360° SERIES V I E W F I N D E R : FA C T S A N D P E R S P E C T I V E S O N T H E P L AY, P L AY W R I G H T, A N D P R O D U C T I O N
W W W . T FA N A . O R G
TA B L E O F CO N T E N T S The Play 4 Excerpt: Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
by Simone Browne
The Playwright 8
Jackie Sibblies Drury: Thinking and Feeling
by Diep Tran
The Production 14
Cast and Creative Team
About Theatre For a New Audience 19 Leadership 20
Mission and Programs
21
Major Supporters
FAIRVIEW was originally commissioned and produced by: Soho Rep., New York, NY Sarah Benson, Artistic Director and Cynthia Flowers, Executive Director and Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Berkeley, CA Tony Taccone, Artistic Director and Susan Medak, Managing Director This production is sponsored by American Express. Leadership support is provided by the Ford Foundation. Additional support is provided by Agnes Gund; Connie Christensen; Clarence Otis, Jr. and Jacqui Bradley; Robert E. Buckholz and Lizanne Fontaine; Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee; Saundra and W. Don Cornwell; and Loida Lewis. Notes Front Cover: Front cover art by Milton Glaser, Inc. This Viewfinder will be periodically updated with additional information. Last updated June 11, 2019
Credits Soho Rep's Fairview 360° | Edited by Nidia Medina | Copy-edit and Layout by Peter James Cook Literary Advisor: Jonathan Kalb | Council of Scholars Chair: Ayanna Thompson | Designed by Milton Glaser, Inc. "Introduction, and Other Dark Matters," in Dark Matters, Simone Browne, pp. 1-30; excerpted. Copyright, 2015, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder. www.dukeupress.edu “Jackie Sibblies Drury: Thinking and Feeling” by Diep Tran. Originally appeared in American Theatre online, 29 May 2019. Used with permission from Theatre Communications Group. Copyright 2019 by Theatre for a New Audience. All rights reserved. With the exception of classroom use by teachers and individual personal use, no part of this Viewfinder may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Some materials herein are written especially for our guide. Others are reprinted with permission of their authors or publishers.
2
T H E AT R E F O R A N E W AU D I E N C E 36 0 ° S E R I E S
360° VIEWFINDER
SOHO REP'S FAIRVIEW
Roslyn Ruff (above) and MaYaa Boateng (below) in Soho Rep's 2018 production of FAIRVIEW, directed by Sarah Benson. Photos by Julieta Cervantes. S O H O R E P ' S FA I R V I E W 3
DIALOGUES
EXCERPT: DARK MATTERS
SIMONE BROWNE
Graffiti in London's Marble Arch by the artist Banksy. Image copyright Bruce Krasting, licensed under CC BY 2.0.
"Introduction, and Other Dark Matters," in Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Browne, pp. 1-30; excerpted. Copyright, 2015, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder. www.dukeupress.edu
S
ince its emergence, surveillance studies has been primarily concerned with how and why populations are tracked, profiled, policed and governed at state borders, in cities, at airports, in public and private spaces, through biometrics, telecommunications technology, CCTV, identification documents, and more recently by way of Internet-based social network sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Also of focus are the ways that those who are often subject to surveillance subvert, adopt, endorse, resist, innovate, limit, comply with, and monitor that very surveillance. Most surveillance, as David Lyon 4
T H E AT R E F O R A N E W AU D I E N C E 36 0 ° S E R I E S
suggests, is “practiced with a view to enhancing efficiency, productivity, participation, welfare, health or safety,” leaving social control “seldom a motivation for installing surveillance systems even though that may be an unintended or secondary consequence of their deployment.” Lyon has argued that the “surveillance society” as a concept might be misleading, for it suggests “a total, homogenous situation of being under surveillance” rather than a more nuanced understanding of the sometimes discreet and varying ways that surveillance operates. He suggests that we should look more closely at “sites of surveillance” such as the military, the state, the workplace, policing, and the marketplace in order to come to an understanding of the commonalities that exist at these various sites. For Lyon, looking at contemporary sites of surveillance requires us to examine some “common threads” including rationalization
FROM DARK MATTERS: ON THE SURVEILLANCE OF BLACKNESS (where reason “rather than tradition, emotion, or common-sense knowledge” is the justification given for standardization), technology (the use of high-technology applications), sorting (the social sorting of people into categories as a means of management and ascribing differential treatment), knowledgeability (the notion that how surveillance operates depends on “the different levels of knowledgeability and willing participation on the part of those whose life-details are under scrutiny”), and urgency (where panic prevails in risk and threat assessments, and in the adoption of security measures, especially post-9/11). In Private Lives and Public Surveillance (1973), James Rule set out to explore commonalities within sites of surveillance as well by asking whether the “sociological qualities” of the totalizing system of surveillance as depicted in George Orwell’s 1984 could be seen in computer-mediated modern systems of mass surveillance in the United States and Britain, such as policing, banking, and national health care schemes. Rule found that although the bureaucratic systems he studied did not function as malevolently as in 1984, Orwell’s novel served as a “theoretical extreme” from which to analyze a given system’s capacity for surveillance, in other words, how near it comes to replicating an Orwellian system of total control. Using this rubric, Rule concludes that a large-scale and longenduring surveillance system could be limited in its surveillance capacity in four ways: due to size, the centralization of its files, the speed of information flow, and restrictions to its points of contact with its clientele. Although much has changed with regard to innovations in information technologies, machine intelligence, telecommunications, and networked cloud computing since the time of Rule’s study in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Private Lives is instructive in its understanding of the workings of centralized and diffused power by state and private actors and institutions, and for identifying earlier developments in what Gary T. Marx has called “the new surveillance.” What makes “the new surveillance” quite different from older and more traditional forms
SIMONE BROWNE
of social control is laid out by Marx in a set of ten characteristics that these new technologies, practices, and forms surveillance share to varying degrees: (1) it is no longer impeded by distance or physical barriers; (2) data can be shared, permanently stored, compressed, and aggregated more easily due to advances in computing and telecommunications; (3) it is often undetected, meaning that “surveillance devices can either be made to appear as something else (one-way mirrors, cameras hidden in a fire extinguisher, undercover agents) or can be virtually invisible (electronic snooping into microwave transmission or computer files)”; (4) data collection is often done without the consent of the target, for example with noncooperative biometric tagging and matching at a casino or a sporting event, or Facebook’s prompt to “tag your friends” using the photo tag suggest feature; (5) surveillance is about the prevention and management of risk through predictive or anticipatory means; (6) it is less labor intensive than before, opening up the possibility for monitoring that which was previously left unobserved, like the detection of illegal marijuana grow-ops by thermal cameras set to sense unusually high temperatures or the detection of illicit bomb making by collecting and testing chemical air samples; (7) it involves more self-surveillance by way of wearable computing or “electronic leashes” such as fitness trackers or other means by which people come to monitor themselves; (8) the presumption of guilt is assigned to some based on their membership within a particular category or grouping; (9) technological innovations have made for a more intensive and interiorizing surveillance where the body is concerned, for example, with voice analysis that is said to measure stress as a way to differentiate between lies and truths; and (10) it is now so intense and with reduced opportunities to evade it that “the uncertainty over whether or not surveillance is present is an important strategic element.” With these developments regarding the scope and scale of surveillance, Marx has suggested that perhaps we have become a “maximum security society.” S O H O R E P ' S FA I R V I E W 5
FROM DARK MATTERS: ON THE SURVEILLANCE OF BLACKNESS
6
SIMONE BROWNE
I want to add to these understandings of surveillance the concept of racializing surveillance. Racializing surveillance is a technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and exercise a “power to define what is in or out of place.” Being mindful here of David Theo Goldberg’s caution that the term “racialization,” if applied, should be done with a certain precision and not merely called upon to uncritically signal “race-inflected social situations,” my use of the term “racializing surveillance” signals those moments when enactments of surveillance reify boundaries, borders and bodies along racial lines, and where the outcome is often discriminatory treatment of those who are negatively racialized by such surveillance. To say that racializing surveillance is a technology of social control is not to take this form of surveillance as involving a fixed set of practices that maintain a racial order of things. Instead, it suggests that how things get ordered racially by way of surveillance depends on space and time and is subject to change, but most often upholds negating strategies that first accompanied European colonial expansion and transatlantic slavery that sought to structure social relations and institutions in ways that privilege whiteness. Racializing surveillance is not static or only applied to particular human groupings, but it does rely on certain techniques in order to reify boundaries along racial lines, and, in doing so, it reifies race. Race here is understood as operating in an interlocking manner with class, gender, sexuality, and other markers of identity and their various intersections.
the example that “street behaviors of white men (standing still and talking, using a cellular phone, passing an unseen object from one to another) may be coded as normal and thus granted no attention, whereas the same activity performed by Black men will be coded as lying on or beyond the boundary of the normal, and thus subject to disciplinary action.” Where public spaces are shaped for and by whiteness, some acts in public are abnormalized by way of racializing surveillance and then coded for disciplinary measures that are punitive in their effects. Racializing surveillance is also a part of the digital sphere with material consequences within and outside of it. For example, what Lyon calls “digital discrimination” signals this differential application of surveillance technologies, where “flows of personal data—abstracted information— are sifted and channeled in the process of risk assessment, to privilege some and disadvantage others, to accept some as legitimately present and reject others.” In this way, data that is abstracted from, or produced about, individuals and groups is then profiled, circulated, and traded within and between databases. Such data is often marked by gender, nation, region, race, socioeconomic status, and other categories where the life chances of many, as Lyon notes, are “more circumscribed by the categories into which they fall. For some, those categories are particularly prejudicial. They already restrict them from consumer choices because of credit ratings, or, more insidiously, relegate them to second-class status because of their color or ethnic background. Now, there is an added category to fear: the terrorist. It’s an old story in a high-tech guise.”
John Fiske shows the operation of racializing surveillance in his discussion of video surveillance and the hypermediation of blackness where he argues that “although surveillance is penetrating deeply throughout our society, its penetration is differential.” Fiske argues that although Michel Foucault and George Orwell both conceptualized surveillance as integral to modernity, surveillance “has been racialized in a manner that they did not foresee; today’s seeing eye is white.” Fiske gives
To conceptualize racializing surveillance requires that I also unpack the term “surveillance.” Surveillance is understood here as meaning “oversight,” with the French prefix sur- meaning “from above” and the root word -veillance deriving from the French verb veiller and taken to mean observing or watching. The root word -veillance is differently applied and invoked, for example, with the terms “überveillance” (often defined as electronic surveillance by way of radio-frequency
T H E AT R E F O R A N E W AU D I E N C E 36 0 ° S E R I E S
FROM DARK MATTERS: ON THE SURVEILLANCE OF BLACKNESS identification or other devices embedded in the living body), “redditveillance” (the crowdsourcing of surveillance through publicly accessible CCTV feeds, photographs uploaded to online image sharing platforms such as Flickr, and online discussion forums, such as Reddit and 4Chan), and “dataveillance,” to name a few. Lyon has outlined the “potency of dataveillance” in a surveillance society, which, he writes, is marked by “a range of personal data systems, connected by telecommunications networks, with a consistent identification scheme.” The prefix data- signals that such observing is done through data collection as a way of managing or governing a certain population, for example, through the use of bar-coded customer loyalty cards at point of sale for discounted purchases while also collecting aggregate data on loyalty cardholders, or vehicles equipped with transponders that signal their George Holliday's video of the beating of Rodney King, via Wikimedia commons.
SIMONE BROWNE
entry and exit on pay-per-use highways and roads, often replacing toll booths. The Guardian newspaper named “surveillance” and “sousveillance” as the words that mattered in 2013 alongside “Bitcoin,” “Obamacare,” and “binge-watching.” For Steve Mann, who coined the term “sousveillance,” both terms— sousveillance and surveillance—fall under the broad concept of veillance, a form of watching that is neutral. Mann situates surveillance as the “more studied, applied and well-known veillance” of the two, defining surveillance as “organizations observing people” where this observing and recording is done by an entity in a position of power relative to the person or persons being observed and recorded. Such oversight could take the form of red-light cameras that photograph vehicles when drivers violate traffic laws, or the monitoring of sales clerks on shop floors with CCTV, as well as, for example, punch clocks that track factory workers’ time on the floor to more ubiquitous forms of observation, productivity monitoring, and data collection, such as remote desktop viewing or electronic monitoring software that tracks employees’ non-work-related Internet use. Mann developed the term “sousveillance” as a way of naming an active inversion of the power relations that surveillance entails. Sousveillance, for Mann, is acts of “observing and recording by an entity not in a position of power or authority over the subject of the veillance,” often done through the use of handheld or wearable cameras. George Holliday’s video recording of the beating of Rodney King by police officers of the Los Angeles Police Department on March 3, 1991, is an example of sousveillance, where Holliday’s watching and recording of the police that night functioned as a form of citizen undersight. • SIMONE BROWNE is an award-winning author, sociologist, and educator. She is Associate Professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also a member of Deep Lab, a feminist collaborative composed of artists, engineers, hackers, writers and theorists. Her first book, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), examines surveillance with a focus on transatlantic slavery, biometric technologies, branding, airports and creative texts.
S O H O R E P ' S FA I R V I E W 7
THE PLAYWRIGHT
JACKIE SIBBLIES DRURY
DIEP TRAN
Jackie Sibblies Drury in rehearsal for Theatre for a New Audience's presentation of Soho Rep's FAIRVIEW. Photo by Gerry Goodstein.
“Jackie Sibblies Drury: Thinking and Feeling” by Diep Tran originally appeared in American Theatre online, 29 May 2019. Used with permission from Theatre Communications Group.
T
he first Jackie Sibblies Drury play I saw, just after I’d moved to New York City in 2012, had a title that sounded like a dissertation: We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884–1915. Up to that point, I had associated plays with linear, static pieces of work, usually with a couch, always about white people with a terrible secret revealed in the last act. Perhaps that’s why, seven years later, I don’t remember much of what I saw in 2012, but I remember We Are Proud to Present. Drury had done things onstage that I, a 24-year-old theatre 8
T H E AT R E F O R A N E W AU D I E N C E 36 0 ° S E R I E S
newbie, had never seen before. In the play, a group of actors are trying to make a play about the genocide of the African Herero tribe by German colonists, but they’re at a disadvantage because the only written records were made by the Germans. “All we are doing is hearing the white version of the story over and over,” says a character in the play, which used metatheatricality and fragmentation in service of topics that few theatremakers were tackling at the time: the legacy of white violence against Black people, racial stereotyping, whose eyes we get to see history from, and who has the right to tell these narratives of pain and oppression. Oh, and cultural appropriation, before that term was a widely contested buzzword. Not that Drury herself was using those words when she was writing We Are Proud to Present. “I
JACKIE SIBBLIES DRURY: THINKING AND FEELING don’t know if I had all the terminology that we have now at my own disposal,” she admitted when we spoke recently, after rehearsal for a remount of her play Fairview, which recently won her the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Though We Are Proud to Present was written in 2010, while Drury was still in graduate school, what it talks about is still so heated and unresolved that it could have been written today. And if it seems lately there’s been a surfeit of Black playwrights tackling race onstage in formally inventive ways, it can be partly traced to Drury’s work at the beginning of the decade. Drury has mixed feelings about the play’s continuing relevance. “It feels nice to have written something vaguely thoughtful enough to still be part of a conversation that’s continuing,” she said with her characteristic modesty, adding that “it’s weird that there’ve been different waves of realization of how far we’ve come and how much the conversation around identity has changed
DIEP TRAN
and shifted and become more complex, and more combative at the same time. That feels crazy.” Seven years later, Drury is continuing that conversation with Fairview, which premiered at Soho Rep in lower Manhattan last year, was extended three times, and earned Drury both the Susan Smith Blackburn Award and Pulitzer. It also made best-of-2018 lists at The New York Times, New York, Time, and this one. This time Drury turns her attention on the white gaze. Fairview begins much like any play you might find in midtown Manhattan: With a couch and a family getting ready for an event. If this were any other playwright or any other venue, we might be treated to a work where secrets are revealed, tears are shed, and monologues recited. And there would be the unfortunate and seldom examined power and racial dynamics of having a Black cast perform for an audience of predominantly white patrons.
Charles Browning and Heather Alicia Simms in Soho Rep's 2018 production of FAIRVIEW, directed by Sarah Benson. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.
S O H O R E P ' S FA I R V I E W 9
JACKIE SIBBLIES DRURY: THINKING AND FEELING If it is an unfortunate reality that the typical theatre audience is white and well-heeled, Fairview takes that unfortunate unequal reality and makes it the point of the play, and satirizes naturalistic dramas in the process. While the actors start the play performing for the audience, toward the end (slight spoiler alert), the fourth wall is broken and the audience is asked to perform for the performers, in essence (and for each other). The Soho Rep production is about to be remounted at Polonsky Shakespeare Center, a Brooklyn theatre three times the size of Soho Rep. The play will then go on to new productions at Woolly Mammoth Theatre in D.C. (Sept. 9-Oct. 6) and the Young Vic in London (2020). Fairview asks its audience to participate, but some refuse, or have negative reactions to that request. For her part, Drury is slightly amused that something like Fairview has rankled audiences so much that the New York Times ran an article about how “uncomfortable” it is. “It’s curious to me that even a simple embodiment of a gesture toward dismantling white supremacy is so difficult for people to do,” she said circumspectly. “I’m not offended by it; it’s just what it is.” Drury’s plays are bold and her writing so complex that they can make you feel slightly heady after watching. By contrast, Drury herself is down-toearth; she’s six-foot-tall with a wide smile and a playful energy. As she talks, you can sense there’s a rigorous brain that’s constantly thinking and refining—she tends to pause mid-sentence to clarify or rephrase her thoughts. And then she’ll make a “that’s what she said” joke. “I do like to think about serious things,” she admitted. “But I also like to make theatre, which I think is fundamentally something that’s supposed to be entertaining. And I like making dumb jokes. I feel like the dumbest joke helps you understand something that’s very complex and violent in a way that your brain is actually able to deal with it.” She cited Richard Pryor as an inspiration.
10
T H E AT R E F O R A N E W AU D I E N C E 36 0 ° S E R I E S
DIEP TRAN
This sensibility informs several moments in Fairview, such as when one of the white characters speaks, with un-PC specificity, about wanting to be Black. “Don’t you think that once a person has enough money, their race just kind of disappears and they’re just rich?” he muses. “Like, if I’m going to be Black, I’d want to be a normal Black person, to like, have that experience, of like going to da club, you know?” To which another white character responds, “You’d just want to be Black so you could say the N-word.” Occasionally when you’re watching a Drury play, you may find yourself laughing, then wondering if you’re supposed to, or allowed to. “It’s my favorite kind of laughter,” she said with delight. “The kind that feels like, Ugh, you’re not supposed to be doing it, or I can’t believe I’m laughing at this, or I hope that no one hears me laughing at this. I like to go to plays to feel stuff, and that is a way to deeply feel something.” Director Sarah Benson, who directed Fairview and programmed two of Drury’s plays at Soho Rep, called Drury a consummate theatremaker. “One of the themes that threads through all her work is Otherness and creating structures that really theatricalize how we feel about other people and think about other people,” Benson explained. “She’s very, very much writing for the theatre.” Drury grew up in Plainfield, N.J. The daughter of immigrants from Jamaica, she was raised by her mom and grandmother, grew up middle class, and went to private school. Though there are no artists in the family, the Sibblieses (Drury’s maiden name) would take trips to Manhattan to see Broadway shows; and on long car rides, Drury and her mom would sing along to the two-CD box set of Phantom of the Opera. “It does keep you awake, trying to sing fake opera in the car,” she said chuckling, then in a faux operatic voice, “‘In dreams he came to me….’” When Drury said she wanted to be a playwright, while studying literature at Yale, her mom was supportive, if skeptical. “She was like, ‘I can’t pay
JACKIE SIBBLIES DRURY: THINKING AND FEELING for your entire life, so unless you figure out how to support yourself, you will have to live on the streets and not be able to eat anything,’” Drury recalled wryly, adding, “That was a justifiable concern.” It was while in grad school at Brown that Drury wrote what would be her breakout play, We Are Proud to Present. Chosen out of 120 entries as the winner of the 2010 Ignition Festival, it secured her a production at Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago. “When I started writing it in grad school, it was right after the 2008 election. It was this weird moment where Barack Obama was elected and everything thought, ‘We’re in a postracial America,’” recalled Drury. “And I thought, ‘Oh no, we’re not! Demon! It’s not that easy!” The Chicago production was reviewed in The New Yorker, then produced at Soho Rep, and Drury
DIEP TRAN
was suddenly a talent to watch. A production at Trinity Rep ensued the following year (Social Creatures, about a zombie apocalypse), and a flurry of commissions followed. But Drury, an admittedly slow writer (“I’m not exactly prolific”), tended to take her time. So between productions, she took temp jobs, then eventually taught playwriting at Fordham University and now the Yale School of Drama. A steady income of playwriting prizes (including the $150,000 Windham Campbell Prize and the $40,000 Jerome Fellowship from the Lark playwrights center in New York City) helped provide her with something of an “endowment,” as she called it. “It makes me feel like I can make different choices,” she remarked. “Take your time, if things get bad, you have this cushion. I wish somehow every writer had this little savings
Charles Browning in Theatre for a New Audience's presentation of Soho Rep's FAIRVIEW, directed by Sarah Benson. Photo by Henry Grossman.
S O H O R E P ' S FA I R V I E W 11
JACKIE SIBBLIES DRURY: THINKING AND FEELING cushion; it feels incredibly fortunate.” It also helps that she and her husband live in a “tiny apartment” in Brooklyn. One thing this relative stability has done is give Drury time to marinate with her ideas. Though Drury had two world premieres in quick succession in 2018 and 2019 (Fairview and Marys Seacole at Lincoln Center Theater’s LCT3), she began writing both in 2015. Drury’s usual process begins when she’s inspired by an idea. For Fairview, she wanted to explore surveillance and the ways implicit bias informs how we watch other people. For Marys Seacole, the theme was care work and how Black women have historically been called upon to take care of white women and their families. Drury describes her approach to writing as akin to throwing spaghetti against the wall to see
DIEP TRAN
what sticks. “It’s lots and lots of pages of notes, and short exchanges of text and some stage directions and some impressionistic gathering of things,” she explained. She’ll write enough to get 40 to 60 minutes worth of material to bring to a workshop. That part is key for her: hearing actors read the words and gathering feedback. It is only through rehearsal, she said, that “somehow you find a simple and direct but nuanced way of explaining something that you’ve been trying to figure out how to articulate. When you find those moments, then you’re like, ‘Yes! I found my ‘to be or not to be’!’” Benson compared working on Fairview to creating a musical. “It’s sort of a secret musical and is very, very technically intense,” she said. Because the play includes dancing, gigantic props, and an immersive sound design (that we will not spoil here), stage timing is crucial. “It’s a very precise physical score,”
Charles Browning, Heather Alicia Simms and Roslyn Ruff in Soho Rep's 2018 production of FAIRVIEW, directed by Sarah Benson. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.
12
T H E AT R E F O R A N E W AU D I E N C E 36 0 ° S E R I E S
JACKIE SIBBLIES DRURY: THINKING AND FEELING said Benson, whom Drury credits (along with set designer Mimi Lien) as a cocreator of Fairview. At one point, all three women were reading the same book, Dark Matters by Simone Brown. But her sense of collaboration is even broader than that. “Making space for a person who thinks about performance to create something specific to them within the experience of the play feels really important, for the directors, designers, actors, and audience,” explained Drury. “There has to be flexibility in a play because that’s part of the form of it to me.” The way Drury constructs her plays, in short, is not a simple matter of crafting a linear narrative and letting it play out. With the material of Marys Seacole, for instance, which earned Drury an Obie—alongside her director Lileana Blain Cruz and actor Quincy Tyler Bernstine—a more traditional playwright might have written a bioplay. Marys Seacole is more ambitious and experimental than that: In its almost two-hour run time, the play shuttles back and forth in time, sometimes in the same monologue, between Mary Seacole, a British-Jamaican nurse who was a contemporary of Florence Nightingale, and Mary, a nurse working in present-day America. Bernstine played both Mary Seacole and the modern Mary. Such intricate construction may have you believing (or fearing) that you’re in for a brain teaser. And then Drury will gut you with a line that’s moving and true, yet stated so simply and directly. In Marys Seacole, one character describes the working conditions in America for Black women: “You go there and they will make you work and mock you while you do it. You go there and they will not see you as human being with a soul and a morality and a vitality, they will see you as worse than a dog worse than a slave. At least for them slaves is property. Them need us but them nah want us.” Bernstine, who also starred in We Are Proud to Present, said that balance between intellectual
DIEP TRAN
rigor and emotional resonance is what makes Drury’s work so powerful. “It’s an odd piece of work and it’s a powerful piece of work,” she said of Marys Seacole. “We so rarely see Mary Seacoles represented onstage. Jackie shines a light on people who don’t often get light shone on them.” Bernstine cites Marys Seacole as the hardest play she’s ever done in her almost 20 years in the business. Fittingly, she also recently earned a Lucille Lortel Award for her performance. In the New York magazine review of Fairview, critic Sara Holdren wrote that it left her “grappling with the question this play inherently asks of whether I (straight, white, cis) should be writing about it at all.” But if white theatregoers are the majority of people watching Fairview, white critics have also been the majority of those writing about the play. Before we parted, I asked Drury what she hopes audiences of color gain from the play, which ends with a wish for white people to “make space” for people of color. The question made her pause. “I guess I wanted people of color generally to be acknowledged, in a way that’s complicated,” she answered with a certain hesitance. As someone who, like me, has been in situations where she was the only person of color in the audience, Drury wanted the work to acknowledge audience members who are still seen as atypical. “I wanted them to receive a gesture that’s trying to alter the space to fit them rather than asking people of color to alter themselves to fit a space, which I feel like is the everyday norm,” she said, gaining assurance. “What is it like if situations altered to fit you rather than you having to alter yourself? It’s not something that people should have to ask for, and hopefully some people do feel empowered to ask for it. And I’m hoping to encourage that." • DIEP TRAN is the senior editor of American Theatre magazine. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Time Out New York, Salon, CNN, HelloGiggles, and NBC Asian America. Follow her on Twitter at @DiepThought.
S O H O R E P ' S FA I R V I E W 13
THE PRODUCTION CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM (Keisha) is excited to make her TFANA debut returning to Fairview. She was last seen in Lynn Nottage's Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine at Signature Theatre. Other credits include Fairview (Soho Rep), Julius Caesar (Delacorte), Good Men Wanted (New York Stage & Film), A Midsummer Night's Dream (Classical Theatre of Harlem). MaYaa recently shot a recurring role on Showtime’s “City On A Hill”, Netflix's "Orange is the New Black" (Season 7), and guest starred on NBC’s “Chicago PD”. She graduated with an MFA from NYU Graduate Acting. MAYAA BOATENG
(Dayton) was last seen in Fairview at Berkeley Rep and SoHo Rep. Previously, World Premiere I Sing The Rising Sea at Virginia Stage Company NY: World Premiere The Capables at The Gym at Judson, The Piano Lesson, Dreamgirls at Gallery Players. NY: Classical Theater of Harlem, Target Margin Theater, Classic Stage Company. Regional: Timeline Theater, Goodman Theater, Chicago Shakespeare. Education: BFA DePaul University, MFA Columbia University, BADA (Oxford University). CHARLES BROWNING
MaYaa Boateng in Theatre for a New Audience's presentation of Soho Rep's FAIRVIEW, directed by Sarah Benson. Photo by Henry Grossman.
(Suze) Broadway: The Father, A Man for All Seasons. Off-Broadway credits include Fairview (Soho Rep), Venus (Signature), The Moors (Playwrights Realm; Lortel nom.), Men on Boats (Clubbed Thumb/Playwrights Horizons), Grounded (Page73; Drama Desk nom.), 3C (Rattlestick). Regional: World premieres of The Moors, Marie Antoinette, Compulsion, Sarah Ruhl’s Three Sisters and the vibrator play. TV: “Madam Secretary,” “The Good Fight,” “The Path,” “Mr. Robot,” “Happyish,” “The Leftovers.” Film: Luce (upcoming). Training: MFA, NYU.
HANNAH CABELL
(Bets) New York Theater: Fairview (Soho Rep), The Last Match (Roundabout), Me, Myself & I (Playwrights Horizons), New Jerusalem (Classic Stage Company), Jailbait (Cherry Lane Theatre), Aliens with Extraordinary Skills (Women’s Project), deathvariations (59E59). Regional: Berkeley Rep, Arena Stage, The Old Globe, Yale Rep, Studio Theatre (Helen Hayes Award Nomination). TV/film: “Law & Order: S.V.U.”, “Workin’ Moms”, “Cardinal”, “Ransom”, “Dark Matter”, “Reign”, “Sensitive Skin”, “Murdoch Mysteries”, The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, The Word. NATALIA PAYNE
(Mack) originated the role of Mack in Fairview at Soho Rep and Berkeley Rep, and is honored to be bringing it back to New York with the TFANA production. Broadway: Avenue Q (Princeton/Rod u.s.). National Tours: Rent (Mark), Avenue Q. Regional: Berkeley Rep (Fairview), Actors Theatre of Louisville (The Last Five Years), Weston Playhouse (Pregnancy Pact), Peterborough Players (The Seagull). Film: She's Marrying Steve. Brown University alum. JED RESNICK
(Jimbo) is a New York City native who trained at the Yale School of Drama. He has performed multiple recurring character and guest star roles on television shows including "Mr. Robot", "The Americans", "Orange Is the New Black", "Instinct", "F.B.I." and "The Black List". Theatrically in New York, he has been seen at The Public Theater, The Atlantic, The New Ohio, and Soho Rep. He has performed at numerous regional theaters. LUKE ROBERTSON
14
T H E AT R E F O R A N E W AU D I E N C E 36 0 ° S E R I E S
THE PRODUCTION
CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM
(Jasmine) Broadway: All The Way, Romeo & Juliet, Fences (Stand by). Off-Broadway: Fairview, X or Betty Shabazz v The Nation, Death of the Last Black Man…, Piano Lesson, Seven Guitars, Macbeth, Familiar, Scenes from a Marriage, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Things of Dry Hours, The Cherry Orchard. Film: Unt. Noah Baumbach, The Help, Salt, Rachel Getting Married. TV: "Godfather of Harlem", "Pose", "Divorce", "Madame Secretary". Awards: Obie, Lucille Lortel, Audelco, Barrymore and 3 Drama League Nominations. ROSLYN RUFF
(Beverly) recently appeared in Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation and By The Way, Meet Vera Stark. Broadway: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, A Raisin in the Sun. Off- Broadway: Barbecue (The Public), born bad (Soho Rep), Insurrection: Holding History (The Public), Breath, Boom (Playwrights Horizons) among others. Film/TV: "Luke Cage", "Seven Seconds", Roxanne, Roxanne, Red Hook Summer, The Nanny Diaries, Broken Flowers, "The Last O.G.", "Law & Order". Awards: Fox Foundation Fellowship Recipient Round 4, Audie Award, The Actors Center. Education: Tufts University, Columbia University. HEATHER ALICIA SIMMS
(Director) Artistic Director of Soho Rep. Recent credits: Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview (Soho Rep, Berkeley Rep), Skittles Commercial: The Broadway Musical (Townhall), SuzanLori Parks' In The Blood (Signature Theatre), also at Soho Rep: Richard Maxwell's Samara with music by Steve Earle, César Alvarez and The Lisps’ Futurity (Callaway Award), Branden JacobsJenkins’s An Octoroon (Soho Rep. & TFANA), Lucas Hnath’s A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney, David Adjmi’s Elective Affinities (site-specific) and Sarah Kane’s Blasted (OBIE Award, Drama Desk nomination). She has also directed at A.R.T., Woolly Mammoth, and M.T.C. MFA: Brooklyn College, Vilcek Foundation Prize. SARAH BENSON
Charles Browning and Heather Alicia Simms in Theatre for a New Audience's presentation of Soho Rep's FAIRVIEW, directed by Sarah Benson. Photo by Henry Grossman.
S O H O R E P ' S FA I R V I E W 15
THE PRODUCTION (Playwright) Her plays include Marys Seacole; We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915; and Really. Drury’s plays have been presented by Soho Rep, Berkeley Rep, LCT3, New York City Players and Abrons Arts Center, Victory Gardens, Trinity Rep, Woolly Mammoth, Undermain Theatre, InterAct Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Company One and The Bush Theatre in London, among others. Her work has been developed at The Bellagio Center, Sundance, The Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, The Racial Imaginary Institute, Manhattan Theatre Club, Ars Nova, Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, New York Theatre Workshop, PRELUDE, The Civilians, The Bushwick Starr, The LARK, and The MacDowell Colony. She has received a Windham-Campbell Literary Prize in Drama, a Van Lier Fellowship at New Dramatists, and a Jerome Fellowship at The LARK. She is a NYTW Usual Suspect and a United States Artists Fellow. She won the 2019 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fairview.
CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM
JACKIE SIBBLIES DRURY
Roslyn Ruff in Theatre for a New Audience's presentation of Soho Rep's FAIRVIEW, directed by Sarah Benson. Photo by Henry Grossman.
(Choreographer) is a choreographer, director, and the artistic director of the feath3r theory and New Brooklyn Theatre. Off-Broadway: The Sandbox, Drowning, Funnyhouse of a Negro, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Everybody, FAIRVIEW. Choreography: Skittles Commercial: The Musical (Town Hall); The Chronicles of Cardigan and Khente (SohoRep); Lempicka (Williamstown Theatre Festival); The Good Swimmer (BAM); The House That Will Not Stand, Hurricane Diane (New York Theatre Workshop); If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka, and A Strange Loop (Playwrights Horizons) among others. RAJA FEATHER KELLY
(Scenic Design) is a designer of sets/environments for theater, dance and opera. She is a co-founder of JACK, a performance/art space in Brooklyn. Recent work includes True West (Roundabout), Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 (Tony Award-Broadway), and A 24 Decade History of American Music (St. Ann’s Warehouse). She is a recipient of a Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, Bessie, OBIE Award for sustained excellence, and is a 2015 MacArthur Fellow. MIMI LIEN
(Costume Design). TFANA: He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box. OffBroadway: Ain’t No Mo’ (Public); Daddy (New Group); Fairview & Is God Is (Soho Rep); Fabulation, The Death of the Last Black Man, & In the Blood (Signature); The House That Will Not Stand, Red Speedo & Nat Turner (NYTW); Pipeline, Ghost Light, & War (Lincoln Center); Eddie & Dave (Atlantic); The Last Match (Roundabout); O, Earth (Foundry). Drama Desk & Obie Award. Training: Oberlin College & Conservatory of Music, Brown University & the Yale School of Drama. montanaleviblanco.com MONTANA LEVI BLANCO
AMITH CHANDRASHAKER (Lighting Design). The Lucky Ones (DD Nom., Ars Nova), Boesman & Lena
(LL Nom., Signature), Blue Ridge (Atlantic), Cardinal (2ST), Fairview (Soho Rep, Berkeley Rep), Fire in Dreamland (Public) Opera: The Flying Dutchman (Houston Grand Opera), Falstaff (Opera Omaha) The Scarlet Letter (Opera Colorado), Dance: Alexander Ekman, Liz Gerring, Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, Rennie Harris, Aalto Ballettt Theatre Essen, Staatstheater Nürnberg, The National Dance Company of Wales, and The Royal New Zealand Ballet. 16
T H E AT R E F O R A N E W AU D I E N C E 36 0 ° S E R I E S
THE PRODUCTION
CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM
MIKAAL SULAIMAN (Sound Designer). Off-Broadway: Continuity (Manhattan Theatre Club); Passage,
Fairview (Soho Rep); Recent Alien Abductions, Time's Journey Through a Room (Play Co.); Meet Vera Stark (Signature Theatre); Blue Ridge (Atlantic Theatre); The Thanksgiving Play (Playwrights Horizons); Rags Parkland, Underground Railroad Game (Ars Nova); Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (NYTW); Master (Foundry Theatre Co.); Skittles: The Broadway Musical. Regional: Berkeley Rep, The Alley, Woolly Mammoth, Trinity Rep, Pig Iron, Arden Theatre, Early Morning Opera. www.mikaal.com COOKIE JORDAN (Hair/Make-up Designer) Broadway: Choir Boy, The Cher Show, Once On This Island,
Sunday in the Park with George, In Transit, Eclipsed, Side Show, After Midnight, Fela, A View From the Bridge, South Pacific. Off-Broadway: Boesman and Lena, Fabulation, Our Lady of 121st Street, In the Blood, Daddy, Twelth Night, Midsummer Night's Dream. Soho Rep: An Octoroon, Is God Is, Fairview. Television: Emmy nominated for make-up design NBC, "The Wiz Live".
(Fight Director) has choreographed some stuff (selected Broadway: Be More Chill, Spring Awakening, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Grace, Speed the Plow, Thérèse Raquin, Long Day’s Journey into Night, NY premieres: Socrates, Pass Over, Hangmen, Yen, Gloria, An Octoroon, The Whipping Man, We are Proud to Present, Blasted, Bethany, Blackbird, Bug, Killer Joe). “Walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone.” G. Fox. J. DAVID BRIMMER
RYAN COURTNEY (Props and Set Dressing) is a director and designer. At Soho Rep, he has
designed props for Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview, Christopher Chen's Passage, and Kate Tarker’s Thunderbodies. With his company Third Person, he has contributed structural authorship, dramaturgy, and direction to projects including Antarabhava, 1001 Stories, and Science Park. Additional frequent collaborators include Ilana Khanin (I Was Unbecoming Then, The Tempest, The Misanthrope), and Gabriel Hainer Evansohn (Black Light, Smile, KPOP). MaYaa Boateng in Soho Rep's 2018 production of FAIRVIEW, directed by Sarah Benson. Photo by Julieta Cervantes.
S O H O R E P ' S FA I R V I E W 17
THE PRODUCTION
CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM
SHANE SCHNETZLER (Production Stage Manager). TFANA:
Julius Caesar, The Emperor, Heart/ Box, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Tamburlaine, Cymbeline. Off-Broadway: Noura, This Flat Earth, The Profane, Rancho Viejo, Familiar (Playwrights Horizons); Napoli, Brooklyn, Look Back in Anger (Roundabout); The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, The Comedy of Errors (NYSF); Detroit ’67 (Public); Night is a Room, The Liquid Plain, The Old Friends (Signature); Red Dog Howls (NYTW); Uncle Vanya (Soho Rep); The Scottsboro Boys (Vineyard). NOAH SILVA (Assistant Stage Manager). Theatre for a New
MaYaa Boateng and Roslyn Ruff in Theatre for Audience debut! Broadway: What the Constitution Means to Me. a New Audience's presentation of Soho Rep's FAIRVIEW, directed by Sarah Benson. Photo by Off-Broadway: If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka , The Henry Grossman. Treasurer, The Profane, Rancho Viejo, Aubergine (Playwrights Horizons), What the Constitution… (NYTW), Othello (NYSF), Hangmen (Atlantic), Relevance (MCC). BFA in Stage Management from Hofstra University.
GARRETT ALLEN (Associate Director) is a black, queer multi/interdisciplinary artist working primarily in
theatre, video, and performance art. Their recent projects include BLK MLK (blackmilk) co-created with Kyle Lopez (Spectrum NYC), directing An Incomplete List... by Dante Green (Polyphone Festival, UArts), and directing/devising We Were All Rooting For You (Playhouse Creatures). Their work has also been exhibited at Harvard, Knockdown Center, Signal Gallery, The Deep End, and YOU ARE HERE. garrettcallen.com BLAKE ZIDELL & ASSOCIATES (Press Representative) is a Brooklyn-based public relations firm
representing artists, companies and institutions spanning a variety of disciplines. Clients include St. Ann’s Warehouse, Soho Rep, The Kitchen, Ars Nova, BRIC, P.S.122, Abrons Arts Center, Taylor Mac, LAByrinth Theater Company, StoryCorps, Irish Arts Center, Café Carlyle, Peak Performances, Batsheva Dance Company, The Playwrights Realm, Stephen Petronio Company, The Play Company, and FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival. TBD CASTING (Casting) Upcoming: The Coast Starlight (La Jolla Playhouse), Nomad Motel (Atlantic
Theater). Recent: Broadway - Frankie & Johnny in the Clair de Lune. Off B’way - Public Servant (Theater Breaking Through Barriers), Playing Hot (Pipeline Theater), Passage (Soho Rep), and Imagining Madoff (New Light Theater Project). Current film/tv include: In This, Our Time (dir. Alexander Dinelaris), Gunmetal Rose (dir. Daniel Hart Donoghue), Give Me Liberty (dir. Kirill Mikhanovsky), and Mordeo (CRYPT TV). Member of Casting Society of America.
SOHO REP. provides radical theater makers with productions of the highest caliber and tailor-made
development at key junctures in their artistic practice. We elevate artists as thought leaders and citizens who change the field and society. We encourage artistic autonomy and an unmediated connection between artists and audiences to create a springboard for transformation and rich civic life beyond the walls of our theater. Since 2000, our productions have garnered 21 Obie Awards; a Drama Desk Award for Sustained Achievement; a Lucille Lortel Award; The New York Times Outstanding Playwriting Award, and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Recent projects include works by David Adjmi, César Alvarez, Christopher Chen, Jackie Sibblies Drury, debbie tucker green, Aleshea Harris, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Daniel Alexander Jones, Sarah Kane, Young Jean Lee, Richard Maxwell, Kate Tarker, and Anne Washburn . Many of our productions, including Fairview, are commissions, began in the Writer/Director Lab, or are developed through our Studio program. 18
T H E AT R E F O R A N E W AU D I E N C E 36 0 ° S E R I E S
THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE
LEADERSHIP
JEFFREY HOROWITZ (Founding Artistic Director) began his career in theatre as an actor and appeared
on Broadway, Off Broadway, and in regional theatre. In 1979, he founded Theatre for a New Audience. Horowitz has served on the Panel of the New York State Council on the Arts, on the Board of Directors of Theatre Communications Group, the Advisory Board of the Shakespeare Society, and the Artistic Directorate of London’s Globe Theatre. He received the John Houseman Award in 2003 and The Breukelein Institute’s 2004 Gaudium Award. (Managing Director) joined Theatre for a New Audience in 2003. She spent the previous ten years devoted to fundraising for the 92nd Street Y and the Brooklyn Museum. Ryan began her career in classical music artist management and has also served as company manager for Chautauqua Opera, managing director for the Opera Ensemble of New York, and general manager of Eugene Opera. She is a 2014 Brooklyn Women of Distinction honoree from Community Newspaper Group. DOROTHY RYAN
MICHAEL PAGE (General Manager) joined TFANA in 2013, where he has managed over 20 productions
at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center. Prior to TFANA Michael was the general manager of the Tony Award-winning Vineyard Theatre and the managing director of Off-Broadway’s Barrow Street Theatre where he managed the U.S. premiere of Nina Raine’s Tribes and David Cromer’s landmark production of Our Town, among many others. Michael sits on the Board of Directors for the League of Resident Theatres (LORT), is active with the Off-Broadway League, and is on the adjunct faculty at CUNY/ Brooklyn College’s Department of Theater.
Polonsky Shakespeare Center. Photo © David Sundberg/Esto.
Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage. Photo by Francis Dzikowski/OTTO. S O H O R E P ' S FA I R V I E W 19
ABOUT THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE About Theatre for a New Audience Founded in 1979 by Jeffrey Horowitz, the mission of Theatre for a New Audience is to develop and vitalize the performance and study of Shakespeare and classic drama. Theatre for a New Audience produces for audiences Off-Broadway and has also toured nationally, internationally and to Broadway. We are guided in our work by five core values: a reverence for language, a spirit of adventure, a commitment to diversity, a dedication to learning, and a spirit of service. These values inform what we do with artists, how we interact with audiences, and how we manage our organization. Theatre for a New Audience Education Programs
S TA F F
Founding Artistic Director Jeffrey Horowitz Managing Director Dorothy Ryan General Manager Michael Page Director of Institutional Advancement James J. Lynes Finance Director Mary Sormeley Education Director Kathleen Dorman Director of Marketing & Communications Jennifer Lam Associate Producer / Director of the Studio Nidia Medina Associate Director of Develeopment Barbara Toy Associate General Manager Kiana Carrington Theatre Manager Steven Gaultney Production Manager Zach Longstreet Box Office & Subscriptions Manager Allison Byrum Building Operations Manager Jordan Asinofsky Institutional Support Manager Sara Billeaux Marketing Manager Torrence Browne Humanities Manager / Assistant to the Artistic & Managing Directors Tatianna Casas Quiñonez Development Associate Richard Brighi Development Associate Allison Haglund Finance Associate Michelle Esposito Education Associate Philip Calabro Associate Facilities Manager Rashawn Caldwell House Manager Coral Cohen Press Representative Blake Zidell & Associates Resident Literary Advisor Jonathan Kalb Resident Casting Director Jack Doulin
20
Theatre for a New Audience is an award-winning company recognized for artistic excellence. Our education programs introduce students to Shakespeare and other classics with the same artistic integrity that we apply to our productions. Through our unique and exciting methodology, students engage in hands-on learning that involves all aspects of literacy set in the context of theatre education. Our residencies are structured to address City and State Learning Standards both in English language Arts and the Arts, the New York City DOE’s Curriculum Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in Theater, and the Common Core Learning Standards for English Language Arts. Begun in 1984, our programs have served more than 130,000 students, ages 9 through 18, in New York City Public Schools city-wide. A Home in Brooklyn: Polonsky Shakespeare Center Theatre for a New Audience’s home, Polonsky Shakespeare Center, is a centerpiece of the Brooklyn Cultural District. Designed by celebrated architect Hugh Hardy, Polonsky Shakespeare Center is the first theatre in New York designed and built expressly for classic drama since Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont in the 1960s. The 27,500 square-foot facility is a unique performance space in New York. The 299-seat Samuel H. Scripps Mainstage, inspired by the Cottesloe at London’s National Theatre, combines an Elizabethan courtyard theatre with modern theatre technology that allows the stage and seating to be arranged in seven configurations. The new facility also includes the Theodore C. Rogers Studio (a 50-seat rehearsal/ performance studio), and theatrical support spaces. The City of New York-developed Arts Plaza, designed by landscape architect Ken Smith, creates a natural gathering place around the building. In Addition, Polonsky Shakespeare Center is also one of the few sustainable (green) theatre in the country, with LEED-NC Silver rating from the United States Green Building Council. Now with a home of its own, Theatre for a New Audience is contributing to the continued renaissance of Downtown Brooklyn. In addition to its season of plays, the Theatre has expanded its Humanities offerings to include lectures, seminars, workshops, and other activities for artists, scholars, and the general public. When not in use by the Theatre, its new facility is available for rental, bringing much needed affordable performing and rehearsal space to the community.
T H E AT R E F O R A N E W AU D I E N C E 36 0 ° S E R I E S
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Chairman: Robert E. Buckholz Vice Chairman Kathleen C. Walsh President Jeffrey Horowitz Founding Artistic Director Vice President and Secretary Dorothy Ryan Managing Director Executive Committee Robert E. Buckholz Jeffrey Horowitz John J. Kerr, Jr. Seymour H. Lesser Larry M. Loeb Audrey Heffernan Meyer Kathleen C. Walsh Monica Gerard-Sharp Wambold Josh Weisberg Members John Berendt* Sally Brody William H. Burgess, III Zoë Caldwell* Ben Campbell Robert Caro* Constance Christensen Dr. Sharon Dunn* Dana Ivey* Catherine Maciariello* Caroline Niemczyk Rachel Polonsky Theodore C. Rogers Philip R. Rotner Mark Rylance* Daryl D. Smith Susan Stockel Michael Stranahan John Douglas Thompson* John Turturro* Frederick Wiseman* *Artistic Council
Emeritus Francine Ballan Dr. Charlotte K. Frank Jane Wells
THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE
MA JOR SUPPORTERS
Even with capacity audiences, ticket sales account for a small portion of our operating costs. The Theatre expresses its deepest thanks to the following Foundations, Corporations, Government Agencies and Individuals for their generous support of the Theatre’s Humanities, Education, and Outreach programs.
The 360° Series: Viewfinders has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the Human Endeavor. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Viewfinder do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. A Challenge Grant from the NEH established a Humanities endowment fund at Theatre for a New Audience to support these programs in perpetuity. Leading matching gifts to the NEH grant were provided by Joan and Robert Arnow, Norman and Elaine Brodsky, The Durst Organization, Perry and Marty Granoff, Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia, John J. Kerr & Nora Wren Kerr, Litowitz Foundation, Inc., Robert and Wendy MacDonald, Sandy and Stephen Perlbinder, The Prospect Hill Foundation, Inc., Theodore C. Rogers, and from purchasers in the Theatre’s Seat for Shakespeare Campaign, 2013 – 2015. Theatre for a New Audience’s Humanities, Education, and Outreach programs are supported, in part, by The Elayne P. Bernstein Education Fund. For more information on naming a seat or making a gift to the Humanities endowments, please contact James Lynes, Director of Institutional Advancement, at 212-229-2819 x29, or by email at jlynes@tfana.org. Theatre for a New Audience’s productions and education programs receive support from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; and from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Additional funding is provided by the generosity of the following Foundations and Corporations through either general operating support or direct support of the Theatre’s arts in education programs: PRINCIPAL BENEFACTORS
($100,000 and up) National Endowment for the Humanities New York City Department of Cultural Affairs The SHS Foundation The Shubert Foundation, Inc. The Thompson Family Foundation LEADING BENEFACTORS
($50,000 and up) Bloomberg LP Deloitte
MAJOR BENEFACTORS
($20,000 and up) The Achelis and Bodman Foundation Sidney E. Frank Foundation Hearst Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP Latham & Watkins LLP National Endowment for the Arts New York State Council on the Arts May and Samuel Rudin Foundation Inc. The Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation Troy Chemical Corporation The Winston Foundation
SUSTAINING BENEFACTORS
($10,000 and up) The Howard Bayne Fund Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc. Coydog Foundation Debevoise & Plimpton LLP The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Jean and Louis Dreyfus Foundation, Inc. Fiduciary Trust International Geen Family Foundation Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP Joseph and Sally Handleman Foundation Trust A Irving Harris Foundation Ingram Yuzek Gainen Carroll & Bertolotti, LLP The J.M. Kaplan Fund King & Spalding LLP Kirkland & Ellis LLP Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison Select Equity Group, Inc. Sidley Austin LLP Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP Wells Fargo Bank
Dorsey & Whitney LLP Forest City Ratner Companies The Claire Friedlander Family Foundation McDermott Will & Emery Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP Litowitz Foundation, Inc. Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP Richenthal Foundation The Starry Night Fund The Dorothy Strelsin Foundation Michael Tuch Foundation, Inc. The White Cedar Fund PRODUCERS CIRCLE—EXECUTIVE
($2,500 and up) The Norman D. and Judith H. Cohen Foundation DeWitt Stern Group, Inc. Marta Heflin Foundation Lucille Lortel Foundation PRODUCERS CIRCLE—ASSOCIATE
PRODUCERS CIRCLE— THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR’S SOCIETY
($5,000 and up) Anonymous (1) Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, LLP Axe-Houghton Foundation
($1,000 and up) Actors’ Equity Association Bressler, Amery & Ross Kinder Morgan Foundation Richmond County Savings Foundation
S O H O R E P ' S FA I R V I E W 21
W W W . T FA N A . O R G