SDC Journal Spring 2020

SPRING 2020

DANIEL FISH + DONALD BYRD INTEREST IN EXTREMES

MIXED SWIMMING Jackson Gay

JOYFUL HELL

Niegel Smith + Taylor Mac

WORKING FROM COURAGE Steve Cosson

CULTURE WARS

OFFICERS

Evan Yionoulis PRESIDENT

John Rando EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

Michael John Garcés FIRST VICE PRESIDENT

Michael Wilson TREASURER

Melia Bensussen SECRETARY

Seret Scott SECOND VICE PRESIDENT

Leigh Silverman THIRD VICE PRESIDENT

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Laura Penn COUNSEL

Ronald H. Shechtmann HONORARY ADVISORY COMMITTEE

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

SDC EXECUTIVE BOARD

SDC JOURNAL

MEMBERS OF BOARD

MANAGING EDITOR

SPRING 2020 CONTRIBUTORS

Kate Chisholm

Braden Abraham

Saheem Ali Christopher Ashley Anne Bogart Jo Bonney Mark Brokaw Rachel Chavkin Desdemona Chiang Liz Diamond Sheldon Epps Lydia Fort Leah C. Gardiner Liza Gennaro Joseph Haj Linda Hartzell Anne Kauffman Dan Knechtges Mark Lamos Kathleen Marshall Pam MacKinnon D. Lynn Meyers Lisa Portes Lonny Price Ruben Santiago-Hudson­ Bartlett Sher Casey Stangl Seema Sueko Eric Ting

DIRECTOR

FEATURES EDITOR

Elizabeth Bennett GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Adam Hitt

Omar Abusaada DIRECTOR + PLAYWRIGHT

Lou Bellamy DIRECTOR

EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Elizabeth Bennett

Jo Bonney Sheldon Epps Liza Gennaro Ann M. Shanahan Leigh Silverman Evan Yionoulis

DRAMATURG

Mark Brokaw DIRECTOR

Donald Byrd CHOREOGRAPHER

Ty Defoe DIRECTOR + CHOREOGRAPHER

SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION EDITORIAL BOARD SDCJ-PRS CO-EDITORS

Emily A. Rollie Ann M. Shanahan SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Kathleen M. McGeever SDCJ-PRS ASSOCIATE BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Ruth Pe Palileo SDCJ-PRS SENIOR ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Anne Bogart Anne Fliotsos Joan Herrington James Peck SDCJ-PRS PEER REVIEWERS

David Esbjornson DIRECTOR

Rolin Jones PLAYWRIGHT

Taylor Mac DIRECTOR + ACTOR + PLAYWRIGHT

Laura Penn SDC EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Marya Sea Kaminski DIRECTOR

SPRING 2020 SDCJ-PRS CONTRIBUTORS

Joelle Re’ Arp-Dunham RADFORD UNIVERSITY

Omiyẹmi (Artisia Green) WILLIAM & MARY

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

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 © 2020 Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. All rights reserved. SDC JOURNAL is a registered trademark of SDC. SUBSCRIPTIONS + ADVERTISEMENTS Call 212.391.1070 or visit www.SDCweb.org.

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SDC JOURNAL | SPRING 2020

SPRING CONTENTS Volume 8 | No. 2

FEATURES 6 FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Culture Wars and the Transfer of Influence BY

LAURA PENN ELIZABETH BENNETT

CHRONOLOGY BY

19 Mixed Swimming

AN INTERVIEW WITH JACKSON GAY BY

ROLIN JONES

COVER 27

Interest in Extremes DANIEL FISH IN CONVERSATION WITH DONALD BYRD

34 Raising a Joyful Hell NIEGEL SMITH IN CONVERSATION WITH TAYLOR MAC

41 Working from a Place of Courage

STEVE COSSON REVISITS THE GREAT IMMENSITY INTERVIEW BY

44

ELIZABETH BENNETT

PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

Aesthetics of Ọya in Reading, Casting, and Staging Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour BY

OMIYE.MI (ARTISIA GREEN)

Daniel Fish + Donald Byrd PHOTO Francis Hills Photography COVER

Aimé Donna Kelly + Kamal Angelo Bolden in Father Comes Home from the Wars at the Goodman Theatre, directed by Niegel Smith PHOTO Liz Lauren SPRING 2020 | SDC JOURNAL

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5

FROM THE PRESIDENT

BY EVAN YIONOULIS

11

Why I Made That Choice

BROKAW

15

Step Forward

BY TY

DEFOE

20 Questions WITH

51

The 2019 SDC Foundation Awards Y REBECCA HEWETT B

Portland Member Meeting Chicago Member Meeting Annual Membership Meeting

The Zelda Fichandler Award Acceptance Remarks

BY MARCELA LORCA

The Gordon Davidson Award Acceptance Remarks

BY LISA PETERSON

59

IN MEMORIAM

Remembering Marion McClinton

BY LOU

60

THE SOCIETY PAGES

Jerry Zaks at Mrs. Doubtfire Rehearsal Los Angeles Happy Hour Staging Intimacy Symposium Holiday Open House Political Engagement Committee Meeting 2019 National Directors Fellows Boston Night Out

BELLAMY

Appalachian State University Visit

OMAR ABUSAADA

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW

ew Directions in Teaching N Theatre Arts ANNE FLIOTSOS + GAIL S. MEDFORD REVIEW BY JOELLE RÉ ARP-DUNHAM EDITED BY

ABRAHAM + MARYA SEA KAMINSKI

BY MARK

17

Boston Member Meeting + Panel

SDC FOUNDATION

IN YOUR WORDS

What I Learned...

BY DAVID ESBJORNSON, BRADEN

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53

Ovation Awards Toast

San Diego Happy Hour

BroadwayCon

Philadelphia Stage Combat Workshop

Los Angeles Member Meeting

Broadway Salutes

Seattle Member Meeting Washington DC Member Night Out Portland Member Breakfast Next Stage Convening

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Ariana Venturi, Bryan Fenkart, James Barry, Keira Naughton + James Lloyd Reynolds in These Paper Bullets! at Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Jackson Gay PHOTO Joan Marcus

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SDC JOURNAL | SPRING 2020

SDC LEGACY

Vinnette Carroll

FROM THE

PRESIDENT This is my first letter as SDC Executive Board President. It’s a great honor to be following in Pam MacKinnon’s estimable footprints and to work with my fellow Board Members, Executive Director Laura Penn, and the extraordinary SDC staff to ensure that, as we enter a new decade, we build on the important work of the past few years with purpose and commitment.

Our Union is strong, national, and poised for even more growth and impact on the field. There are many opportunities on the horizon, and, of course, many challenges.

In our recent negotiations, we made significant advances in ensuring that our Members are compensated fairly and that our pension and health funds remain strong. We made tremendous strides in choreographer compensation on Broadway and advanced the coverage for fight choreographers in LORT, ANTC, and Off-Broadway.

We continued to solidify recognition for new play development activity—from day one of work with actors—in jurisdictions large and small. Going forward, we are determined to secure recognition for Broadway associate/resident directors and choreographers, ensuring they get all the protections under a collectively bargained agreement, including pension and health, that they deserve.

These things are concrete and important. As we look at the changing landscape of the field, we are also looking at the less tangible ways in which we as a Union must serve our Membership.

Before I joined the Board, I was an at-large Member of the Education Committee, led by Joe Calarco and Pamela Berlin. This was in the final days of the drafting of our Rights and Responsibilities, the first of which are: We have the right to own our direction and choreography.

We have the responsibility to create original direction and choreography or to secure permission to replicate the direction and choreography of others.

Our agreements with employers explicitly state that we own our direction and choreography. However, we find that we need to do even more work to educate the field about what exactly it is that directors and choreographers do. And, perhaps surprisingly, we need to remind our own Members, as well as aspiring directors and choreographers, about their obligation to do their own work, especially in an age when bootleg videos of original productions are easily accessed online and increase the danger of intentional and unintentional replication.

The Executive Board considers our Rights and Responsibilities a living document. As Pam reported in the Winter 2020 Journal, we recently expanded their scope to more explicitly address workplace conduct. We have also rightly sought to reexamine our standards for Board service, seeking to codify ethical practices and avoid potential conflicts of interest.

Directors and choreographers are leaders in the room. SDC wants to ensure that its Members work in safe and equitable workplaces themselves and that they create the conditions in rehearsal halls and theatres that allow actors, designers, and other collaborators to be free to do their best work. It is vital that we as directors and choreographers are in fact part of the solution to workplace issues, and that we work to be viewed as such.

It’s an exciting time to be working in the theatre, a time when voices that have not been heard and stories that have not been told are being brought to the stage. SDC is committed to fostering diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplaces and to celebrating and supporting diversity in all its forms. We seek to address the needs of those who direct and choreograph on Broadway, as well as of those who work in smaller, yet-to-be-organized venues. We work conscientiously to consider not only those in the prime of their careers but also those struggling to find work and those just starting out.

This issue of the Journal examines a time when rights to freedom of expression in the theatre were threatened in this country. I hope you find the story of these artists who unapologetically pursued their artistic vision as inspiring as we have.

Just as these brave individuals did 30 years ago, our Union has fought for its Members’ rights and persevered. It has also sought to follow through on its responsibilities.

I know the strategic thinking, determination, patience, and, yes, courage it has taken to achieve all that we have so far, from the first days of SDC (so beautifully chronicled in the Winter 2020 Journal) to our current efforts. And I know that it will take strategic thinking, determination, patience, and courage to carry out our upcoming agenda.

I look forward to working for and with you into the new decade.

In Solidarity,

Evan Yionoulis Executive Board President SPRING 2020 | SDC JOURNAL

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FROM THE

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR PHOTO

Hervé Hôte

CULTURE WARS BY

LAURA PENN

Fall 1997, well past midnight: I was sitting with my fellow members of the Theater panel in the National Endowment for the Arts offices at the Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. We were reviewing applications submitted to the federal government’s agency that funds the arts nationwide. The heat wasn’t working— or maybe a government shutdown was responsible for the chill that hovered over us.

We had been there all week. It seemed we might never leave.

Those of us who had been friends and colleagues developed deeper bonds as we forged meaningful relationships with those we had only met a few days earlier.

Frustration and confusion were mixed with dismay at the brilliance of the applicant pool in comparison to the meager dollars available to distribute. Theater Program Director Gigi Bolt and her staff deftly guided us as we attempted to understand the new “Creation and Presentation” category; the structure seemed cumbersome.

Rumor of our struggles had made their way to the chair’s office: Jane Alexander— who had been appointed by President Bill Clinton—appeared after hours for a visit. She offered gratitude for our service and words of encouragement to help us carry on, not only during that panel but to continue the good fight in the theatre communities where we did our daily work. We were all a little starryeyed and insisted on a photo.

Once upon a time, we supported artists for their potential or where their body of work might next take us. But no longer.

Organizations were no longer able to apply for general operating support: they were required to present a project. Artists were now only a component of grants subdivided into category titles such as “Heritage and Preservation” and “Creation and Presentation.”

Applications were now submitted by

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SDC JOURNAL | SPRING 2020

AND THE TRANSFER OF INFLUENCE

organizations. As panelists, we were instructed to focus on the value of the project before us and the applicant organization’s capacity to fulfill that project. A company unable to articulate fully a specific level of detail on that project might be set aside.

Earlier in the decade, the political far right, the Christian Coalition, the fallout from the NEA Four, Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ photograph, and the Mapplethorpe exhibit had taught us about censorship. So, on that fall night in 1997, my fellow panelists and I wondered how many of the grants before us were the result of a different kind of censorship: self-censorship.

Were theatres applying for projects that they felt would not offend? How many of us were unconsciously gravitating toward a safe path to funding? Now we could do it to ourselves, to save ourselves.

To paraphrase David Byrne: Well, how did we get here?

In 1987, a $75,000 NEA grant supported the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Arts (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, NC, for the seventh year of AVA (Awards in the Visual Arts). This was a traveling exhibition featuring the work of 10 artists, including Andres Serrano. AVA-7 opened in Los Angeles in the spring of 1988 and included Serrano’s Piss Christ, depicting a urine-submerged crucifix.

Also in 1988, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Pennsylvania received $30,000 from the NEA for The Perfect Moment, a retrospective of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work in black and white captured intimacy, strength, and vulnerability in male and female nudes and invoked classical Greek lines of beauty in still lifes. But his work provoked controversy as well. A group of works that would come to be known as the “X Portfolio” depicted “deviant”

behavior, such as gay BDSM and urophagia.

Mapplethorpe died of AIDS in March 1989, just four months after The Perfect Moment opened in Philadelphia.

By the spring of 1989, a virulent new form of family values was taking hold. The American Family Association, the Christian right, Jesse Helms, Alfonse D’Amato, and 22 senators demanded a review of the NEA’s grants. In July, Senator Helms had inserted language now known as the “decency clause” into the bill reauthorizing the agency. It stated that the NEA could not use funds to support any work that was deemed obscene or indecent.

Even so, Piss Christ and Mapplethorpe didn’t appear to be enough to bring down the agency; the Senate reauthorized the NEA with no reduction in funding, although it did allocate $250,000 for an independent commission to study the agency’s grantmaking.

On June 29, 1990, John Frohnmayer— appointed NEA Chair by President George H.W. Bush—announced that he had confirmed consent from the National Council on the Arts to withdraw grants to individual artists Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller. These were performance artists whose work explored sexuality and identity; they were brazen, visceral, naked, and angry, without compromise. They provoked.

These fearless artists would appeal Frohnmayer’s decision, challenging the grant rejections as illegal and claiming the decision was based on political standards rather than artistic excellence. From that moment forward, Finley, Fleck, Hughes, and Miller would become known as the NEA Four.

Performance artists were easy prey for the conservative right, the Christian Coalition, and the censors. Working in the underground scene or performance art world, many solo artists had latitude and could often be found

exploring themes of LGBTQ identity and communities, sexuality and the human body, and the objectification of women. These four artists became the lightning rods for what had begun with the NEA’s grant for AVA-7.

The decency clause was taking hold. Going forward, the clause insisted that the NEA must consider not just artistic merit but “general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs of the American public.”

In other words, the NEA could deny funding based on the subject matter alone.

As theatre artists and administrators, we were outraged, confused, righteous—and in need of the precious funding provided by the NEA. As grant recipients, if we accepted funding, we were accepting the conditions of the decency clause. Joseph Papp famously rejected funding for The Public Theater, while managers, artistic directors, and boards across the country wrestled with what to do. Many (maybe most) accepted the new mandate. Some sorted through the options and felt they had to comply despite their objections. Others felt they could do more good with the grant than without it. And some felt the work of their theatres actually aligned with general standards of decency within their communities.

The NEA Four won an out-of-court settlement in 1993 that awarded them amounts equal to the grants they were to receive. In late 1997, they filed suit in federal court to litigate the decency clause. Ruling in the 1998 case NEA vs. Finley, the Supreme Court upheld the decency clause even while declaring that the language was “advisory,” meaningless, and

did not interfere with First Amendment rights.

Although the courts ruled the clause had no real teeth, it was here to stay.

The culture wars for my generation had begun.

If you research “culture wars,” you may find yourself, as I did, on a fascinating trip back to Germany in the late 1880s. The term first appears to describe the ideological struggles between religious and cultural forces of that time. The first US reference to culture wars was in the 1920s, when social and political conflicts divided communities as values shifted in response to the ways in which modernization was changing our social and moral codes. It seems that from decade to decade over the course of the past 150 years, you can find scholars and historians staking claims to a new culture war. A common thread: every battle in every culture war is influenced by artists—because it dramatically impacts their lives.

Public funding for the arts has always been fraught. It’s easy to get distracted by the hyperbole of any point in time. At times, political leaders have even taken advantage of the power of the arts. With the WPA work programs, the arts were a central cog in an economic engine. During Nixon’s presidency, the NEA budget grew from $8 million to $161 million. Nixon felt that the arts served a purpose—propaganda, if you will—in the Cold War as the US positioned itself as the “land of the free.”

Some attribute the culture wars of the ’90s to the success of the gay rights movement, the increased presence of women in leadership

and politics, and the glimmers of what an increasingly racially diverse society might mean in the 21st century. It’s also likely that Senator Helms was simply lying in wait for artists like Serrano, Mapplethorpe, and the NEA Four. In 1974, he had lashed out at the NEA and its chair, Nancy Hanks, after learning that Erica Jong—who had just published Fear of Flying, with its uninhibited portrayal of female sexuality—had been an NEA grantee.

Helms was not successful in rallying support at that time. But 15 years later, he did.

By 1993, Frohnmayer was forced to resign because of the continuing onslaught of controversies. The NEA budget was gutted, reaching a low of $99.5 million from its peak of $169 million in 1989.

The culture wars hit hard at the regional level, playing out in communities across the country through intense struggles over content and funding. Angels in America stunned American theatre audiences in all the right ways, even as productions pushed through the pressure of community censors.

Just hours before the opening night of the 1996 Charlotte Repertory Theatre’s production, Superior Court Judge Marvin Gray instructed that no members of the cast should be arrested, as nudity in the play “appears to constitute artistic expression” and was “not properly the subject of criminal prosecution.” Soon after, $2,000,000 was cut from the local arts and science council.

Community members were going to be sure that no public money would go to groups that offer “exposure to perverted forms of sexuality.”

Jane Alexander and the 1997 NEA Theater panelists

SPRING 2020 | SDC JOURNAL

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American theatres rose to the occasion to defend themselves against these threats to their core funding and artistic decision making. I experienced these events from the frontlines at Seattle Rep and later as Managing Director at Intiman Theatre. My fellow managers and I produced fact sheets for subscribers, urging them to make calls to representatives; we made visits to “the Hill,” with service organizations TCG and American Arts Alliance, dragging board members from office to office with those same fact sheets that, by that time, they had memorized.

considerable lobbying on behalf of the arts, Slade Gorton—a Republican senator from Washington state—proposed a symbolic increase to the agency, stating, “I have polled the members of the subcommittee and I don’t find any sentiment on the committee to end the endowment. I think it’s much more likely than not that the agency will survive.”

(Tangled up in the same appropriation bill, though, was Gorton’s ultimately unsuccessful challenge to Native American tribes’ sovereign immunity and rights to basic federal operating funds for reservations.)

We did delicate dances with individual donors whose political leanings were not always easy to decode. We had conversations with corporate sponsors as they became more strategic in their giving, less philanthropic, and more interested (or concerned) with how a particular project might impact their brand.

Many believe that NEA Chair Jane Alexander saved the NEA. She reframed the narrative and, out of necessity, the programs, by embracing the agency’s service to the public and communities. (Some claimed this would be done by shifting the agency’s focus away from artistic excellence and toward arts education.) By the turn of the millennium, peer panels would still exist but were organized around new categories of Creation and Presentation, Heritage and Preservation, Education and Access, and Planning and Stabilization. Site visits: gone. Grants to individual artists: gone. General operating support to theatre companies: gone. Today, the agency soldiers on from appropriation cycle to appropriation cycle, providing critical support where it is able as its tenacious program staff advocates for our artists and our theatres.

Partnerships were forged with our colleagues in dance, symphony, and opera companies as we embraced our commitment to young people and education programs.

(Simultaneously, arts programming in public education was being gutted.) We began to focus on rural arts and the underserved.

We touted the economic impact of the arts and insisted the NEA was necessary. And we courted our neighborhood Republican leaders to keep the NEA alive. In 1997, after

“The government wants art to be propaganda for the state, and we’re not willing to do that.”

–KAREN FINLEY

Karen Finley performing We Keep Our Victims Ready at the Walker Art Center, 1990 PHOTO c/o Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

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SDC JOURNAL | SPRING 2020

While the drama of the ’90s culture wars has faded and the economic recession of that decade recedes into distant memory, we have not seen any restoration of support across contributed income sources. In fact, we have seen a steady decline.

Whether consciously or not, funders appear to have followed the NEA’s lead. Corporate support was the first to become projectbased, and foundations incrementally migrated away from general operating support to funding projects and special initiatives that all too often required new programs and additional operating expense to produce. Last to conform to new contributed income norms were individuals who, at one time, loved theatres and believed in their inherent value to communities.

Individual philanthropists were beginning to sponsor a production or an education program that spoke directly to their interests.

Many funders continued to support theatre from one year to the next, and yet one could start to wonder what might happen if your next season didn’t include a play that had a special kind of resonance. The lack of general operating support has contributed to the structural deficit facing many of our theatre companies. The burden remains very real and has contributed unrelenting stress to our theatres.

And now, some 30 years out from the NEA Four battle, we are in another culture war.

Perhaps one that has broken out on two fronts.

Externally, we are threatened by political and societal forces that are challenging the very nature of our civil society, wreaking havoc on our lives while placing unprecedented pressure on a deeply undercapitalized nonprofit arts sector and the volatile, high-risk, rarefied proposition that is the commercial arena. While daunting and discouraging, this battlefield is not unfamiliar.

Less familiar is the other front, where we are struggling in our relationships with one another as we respond in real-time to the long overdue recalibration of our culture.

Like 100 years ago, our values and habits are shifting. Cultural and political conflicts divide our communities while many theatre practitioners are responding as best they can—under the watchful eye of everexpanding and volatile social media realities.

We are in the midst of a transfer of influence.

We are reckoning with the fact that a life in the theatre has too long been the exclusive purview of a select few. Not just a field where jobs have been dominated by a single demographic but a craft whose very expression has been too often limited to a single cultural perspective. Artists of color are no longer willing to accept a career that would mean primarily working on smaller stages, on projects limited to their own race or ethnicity, and little, if any, access to the commercial sector.

In the late 1980s, I was introduced to the Hudson Institute study “Workforce 2000: Work and Workers for the 21st Century,” a report that gave insights into the major demographic shift in the workforce at the turn of the century and called for careful policy development to prepare for the change. Without preparation and changes in policy, the US position as a global economic force would be at risk. The study’s predictions were manifest: more women would be entering the workforce, with minorities representing an even larger share, and immigrants would represent the largest share of the increase in the population and the workforce since World War I. The theatre would be no different. Change would infuse our companies with new possibilities; it was inevitable. Prior knowledge for those of us who were familiar with its predictions has not necessarily given us the tools we need.

Simultaneously, our culture is demanding we all be held accountable for our actions and behavior. We are being asked to evaluate and adjust our practices and relationships, to

“We got our butts whipped in the culture wars. Not necessarily the [NEA Four] in particular, but this incredibly rich landscape of alternative art spaces that existed all over the country. They are almost all gone now. They have almost all been starved by…years of anti-art hysteria in this country.”

– TIM MILLER

PHOTO

Dona McAdams

reconsider the work we make and the way in which we make it.

Impatience can be a good thing. It can drive overdue change. Some 80 years into the nonprofit theatre movement, impatience is pressing many of our well-established companies to embrace new values for a new century, and while some can pivot, others lack the agility to evolve fast enough. Can we find that place between pressure and support, so they can become new versions of themselves, born of systemic transformation, becoming vibrant homes for a new generation of theatremakers? Can we find the place between pressure and support for one another?

This current cultural moment is as thrilling as it is terrifying. Many of our artists are drawn to the theatre to contribute to building an informed citizenry, to lighting the imaginations of our friends and foes as the lights go down in theatres across the country night after night. How do we balance our internal commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion so that all voices are heard—while also remaining united to hold our ground as external forces threaten our vital role in our communities?

All the while, the decency clause remains in place: “general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs of the American public.” What does it mean today? If we didn’t know the story of the NEA Four, how might it read? At first glance it might seem innocuous, or perhaps a reasonable standard to strive for. Decency and respect are values many hold dear, but we must remember the insidiousness of this phrase as it set out to silence our most daring artists. To protect our future, we must braid learning from the past into the present. Remembering how we got here may better equip us to chart a course through the battles we find in our communities today—and those that we will meet in the future.

You may find a few inspirations in this issue of the Journal, which features artists whose visions are bold and uncompromising; they wake us up, challenge our assumptions, and take us out of ourselves into provocative, sometimes dangerous terrain. Jackson Gay. Daniel Fish and Donald Byrd. Niegel Smith and Taylor Mac. Ty Defoe, Omar Abusaada, Steve Cosson, and more. Resisting censorship and pressing us on and off our stages to consider what is possible, what is necessary. They are our friends and they are fierce—as are our foes.

SPRING 2020 | SDC JOURNAL

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THE CULTURE WARS: A CHRONOLOGY 1989

President Lyndon B. Johnson with Agnes de Mille after signing the Arts and Humanities Bill calling for the creation of the NEA PHOTO c/o LBJ Library ABOVE

1965

Sept. 29: Congress creates the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) as an independent federal agency that “funds, promotes, and strengthens the creative capacity of our communities by providing all Americans with diverse opportunities for arts participation.” American Ballet Theatre receives the first NEA grant.

Two NEA grants come under political scrutiny and attack. The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania’s Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective The Perfect Moment, which included homoerotic photographs; and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Arts (WinstonSalem, NC) for its funding of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine. Piss Christ draws the wrath of Republican Senators Jesse Helms and Alfonse D’Amato and prominent conservative figures Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan. On the Senate floor, D’Amato rips up the catalogue featuring the Serrano photograph.

1971

In the fifth year since the NEA’s founding, 26 grants made through the Theater program total $559,000.

1985

Tipper Gore (wife of Senator Al Gore) co-founds the Parents Music Resource Center with the goal of increasing parental control over lyrics in popular music. The committee seeks to limit access that children have to violent, drug-related, or sexual content.

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SDC JOURNAL | SPRING 2020

February: Rohrabacher sends letters to all House members condemning NEA support for Wojnarowicz’s retrospective.

Simultaneously, the NEA Solo Performance peer panel unanimously recommends funding 18 artists, including Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes.

April: The Perfect Moment opens in Cincinnati. Museum director Dennis Barrie is indicted for pandering obscenity and “illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material.”

Senator Jesse Helms PHOTO Scott J. Ferrell ABOVE

June 13: In Washington, DC, the Corcoran Gallery cancels the Mapplethorpe exhibit The Perfect Moment, afraid that it would anger conservative politicians.

July: John Frohnmayer becomes Chair of the NEA. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) initiates the first of many proposals to defund the agency.

Nov. 8: Frohnmayer revokes a $10,000 grant to Artists Space for Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing (a visual art exhibit about AIDS) because of a catalog essay by David Wojnarowicz that angrily denounces Cardinal O’Connor, Jesse Helms, and other rightwing politicians.

1994

NEA Chair Jane Alexander stops all grants to individual artists.

1995

House Speaker Newt Gingrich resurrects the idea of dismantling the NEA, the National Endowment of the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. While this motion isn’t enacted, budgets for the agencies are cut and particular grants are denied funding.

May: The National Council on the Arts (an advisory group) convenes to discuss the grants.

June 29: NEA Chairman John Frohnmayer, acting on the NCA’s recommendation, rescinds the grants made to performance artists Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes.

September 27: Finley, Miller, Fleck, and Hughes—who become known as the NEA Four—sue the agency for the amounts of the grant award recommendations.

They cite political reasons as the cause of being denied grant funding.

1966

The NEA awards the first two Laboratory Theatre Project grants to Trinity Square Repertory Company in Rhode Island, under the direction of Adrian Hall and John McQuiggan, and Repertory Theatre of New Orleans, under the direction of Stuart Vaughan.

1990

October: Congress passes legislation introduced by Senator Pat Williams (D-MT) that includes the “decency clause”—requiring that the agency only fund works that meet “general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public.” This law was the first content restriction that Congress had ever placed on the NEA.

1992

John Frohnmayer resigns from the NEA.

1993

June: The NEA settles out of court with Fleck, Hughes, Miller, and Finley. The artists receive the grants that were denied to them previously. They decide to continue fighting against the decency clause, which will result in the 1998 Supreme Court case Finley vs. NEA.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich + Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott PHOTO Scott J. Ferrell ABOVE

1998

April: The Supreme Court hears arguments about the decency clause.

June 25: In Finley vs. NEA, the Supreme Court upholds the decency clause—while declaring the language “advisory” and meaningless. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor expresses the opinion of the court when she states that “the First Amendment protects artists’ rights to express themselves as indecently and disrespectfully as they like, but does not compel the government to fund that speech.”

2017

When President Trump unveils his first federal budget proposal, it includes elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts.

2019

For the third year in a row, President Trump proposes a federal budget that would eliminate funding for the NEA.

2020

The NEA budget is announced as $162 million, a $7.25 million increase over 2019. This marks the largest increase for the NEA since 2013.

WHAT I LEARNED…

BY DAVID

ESBJORNSON, BRADEN ABRAHAM + MARYA SEA KAMINSKI

IN YOUR WORDS What I Learned...

Why I Made That Choice Step Forward 20 Questions

Marya Sea Kaminski in My Name Is Rachel Corrie at Seattle Repertory Theatre, directed

by Braden Abraham PHOTO Chris Bennion

In 2005, My Name Is Rachel Corrie premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, directed by Alan Rickman. Rickman and journalist Katherine Viner had assembled the play from the diaries and emails of activist Rachel Corrie, who was killed at the age of 23 by an Israeli bulldozer during an anti-demolition protest in Gaza. The production was scheduled to transfer from London to New York Theatre Workshop but was postponed indefinitely amid heated controversy. The following season, the play was mounted at Seattle Repertory Theatre, where David Esbjornson was Artistic Director; it was directed by Braden Abraham and featured Marya Sea Kaminski as Rachel Corrie. Here, they each reflect upon that powerful experience.

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.

DAVID ESBJORNSON When I selected My Name Is Rachel Corrie for the Seattle Repertory 2006-07 season, the controversy in New York had not yet played out. I was attracted to Rachel’s youthful passion, her belief in advocacy, and the honesty with which she expressed herself.

Rachel had grown up in Washington state, and I was counting on my audience recognizing her as someone belonging to them.

Even at a young age, Rachel had been doing battle against domestic injustices: helping the homeless, fighting for the environment, and then, naively or perhaps not, she began to empathize with the plight of the Palestinians who lived under occupation and military violence in the Gaza Strip.

I think Seattle Repertory managed the controversy around this production reasonably well, but we had our share of pushback. Despite

the fact that we invited picketers to see the show for free, we couldn’t coax them through the front door, and a statement denouncing the production was set to appear in our own program. This created some internal friction as we tried to decide what to do.

Fortunately, a colleague advised me to say as little publicly as possible, as I would most likely see my words cut up and requoted out of context. I mostly followed that advice, but the restraint proved personally challenging to me.

I had to constantly fight the emotional impulse to defend myself against the accusations of anti-Semitism. Eventually, I would also have to accept that because of this programming choice, support for my artistic leadership would forever take a negative hit from a portion of the Seattle community. The theatre has long been a haven for the disenfranchised, often giving voice to those silenced by bias or

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hate. Challenging those who don’t share this viewpoint will always come at a cost.

This is what I wrote to our subscribers at the time: “There have been many forces that have attempted to prevent or discourage us from presenting this production. Most of the angry letters I have received are from people who have no first-hand experience of watching this play. It is important to note that every piece of literature, dramatic or otherwise, has an inherent political point of view. When plays directly challenge our belief systems they feel more political to us, when they affirm our thinking they seem less so. Buying ads in our theatre publication to denounce the work on our stage is unprecedented. Though deeply saddened by these actions, I have no choice but to acknowledge the right of these groups to their free expression…however, I urge you to open yourselves up to one small voice that suggests that there are many victims on both sides of this on-going tragedy.”

Engaging Braden Abraham and Marya Sea Kaminski as principal artists was important to the production’s success. Both had youth on their side and deep connections to the Northwest community, and were willing to explore the raw emotion that lay beneath the surface narrative. Marya gave a beautiful, vulnerable performance, and Braden sensitively let the story unfold without pushing an extra agenda.

I believe the play, at its core, is a story about the bond that existed between Rachel and her parents. Rachel depended on their love, understanding, and advice, expressing those sentiments in her letters from the Gaza Strip.

As her parents, they had proudly supported her political passions and the social-minded choices of her youth. Now, sadly, they were haunted by the fact that one of those choices had led to her premature death.

The production received an unexpected front-page Seattle Times review, and Rachel’s parents, committed to the conversation surrounding their daughter’s actions, drove to Seattle for every public discussion of the play.

Success is often a matter of perception, but I believe we were able to elevate this material in a meaningful way and create an event that generated a positive public dialogue.

BRADEN ABRAHAM There was a lot of attention on our production because of what had happened in New York. I remember I was tense and anxious in the lead-up to rehearsals, but once we got into the room and started working, something shifted, and I got very focused and strangely calm. Maybe because I knew I had such a good collaborator in Marya Sea Kaminski, and I knew I had the unyielding

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Braden Abraham + Marya Sea Kaminski rehearsing My Name Is Rachel Corrie at Seattle Repertory Theatre PHOTO c/o Seattle Rep

support of David Esbjornson. Also, from reading the first few pages of the script, I felt I knew Rachel and I knew the story we were telling. Her experience growing up in the Pacific Northwest was not all that different from my own. She reminded me of the young artist-activists I hung out with in college at Western Washington University, just up the road from Evergreen State College, where Rachel went to school. She was messy, driven, impulsive, wise, observant, playful—a charismatic free spirit bundled in contradiction. She was a few years younger than me, but we were inspired by the same artists and read the same books. Her radiant, moving description of looking out the window flying over Puget Sound stirred up in me a visceral connection to home. I’d shared that same view many times, and I’d shared the feelings she described: reverence for the majestic beauty of our corner of the world, and an insatiable desire to break free from it in pursuit of meaningful experiences elsewhere.

Any good play contains more than one truth, and I tried to deliver what I read on the page—a portrait of a young, idealistic woman wrestling deeply with her voice, her purpose, her actions, and the actions of her government. In the script assembled from her writings, Rachel describes moments of real terror living in Gaza. She bears witness and offers insight into the struggles of civilians living under a brutal military occupation.

There are also goofy, affectionate moments with her family in the play, and moments of loneliness, angsty love, and tender humanity.

I like to think all those threads came through in our production. Our aim was not to change

the audience’s mind about where they stood on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but to complicate their point of view by sharing Rachel’s unique story. We created a space to have that conversation through language, performance, and design—through the words of a young American white woman trying to use her privilege to make peace at the ultimate and most devastating personal cost.

I spent a day with Rachel’s parents driving around Olympia, listening to them tell stories about their daughter. They were kind and open and funny, and yet there was a sense of grief that hung over us like a thin, translucent shroud—almost undetectable at times, but always there, impossible to tear away. The character on stage could never be Rachel, could never replace her, but I felt a tremendous weight of responsibility to invoke her voice as clearly as we could to our community.

No theatre, no culture, can be great without nurturing new talent and seeking the stories and new forms that test the limits of our understanding and experience of the issues driving our age. The experience directing My Name Is Rachel Corrie taught me that our commitment to this pursuit is more demanding and difficult than I had previously imagined, and also one of the most rewarding gifts of our vocation.

MARYA SEA KAMINSKI Sitting in my dressing room every night, I’d read Rachel’s journal before the show. Among the insights and photos that her parents had shared with us was a copy of her complete writings detailing her time at college, her

early ideas about art and activism, and the map of small decisions that led to her move to Rafah. While she believed this decision to travel to the Gaza Strip was important, she could not imagine the details of daily life that she’d find there—the family dinners, the bullet holes in her walls, the loneliness.

I suspected but didn’t fully understand how dangerous her story was. Or rather, I misunderstood the danger. I was humbled by the risk of playing her; I was intimidated by the idea of embodying this revered activist icon who people in my community knew personally and loved deeply. I have a friend who went to school with Rachel. He has a tattoo of her on his forearm. He came to see the show three times. I’d imagine how conflicted Rachel would feel about having friends in the audience: I’m glad you’re here, but why are you sitting in a theatre thinking about me when you should be out there doing something?

me into the act of theatremaking with more gravity, depth, and devotion. It confirmed for me that the theatre is one of the few places left in our world where we can still have a humane debate. One that involves our hearts, not only our opinions.

In her journal, Rachel would make lists. When she was overwhelmed, or bored, or didn’t quite know how to describe a thing, she’d start with a list. She taught me how to do this.

Courage. Pain. Action. Dust. Families.

Love. Violence. Disruption. Fear. Who. When. Now.

Lori Parks’s In the Blood; Hampton’s Appomattox; Buffini’s Gabriel; Dorfman’s Purgatorio; Parnell’s Trumpery; Neil Simon’s Rose and Walsh. Also: Tuesdays with Morrie, Confederacy of Dunces, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and Red Hot Patriot. Revivals: Glass Menagerie (Shanghai); A Few Good Men, Shawshank Redemption (London); Death of a Salesman (Dublin); Hamlet (TFANA); Measure for Measure and Much Ado about Nothing (NYSF); Lady from Dubuque and Mud and Drowning (Signature); Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Summer and Smoke (Guthrie); The Normal Heart (Public); Endgame, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, The Entertainer (CSC). David has been Artistic Director of NYC Classic Stage Company and Seattle Repertory Theatre and is currently chair of Rutgers Theatre Conservatory.

Speaking her words. Telling her secrets.

Making her choices, in front of her sweet, bereft parents. That is what felt dangerous to me.

But like all good plays, trying to understand the world of Rachel’s story opened up a new part of our greater world for me. One truly filled with terror. Burrowing into her individual perspective opened up an entire universe of disparate, angry, passionate points of view on the subject of the Palestinian and Israeli crisis.

And like all great plays, most of the answers I needed to navigate these new, intimidating questions where hidden in the text. In her words, in her character, in her belief that witnessing is an act of faith and courage.

Rather than isolating me in a political position, embodying Rachel allowed me to enter into these conversations with care, responsibility, and a humble curiosity. At times, I felt her in the process, taking my hand and guiding me through the protesters assembled outside of our theatre, as I took their pamphlets and read them carefully. I’d sense her in the lobby when I passed an Arab man kneeling in ritual prayer before a weekend matinee. In one of the student talkbacks, a young Israeli student stood up (in the midst of a mostly pro-Palestinian debate) and described losing her aunt in a bus bombing in Israel. She described the terror she felt for her family and for her country because of this conflict. I imagined Rachel standing next to her, as that young woman opened her heart and invited us into the deep complexities of this conflict and the way it has battered families and friends on both sides.

Before I worked on My Name Is Rachel Corrie, I think I fancied myself a political artist, but her story made me realize that I’d only been a provocateur. This “dangerous” play called

BRADEN ABRAHAM has been Artistic Director of Seattle Rep since 2014. Braden has directed many productions for Seattle Rep, including most recently: The Great Moment (premiere); A Doll’s House, Part 2; Last of the Boys; Ibsen in Chicago (premiere); Well; Luna Gale; A View from the Bridge; The Comparables (premiere); Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; A Great Wilderness (premiere); and Photograph 51. He has developed plays with The O’Neill, Ojai Playwrights Conference, The Denver Center, Inge Festival, Portland Center Stage, The Playwrights’ Center, and Perseverance Theatre.

DAVID ESBJORNSON. Premieres: Driving Miss Daisy (Broadway, London and Australia); Albee’s The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?, The Play about the Baby; A. Miller’s The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (Broadway), Resurrection Blues; Kushner’s Angels in America, Homebody/Kabul; Suzan-

MARYA SEA KAMINSKI is a theatre artist based in Pittsburgh, where she serves as the Artistic Director of the Pittsburgh Public Theater. She combines her experience as a director, writer, solo performer, and scenic designer to create theatrical experiences that connect us more deeply to one another and to this unique moment in time. She is a founding Co-Artistic Director of the Washington Ensemble Theater, where she produced over a dozen regional and world premieres. And from 2014 to 2018, Kaminski served as the Associate Artistic Director at Seattle Rep, where she founded Public Works Seattle, an artistic initiative that creates large-scale works of participatory theatre founded in authentic, long-term civic partnerships.

With each new project, she renews her commitment to values-based leadership that creates spaces where equity and excellence can intersect.

PHOTO CREDITS: My Name is Rachel Corrie by Alan Rickman + Katharine Viner. Directed by David Esbjornson. Scenic design: Jennifer Zeyl; costumes: J.K. Arnold; lighting: L.B. Morse; sound: Obadiah Eaves.

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E D A M I Y WH AT

TH

E C I O H C W ROKA

ARK B

BY M

In the fall of 1996, I got a call from Doug Aibel, the Artistic Director of the Vineyard Theatre in New York. I’d never worked at the Vineyard, but he’d been wondering if I’d take a look at a new play by Paula Vogel called How I Learned to Drive that they were quickly putting into production that winter. I was familiar with Paula’s work but had never met or spoken with her. I was bowled over by the play, and Doug put me in touch with Paula.

I told her that I loved the play and her novel use of a three-member Greek chorus, and deeply admired the brave and daring nature of her story about a taboo relationship sure to push buttons for every audience member.

I was especially enamored of how she used humor to keep us off-balance until the play swooped in with its devastating penultimate scene. Most importantly, near the end of the call, I asked her how she’d feel about telling the whole story with nothing on stage but five chairs and a rolling table. After a healthy pause, she replied in the affirmative. That production marked the beginning of four relationships that have been central to my life as a director: I went on to direct eight more productions at the Vineyard, Paula and I worked on numerous productions together, and I began an artistic journey with the actress Mary-Louise Parker that’s led to places I never would have imagined. The fourth relationship, with the play itself, has been unspoken and silent until recently.

A few years back, the Vineyard was producing a number of readings of past productions in honor of an anniversary year for the institution. We miraculously gathered the original cast together from the 1997 production of How I Learned to Drive and spent a day together putting up the reading.

At the end of the day, we all realized how powerfully the play still lived inside of us, and how Mary-Louise, David Morse, and Johanna Day still perfectly fit their roles in this memory play. The story tumbles from the memory of the central character as she picks the scab over the wound of an abusive relationship that for many years defined her

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life. The role was originally written for an actress not many years off from Mary-Louise’s current age; that was adjusted younger back in ’97 because of the casting of Mary-Louise.

Over the course of the next couple of years, we pushed and angled for a new production, but every opportunity fell through. Last spring, Manhattan Theatre Club called—a production they had slotted had fallen out.

Were we interested in grabbing the slot?

Schedules were sorted and moved around, numerable times, and we finally were able to say yes.

I wrote to Paula a few weeks after that and told her I had been afraid to read the play again after everything became final. I was afraid it would be revealed to me that we’d all made a horrible mistake. But if anything, the actors seemed more right for the roles, and the play felt more true, more moving, and fresher than it ever had. The world’s changed in many ways since 1997, but most profoundly for the play’s story, the public focus on relationships dealing with sexual abuse arrived at center stage. Whether it’s the Catholic church, doctors of Olympic teams or university sports, or Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo movement, light was being shined on deeply damaging behavior inflicted by trusted authority figures through an abuse of power—and on relationships that had only been whispered about. All these given circumstances didn’t change my point of view toward the two central characters, but it lit up everything surrounding them. I don’t remember us spending a lot of time discussing all the enablers in the story the first time around—or, as Paula mentioned in an article at the time, the idea that we all are participants in a culture that objectifies women and projects sexuality onto children.

Paula said she originally wanted the tagline to be a tribute to Hillary Clinton’s book It Takes a Village to Raise a Child. She wanted the tagline for the play to be: It Takes a Village to Molest a Child.

David Morse + Mary-Louise Parker in How I Learned to Drive at the Vineyard Theatre, 1997, directed by Mark Brokaw PHOTO Carol Rosegg

As I write this, we’re a few months off from starting rehearsals for this new production, and that’s how I’m viewing it: it’s not a remount but a reinvestigation of something we all deeply felt and experienced many years ago. Not only have we changed, but also audiences have, too. I’m excited to see how those changes will affect how this play meets its audience. And I’m very happy to spend time in the rehearsal hall with all my old friends and take the journey down this dark road to healing once again.

MARK BROKAW’s Broadway credits include: Simon Stephen’s Heisenberg, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella, The Lyons, After Miss Julie, The Constant Wife, Cry-Baby, Reckless. New York premieres include works

by Lynda Barry (Good Times Are Killing Me), Douglas Carter Beane (As Bees in Honey Drown), Lisa Kron (2.5 Minute Ride), Kenneth Lonergan (This Is Our Youth, Lobby Hero), Craig Lucas (The Dying Gaul), Nicky Silver (The Lyons), and Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive, Long Christmas Ride Home). Regional includes the Guthrie, Seattle Rep, Center Theatre Group, Hartford Stage, Yale Rep, La Jolla, Steppenwolf, Berkeley Rep, and the Sundance Theatre Lab. He serves on the Executive Board of SDC and is a trustee of the SDC Foundation.

STEP FORWARD

BY TY

DEFOE

Manahatta at Yale Rep, movement direction by Ty Defoe PHOTO Joan Marcus

Art revolves around the ever-changing construction and reconstruction of culture, through an astonishing ensemble of connections among people, land, and spiritual worlds. If I were to ask my father, who recently passed, what art means, he would laugh and say, “You mean what our ancestors have been making?”

Cultural memories course through my being, influencing my worldview in ways I might never stop to consider if I didn’t conjure and transform what I refer to as “blood memory.” Blood memory brings forward the past to the present moment during interactions or gestures in such a way that the formulation of elements in a movement’s collective identity appears to mirror past formulations. Recently, I have been incorporating blood memory into the ways I have been creating work across Turtle Island, from a small Yup’ik village in rural Alaska relocating due to climate change and flooding to working as collaborator on Mary Kathryn Nagle’s play, Manahatta, directed by Laurie Woolery. There is a spectrum of unapologetic risk and resilience in artmaking that invokes liberation; it takes extra time, extra care, and extra questioning.

It is a way to decolonize and at the same time indigenize the “American” theatre.

Currently, I’m movement director for Manahatta, developed at Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Yale Rep. In Manahatta, the play collides the past and the present and illustrates the consequences brought on by settler colonists’ commercial exploits, including the removal of the Lenape people from their ancestral territory in the 16th century. Blood memory embodies horrific miscommunication on stage. In exploring a scene that exposes Dutch settlers’ desire

to purchase Manahatta for a few knives, kettles, guns, and axes by the use of a simple handshake, Laurie and I spoke collaboratively about the misinterpretation of what “trade” and “ownership” is. And how we can create a room that is safe, working with Native-identified actors who reenact moments that can trigger their own passed-down trauma. As we were “jamming on ideas,” as Laurie says, we asked ourselves: how can we communicate to an audience the complications caused by vastly different cultures with inherently different values, speaking very different languages? And show why the land that is now New York City was perceived to be bought, but was actually stolen through a series of unfortunate, quick complications of languages? We decided to explore gestures called “Indigenous Hand Speak.”

Indigenous Hand Speak is a form of communication that decentralizes the English language. It is a simple yet complex language that a multitude of Indigenous/First Nations people and settler colonists used to connect. It predates, but still is in conversation with, contemporary American Sign Language on Turtle Island/North America. Using hand speak theatrically in this play indicates to an audience who knows the Lenape language and who doesn’t.

In the rehearsal room, the use of hand speak allows the words that have symbols to live organically in the hands of the actors, especially those English words that do not have words to describe their meanings in the Lenape worldview.

Jane Snake, the main character, ends up returning to Manahatta, translating to “Island of Many Hills.” A simple gesture is

Ty Defoe

created: she uses two hands moving away from the body to form an island coming together with rounded palms rushing over two hills outward. It is simple and yet feels dangerous in all that it embodies.

To tap into blood memory is also a way to find empathy to tell the narratives that aren’t often heard in the “American” theatre. This past year and next year, I am working in a small Yu’pik community called Newtok, Alaska, soon to be newly named Mertarvik. The village’s need to relocate is urgent and complicated. There is both vocalized and silent fear around the loss of land and cultural lifeways.

The crisis around lack of water and clean water is critical. So the conjuring of blood memory and keeping it alive and vibrant is a call to action. It is a call to preserve memories and provide inspiration to this small village that is physically eroding into the ocean on one side and, on the other, flooding with unsanitary excretion.

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The boardwalk community in Newtok, AK PHOTO Ty Defoe

Before the Land Eroded, written by myself, X’unei Lance Twitchell, Marleah Makpiaq LaBelle (also creative producer), and Martha Kasiauli, is set out to restore and preserve blood memory. The first step of the process was a visioning meeting where the act of listening was held with the highest regard.

Marleah, who identifies as Sugpiaq and Iñupiaq, became our bridge builder to maintain relationships, especially with Martha (an aspiring teenage theatremaker), our main point of contact. Martha is a poet and currently hosts the after-school Yu’pik dance rehearsals.

A week of activities led up to the witnessing of the play performed by community members. The story that is a central part of their lived experience became healing.

Assigning roles and responsibilities became a teaching tool and provided accountability of community building with youth and a sense of purpose. The spectrum of participation gave the more tentative community members a way to build trust with our team of outsiders made up of scientists, artists, engineers, and theatremakers (identifying both as Native and non-Native), all wanting to help and dedicated to this deeply humanitarian need of simply connecting. I experienced firsthand the commonalities between science and sacred knowledge, as Before the Land Eroded became a historical milestone. The sharing of the play was not in a Eurocentric theatre setting, but it became a symbol of hope and celebration in the only place to make theatre and where there was running water, the school gym.

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Ty Defoe with local youth in Newtok, AK PHOTO Marleah LaBelle

During the sharing, elders watched teenagers embodying various scenes about fear of the unknown while at the same time celebrating the rich cultural language and songs that have existed since before anyone in the village could remember.

Highlights included the King Salmon character as a comedic relief and interstitial Yu’pik song and dance to ritualize hunting or traveling on the nearby river when it was once clean. At times, my director role turned into that of listener, facilitator, coach, even doctor. Themes of the play and activities around the play proper amplified education about water, both scientific and cultural, while providing healing arts to a community that could ultimately just give up due to the inability to have basic needs to live addressed. But no! The culture, the stories, the perseverance, and the remembrance of ancestors past looms with their attitude of We. Must. Do. Our. Best.— the Yu’pik cultural value of taking action rather than describing states of being.

The power of creating new stories, as well as hearing their traditional stories, shifts despair into hope and builds aspirations for the future yet to come.

I hold with me blood memory, just as Newtok, and the people there in the village, will carry this experience to their new location, just as the creative collaborators in Manahatta conjure the past into the present, for the future generations yet to come. If we are interested in enhancing our intuitive skills and abilities, it might be wise to examine our own ancestral connections, no matter how removed we might feel from them. For some, this involves risk, and for others, resilience.

For me, making art at this moment, in this

way, is transformational. My father would say, be yourself. Remember that great circle of life, how everything is connected.

TY DEFOE (Giizhig), Oneida and Ojibwe Nations, is an interdisciplinary artist-writershapeshifter, and Grammy Award winner.

Ty aspires to interweave artistic projects with social justice, indigeneity, indiqueering, and environmentalism. Global cultural arts highlights: the Millennium celebration in Cairo, Egypt; Ankara, Turkey, International Music Festival; and Festival of World Cultures in Dubai. Awards: First American in the Arts, Global Indigenous Heritage Festival Award, a Robert Rauschenberg Artist in Residence, Jonathan Larson Award. Works created: River of Stone, Red Pine, The Way They Lived, Ajijaak on Turtle Island, Hear Me Say My Name. Ty is co-founder of Indigenous Direction (with Larissa FastHorse), core member of All My Relations Collective, and artEquity. Publications: Casting a Movement, Pitkin Review, Thorny Locust magazine, HowlRound, and Routledge Press. Movement direction: Mother Road, dir. Bill Rauch (OSF); Manahatta, dir. Laurie Woolery (OSF + Yale Rep); among others. He appeared on the Netflix show The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and made his Broadway debut in Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men, dir. Anna Shapiro. tydefoe.com

PHOTO CREDITS: Manahatta by Mary Kathryn Nagle. Directed by Laurie Woolery; movement direction: Ty Defoe; fight direction: Rick Sordelet.

Scenic design: Mariana Sanchez; costumes: Stephanie Bahniuk; lighting: Emma Deane; music + sound: Paul James Prendergast; projections: Mark Holthusen.

20 WITH

QUESTIONS

OMAR ABUSAADA

Omar Abusaada is a Syrian director and playwright whose vision is to build a politically and socially conscious theatre. A co-founder of Studio Theatre in Damascus, Abusaada has taken his work to Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, and Jordan, as well as major international festivals. SDC Journal asked Abusaada to share a little about his work and life in Syria and beyond.

PHOTO

Describe yourself in two words.

Theatre writer and director.

Why did you choose to make theatre? Why directing?

Theatre came into my life by accident. I started out studying electric engineering, then I realized gradually that I wanted to do something more artistic. I decided to study theatre, and from my first day in the theatre institute, I knew that I’d spend my life in the theatre.

Where do you live? What does home mean to you?

I’m still living in Damascus; my family lives in Egypt. Since 2011, I’ve been traveling all the time with my theatre works, so gradually I’ve started to think of theatre as home for me.

What are some of the joys and struggles of maintaining an active international career?

Most of the joys come from meeting new people and discovering new places, which teach me a lot about life. At the same time, the lack of stability creates pressure that can be very hard sometimes.

How central is Syria to your work? Do you feel a sense of responsibility as you try to represent Syria in your work?

Most of the works I have directed are centered around Syria in a social and political way. Especially after the revolution in Syria in 2011, I felt that I wanted to support the principles that I believed in, to build a new country on the basis of freedom and equality. I believed that theatre could be an excellent way to express these ideas and also to give a real look at the situation in Syria that is different from the view that we see in the

Western media. I think theatre can be an excellent tool of resistance for artists all around the world.

You studied at the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Damascus. What made that program unique?

I studied in the institute between the years 1998 and 2001. At that time, I was so lucky to have excellent teachers who created a space for us to study and explore in a free and creative way—very different from the way of teaching in most Syrian universities, which deal with their students in a very conservative way.

Tell us about your process working with playwright Mohammad Al Attar.

How many projects have you worked on together? Are they all documentary pieces?

Mohammad has been my colleague and friend since we studied in the same theatre institute in Damascus. Our relationship in the work grew steadily year by year. We have made more than 10 projects together; some of them were documentary theatre, and others were fiction. The work is built initially through a deep collaboration during the first phase, which is working on the idea of the project. After that, Mohammad starts to write the first draft alone, then he gives it to me for feedback, and then he develops the text further. Most of the time, he comes to rehearsals and gives his feedback, then he makes a final draft of the text.

What does the director/writer collaboration look like in documentary theatre?

I think in principle the collaboration is not different from documentary theatre to fiction works. The relation between the

Hervé Hôte

writer and director is complicated and can be very different depending on the character of the artists themselves. Sometimes it can be very tough, and other times it’s very easy and productive.

How long does it take you to make a piece?

From starting to work on the idea till the premiere, usually it takes around one year. And usually I have six to seven weeks for rehearsals.

When your production of While I Was Waiting played at the Avignon Festival in 2016, you described it as a metaphor for the state of your country—“neither alive nor dead, this gray zone somewhere between hope and despair”—and also for your dreams of a political theatre there.

Do you see theatre as an act of resistance?

What do you hope for in your political theatremaking?

Theatre has always been a great tool of resistance for artists, and I think nowadays this tool has become even more important.

In my works, I hope to open discussion about the subject among the audience members— this is the most important element for me.

What sources do you draw upon to make your work?

The sources of my work depend on the nature of the subject itself: sometimes it comes from a very personal story, like what we did in While I Was Waiting; other times, it comes from a story in the newspapers, like when I examined the Lafarge Cement factory in Syria in my performance The Factory. So it can be very different and could come from anywhere.

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The Factory, directed by Omar Abusaada PHOTO David Baltzer

Tell us about your daily routine. We understand you don’t have a cell phone.

Yes, I don’t like to use the cell phone that much, but sometimes I find myself forced to use it. I think cell phones take a lot from the intimacy of our meetings.

My daily routine is very different between Damascus and Europe. I stopped working in Damascus in 2011. Now, I’m going there just to keep my relationship with my city, so usually I have more time for myself in Damascus that I like to spend walking, going to my favorite coffee shop, reading, and meeting friends. In Europe, mostly I’m very busy with work, so usually I’m in rehearsals for around eight hours, then I’m back home to prepare for the next day’s rehearsal.

You were at Lincoln Center in 2017 with While I Was Waiting, which was banned in Syria. Can you talk about that experience?

My experience there was amazing. We were touring in Europe with this work, but the audience in New York was very different— they caught the humor in the play, and we felt they were connected to the story from the first minutes of the performance. Many audience members came to talk to us after the play, and they had been touched deeply.

I really enjoyed this experience a lot, and it is still with me.

remember how impressed I was the first time I read Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. This was one of the best texts I had ever read, and it led me to discover more texts from American theatre. Later on, when I visited the US in 2010 through a Kennedy Center program for international directors, I felt very connected to the people I met during the trip.

Which theatre directors do you admire?

This changes with the growing of my knowledge in theatre. I can give some names like Peter Brook, Patrice Chéreau, Krystian Lupa, the Wooster Group, and Fahdel Jaibi, among others.

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading a book about the history of Damascus in the 1930s by Syrian historian Sami Moubayed. And the play The Abyss by young Syrian writer Ghiath Mohethawi.

You work in Europe a lot and you tour— what are your observations about the producing models and funding sources for theatre in Europe and the Middle East? Are there lessons the US can learn from these models?

I think the theatre production models everywhere need to focus more on the needs of the artists and the specific project they are making. Each project is different, and the system needs to adapt with it, not adapt the artistic project to the system, because this can kill the original character of the project itself. Sometimes I have been very lucky to work with producers who understand this need and struggle with the system to create the best circumstances for the work, but unfortunately, this is not the case in general.

What are you currently working on?

Last year, I worked on a play about Damascus in 2045, and next year we’re planning to show it in Freiburg, Germany, so right now I’m working to develop this project. Also, I’m developing a text based on the biography of a Syrian actress who I have known for a long time.

What would you like to explore next?

I want to work on the theme of absence. In the last few years as a Syrian, I lost friends, relatives, places. And I want to reflect more on this experience.

PHOTO CREDITS: The Factory by Mohammed Al Aattar. Directed by Omar Abusaada. Scenic design + costumes: Bissane Al Charif; lighting: Denise Potratz; projections: Rami Farah. | Damascus 2045 by Mohammed Al Aattar. Directed by Omar Abusaada.

Scenic design + costumes: Bissane Al Charif; lighting: Piotr Pieczyński; projections: Szymon Rogiński.

What are your impressions of the system that supports American theatremakers?

I don’t know a lot about the system of production in American theatre. But this year I had the chance to participate in the Sundance directors’ retreat in France, and I got to be among American theatremakers and to understand more about the production system in the USA. Are you interested in directing in the US? Yes, sure—this has been a dream for me since my student years in Damascus. I still

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Damascus 2045, directed by Omar Abusaada PHOTO Szymon Roginski

MIXED SWIMMING

AN INTERVIEW WITH JACKSON GAY

I

BY

ROLIN JONES

n May 2019, word got out about a 24-hour-long live reading of “The Mueller Report.” After theatregoers recovered from the whiplash reaction of wondering, “Whhhaaat?” they were not surprised to learn that Jackson Gay would be directing the staging. Over the last 10 years, the adventurous Gay has earned a reputation for developing and directing unusual, inventive, thoughtful, and thought-provoking work, particularly with material—new plays and classics alike—addressing today’s challenging but necessary issues of equity and politics.

Jackson Gay is going to have even more opportunities to do so in the future as she and Co-Artistic Director Steven Padla steer the next phase of activities for New Neighborhood, a multidisciplinary, multiformat company she co-founded with a group of like-minded artists to present a variety of theatrical, musical, and film events and productions. To talk about how she has moved through life from the restraints of a religious childhood to defying the US president and Russian oligarchs alike, SDC Journal paired Gay with playwright/ screenwriter Rolin Jones, her longtime collaborator and fellow Neighbor.

ROLIN JONES | Here’s my first question, Jackson. How did you go from Sugar Land, Texas, to becoming an in-demand theatre PHOTO Josiah

Bania

director in New York and the regions, an Ivy League teacher, and the “go-to” developer of world premiere plays? How did that happen?

JACKSON GAY | Theatre. Like many people, I found theatre at a young age in school and initially used it as an escape from a not-great home life that was unpleasant a lot of times.

My little sister and I were adopted from foster care through the state of Texas. My adoptive parents brought us into a home with four boys in Sugar Land, Texas.

ROLIN | This is not a big town.

JACKSON | No. It was tiny back then. We were a very religious family: we went to church Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, and, at times, other days of

the week. I was taken out of square dancing when I was in elementary school and made to sit in the library during that period. Dancing wasn’t allowed.

ROLIN | What, like in Footloose? Square dancing was dangerous in your family?

JACKSON | Yes. No square dancing for me or, starting in junior high, no swimming in a pool with boys. My mother called it “mixed swimming,” which meant that a proper, morally righteous woman would never put on a bathing suit and get into a swimming pool with a male. I was 19 or 20 years old before I ever went in a swimming pool with somebody of the opposite sex. We occasionally went to the beach in Galveston, Texas, but I guess that was okay because my parents were there.

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JACKSON | Yeah. But I had to make money: it was just a gig. It ended because the last one was at an ice house in the middle of nowhere.

That experience made me think, “This is really stupid and I’m taking my life into my own hands. I’ve got to find something else to do.”

ROLIN | Was that the moment you realized, “I should go to college?”

Rolin Jones + Jackson Gay in rehearsal for These Paper Bullets!

PHOTO c/o Yale Rep

ROLIN | If you were not allowed to square dance or mixed swim, how did you sneak in theatre at school and not bring it home?

JACKSON | My big break was in Mame. I played Agnes Gooch. There was a theatre class in high school, and my teacher—a man named Jerry Baber—could tell that I really needed a lot. I needed attention.

I was very introverted. Very shy. I needed somebody to encourage me, to listen to me and see me. It was as though I was dehydrated and needed water.

So, I glommed onto it. In theatre, I found myself and was able to imagine a different life through learning about other people’s experiences and cultures. That helped me understand that I could do something else and be somebody else.

I give a shout-out to all the amazing high school drama teachers in the world.

I ended up moving to Houston and going crazy for several years. All through high school, I didn’t go to a single party; I didn’t go to any dances; I didn’t go to prom; nothing, because of family rules. So, when I first got out on my own, I went crazy.

I was the youngest person to be hired at The Comedy Workshop, which was a big standup comedy and sketch comedy place in Houston that was famous for a lot of comics like Sam Kinison getting their start there. So, I went from my household in Sugar Land to The Comedy Workshop, which was too drastic. I just was very clueless.

I had left home very much against my parents’ wishes. My father showed up at The Comedy Workshop with a shotgun. I was on

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stage in the middle of a rehearsal with one of my best friends. I kid you not.

ROLIN | Loaded?

When you write people off and label them as failures, not capable, or not smart enough, you are very possibly not taking the time to really see them or where they come from and the value they bring to the conversation.

– JACKSON GAY JACKSON | Yeah, this is Texas. He wanted to take me home, and I was resisting. It was scary. He wasn’t going to shoot anybody, but he wanted to make a point.

I did end up going home, and then left again.

A couple of months after that, my parents sent the church elders to my apartment in Houston. They were six or seven old white men who came into my apartment, sat on the couches and the chairs, and basically tried to save my soul.

ROLIN | How’d that go?

JACKSON | I was polite. Obviously, it went how it went because I’m now where I am.

I did a lot of stuff in Houston for a lot of years, waiting tables, bartending, singing telegrams.

ROLIN | Would you get more money for the raunchier ones?

JACKSON | I met my husband [Dickson Musslewhite], and he was in grad school at the University of Houston for fiction writing.

We were housemates and best friends. All of his grad school friends would come over, sit around, make pancakes, and talk for hours and hours about fiction writers, poets, and poetry. One day, I said to Dickson, “I wish I could be a part of this conversation. I wish I could talk about these things. I wish I could go to school.” He said, “Why don’t you?”

Honestly, it had never, ever occurred to me that I could go to college. I said, “How?” and he responded, “What do you mean ‘how’?

You do this, you do this, and you do this.” It was just mind-blowing.

I know that’s hard for a lot of people to understand, but when I was growing up, it just wasn’t something that was talked about as a possibility for me. I was so miserable and had so much going on outside of school that I literally barely graduated from high school.

Then, when I did end up going to college, I graduated second out of the entire university.

That just goes to show you that when you write people off and label them as failures, not capable, or not smart enough, you are very possibly not taking the time to really see them or where they come from and the value they bring to the conversation. That had a profound effect on me, going from the high school experience to getting to college.

ROLIN | What college was this?

JACKSON | University of the Arts in Philadelphia. I picked it out of a book of schools that had a good theatre department and that you auditioned for as opposed to relying solely on grades. I hocked my bicycle to pay for my plane ticket, flew to Philadelphia, auditioned, and my wonderful teachers, Johnny Hobbs, Jr., and Charles Conwell, accepted me right then and there. I’ll be forever grateful.

It was satisfying to leave Texas finally and go on this new adventure. It wasn’t easy.

It was very expensive. I worked the entire time as a housekeeper and a waiter. All four years, I cleaned houses for some of my teachers at school. I took out student loans, got scholarships. I did everything you could think of.

ROLIN | You went in as an actor and made the switch from actor to director?

JACKSON | I went as an actor. My last year in undergrad, I took a directing class from Paul Berman, who was a major influence on me and which writers have influenced me. He was into existential playwrights such as Beckett, Chekhov, and he loved Witkiewicz. He taught a directing class, and during the first week, after my first exercise in it, I thought, “Okay, this is what I want to do.” It was instant.

The first play I directed was Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker.

ROLIN | I’m sorry…the first play you chose, out of all the plays in the world, was The Skriker?

a one-on-one meeting with one of the directing faculty. The third part is that all three directing faculty sit at a table and give you three choices of plays you can pick from, and you have to direct a scene from one of these plays. The plays during my year were The Cryptogram by David Mamet, The Way of the World or something like that, and Much Ado About Nothing.

ROLIN | You picked Much Ado. You had to.

JACKSON | I picked Much Ado. You go in and the second-year actors learn these scenes, then you direct the scene with

them. They give you 45 minutes. You stand in front of the faculty and direct the actors however you want. Table work, up on your feet, or a combination of it.

It was one of the scariest things that I had ever done. I think back on it a lot. I remember freezing up. I stopped talking. Not a peep came out of my mouth for at least a minute, way past the point where you can cover for it and pretend you were thinking. I had to give myself a pep talk. In my head, I said, “Jackson, this is it. If you don’t do this, this is it. You have to do this.” I talked myself out of complete fear and panic, and then started talking again as if nothing had happened.

JACKSON | Yes. ROLIN | The thing that got me excited about life was Pippin. What the Venn diagram is between you and me, I have no idea. So, you directed The Skriker.

JACKSON | I directed The Skriker. I rented an art gallery space in Philadelphia. Sadly, I used my student loans. I wanted to direct a play!

It turns out that I really did need to. It was a crazy choice for a first-time director, but I liked the challenge of it. It had a humongous cast, was language-driven, and was dense and crazy.

ROLIN | I don’t understand. You did this in addition to schoolwork and the jobs that you had to do to pay for school. You picked a crazy play; you rent a studio; and you get all these other people to do this in their off-time, too?

JACKSON | Yeah. My classmates at University of the Arts were all in it. It was a gigantic cast because there was no double casting. It was huge—almost too big for this little room we rented.

ROLIN | Clearly, we’ve gone way past mixed swimming and square dancing.

You’ve decided this is what you want to do and you go from undergrad to grad school, right?

JACKSON | Immediately. I didn’t even start undergrad until I was 26 years old, so I was in a bit of a different situation. A lot of times, graduate theatre programs want you to have two years of work before you go to school. At Yale, they counted my entire life experience and considered it part of who I was as an artist.

The interview was terrifying. There are three parts. The first step is that they select you out of what you send. The second part is

Seema Sueko + Remy Auberjonois in The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow at Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Jackson Gay PHOTO T. Charles Erickson

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Ato Blankson-Wood + Juan Castano in Transfers at MCC Theater, directed by Jackson Gay PHOTO by Joan Marcus

ROLIN | What is that feeling of danger or fear for you? Fear of failure or exposure? What is that about?

JACKSON | I think it’s a fear of not being good enough. It’s not even “good enough,” it’s “worthy enough.”

It’s things that you carry with you your whole life: that you don’t have enough money, you’re not wealthy enough; you don’t come from the right family; you are a female.

Things that are said to you throughout your life, such as, “You shouldn’t speak”; basically, “You’re stupid.” Even though you know that that’s not true, if people say it to you long enough, it affects you. It’s real.

ROLIN | When does that leave? It seems like you’re building up a number of successes along the way.

JACKSON | It gets easier, but it never goes away. I think many, many people can relate to this in some way. It’s crazy. It’s like you get thrown back someplace over and over and over, and you have to climb back up the hill each and every time.

I have to remind myself of who I am and what I’ve accomplished, and also just be honest with myself about where I am and things that I need to take responsibility for myself. It’s constant.

ROLIN | I’m fascinated by the person who talked you out of that dead silence, the powerful Jackson or whoever that person is.

I’m wondering what that person looks like, looking down or being outside of that body, and what that person looks like now. That other voice that pulls you out of this moment.

JACKSON | I think that person, now, is somebody who is not buying in to shame and

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Kerrie Seymour, Rob Kahn + Andy Croston in Power of Sail at Warehouse Theater, directed by Jackson Gay PHOTO Wallace Krebs

that narrative anymore. What I think I do now is, instead of hiding it, I want to expose it and talk about things that a lot of people prefer you didn’t bring up. Things that are not polite to bring up.

There are discussions about inequality in the entertainment field, in terms of debt, money, and who gets to do things and who doesn’t.

Those kinds of conversations are very difficult for people to want to talk about.

That’s one reason I have always been drawn to [playwright] Lucy Thurber, because she just puts it all out there.

ROLIN | Okay, Lucy Thurber. She’s one of the playwrights you work with over and over.

Can you talk about meeting her and what attracted you to her writing?

JACKSON | I met her years ago through David Van Asselt at Rattlestick. She was the strangest creature I had ever seen in theatre.

What attracted me about Lucy is her honesty.

Lucy does not write realistic plays, naturalistic plays. People think that she does, but they’re not. They’re heightened, and there’s something more going on there besides some people in western Massachusetts in a house. I get a head start in terms of knowing these characters.

ROLIN | Both of you did not grow up with money.

JACKSON | She tells me stories about her childhood that are just so heart-wrenching but also full of joy and laughter. I think what makes her work successful is that she’s so compassionate about where she came from and the people that surrounded her—and surround her still. I love that.

And I love that she talks about class. She actually talks about class in America—which is underrepresented on stage—and she gets slammed for it.

I still remember a [Charles] Isherwood review of her play Scarcity, which we did together at the Atlantic [Theater Company]. There was a character who was blown away that there was a healthy salad bar at the college that he had been given a scholarship to. That was one of the details in her script that I loved so much: it was something I could relate to.

In his review, Isherwood wrote on and on about the salad bar; he singled it out as being unbelievable and ridiculous to talk about it.

To me, it highlighted the willful entitlement of a reviewer happy to mock another human being with a different life experience than his own. That was maddening and very upsetting. With Lucy, there are those little details. She gives a voice to the people that you rarely hear or see. I think this really makes her special.

ROLIN | Yeah. You’re in an art form where the characters that you and Lucy put on stage… there aren’t a lot of those people seated in the theatres. Especially in New York, where it costs $60 to $70 a pop for a seat.

You two have done six or seven plays together now. Is something like the Isherwood review a bonding experience? Is that where you two can link arms and say, “We are pushing this unpopular American story to people who are not familiar with it?”

What’s the tension about delivering this kind of story for a paying audience that did not grow up like you?

JACKSON | It’s a complete bonding experience. If there’s tension, the tension is always needing and wanting to be hypercareful with how you portray the characters.

They are flawed, like anyone, but they’re human beings deserving compassion and an attempt to understand why they do what they do, why they believe what they believe. That means a lot to both Lucy and me. We take seriously how their stories are being told.

ROLIN | Those are wildly different playwrights. If you were to house Ken Lin, Rolin, and Lucy Thurber into whatever director house you’ve made, what’s the commonality? Or do you say, “Hey, I’ve got to do something completely different?”

ROLIN | Is that a democratic exercise, an exchange of values and how you can get a New York audience, or a regional theatre audience, into either Sugar Land, Texas, or Western Massachusetts, where Lucy is from?

JACKSON | My main joy—and the only reason that I love what I do as much as I do—is because I get to do different kinds of things.

JACKSON | I think so. It’s about wanting to share these stories and human beings with other human beings. Nothing will ever change if you don’t get people to think about and feel for their fellow human beings. It doesn’t really change unless you can get somebody to, literally, put themselves in somebody else’s shoes, just for an hour.

And laughter. Humor is important. Lucy’s plays are funny.

ROLIN | One of the things that you’re known for in the American theatre is world premieres and new work. Lucy is the person that you’ve probably collaborated with most in terms of new plays.

JACKSON | My main collaborators—the writers I work over and over again with— have been Lucy, some guy named Rolin, and Kenneth Lin.

Feeling trapped for so long... When I moved away from Texas, I had spent so many years in my imagination going to all of these different places, and I wanted to do that for real. I never wanted to be trapped some place again. I still feel that way sometimes, to my detriment. I’m restless and I worry a lot about being confined.

So I like the fact that I’m known for being very eclectic, and that I get offered crazy, different things. If I only got to do one kind of genre, style, or subject matter, I would not be doing this anymore.

ROLIN | What’s the difference between breaking down a Lucy Thurber play, a Ken Lin play, and a Rolin play? Part two: do you have a head start with a Lucy Thurber play because of your life experience?

JACKSON | The answer to the first question is that I always start with the writer. I try to understand and get into the head and heart

of the writer, listen and watch them, and listen to what they say. A lot of times, I listen to them read their own material so I can hear how they read it to understand the tone.

ROLIN | They read it poorly, I would assume.

I know all three of those people are terrible actors. All of them, terrible.

JACKSON | Well, yeah!

It becomes clear really quickly what it is they care about and what they’re trying to express or do. That leads everything else. It gives you a direction on everything else that you do.

ROLIN | Since danger is a theme in this SDC Journal issue, I want to ask about two “dangerous” plays you directed in the last three years: Paul Grellong’s Power of Sail and Kleptocracy by Kenneth Lin. Is that fair to say these were “dangerous plays,” considering the landscape of what gets produced in American theatre?

JACKSON | I think so. It’s not even just what gets done in American theatre, but it’s the state of our world right now where it is scary, sometimes, to put certain plays up.

We did Power of Sail at a wonderful theatre in South Carolina called The Warehouse. Power of Sail is about the rise of white nationalism in America. Paul, the writer, doesn’t pull any punches. As the plot, you have a white Harvard professor and a black former student

Greg Stuhr, Anthony Manna, Brian McManamon, Andrew Musselman + Jabari Brisport in These Paper Bullets! at Yale Repertory Theatre, directed by Jackson Gay PHOTO Joan Marcus SPRING 2020 | SDC JOURNAL

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Kleptocracy at Arena Stage, directed by Jackson Gay PHOTO C. Stanley Photography

who has risen to prominence by writing a book, eclipsed his mentor, and is now a talking head on CNN and MSNBC. He still looks up to his professor and there’s an exchange between them that is very upsetting and shocking for both of them.

It’s told in the form of a thriller and it’s told forward and backwards.

ROLIN | What happened to your actors when you were exploring the play?

JACKSON | In rehearsal, it’s very difficult to deal with all of these issues. The process was upsetting at times because of the things we had to discuss and talk through honestly and the things that actors have to have said to them on stage. Even though they’re acting— it’s obviously a character saying it to another character—it takes a lot out of an actor to put themselves out there like that. There is the potential to bring a lot up from their own lives and personal experiences.

ROLIN | What are we talking? The N-word, anti-Semitism?

JACKSON | Yes: everyday racism, overtly and casual racist statements and attitudes, slurs, anti-Semitism in the United States.

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A lot of the pain in the play—the most upsetting thing about it—comes from the moment you see something ugly and hateful inside a person you thought you knew.

Somebody who you trusted as a mentor or a friend. An ugliness that person hadn’t even acknowledged about themselves. So the shock and pain are palpable and instant for both. And their lives are forever changed.

We had questions about how this particular audience would react to this play.

ROLIN | Because, geographically, they’re 15 or 20 miles away from where people who would espouse this openly live? Is that why?

JACKSON | Well, down the street is a Confederacy museum, open to the public, in someone’s house. This is definitely not to say this is who these people are in this area, but it is who some of them are. And you can find these kinds of people, groups, and museums all over the United States, including where I live in New York.

ROLIN | That becomes the question of the art: where is the theatre bubble? When you’re sitting at the back of the house, you feel your audience. When you put this hot-button work on stage, it feels different from what was

happening in the audience with something like our Much Ado musical adaptation, These Paper Bullets! You know what I mean?

JACKSON | Right. It feels dangerous. I’ve never watched an audience so intently before.

It’s really putting stuff out there for people to think about and have lively discussions about.

It’s not a situation where you can sit back and enjoy the show: it’s not that type of play. That was very exciting.

ROLIN | What were the audience reactions to it?

JACKSON | The audiences were, for the most part, really blown away. They were very receptive. Lots of discussion, lots of staying after and starting conversations in the theatre. It was very successful in that way.

ROLIN | Mm-hmm.

You’re sitting in the back of the audience at Arena Stage for Kenneth Lin’s play Kleptocracy. Let’s get into that piece of dangerous, exciting theatre. What’s the play really about?

JACKSON | It’s a fictional dramatization of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Vladimir Putin, centered on Khodorkovsky—a Jewish-Russian

man—who rose from passing out pamphlets on a street corner with a barely running car to becoming the richest man in Russia, to being the owner and founder of Yukos Oil, to Vladimir Putin throwing him in prison for 10 years after a power struggle for the heart and mind of Russia.

ROLIN | You were directing that at Arena Stage, in Washington, DC, the city that is the most politically involved in the entire world.

You were in a town that has a significant Russian population, including diplomats. One of the major businesses of Washington is international relations with other countries, and Russia is one of our big adversaries in the world. So, what was that like?

JACKSON | The audiences were smart and engaged with the material. Ken’s play allowed us to use our imaginations to theatricalize a story and a time that resonates today in our own time and country. If being a kleptocracy means that you steal from the money and resources of your own country, then one could say there’s a lot of similarity between the two.

ROLIN | I’m interested in what happens to you, as an artist, who puts on a play and, because of the content, something different happens other than the usual process of reviews, and maybe it’ll move to New York or London. When something unique happens, such as threats or danger, what’s your state of mind?

JACKSON | It feels a little scary at times, in a thrilling way. I want to do more things that make me feel that way. There is something about Kleptocracy and Power of Sail that is so “happening-right-this-second” in a crazy, important way that is very exciting. You don’t know what’s going to happen; you don’t know how it’s going to end.

There are so many people out there who are trying to get and keep control of the narrative, and make sure that their story is the one that is out there. It was scary-thrilling to have people be emotional, angry, or whatever about what stories we were trying to tell.

ROLIN | Imagine Jackson Grace Gay sits down to flip around channels. You’re flipping on CNN, NBC, Fox…and they’re all talking about the same story but in very different ways. You have a theatre piece here that, potentially, you’re telling one truth of this—your truth— and there are other people out there who say, “No, that’s not the story. The story is this.” Did you ever feel weird about not knowing if you were right?

JACKSON | In essence, we flipped around to all the channels. We read so many different things and I never felt, “This is this.” What you

do as a director—what I did—is focus more on the characters’ objectives and what makes a human being strive for what they want. I find something to tell the story of a human being overcoming obstacles to get what they want.

ROLIN | Let’s talk about one of your recent theatrical ventures: “The Mueller Report.”

What was that all about?

JACKSON | After Kleptocracy, it felt so good to get a conversation going about the world we live in. Right after that, I was watching a lot of news channels on TV, and they were talking about “The Mueller Report” and, jokingly, the idea to put it on stage came up because it didn’t seem like anybody was reading it.

When you think about what theatre is—or could be or should be, or what it used to be—it’s that a community comes together and experiences something that has to do with a present-day issue.

And then they talk about it and go home, hopefully changed or expanded in some way.

– JACKSON GAY ROLIN | It’s 500 pages long.

JACKSON | Yes. I had read little bits of it at that point, so I went on Facebook and wrote, “Who wants to get together and read ‘The Mueller Report’ out loud?” as a joke. People started responding and it grew and grew.

John Belitsky and Sari Caine from a space called DMDR at the Arc in Queens said they wanted to co-produce it and would love me to use their space. Dan Butler came on board to help produce it, and you—specifically, New Neighborhood with Steven Padla—got behind it. It was an outrageous amount of work.

ROLIN | It’s not character driven; it’s not a play; it doesn’t have the shape of a play, but you’re trying to make a theatrical event out of it. What the hell is that?

JACKSON | It’s maybe one of my favorite theatrical productions that I’ve ever done.

We thought about it just as you would with a play: what does this really want to be about? Then, after a lot of talking, it ended up being just a person’s voice, amplified, with nothing else.

Jackson Gay’s Facebook post inviting people to read “The Mueller Report” out loud ABOVE

When you think about what theatre is—or could be or should be, or what it used to be—it’s that a community comes together and experiences something that has to do with a present-day issue. And then they talk about it and go home, hopefully changed or expanded in some way.

After a massive amount of work and trying to get the word out, it started at eight o’clock on a Saturday night and ended at eight o’clock the next day. We wanted to do it as straightforward as possible, with no commenting. Our readers were a combination of actors, directors, dramaturgs, artistic directors, designers, and people not involved in theatre at all. The first reader stepped up on this little platform with a microphone and started reading. I got emotional about it. It was so quiet and you could only hear just this person’s voice. Then, when they finished their section, the other person was standing there, ready to go on. As that first reader put the mic down and turned to step off stage and let the other person step on, they started to pat each other. One of the people grabbed the other person and hugged them. And that was it. The other person went up and started reading.

For 24 hours, that was my favorite part of the event: watching the pass-off. People sat there for hours, just listening to people, one after another. We slept for 45 minutes in 24 hours.

When we finished, I thought, “This is what I should be doing.” In addition to other things that I also love.

I didn’t think that I really had the skills or the knowledge to be engaged in this way, but I really do. Why am I not doing this? It’s these little things that could bring people together.

It was a big moment for me not just as an artist, but as a human being, and as a mother.

My daughter came, and I got to show her this thing. That was important for me.

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ROLIN | What did she think of it?

JACKSON | She loved it. She was our unofficial photographer.

ROLIN | Your mom pulled you out of square dancing, and you brought your daughter to this staging of “The Mueller Report.”

JACKSON | Exactly. I’ve come a long way, Rolin.

ROLIN | I think this is clearly where you are at right now as an artist. But what are the dangers of doing theatre as a mom, cobbling together the career that allows you to put her through school and create a better life to give her an advantage from where you started?

What’s the danger about this lifestyle as a theatre artist?

JACKSON | The danger is that she won’t be able to pay her rent or feed herself.

ROLIN | But you are.

JACKSON | I am, but it really is a constant worry. It’s very difficult to be a female director raising a daughter. Dickson and I use the money that I make in my directing life and teaching to actually live. It’s not “fun money.”

Working in theatre requires you to be away from your child. Sometimes you have to take a job because it’s a wonderful project or because of the people involved, or, sometimes, honestly, you just need to pay bills.

ROLIN | Yeah, but it’s worth it.

JACKSON | It’s worth it.

I don’t think it’s a secret to say that a lot of people involved in theatre come from some sort of financial advantage. It’s just how it is, because you do not make enough money in theatre. And it’s not just about making money: it’s about knowing people who can help get you other things.

That’s not just for theatre, that’s a problem in all of America. You’re born into a certain class, and you go to school, to birthday parties, church, or whatever you do, with people who also have the same societal and financial advantages. So of course you’re going to be around people who will help you immensely to get what you want. And that cycle of financial advantage continues to the next generation. That’s not a secret.

It’s also not a secret that people without that really struggle or give up.

ROLIN | Your particular story is that you’re in this art form and doing some provocative work that’s holding up a mirror to the country at this moment. And this is an art form that is a struggle if you don’t come

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from those advantages. If you come from your background and your situation, it’s hard to do.

JACKSON | Yes, it is really hard. Many productions that I’ve done make it worth it to me because I so love what I do. I understand that there are a million people who come from way worse situations, so I’m really grateful for many people that have helped me along the way and for the advantages I myself have gotten.

ROLIN | The Jerry Babers, the Paul Bermans, the Liz Diamonds…all those people that got you there along the way. I get that.

JACKSON | After “The Mueller Report,” New Neighborhood’s Steven Padla and I talked about how New Neighborhood should do more theatrical events that have to do with various topics relevant today in American life. We talked about what is missing in our souls, in our own lives, and came up with ideas of what we could do.

Part of us wanting to make more work like the Mueller reading event is wanting to not just be focused on a career—how to keep jobs coming and all of that—but that you could take time out to create socially interactive events to get a conversation going in a community and do it in a theatrical and fun way.

There was a lot of the idea of joy and audience engagement in the origins of New Neighborhood from the beginning: to do something that is different, fun, and involves the audience. Steven Padla and I will now be taking the reins of New Neighborhood and will focus the work on amplifying the experiences of our fellow American citizens through the creation of “Live Actions,” which we think of as socially interactive theatrical events that change and grow as audience members contribute their own voices and diverse perspectives to the conversation.

Our current project—Endless Loop* of Gratitude—is an interactive “live action” piece that gives participants the opportunity to express gratitude for events, people, or places that positively impacted their personal lives. There will be a sign encouraging people to step up to the mic and share their stories in their own voice. Each speaker is recorded and those recordings will enter a stream that is played for everyone to hear. The voices will fade into one another in a stream that bathes the audience in gratitude, thankfulness, and kindness. For those shy or uninclined, we will have “thank you notes” sent from all over the country to be read, allowing a stranger’s gratitude to enter the room and the world.

We want this experience to have an emotional impact on people, providing momentary respite from a world overwhelmed with partisanship, identitydriven grievance, and maybe even raw anger.

ROLIN | It seems, at the heart, what you’re looking for, or what’s slightly different here, is some version of mixed swimming: getting people together. What’s coming in the door all seems very provocative. It’s not that what’s on stage isn’t important, but it’s conceived by creating a little gumbo with the American experience. Right?

JACKSON | I guess it really is. I love how you’re putting this together.

If you keep a teenage girl away from boys in a swimming pool, they’ll have no idea who boys are, won’t know how they think, won’t know what their flaws are, and won’t know what their good parts are. They won’t know anything about them. They’ll be terrified of them.

There’s something about getting in and getting to know each other…yes, it could be dangerous, but you learn about each other.

You learn what one person wants, what the other person doesn’t want. You learn everything you need to know about life together. You learn to not have any shame about who you are, your body, anything. I think it is a good metaphor: you have to put on a swimsuit, say, “Here I am,” and jump in together.

So, there you go.

PHOTO CREDITS: The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow by Rolin Jones. Directed by Jackson Gay. Scenic design: Lee Savage; costumes: Chloe Chapin; lighting: Miriam Nilofa Crowe; sound: Hillary Charnas. | Transfers by Lucy Thurber. Directed by Jackson Gay. Scenic design: Donyale Werle; costumes: Jessica Ford; lighting: Russell H. Champa; sound: Broken Chord. | Power of Sail by Paul Grellong. Directed by Jackson Gay. Scenic design: Shannon Robert; costumes: Kendra Johnson; lighting: Tony Penna; sound: Marc Gwinn. | These Paper Bullets! Adaptation by Rolin Jones; songs by Billie Joe Armstrong. Directed by Jackson Gay; choreography: Monica Bill Barnes; fight direction: Michael Rossmy. Scenic design: Michael Yeargan; costumes: Jessica Ford; lighting: Paul Whitaker; sound: Broken Chord; projections: Nicholas Hussong. | Kleptocracy by Kenneth Lin. Directed by Jackson Gay; fight direction: Lewis Shaw.

Scenic design: Misha Kachman; costumes: Jessica Ford; lighting: Masha Tsimring; sound: Broken Chord; projections: Nicholas Hussong.

INTEREST IN

EXTREMES DANIEL FISH IN CONVERSATION WITH DONALD BYRD After choreographer Donald Byrd saw the recent Tony Award-winning revival of Oklahoma! on Broadway, he knew he wanted to speak with director Daniel Fish, whose bold production of the American classic reenvisions it for the 21st century. Over the last three decades, Fish’s work as a director has crossed the forms of theatre, opera, and film at venues ranging from The Chocolate Factory Theater in Long Island City to New York City’s Public Theater to the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis and overseas at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus.

Bruce McKenzie in White Noise at the NYU Skirball Center, directed by Daniel Fish PHOTO Paula Court

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Last fall, while Byrd was choreographing the world premiere of Greenwood at the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater and Fish was in New York City to remount a piece based on Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, the two artists spoke on behalf of SDC Journal.

DONALD BYRD | Your work has been characterized as edgy or avant-garde. Do you consider yourself edgy or avant-garde?

DANIEL FISH | No, I’m very suspicious of those categorizations. I’m just trying to make the work that I want to make, do the things that interest me, and learn about the things that I’m confused about.

People want to put us all into categories. I get why they want to do it, but do you think that way about your work?

DONALD | I do not.

DANIEL | It’s just work.

DONALD | Yes, it’s just work. But what is interesting about your response is you said you want to learn; you want to discover or know something. What do you look to know?

DANIEL | I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace again. He infamously said that writing was learning what it’s like to be a fucking human being. I kind of like that, and I think of directing as writing in some ways. I also think of reading as performing.

DONALD | You created an experimental performance piece based on Wallace’s writing. There were some unusual strategies in your approach: the texts changed with each performance, the actors navigated a set strewn with tennis balls on the floor. I hate it

when anyone asks me this question, but what was your intent?

DANIEL | You saw what I was trying to do.

When somebody asks, “What was your intention?” I think, “You saw my intention.”

My intention was to make the piece that you saw. If I could explain to you why I did it, I wouldn’t have to make it.

I had read a bunch of Wallace’s work and got really captivated by it. Then I heard recordings of him reading his work and that changed how I read his work. For me, that was the hook. His voice became the hook. His writing wasn’t the text of the piece; his voice was the text.

DONALD | That’s really interesting. I developed a piece with Anna Deavere Smith, using her methods of recordings. We were working with audio of James Baldwin and Margaret Mead. In Anna’s method, you listen to the audio, speak with the audio, and then eventually you stop listening and you just say it. You’re not trying to mimic or be a ventriloquist. There’s a truthfulness and authenticity that comes through: that’s what you’re trying to capture. My experience was I could not ever completely capture what James Baldwin was saying. I would have moments that would go in and out, but there’s something impossible about the task.

DANIEL | Sure. Certainly with the Wallace piece, there was a game about watching the actors struggle to do it; that was part of what was delivered. I felt how I felt when I read his work: like running a race. Difficult and exhilarating. I was trying to capture that, but I’m not even sure I knew I was trying to capture that until I saw it.

A (radically condensed and expanded) SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN at the Chocolate Factory Theater, directed by Daniel Fish PHOTO Paula Court

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I think one of the things that we were trying to do is that the actor becomes a vessel for the material in a way that if it’s really cooking, the song or text is singing the actor. They’re not singing the song or they’re not acting the play; the play is acting them.

I think what happens often is I read or see something and I want to have a conversation with or spend more time with it. And the way I spend more time with it, or to have a conversation with it, is to make a piece of theatre with it. Someone else might write a critical essay; someone else might have read it 10 more times. But for me, maybe I read something and I think I’m not done with it or it’s working on me or it’s a way to try to learn something or discover something.

The other day, I was thinking about the phrase “museum piece.” That is a derogatory term, right? “Oh, I don’t want to make a museum piece.” If that’s a derogatory term, I thought, “Why is that a derogatory term?”

I love going to museums. What’s more alive than looking at a painting that blows you away? So maybe I do want to make the museum piece.

I like being turned on by or lost in a painting or a sculpture. For me, it feels very similar to when I’m really excited by a work of theatre.

Or a work of fiction. It either disturbs or calms me, depending on my mood, but it’s engaging me on a deep level and asking something of me. It’s asking me to work and look at something—maybe for a long period of time or to look carefully. That’s the work that draws me in.

I’m not sure I’m able to do that all the time in my work, but I’d like to think that I’m working towards that.

become used to something that’s very fast.

And, of course, television and everything in our culture is a part of this.

DONALD | With the contemporary literary texts that you work with, what in that writing strikes you as being theatrical?

It’s a little misguided to put the blame on the audience entirely. We have a role in that.

What happens is that they get scared, we get scared, and we stop making work that may engage people on a level that might just ask them to look at a stage picture or sit with a difficult piece of music for a long period of time before we start changing it.

DANIEL | I think it’s writing that turns me on and that, on some level, I want to hear aloud.

I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily dramatic, but it feels performative or theatrical.

When I was in performance studies at Northwestern, Frank Galati was one of my teachers. On the first day of class, Frank gave all the directors the first page of a short story. Everybody got a different short story. I got the first page of a T. Coraghessan Boyle short story, and Frank said, “Okay, on Thursday you have to stage it. You can do anything you want, only you can’t cut a single word.”

This was a huge lesson for me because I was faced with a bit of narrative fiction and forced to make all these decisions. Is it one person, is it 10 people? Is it men, is it women? Is it text spoken, is it text visual? I couldn’t make any assumptions; you know, the kind of assumptions that usually come with the structure of a play. There’s no patriarchal figure saying, “This is the form it must fit into.” I had to take responsibility for making that form up. This was extremely liberating for me.

I don’t really look at theatrical text differently.

I look at White Noise differently than I look at Oklahoma!, but because they’re different, not because one is a play and one is a novel.

One is written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II and the other by Don DeLillo.

The form is kind of secondary.

You start operating out of a place of wanting approval or love instead of actually giving them something that you’ve worked really hard to make, just the way you want it to be.

And then, if you’re lucky and you get it that way—which we all know how hard that is, and there are many, many obstacles—it’s not yours anymore. It belongs to them.

If you’re talking about asking the audience to work, but not asking the audience to work too hard, then I’m not interested.

– DANIEL FISH DONALD | So where is that place in the middle—if one is actually looking for middle?

My experience of looking at Oklahoma!, for example, is that there was no middle ground; it was one intention or focus. I thought

that you were not trying to please or seek approval from the audience, but rather you were doing the best work you could without regard to how it might land for an audience or producer.

So how do you think of the work of trying to find a middle?

DANIEL | I’m not trying to find a middle. I’m interested in extremes.

On a micro level, maybe sometimes you’re looking for a sweet spot. You’re looking for the thing that is going to make something click and that may be about the idea of balance. But I don’t think that’s quite what you’re talking about.

If you’re talking about asking the audience to work, but not asking the audience to work too hard, then I’m not interested. I’m making it the way I want to make it. I’m going to do the best job I can. Making it so that you’re seeing, hopefully, exactly what I want you to see and hear.

Work can be entertaining; work can be thrilling; work can be funny. It doesn’t all have to be just hard. But I do think it’s about asking people to be present and alert and asking people to be in the room with another human being with language, music, and light.

DONALD | If producers or presenters enter into an agreement and say, “We want a piece of yours. We want you to direct something,” they know what they’re getting. It seems to

DONALD | I’m curious about something.

You said that when you read, you seem to be responding to things that make you work. To me, I hear that the material challenges you in some way. I often find that people don’t want to experience things that make them work; they don’t want to be engaged that way.

They want the path of least resistance when they’re encountering a piece of art. Is that the experience you want your audiences to have?

DANIEL | Well, I want my audience to have a good experience. I think what you’re talking about is something we hear all the time: “Can it be shorter? Why does it have to be so long?” I’m like, “It’s going to take the time it’s going take.”

I think that it’s very easy to blame audiences.

But it works both ways. I think we haven’t given audiences work that challenges them, and so that muscle gets atrophied. They

Bruce McKenzie in White Noise at the NYU Skirball Center, directed by Daniel Fish PHOTO Paula Court

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Ali Stroker in Oklahoma! on Broadway, directed by Daniel Fish PHOTO Little Fang

me they should say, “We want you to bring the thing that you do—the best of you—to the table. That’s really what we are paying for: the best of how you want it done.”

DANIEL | That’s what good producers do. The folks at Bard SummerScape did it. And Susan Feldman at St. Ann’s Warehouse did it. For Oklahoma! at St. Ann’s, we rehearsed for five weeks on a completed set. No one does that.

And I think that shows in the work.

This funny thing happens in theatre. You work for four weeks and then you add lights, costumes, and set. We wouldn’t think of working without texts for five weeks and “adding” a text! We wouldn’t think of working without actors for five weeks and then just “adding” the actors! Why do we think we can just add these things at the last minute and it’ll be good? I don’t get it.

DONALD | I want to ask a question about the space in Oklahoma! Do you think part of the problem at the center of the play is communication and miscommunication?

One of the things that I noticed and was very engaged by in the book scenes was when you chose to put people close together and when you chose to have them really far apart. The communication was affected; the urgency of the communication was dependent on how

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close or how far away people were from each other. Were you using spatial relationships to amplify misunderstandings?

DANIEL | I think that’s true, but I don’t think I was consciously doing that. I was probably thinking more about composition, dynamic, contrast, and interest.

I started my process in 2007 when JoAnne Akalaitis—who was running the theatre program at Bard College—asked me to come and do a show. Almost on impulse, I said, “I want to do Oklahoma!” I didn’t know much more about it at the time. I hadn’t seen it for a long time, since I was a kid, so there was nothing other than a deep memory of the music.

There is flexible space at Bard. At the time, John Conklin was the designer and we were thinking about dinner theatre. The idea of a table with Crock-Pots of chili and sitting in the fringe grew out of that.

That got refined when Laura Jellinek came on as set designer in 2015. We still kept the idea of the tables and the chili in this long wooden space, which has always been part of it. The idea of everybody being in the room together was part of that. Each time we’ve done it, we’ve doubled the audience size.

So, the chili and Patrick Vaill—who has played Jud throughout—were there from the beginning. I liked that his Jud was so young and had the impulses of a young man.

The first Bard production in 2007 was very different from what we did at Bard in 2015 and then subsequently at St. Ann’s and at Circle in the Square [on Broadway]. The first cast was a bunch of 17- to 21-year-old kids.

There was a wonderful scrappiness about it.

DONALD | What in the story or music most resonated with you at the start of your process?

DANIEL | As I got into it, I certainly think that last scene—that trial scene—became very important to me. And the idea of the need for a community to create an outsider in order to define itself. A community is only a community by virtue of who or what they exclude from it.

DONALD | Your production was so much about the “outside.” The Rodgers & Hammerstein (R&H) management tend to be tight about things you can do in production.

What was your experience?

DANIEL | I can honestly say it was very positive. From the beginning, we worked with Bruce Pomahac, who was the Director

of Music for R&H. He is one of those people who has extensive knowledge of those shows.

He can sit down at the piano with the 1943 version and will tell you, “These four parts went like this and in the movie, it went like this, and in 1979…” He became a real resource to Dan Kluger, the orchestrator, and to me.

With Ted Chapin [Chief Creative Officer of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, which publishes and licenses the works of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II and many others], it was always a conversation. It never got prescriptive.

When he saw it at Bard, he raised concerns about the end and asked me to address them.

I think it really became about me articulating what I was doing. He saw one thing, and I thought, “Well, that’s not what I see.” I had to go back and try to make clear what it was.

I hope that other estates can take a cue from this. Ted was vigilant, interested, and he was by no means a free ticket to do anything, but it was always a conversation. Right up through when we were on Broadway, we were dealing with the length of the dream ballet.

I have nothing but really good things to say about how that went.

DONALD | Now, I may have this wrong, but it’s written that the dream ballet closes Act I. In your production, it opens the second act.

John Heginbotham and I to work with dancers and to try to figure out what would become a dream ballet.

DANIEL | Correct.

DONALD | It seems to me there is this thing about how much dust and cobwebs is on something. And then when you’re looking at it and you really want to get a clear picture of understanding it—let’s say with Oklahoma!—there’s a lot of noise that needs to be cleaned off.

DONALD | I’d read a story—a rumor—that you had asked to cut the ballet completely.

DANIEL | That’s not true. That came up at Bard in 2015.

We were struggling with what wasn’t a dream ballet. We used a version of the music and created a stage picture you see at the very end of the ballet, of people in space. But there was no dance at the time.

Then we were in our final dress and I had the thought to move it to the top of the second act because there was something about wanting to slam it right up against “The Farmer and the Cowman” and end the first act with Laurey in the most acoustic, raw way possible.

Ted Chapin saw that and said, “I really think there needs to be a ballet.” At St. Ann’s, Eva Price came on as enhancing producer, and she and St. Ann’s supported a number of workshops for [choreographer]

DANIEL | I guess I would ask, “How can you not do that?” That’s your job.

DONALD | If you think that the job of the director is to create clarity, then yes. But don’t all directors — DANIEL | No, I don’t think the job of the director is clarity. For God’s sake, clarity?

Clarity makes me want to reach for my Luger.

I think it’s about not making assumptions about a piece of material. You look at Oklahoma! and what do you have? Words and musical notation on the page, right?

You’ve got that brilliantly put down by Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers. Beyond that, everything else is applied.

Gabrielle Hamilton in Oklahoma! at St. Ann’s Warehouse, directed by Daniel Fish PHOTO Paula Court SPRING 2020 | SDC JOURNAL

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What I’m interested in is engaging with the words and the music and bringing them to life in a way that interests me, that moves me.

If it moves me, then maybe it’s going to move somebody else.

DONALD | I agree with you and you’re absolutely right in the purest sense that what’s there is: text and music.

However, there’s a performance history that goes along with it that many people bring with them as well, including the audience.

How does one push through that? I would say, with Oklahoma!, for example, it’s a kind of willingness: you have to be willing to see what’s there. As a director, you’re already coming at it with, “I’m just going to start with the texts and the music and I’m not going to bring all that other stuff there if I’m going to resist having that invade the space of the creation.”

DANIEL | No. I’m not that pure. Of course I looked at the film. Of course I listened to every recording I could find. All of that is useful information, right? But it just goes in, whether it is useful or not. The same way I’d walk out of my house and see something interesting on the street—is that useful? Or reading about something that’s happened in the news. Is that useful? That’s all that it’s about.

I think the dream ballet in the movie is phenomenal. It deeply informed John Heginbotham’s work on our dream ballet.

And then we found Gabrielle Hamilton, the dancer who originated the part at St. Ann’s and on Broadway. She blew us away. The ballet was very much made on her; I would say the whole production is made on those actors. I don’t think people quite understand the extent to which this is so.

DANIEL | You’ve done Oklahoma!, is that correct? Did you direct it or choreograph it or—

hadn’t thought about that.” What you said about “you should hang yourself” resonates in this way.

DONALD | Choreographed. In that production, I was very involved in a dramaturgical way. I did a lot of research that I shared with the director and actors on the state of Oklahoma at the time that it’s taking place. The Oklahoma territory and then how many black people there were there—

DONALD | I’ve had two really good times in the theatre in the last 10 years or so, and your Oklahoma! was really good. It didn’t mean that I loved everything, but I was so engaged and happy I’m here. It became really clear to me in the first five minutes that that’s where I wanted to be. By the time we got to the end, I felt like I had been thrown up against the wall emotionally in the sense of how things were ricocheting off each other and in meaning and possibilities. That’s what I hope for anytime I go in and sit down in a theatre.

I would say Oklahoma! verged on being profound, if not profound.

DANIEL | Right, race riots and— DONALD | I’m at work now on a piece for the Alvin Ailey company about the race riots in Tulsa. I’m really excited about that.

In the Oklahoma! I choreographed, we cast Jud as black and then there were black people in the community. There was not much attention to race except we felt that the stuff with Jud—because of his blackness— created a tension that was really interesting.

Also, when Curly says, “You should hang yourself,” that resonated for people because of the history of lynching in this country.

Some people were upset and asked, “How could you do that?”

DANIEL | Thank you. What was the other one?

What was also interesting was when Jud is dead and they’re going to move his body, one of the black actors had the line, “Don’t you touch him.”

DANIEL | Isn’t it amazing, how that happens?

Like when Mary Testa, as a white woman, says, “Shut up,” to Anthony Cason [who is black], or when Will Mann, who is one of the black actors, says “self-defense, alright,” and sides with the [white] community. Those lines are fascinating. I’m thinking, “Of course, I

I think my work—and I know this particularly true about Oklahoma!—is so dependent on the vulnerability and the preparedness and the willingness of the actors to show up every night and bare themselves. If they don’t do that, my work is nothing.

DONALD | I find the same thing. That who is in the room—whether I’m working with my own group or whether I’m making work on other dance companies—determines what the work looks like and what it is. Often, I don’t want to work with other dancers because you have to go through this long process of their getting to know you, hoping that they trust you.

Rebecca Naomi Jones + Damon Daunno in Oklahoma! on Broadway, directed by Daniel Fish PHOTO Little Fang

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I was talking to someone the other day about [New German Cinema director Rainer Werner] Fassbinder and David Foster Wallace—about people who really look at suffering, pain, abuse of power, and what it is to be human. To look at how wonderful but also awful people can be. Who are the artists able to really go there and don’t let it overtake their lives?

DONALD | I hadn’t really considered what this question was when you started talking, but the dangerous part sounds like fascism to me—the Nazis. So, I think “dangerous art” is a little overwrought. I think maybe the attempt is to say that art disturbs our desire to be complacent.

The outcome of the NEA Four was that the NEA stopped supporting individual artists.

Did we lose the war—or is the war still going?

Donald Jones Jr. + Kara Walsh in Oklahoma! at 5th Avenue Theatre, choreographed by Donald Byrd PHOTO Chris Bennion

DONALD | It was a very different experience: Hand to God [by Robert Askins]. Is it a good play or not? I don’t know. But it was an experience: it was the most diverse audience I have seen in a Broadway house ever.

When I say diverse, it was not only white people—the people that you see going to Broadway shows regularly—but there were a lot of black people. There were a lot of really young people sitting in the audience; a lot of gay people—young gay people, not just the gay people that go to Broadway musicals and stuff like that. And then there were a lot of young, straight white people there. People were all having the same experience and enjoying it.

DANIEL | Well, who marketed that? Hire them.

DONALD | With Oklahoma! and Hand to God, I thought, “Okay, two very, very different experiences and two very different kinds of theatre.” But it spoke to the fact that theatre can really be inclusive without wanting to be offensive or wanting to play safe (whatever that is) or wanting to provoke people. Both were provocative, but I don’t think that’s what they were trying to do.

DANIEL | No, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being offensive. I think, particularly in the world we’re living in, it’s a worthwhile act. If it’s not doing anything else, then maybe not.

DONALD | Yeah, but provocative is part of the delivery system. If provocative is what’s needed to communicate, then you can be provocative or should be.

Have you had producers or artistic directors tell you that you have to change something, do it differently?

DANIEL | Certainly. It’s why I stopped working in regional theatre. I started producing my own work because I was told, “If you want to do that sort of thing, you can’t do it here anymore.” So I started self-producing.

My work...is so dependent on the vulnerability and the preparedness and the willingness of the actors to show up every night and bare themselves. If they don’t do that, my work is nothing.

– DANIEL FISH DONALD | One of the things that this issue of SDC Journal is exploring is the idea of what constitutes dangerous art. Do you recall what was going on when you first learned about the NEA Four?

DANIEL | I must’ve been in college or just graduated college. I was aware of Mapplethorpe. I had seen Karen Finley. I was excited by all of that work.

The term “dangerous art” is a little suspicious.

I think [performance artist] Chris Burden’s work is certainly dangerous because he was harming himself. But “dangerous” is living in toxic waste. Walking out into the middle of traffic is dangerous. Living on the street is dangerous. I’m not sure art is dangerous, unless you’re actually harming yourself or somebody else.

DANIEL | I think there is a battle around censorship—what can be said and what can’t be said. But those are battles that are being fought in different ways right now.

There’s an unfortunate thing in our field and it’s rampant in grant writing right now: money is awarded on a project basis. You’re asked to describe what the project is going to be. I don’t know what the fucking project’s going to be before I make it. If I knew what it was going to be, why would I make it?

DONALD | Are there things in the current American theatre that you think are risky now?

DANIEL | The risk is when one—a director, a designer, an actor—starts operating from a place of wanting to be celebrated, when one becomes driven by the need for accolades or laughs or applause or love. There’s nothing wrong with being praised: it’s human to want it. But there’s a real cost to the work when that becomes the driving force behind it.

PHOTO CREDITS: White Noise by Don DeLillo. Directed

by Daniel Fish. Video: Jim Findlay; scenic design: Andrew Leiberman; costumes: Doey Lüthi; lighting: Stacey Derosier. | A (radically condensed and expanded) SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN after David Foster Wallace. Directed by Daniel Fish. Scenic design: Laura Jellinek; costumes: Andrea Lauer; lighting: Thomas Dunn; sound: Daniel Kluger. | Oklahoma! by Richard Rodgers + Oscar Hammerstein II. Directed

by Daniel Fish; choreography: John Heginbotham.

Scenic design: Laura Jellinek; costumes: Terese Wadden; lighting: Scott Zielinski + Thomas Dunn; sound: Drew Levy; projections: Joshua Thorson. | Oklahoma! by Richard Rodgers + Oscar Hammerstein II. Directed by Peter Rothstein; choreography: Donald Byrd; fight choreography: Geoffrey Alm. Scenic design: Matthew Smucker; costumes: Lynda L. Salsbury; lighting: Tom Sturge; sound: Ken Travis.

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RAISING A

joyful

hell NIEGEL SMITH I N C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H

TAY L O R M A C

Taylor Mac + ensemble in A 24-Decade History of Popular Music at St. Ann’s Warehouse, co-directed by Taylor Mac + Niegel Smith PHOTO Teddy Wolff

When Niegel Smith was named Artistic Director of New York City’s The Flea Theater, the New York Times quoted him as saying, “I’m hungry and I have something urgent I need to say right now.” The North Carolina-born, Detroit-raised, Dartmouth-educated, Bessie Award-winning director and performance artist had a lot to say long before his tenure at the Flea began in 2015. Smith’s creative mission to create provocative, rigorous works that incite dialogue is one he has been true to all along, whether assisting directors such as Jo Bonney, George C. Wolfe, or Bill T. Jones, or through works created at HERE Arts Center or the New York International Fringe Festival, the Goodman Theatre, Magic Theatre, or The Public Theater.

Over the last few years, Smith has collaborated with director/actor/singer/performance artist Taylor Mac on trailblazing projects, including Mac’s play Hir, a surreal comedy that broke new ground for transgender characters and actors; co-direction of the sprawling and stupendous A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, which defies theatrical conventions, audience expectations, and physical stamina, and challenges its audiences to think deeply and enjoy; and a new Mac-penned play called The Fre that premieres at The Flea in March 2020.

Amid Fre auditions and just before embarking on a Berlin run of 24-Decade History, the friends and artistic partners made time to talk about Smith’s career, their work together, and the shared sensibility of being queer, activist artists.

TAYLOR MAC | What does it mean to be an activist artist in the 21st century?

NIEGEL SMITH | To never sleep.

TAYLOR | To never sleep…

NIEGEL | To never sleep. This question is funny. The first thing that comes to mind is, “How do I care for myself?” Maybe it’s my

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age. In my twenties, to be an activist artist meant every time a thing happened, I asked, “What is our artistic response?” For a while, I had a company called Willing Participant with a dear collaborator, Todd Shalom. Our mission was to react with a poetic response to the crazy shit that happens.

TAYLOR | How can we respond tomorrow— and not have to go through a year of submitting plays through literary offices, artistic directors, and the new play development process, and by then, the issue is over?

NIEGEL | Absolutely. A shooting or an incident would happen; we would email this list and get together in two days. We asked, “How do we create a batline, or more quick way to respond, and get folks together who wanted to do that kind of work?” Part of our practice was that we would design and execute a response within a week of that meeting. Get in, do it.

How can we actually embody—as a theatre and performance—embody, empathize, and be there in the space of all the folks who are really touched by that tragedy? It took an incredible amount of work to find other folks

who wanted to engage and practice. Willing Participant came out of that need. We had the energy of youth at that time and it took us a long way. Now I need to sleep, too.

The other thing I think about is that I don’t see a lot of nuance in the public discourse around culture and political identity. One of the things I love about this play you and I are making, The Fre, is that both audience members and the characters in the play have to make space for different worldviews. I get a lot of potential projects—scripts—that are polemics. There’s only one right way, there’s only one vision. Taylor, how do you allow space for multiple visions, but not elevate visions that denigrate humanity or humanism?

TAYLOR | How do you invite everybody to the party but not let them be in charge of the party that you’re creating?

NIEGEL | Yes, yes, yes! That’s a brilliant way of putting it. I think a lot about that in my work. We have a responsibility to be careful and respectful and inclusive, but to not water down the critique.

TAYLOR | And not to equate. Oftentimes, because it’s polarized, there’s an assumption that there are two equal sides fighting each other, and that is not actually what’s happening. They’re not the same thing and they don’t all have equal power.

NIEGEL | I’m really trying to figure that out in my practice. I haven’t gotten there yet, but I think the next step is with audiences outside of New York. And I think about dialogue and exchange.

TAYLOR | Being an activist artist in the 21st century is sometimes figuring how to get outside of the liberal bubble.

NIEGEL | Yes. And to allow your work to be pushed on from other spaces. How do I go back to North Carolina, where I grew up?

Niegel Smith + Taylor Mac at a table read of The Fre, directed by Niegel Smith PHOTO Adventure We Can

TAYLOR | Do you have any ideas about how to manifest that?

intentional, if I’m aware of those things, I can be in conversation with it.

NIEGEL | I go to the walk first. That’s a form I know really well: the walking form.

TAYLOR | The Confederate soldier statue alone is telling one story. The Confederate soldier statue with a young black woman dancing around it tells a totally different story.

TAYLOR | Why don’t you explain what the walks are?

NIEGEL | The walks are poetic responses to our everyday space. The idea was to offer a handful of people a different way of seeing and interacting with their world. There’s this core belief that everyone is a creative person.

We are creative when we’re intentional, so it’s about creating moments of intentionality in public spaces.

An artist takes a location or theme and builds a durational work where people go from one space to another. They do a series of prompts that relate to the theme. So, for instance, if we’re looking at poetry and found environment, we might take found objects along the way and create visual poetry out of that. We might take found words that we see on the buildings around us and create poems off of that.

There’s a walk I do around public sculptures and public monuments that exist—and ones we hope will exist—that we make with our bodies. There’s a moment where we dance with sculptures: “Oh, I’m moving through space. The shape, the ovals in this piece are actually manipulating my body.” There’s a moment here I might take that in. Whether I do a full dance, or I just let it linger on me as I pass by. Being intentional.

TAYLOR | Even the inanimate is a scene partner.

NIEGEL | There are these scripts all around us. It might not be text, but if I’m walking down the street and all I see are statues of people of a certain gender, class, and time, that is scripting value onto my world. If I’m

NIEGEL | Yes. That’s the hope. Don’t take it for granted. Be intentional about this space around us.

I did a walk in a downtown Detroit plaza about 10 or 12 years ago. This was right after the financial crisis. We offered to carry people’s baggage for them, asking, “What can we carry for you today?” We had little note cards where they wrote down what they wanted us to carry for them.

It’s not social practice work. I think the work is to consider and reconsider—in question form.

I don’t offer solutions in the work form.

TAYLOR | I’m hearing that it takes going to Detroit or North Carolina. You don’t have to deal with the pressure of the history of “Theatre A” accepting your project, and what communities have been invited into that theatre. You can just go and do it wherever you want to do it, and in spaces where everybody feels welcomed. That’s the other good thing about getting out of the bubble.

That’s what activist art is about. I go to street protests all the time. I think protest is selfcare, so I show up with the community. March through the streets. I don’t expect anything politically to change; I’m too cynical for that.

But I feel better just hanging out.

TAYLOR | We’re talking metaphorical baggage or actual baggage?

NIEGEL | “Here we are together; we’re in community with it.”

NIEGEL | Metaphorical baggage. We opened with a poetic phrase that made someone go—

TAYLOR | People chant things like, “Tear down the wall.” At the queer one, it was something about ICE and they rhymed it with, “We’re not being nice.” I thought, “But aren’t we? Aren’t we being nice? We’re just marching through the street politely and shouting, but it’s all organized, we have the right paperwork, and we’re not actually tearing down ICE.”

TAYLOR | Just a person walking by?

NIEGEL | Just a person walking by, or groups of two.

TAYLOR | And would people do it?

NIEGEL | Oh, yes. Dozens of people stopped and then shared moments, like: “I don’t know how I’m going to pay my child’s college tuition.”

TAYLOR | How do you carry that for the day, other than just the gesture—simply in the asking, that you’re helping to carry?

NIEGEL | The first part is to say someone’s actually asking and caring. The second is that we created visual sculptures with our bodies in the plaza.

NIEGEL | We’re not going to the Federal Reserve and taking the money and redirecting it ourselves.

TAYLOR | Right. So in that way, rallies and political marches don’t feel like direct action, but they do feel like self-care.

NIEGEL | I think it’s poetic. Part of our role as makers of culture is to help shift people’s perspectives on the questions they’re asking.

TAYLOR | When did social consciousness or social justice start to play a role in your artistic life?

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NIEGEL | Everyone knew them. You learned them. Think about slave culture. It’s oral tradition, so a lot of black American culture is oral tradition.

What was fun about going to church on Sundays was for six hours, sometimes for two hours, we were in it. We were singing to God; it was the narrative of “You’re all equal in God’s eyes, you’re all God’s children, you’re all here to sing whatever song you need to sing, or catch the spirit when you need to catch the spirit, or tell the story you need to tell.”

Suddenly, there’s an equalizer.

TAYLOR | It was improv theatre, with structure!

Ben Euphrat + Nancy Opel in Hir at Magic Theatre, directed by Niegel Smith PHOTO Jennifer Reiley

NIEGEL | Social justice was always part of my life. I can’t speak for all black Americans, but my earliest memories are ones of being aware of the folks that worked so hard and sacrificed so much so that I could be seen as a full citizen. Family reminding me of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and the people inside of my family who have wrestled with authority and with being demeaned.

Learning, very early on, that there were only certain jobs that were available to people in my family.

I had an academic gift, and my family glommed onto that like the second coming of Jesus. They said, “This is your way out. This is how white society is going to affirm your humanity.” How fucked up is it that, thank god, I had a gift and that was something I could latch onto, but to be born isn’t enough to be human? That was the lesson. To be born was not enough to be seen as equal.

TAYLOR | Something in your brain or your sensibilities had to click with what white institutions have deemed appropriate for your family to say, “This is your way out.”

NIEGEL | Yeah, it’s nasty. It’s a feeling of ugliness. Recently, I took my partner to the town where I grew up. There’s a little town park and I said, “On this side, the white people park. Then on this side, the black people park.” When I was in first grade, some Mexican families moved to the city and they parked at the end of the black section. There was an inherent self-segregation going on.

I saw these things and I noted them. So, as a younger artist, I found myself attracted to works that were wrestling with what looked or felt like the ugliness I saw out in the world.

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American black cultural tradition is theatrical.

At the core of most of our performance tradition is the need to move the body, to shout, to ring out, and to call out in a way that acknowledges the listener to be aware that the performer is indeed performing.

We have a music tradition that gives way to fully bodied, neck-craning gospel and, later, the bards of hip hop—the MCs whose hands move like gods and cue the entire crowd.

Social dances, that began in ritual circles, later coopted by minstrelsy and revised by block parties and juke joints. Our comedy, acutely aware of stinging our listener while they are doubled over in laughter. There’s this wellrehearsed craft, always being seen, always knowing that you are being known as black, never being able to leave the performativity of self of race that leads to a phenomenal, theatrical craft.

My first theatre was Pentecostal church.

There’s this one-room church, Colston Street Church of God, which is still there in rural Albemarle, North Carolina.

TAYLOR | Do you go to it when you go back home?

NIEGEL | No, I don’t go to church anymore.

TAYLOR | Do you miss that?

NIEGEL | There’s a part of church that I miss.

One of the things that was amazing about the Church of God is that you didn’t know what was going to be sung each Sunday. You got to church and whatever Sister McCray wanted to sing, the congregation would start singing it and the pianist would join in.

TAYLOR | And you knew all the songs, or you just kind of faked your way through it?

NIEGEL | Totally with structure. The same thing I love about theatre—structured reflection.

TAYLOR | Was there a moment where you thought, “I miss this thing and I’m drawn to theatre because of this,” or was it all subconscious?

NIEGEL | It was subconscious until a point.

My cousins and I would make up all kinds of games in our backyards. We played church and college. I remember standing in my grandma’s yard—five-and-a-half, six years old—and thinking, I want to be a preacher man because the preacher had everyone’s attention.

In middle school, I was the drum major in marching band. I was like, “I’m here. I want to be seen. I want to wear the big Poobah hat.” It was so cool. So that hooked me.

When we moved to Detroit, that love of leading the band and making stories led me to think, “Oh, theatre. They’re doing things over there. They’re making up stuff.”

TAYLOR | Do you have a memory of discovering the theatre department?

NIEGEL | Yeah, the first week of my all-boys Catholic high school. There was a theatre in our school: we had two shows, and the girls’ school across the parking lot had two shows, so we were doing four shows a year. I was just drawn to making, creating. It was part of my DNA. TAYLOR | Were you in the shows, or what did you do then?

NIEGEL | I was the assistant director. I got to give notes. I had been on stage and I thought, “But I have opinions about everything.” I thought, “I want to sit out there.”

I went to Mrs. Ayrault—I love her—and said, “Can I assist you on your next show?” She said, “Sure, let’s do this.” It was fabulous.

Suddenly I understood why the lights turned on, all that stuff.

TAYLOR | Yeah, but you took the agency for that. She didn’t say, “Hey, Niegel, why don’t you assist me in this?” You were like…

NIEGEL | “I want to do that. I want to be in that chair.” The first play I felt an urge to direct was The Zoo Story. We were reading Edward Albee in English class. I directed it at a coffee shop. I did that and David Ives. Those are the plays that landed in my lap.

TAYLOR | It’s all about the white canon. It was for us too.

NIEGEL | That’s what they gave us at that time.

TAYLOR | One of the topics SDC Journal is covering in this issue is the impact of the culture wars in the early ’90s. Do you recall how it was that you first learned about the culture wars and the NEA Four?

NIEGEL | I first became aware of it in a performance studies class in college. I was like, “What? That’s bullshit.” Then, when I found out Jesse Helms was involved, I thought, “Oh god,” because I grew up in North Carolina, and Jesse Helms…

TAYLOR | He was your senator!

NIEGEL | I was aghast. I didn’t quite understand it, but I sort of understood because I understand divisiveness and the “othering” of things we don’t quite know.

When someone sees a piece of art that challenges their worldview, the first thing they want to do is destroy it. Not walk away from it, not co-center it, but destroy it—make it cease to exist in the world.

I think my Achilles heel is that I have empathy for the oppressor. My first thought is, “Oh my god, how do we help them?”

NIEGEL | And has been a great strategy for the conservative movement.

TAYLOR | Everyone always says theatre is so liberal.

NIEGEL | It’s the most conservative art form.

TAYLOR | Almost every single thing I see feels really conservative.

Ultimately, with the NEA Four, the narrative got changed on what was actually progressive theatre. Now Hamilton is progressive theatre and, yes, it is to some degree, but it’s also about capitalism and how great capitalism is.

NIEGEL | There’s no federal funding for individual artists. There was federal funding for individual artists, the NEA Four happened, and since then, there hasn’t been any funding for individual artists. Institutions are what’s funded [for project-specific purposes].

I’m interested in community and community practice. In our work, we talk not just about making the show but what community we’re building, what the values are.

– NIEGEL SMITH TAYLOR | Right. That is so messed up.

NIEGEL | Institutions by their nature have to be conservative because we are thinking about the survival of the institution. If the institution is to have lasting impact and serve artists, managers, and audiences over years

and decades, we have to make decisions that keep it fiscally thriving while culturally relevant. The artists who are most in the position to push us forward and expand what these institutions do, and therefore what the culture does, aren’t being funded. That’s a loss.

I find myself thinking, “Maybe I’ve just been lucky, you know, to just do the work I want to do.” But I’ve also sacrificed a lot. As a young director—a young performance maker—I thought, “You don’t have to make a living from this.” I removed my vocation from my profession and made an intentional choice at an early age: I was going to direct and make the work that I most needed to make, and I would find other ways to make a living.

TAYLOR | Now that you’re getting a salary from an institution and you’re running an institution, has it changed?

NIEGEL | It’s still the same. To be totally honest, that was part of the plan. Early on, I worked at The Gap overnight, walked some dogs. Then there was my assistantdirecting work. All along the way, I was taking fellowships and staff positions in artistic leadership because I knew you can make a living in leadership in American theatre.

TAYLOR | You see being a leader in an organization in some ways as a day job.

NIEGEL | It’s a day job. I’m going to be totally honest. I’m a cultural leader, so I’m also helping to shape what the cultural conversation is, but it’s my job.

TAYLOR | But you’re so good at it.

TAYLOR | That’s a rough Achilles heel. We talk about it in 24-Decade History, where our duty is to forgive the oppressor but vilify the outsider. That’s the historical technique that has been used over and over in US history, always having to forgive the oppressor.

NIEGEL | It was a survival technique. I didn’t come from a community of revolutionaries.

No one in my family grabbed a gun or armed themselves or said, “We’re going to demand.”

I come from a stock of people that said, “We’re going to try.” My dad said you have to be 110 percent; you have to outdo them. Very different trauma-coping mechanism.

With the NEA Four, I was inspired to think, “I want to make work that’s so provocative that people want to stop funding it.”

TAYLOR | Well, certainly funding for the arts is being used as a tactic to rally conservative opponents…

Bernard Gilbert, Nicole Michelle Haskins, Tyrone Phillips + Jaime Lincoln Smith in Father Comes Home from the Wars at the Goodman Theatre, directed by Niegel Smith PHOTO Liz Lauren

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can’t be a leader because you dealt with sex.

You’re dirty.”

But it’s part of our life; it’s part of our art.

When it comes to me—my work—sex will always feel risky, too scary. There’s so much around power and power dynamics that that does feel risky.

It took me a long time to feel comfortable in my queerness in public space. Even though I came out very early—I was out at 14—I still thought, “The queer in public space: it’s dangerous, it’s volatile, someone might hit you. Someone might throw words at you.

Someone might throw an egg at you.”

The Fre at The Flea Theater, directed by Niegel Smith PHOTO Hunter Canning

NIEGEL | I’m passionate. I love it.

TAYLOR | When you became the Artistic Director of The Flea, did you come in with a new mission statement that you wanted to build? Or did you say, “What’s the mission statement of the theatre, and can I work within that mission statement?”

NIEGEL | I came in enthused about what was already The Flea’s mission: “Raise a joyful hell in a small space.” Whoa.

TAYLOR | That is a good mission statement.

NIEGEL | Mac Wellman wrote that.

TAYLOR | Of course he did.

NIEGEL | I’m interested in community and community practice. In our work, we talk not just about making the show but what community we’re building, what the values are.

TAYLOR | The process becomes part of the art, not just the product.

NIEGEL | Yes. The art starts as soon as you talk about it with someone else. It starts in the room: how we’re making it and putting it together. I knew that I wanted it to be part of a mission but to expand. I came in talking about how we widen the tent of the kinds of works that The Flea supports, and to further the diversity of the artists in the room.

TAYLOR | Further what a joyful noise could be and sound like and look like.

All the plays that happen here are plays of ideas and consequence. I think it’s kick-ass. I guess if that’s a day job, quit the art job and do the day job, because it feels like it matters

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more to some degree. I don’t know if that’s actually true—and I don’t want you to quit your art job—but you know what I mean?

Maybe that’s just me being down on art.

NIEGEL | It’s a little bit being down on art.

Making the art: that’s such a special place.

What’s so satisfying about rehearsals is that we’re solving problems and making things— and the whole time we’re considering what it is we want to put into the world. What do we want the audience wrestling with, what experience do we want? It’s a similar job to artistic directing.

TAYLOR | I don’t know…we all have our day jobs, our survival job that we do while we’re making our art as well. My day job is applying for grants. Yours feels ethical.

NIEGEL | What’s unethical about redistributing the wealth towards art?

TAYLOR | That’s true. What has been the most dangerous territory that you ventured into professionally?

NIEGEL | For me, danger is always when my queer sex life enters my work.

TAYLOR | And you’re supposed to be asexual if you’re going to lead an organization.

NIEGEL | What a strange, unnecessary thing.

I’m deeply interested in sex and sexuality. It’s a deep place of pleasure and curiosity and performance. I love the performativity of sex, particularly queer sex. There can be lots of identity play inside of it. Sex makes people so squeamish.

I think my fear becomes, “Oh, am I not going to get the grant?” Someone will say, “You

TAYLOR | I wonder about that with The Fre. I’m writing an all-ages play, but it’s primarily for kids. I wrote it for the queer kid, for my young, queer self that would have loved to have seen something like this. But in reality, it probably would have made me really uncomfortable.

NIEGEL | Because you think, “Someone might find out that I actually like this moment here…

Oh my god, I want to go up there and join them. Yes, I want to play in the mud!” One of the things I love about our work is we give permission. We create space for audience members to say, “Yes, I can be part of the art today too.” But would our young selves have been too terrified to take that opportunity?

TAYLOR | Is there anything more we can do when we invite those young, queer kids into this space? Is there something more we can do to help them?

NIEGEL | Look at what the invitation is. Is there something more we can do?

TAYLOR | I don’t know. It’s something to think about.

NIEGEL | People say theatre is a judgmentfree zone. It’s not true, though.

Last year, I went to What to Send Up When It Goes Down, which is a piece for black folks— but everyone is invited—at the Movement Theater Company. After the bows, the black folks were invited to stay if they wished and everyone else was asked to leave the room. I thought that that was a huge risk. To actually say that there are times and moments for segregation. That’s a risk.

TAYLOR | Yeah, but that doesn’t feel like something that can’t be done. We did it too, to a degree, in 24-Decade when we asked the white people in the center section of the audience to sit on the sides and let the people of color take the prime seats. We get judged for it but also celebrated, and we continue to do it.

What’s something in theatre that you can’t do without getting shut down?

Maybe actual violence—though for me, personally, I wouldn’t want to see actual violence.

NIEGEL | Absolutely not. I don’t care if it’s consensual. I don’t want to see it.

TAYLOR | I’m even getting tired of seeing pretend violence on the stage, especially against women. I’ve seen so much of it I just don’t think it’s useful anymore.

NIEGEL | And the glorification of a kingpin— someone who uses violence to get their work done in the world, to be at the top. I’m done seeing those stories.

TAYLOR | In some ways, it’s not the most outrageous thing that is dangerous anymore.

It’s actually the thing we’ve seen too much of.

NIEGEL | I don’t need to. I want to see someone use song and dance to change my mind. Maybe that’s why I like musical theatre.

You can change hearts in just a dance.

TAYLOR | You can: music will change everything.

Have there been any instances when you’ve been at work on a production and felt you faced censorship of a choice because the producer or artistic director felt it would be controversial? Have you ever adjusted your materials, self-censored?

NIEGEL | That’s not who I am.

TAYLOR | That’s not who you are. You’re more of the person who’s aware that somebody wants to censor. You’re aware that it’s dangerous, but you do it anyway.

NIEGEL | I feel I’m very up-front. “This is what the work is going to be.” I’m not afraid of how my work is received.

TAYLOR | In the rehearsal room, I never find you afraid to provoke actors or designers.

NIEGEL | That’s a place where I feel very sure.

I only make my work for three people.

TAYLOR | For three people? Who? NIEGEL | My mother. I want my mother to be able to grab something from it. I use my mother because I love her to death. Workingclass woman, didn’t get to go to college.

I want her to have cultural references or narrative markers that she can hold on to. I don’t want it to be over her head.

I make it for me. I want to be surprised by the work.

TAYLOR | Every time you see it?

NIEGEL | Every time I see it. I know that I’ve made work I’m not satisfied with if I come and I’m not surprised. That means I’ve held the reins too hard, or I haven’t let people create and be creative and bring their full selves to it.

And then there’s an aesthetic god. It’s probably my ego.

TAYLOR | Somebody that you think is outside yourself. Or looking down on you going, “Is this cute? I don’t know.”

NIEGEL | “That hem’s not high enough.”

“Those colors are too tame.”

What’s so satisfying about rehearsals is that we’re solving problems and making things— and the whole time we’re considering what it is we want to put into the world.

– NIEGEL SMITH TAYLOR | They’re all those people that are saying, “Have you put yourself out enough aesthetically?” Oh, that’s fun. The consciousness in doing that.

There are so many works you’ve created that break boundaries or traditional definitions for theatre or performance. Let’s talk about us and our collaboration.

NIEGEL | What I love about us is that everyone is honored for what they’re bringing. When we’re on tour with 24-Decade History, the person downstairs who is preparing the food is just as important and interesting, and I want to know them.

TAYLOR | This is what I’ve seen you do: you want to know what their craft is and how you can take the craft to the larger piece and find a way for that person to enter. Or that Dandy Minion—that person who has got one little walk-on. How can they bring their own special thing into it?

NIEGEL | That’s it. There are many codirection models. With 24-Decade History, you made stuff before I came in. I wasn’t around when you made one-hour or twohour versions. Maybe we talked a little bit about it. Then I would show up and we would have a conversation, because I was able to sit on the outside.

TAYLOR | I just did a reading with Bart Sher, and he said, “It’s weird to give you notes on your own verse.” I said, “But that’s the job, right?” Which was sweet. I was happy he acknowledged the awkwardness. It’s a reality,

but it is something I’ve also always depended upon you for. You know that I’m figuring it out too, so it’s not like you’re just giving me notes.

NIEGEL | There are moments that make me nervous, like whenever you’re up in the air and you ask, “What pose is the right pose?”

I am conscious that I don’t want to tell you that you have to hit a certain image every time: I don’t want you to have to think about that every time. But at the same time, I say, “If your leg goes down and the other comes up, the aesthetic god will be happy.”

TAYLOR | “The aesthetic god will be happy.”

NIEGEL | We were doing auditions today, and hearing you talk to the actors gave me language and conceptual frames I need in order to direct the play.

TAYLOR | What’s funny is that with a different director, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable saying anything. But with you, I know that you can handle it. It doesn’t hurt your ego. It’s not like that with everyone. Some people get very territorial. It’s easier with you. You make that environment where people feel free to talk and wonder together.

When I try to describe how we co-direct in 24-Decade History together, I feel like you’re looking at the stage and I’m looking at the audience, so in some ways I’m taking care of the audience and you’re taking care of everyone on the stage.

NIEGEL | Totally. I know.

TAYLOR | Do you freeze your shows when you’re not working with me?

NIEGEL | I often set limits. One of the things that infuriates my staff at The Flea is that there are always places in my plays that I don’t stage. They know because it’s not the same.

TAYLOR | I love it. So you just let it be different. Do the actors find their way to the same thing every night and you have to go in and tell them, “Hey, I didn’t stage that, so don’t you stage it?”

NIEGEL | That has not yet happened, but I think I’m clear about what the thing is. I say, “You’re going to find this every night. This is your place to play.”

TAYLOR | That’s what I think pauses are.

When I write a pause in the script, it’s my little present to the actors to not just sit there and do nothing. It’s like a present. Invent something.

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you consider artistic risk when choosing the season?

NIEGEL | Absolutely. That’s the majority of what I consider. You know, “Is this artist taking a risk, in the content or in the form?”

Luckily, I’m at a theatre where the board embraces artistic risk. During my first season, I had individual lunches with all the board members, and one said to me, “If you’re not doing things that make me uncomfortable, you’re not doing your job.”

TAYLOR | That’s the best board member that you want!

NIEGEL | Absolutely.

TAYLOR | Do you feel comfortable talking about what happened last year?

NIEGEL | We can talk about that. The Flea did a whole season of plays that tackled race. It was called “Color Brave.” It was a risk.

TAYLOR | What’s not a risk for us is a risk for other people, so it’s so strange.

NIEGEL | Yeah. I had a major donor say, “Why am I giving money so you can do a whole season about just this?”

TAYLOR | About people of color.

NIEGEL | People of color.

TAYLOR | Do you first say to them, “Well, what you just said was racist and perpetuating white supremacy?” Do you say that and ask, “Do you want to change?” Or do you just say, “Bye. I’m done with you.”

NIEGEL | No, you say, “I want you to be part of this project. You’re going to face these things that you have biases around. We’re going to engage those directly, and you’ll be okay.” I’ve had meetings with stakeholders where we’ve done that. At the end, people say, “Wow. Thank you for that.”

It’s interesting because when we’ve taken a big risk like that, the reward has been so deeply personal. A younger version of myself would have shirked that opportunity to engage someone directly. But that’s leadership.

TAYLOR | Is it galvanizing to do that, or exhausting, or both?

NIEGEL | In the moment, it’s exhausting.

When you hear from them later and someone says, “Thank you,” then it’s galvanizing for the next time. It is a lot of work. I think we tell a good story about what we’re doing. For the most part, people know what they’re signing up for.

A board in a not-for-profit theatre is, to me, the biggest cheerleader. One of the ways they show their cheer is through their donations—

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Roland Lane, Alana Raquel Bowers, Michael Oloyede + Tanyamaria in Scraps at The Flea Theater, directed by Niegel Smith PHOTO Hunter Canning

whether that’s time or money or resources.

Those people have to be on board with what your project is. If you’re honest and up-front about what it is, then at the end, they’re going to say, “Oh yeah, that’s what you said we were doing.”

TAYLOR | I can’t help but feel we have a responsibility towards not allowing people who traditionally have the money and the culture to run the culture. I always come up against that when thinking about boards.

NIEGEL | They should not be in the position to dictate the work. Our board doesn’t approve our seasons. They approve the budget. We say, “This is the work we’re doing.” They approve it if we have a good financial model for producing that work.

I create space in board meetings to talk about impressions and reception of the work. This is not a time to tell Niegel, “Oh you shouldn’t program…” or, “I don’t like that…” but to say, “When I was there, I experienced…” and “What I found about it is…” It has helped me understand the things that they value and look at inside a piece of art but also gives me a chance to talk about the work and deepen their engagement and appreciation around things that might be new to them.

TAYLOR | Yeah. We assume that we have to go to North Carolina to help the culture, but actually it’s fucked up right here too.

NIEGEL | I’ve chosen to run a theatre that has a resident company of young artists.

Everyone tells me I’m crazy. In New York, the value is the headline artists, the person who has established their career, or their fame.

“Yes, we’re going to go out tonight and have a really lovely, expensive meal and see them

and go to work tomorrow and say, ‘I saw them. Them.’”

We have work to do here in New York to say, “Yes, we want to see them, but then who are all the artists and voices that need our support?” There’s work that can happen right here.

I think it’s incumbent upon all artists, but particularly theatre artists, as we move from building to building to building. Our job is to get inside of these spaces and expand what those spaces are trying to dictate.

TAYLOR | Yeah, absolutely. That’s all we’re trying to do.

NIEGEL | Joyful hell in a small space.

PHOTO CREDITS: A 24-Decade History of Popular Music created by Tayor Mac with Matt Ray. Co-directed by Taylor Mac + Niegel Smith; choreographic consultant: Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. Scenic design: Mimi Lien; costumes: Machine Dazzle; lighting: John Torres; sound: Jamie McElhinney + David Schnirman/Hear No Evil Inc. | Hir by Taylor Mac. Directed by Niegel Smith; fight direction: Dave Maier. Scenic design: Alexis Distler; costumes: Christine Cook; lighting: Mike Inwood; sound: Sara Huddleston. | Father Comes Home from the Wars by Suzan-Lori Parks. Directed

by Niegel Smith. Scenic design: Courtney O’Neill; costumes: Keith Parham; lighting: Linda Cho; sound: Justin Ellington; projections: Michelle Lopez-Rios. | The Fre by Taylor Mac. Directed by Niegel Smith; choreography: Sarah East Johnson. Scenic design: Jian Jung; costumes: Machine Dazzle; lighting: Xavier Pierce; sound: Matt Ray; video: Adam J. Thompson. | Scraps by Geraldine Inoa. Directed by Niegel Smith; violence choreographer: Michael G. Chin. Scenic design: Ao Li; costumes: Andy Jean; lighting: Kate McGee; sound: Megan Deets Culley.

WORKING FROM A PLACE OF

COURAGE THE GREAT IMMENSITY STEVE COSSON REVISITS INTERVIEW BY ELIZABETH

BENNETT

Steve Cosson + Michael Friedman discuss climate change with students at Princeton PHOTO Denise Applewhite

During the culture wars of the 1990s, when Jesse Helms and his fellow senators objected to using government funds to support artworks they found offensive, their complaints weren’t only about decency and morals. The politicians invoked a battle cry over wasteful spending of taxpayer money—and pointed to cultural grants as a leading example of how public funds shouldn’t be spent. In the decades since, NEA funding and cultural grants have been regularly hauled out by conservative politicians to make their case for cuts.

Steve Cosson, Artistic Director of the New York City-based theatre company The Civilians, has had firsthand experience with the scrutiny of politicians and the media over public funding for the arts. In 2010, The Civilians was awarded nearly $700,000 from the National Science Foundation to support the creation of The Great Immensity, a musical written and directed by Cosson, with music and lyrics by Michael Friedman. The Great Immensity is described by the company as “a highly theatrical look into one of the most vital questions of our time: how can we change ourselves and our society in time to solve the enormous environmental challenges that confront us?” The project—which is recognized as the first major American play about climate change—encompassed not just content and script development but also creation of a science-based arts education curriculum and other ancillary programs. It was produced in 2012 with Kansas City Repertory Theatre and in 2014 with The Public Theater in New York City. The cast album was recently released

by Ghostlight Records as part of the Michael Friedman Recording Project.

In January 2020—10 years after the grant was made—Cosson spoke with Elizabeth Bennett of SDC Journal about his reflections on the relationship between government and the arts.

ELIZABETH BENNETT | Let’s go back to the roots where the later hullaballoo over The Great Immensity may have started: the late ‘80s/early ‘90s and the culture wars. What

level of awareness did you have about the culture wars and the NEA Four case when it was going on?

cannot fund work by individual artists: NEA money can’t go directly to an artist making art.

STEVE COSSON | I was very conscious of it.

As my day job when I was in my twenties, I worked as a development professional, writing grant proposals at a nonprofit arts organization in San Francisco. Some of the NEA Four were performers whose work I liked. Holly Hughes performed in San Francisco a lot.

ELIZABETH | Did you think about taking political action at the time?

After the case happened, my arts organization wanted to go through its endof-year journal and edit out anything that was too sexually explicit, especially anything that was somehow not heteronormative.

Editing the journal wasn’t my job, so I didn’t have any power over it. But it was sad to see how easily an arts organization could censor itself. And I remember thinking, “Gosh, why am I feeling so particularly anxious and depressed right now?” And my response was, “Well, I’m a gay man and I work at an arts nonprofit doing fundraising, and right now our federal government is attacking all of those categories on multiple fronts.”

The message from the NEA Four case was anti-gay, anti-sex, and anti-feminist. Or, “We can’t do this horrible thing of supporting artists because then they might make art that we don’t like or makes us uncomfortable.”

The scandal of the NEA Four pushed us into a ridiculous circumstance where the NEA

STEVE | No. It was the early ’90s, and the activism I was involved with had to do with Act Up and Queer Nation. AIDS activism outweighed the arts funding question.

I think Jesse Helms—with his campaign against Mapplethorpe and any AIDS education that would “promote homosexuality”—was a true believer in his cause. He did not believe that gay men had equal value as human beings. My favorite quote from the culture wars was in Jesse Helms’s Senate testimony. He showed some of the Mapplethorpe photos to his wife, Dorothy, and she said, “Oh, Lord have mercy, Jesse. I am not believing this.”

ELIZABETH | That would make a great title for a play.

STEVE | It always made me think, “Well, no.

Somebody like Jesse Helms’s wife is not supposed to be looking at a picture of Robert Mapplethorpe sticking a whip up his ass.”

We have very different people living in this country together and those two people might not cross paths. The government should fund a museum that can put on that show and Mrs. Helms is probably not going to walk into that museum. Her husband and his own personal tastes should just not be involved.

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Much later, Mick Mulvaney—then the budget director for Trump—cited the grant in a press conference as way to say that the Trump administration would not be funding climate science. I wrote an op-ed, which got placed on CNN.com. [Editor’s Note: In a June 2017 interview with CNN, Cosson draws analogies between the Trump administration’s “willful denial of climate change” and its desire to cut federal arts funding by 87 percent, pointing out that it’s not just the arts that are under attack from the right wing.]

Molly Carden, Rebecca Hart + Todd Cerveris in The Great Immensity at KCRep, directed

by Steve Cosson PHOTO Don Ipock

ELIZABETH | Given your familiarity with the history, how did you feel in 2014 when Congressman Lamar Smith pointed to The Civilians’ National Science Foundation grant as an example of wasteful government funding?

STEVE | I was not particularly surprised. I had seen those tactics used for decades, particularly by Republicans, as a tool to try to go after programs. It’s a tactic we’re all very familiar with: cherry-picking something and holding it up in front of Congress to be used as an example to say, “Look at all the terrible things that happen if you vote for the other party.”

There were three phases of life for The Great Immensity when the project was called out: when the grant was first announced, when we did our first production with Kansas City Rep, and then the second production with The Public Theater. Over the whole life of The Great Immensity, it felt as though the conservative media and certain members of Congress were trying to make it into “a thing,” but it never fully took off. There was just so much going on in the world that, fortunately, it didn’t become a huge source of outrage in the national media.

Every time a right-wing news story or blog piece appeared about it, there would be several hundred comments. That’s certainly true of anything about climate change in that climate change has successfully been made such a politicized issue and—like so many

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other things in that category—it’s troll bait.

There’s a world of people out there that, if there’s an opportunity to make a comment on the internet, they will find a way to do so.

I don’t know if, in their hearts, the Republicans actually oppose the projects but they think that going after these targets will curry favor with their supporters. Not to say that I have insight into the inner workings of their minds, but I think that part of it is truly about getting publicity.

It also serves the Republican ideology—if not their practice—that they are a party that believes in “small government” and will maintain your liberty and freedom by keeping the government small and out of your life.

They will not waste taxpayer money. Of course, I think there’s an argument that what the party does is not consistent with that ideology or the PR version of their politics.

ELIZABETH | How did you respond to Representative Smith or to the news coverage?

STEVE | We were in conversations with the National Science Foundation throughout all of this and their advice was that we just let it go. They didn’t want to draw more attention; they had been to this party before. The “waste book” is something that I think happens every year, and part of that is combing through the National Science Foundation grants to find the things that might sound ridiculous.

Throughout it all, I got a taste of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a right-wing media campaign. Congressman Eddie Bernice Johnson argued that Lamar Smith leaked our confidential grant reports to Fox News, who then spun certain details in a negative light.

(These were details that later resurfaced at the Washington Post and other mainstream media.) Over the years, I got easily more than 150 Google alerts about some new piece decrying this terrible grant and saying that I’m a bad artist, my play was terrible and it closed early (which was not true), and various other things that they made up. And the day after one Fox News piece, our education site for the project and The Civilians’ website got hacked and taken out.

Maybe if we had been defunded like the NEA Four were, then there would have been articles supporting the project. But we were being attacked for keeping our funding. The tone of the mainstream reporting, although much smaller than the right-wing response, leaned towards the same framing: the grant was excessive and wasteful. There really wasn’t much of a public voice of support.

There were years of attack articles, on top of being attacked by members of Congress.

And yes, we kept our funding, and I’m very grateful for that. But it was an intimidating and demoralizing experience. We got hit by the massive machine the right has at its disposal, from Congress to Fox to the troll army, whereas on the other side…

ELIZABETH | We could go down a rabbit hole of what that commentary is on the liberal media.

STEVE | What happened, ultimately and unfortunately, is that the negative story reached a lot of viewers. The message got out to a large number of people that the government engaged in ridiculous wasteful spending on both the arts and science. I venture to guess that the National Science Foundation would be very cautious now to fund anything that could be considered an artistic project.

And the grant was weaponized against climate science. To go back to that moment

in 2017, several years after the grant finished, when the press asked Mick Mulvaney if Trump’s budget was going to include funding for climate science, his response was, “What the government did the last time when they funded climate science, they funded a musical. I know you don’t want that to happen with your tax dollars.”

ELIZABETH | Is it fair to assume that the National Science Foundation funding was essential to creating the piece and that The Civilians might not have done it otherwise?

STEVE | The National Science Foundation funding was critical to the play being done but also being done well.

This was one of the most significant theatre projects that they had funded through that program. We accompanied both productions with a whole array of educational tools.

There’s a website with all types of information that could be shared with the audience. There was a curriculum for the school groups that would come to see it. There were events at the theatres, lots of post-show programs.

There was also—and this was a very important part of the funding for the NSF—a significant amount of money to study the efficacy of theatre to serve as informal science education. I probably spoke on 20 different panels about theatre and climate change over the years. An evaluator surveyed audience members, surveyed users in any way that we might interface with the public, worked with the project over the several years of its life span, and then wrote a very detailed report on her research.

ELIZABETH | That’s a lot of energy to put into it as a creator and artistic director.

STEVE | Well, that was the project. The education and the evaluation elements were as important as the play itself.

The funding was very generous in that it was a significant amount of money and it paid for all that additional work. It paid for a portion of each production; both Kansas City Rep and The Public also contributed to the productions.

ELIZABETH | The scale of the grant size is so much greater than those of us working in the arts are accustomed to.

STEVE | A lot of arts funding is almost like the performance of arts funding. Everyone is going through the motions as if there was funding happening: “We’re doing this proposal. There are a lot of people doing a lot of work to read the proposals and there’s this work being done to report on the grants.”

But often there isn’t any real money moving about in a meaningful way.

The size of our NSF grant was an effective political tool. It sounds like a lot of money because it is a lot of money. If you don’t work in theatre and you hear somebody got $700,000 for a play, that might sound insane. Whereas to do a play with music, one production, in an Off-Broadway, nonprofit theatre in New York City with 199 seats, that can be $700,000. It can also be a lot more.

Our grant supported three years of work, contributed to two productions, plus the education and evaluation, with everyone earning normal nonprofit theatre money (i.e., not that much).

ELIZABETH | Where do you see the responsibility of not just leaders of theatre companies but also workers at arts organizations? What’s our responsibility at this point in time?

STEVE | That is a very big question. On the most basic level, our responsibility is to try as best as we can to live and work in the world as it actually is. That may entail putting in some effort to discern where and how you might be living within a certain kind of bubble—and then figuring out strategies for how you might challenge that and somehow make the scope of your work wider.

Another broad-strokes response is a desire for theatre institutions and for theatremakers to work from a place of courage rather than fear. I think in many ways we are used to working from courage. Just to make any kind of theatre and to put it up in the world—to take that risk requires courage.

But I think that the more challenging, essential piece is the fear we have of running out of money. The funding is going to get pulled or people aren’t going to buy tickets, or the important people who buy tickets and give money are going to be upset or whatever it might be.

That fear is oftentimes very valid. We don’t have the kind of government subsidy that offers the stability that theatres in other developed countries have, where you can weather the ups and downs of ticket sales or take a risk on something that may or may not pan out.

So, I don’t mean to discount the fear. It’s real.

I also run an organization and have to deal with the consequences of choices. If you make a choice that then hurts your bottom line, it threatens your livelihood and your ability to do the work that you’re supposed to be doing.

But even though the economic fears are real, I think they can contribute to a vicious cycle of neglecting to engage in all sorts of really meaningful aspects of life—thereby, in the worst-case scenario, guaranteeing the irrelevance of your art form.

ELIZABETH | Because it’s too safe.

STEVE | Because it’s too safe. Yeah.

ELIZABETH | One of the things that I am concerned about is whether the fear of losing funding is a form of censorship.

STEVE | No theatre really has absolute freedom of speech. It’s a given that it is going to be curtailed in some way by the beliefs of what’s acceptable and who might buy tickets and support the institution. It’s a balancing act.

At the same time, there are certainly a lot of risky plays getting produced now, which is exciting. Of course, there are certain kinds of risks that are acceptable and others that are not. At any given moment, certain plays that challenge on issues of race, class, sexuality, geopolitics, or whatever will be acceptable and others will not be. I think that’ll always be the case. So, it will always be a matter of trying to push the goalposts further along.

But I think there’s value in those companies and artists or institutions—big or small—that have the capacity to widen the aperture in whatever way they can. That work is valuable and it affects the whole landscape.

ELIZABETH | What was your reaction to the recent announcement that not only would the NEA not be shut down in 2020—as the president had threatened—but that the budget was increased to $162 million?

STEVE | The more NEA budget, the better.

But I think we should all pay attention to how that money is spent and what kind of work it supports. The more we know, the better.

Steve Cosson’s 2017 op-ed on CNN (“How my climate change musical became a GOP talking point”) and 2014 op-ed in the New York Times (“The Tide Is Turning on Climate Change, but Americans Must Take Action Now”) can be read at: https://www.stevecosson.com/press

PHOTO CREDITS: The Great Immensity, book by Steve Cosson; music + lyrics by Michael Friedman. Directed

by Steve Cosson; choreography: Tracy Bersley. Scenic design: Mimi Lien; costumes: Sarah Beers; lighting: Tyler Micoleau; sound: Ken Travis; projections: Jason H. Thompson.

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SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

Directors are often in a unique position when staging a “canonical” work; we may feel a need to be attentive to the play’s history and the playwright’s intentions, but are also charged with re-seeing the play through lenses that will help contemporary audiences encounter it in new ways. Director Ivo van Hove has recently gained renown for his directing of such American classics as Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (2014) and The Crucible (2016). In this issue of the Peer-Reviewed Section, Omiyẹmi (Artisia Green) offers a new framing of a modern American classic: The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman. While acknowledging the play’s problematic elements, Omiyẹmi uniquely employs an African spiritual lens in her direction. Using the aesthetics of the Yoruba Ọya, a spirit of wind and storms, death and rebirth, the author prompts audiences to consider elements of plot and character in The Children’s Hour through lenses that pose death as rebirth and offer new perspectives on characters’ behavior. Coupled with close comparisons of source material and Hellman’s revisions of the play, Omiyẹmi’s fresh direction of the play follows Hellman’s initial aims of repentance through revision with this controversial classic.

INTRODUCED + EDITED BY

EMILY A. ROLLIE + ANN M. SHANAHAN

AESTHETICS OF ỌYA IN READING, CASTING, AND STAGING LILLIAN HELLMAN’S THE CHILDREN’S HOUR

BY OMIYẸMI

(ARTISIA GREEN), WILLIAM & MARY

“What if we were to stand on our heads and assume that our American culture is African-rooted, so that the European elements could be regarded from an Africanist perspective?”

–Brenda Gottschild

My direction is about revealing the invisible forces that give meaning to our realities. I listen for different rhythms and, through my scholarly and creative praxis, turn up the volume on those tonal shifts—a play’s interior values, its phantom limbs, its life force, its spiritual exposition, its mythic resonances. These tonal shifts are as the beat of the drum: the driving impulse of the work. Making this impulse clear for the audience is my responsibility as an artist, for I agree with James Baldwin’s assertion in “The Creative Process:” Society must accept some things as real; but [they] must always know that a visible reality hides a deeper one and that all our action and achievement rest on things unseen. A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and [she] must let us know, there is nothing stable under heaven. (670) As an Ifá-Òrìṣà priest, I source a number of devices from this spiritual tradition to use as black dramaturgical and performance strategies.

Paul Carter Harrison states, “The truest barometer of black experience is how the story is told” (248). Consequently, I implemented aesthetics of Ọya—the deity of change and transformation from the Yorùbá Òrìṣà pantheon—to invite in or tease out, as Brenda Gottschild notes above, the “Africanist perspective” in directing Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934).1 Hellman’s first play, The Children’s Hour, was dubbed “The Thunderbolt of Broadway”; it ran for 691 performances, and brought Hellman, virtually unknown at this point, instant recognition. The story is an adapted from “Closed Doors, or The Great Drumsheugh Case,” a chapter from William Roughead’s book Bad Companions

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(1930). “Closed Doors” was a true crime story about a girls’ school in Edinburgh, Scotland, forced to close because its owners, Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods, were said to be lesbians, in a rumor spread by one of the students, Jane Cumming. The Children’s Hour tells the story of two hard-working college friends, Martha Dobie and Karen Wright, who purchase a farm and open a boarding school for girls.

Their business and professional lives are ruined when one of their nine pupils, Mary Tilford, tells her grandmother, Mrs. Tilford, that she saw the two women kissing (Fig. 1). A smear campaign ensues, students are withdrawn, and the school is forced to close. Martha and Karen file libel charges against Mrs. Tilford. However, they lose the case and are convicted of having “sinful sexual knowledge” of each other (1953, 61; Fig. 2). After Karen’s fiancé leaves her, Martha realizes for the first time, and admits her sexual love for Karen, confessing, “Maybe I love you that way. The way they said I loved you” (1953, 68). In a disturbing ending, which scholars such as Jill Dolan have deservedly criticized for inscribing tropes of self-harm by lesbians and gay men,2 Martha commits suicide. Immediately following, Mrs. Tilford arrives to acknowledge to a bereft Karen that the entire case was based on a false accusation.

The Children’s Hour is a problematic text. Beyond the injurious ending and the potential for a hysterical personification of Martha in the melodramatic overtones of the last scene (amplified in William Wyler’s 1961 film version), Mary’s characterization lacks nuance and she is totally absent from the play’s ending. Inspired by my own artistic sensibilities and by Brenda Gottschild’s words in the epigraph, I sought to turn the text on its head, and re-imagine Hellman’s take

FIG. 1

Fig. 1. Act II: Anna Boustany (Mary) and Hannah Brown (Mrs. Tilford); Set Design: Matthew Allar, Lighting Design: Steve Holliday, Costumes: Jenn Baker.

PHOTO ©Samuel Flint

on events in a fictional New England community from an Africanist perspective. While such a perspective would not change the harmful trope of the end, an Africanist lens would help me and student-actors motivate Mary’s behavior and serve to reframe Martha’s death in an emancipatory fashion. This approach, encouraged by Hellman’s own revisionist dramaturgy, enabled students and audiences to “expand the limits of [their] historical and cultural imagination”—not only to engage conceptions from Hellman’s earlier work for a holistic understanding of the play, but also to look deeply at the “latent [spiritual] qualities” of the text (Danto 98).

In an interview with Harry Gilroy, reprinted in the 1953 Dramatists Play Service edition, Hellman disclosed that “she had a great temptation to rewrite” The Children’s Hour as she was a “different person with a whole different series of emotions” (5). Revisionism is also the subject of one of her memoirs, Pentimento: A Book of Portraits (1973), a compilation of essay portraits about significant figures in her life.

The title, “pentimento,” an Italian word which means “repentance,” could serve as “a metaphor for her own remorse in repressing her bisexual tendencies” (Anderlini-D’Onofrio 97), but also as a means of processing “the half-remembered, the half-observed, the halfunderstood” moments in her childhood (Four Plays, viii). Hellman describes the title’s significance, writing: Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent. When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea. That is called pentimento because the painter “repented,” changed [her] mind. Perhaps it would be well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again. (Three, 309) There are five copyright protections noted in the Dramatists acting edition of The Children’s Hour. Thus, as Hellman acquiesced to selfevaluation, to which she admitted paying only “polite lip-service” (Four Plays, viii), and as her political and perhaps sexual

consciousnesses evolved, she continued to see and re-see her “old conception” in new ways. In the introduction to Four Plays, she writes: It took a year and a half of stumbling stubbornness to do [The Children’s Hour]. I remembered . . . how many times I tore it up, how many characters I took out and put back and took out again; how I reached back into my own childhood and found the day I finished Mll. De Maupin; the day I faked a heart attack; the day I saw an arm get twisted. . . . There are many things wrong with The Children’s Hour. (Even with my new clarity I have not seen them all, which is just as well, and better for my health.) (viii) In the eighteen years between the opening of The Children’s Hour at Maxine Elliott’s Theatre in 1934 and its 1952 reprisal at the Coronet Theatre, Hellman “repented” in her dramaturgy. She dropped Evelyn’s speech pathology, gave Peggy career aspirations to be a veterinarian as opposed to a light-keeper’s wife, and slimmed down Rosalie, described as “fattish” in the earliest version of the text. Hellman’s adjustments to characterization, coupled with alterations to racial undertones and literary references, informed my casting.

Distinctions between the 1934 and 1952 texts around the issue of race emboldened me to think about destabilizing expectations around assumed constructions of whiteness in the work. In both the 1934 and 1952 manuscripts, out of the need to make sense of Mary’s troublesome behavior, Martha asks Joe about his family; Joe is Mrs. Tilford’s nephew and first cousin to Mary’s deceased father. Martha asks, “Any idiots in your family, Joe? Any inbreeding?” (1942, 22; 1953, 23). In the 1934 text Joe responds, “Don’t blame her [Mary] on me.

It’s another side of the family.” Joe references Mary’s family on her mother’s side, “You can look at Aunt Amelia and tell: old New England stock, never married out of Boston, still thinks honor is honor and dinner’s at eight thirty. Yes ma’am, we’re a proud old breed” (19). In the 1952 text, Hellman repents, and edits this line to simply read, “Don’t blame her on me. It’s another side of the family” (23). Hellman leaves reference to the Boston pedigree entirely unaddressed in all subsequent versions of the play.

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It is twice blest; it blesseth him that gives and him that takes: ‘tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes the throned monarch better than his crown; his scepter shows the force of temporal power, the attribute to awe and majesty, wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; but mercy is above… (5) In the 1952 version, Hellman eliminates the references to authors Pope and Ibsen, and instead of reciting Portia, Peggy reads Cleopatra from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: I hear him mock the luck of Caesar, which the Gods give men to excuse their after wrath: Husband, I come. Now to that name my courage prove my title. I am fire, and air; my other elements I give to baser life. So have you done? Come then, and take the last warmth of my lips. Farewell, kind Charmian; Iras farewell. (3)

FIG. 2

Fig. 2. Act III: Divinity Summers (Karen) and Neonna Ferebee (Martha); Set Design: Matthew Allar, Lighting Design: Steve Holliday, Costumes: Jenn Baker. PHOTO ©Samuel Flint

However, Mikko Tuhkanen’s “Breeding (and) Reading: Lesbian Knowledge, Eugenic Discipline, and The Children’s Hour” provided additional clues that contextualize Martha and Joe’s vague but charged comments. In the original story, “Closed Doors,” Jane Cummings is a biracial child, born in India of an unmarried Indian mother and Scottish father, recently deceased. According to Tuhkanen, because Cummings denied having read about “lesbian knowledge” and the crime was “so infamous, that it never was before heard of in this country,” Pirie and Woods suggested that it was in Cummings’s country of birth, described as “the pollutions of the heathen world,” that she had allegedly learned of this “deviant knowledge” (Tuhkanen 1005-6). In the 1934 text, Mary’s ethnic background is unclear, and, unlike Cummings, she does learn of “lesbian knowledge” from an illicit book. However, through Martha’s and Joe’s comments, Hellman suggests, much like Pirie and Woods, that there is something about Mary’s maternal genealogy that exists outside of the “proud, old, [Tilford] breed”—a difference that could perhaps explain her social difficulties.

Hellman’s revisions to lines which she says “felt too literary” further informed my casting choices as well as my directorial approach (Gilroy 4). For example, the 1934 text opens with the young women in sewing and elocution classes. Some of the students conjugate Latin. There are literary references to poet Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Man” and dramatist Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. Other students read from classics such as Marcus Cicero’s Cataline Orations and William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. The opening lines are spoken

by Peggy reciting Portia’s speech about the virtues of mercy:

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As a director who desires to reaffirm life and liberation in their work, I considered that Hellman’s insertion of Antony and Cleopatra might reflect her desire to cast a somewhat emancipatory light on the tragedy of Martha’s death in Act III. In Shakespeare’s work, Cleopatra, refusing to succumb to being a trophy or spectacle of the Roman Empire, and inspirited by a superhuman vision (she is “fire and air”), approaches her grave with resolution and conviction, by her own hand. In this context, Martha’s suicide could be read similarly as an act of liberation and love through which she could both free herself from homophobia (externalized and internalized) and gesture to her adoration for Karen. Martha’s self-destruction could free them both from being lesbian spectacles and offer Karen the possibility of living the life she previously desired—being a wife to Joe and a mother to any children produced of their union—should she still desire these goals. Perhaps Hellman’s revisioning of the opening quote was a way for her to frame Martha’s problematic death in a more empowering way? Whether Hellman consciously reframed Martha’s death as liberatory, by opening the play with Cleopatra’s quote or not, this was certainly intentioned in my directorial approach. My re-envisioning was similar to the redressive practice of ex-slaves who re-envisioned the memory of suicidal practices during North American enslavement through flying African folklore, as in the example below (Snyder, 43, 59): I have heard of them people. . . . My mother used to tell me about them when we sat in this city market selling vegetables and fruit. She say that there was a man and his wife and they got fooled aboard a slave ship. First thing they know they was sold to a planter on St. Helena. So one day when all the slaves was together, this man and his wife say, “We going back home, goodie bye, goodie bye,” and just like a bird they flew out of sight. (Carrie Hamilton qtd in Snyder, 47-48) While the conditions which fostered suicide within the context of North American slavery vary, the performance of suicide as an “honorable escape,” a “form of defiance,” or “a source of spiritual relief” from oppression and inhumanity were understandings I applied to my reading of both Cleopatra’s and Martha’s suicides. My staging of the problematic tragedy was grounded in the courage conveyed by Cleopatra and the resolve of those who committed acts of self-murder, mythologized through flying African folklore. After contextualizing Martha’s attitude in her final moments with this lens, I instructed the actress to look at Karen with longing, kiss her forehead,3 and walk towards her desk, grab and smell the purple scylla (referenced in the text), and then exit without looking back. While the staging did not resolve the rightful critique of the trope of suicide for LGBTQ+ characters, I aimed to allay clichéd executions of the deeply troubling event by adding a forthright moment of intimacy between the two women, coupled with a decisive, emancipatory tone to Martha’s departure.

Although unpacking the rationale behind the evolution of Hellman’s acts of repentance and revision is outside the scope of this discussion, these traces of her “original lines” from her “old conception” influenced my interpretation of her “later choice[s]” and/or suppressions in the 1952 text. Dramaturgically, the 1934 text, coupled with an understanding of elements of “Closed Doors,” enriched my understanding of Mary, who is otherwise one-dimensional. Hellman describes Mary as “malicious,” “neurotic,” “sly,” and “a bad character” (Gilroy 4). However, neither version of The Children’s Hour offers clues on the roots of her sinister conduct, and given that she is removed from the third act, Hellman offers Mary no opportunity for redemption. Thus, clarifying the conditions of Mary’s childhood and potential impulses for her destructive behavior, as well as grappling with the unsettling resolution which Hellman opines “should have ended with Martha’s suicide” (Four Plays, viii), were two key areas for me to consider as I prepared to direct the play.

The production I directed ran in the fall of 2018 for four performances in the Kimble Theatre at William & Mary.4 The play was selected in honor of the 100th year of co-education at William & Mary and to support the COLL 300 course theme, “Bodies that Matter.” I attended to both the 1934 and 1952 versions of the play as well as the true account upon which Hellman based her work. In my revisionist reading, Mary was a biracial child of European/Middle Eastern descent, sent to New England to live with her grandmother. Grieving the death of her favorite son, Mrs. Tilford overindulges his progeny, ultimately creating a manipulative, anti-social child, some of whose troublesome antics could be rooted in maternal separation anxiety.

As director, I had three goals for the production. One, I would build an inclusive ensemble, challenging perceptions around ability, color, gender expression, physical type, and sexual orientation in order to explore how consideration of these signifiers in casting could make the work resonant in our present moment. Two, I would demonstrate that Black Theatre is a dramaturgical and/or performative methodology grounded within an Africanist ethos. Three, I sought to illuminate the spiritual forces at play in order to help us understand the motivations for Mary’s anti-social behavior and, despite the drastic consequences of her deceit, offer her, a mere child, a chance at redemption.

A major theme of The Children’s Hour is the idea of unearthing or making way for truth to emerge. Hence, I tapped into the mythic conscious and energy of Ọya, one of the 400 plus one òrìṣà within the Ifá-Òrìṣà tradition of Southwestern Nigeria.5 Individuals with a disposition similar to Ọya have the power, as signified through the mask often seen in Ọya portraiture or shrines, to see through the deception in others, for just like the wind, Ọya uncovers the truth (Jones). Martha brings the idea of Mary and Ọya’s perceptive ability directly into focus when she remarks to Karen, “Suddenly a little girl gets bored and tells a lie—and there, that night, you see it for the first time, and you say it yourself, did she see it, did she sense it—? She found the lie with the ounce of truth” (1953, 69).

In the worldview of the Yorùbá, the òrìṣà are defined as select heads or manifestations of the Divine in nature. Each òrìṣà has their own distinguishing attributes and aesthetics (i.e. numbers, associative animals, foods, tools through which they are invoked), praise names, songs, mythology, and metaphysical principles. In her anthropomorphized and gendered state, Ọya is known as a hunterwarrior. She, whose name means “she tore,” is the òrìṣà of change and transformation. Her energy manifests as air in motion. It can be seen in rustling leaves, escalating winds—tornadoes and cyclones— and it moves through rainstorms, fire, and earthquakes. Ọya guards thresholds, edges, borders, the transformation of things from one state to another, and “radical shifts of being” (Gleason 31). She is

considered the patron of the marketplace (i.e., earth, commerce, business, bartering) because of its transitory and transactive nature.

A generative energy, a praise name for Ọya is “Yansan,” which means the “Mother of Nine.” In the lore surrounding Ọya, nine is connected to the nine estuaries which lead to the Niger River, the waterway she is associated with in Nigeria. Nine, represented through her nine different colored skirts, may also represent each of her progeny: the dark mother (black); the blood mother (red); the golden mother (orange); the sun, a “shield” to blind the enemy (yellow); the weaver woman (green); the hurricane (blue); lightning (indigo); the crone (purple); and the wind or “dancer in the flame” (silver) (Jones). Within the Ifá-Òrìṣà tradition, it is believed that it is Ọya’s energy which escorts humanity into the world as individuals take their first breath (emi) upon emerging from the aquatic environment of their mother’s womb. Ọya is also thought to usher the deceased away from the earth as they exhale for the last time. As death is a state of change and transformation, Ọya is connected to the ancestors (Egún). They are her children. From a Ki-Kongo perspective, when one dies or is in the ancestral realm—a site of “perdurance”—they are stronger (Thompson, 142). This philosophical aesthetic of Ọya, the notion of her as a hub to a repository of endurance and permanence in immortality, further buoyed my emancipatory reframing of Martha’s suicide. She only dies physically. However, in her death her spirit is stronger, immortal, and perhaps freer—like unconstrained “fire and air”—in her elevation.

In Ọya: In Praise of an African Goddess, author Judith Gleason describes her as “an agent of purification” (46). She clears the air with her twirling ìrùkẹ̀ (whisk) and skirts, whipping up storms that cause a ventilating action on her path and in immediate surroundings (46, 70).

The sweeping/cleansing motion, or destruction that is associated with her circulative energy, allows for the birth of something new.

This notion of intense movement or chaotic flow of energy extends to humanity. According to Philip Neimark’s The Way of the Orisa, individuals whose personalities and energy are similar to Ọya may have been “difficult” as children (130). He writes further: Omo Ọya are volatile in nature. The energy of this orisa simply cannot be suppressed for any significant length of time. When male or female Oyas are angered, they will express it in dramatic and often tornadic style. They are often called, “the rushing wind that tears down trees from the top.” As children they will be difficult to control, insisting upon their own tastes and setting their own agendas. Their tantrums will spring full blown from seemingly innocuous situations, and calming them will be harder than expected. (130-1) From skipping class to walk in Conway’s cornfield to feigning heart pain, breaking lover’s gifts on Karen’s desk, and “expertly” twisting the arms of her classmates as well as the heart of her grandmother, The Children’s Hour is rife with examples of Mary’s use of lies, fear, manipulation, guilt, and violence to control those around her rather than be controlled by them or incidences of following her own plan (1953, 31).

In my production of The Children’s Hour, aesthetics of Ọya were implemented in four key areas: set design, casting, character study, and transitions.6

SET DESIGN Aesthetics of Ọya were implemented within the set design. The energy of Ọya was visually suggested through the nine windows suspended in the air (Fig. 3). These windows also served as the farmhouse/ schoolhouse wall. At times, the panels of the windows resembled SPRING 2020 | SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

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FIG. 3

Fig. 3. Act I: Brennan McCray (Rosalie), Erin McKeown (Evelyn), Veronica Silva (Catherine), Andi Nealon (Lois), and Lilly Greenwald (Peggy); Set Design: Matthew Allar, Lighting Design: Steve Holliday, Costumes: Jenn Baker. PHOTO ©Samuel Flint

blockages—the social constraints felt by Martha and Karen who are, in a sense, imprisoned by both the judicial system and the community’s dehumanizing perception. The color palette (with some intentional exceptions), subtly reinforced the mercurial nature of Ọya through degrees of red, muted and dark mahogany, purple, and gray, while simultaneously complementing the colors of the performance venue.

CASTING Riffing on the rainbow symbolism evoked through Ọya’s nine different colored skirts and the rainbow’s association with the LGBTQIA+ community, I cast a transcultural ensemble, rich in sexual, gender, and ethnic identities, body types, neurodiversity, and varying levels of acting experience (Fig. 4). I fully disclosed my casting politics in the audition form, stating, “I wish to build an inclusive ensemble with intentional regard for challenging perception around ability, color, gender expression, physical type, and sexual orientation.” Being transparent about my own politics gave students space to declare their own. In the space offered for concerns, questions, and/or comments, many students disclosed their sexual identity: “I’m lesbian, but I have only come out to a few friends. I don’t mind if the production team know[s] my sexual orientation, but other than that I hope to keep it a secret.”

“As a lesbian, I’m extremely interested to see how we bring this production into the 21st century, especially considering rising controversy surrounding the ‘bury your gays’ trope in [the] media.”

Others shared larger aspirational aims on shifting the cultural climate within the department and the world beyond William & Mary:

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“I would appreciate the opportunity to contribute to . . . the emphasis on diversity.”

“Inclusivity, love [and] acceptance are what our country lacks and play a huge part in The Children’s Hour and the end of the show.

I’m so interested in this exploration.”

Some actors were interested in a nuanced form of storytelling that made space for visible and non-visible signifiers such as physical appearance and heritage, respectively: “It would be refreshing to see the challenges of intersectionality at play for a Black queer woman should a Black woman be cast for the role of one of the [leads].”

“I am also of Middle Eastern descent, which is not obvious when looking at me and when people find out, their idea of me is changed.”

My informed approach to creating a “welcome table” yielded a production that looked like any classroom at William & Mary and held space for students who identified with the play’s subject matter.

In this way, my casting mirrored Hellman’s dramaturgy. She used her characters (i.e., Martha, Mary, Julia) as a means of expressing parts of her identities and getting in touch with “the queer aspects of her personality” (Anderlini-D’Onofrio 97). Thus, our production of The Children’s Hour was no longer just the story of Hellman’s characters; it became a site for collective story making.

In keeping with the goal of staging the play with an “Africanist perspective,” I fully embraced the ethnicity of the actors who played Martha, Karen, Mrs. Mortar, and Agatha. For example, their natural

hair remained in its natural state, styled according to the character’s personality, not White American beauty standards of the 1930s. Mrs. Mortar’s hair was two-strand twisted in small sections, a popular protective style of 21st-century Black women, but pinned into an up-do to reflect her age, conventional nature, and desire for order.

Martha’s hair was also two-strand twisted, but in much larger sections.

As her hair was shorter, her twists created a halo of distinctiveness that, like her sexual preference, flew in the face of societal norms.

Relatedly, the twisted hair evoked the sense of movement conveyed through contorted and intertwined air in artistic renderings of Ọya.

ACTING METHODOLOGY Student actors utilized òrìṣà archetypes to build their characters. For example, the student portraying Mary used aesthetic attributes of Ọya as a performance strategy. Mary moves as a tornado through the play, tearing down everything in her path. However, some truth emerges from this destructive behavior, for although the women did not have “sexual knowledge of one another,” Martha reveals that she did love Karen: I’ve been telling myself that since the night we heard the child say it. I lie in bed night after night praying that it isn’t true. But I know about it now. It’s there. I don’t know how. I don’t know why.

But I did love you. I do love you. I resented your marriage; maybe because I wanted you all these years; I couldn’t call it by a name but maybe it’s been there ever since I first knew you . . . I never loved a man—I never knew why before. (1953, 69) According to Harrison, “Without the benefit of a forceful, spiritually expressive character, the dramatization of black experience becomes frozen in sociological analysis” (321). Thus, understanding the function of Ọya clarified the actor’s objectives, kept her performance clear of emotive clutter, and established a rhythm or pacing within the show which, like the wind, escalated towards the climax. Rather than playing an adolescent miscreant, the actress conveyed the larger ideas and aims of Ọya as a driving impulse.

TRANSITIONS As transitions between acts of a play are also within Ọya’s domain, I extended the idea of change and transformation through the scenic changes, evoking squall-like movement between the three acts. The

cast became the violent gust of wind as they rolled up, off, or on pieces of the set. Each transition was set to purple lighting (Fig. 2) and thematically related, anachronistic music, which further invoked Ọya’s energy.7 At the end of Act I, Mary runs away from the school to resist punishment. Riffing on the idea of wild winds, I bridged Acts I and II with The Temptations’ “Runaway Child, Running Wild” from their 1969 LP Cloud Nine. Then, the windy-thunderstorm prelude of The Dramatics’ “In the Rain” bridged Acts II and III, bringing the weather elements Hellman calls for in Act III. As the stage technicians opened the stage curtains differentiating the school from Mrs. Tilford’s home, they billowed, heightening the idea of a squall. Bilal’s “Butterfly” (featuring Robert Glasper) served as the bookend to Act III, reinforcing the metamorphic ideas associated with Ọya and offering Mary the moral redemption I felt the text lacked, but that is central in Black dramaturgy (Harrison 247). The song—specifically the lyrics—were “the light” in the darkness which “illuminate[d] [Mary’s] path toward epiphany” (247). Ọya’s association with life and death or change and transformation was used to bring Mary back into the life of the play and offer her a chance at redemption. Despite the deep ruptures that Mary’s actions caused in the community, I wanted the audience to see that she, like the energy of Ọya through the air we breathe, was still “inside life.” By including Mary within the life of the ending, I was able to, as scholar Victor Leo Walker says, “reaffirm the life force of the community by engaging the community in an experience that reinforces the collective worldview in which the natural rhythms and cosmic balances of the community, despite periodic disruptions, are in harmony” (14).

While I made new interpretations, protecting the integrity of Hellman’s work was important. Hence, I was limited in what I could offer Mary and Karen at the end. All I could suggest was that they had the opportunity to choose harmony. Therefore, in Act III of my production, Mary became a visible but silent presence. Following the motif of eavesdropping that Hellman establishes in Act I, in my re-visioning, Mary accompanied her grandmother to the Dobie-Wright farmhouse.

Curious about what was taking Mrs. Tilford so long, she peeks through the window, just at the moment Karen tells Mrs. Tilford that Martha has committed suicide (Fig. 5). She remains there for the rest of the scene and Karen catches a glimpse of her after Mrs. Tilford’s exit. The two of them fix on one another, conflicted, but Mary’s is the only face the audience could see. The audience watched her move through a

FIG. 4

Fig. 4. Act III: Divinity Summers (Karen) and Neonna Ferebee (Martha); Set Design: Matthew Allar, Lighting Design: Steve Holliday, Costumes: Jenn Baker.

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NOTES

FIG. 5

Fig. 5. Act III: Hannah Brown (Mrs. Tilford), Divinity Summers (Karen), and Anna Boustany (Mary); Set Design: Matthew Allar, Lighting Design: Steve Holliday, Costumes: Jenn Baker. PHOTO ©Samuel Flint

range of emotions, ending with contrition. They were witnessing Mary’s emotional growth. Although no one knew for certain where Karen or Mary’s paths would end (in keeping with the original ending), it was evident that redemption and harmony were there for the taking, if either of them chose it.

In The Children’s Hour, Hellman employs a revisionist dramaturgy that encourages readers to consider earlier versions of the play as well as the source material, Bad Companions, and invites directors to embrace a similar practice in developing their conceptual approaches.

A holistic understanding of the primary source, the adaptation, and subsequent developments of The Children’s Hour can help a director avoid reductive analyses and stage productions limited to examinations of “good versus evil” as Hellman once characterized the conflict (Four Plays, ix). Storytelling approaches utilized in this case study—a reconceptualization of the text from an Africanist (and spiritual) perspective—allowed for a uniquely nuanced reading and understanding of the play. By forthrightly positioning my personal politics and pedagogies, and using transnational, inclusive casting as well as queer artistry, this production demonstrated the possibilities of theatre-making practices aimed at conveying the truths and sensibilities of everyone in the rehearsal room, and thus creating more humane worlds on stage. This inclusive approach is especially meaningful with such plays as The Children’s Hour, where gender, racial, and sexual bias are evident.

Any production of The Children’s Hour staged in a supposed post-civil rights “gained” era, will remain unsettling as long as Martha is denied her humanity and feels forced to choose self-murder. Yet, the theatre can be as honey, adding sweetness to the ever-present warring forces.

It alone may not eradicate societal ills. However, with consideration of our practices in making it, theatre can offer enlightening perspectives that counterbalance darkness within the world and elevate our collective consciousness. Such balance and elevation can strengthen our resolve and commitment to seeing ourselves and each other in new ways.

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1. I have utilized aesthetics of the òrìṣà in previous directorial projects such as August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and Katori Hall’s Hoodoo Love.

2. Critics, including notably Jill Dolan, have criticized the play’s ending for inscribing tropes of self-harm by gay and lesbian characters. See Dolan’s Theatre and Sexuality (Palgrave McMillan, 2010): “Playwrights of some renown, including Lillian Hellman, inscribed the day’s dominating opinions when they wrote stories in which lesbians and gay men kill themselves or live lives of desperate isolation because of their sexual desires. In Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (Maxine Elliott’s Theatre, New York, 1934), for instance, two young teachers lose the school they founded when one of their students spreads rumors about their ‘unhealthy’ relationship. When one of the women admits she does have feelings for the other, her distraught confession prompts her to hang herself. For much of American and British history, mainstream theatre produced by noted playwrights had no place for a healthy, self-actualized gay men or lesbians” (8). See also Dolan’s blog, “The Feminist Spectator”: http://feministspectator.princeton.edu/2011/03/17/thechildrens-hour/.

3. Staging this brief intimate moment between Martha and Karen was inspired by a conversation with my colleague, Dr. Leisa Meyer. She referred me to the ending of the film, Carol (2015) directed by Todd Haynes, as an example of desire expressed simply, but with resonance between two women (actresses Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara).

4. The Kimble Theatre is not located on the campus proper, but adjacent to it in Colonial Williamsburg’s Merchant Square.

5. In the lore of Ọya, she is known as Ṣàngό’s favorite wife, who committed suicide “when she felt disillusioned in consequence of the ignominious end of her husband’s career” (46). See Yoruba Beliefs and Sacrificial Rites (1979) by Omosade Awolalu.

6. Ọya’s energy extended beyond the production. During the rehearsal period, the Department of Theatre, Speech and Dance transitioned from one academic building to another in anticipation of the building of a new arts complex and Hurricane Florence (a weather phenomenon completely in Ọya’s domain) impacted the Southeastern Seaboard. The combined effects of the transition and hurricane resulted in campus closures and/or rehearsal cancellations. As a result, the production team mounted this show with only twelve days of rehearsal and six days of tech and dress. During a guest talk in Dr. Suzanne Raitt’s Lesbian Fictions course, I told the audience, “I don’t know if we were single-handedly responsible for Hurricane Florence, but I do know that if the Òrìṣà are invoked they will come.” This is important to note as the Òrìṣà tradition cannot be reduced to a theoretical exercise or set of mythologies to reference in the rehearsal room. The tradition is a form of spiritual technology that is a dynamic part of the culture, worldview, and lived experience of a socio-linguistic group and practitioners all over the world.

7. Most of the artists included in the pre-show soundtrack were either openly queer, black, or self-identified as women. Music chosen and arranged by me reinforced the play’s storyline, amplified themes, or extended the COLL 300 theme, “Bodies that Matter,” by inserting voices that mattered.

WORKS CITED

Anderlini-D’Onofrio, Serena. “The Lie with the Ounce of Truth: Lillian Hellman’s Bisexual Fantasies.” Journal of Bisexuality Vol. 3, No. 1, 2003: 87-114.

Awolalu, Omosade, J. Yoruba Beliefs and Sacrificial Rites. Longman, 1979.

Baldwin, James. Collected Essays. New York: Library of America, 1998: 669672.

Danto, Arthur. “Art & Artifact in Africa.” Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective. Berkeley: U of California, 1998.

Dolan, Jill. Theatre and Sexuality. Palgrave McMillan, 2010: 7-8.

Gilroy, Harry. “The Bigger the Lie: Drama Dealing with the Big Lie.” New York Times, 14 December 1952, reprinted in The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman. Dramatists Play Service, 1953: 3-5.

Gleason, Judith. Oya: In Praise of an African Goddess. Harper Collins, 1992.

Harrison, Paul Carter. “Introduction to Part III: Dramaturgical Practice,” in Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora edited by Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker II, and Gus Edwards. Temple UP, 2002: 247-250.

Hellman, Lillian. Four Plays. Random House, 1942.

—. The Children’s Hour. Dramatists Play Service, 1953.

—. Three: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, and Scoundrel Time. Little, Brown & Company, 1973: 307-451.

—. The Children’s Hour, reprinted in Plays By and About Women edited by Victoria Sullivan and James Hatch. Vintage Books, 1974.

Jones, Latasha. Personal Interview. 19 November 2017.

Neimark, Philip. The Way of the Orisa: Empowering your life through the ancient African religion of Ifa. HarperCollins, 1993.

Pao, Angela C. No Safe Spaces: Re-casting Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in American Theater. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2010.

Shannon, Sandra. “Audience and Africanisms in August Wilson’s Dramaturgy.” In African American Performance and Theater History edited by David Krasner Harry J. Elam. Oxford UP, 2001: 149-167.

Snyder, Terri, L. “Suicide, Slavery, and Memory in North America.” The Journal of American History Vol. 97, no. 1, 2010: 39-62.

Thompson, Robert, F. Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy. Vintage, 1984.

Tuhkanen, Mikko. “Breeding (and) Reading: Lesbian Knowledge, Eugenic Discipline, and The Children’s Hour.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies Vol 48, no. 4, 2002: 1001-1040.

Walker, Victor Leo, II. “Introduction to Part I: African Roots,” in Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora edited by Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker II, and Gus Edwards. Temple UP, 2002: 13-17.

OMIYẸMI (ARTISIA GREEN) is Associate Professor of Theatre and Africana Studies, Director of the Program in Africana Studies, and a W. Taylor Reveley, III Interdisciplinary Faculty Fellow at William & Mary. As a director and dramaturg, she searches for the cultural metalanguage of performance and literature, and in her practice/ production and publications, illuminates it as a life-giving, spirited, dynamic, and vital force that shapes reality. The larger aims of her scholarship are to contribute the development of a critical lexis which affirms the premise of Black Theatre as a performance strategy rooted in social and spiritual practices of the African Diaspora.

SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW New Directions in Teaching Theatre Arts Edited by Anne Fliotsos and Gail S. Medford PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2018. 310 PP. $199.99 HARDCOVER. While this edited compendium focuses on theatre education in the traditional academy, directors, particularly those in nonprofit theatres and anyone teaching theatre, will benefit from its essays. Challenging educators to “rethink” classrooms for the technological and societal shifts affecting students, New Directions in Teaching Theatre Arts delves into contemporary students’ educational needs and responsibilities. As editors Anne Fliotsos and Gail S. Medford state: “Because of its innate connection to human life and culture, theatre is a discipline always poised to respond to the pedagogical changes that will improve student engagement, learning, and success” (3). This connection helps to justify theatre education in a time of STEM essentialism because theatre helps students in all disciplines learn better. The book doesn’t only indicate why we need to rethink teaching and directing methodologies; it also provides a plethora of practical resources for doing so.

William Lewis suggests in Part I: “Teaching with Digital Technology” that “thinking through the digital paradigms to reassemble what theatre is and what it will be for today’s students” is a pedagogical necessity (10). Lewis proposes that we stop perceiving students’ “hyper-attention” to multitasking as a flaw and reframe it as “a way of seeing the world as a necessity” of growing up in a mediatized society (13). Lewis urges educators to develop interactive theatre experiences, and looks to game design for inspiration. The next chapter in Part I “reimagines” an online Introduction to Theatre course. In the provocatively titled third essay, “‘I Had Never Danced in a Bathroom Before’: Using Audio Walks to Engage Theatre Students in the World Outside the Classroom,” James McKinnon suggests audio walks as a “paratheatrical learning activity” to help students “connect to the world” in an “experiential learning” activity (46, 55).

By deliberately not including an actor in the activity, he broadens students’ ideas of performance space and audience and fosters active student participation. The essays in Part I suggest practical technology strategies beyond PowerPoint for energizing the imaginations of media-centered students. “Teaching with Digital Technology” will also be useful at non-academic theatre companies looking to recruit and retain young audience members.

Part II: “Teaching in Response to Educational Trends” is a must-read for those considering curriculum design. Jane Duncan, Bradley W. Griffin, and Travis Malone’s “Theatre Assessment for Teaching and Learning” demonstrates examples for mapping what students need to know and ties the examples to institutional learning outcomes. Kelly Aliano and Dongshin Chang illustrate ways to teach critical writing in theatre classrooms that still leave room for course content. Stacey Connelly describes her “transdisciplinary” model that encourages discussions of contemporary relevance in her First-Year Experience classes. Although geared towards first-year students, Connelly’s practical exercises are great prompts for any directing class. Part II brings theatre faculty into conversation with a wider educational field, providing resources to improve the efficacy of our teaching and to track the ever-elusive evidence for effectiveness required by so many institutions.

Part III: “Teaching New Directions in Performance” challenges what we may have thought was inclusive teaching, directing, and producing theatre. Deric McNish tackles “Training Actors with Disabilities,” gleaning strategies from The National Center on Universal Design for Learning to “provide multiple means of representation, provide multiple means of action and expression, and provide multiple means of engagements” (141). Provocatively, he asserts that “movement pedagogies that are concerned with ‘correcting’ the body must be reinvented” (147). Chris Hay and Kristine Landon-Smith critique “neutrality” in theatre work, claiming that this idea is an assumption of “cultural production” and is one of many “uncritical habits of mind” that “excludes alternate viewpoints” (160). Helpfully, they give several exercises to challenge these assumptions and “engage and embrace actors of diverse identities and diasporic heritages” (172). On a different note, Peter Zazzali researched acting training programs for how they incorporate video and other media as a 21st-century necessity (182). Part III serves to help directors analyze their own biases around what an actor “should” be, how actors “should” be taught, and how bodies are represented on stage.

Part IV: “Teaching Beyond the Traditional” provides strategies for stretching traditional subjects to become more topical and relevant.

Ann M. Shanahan performs Kurt Weill’s “Pirate Jenny” in class to illustrate Brecht’s theories, engage feminist pedagogical principles that help students reflect on their own sociopolitical circumstances, and break down traditional hierarchies in the classroom (194). Jeanne Klein reasons that teachers of children’s theatre should have practical experience with children and gives examples of how she incorporates this in a theatre curriculum. Sally Bailey and Paige Dickinson’s SPRING 2020 | SDC JOURNAL PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

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“Generating Ethics and Social Justice in Applied Theatre Curricula” suggests a “code of ethics” to spark a mandatory discussion in every classroom and theatre (245). Arguably, every essay in this volume fits Part IV but these three demonstrably challenge the status quo in classroom relationships. In a future edition, an excellent addition to this section would be a discussion of Stage Intimacy best practices to incorporate in theatre classrooms and rehearsal spaces.

The last section, Part V: “Teaching Collaboratively or Across Disciplines,” provides ways to branch out from the classroom to engage students and communities. Rich Dionne highlights how the structures of our education (such as lectures, labs, etc.) become “signature pedagogies.” Since “learners approach material from different knowledge domains,” we should examine our “deep structure assumptions” when designing courses (267). Emily A. Rollie brings theatre tools to business students to increase their creativity and communication skills. For Rollie, this bridge between business/entrepreneurship and arts shows that “interdisciplinary, ensemble-driven, and beyond the bounds of the traditional theatre classroom” collaborations are “a viable and necessary direction for theatre pedagogy and the future of our discipline” (281).

The book ends with an outreach project in “Cities as Studios: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Community-Engaged Theatre Through the CitySpeak Project” by Thomas E. Conroy, Sam O’Connell, and Adam Zahler. Their CitySpeak Project devises theatre based on community experiences incorporating “theatre studies and an urban studies curriculum” (287). For these educators, “training the artist as an active agent in the affairs and concerns of community, city, and country is central” and they provide great ideas for reaching out beyond the scope of the traditional theatre community (286). These strategies may inspire directors to serve populations who would never have entered a traditional theatre space, and students to engage with the greater communities in which they live.

New Directions in Teaching Theatre Arts provides a broad range of material useful for theatre directors and teachers in the academy and in the professional world. Medford and Fliotsos stress that because the academy is expected to meet demands for a skilled workforce even as funding decreases, clear assessments and strong student engagement are critical. Rethinking educational strategies will also benefit nonprofit theatres that are financially reliant on educational programming. Though it may be difficult to critically examine our own assumptions and processes, the practical examples provided in these essays signpost “New Directions” where directors can look in order to create vital classrooms and theatre spaces.

JOELLE RÉ ARP-DUNHAM RADFORD UNIVERSITY

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-journal-peer-review/

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PEER-REVIEWED SECTION EDITORS THANKS & WELCOME The SDCJ-PRS editorial team wishes to thank David Callaghan for his two years serving as Co-editor. A founding member of the Peer-Reviewed Section, David is Theatre Chair at the University of Montevallo. Recent directing projects include Chicago at UM and My Fair Lady and Two Henrys for Red Mountain Theatre Company. David has published extensively on The Living Theatre and avant-garde performance, and has an essay on Richard Foreman included in the forthcoming Great North American Theatre Directors Series. David looks forward to continued work on PRS as a Peer Reviewer!

We welcome former Associate Book Review Editor Dr. Emily A. Rollie as the new Co-editor. Emily is a freelance director, intimacy choreographer, and assistant professor at Central Washington University, where she directs for the main stage and teaches directing, acting, theatre history, and pedagogy. A dedicated artist-scholar, Emily focuses her work on gender and performance, with articles published in Theatre Annual, Canadian Theatre Review, and the edited collections About Directing and New Directions in Teaching Theatre Art. Ruth Pe Palileo will serve as Associate Book Review Editor. Ruth directs for Current Theatrics of Las Vegas/New York and writes for Pintig Cultural Group of Chicago. She has a PhD in Theatre from Trinity College, Dublin, and is affiliated with College of Southern Nevada. Recent directing credits include P/Faerie Tale (Dublin 2019), Leonard Wibberly’s The Saintmaker (Las Vegas 2018), and Tim Powers’s Anubis Gates (London 2014).

Continuing as Book Review Editor, Kathleen M. McGeever is a director, actor, educator, and arts administrator. She has directed over 50 plays, including The Art of Dining, Sticks and Bones, Dancing at Lughnasa, The Servant of Two Masters, Water by the Spoonful, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The School for Lies, Peter and the Starcatcher, and Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play. Kathleen is Professor of Performance at Northern Arizona University, where she has served as Chair of the Department of Theatre since 2007.

Serving another term, founding Co-editor Ann M. Shanahan is Chair of Theatre at Purdue University, where she serves as Artistic Director for Purdue Theatre and directs for the main stage. A scholar-artist, she has had several essays focusing on directing and gender and theatrical space published in journals and anthologies. She is editor and contributor for a volume on Meredith Monk, Robert Wilson, and Richard Foreman for the Great North American Theatre Directors series for Bloomsbury Methuen (James Peck, Series Editor).

SDC FOUNDATION

THE 2019 SDC FOUNDATION

AWARDS BY

REBECCA HEWETT

On Tuesday, November 12, 2019, SDCF celebrated the third annual SDCF Awards in Manhattan at the Laurie Beechman Theatre.

This special evening recognized talent both in New York and regionally with five peer-given awards: the Gordon Davidson Award and the Zelda Fichandler Award for achievements in regional theatre; the Joe A. Callaway Awards for choreography and direction Off-Broadway; and the Breakout Award for achievement by an Off-Broadway newcomer. The room was full of longtime friends and collaborators, SDCF funders, and the honorees’ friends and families. Two-time Obie Award winner and SDC Board Member Anne Bogart was on hand to host the evening with her singular combination of generosity, intelligence, and sly humor. She led us through an evening of moving and funny tributes from award presenters and thoughtful, energizing speeches from recipients.

Taibi Magar + Saheem Ali

Annie Tippe, Raja Feather Kelly, Camille A. Brown + Pamela Berlin

Anne Bogart

Rick Dildine, Wendy C. Goldberg, Blake Robison + Lisa Portes

Marcela Lorca + Lisa Peterson

Kenny Leon

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Pamela Berlin

Jamil Jude + Kenny Leon

Jeff Kuperman, Erica Schmidt + Rick Kuperman

Taibi Magar

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We began with the Joe A. Callaway Awards, which recognize excellence in both stage direction and choreography for the most recent Off-Broadway season. Pamela Berlin, Chair of the Callaway Committee and former SDC President, thanked the Callaway Committee Members, especially Jonathan Cerullo, who departed the committee this year after seven seasons, a tremendous service to SDCF. Berlin first honored the finalists for the Callaway Award: for directing, Annie Tippe for Octet at Signature Theatre and Stephen Brackett for A Strange Loop at Playwrights Horizons; and for choreography, Camille A. Brown for Much Ado About Nothing at the Public Theater and Raja Feather Kelly for his work on both A Strange Loop and SoHo Rep’s production of Fairview at Theatre for a New Audience.

Berlin then introduced Jamil Jude, Artistic Director of Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre Company in Atlanta, who took the stage to present Kenny Leon with the Callaway Award for directing Much Ado About Nothing at the Public Theater. The production, set in current-day Atlanta, was staged as part of the Public’s annual Shakespeare in the Park festival at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. Jude reminded us that, despite much success and accolades, Leon always “finds a way to lift up the best idea in the room to give it space and support its brilliance.” Leon joined Jude to make his own remarks, a spirited address ranging from admiration of the attendees to an exhortation to diversify Broadway. Said Leon: “[Much Ado] was running 1500 into 2019. I think Shakespeare would be really proud, because Shakespeare was writing for all of the people, not some of the people. I will use this as fuel to continue to do the work and to continue to be relevant.”

Next, Erica Schmidt presented the Callaway Award for choreography to Rick and Jeff Kuperman in recognition of their work on Alice by Heart at MCC Theater.

Schmidt collaborated with the Kupermans on Cyrano this season, also at MCC, and shared endearing descriptions of watching the two collaborators and brothers work together on their athletic, fluid style of movement: “Whose idea is being used is always trading, changing, and evolving. It’s a true partnership and amazing to watch.”

The Kupermans then spoke with humble gratitude, saying: “It is a tremendous honor, privilege, and responsibility to tell stories on the stage. These stories increase our empathy; they shape our culture; they connect us all. We are infinitely lucky for the chance to tell stories and to be a part of this inspiring community.”

Following the Callaway Awards, Saheem Ali presented the Breakout Award, which honors an SDC Member director or choreographer experiencing a breakthrough moment in their work OffBroadway, to Taibi Magar. Magar’s recent work on Underground Railroad Game at Ars Nova, Is God Is at SoHo Rep, and The Great Leap at Atlantic Theater Company, have all earned her praise from colleagues, critics, and audience members alike. Ali described Magar as an artist who has “carved out a name for herself as an inspiring and prolific American director,” and shared from Neil Pepe, Artistic Director of Atlantic Theater Company, that Magar’s work is “consistently smart, visceral, and rigorous.” Magar used her acceptance, as many recipients did, to hark back to her initial calling to the craft: “[It’s] so delicious getting the Breakout Award after literally 20 years of being a director almost to the exact day. It was indeed a cold November when I was 17, that my acting teacher pulled me aside and said, ‘I think you’re a director.’ After some serious teenage attitude, I agreed to watch his rehearsal that night. He was rehearsing “Master Harold”…and the Boys, the final scene, and it took approximately 15 seconds of watching him to know that was going to be the rest of my life.”

With the New York-centric awards wrapped up, we turned to honoring achievements in regional theatre. First: the Zelda Fichandler Award. Named for the venerable founding Artistic Director of Arena Stage in Washington, DC, this award honors midcareer choreographers and directors who have devoted their talents to enriching the national theatrical landscape. Each year focuses on one of three national regions; this year’s Fichandler Award focused on the central United States. Lisa Portes, Chair of the Fichandler Committee and a previous Fichandler Award recipient herself, introduced the three finalists: Rick Dildine, Ron OJ Parson, and Blake Robison. A resident artist at Chicago’s Court Theatre for 12 years, Ron OJ Parson is also a cofounder and former Artistic Director of The Onyx Theatre Ensemble. He is a company member of TimeLine Theatre and Associate Artist at Writers Theatre and Teatro Vista.

While Parson was unfortunately unable to attend that night, Portes honored him in his absence: “Ron OJ is a Chicago treasure who has devoted his entire career to centering black work in Chicago, the region, and the nation.”

Rick Dildine is the Artistic Director of Alabama Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery; before that, he served as Artistic Director of the Shakespeare

in the American theatre and have been for a very long time. Everyone and every project you touch resonates long beyond that moment. We are better for having your eye on our work and your spirit in our lives.” Peterson then took the stage to share remembrances of her time working with Gordon Davidson in Los Angeles and moving accounts of the work that propelled her own career forward. For her full remarks, see page 57.

Carla Hoke-Miller, Laura Penn, Anne del Castillo + Rebecca Hewett

Festival of St. Louis and Managing Director of Chicago’s About Face Theatre. In her presentation, Portes read from the personal statement Dildine submitted with his application: “Storytelling builds community.

When we hear our own story, we experience great happiness, empathy, understanding, and joy. People often say, ‘The South is complicated.’ Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to it as a storyteller. Its inherent goodness and beauty are thrilling, and yet its history is littered with some of the most oppressive acts our country has experienced. As artists, we have a unique opportunity to tell the story of the South to the South in the South.

Theatre changes citizens, and citizens change society. Theatre is liberation. Theatre is local.” In Dildine’s remarks to the room, he acknowledged the power of mentorship in our field and offered this thanks: “I am so grateful to the mentors in this room and all throughout the country.”

Blake Robison has been the Artistic Director of Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park for eight years. Prior to that, he served as Producing Artistic Director at both Round House Theatre in Bethesda, MD, and Clarence Brown Theatre in Knoxville, TN. Portes shared this piece of his personal statement: “It’s been said that the regional theatre is our national theatre.

I believe that. Every community deserves great art. Those of us between the coasts are committed to that ideal, committed to balancing the entertainment with the hard conversations, committed to swimming in a sea of purple—where most of America lives.”

Robison’s acceptance speech paid homage to the night’s theme: “Events like this are about legacy, and we’re passing it on, we’re gifting it down the line. You get to a certain place and you send the elevator back down and bring somebody up with you.”

Emily Mann next presented the Zelda Fichandler Award to Marcela Lorca, Artistic Director of Ten Thousand Things Theater in St. Paul, MN. Prior to helming Ten Thousand Things, Lorca was the longtime Movement Director/Choreographer at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Before calling Lorca to the stage, Mann first paid tribute to Zelda Fichandler, describing her as the “North Star” of the American theatre and a tireless advocate for women in our field: “It was Zelda who got up in front of the American theatre and said women could [direct], and by her very presence showed women could [direct].” Mann described Lorca’s work as a director and choreographer as showing “extraordinary power and range,” of which Fichandler herself would be proud. Lorca accepted the honor with an exhilarating account of her upbringing in Chile, which set her on a path to theatre in the Twin Cities. Her speech in its entirety is below.

We turned last to the Gordon Davidson Award, in recognition of lifetime achievement through transformational service to the American regional theatre, named for the founding Artistic Director of Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles. This was only the second time the honor has been bestowed in our field, as the award was created last year. Producer Mara Isaacs joined us to present the Davidson Award to Lisa Peterson. A two-time Obie Award winner, Peterson was a resident director at the Mark Taper Forum for 10 years, and an Associate Director at both Berkeley Rep and La Jolla Playhouse. Of Peterson’s unique devotion to her colleagues and her body of work as a director, Isaacs remarked, “On behalf of SDCF and all the theatre artists you have touched, you are a powerful force

Anne Bogart closed the proceedings by remarking on the extraordinary night we had shared, and, with a twinkle in her eye added, “Don’t you think SDC and SDCF are where it’s at?” We’ve always thought so. The SDCF Awards was an evening to celebrate colleagues and the ways in which we both support and challenge each other to move our work, and the field, ever forward. Sitting in the audience, it was easy to marvel at how lucky we all are to work and play alongside each of these remarkable artists.

SDCF extends deep thanks to the many committee chairs and members who worked for months in reviewing and championing their colleagues’ work. And the event itself would never have been possible, or nearly as successful, without our director, Danny Gorman, producer Sarah Bierstock, stage manager Marisa Levy, and lots of help from the SDC and SDCF staff. As Kenny Leon said that night, “I am blessed to be in the world with you.

To spend time on the planet with you at this given moment.” We’re already looking forward to celebrating next year’s cohort of award recipients and hope to see you there.

THE ZELDA FICHANDLER AWARD ACCEPTANCE REMARKS BY

MARCELA LORCA

When Lisa Portes called to tell me I had won this prestigious award, my heart burst with joy and gratitude. It is such a great honor and privilege to stand before you this evening. I want to thank the members of the selection committee and the SDC Foundation. Our Central region is full of wonderful artists, and I’d like to honor fellow directors [and Fichandler finalists] Rick Dildine, Ron OJ Parson, and Blake Robison for their incredible contributions to our field.

My artistic journey began in my country of origin, Chile, a faraway land full of poets and SPRING 2020 | SDC JOURNAL FOUNDATION SECTION

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design, dance, and theatre—and my love for the study of cultures—were all called upon.

What followed were many years of choreographing, coaching, and directing in theatres large and small.

I have a deep love for this craft, for every tool that can make a play sing, for every way that can inspire an actor to be free and powerful in their expression, for every strand that weaves a production and invites the audience to dwell into that luminous place that is their deep soul, in a collective space.

Marcela Lorca

feisty people. I am an immigrant to the United States. I came in the mid-1980s, hoping to pursue an artistic career, and to escape Chile’s then-brutal dictatorship. As a young woman in Chile, during those repressive times, I studied theatre design and joined a very unique dance theatre company. We practiced a physical vocabulary of poetic metaphors. Movement expression charged with meaning, passion, and rhythm. We were determined to lead our audiences to “Wake Up!” Ours was a powerful theatrical vocabulary that escaped military censorship of words and text.

Waking people up is incredibly important— especially when those in power want the population to stay dormant. Goyo Fassler, our director, would say to us every day: “Awaken your senses, your consciousness.” These lessons became the foundations for my work in this country. My beginnings here, I’m sure, tell a familiar story of many that come from foreign lands. I started on the very streets of this lovely New York City. I worked in pizza joints and learned English watching Sesame Street and soap operas. I attended theatre performances, took dance classes, and followed everything that Jennifer Tipton ever lit. Fate took me to Minneapolis, and there, whenever I knocked on a door, it would open. So I kept knocking, and the doors kept opening. I said yes to anything that came my way, without discriminating. I was just so happy to participate and be able to work. This is what immigrants do.

Within a couple of years, I landed in one of my artistic homes, the Guthrie Theater—where I worked for over two decades. For many years, I was fortunate to work closely with the romantic and adventurous director Garland Wright.

Together, with a resident company, we embarked on an artistic laboratory where my skills in

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This practice of awakening together is central to my artistic drive and to my conversation with audiences. It has also been crucial for me to pass on the tools of our craft and to guide young artists to wake up to their own potential. Alongside my dear colleague, the brilliant Ken Washington, I was part of the founding and nurturing of two actor training programs.

These attracted hundreds of talented young artists to train in Minneapolis. And they are now raising the bar of what’s possible in our communities and across the country.

I’ve had wonderful opportunities as a director and choreographer. Thanks to Tim Bond, Jack Reuler, Bill Rauch, Joe Dowling, Jim Houghton, Emily Mann… [and] all who opened doors for me.

But evolving as an artist and leader has also come with many difficulties and frustrations.

Many of which are familiar to women, but more especially to women of color. And in dark moments, it has been all the more important for me to stay present to what life has to offer, and to continue creating.

I’ve had the chance to lift many stories that highlight the rich diversity of this country, to create new work that wrestles with the issues of our times, and to provide opportunities to many immensely talented artists of diverse cultural backgrounds.

that come to our spaces, but also brings it to those unable to attend or afford theatre presented in a traditional venue.

This work is stretching us into imaginative theatre landscapes that speak to everyone and lead people, of all walks of life, to feel the deep awakening and inspiration that theatre can bring to their lives.

Recently, some folks at SDCF asked me who has been a great influence in my life.

As I kept thinking about this question, I found in my roots those who I owe my all.

The artistic fire at the center of my heart was passed on to me by my grandmother, Luz, whose imagination and heart knew no bounds, and by my mother, Maria Eugenia Lorca, who is here tonight. Maná, as we call her, is a great artist in the field of dance and design, and she continues to work in Chile and teach to this day. From these earthy, adventurous women I learned to dream and to value kindness over all things.

I’d like to thank my son, Julian, and my daughter, Alondra. They taught me about unconditional love and made me a wiser and more resilient woman. So grateful for my partner, Seth, and his daughter, Ellie, for the joy they bring to my every day. And thanks to the great community of generous friends and colleagues, who have lent me a hand along the way.

This award is not just about my work, as theatre is about communities and collaboration. I’d like to share it with the Minneapolis/St. Paul theatre community— with the many artists that are not only remarkable in their talents but in their support and kindness toward one another.

I’d like to applaud also our Minnesota audiences, who are consistently engaged and so supportive of the work. Did you know that the Twin Cities is second only to NYC in theatre per capita?

I’ve always passionately pursued this path not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it creates exciting and dynamic art and brings crucially important conversations to our audiences.

A year and a half ago, another great door opened for me as I became Artistic Director to a powerful theatre company.

It is Ten Thousand Things in the Twin Cities. Our company embodies the values that Zelda Fichandler stood for.

Founded by the fierce Michelle Hensley, TTT is a company that not only looks to offer excellent theatre to audiences

Marcela Lorca + Emily Mann

Theatre has such tremendous capacity to awaken audiences from all walks of life with inspirations that can spread through community, region, nationally, even globally. So long as we fulfill this great purpose with infectious and generous creativity, theatre will be alive for many generations to come.

Thank you so much.

MARCELA LORCA is the Artistic Director of Ten Thousand Things Theater Company in St. Paul, MN. At Ten Thousand Things, Lorca has recently directed Thunder Knocking at the Door, The Winter’s Tale, The Sins of Sor Juana, and Into The Woods. Other recent Twin Cities credits include La Pasión Según San Marcos with Minnesota Orchestra, and Disgraced at the Guthrie Theater, McCarter Theatre Center, and Milwaukee Repertory Theater. Other celebrated productions include Caroline, or Change; The Burial at Thebes; The House of the Spirits; and Blood Wedding at the Guthrie Theater, Syracuse Stage, Mixed Blood Theater, and Missouri Rep. She has worked at many regional theatres in the US as well as in, Chile, Brazil, and Europe.

Previously, she was Movement Director and Choreographer for the Guthrie Theater, where she worked on over 150 plays and was a founding member of two actor training programs.

THE GORDON DAVIDSON AWARD ACCEPTANCE REMARKS BY

LISA PETERSON

I’ve been looking forward to this opportunity to speak about Gordon [Davidson], because I was on the wrong coast for both of the major memorials that were held for him, and so I missed my chance to talk about why I loved him and what he meant to me.

I never went to grad school. I hurried to New York City right after getting my bachelor’s degree, leapt into the new play world here, and interned and then paid my rent by house managing and casting.

That was my grad school, watching great directors lead auditions and put together readings of brand-new plays.

When Robert Moss started giving me the chance to direct up at the Hangar in the summers, that was my grad school, too. It was at the Hangar that I first tried

adapting Virginia Woolf’s The Waves for the stage—and that led to Jim Nicola bringing it to New York Theatre Workshop, and now I was a New York director and could quietly stop casting and start only directing, since that was where I was happiest—in the room. I was a young New York director, and New York was my home, and I really kind of hid my dirty little secret: I am a California girl. This was 30 years ago, and doors were starting to open for women directors, but just a bit.

Julie Taymor hadn’t made The Lion King yet, Mary Zimmerman hadn’t brought her Metamorphoses to Broadway, and I didn’t want my blonde hair and the fact that I grew up in Santa Cruz to lead people to think I was an airhead, incapable of leading a room. I didn’t want my California-ness to keep me from working.

So when Des McAnuff first offered me an associate director gig out in La Jolla, I agonized over whether or not to leave New York. I made pro and con lists. I talked to anybody who would listen: would this be the end of me? Was it a mistake to “go home”? In the end, I think I had a gut feeling that, if it might not be the best choice for my career, it might be the right choice for my heart. I had a feeling that if I went back west, my life might get bigger…and it did. The work that I was able to do and to see while at La Jolla was big, and ambitious, and diverse in every direction. This was the early ’90s, and I would drive my beat-up Honda Civic up the 405 as often as I could to see some of the earth-shattering new work that was happening at the Taper: The Kentucky Cycle, Twilight: Los Angeles… And then there was the play that kicked out the boundaries of what American playwriting could do and be: Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. This work felt urgent, but also it was just so dynamic: big, epic plays about the issues we’re grappling with as a country, and on a big stage, done with such intelligence and theatrical chutzpa…I didn’t know Gordon yet, but I wanted to be near that vision. So when Oskar Eustis called to say he’d gotten the job at Trinity Rep, and was I interested in moving up to LA to work at the Taper in his place, I didn’t agonize: I did everything I could to make it happen.

Now, the late ’90s at the Taper was a very fertile time. There was still funding then (most of us on the artistic staff were there on Mellon grants), and Gordon surrounded himself with artists leading development programs: Chay Yew; Luis Alfaro and Diane Rodriguez; Lee Richardson; Robert Egan; my late, great pal John Belluso; and me. There were

Gordon Davidson PHOTO c/o Center Theatre Group

Lisa Peterson

six different play development labs, a vital new play festival, and the hallways were full of writers and directors and actors and designers… these people had all been invited into the tent

by Gordon, and they became my family, too.

Every week, we’d have a vigorous artistic staff meeting where we’d talk about, argue about, the plays we’d read that week. And if Gordon fell in love with a new play—and this would happen all the time—he’d produce it. I did seven plays in 10 years at the Taper: a play about women in the Jamaican-British drug trade (Mules), a play about an early-20th-century American activist for disability rights (The Body of Bourne), a play about the power dynamics in a Spanish household made up entirely of women (The House of Bernarda Alba), a play about a fearless female search-and-rescue pilot SPRING 2020 | SDC JOURNAL FOUNDATION SECTION

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Mara Isaacs + Lisa Peterson

(Tongue of a Bird), about the Greek-sized tragedies playing out in East Los Angeles (Electricidad), about the cost of the public domain laws in this country (Chavez Ravine), about the way in which power and the law were dangerously intertwined in LA politics (Water & Power). These were the kind of plays that Gordon believed in, and they were the kind of political, theatrical, poetic plays that I loved, too.

After every preview, Gordon would take the team down to Otto’s (that was the name of the bar under the Music Center then) and hash it out. Those conversations could be painful, and loooong—I’m talking 3 a.m. long. It seemed that Gordon never slept, because he was at the theatre every night— not only during previews but every night, it seemed, greeting his audience, leaping up on stage to introduce the play, sticking around after to find out what people thought. And then there he’d be, back in his office the next morning, wanting to talk some more.

Every once in a while, he’d call me in to sit on the expansive, L-shaped couch in his office. He’d want to talk about my role at the Taper and my future. He wondered why I wasn’t taking a more “producorial” role at the theatre—why not use my time with him to train to be an artistic director? And this made a lot of sense to me and began a period of time when I tried to do that. I went up for quite a few artistic directing jobs, big and small, and would get close but not land them. I started to feel like I was letting Gordon down, and even that maybe I was letting down the field, you know?

That I was meant to do this other, big thing, but that somehow I just couldn’t make it happen. Often, chatting with Gordon, I would find myself confessing, “I just like to make work, I love to be in the room,” and he would nod and confess back to me that he did, too. And that being a producer, an artistic director, meant he didn’t do as much directing as he wanted, sometimes. But I knew that the American theatre needed the

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kind of sacrifice and passion that people like Gordon, and Zelda, and the pioneers of the American regional theatre had brought to the landscape. That Gordon had helped create a NATIONAL theatre that wasn’t in New York, but was spread into every large and medium-sized and small city in America, and made a big enough table for everyone to be at. For theatre geeks of all ethnicities and races and genders who all fell in love with the stage as a place to talk about the things that worry us, that scare us, that excite us. In the ancient Greek way. On these fabulous thrust stages, at the Taper and the Guthrie and Arena Stage—the fabulously asymmetrical thrust at Berkeley Rep. The thrust!—with voms that move the action out and through the audience! The thrust stage!

I was and am so grateful to these pioneers of the regional theatre, because as it happens, it’s my work in the regional theatre that has allowed me to make a living doing what I love. And it’s also meant that I have had a chance to meet and work with and see the work of artists from all over this country, this giant family that is the American theatre. You know, I always wanted a big family. I grew up in a modernist, ’60s nuclear family—two kids—but dreamt of families bursting at the seams, like in Cheaper by the Dozen. It’s quite amazing to live the nomadic life of a freelance director, an endless creative road trip—but sometimes this country’s so big that it becomes incredibly lonely. Since I’m usually getting on a plane the morning after an opening, it’s like having an intense, sixweek affair and then just disappearing. And what I did in Berkeley, or in Minneapolis, can often seem not to matter in LA, or in New York. A drop in a giant bucket.

That’s why this award means so much to me.

Because it’s given in honor of a man who viscerally adored the stage and believed that it was from the stage that we could engage the most difficult ideas and really listen to them. Because it represents his commitment to the hard stuff, the thorny stuff, the stuff that believes it can change the world. Because this year, you’ve chosen to give it to a freelance director who lives most of her life out of a suitcase, living in this giant country, making work with her big, big, big family.

Gordon said, “I believe it must be the job of the theatre to take hard looks at life, at issues people don’t always want to confront. They will listen to what is said to them from a stage.

That is the power of theatre: I respect it. I am in awe of it.” That’s beautifully said, Gordon. Thank you for saying it, back in 1979. Thank you for making a stage where we can try to fulfill that vision. And thank you, SDCF, for deciding to give this award to an artist who works on that stage.

This means everything to me. Thank you.

LISA PETERSON is a two-time Obie Awardwinning writer and director. She won her first Obie for directing Caryl Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire at New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) in 1990, and her second Obie, as well as a Lortel Award, for writing and directing An Iliad with Denis O’Hare in 2012, also at NYTW. Since then, she and O’Hare have written The Good Book, commissioned and produced by the Court Theatre in Chicago, and recently at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Her directing work includes the world premiere productions of new plays by Tony Kushner, Beth Henley, Donald Margulies, Naomi Wallace, and José Rivera.

PHOTOS (EXCEPT WHERE NOTED)

Zach Infante, Jessica Chase, Bernie Telsey, Jeff Kuperman, Rick Kuperman, Kim Blanck + Will Cantler

Walter McBride

Lou Bellamy + Marion McClinton PHOTO Ben Garvin/St. Paul Pioneer Press

On November 28, 2019, we lost one of the most beloved members of the Penumbra Theatre family, Marion McClinton. He was 65. Marion was there at the very beginning, one of Penumbra’s founding company members. His efforts and contributions to the company helped shape Penumbra’s style and its representation of black ethos.

The direct results of Marion’s efforts are the crystallization of an ensemble acting style and development of content that changed American theatre. His genius was always present in his critical and loving portrayals of black life. He applied those tenets in every facet of theatrical endeavor. He excelled in acting, directing, writing, dramaturgy, and critical analysis. And he recognized those same qualities in his fellow company members. Marion understood the power of the ensemble, and he came to artistic maturity as he helped develop what many have come to recognize as the “Penumbra Style.” He was on stage as the narrator in Penumbra’s production of Black Bart and the Sacred Hills—August Wilson’s first professional production—and he directed Penumbra’s production of The Piano Lesson.

Wilson, himself, termed that effort the definitive production of his play.

One of Marion’s most defining gifts was his ability to recognize talent in its most

REMEMBERING MARION MCCLINTON

BY LOU

elemental forms. He understood that the experience and knowledge he possessed had its most powerful fruition in the giving of that experience and knowledge away. His encouraging criticism continues to inform the work of young actors, directors, writers, and theatre technicians.

Certainly, Marion’s contributions to the field will be measured by his numerous awards and honors. A Tony nomination, an OBIE, two AUDELCOs, the Kesselring Prize, and the first Penumbra Theatre August Wilson Award are only a few of his several distinctions. They reflect the professional directing acumen he attained. His plays and critical analyses do so as well. Perhaps, though, his most enduring legacy may be his consistent pursuit of excellence, his kindness and generosity of spirit, his abiding respect for text, and his insistence on truthful and loving representation of the black ethos. American theatre has lost an erudite and talented theatre practitioner. Penumbra Theatre has lost one of its most esteemed, beloved, and eminent company members, Marion Isaac McClinton.

MARION McCLINTON, an award-winning director, playwright, and actor known for his productions of August Wilson’s plays, died on November 28, 2019, at the age of 65.

BELLAMY

Born in Saint Paul, MN, McClinton spent his early theatre career at Penumbra Theatre Company. He played the part of narrator in August Wilson’s Black Bart and the Sacred Hills in 1981 and remained active at Penumbra through the early 1990s.

McClinton maintained a long friendship and professional relationship with Wilson, and during his career, he directed most of Wilson’s plays. In addition to bringing King Hedley II (premiere) and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2003 revival) to Broadway, McClinton directed Gem of the Ocean, Seven Guitars, Two Trains Running, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Fences, The Piano Lesson, and Jitney at regional theatres across the country. He received a Tony Award nomination for Best Direction for King Hedley II. McClinton also directed Regina Taylor’s Drowning Crow on Broadway in 2004, several plays Off-Broadway, and extensively in regional theatres. He was the winner of two AUDELCOs, an Obie Award, and the Kesselring Prize, and the recipient of Tony Award, Drama Desk, and Evening Standard nominations. He was a founding company member of Penumbra, an Associate Artist at Baltimore Center Stage, and an alumnus of New Dramatists.

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THE SOCIETY PAGES SDC MEMBERS @ WORK + PLAY

Dan Granke, staff member Maegan Morris, and Darrell Rushton hosted the SDC vendor table at the “The Philly Cheesesteak” Philadelphia Stage Combat Workshop on October 26, where they shared information about Membership for fight choreographers.

Tom Markus, David Ellenstein, Jeffrey Moss, Daniel Jaquez, Kristy Cummings, Christopher Ashley, Allison Bergman, Cody Walker + Stephen Buescher

Executive Board Member Christopher Ashley hosted a San Diego Member Happy Hour at La Jolla Playhouse on October 21, 2019. Members gathered to socialize and hear updates from the Union and the SDC-League Funds from Ashley, staff member Kristy Cummings, and SDC-League Funds staff member Suzette Porte.

Brian Stokes Mitchell + Joseph Benincasa

Laura Penn + Anthony Van Laast

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Brian Stokes Mitchell hosted the 11th Annual Broadway Salutes at Sardi’s on November 5. The industry-wide event, hosted by the Coalition of Broadway Unions and Guilds (COBUG) and the Broadway League, celebrates Broadway union and guild members who have dedicated 25, 35, and 50+ years in service to Broadway. This year’s celebration included a special recognition for the Actors Fund for its invaluable support of the theatre community. New Member inductees at the 25-year level included Denis Jones, Paige Price, and Anthony Van Laast.

Timothy Douglas, Michael Bobbitt, Lisa Rafferty, Benny Sato Ambush, Randy Anderson, Robert Walsh + Maegan Morris

Staff members Randy Anderson and Maegan Morris traveled to Boston November 10-11 to host a Boston Member Meeting and Panel Discussion on new plays. The meeting provided an opportunity to update Boston-area Members on recent negotiations and upcoming organizing initiatives. The panel discussion, “Collaboration on New Plays: Shaping New Voices for the Stage,” featured Benny Sato Ambush, Melinda Lopez, and Kate Snodgrass and was moderated by Lisa Rafferty.

Linda Hartzell, Dámaso Rodríguez, Tracy Francis, Jonathan Cole, Sam Hull, Chip Miller (back); Brandon Woolley, Gemma Whelan, Lava Alapai, Sarah Andrews (middle); Adriana Baer, Samantha Van Der Merwe, Jane Unger

Northwest Regional Representative Linda Hartzell and Regional Presence Committee Member Adriana Baer held a Portland Member Meeting on November 13 in Portland, OR, hosted by Dámaso Rodríguez at Artists Repertory Theatre. Members discussed some of the Union’s current initiatives as well as ways to continue to grow and strengthen Union presence in the Portland area.

On November 16, Chicago-area Members and staff members Adam Levi and Barbara Wolkoff saw the matinee performance of Rivendell Theatre Ensemble’s production of Laura and the Sea, directed by Devon de Mayo, prior to attending a Chicago Member Meeting next door at Rivendell’s rehearsal studio.

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Pam MacKinnon, Evan Yionoulis + Laura Penn

The Annual Membership Meeting, held on November 18, brought together Members, Executive Board Members, and staff at Manhattan Theatre Club and online via video streaming. Outgoing Board President Pam MacKinnon began by welcoming new Members and Associate Members and presenting the State of the Union, highlighting SDC’s numerous activities across the country and ongoing organizing initiatives. Executive Director Laura Penn thanked the Membership for participating in the Union’s research study on the lives of directors and choreographers, and staff member Randy Anderson shared details on the Union’s new Collective Bargaining Agreements, including Off-Broadway and Association of Non Profit Theatre Companies (ANTC). SDC-League Funds staff member Suzette Porte provided an update on the Union’s work to re-establish an inhouse Health Funds office, and SDCF Executive Director Rebecca Hewett shared details on recent Foundation activities. MacKinnon gave the President’s Award to Sheryl Kaller, and Joe Calarco shared the Executive Board election results. The Membership also thanked MacKinnon for her years of service to the Union and acknowledged incoming Board President Evan Yionoulis. The meeting ended with a Q&A with MacKinnon, Yionoulis, and Penn.

Bill Berry, Bernadine Griffin + Jerry Zaks

Jerry Zaks took a break from rehearsals for Mrs. Doubtfire at Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theatre on November 30 to take a picture with Managing Director Bernadine (Bernie) Griffin and Producing Artistic Director Bill Berry.

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Members gathered for a Los Angeles Happy Hour on December 6 to network and catch up on Union activities in the Los Angeles area.

Rebecca Hewett + participants

Hannah Wolf, Carly Weckstein, Allison Bibicoff + Brendan Hughes

On December 7, SDCF held a day-long Staging Intimacy Symposium at Boston Court Pasadena in California. The day started with a two-hour workshop with Intimacy Directors International, followed by two engaging panel discussions on staging intimate moments and collaborating with intimacy choreographers. Panelists included Mara Klein, Michael Michetti, Diane Rodriguez, Eddie Ruiz, Allison Bibicoff, Brendan Hughes, and Carly Weckstein. The conversations were moderated by Ann James and Hannah Wolf.

Edie Cowan + Charles Abbott

Gary John La Rosa, Patty Wilcox, Jonathan Cerullo + Andrea Andresakis

Executive Board Members Lisa Portes, Rachel Chavkin, and Casey Stangl, and Paige Price, Julie Kramer, Lanxing Fu, and Laura Penn, all Members of the Political Engagement Committee, snapped a group photo on their way to meet with the Dramatists Guild on December 13 to discuss joint initiatives. from top): Rachel Chavkin, Casey Stangl, Julie Kramer, Lanxing Fu, Paige Price, Laura Penn; Lisa Portes (center) ABOVE (clockwise,

Sturgis Warner, Victoria Traube, Gerald van Heerden + Rebecca Hewett

The SDC offices hosted their annual Holiday Open House on December 9, where the Executive Board and staff celebrated the holiday season with Members, Coalition of Broadway Unions and Guilds (COBUG) leaders, general managers, producers, SDCF Observers, and more.

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Sarah Hughes, Rebecca Wear, Adam Levi, Maria Patrice Amon, Will Detlefsen, Addie Gorlin + Wendy C. Goldberg

Staff member Adam Levi visited the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center on January 7, 2020, to meet with Wendy C. Goldberg and speak with the 2019 National Directors Fellows.

Michael Bobbitt + Amanda Giglio

Amanda Giglio and Michael Bobbitt attended a Boston Night Out on December 14 to see a performance of Bobbitt’s Oliver! at New Repertory Theatre.

Jason Moore + Barbara Wolkoff

On January 9, Jason Moore and staff member Barbara Wolkoff spoke with Keith Martin’s students from Appalachian State University’s theatre program.

Members celebrated the nominees of the LA Stage Alliance Ovation Awards in Los Angeles on January 13 with a pre-award ceremony toast.

The awards celebrate the theatrical community of the greater Los Angeles area.

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SDC JOURNAL | SPRING 2020

Michael Rubinoff, David Connolly, John Heginbotham, John McGinty (back); Sydney Mesher, Karyn Casl (front)

David Connolly and John Heginbotham participated in the “Ready, Willing and Able” panel at BroadwayCon on January 24. The panel discussed the importance of increasing physically disabled representation on stage and the courage needed to achieve that goal.

Sheldon Epps, Casey Stangl, Jeffrey Polk + Paul Lazarus

Western Regional Representative Casey Stangl and Members of the Los Angeles Steering Committee hosted a Los Angeles Member Meeting on January 27.

Julie Beckman, Kelly McMahon, Marianne Savell, Karen Lund, Jane Jones, Victor Pappas, Kaytlin McIntyre, Tammis Doyle, Donald Byrd, Linda Hartzell, Scott Nolte, Wilson Milam + Richard E. T. White

Northwest Regional Representative Linda Hartzell and the Seattle Steering Committee hosted a Seattle Member Meeting on January 27.

The meeting provided Members with an opportunity to reconnect with colleagues and learn about the Union’s latest initiatives.

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Michael Bloom + Whitney White

Robb Hunter, Seema Sueko, Chelsea Thaler + Anika Harden

On January 28, Members joined Executive Board Member Seema Sueko for a Washington, DC Member Night Out featuring Sueko’s production of Silent Sky at Ford’s Theatre, followed by a post-show gathering.

Marina McClure, Jonathan Cole, Adriana Baer, Claire Martin, Lava Alapai, Dámaso Rodríguez + Michelle Seaton

Members and non-members alike gathered on January 29 for a Portland Member Breakfast to socialize and discuss the Union’s work in the Portland theatre community.

On February 3, SDC and SDCF hosted a Next Stage Convening to share the results of the Union’s study on the lives of directors and choreographers with Members, industry stakeholders, producers, collaborators, funders, and service organizations with the goal of creating meaningful change for directors and the field.

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An award-winning director, playwright, and actress, Vinnette Carroll dedicated her career to supporting black actors and black audiences, giving a voice to minority communities through theatre.

Born in New York, Carroll spent much of her youth in her parents’ native country of Jamaica, where she developed a deep appreciation for history and culture.

After completing an MA at New York University, she studied theatre at the New School, where she worked with Erwin Piscator. She then taught at New York’s High School for the Performing Arts and acted professionally before turning to directing. In 1962, Carroll earned acclaim for her production of Langston Hughes’s Black Nativity, which today is widely performed by performing arts groups throughout the country.

In 1967, Carroll founded the Urban Arts Corps and served as its first Artistic

PHOTO Photofest

Director, where she helped nurture black and Hispanic composers, performers, and writers. She used the program to develop her gospel revue Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope, which premiered on Broadway in 1972. With this production, Carroll became the first African American woman to direct on Broadway and to receive a Tony Award nomination for Best Direction of a Musical. Also on Broadway, she conceived and directed the musicals But Never Jam Today and Your Arms Are Too Short to Box with God (for which she received two Tony nominations). Carroll is credited for developing the gospel songplay style and for introducing gospel to Broadway.

In later years, Carroll founded a repertory theatre in Fort Lauderdale, FL, devoted to featuring minority playwrights and actors.

SDC Foundation honored her with the “Mr. Abbott” Award in 1999.

When I said I wanted to direct, I was told I’d have to take a third off a show’s budget because I’m black, and a third off because I’m a woman. And I said, ‘I’m going to do a helluva lot with that other third.’

SDC LEGACY

VINNETTE CARROLL 1922–2002

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SDC MEMBERS + ASSOCIATES continued...Kevin

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