? You have a longer history with Undesirable Elements; I think you’ve worked with him on 10 of those, and there have been three iterations of Collidescope to date. Can you talk a little bit about that co-creating relationship?

TALVIN | Ping is a virtuosic mover and shaper of bodies and space. That’s a foundation. I think it connects with my movement-based approach to staging.

Talvin Wilks + Ping Chong work with students on Collidescope at UMass Amherst PHOTO University of Massachusetts Amherst

We first worked together in 1994 and then more consistently since 2000. That’s a long-term relationship—well over 20 years—that continues to evolve and develop. We really see our present work as co-conceivers, collaborators. We share the work. We share a very simpatico vocabulary and a process of exploration that we see and support in each other.

My history with Ping goes back to the very first production of Undesirable Elements that I worked on in Seattle. Undesirable Elements is a long-term oral history theatre piece, but it’s really more of a choral-archival exploration of history. Many worlds meld and merge into what we do on-site with communities. Ping is a collaborative writer; he prefers working with a writing partner. My initial role was to think of myself as the dramaturg in that process, but it always involved co-writing and co-interviewing.

It was a co-collecting, collaborative process.

Initially, the participants had to be bilingual and bicultural, which was a guarantee that they would have a family story from another place, different from the place that we were exploring, which heightened this exploration of otherness.

That was the established foundation for many, many years until we started developing the next phase of the hybrid Undesirable Elements, which was about taking voices from previous productions and putting them together to see if there was a way to tell a broader history—an immigrant history, a history of place, a history of culture.

That became very exciting. That started to evolve into thinking about otherness and differences within communities. I developed one of the early versions of that called Women of the Hill, which was an Undesirable Elements project we did in Pittsburgh as part of an August Wilson celebration for the inaugural season of the August Wilson Center for African American Culture. The piece we developed was a tribute to the voices of African American women from the Hill District over a period of time. It was intergenerational. It crossed class lines, explored color issues, and we explored socioeconomic conflicts within the community.

Then you started to see this interesting exploration of difference and what that meant internally within specific communities.

Inside of that, most of the stories and the re-creations are based on factual documents, historical documents that we stage in a type of futuristic “holodeck” because the piece is told through the gaze of an intergalactic alien traveler who is trying to understand this unique practice of racial abuse of the Black body throughout American history.

Today, Undesirable Elements has evolved so that we explore many different issues: people’s disabilities, transgender identities, and survival stories of sexual assault and sexual abuse. Ping has done—I don’t even know what the count is anymore—over 50 productions nationally and internationally.

PRISCILLA | I watched you directing student actors at University of Massachusetts Amherst when the production was done here. You helped actors create intimate moments of content that is very challenging, dehumanizing, even. I witnessed you move the actors through this challenging work in a caring way. I think you helped them immensely with their craft.

So, our long-term collaboration with Undesirable Elements shows an aesthetic evolution. It is an exploration into multimedia, specific cultural elements, and movement. Our work on Undesirable Elements led into the collaboration for Collidescope, which started as a commission from the University of Maryland and has now evolved into a long-term exploration of the history of racialized violence in the United States.

That now has become this wonderful landscape for the way we move bodies through space on stage, the way we integrate multimedia, the way we use found text inside of our storytelling, and the way we’ve merged this type of stylized performance. So Collidescope has evolved out of that long-term, longstanding 20-year-plus exploration.

The staging of lynchings and other forms of racialized violence shows up not only in Collidescope but in other works, too. Can you describe how, in terms of craft, you link the ideas of these historical, violent moments to acting? What do you give to the actors who have to confront this history and then create these images for the stage?

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TALVIN | Preparation is really in those very first conversations and how we’re engaging and thinking. It also depends on when I’m actually entering into the process. Ideally, I enter right at the beginning, so I’m there. This helps to formulate the collaborative language, what the project is or can be. I consider myself to be on the first That’s the real action level of the actual thinking, between theatre and dance.

TOP Walking with 'Trane, Urban Bush Women PHOTO FSU Photography Services, Bill Lax if it is a collaboration— Look at the work in Camille BOTTOM Mr. TOL E. RAncE, choreographed by Camille A. Brown PHOTO Christopher Duggan whether I’m working with A. Brown’s Mr. TOL E. RAncE Ping Chong or with Camille or at some movement-based say, how they move on stage is true and A. Brown, it starts in conversation. We start process in Walking with ’Trane with Urban Bush generated from a rooted place of truth. I use by talking about thematics, ideas…conceptual Women. Then look at the movement-based it in performance practice. I use it in dance ideas. exploration inside of telling those very violent exploration. I use it inside of my own theatrical stories inside Collidescope. staging and approach to characterization.

I begin the process of collecting imagery, So rootedness is the body as storyteller as a vocabulary, and language. Normally, it is The exploration was often first and foremost foundation. In many ways, it’s a practice. It’s something that’s coming from a piece of text ritualized. It was a way of connecting body a principle. It’s an understanding of a type of or coming from an image or an idea. Then and emotion and voice, and heightening or performative truth. And it’s a technique.

I go and research and build another type of channeling the physicality of the story and construct and understanding, bringing that back the characterization itself. The process wasn’t PRISCILLA | It was a privilege to watch into the conversation with the artist that I’m always around text; it was really thinking about that process and see you bring this idea of collaborating with. In fact, most of these ideas the embodiment of the story itself. Having the rootedness to their craft. I think it was a real are generated before we have even entered into actors step into a movement-based exploration gift for college actors. any type of rehearsal process or room. So that’s or a movement-based expression of the why, to me, the important word is collaboration.

TALVIN | It’s really about creating other It’s really those first engagements, the building Story or a vocal interpretation of the story is options for them. They often feel like they’re of those first conversations. That’s the work that a foundation of how I work. It connects to a wrong, that they’re wrong in their own bodies.

I love doing. I’m right there at the beginning of process that I call “the rooted character.”

So the goal is to make them feel right in their the initial idea. bodies.

Rootedness as an exploration is really thinking PRISCILLA | In your most recent work with of the actor/performer as an embodied PRISCILLA | This idea of the body as storyteller Bebe Miller, tell us how your role as the storyteller. You are ultimately trying to connect connects to your work in dance. Can you dramaturg led you to create a performance every performer to this type of internal truth describe your preparation process for dancearchive that she’s now using to generate work. so that everything they do, everything they based work?

TALVIN | I think this connects to the idea of the movement-based practice. We’re really talking about embodiment.

It’s an essential part of the storytelling. It’s not necessarily just textual. It’s how we are physically living inside of this particular history.

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Can you describe that?

TALVIN | That comes from the long-term history of our process.

We’ve been working together for over 20 years. We started in 1998 in the development of a piece called Going to the Wall.

It had already been in process, and I stepped in midway, mainly working with the ensemble to think about character, concept, and performing themselves inside of the work. With that piece, we TOP A History, Bebe Miller Company PHOTO Kathryn D. Spengler navigated very challenging issues BOTTOM Vanessa Butler + Aaron Pitre in Jimmy and Lorraine at around race, identity, and gender in HartBeat Ensemble PHOTO Andy Hart the room in which the dancers were really like to be in the room in the same way asked not to check their identity at that a dancer is in the room throughout the the door but to explore and bring it into the development of the process. That has really actual process. become the preferred role that I play, especially in dealing with choreographers and dance.

Bebe was looking for a much more performative, theatrical way of exploring identities in the room, and there wasn’t really a language for that kind of process. That created an immediate role for me. In conversations with [dramaturg] Katherine Profeta, there is this notion that, as a dramaturg, you recognize an understanding between yourself and the choreography, or yourself and the director.

We call it the “simpatico” moment. There’s an established language, vocabulary, and aesthetics that build the foundation for a successful relationship.

From there, Bebe commissioned me to be a writer and dramaturg for the next piece, Verge.

The important thing about that work is that, through an Individual Artist grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, I was able to be in the room all the time. It supported my presence inside the collaborative room. I

We started to build a way of working and understanding vocabulary and collaboration— the arc of thought, the embodied history that lives inside of dancers that’s not always identified—and we established that they are themselves these incredible living archives of information that choreographers rely on, especially choreographers like Bebe Miller.

I was augmenting the process through my templating/documenting of the work, which was already building an archive of process.

That documenting was mostly used inside of the development process itself when we were exploring the work called A History. It was later used for a website called DanceFort and made into an e-book. Basically, in A History, we were making a work about the way dancers make dance and the resources that we call upon to make dance.

So, from that, we came to this notion of what I call the living archive, the performance archive.

It’s this idea that you can look back to generate forward. The archive is not something that’s just locked away or historicized or put on a shelf. It is actively there to navigate, to think about process, to think about what is next. The living archiving is a type of recall, reclamation, and not even necessarily re-envisioning, but the visioning anew.

This is my my long-term collaborative history with many of the artists mentioned earlier.

I’ve created six world premieres with the Bebe Miller Company. With Camille A. Brown, we’re now on three. With Urban Bush Women, I just started working with them in 2015 and we’ve already worked on three projects, and I can see that continuing. With Ping Chong, we have worked on over 13 projects and counting.

I think in all of these works, the operative word is collaboration: where my role melds and merges as the guiding eye, shaping eye, directorial eye, choreographic eye, documenting eye…

PRISCILLA | That’s so beautiful. That’s exactly right.

I want to talk about a piece of yours, Jimmy and Lorraine, which was supported, developed, and produced at Heartbeat Ensemble [in Hartford, CT] and has gone on to a few other presentations. The story is an exploration of two of America’s most iconic writers, James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry. Why do you SPRING 2018 | SDC JOURNAL

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think that the lives and the works of these two artists in particular still hold a primary place of interest for so many readers and for so many theatregoers? And why does it hold importance for you?

The piece is called A Musing. It’s really “a musing,” which is a meditation in thinking about their lives, their language, their voices. I wanted to capture the actions—a recitation of life the way I see it.

TALVIN | That’s a big question.

Baldwin and Hansberry were unique vessels because they were artists. They were in a particular vanguard. They were wrestling with issues of race, identity, sexuality, gender, politics, and art. I wanted to live inside their language. It’s not a docudrama. It’s not the foundation of a biopic. It really is, as I say, a musing. It’s a meditation of the embodiment of their life story and their own language.

The “why” is almost immediate. You have a visceral response to their language. The goal for me was to really showcase, in particular, Lorraine’s radical voice that you don’t necessarily connect to the plays if you don’t know all of them. If you don’t know Les Blancs, you don’t really know some of the radical, political aspects of her writing. Even though, of course, Raisin in the Sun was very groundbreaking, political, and impactful. But

I feel it was a ritual. It was a meditation to engage with the power of their voices from

TALVIN | If you look at my work, movement has always been a foundation. The collaboration with Sekou Sundiata and Marlies Yearby, for example: movement is there. If you really look through the arc of my work, the elements of movement, music, spoken word, and lyricism are always in there.

PRISCILLA | Another point in the arc of your work, and where we spent time together, was at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

You joined the faculty and came on as the interim Artistic Director of New WORLD Theater.

TALVIN | That was another artistic home.

Even before I joined New WORLD Theater, I was already a part of New WORLD because

ABOVE LEFT Talvin ABOVE RIGHT Liza

Wilks directing The Owl Answers at Penumbra Theatre PHOTO Allen Weeks Jessie Peterson in The Peculiar Patriot, National Black Theatre and Hi-ARTS, directed by Talvin Wilks PHOTO Garlia C. Jones-Ly

she was also an incredible speaker and activist, called to the front lines mainly in the North— not in the South—to really tell the story of the civil rights movement.

So I wanted to put those two voices in conversation. They had a wonderful friendship.

They were often called to the front lines together, and it isn’t necessarily fully known, mainly because we lost her at the age of 34.

The interesting thing about the structure of the piece—which was directed brilliantly by Brian Jennings, a longtime collaborator of mine—is that it also could be seen as movement based, mainly because of the lyrical way I structure text on the page and how I think about it. Brian knows how I think about moving bodies and space and collaboration, and about text and movement and sound and music.

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the early 1960s as we’re looking at these “50th anniversary” explorations of that very significant time in our history. So that piece is the perfect example of how I think about the creation of a particular work. And it carries all of those elements. I think, in many ways, that’s the work that I’m attracted to. That’s the work I understand.

PRISCILLA | All of those things show up in different ways in your work. There are some delightful scenes in Jimmy and Lorraine where they do a sort-of vaudeville minstrel show as they’re talking about some of the toughest material in the piece. And yet they have a whole choreographed dance that’s very jarring in terms of the content and what we’re looking at. I think it is a good thing to jolt the audience.

of [Founder/Artistic Director] Roberta Uno’s vision. She really created the home for this convergence of artists—and also the next generation of artists—coming out of that particular performative cauldron. There were dancers who were hip-hop theatre performers—movement-based explorers.

So that’s the third phase of the arc. It was just the perfect nexus of this collaborative process.

Performers like Universes, Baba Israel, Rha Goddess, who are innovators, looking at text and movement—a new generation who all came through New WORLD. New WORLD was the next arrival place for me as an artistic director, curator, and collaborator.

It was definitely a place to further my ideas about the curatorial process as dramaturgical practice and to guide, support, and inspire that

The Owl Answers at Penumbra Theatre, directed by Talvin Wilks PHOTO Allen Weeks

particular generation of artists at that time. It was short-lived but perfect.

For example, one of the beautiful things that got added into the curatorial mix in a very unique way was the built-in intergenerational nature of Project 2050, the youth retreat program at New WORLD. A number of folks I just mentioned—Rha Goddess, Baba Israel, Steven Sapp, and Mildred Ruiz—worked as teaching artists and mentors for Project 2050. Those folks were also artists who were being supported, presented, and produced at New WORLD, but who were also working in collaborative ways with young people that I think furthered the conversations about how to think about interdisciplinary work and how to make work that crossed a number of different lines in very organic ways.

PRISCILLA | I’d love to hear about what you’re working on now.

TALVIN | I’m working as dramaturg on an adaptation of Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Cotes, with Kamilah Forbes, who is the conceiver and director, at the Apollo Theater, and Lauren A. Whitehead, the adapter.

We’re still formulating the language around it: concert performance, oratorio, meditation that evolves from a chorus of voices. It [was] presented at the Apollo and the Kennedy Center in April 2018.

I’m in production for Harrison David Rivers’ play This Bitter Earth at Penumbra. That open[ed] in April as well. The piece I’ve just finished directing at the University of Minnesota is Machinal, by Sophie Treadwell, which I approached as a dance-theatre piece that explores movement of the Jazz Age as a foundation inside of this American expressionistic form.

I’m working with Baba Israel on his hip-hop musical, Cannabis, as well as the ongoing tour of The Peculiar Patriot, by Liza Jessie Peterson.

I’m working on a jazz cabaret with Urban Bush Women called Scat, and there is future work with Ping Chong and Ain Gordon.

PRISCILLA | Beautiful. What surprises you the most? In theatre, in life?

TALVIN | What inspires me is what’s next and what’s coming. And the importance of being connected to that in a collaborative way. I want to know and work with new artists, the emerging, the newly established, the makers of now. That always continues to inspire me.

I understand my career as a privileged series of rooms. I’ve lived through, and have experienced, many generations of artists. I’ve been in the room with and made work with Carmen de Lavallade. I’ve been under the tutelage of the founders of Crossroads Theatre, and they supported my early launching as a professional artist. I have a long-standing history with Penumbra Theatre and the incredible work that they allow me to think about and to make today. I was just produced by the National Black Theatre in Harlem and Hi-ARTS, these two incredible institutions committed to making new work.

I just spent time at Jacob’s Pillow with Urban Bush Women and the Bebe Miller Company. In December, I was in residence with Camille A. Brown for the premiere of ink at The Kennedy Center. I am blessed in this navigation of generative practice. In this unique realm of collaboration with artists making new work, that’s a career. It’s a wonderful place to live.

That’s what I’m feeling right now.

What surprises me most is the pervasive, endless racism in our society. As naïve as that may sound, it surprises me because it is so enduring. It surprises me and exhausts me, this wasteful activity.

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FIG. 1

Cast of Virginia Tech’s 2016 production of Babes in Arms PHOTO Amanda J. Nelson

SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION Musical theatre training programs in higher education continue to grow and evolve, with many formal degree programs now operating with faculty and staff voice teachers, accompanists, etc., that are totally separated from counterparts in music programs. However, despite differences between disciplines and pedagogy, many colleges and universities, especially those with a liberal arts model of arts training, often produce a collaborative musical offering that integrates the talents, resources, and training approaches of faculty and students from both music and theatre.

In the following essay, Amanda Nelson and Richard Masters explore the traditional pros and cons of engaging collaboration among faculty artists from different fields, with a fresh perspective. Given the current trend of declining summer enrollments at many colleges—as students increasingly seek online options outside regular semesters—their summer musical theatre intensive was conceived in response to a university charge to boost on-campus enrollments.

Nelson and Masters examine how their course allowed students from both departments, none of whom had extensive musical theatre training, to rehearse and perform a lesser-known, historic musical for audiences drawn from the campus and local communities. In our current economic climate, professional and academic theatres often turn to co-productions and collaborative endeavors to increase opportunities for their companies and audiences. We hope that the model described in the essay might prove inspirational for arts programs and directors seeking to expand programming, training opportunities, and audiences within an intensive summer experience.

INTRODUCED + EDITED BY DAVID

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CALLAGHAN + ANN M. SHANAHAN

RETHINKING THE COLLEGE SUMMER INTENSIVE: A NEW MODEL FOR COLLABORATION BY

AMANDA J. NELSON, VIRGINIA TECH + RICHARD MASTERS, VIRGINIA TECH

music. Importantly, both faculty directors were and the final public performances, this article “‘Why,’ you ask, ‘are these youngsters willing, compensated as though the course was a full shares challenges faced and opportunities even eager, to break their backs, lose their summer term in length, and students received discovered, while also providing suggestions sleep—all for nothing?’ Because ladies and the corresponding three credit hours for the for implementation and replication at other gentlemen they are working in the theatre. intensive course. The course attracted both colleges and universities.

And, the theatre is their life” (2). The quote is music and theatre majors, with an almost equal from Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s Babes number of both participating. While all of The summer intensive is not a new model for in Arms. The setting of the play is a summer the students had a strong interest in musical the performing arts. Many schools use such stock theatre and the “youngsters” are eager, theatre, only a handful had earnest, and committed. prior experience, and skill They have gathered to work, levels varied widely. Our to learn, and to perform. If institution offers B.A. degrees the setting were a college FIG. 2 Babes in Arms opening musical number, Virginia Tech summer 2016 in theatre and music but campus rather than a PHOTO Amanda J. Nelson does not have an established theatre, the “youngsters” musical theatre program. would be students, and they The “Rarely Heard” model would be taking part in a could be scaled to meet the summer intensive course experience and skill level of much like the class we students at any institution, offered at Virginia Tech in including conservatories. A the summer of 2016. school with a strong musical theatre program could “Rarely Heard: Reviving be more ambitious in the Musical Theatre from the selection of the musical, Past” was a collaboratively incorporation of more conceived pilot for a complex choreography, summer intensive course. and the number of public We saw the development performances. of a new course as an opportunity for us—faculty members in two separate SCRIPT SELECTION but related programs—to Given the limited experience jointly build a musical of the students involved theatre ensemble. We and the time constraints wanted to address learning of the summer intensive outcomes beyond those of model, the selection of the traditional course models, musical proved to be the including enhanced most important first step concentration and focus, in achieving our desired increased motivation outcomes. If the selection and commitment to a were too complex—musically, collaborative creative dramatically, or movementprocess, and a deeper wise—we were concerned understanding of the era that the students, many in which the musical is set. with little musical theatre Borrowing our approach experience, would put from New York City Center’s an emphasis on the final Encores!, we selected a performance rather than rarely produced musical: on their improvement over Rodgers and Hart’s Babes the course of the class. If programs as recruitment vehicles, while others in Arms. With the students, we examined the there were few lead characters, not all of the use the model to serve current students. At our musical’s production history; explored the students would be appropriately challenged. institution, there has been a renewed interest story and score in its historical milieu—the If the score were unmemorable, it would be in summer intensives as the university looks Great Depression—and performed the work difficult for the students to learn and connect for ways to expand on-campus enrollment in with minimal sets, costumes, and lighting. The with in the short time we had to rehearse. summer sessions. In the winter of 2016, faculty summer intensive course model proved to be Likewise, such a production would be less likely members were encouraged to develop new both a boon and a burden. The format fostered to attract the desired summer audience. While courses that could be taught in a “mini/micro focus, creativity, and collaboration amongst the we wanted a musical that had several ensemble summer session,” just three weeks in duration. students and the faculty involved, but it also numbers, allowing the full cast an opportunity “Rarely Heard” was co-created and taught by demanded extensive preparation, planning, to sing and dance, we did not want to mount a faculty member from theatre and one from and adaptability. A reflection on our process a production with too many of them because SPRING 2018 | SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

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of the difficulty of learning the songs, as well as the challenge presented by trios and duets with intricate counterpoint.

Selecting a musical that was out of the mainstream was important: our students are generally familiar with popular modern works such as Spring Awakening and famous older pieces such as The Sound of Music and Fiddler on the Roof; they are generally not familiar with pieces written prior to Oklahoma!. Since more research is required when mounting a work with a limited production history, producing less frequently produced work can increase interest and engagement from students and faculty directors alike. Our selection of Rodgers and Hart’s Babes in Arms reflected a consideration of all of the factors above.

accommodate the needs of the students and the project. Given the limited experience of the students and knowing of their potential discomfort with singing, the stage director ultimately agreed that it would be most beneficial to the process to begin with music rehearsals.

“Teaching is always collaborative, and the student-centered learning models gaining currency in today’s universities foreground the co-creative element in a higher education context” (Hopkins vii). A summer intensive culminating in a production demands a higher level of collaboration between teacher and student, more so than in a typical semester-long course. During our project, the students themselves also ultimately identified

weeks, students developed a close rapport that proved productive in engagement with the work of their peers. While we cannot confirm that the group dynamic was a direct result of the summer intensive model, we do believe that the level of intensity inherent in the model led to a deeper, more committed collaboration among the students.

SCHEDULE

Like the Encores! program, our rehearsal period was short and intensive. Our class met from 1:00 pm–5:00 pm Monday through Friday, with the occasional morning or weekend supplement. Because our three-week course culminated with two public performances on a Thursday and Friday, in reality we had just

COLLABORATION

“Collaboration is a word threatened with depleted meaning through overuse, and now tends only to be a well-intentioned reference that vaguely intimates a generous and modern spirit” (Thomson 118). It should be acknowledged that the relationship between music and theatre programs in higher education is often fraught with problems. Too often, competition between the players involved leads to zealous guarding of students and resources. Often there is an expectation that one department should act as a service organization to the other: the music department providing theatre with musicians and a music director; and the theatre department providing costumes, sets, and props for the production. These unfortunate circumstances often stifle true faculty collaboration. With these potential obstacles in mind, our course was planned with equal input from the theatre director and music director.

While each faculty member’s expertise was relied upon for the production process, a collaborative team approach meant that in practice both faculty members were involved in musical and staging decisions. This team approach demanded significant amounts of time from the faculty prior to the start of the class, but it also improved communication, paving the way for substantive collaborative decision-making and leading to the overall success of both the class and production.

Together, we explored the text of both script and score; researched the original production; made casting decisions (including doubling); and developed course assignments.

Determining the rehearsal schedule proved to be the most challenging element of the planning process. The theatre director expected to begin rehearsals with a table read-through of the script, while the music director wanted to start with music rehearsals, running through all of the songs. Several schedules were discussed and revised, each director compromising when necessary to

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FIG. 3 Students in the 2016 pilot summer intensive course “Rarely Heard: Reviving Musical Theatre from the Past” PHOTO Amanda J. Nelson

collaboration as a key element in the course.

From the first day of class, we emphasized collaboration and responsibility between and among the cast and crew. The stage director opened with a pep talk to the students, making it clear that they had a higher level of responsibility to one another given the truncated production schedule.

Our focus on collaborative practice in class led to collaboration and bonding outside of the course. The students met after class and on the weekends to work on assignments, to rehearse, and even to cook and eat meals together. They formed a social circle that provided support, guidance, and learning beyond the rehearsal hall. We found this group bonding to be particularly evident in the summer intensive model: over the three

two and a half weeks to prepare. The short duration of our production schedule (what we termed “extreme rehearsing”) is not typical, nor is it necessarily advisable, as a standard college production process.

These time constraints proved both a help and a hindrance. In her journal for the course, one student shared, “I have never blocked anything this fast! It’s crazy how quick we have to get everything together, but it’s working.”

Though the compact course required very careful preparation and time management from students and professors alike, there were many positive aspects. The limited rehearsal time made the course more accessible, allowing students who might otherwise be occupied with summer jobs or family vacations to participate. Limited time also raised the bar

for the required level of preparation and focus of the students participating and required us to find creative ways to approach singing, acting, and movement. With a two-and-a-halfweek rehearsal period, the end goal was not the same as in a semester-long class devoted to producing a musical. The end result was to provide a pastel sketch, rich in color and content to be sure, but without the detail of an oil painting. To set expectations for audience members, the stage director addressed the truncated rehearsal time frame in the curtain speech, and the course design was included in descriptions of the production in marketing materials.

An often-frustrating aspect of musical theatre production is the synchronization of the script with the music director’s score. Most piano/ vocal scores include text cues at the beginnings of musical numbers that indicate the dialogue immediately prior to the song. We have found that many scores, including Babes in Arms, have incorrect cues and often lack the accurate scene number. During the table-read, we recommend the music director carefully review the cues and scene numbers in the score to avoid difficulties during the rehearsal process.

The actual timing of our class turned out to have an added benefit. Our performance schedule coincided with a local summer arts festival produced in collaboration with the university. The festival producer eagerly incorporated our show into the planning as the grand finale of the summer festival. In turn, our production benefited from the festival’s marketing campaign, which resulted in full houses for our performances.

To further aid students in their preparation, we sent rehearsal tracks via email instructing them to learn their parts before the beginning of the course, an especially important step in such a shortened timeframe. Files were uploaded in chronological order to a folder on Google Drive, and a link was sent to the students. Also uploaded to a separate folder on Google Drive were tracks from a commercial sound recording of the show, shared with the caveat to actors that the commercial recordings would likely be in a different tempo and might have different ensemble arrangements.

AUDITIONS

REHEARSALS

Since this was a pilot course, we opened it to both majors and non-majors, though we did require an audition for performers and an interview for those interested in production or stage management. Both the audition and the interview included a short conversation about the student’s background and interests. For the audition, we asked students to prepare 16 bars of music by Richard Rodgers and told them that we would be doing cold readings from the script, acknowledging that actors would not have access to the full text of the play prior to the audition. The 16-bar song portion provided a clear picture of vocal abilities, while the cold readings provided a sense of each student’s energy and ability to connect with other actors. To ensure we had adequate time to work with each student, we decided to cap our course enrollment at fifteen, but ended up with a cast of nine, all majors in either music or theatre. The class also included a percussionist to accompany the music director who would be on piano, and management staff (stage manager, assistant stage manager, and production assistant).

PRE-REHEARSAL PREPARATION

Musical play scripts typically include the text of the songs without the actual score. We felt that it was necessary to create a “Frankenstein” script that combined the spoken text and the score in chronological order. By literally “cutting and pasting” text and score into one document, the preparation required by the students prior to the start of the class was greatly simplified: the students could more easily understand the songs within the context of the entire book.

To accommodate the truncated schedule, we emulated Encores! with our own semi-staged production: scenic elements were simple; lighting cues were minimal; and costumes were uniform (old jeans or shorts with a brightly colored t-shirt with the Babes in Arms logo printed on the back, and Converse sneakers).

Additionally, from our first day of the project we rehearsed in the performance space rather than a rehearsal room. We also worked with our production manager to ensure that our set and prop pieces would be available for use in rehearsal by the end of the first week.

A modular set made up of seven individual components (designed to look like old apple crates) allowed flexibility in staging and ease during scene transitions. The crates fit together to form a wall and then were easily separated into smaller set pieces, becoming seats, a bed, and a bar. All set and prop elements were everyday objects (a clothesline, apple crates, dish towels, brooms, ladders, and mops) that served multiple purposes—a reference to the setting of the play in the Great Depression, when being frugal was a necessity and everything was used and reused.

We allocated the first two days of rehearsal to music, and through careful scheduling we found it was possible to rehearse every musical number twice in this time frame. If a student asked for outside coaching, that was provided, but the majority of coaching for solos and small ensemble numbers occurred in the first two days. The large ensemble numbers were run during the first twenty minutes of every class until the public performances.

In the music rehearsals, the students worked on what music education specialist Robert A. Duke refers to as “small approximations” (98). The path from the starting point of learning a song to the end goal of performing is negotiated in minute steps, with new additions every day. We worked on simple diction and ensemble issues (for example, tuning of chords, group rhythmic precision, etc.), encouraging a sense of achievement and, as Duke puts it, “developing correct patterns of behavior and thought” (99). The first two days devoted to music rehearsals put into place the rough outlines of those “correct patterns”; the remainder of time dedicated to music focused on deepening routine, and moving the approximations closer and closer to the desired end result. The overall pace of these music rehearsals was much faster than usual given the intensive nature of the course. At the same time, the deliberate and intense work done during the first two days made it more likely for students to be successful, giving them a clear framework upon which to base their routine over the next two weeks.

FIRST READ-THROUGH

Our decision to start the rehearsal process with two days devoted to music meant that we did not read through (or even discuss) the full text until the third day. The table-read of the book was a particularly important step for students, helping them to connect the songs and lyrics to the story and characters.

Character relationships became clearer and the play’s humor became more apparent to cast and crew. It should be emphasized that the students did not sing during the read-through, preventing the anxiety that would result from singing for each other without much practice.

During the table-read, we paused between scenes to define and discuss some of the more archaic vocabulary and references in the script, phrases and people unfamiliar to the students, such as the expression “I’m all wet,” and famous figures of the time, including Helen Hayes, Mary Martin, and Noël Coward.

BLOCKING

Immediately following the read-through, we started blocking. Given our limitations of time for technical aspects of the production, we decided that the actors would be on stage for the duration of the performance and serve as crew members, moving props and set pieces as needed. As is done in our model Encores!, our actors would have scripts in hand except during musical numbers. The way in which script binders were incorporated into the blocking required discussion, brainstorming, and practice. At first, students struggled with what to do with the scripts in hand, but slowly they began to find creative ways to use their scripts as props. For instance, the student playing the character Val, the composer of the group, began using his script as though SPRING 2018 | SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

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it were a new musical composition he was working on, and others deliberately used the script binders as props, such as a serving tray.

A repeating physical gag in our production was a highly-stylized kissing sequence in which a script binder became a privacy shield.

One audience member even commented, “I was not aware that the performers would be holding scripts … but it worked out perfectly, not a distraction at all.”

Time constraints meant that we needed to block the full book in just two-and-a-half days, requiring that much of it be pre-determined.

Adjustments were made to accommodate student input and the realities of the space.

These demands resulted in students working more diligently outside of rehearsal. Many of the students were cast in two or three roles, requiring them to find physical and vocal differences between their characters.

The physicality of each character and comic gags incorporated into the work developed throughout, altering some of the movement originally planned, most often for the better.

Students found creative ways to handle the quick changes between their characters, all of which occurred on stage in full view of the audience. Because the cast was on stage the entire play, the students worked harder than usual to find nuances and expand back stories for the relationships between their characters.

CHOREOGRAPHY OF ENSEMBLE NUMBERS

During the auditions, a number of students stated, “I can’t dance.” In order to accommodate this claimed lack of ability and our rehearsal time limitations, we adjusted the choreography to the skill level of the cast.

We used the term “blocking to the music” to refer to this limited choreography. It should be noted that the director on this project was not a professional choreographer; universities often have limited budgets for summer school, and so it is not unusual for the stage director to take on the role of choreographer. During the second week of rehearsals we incorporated choreography and scene transitions. We drew on the choreographic approach of Busby Berkeley, who worked extensively in the musical films of the 1930s. Berkeley’s choreographic style was influenced by his time as a drill sergeant in the army. Mimicking his style meant that we could create interesting patterns on the stage through relatively simple steps. Rather than use dance terms to set the choreography, we used familiar terms such as step, march, cross, and lunge. This proved a good solution for those students with little or no dance ability. Students quickly saw how complex stage patterns could be created through the use of simple, everyday movements. One student noted that our choreography was like

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being in marching band. Another noted, “I am not a dancer, but I do learn choreography well, and I feel that the patterns will really come across to the audience.” To further assist students in visualizing the dances, we viewed video clips of Berkeley’s work. The students appreciated seeing this footage before being asked to dance themselves. Learning that Berkeley himself had never taken a formal dance class visibly relieved those students who were apprehensive about the choreography.

ONE-ON-ONE COACHING WITH DIRECTORS

A theatre director is loath to give line readings directing the student specifically towards an emotion or delivery. Instead, discussions of character objectives and tactics are employed to move the student actor toward clear and meaningful choices. In the world of opera, however, directed line readings are not only commonplace, but expected. With limited time to achieve desired results, the classically trained music director would sing phrases to indicate the phrasing he wanted, and ask the student to shape the music in a similar way. This “line reading” assured that students had a specific sound in their ears and a plausible approach to every sung line. The students in our production were made aware of the difference in approach, but understood that we were comfortable with each other’s methods. Our willingness to “agree to disagree” was a cornerstone of our collaboration, ultimately proving to be a strength in modeling collaboration to our students.

most important element in a musical was to them (music, story, comedy, dancing, or drama) and overwhelmingly the response cited was the music. In response to a question asking why they came to the show, two responses were cited the most with phrases such as: “I love musicals” and “I came to support the students.”

While a significant number of surveys were completed, we recognize that the majority of survey respondents were those who enjoyed the performance. To counter this bias, for future “Rarely Heard” productions we are considering enlisting volunteers to administer the survey to randomly selected audience members.

After the performances, we also had a discussion with the cast and crew about impressions of the course and suggestions for improvement. Among the more surprising comments from the students was that they believed they could be completely off-book for the performances. Although many of them had described an uncomfortable relationship with dancing, feedback indicated a willingness and even desire to have more complex dance numbers. And, they appreciated the ensemble nature of the particular piece we selected: each of them felt that they had an important role to play. Some felt we could select an even more difficult and complex musical for the next incarnation of the course. In response to this student feedback, for our next “Rarely Heard” we selected George and Ira Gershwin’s Oh, Kay!: a piece that demanded a higher level of skill in dancing and singing.

“Like performance itself, collaboration is ephemeral, a complex cultural event that resists easy documentation. Despite its significance for our mission statements and learning outcomes, challenges arise when it comes to assessing collaboration” (Stufft, 56). In our case, the outcome itself proved to be one important assessment of our collaboration.

The end product was a successful production, determined by happy audiences and satisfied students. Including public performances at the conclusion of the course resulted in the students taking much more responsibility for and pride in their work than perhaps they would have done for a final showing just for classmates.

As is typical in performance courses, students were expected to keep a journal reflecting on the learning and production process. The act of reflecting on a rehearsal, the questions raised about character and interactions, the direction and performance notes given all required critical analysis on the part of the students. One student reflected on how much she had grown as a performer: “Final day of true rehearsal. I’m both sad and excited to be done. More sad than excited though because I’ve discovered how much I really enjoy acting, and I think I’m pretty good at it for not having much experience.” Another shared, “I can really tell that everyone, especially myself, is improving when it comes to the music in the show.

Everyone is getting more confident…. I know that I am feeling more confident every day.”

To assess the production itself, we developed a short audience survey. We announced the survey during a curtain speech at the top of the show and then had the surveys set out on a table in the lobby after the performance.

Audience responses were enthusiastic; all those who took the survey said “yes,” they would return again the next summer to see another production. We asked the audience what the

Our willingness to focus on learning processes rather than final performances led to creative solutions to the problems posed by the limited rehearsal period. We found this approach liberating, as it freed us to focus on student development. The straightforward choreography, careful preparation of the songs, and simple production values allowed every student to succeed. As creative artists, we

OUTCOMES AND ASSESSMENT

appreciated this opportunity to collaborate; being busy academics, the project fostered a connection between our respective areas in a way that a typical school-year production might not. The compressed schedule demanded timely compromise. The mutual decisions made often resulted in a stronger artistic product. We believe “Rarely Heard” can be replicated by other universities seeking to develop an ensemble-building summer intensive for students with a range of abilities.

Faculty in theatre and music can come together to create a dynamic summer class that provides students with performance experience, attracts an audience to campus outside of the usual September through June period, and enhances collaboration between theatre and music departments.

WORKS CITED

Barnett, David. Brecht in Practice: Theatre, Theory and Performance. Bloomsbury, 2015.

Duke, Robert. Intelligent Music Teaching: Essays on the Core Principles of Effective Instruction. Learning and Behavior Resources, 2005.

Hopkins, D. J. “A Note from the Editor.”

Theatre Topics, vol. 24, no. 1, March 2014, pp. vii-viii.

Oppenheimer, George. Babes in Arms. Music

by Richard Rodgers, Lyrics by Lorenz Hart.

R&H Theatricals, 1959.

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW Stanislavsky and Yoga

By Sergei Tcherkasski Translated by Vreneli Farber ROUTLEDGE, 2016; 126 pp. $24.95 PAPERBACK.

Sergei Tcherkasski’s Stanislavsky and Yoga offers a detailed analysis of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s use of yoga in his system of actor training. While Stanislavsky’s work has been widely studied, his exploration of yoga has only been addressed by a few scholars and rarely outside of academic circles. Expanding on previous scholarship by Sharon Carnicke, R. Andrew White, and others, Tcherkasski illustrates how yoga was central in Stanislavsky’s work,

Stufft, Monica. “Putting Collaboration Front and Center: Assessment Strategies for Theatre Departments.” Theatre Topics, vol. 23, no. 1, March 2013, pp. 53-67.

Thomson, Lynn M. “Teaching and Rehearsing Collaboration.” Theatre Topics, vol. 13, no.1, March 2003, pp.117-28.

AMANDA J. NELSON is an assistant professor of theatre and the director of the MFA in theatre in arts leadership program at Virginia Tech. She has written on a range of theatre topics, regularly presents at conferences, and is a freelance theatre reviewer for The Roanoke Times.

RICHARD MASTERS is an assistant professor of piano at Virginia Tech, where he teaches piano, accompanying, opera workshop, Italian diction, and conducts musical theatre performances. His articles on various topics have appeared in The Record Collector, American Music Teacher, and other journals.

informing his emphasis on breathing, muscle relaxation, and even such key concepts as stakes and objectives. In so doing, Tcherkasski helps uncover the largely overlooked story of how yogic principles influenced the main system used for realistic actor training from the early twentieth century to the present.

Drawing from both Stanislavsky’s published and personal writing, as well as written accounts by actors in his studios and rehearsals, Tcherkasski argues that the physical and philosophical practice of yoga was a central component of Stanislavsky’s approach to actor training throughout its development. Whereas other accounts suggest that Stanislavsky’s interest in yoga was early and fleeting, Tcherkasski introduces his book with a convincing argument for yoga’s central and long-lasting role in the Russian director’s work. Tcherkasski provides background on the evolution of the ancient practice of yoga into the modern version marketed to Western consumers. However, exploring yoga’s history and spiritual foundations is not his central purpose. Tcherkasski argues that Stanislavsky was aware of yoga’s roots, but his goals were more practical than spiritual. This said, Stanislavsky and Yoga is not a practical handbook and does not offer exercises for

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS 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/sdc-journal/sdc-journalpeer-review/

incorporating yoga into training programs; the book assumes some basic knowledge of both acting and yoga practices.

The first chapter, “Yoga in the Theatre Practice of Stanislavsky,” uses accounts of actors who worked with Stanislavsky to examine his use of yoga in training and rehearsal.

Following Carnicke and White, Tcherkasski connects Stanislavsky’s interest in yoga to the yogi known as Ramacharaka, author of one of the first books about Hatha Yoga written in English. Interestingly, Tcherkasski does not reveal until his second chapter that Ramacharaka is a pseudonym for American attorney and publisher William Atkinson, a pioneer in the turn-of-the-century New Thought movement. Tcherkasski identifies parallels between Stanislavsky’s teachings and Ramacharaka’s books; he notes that the form of yoga Stanislavsky encountered through Ramacharaka blended ancient principles with American interpretations to focus more on selfcontrol and self-improvement than on spiritual development.

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Raja Yoga. Quoting the original sources, Tcherkasski relates how Stanislavsky’s concept of the “task” or zadacha (now commonly interpreted as objective) may be linked to Ramacharaka’s employment of “spiritual tasks”; similarly, Ramacharaka’s “object of examination and consideration,” used to focus concentration, can be connected to Stanislavsky’s “object of attention” (qtd. 69).

He argues that, because censorship forced Stanislavsky to eliminate direct references to yoga in his published writings, actors familiar with Stanislavsky’s system might be unaware of the role yoga plays in their work. Conversely, actors who have long incorporated yoga into their acting practice are likely to feel validated in, if unsurprised by, such connections.

The concluding chapter explores additional yogic principles that appear in Stanislavsky’s system. For instance, the system takes its emphasis on muscle tension and relaxation directly from yoga. Stanislavsky used ideas about prana (breath) and pranayama (breath control) in developing his concept of “energy” and the control of it through rhythmic breathing. Stanislavsky argues that this control can improve communication between actors, much like the deep, rhythmic breathing of yoga links yogis during group practice. While Tcherkasski never addresses Stanislavsky’s later work with text analysis, he does explore the superconscious and Stanislavsky’s use of yoga’s meditative state as a way to transcend the separation between actor and role, just as a yogi achieves oneness with the object of their meditation.

While Tcherkasski offers no tools or exercises for the practical application of yoga in the rehearsal hall or classroom, he validates the longstanding incorporation of yoga into actor training and provides new insight into the underpinnings and development of Stanislavsky’s teachings. Stanislavsky and Yoga illuminates a key element of Stanislavsky’s work that is often misunderstood and largely undocumented—one that will be of interest to scholars and practitioners alike.

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HOW TO READ A PLAY: SCRIPT ANALYSIS FOR DIRECTORS

By DAMON KIELY ROUTLEDGE, 2016; 204 pp. $46.95 PAPERBACK.

Damon Kiely’s How to Read a Play: Script Analysis for Directors offers thoughtful reflections and practical guidance for approaching a play as a director.

An invaluable resource for directors at all levels, the book artfully blends a history of dramatic analysis with contemporary practices to help directors find their own preferred methods for analyzing plays. Kiely goes beyond a step-by-step system of script analysis seen in some textbook models to offer readers a variety of techniques used by working directors, as well as exercises to help engage with plays according to their personal artistic desires and logistical constraints. While some script analysis texts assume a novice reader and provide standardized systems, Kiely’s more individualized, flexible approach will prove useful for both beginners and established professionals.

The book’s five chapters can be read separately or together, in any order. After a brief introductory chapter, “Lessons from the Past” profiles significant figures in the history of script analysis, from Aristotle to Harold Clurman, and covers important common elements of dramatic scripts in the Western tradition. Chapter Three, “Survey of Current Practices,” features stories from contemporary directors about approaches to script analysis that have both succeeded and failed. By including a diversity of stories from the field, Kiely highlights the malleability of analytic processes, encouraging directors to shape approaches that meet their needs.

A fourth chapter focuses on devised plays.

Through treatments of Antonin Artaud and Jerzy Grotowski, “Reading a Play Without a Script” offers important insights for any director engaging in devised theatre. Kiely explores unique analytical questions raised by working on such productions: Where does one begin, for instance? What does one analyze?

Kiely draws from interviews with six theatre companies who specialize in devised work and explores questions relevant not only for devised pieces, but also for written scripts.

The twenty-one exercises provided in the final “Workbook Chapter” offer analytic techniques for thinking about design, building character and relationships, working with dialogue, and other directorial tasks. Simple and easy to follow, the exercises can be used to either inspire new or deepen existing aspects of a director’s process.

While the profiles explored in “Lessons from the Past” provide a rich foundation for beginners, they may prove less useful for advanced directors. In “Survey of Current Practices,” Kiely offers examples extracted from interviews with forty working directors and moves with ease from covering independent research to the collaborative processes with designers and actors. Each anecdote highlights script analysis techniques that helped or hindered processes, including tips on how to grapple with challenging language, composing character histories, and performing collaborative analysis with designers. The directors share general practices and advice, as well as specific stories from actual productions.

In the “Workbook Chapter,” Kiely offers thought-provoking prompts for building the world of the play, analyzing and using space, and creating scene breakdowns. While advanced directors will find some of the exercises familiar, others are less well known.

This chapter will be particularly helpful for early career directors who may find script analysis overwhelming at first.

In How to Read a Play, Kiely aims to make script analysis a less daunting process for directors and to inspire individualized approaches. Kiely accomplishes both aims by offering readers a variety of exercises, techniques, and insightful stories. Seven appendices provide further examples of methods and tools, including scene breakdowns, character analyses, and scored scripts. Kiely includes documentation of his interviews, along with biographies of his interviewees. Though intended for directors, the book offers diverse approaches that will make it a valuable resource for anyone looking to expand their understanding of plays. True to its title, the book will be especially helpful for directors hoping to inspire and hone individual approaches to text analysis.

DENNIS SLOAN BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY

REMEMBERING BILL MARTIN BY

SUE LAWLESS

It’s difficult to pay tribute to a man, relatively unheralded, who was so gifted and eloquent because at heart he was softspoken and self-effacing. Dr. William G. Martin, Jr., was such a man, a special human being and a gifted director, a true life in the theatre with a resume that puts one in awe of his career achievements.

Few know that Bill was an early President of the fledgling SDC Foundation Board in the 1970s and ’80s and, in fact, could be considered one of the founding fathers, he spent so much time in its service. Because there was no space in the tiny office of the young Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers (SSDC) on the 26th floor in the old Paramount Building, he kept the files in a cabinet at home within easy reach for meetings there. Under his leadership, the small but energetic autonomous Board kept it going, organizing and promoting programs the Foundation still offers today.

Along with orchestrating the early George Abbott Awards, his most endearing achievement was the Joe A. Callaway Award for Excellent Work in the Art of Directing and Choreography. He was present in the meeting with Mr. Callaway when they crafted the award in 1987, and he continued to work on the Callaway Award Committee almost to the day he died.

WILLIAM “BILL” GEORGE MARTIN, JR.—director, playwright, teacher, and past president of SDC Foundation—died on November 16, 2017 at the age of 80.

Born and raised in Pueblo, CO, Martin served in the Navy before earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Bob Jones University in North Carolina and his doctorate in theatre history from the University of Wisconsin. He became a director after moving to New York in the early 1970s.

In 1974–75, Martin earned a Tony nomination for Best Musical and a Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Direction of a Musical for The Lieutenant. He went on to direct more than 200 productions of opera, musical theatre, and nonmusical theatre, including works with Eartha Kitt, Deborah Kerr, Frank Langella, Jerome Hines, Jason Alexander, and Dick Shawn.

Martin managed Applause Books in the early 2000s before moving on to the Drama Book Shop in 2007, where he was known for his expertise of the directing, children’s, and education sections as well as admired for his stories and historical knowledge.

Martin was extremely active in the SDC Foundation, serving as both a trustee for many years and as president from 1989 to 1991. He continued to serve on the Callaway Award Committee up to the time of his death.

Few knew that he joined the infant Union in 1975 as the director of Broadway’s The Lieutenant, for which he was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Best Director of a Musical. It was a rock opera based on the still-sore wound of the Vietnam War's My Lai incident. The production was critically praised and nominated for a Tony Award for Best Musical.

Few knew that he was a produced playwright. His most significant work was updating and adapting little-known operettas of John Philip Sousa. One of them, Désirée, was produced at the New York State Theater of Lincoln Center in the mid-’90s.

Few knew he had a Ph.D. in Fine Arts from the University of Michigan. His resume was filled with too many credits of professional directing, writing, acting, and personal coaching.

His favorite title was Professor, Adjunct Faculty, at such institutions as the University of Virginia, New York University, and especially the University of Illinois. He loved teaching.

In his later years, he found a perfect fit. Bringing his extraordinary knowledge and theatrical experience, he returned to his place as manager of the Drama Book Shop here in New York. He quickly became a mentor for his young staff and their aspirations. They adored him. The store was so important to him that when their right to marriage became legal, he and Tom Gustafson, his life partner of over 40 years, were wed there in the middle of theatrical history. Visit the store; ask for Bill’s Corner. If you want to find the treasures, tell them Bill sent you.

Yet the theatre will miss the treasure itself: Bill.

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Gemze de Lappe + Tommy Rall rehearse Juno with Agnes de Mille, 1959 PHOTO Photofest

GEMZE DE LAPPE, a dancer and choreographer noted for restaging the works of Agnes de Mille, died on November 11, 2017, at the age of 95.

REMEMBERING GEMZE DE LAPPE BY

DANNY PELZIG

As creators of theatre, we are storytellers, and Gemze de Lappe was first and foremost a storyteller. Like the preeminent storytellers of her era, Agnes de Mille and Jerome Robbins, she had a great instinct for how dancers could be fully human and inhabit a character on stage.

She came out of the tradition of ballet-based dancers of the 1940s, many of whom moved freely between the major ballet companies of the time and Broadway shows. The ballets of Robbins, de Mille, and Anthony Tudor were story-driven, and the dancers of Gemze’s generation needed to be both technically adept and capable of inhabiting character and expressing emotional realness. This was her theatrical imperative.

I intersected with Gemze at three points in my life. First, when we were both teaching musical theatre dance at a summer session at Smith College. Then again, when she cast me in an unrealized Broadway revival of Carousel. And finally, when we worked on different projects on the same program for Tulsa Ballet: Gemze, setting a suite of dances from Oklahoma! as a tribute to the Oklahoma centennial, and I, restaging a ballet initially created for Boston Ballet. Though we were of different generations, we were soulmates in how we saw the purpose of dancers and dance in the fabric of storytelling. We both saw gesture as an imperative in theatre dance and a strong ballet and contemporary technique as a core component of its expression. She would often focus on the detail and nuance of the gesture and make dancers repeat and adjust and repeat again until the true meaning of the gesture, and thus the character, was relayed. And though she could be impatient and at times a task master, she would also express delight and generosity when the work was right. When I would sit in her rehearsals, she would readily ask for my thoughts and opinions and see if I had ideas that would help create transitions between the dance sequences. She was open, collegial, funny, and smart, and she had all the material in her head, which thoroughly amazed me. Although she was a choreographer in her own right, she was more widely known as a stager of the works of de Mille, notably Oklahoma! and Carousel.

We will miss her craft, her strength, her integrity, her honor, her commitment, her spunk, her joy, and her belief in the power and humanity of theatre. We will miss that she was a true bridge from generations past to generations present, and yes, generations future. We will miss her.

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Born in Portsmouth, VA, de Lappe originally trained with Irma Duncan and Michel Fokine, beginning her career in Fokine’s company. Her long career as a dancer included engagements with the Agnes de Mille Dance Theatre and the American Ballet Theatre, and she danced the role of Laurey in the original West End production and first national companies of Oklahoma!. She also appeared in the original productions of The King and I and Paint Your Wagon on Broadway.

De Lappe’s work as a choreographer focused on reconstructing and recreating the work of de Mille, Isadora Duncan, and Jerome Robbins. She traveled the country recreating the original choreography for The King and I, Oklahoma!, Brigadoon, and Carousel for numerous professional, educational, and regional theatre companies. Her Broadway credits include restaging de Mille’s choreography for the 1979 revival of Oklahoma! and creating original choreography for Abe Lincoln in Illinois.

De Lappe was also a renowned instructor. She was a professor of dance at Smith College and received an honorary doctorate from Niagara University.

In 2007, de Lappe was awarded the Tony Honors for Excellence in Theatre. She remained active as a choreographer and teacher up to the time of her death.

THE SOCIETY PAGES SDC MEMBERS @ WORK + PLAY

More than 65 Members and Associates attended the SDC Annual Membership Meeting, held on November 13, 2017, at Theatrical Wardrobe Union (TWU) Local 764, IATSE. At the meeting, SDC President Pam MacKinnon reported on the state of the Union, which included a discussion of the revised rights and responsibilities and new work rule addressing issues of sexual harassment; Director of Contract Affairs Randy Anderson reported on recent arbitrations, contract enforcement, and the advancement in coverage for developmental work; Treasurer Michael Wilson and Executive Director Laura Penn gave a comprehensive presentation on the current financial position of the Union; and Evan Yionoulis, Chair of the By-laws Committee, presented a proposed by-law amendment to add two Vice Presidents to the Executive Committee, which was voted yes by the Membership. After election results were announced, MacKinnon presented Robert Moss with the President’s Award for Extraordinary Service.

“Every board table needs a Bob Moss,” she remarked. “His vision for the American theatre, for off-Broadway theatre, for SDC, remains unparalleled.”

LEFT

Bartlett Sher + Leigh Silverman RIGHT

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A Chicago Member Meeting was held January 7, 2018, at the Goodman Theatre, hosted by Henry Wishcamper, Member of the Regional Presence Committee. Laura Penn and Executive Board Member Lonny Price managed to make it despite the “bomb cyclone,” one of this winter’s many storms.

LEFT

William Brown, Gary Griffin + Jess Hutchinson

On January 10, 2018, undergraduate students from Columbia College Chicago visited SDC and talked with the staff to learn about working as directors and choreographers. The visit was organized by Associate Professor and coordinator of the Columbia College directing program Susan Padveen.

ABOVE Rylee Freeman, Sophia Vitello, Hannah Siglin, Matt Masino, Madison Kessilring, Michael Moynihan, Spencer Kalsen + Susan Padveen

Executive Director Laura Penn met with fellows of the Theatrical Workforce Development Program (TWDP) on January 24, 2018, to talk with them about what directors do and the production process of a new play. The free, three-year program is a new initiative that trains and places young adults in professional technical theatre careers and is offered by the Roundabout Theatre in partnership with the International Association of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and the youth development not-for-profit The Door, with generous support from the Mayor’s Office.

LEFT

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Laura Penn + TWDP Fellows

SDC and a bevy of SDC Members curated five panels at the third annual BroadwayCon, held at New York City’s Javits Center from January 26 to 28, 2018. SDC sessions included “Dancing Through Life: The Transition from Dancer to Choreographer” and “What Does a Director Do?” TOP Mark Brokaw, Gina Rattan, Tina Landau, Kenneth Ferrone, Jack O’Brien + Matt Lenz LEFT Paloma Garcia-Lee, Sam Pinkleton, Ann Yee, Leigh Scheps, Leah Hoffman + Mayte Natalio

Kathleen Marshall, Ed Sylvanus Iskandar + Moritz von Stuelpnagel

BELOW LEFT

BELOW RIGHT

Sergio Trujillo + JoAnn M. Hunter

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An SDC Foundation Artistic Leadership Group session brought together 25 Members and Associates at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center in Los Angeles on January 27, 2018, to discuss the idea of “scaling up,� or how directors move from a career in smaller companies to a larger institution or grow their own company.

The following day, strong leadership by the Los Angeles Steering Committee helped turn out 35 Members and Associate Members for a Los Angeles Member Meeting at the Theatre at Boston Court in Pasadena.

ABOVE RIGHT

Jessica Kubzansky, Cathy Linder + Andrew Barnicle

LEFT Gregg

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Brevoort, Elina de Santos + Casey Stangl

The Ovation Awards, presented annually by the LA STAGE Alliance to recognize the best in Los Angeles-area theatre, were held January 29, 2018, at The Ace Hotel in L.A. The awards for directing and choreography all went to SDC Members: Thomas James O’Leary (Best Direction of a Play, 33 Variations at Actors Co-Op), Nancy Keystone (Best Direction of a Musical, Next to Normal, East West Players), and Paul McGill (Best Choreography, The Legend of Georgia McBride, Geffen Playhouse). SDC President Pam MacKinnon and SDCF President Sheldon Epps were on hand to present the directing awards.

TOP LEFT TOP RIGHT

Nancy Keystone

Pam MacKinnon + Sheldon Epps LEFT

PHOTOS

Benny Sato Ambush

Paul McGill

Capture Imaging Photography

Maria Mileaf

At the 2018 Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF) Region 1 Festival, held from January 30 to February 4, Benny Sato Ambush and Maria Mileaf served as responders for students competing in the SDC Directors Program. KCACTF regional festivals showcase the finest of each region’s entered productions for the year and offer a variety of activities, including workshops, symposia, and regional-level award programs.

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On February 5, 2018, at SDC, SDCF Executive Director David Roberts sat down with Liesl Tommy and Stephanie Ybarra for a Oneon-One Conversation titled “The More Things Change: Shifting the Narrative on Who Gets to Lead.� Hosted by SDCF and the Dramatists Guild of America, the discussion focused on the intersections of women, people of color, and leadership in American theatre during the current sea change in artistic leadership posts across the United States.

ABOVE

Stephanie Ybarra, Liesl Tommy + David Roberts

Philadelphia Members gathered with Northeast Regional Representative Melia Bensussen at the Wilma Theater on February 26, 2018, for a Philadelphia Member Meeting, where they learned about updates on Union business and initiatives and had a chance to meet and mingle with other local Members.

Blanka Zizka, Jill Harrison, Marisa Levy, Maegan Morris, Melia Bensussen, Bill Fennelly, Paige Price + Sarah Scafidi

BELOW

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ACT – A CONTEMPORARY THEATRE FOUNDER GREGORY A. FALLS 1922–1997 Gregory Falls, a founder of ACT – A Contemporary Theatre and former chair of the University of Washington (UW) School of Drama, was instrumental in creating Seattle’s vibrant theatre scene, starting in the 1960s.

A Fulbright Scholar, Falls settled in Seattle in 1961 to head up the UW School of Drama, where he founded the Professional Actor Training Program and the school’s doctoral program. Under his leadership, the UW drama school became one of the best in the nation.

With his wife, Jean Burch Falls, in 1965 Falls founded one of Seattle’s mainstays, ACT, because he believed Seattle needed a theatre that would reflect the cultural ferment of the 1960s. ACT drew loyal audiences, producing plays by Arthur Kopit, Tom Stoppard, David Mamet, Sam Shepard, and other contemporary playwrights while also staging classics and mainstream shows. In 1976, the theatre inaugurated an annual

Seattle holiday tradition with Falls’ own adaptation of A Christmas Carol, which has continued every season since.

Falls remained ACT’s Artistic Director for 23 years until his retirement in 1987. His influence extended beyond UW and ACT; he played an important role in helping other Seattle theatres get their start, including the Empty Space and Intiman.

Falls earned numerous awards for his work in the theatre. A former president of the National Theater Conference and Washington Association of Theater Artists, Falls was inducted into the prestigious College of Fellows of the American Theatre in 1994. Theatre Puget Sound’s annual celebration of excellence in Seattle theatre, the Gregory Awards, are named in Falls’ honor.

“

If theatre reflects the many ideas and attitudes of its time, then it serves an important and dynamic cultural function.

” Gregory Falls (foreground) at the University of Washington Playhouse Theatre with actors Lori Larsen, John (Johnny) Kaufman + John Aylward PHOTO c/o Shelley Schermer

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SDC MEMBERS + ASSOCIATES continued...Stephen Stout • Kate St-Pierre Joanna C Strange • John Strasberg • David Strickland Guy Stroman • Susan Stroman • Mark Stuart Eckstein Seema Sueko • Caitlin Sullivan • Colleen Sullivan David E. Sullivan • J R Sullivan • Shea Sullivan 321 W. 44TH STREET | STE 804 | NY, NY | 10036 Daniel Sullivan • Jenny Sullivan • Fred Sullivan Jr. Sarah Cameron Sunde • Carol Sundquist • Sonita Surratt Michael Susko • Scott Susong • Mark Sutch Melanie Sutherland • Leslie Swackhamer • Elizabeth Swain Charles Swan • David P. Swan • Kate Swan Michael Swanson • Nick Sweet • Cheryl L. Swift Ted Swindley • Norah Swiney • Mel Swope Marlene T. Taber • Anthony Taccone • Rebecca Taichman Paul Takacs • Linda Talcott Lee • Tony Tambasco Peggy Taphorn • Dana Tarantino • John Tartaglia Chris Tashima • Ashley Tata • Jason Paul Tate Lars Tatom • Michelle Tattenbaum • Richard Tatum Gregory Taubman • Sonya Tayeh • Michelle C. Taylor Regina Taylor • Lynne Taylor-Corbett • Danya Taymor Julie Taymor • Roland Tec • Teller • Paul James Tenaglia Susan Tenney • Laura Tesman • Chelsea Thaler Twyla Tharp • Ginger Thatcher • Jessica Thebus • Bill Theisen • Eric Thibodeaux-Thompson • Missy Thibodeaux-Thompson • Cynthia Thole • Laurie Thomas Sheriden E. Thomas • David Thome • Jenn Thompson • Kent Thompson • Scott Thompson • Tazewell Thompson • NaTasha R. Thompson • Lynn M. Thomson Steven E. Thornburg • Joan Vail Thorne • Ryder Thornton • Myles Thoroughgood • Tim Threlfall • Julia Thudium • Lucie Tiberghien • Michael S. Tick • John Tiffany Jana Tift • John Tillinger • Alex Timbers • Becky Timms • Awoye Timpo • Eric Ting • Alex Tobey • Lawrence Tobias • Kelly Todd • Liesl Tommy • Susan Toni Daniella Topol • Lori Craig Torok • Matthew Kaylor Toronto • Edward Torres • Maria Mercedes Torres • Jacob Toth • Charles Towers • Anne Towns • Randee Trabitz David Trainer • Sal Trapani • Joseph Travers • Chloe Treat • Leta Tremblay • Kara Tremel • Darko Tresnjak • Russell L. Treyz • Tom Troupe • Timothy X Troy Dmitry Troyanovsky • Matt Trucano • Sergio Trujillo • Evan Tsitsias • Shaun Patrick Tubbs • Susana Tubert • Stanley Tucci • Eric Tucker • Marc Tumminelli Tommy Tune • Jennifer Turey • Jake Turner • Lyndsey Turner • Amiee Turner • Kathleen Turner • Andrew Turteltaub • John Turturro • John Tyson • Psalmayene 24 Amy Uhl • Steve Umberger • Jane Unger • Michael Unger • Shari Upbin • Gaye Taylor Upchurch • Francesca Ursone • Elaine Vaan Hogue • Katjana Vadeboncoeur Kara Lynn Vaeni • Mark Valdez • Kinan Valdez • Julie Valentine • Ansley Valentine • Shane D. Valenzi • Jose L. Valenzuela • Tara Jeanne Vallee • James Valletti Eric van Baars • Elizabeth van den Berg • Jan-Willem H. Van Den Bosch • Molly M. Van der Molen • Elizabeth Van Dyke • Diana Van Fossen • Kristen van Ginhoven Ivo Van Hove • Anthony V. Van Laast • Kathryn Van Meter • Margaret Van Sant • Candace Vance • Gerald vanHeerden • Ovi Vargas • Patrick A. Varon Daniela Varon • Doug Varone • James Vasquez • Patrick Vassel • Kimberly Vaughn • David F. M. Vaughn • Dona D. Vaughn • Kevin Vavasseur • Christie Vela Frank Ventura • James Vesce • Tony Vezner • Susan Vick • Birgitta Victorson • Scott Viets • Natalie Villamonte Zito • Ludovica Villar-Hauser • Takonkiet Viravan William A. Virchis • Sam Viverito • Heidi Winters Vogel • Andrew Volkoff • Moritz von Stuelpnagel • Dina Vovsi • John Vreeke • Dr. Robert J. Vrtis • Alan Wade Stephen Wadsworth • Nela Wagman • James Wagoner • Alexandria Wailes • Michael Wainstein • Josh Walden • Jennifer Waldman • Mark L. Waldrop Cody Walker • Daisy Walker • Mia Walker • Michael Thomas Walker • Adin Walker • Chet Walker • Matt Walker • Bonnie Walker • M. Burke Walker • Jeff Wallach Carl N. Wallnau • Patrick Walsh • Robert Walsh • James Walski • Tony Walton • David Wanstreet • Matthew Warchus • Kirby Ward • Jonathan Warman Katharine J. Warner • Sturgis Warner • Dr. Brian J. Warren • David Warren • Jonathan Warren • Thom Warren • James Warwick • Tamiko Washington Ajene D. Washington • Ashlee Wasmund • Elliot Wasserman • Bryna Wasserman • Robert Waterhouse • Les Waters • Joshua Waterstone • Brad Watkins Cameron Watson • Maria Watson • Nicole A. Watson • Susan H. Watts • Allison M. Weakland • Jim Weaver • Peter Webb • Jennifer Weber • Tommy Wedge Catherine Weidner • Kim Weild • Claudia Weill • Scott Weinstein • Tara Weintraub • Gabriel Vega Weissman • Emily N. Wells • Ashley Wells • Mark Wenderlich Emma Rosa Went • Scott Wentworth • Jennifer Werner Cannizzaro • Donald C. Wesley • Ben West • Janeve West • Jessica Phelps West • Matt West • Ron West Dawn A. Westbrook • L. Robert Westeen • Robert Westenberg • Robert Westley • Spencer Whale • Christopher Wheeldon • Gemma Whelan • DeLisa White Sullivan C. White • Blake White • Cynthia White • Randy White • Richard E. T. White • Lillian W. White • George C. White • Robert Whiteman • Debra Whitfield Jeff Whiting • Lewis Whitlock • Kate Whoriskey • Patrick Wickham • Kevin Wiczer • Lauren Widner • Matthew Wiener • Patricia Wilcox • Alec Wild • Ed Wilhelms Lewis Wilkenfeld • Martin Damien Wilkins • W. David Wilkins • Lee A. Wilkins • Talvin Wilks • Bob Willenbrink • Andrew Williams • Cezar Williams Michael T. Williams • Dawn Monique Williams • Arthur R. Williams • LA Williams • Debbie Williams • Jaye Austin Williams • Matt Williams • Maxwell Williams Schele Williams • Cliff Williams III • Elizabeth Williamson • Laird Williamson • Steven Williford • Susan Willis • Walter Willison • Andrew Willis-Woodward Dustin H. Wills • Misti B. Wills • Michael MacKenzie Wills • Amile Clark Wilson • Timothy Wilson • Jonathan C Wilson • Matthew R. Wilson • Michael R. Wilson Cole Wimpee • Christopher Windom • Jen Wineman • Daniel Winerman • Halo Wines • Mark Wing-Davey • Grechen Lynne Wingerter • David Winitsky Val Winkelman • Ted Wioncek III • Scott Wise • Victor Wisehart • Henry Wishcamper • Jill Wisoff • Molly Wissinger • Michael L. Witkes • Robin Witt • Steve Witting Scott Wittman • Stan Wojewodski, Jr. • Tom Wojtunik • Thomas Woldt • Hannah Wolf • Marissa Wolf • Matt Wolfe • George C. Wolfe • Becca Wolff Deborah Wolfson • Curt Wollan • Jean Wolski • Jenn Womack • Caroline Wood • Eric Woodall • Lori Woodall-Schaufler • Tamilla Woodard • Jeffrey Woodbridge Robert Woodruff • Chris Woodworth • Laurie Woolery • Steven Woolf • David B. Woolley • Henry Woronicz • Jenna Worsham • Bryna M. Wortman Stephen Wrentmore • Meredith R. Wright • Doug Wright • Michael C. Wright • R. Hamilton Wright • Sidney Erik Wright • Diana Wyenn • Samantha K. Wyer Bello Stephen J. Wyman • Luke B. Yankee • Michelle Yaroshko • Gary Yates • Marlies Yearby • Ann Yee • JoAnn Yeoman • Chay Yew • Evan D. Yionoulis • Desiree York Courtney Young • Wesley Young • Keith Young • Pirronne Yousefzadeh • Daniel Yurgaitis • Dennis Zacek • James Zager • Adam Zahler • David G. Zak • Jerry Zaks Francesca Zambello • Greg Zane • Matt ZanFagna • Judy LB Zanin • Manuel Zarate • Melissa Zaremba • Janet Zarish • Peter Zazzali • Abigail Zealey Bess Franco Zeffirelli • Anthony Zerbe • ZJ Zhang • Scott Zigler • Christie Zimmerman • Kent Zimmerman • Mary A. Zimmerman • Jeff W. Zinn • Joanne Zipay David Zippel • Blanka Zizka • Steve E. Zuckerman • Ernest Zulia • Daniel E. Zuzalek • Joel Zwick • Jules L. Aaron • Cassie Abate • Charles Abbott • Hisham Abdel Khalek Braden Abraham • Ernest Abuba • Valerie Accetta • Robert Allan Ackerman • Arthur Adair • Abigail Adams • Dean Adams • Hilary S. Adams • Lori J. Adams Warren Adams • Jerry Adler • May Adrales • Suzanne Agins • Corey N. Agnew • Julio Agustin • Sherrie Ahlin • Kaiser Z. Ahmed • Maria Aitken • JoAnne Akalaitis Tea Alagic • Lava Alapai • Kenneth Albers • Rachel Alderman • Jeremy Aldridge • Adrian Alexander Alea • Bryce Russell Alexander • Jace Alexander Jason Alexander • Kate Alexander • Saheem Ali • Christopher M. Alleman • Barbara J. Allen • Timothy J. Allen • Brian P. Allen • Debbie Allen • Janet Allen Woody Allen • Stacy Alley • Jack Allison • Michael T. Allosso • Geoffrey Alm • David Alpert • Tom Alsip • Jeremy Aluma • Kikau Alvaro • Richard Amaro Stephen Amato • Benny Sato Ambush • Justin Amellio • Don Amendolia • Peter H. Amster • Nuo An • Kyle Ancowitz • Carl B. Anderson • Christopher J. Anderson Rick D. Anderson • Aaron D. Anderson • Jane Anderson • Melissa Rain Anderson • Pablo Andrade • Andrea T. Andresakis • Rosemary K. Andress • Carl Andress Keith Andrews • Julie Andrews • Bob Angelini • Paul Angelo • Darin Anthony • Frank Anzalone • Rebecca Aparicio • Libby E. Appel • Michael Arabian Jonathan A. Arak • Elena Araoz • Matthew Arbour • Arin Arbus • Loy Arcenas • Michael Arden • Kate Arecchi • Rommel Arellan-Marinas • Julie Arenal Stafford Arima • Alan W. Arkin • Carlos P. Armesto • Robert Armin • David S. Armstrong • David Glenn Armstrong • Mark Armstrong • Denis Arndt • Randall Arney Michael Arnold • Heather Arnson • Alexandra Aron • Joelle Re Arp-Dunham • Marlene H. Ascherman • Joel Asher • Rob Ashford • Izumi Ashizawa Christopher Ashley • Peter D. Askin • Michele Assaf • Melissa Attebery • David Auburn • Matt August • Daniel Aukin • Nathan Autrey • Bob Avian • Nicholas C Avila Alan Ayckbourn • Garrett Ayers • Karen Azenberg • Akin Babatunde • Kevin Backstrom • Mark Baer • Adriana Baer • Vernel M. Bagneris • David R. Bahgat Alan Bailey • Chris Bailey • Cliff Fannin Baker • Keith Baker • Bob Balaban • Michael Balderrama • Elizabeth Baldi Constabile • Nell Bang-Jensen • Jonathan Bank Daniel Banks • Martha Banta • Jon Baptiste • SuzAnne Barabas • Michael Barakiva • Sherri Eden Barber • Kelli Barclay • Hillary Sea Bard • Lynnette Barkley Michael Barnard • Ben Barnes • Paul M. Barnes • Andrew E. Barnicle • Debra Baron • Michael Baron • Drew Barr • Gabriel Barre • Ellie Potts Barrett • Marco Barricelli Seth Barrish • Rob L. Barron • Rob Barron • Joe Barros • Robert Bartley • Terry J. Barto • Christopher Basile • Jacob Basri • Judy Ann Bassing • Kathy Bates Gleason Bauer • Jennifer Elizabeth Bauer-Lyons • Jessica Bauman • Ronald P. Baumanis • Michael Baxter • Keith Baxter • Cheryl Baxter • Christopher Bayes Sammy D. Bayes • Roger Bean • Amanda Bearse • Kurt Beattie • Steve Bebout • Carol Becker • Ilana Becker • Willard Beckham • Eliza Beckwith • Megan Behm Andrei Belgrader • Craig Belknap • Ian Belknap • Mark Bell • David H. Bell • Lou Bellamy • Alexandra Beller • Elizabeth Bell-Haynes • Christopher L. Bellis Michael Bello • Hannah Grace Bellows • Ian A. Belton • Jen Bender • Vivienne Benesch • Peter Bennett • David Bennett • Jenny Bennett • Tim Bennett • Sarah Benson Martin Benson • Melia Bensussen • Robyn Berg • Joshua Bergasse • Marina J. Bergenstock • Jesse Berger • Evan Bergman • Allison Bergman- Evans • Jay Berkow...