Almanac Issue 1

ALMANAC #01

A literary magazine from

2021

Almanac Batch 2 Print & Review Version

50 YEARS AND COUNTING

As we celebrate 50 years of Playwrights Horizons, we are looking back at our past and ahead to our future. Throughout our history, we have been steadfast in our commitment to supporting artists who use their unique voices to tell our collective story. Even in these trying times, that dedication has never wavered.

Your support helps us encourage artists to keep creating the thoughtprovoking and important new work we love — both digitally and, when it is safe to be together, in our theater.

As we look to the next 50 years, your contributions allow us to champion and uplift our artistic community. We hope you will join us by making a donation. Donate now by texting PH50FOR50 to 44-321 or visiting phnyc.org/donate.

We can’t do it without you. Thank you for your continued support.

ALMANAC Almanac is a literary magazine from Playwrights Horizons. Established in 2020, at a time of pandemic and protest, Almanac is a new kind of publication — one in which a theater and the artists who comprise it come together to take stock of contemporary politics, culture, and playwriting. Through plays, essays, interviews, poems, and visual art, Almanac charts the coordinates of the present day, as measured by thinkers and makers whose work lives both on and beyond the stage.

EDITORIAL BOARD DRAMATURG, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Ashley Chang

Adam Greenfield

Jordan Best

ARTISTIC PROGRAMS MANAGER

DIGITAL CONTENT EDITOR

DIGITAL CONTENT PRODUCER

Karl Baker Olson

Iman Childs

Alison Koch

COMMUNICATIONS ASSOCIATE

ASSOCIATE MANAGING DIRECTOR

LITERARY MANAGER

Billy McEntee

Kyle Sircus

Lizzie Stern

ALMANAC

PLAYWRIGHTS HORIZONS

416 W 42ND ST, NEW YORK, NY 10036

Copyright © 2021 Playwrights Horizons, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed by Michael Harrison of WestprintNY. The Almanac commissions were supported by funds raised by the Play-PerView reading of Heroes of the Fourth Turning.

CONTENTS

PASTS

14

50

Selling Kabul: In Rehearsal

The Center of the World

22

56

Iman Childs

May Treuhaft-Ali

Pardon the Interruption

Mr. Burns: Far and Wide

26

60

Tim Sanford

Jordan Best

A Strange Loop: Portraits of a Musical

Looking Back

28

66

Arnulfo Maldonado

Kirsten

Kirsten Childs and Robert O’Hara

32

site visit: 416W42 David Zinn

Ashley Chang

Coiled Spring Will Arbery

68

The Seeing Place Agnes Borinsky

76

114

Notebooks

Adam Greenfield and Bob Moss

78

Check-In

Karl Baker Olson, Ashley Chang, Libby Peterson, Eva Rosa, Bonita Carol Thomas, and Libby Zambrano

116

Not Writing Clare Barron

NOWS

84

Abundance

Tellit To Me In My Ear James Ijames

86

Angela & JMM

Alaine Alldaffer, Lisa Donadio, Angela Lewis, and J. Mallory McCree

90

Lizzie Stern

122

The Freelancer’s Pocket Guide to Budgeting Ari Teplitz

126

Intermission (Crossword) Adam Greenfield

128

THE WORST THING YOU CAN HAVE RIGHT NOW...IS AN IDEA?

Lortel & Obie

Raja Feather Kelly

Tim Sanford

96

131

A Strange Loop: Portraits of a Musical

That Doesn’t Apply to Me

Arnulfo Maldonado

Sylvia Khoury

97

136

Yet Another Reason Patriotism Is A Mistake Craig Lucas

98

Morning

Jean Ann Douglass

138

The Broken American Dream

A Strange Loop: Portraits of a Musical

Rodrigo Muñoz

Arnulfo Maldonado

106

139

Remaking Ourselves Tomi Tsunoda

110

Organizing In Community

Ashley Chang and Libby Peterson

a monologue to my sister because she can’t have a dialog Larissa FastHorse

Double Take Mia Chung

144

FUTURES

142

A Strange Loop: Portraits of a Musical Arnulfo Maldonado

145

Eleven Thoughts (In Order) Adam Greenfield

150

The Artistic Directors

AndrĂŠ Bishop, Adam Greenfield, Bob Moss, Tim Sanford, and Don Scardino

155

A Strange Loop: Portraits of a Musical Arnulfo Maldonado

156

The Dream and the Delivery System Alison Koch

160

Bob & Adam

Adam Greenfield and Bob Moss

166

The Future of Theater

Brittany Allen, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, C.A. Johnson, Hansol Jung, Heather Raffo, and Sanaz Toossi

176 Dave

Taylor Reynolds and Dave Harris

180

HANG TIME (an excerpt) Zora Howard

182

Well Past Time

Kim Golding, Divinia Shorter, Lizzie Stern, and May Treuhaft-Ali

190

Selling Kabul: On Stage Iman Childs

CONTRIBUTORS ALAINE ALLDAFFER has cast theater and television for over 25 years. She has received 12 Artios Award nominations and two wins for Excellence in Casting. Alaine proudly serves as Casting Director for Playwrights Horizons, a position she has held for more than two decades.

BRITTANY K. ALLEN is a Brooklyn-based writer and performer. Her play Redwood (Kilroys List 2017 and 2020) received its world premiere at Portland Center Stage in fall 2019, and will appear in upcoming seasons at the Jungle Theater in Minneapolis and Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York.

WILL ARBERY is from Texas + Wyoming + seven sisters. His play Heroes of the Fourth Turning, produced at Playwrights Horizons, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and the winner of an Obie and Lortel. He’s the recipient of a Whiting Award.

Other plays include Plano and Evanston Salt Costs Climbing.

KARL BAKER OLSON serves as the Artistic Programs Manager at Playwrights Horizons. He has held several titles at the theater since first joining the staff as a Fellow in 2013. He grew up at the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis, and received a BFA from the Boston University School of Theatre.

CLARE BARRON is a playwright and performer from Wenatchee, WA. Her plays include Dance Nation, You Got Older, and I’ll Never Love Again.

JORDAN BEST is the Graphic and Digital Content Associate at Playwrights Horizons.

ANDRÉ BISHOP was the Literary Manager of Playwrights Horizons for five years, and its Artistic Director for ten. In 1991 he went to Lincoln Center Theater where he is the Producing Artistic Director. He serves on many boards including Ten Chimneys, the Kurt Weill Foundation, and, happily, Playwrights Horizons. He is a member of the Theatre Hall of Fame.

AGNES BORINSKY is a writer based in Los Angeles. She has written many plays, including, Brief Chronicle, Books 6-8, available from 3 Hole Press. Her YA novel, Sasha Masha, came out this fall.

ASHLEY CHANG is Dramaturg at Playwrights Horizons, as well as a Doctor of Fine Arts candidate in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at Yale School of Drama, where her research examines the intersections of theater, performance, and ecology.

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IMAN CHILDS is an arts administrator, content creator, and Fulbright alumna with a background in film. She is currently a Producer and Editor at Playwrights Horizons.

KIRSTEN CHILDS is the writer of the musicals The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin, Miracle Brothers, Fly, Funked Up Fairy Tales, and Bella: An American Tall Tale. For her work she has received Obie, Kleban, Larson, Richard Rodgers, Audelco, and Gilman/Gonzalez-Falla awards, as well as Lortel and Drama Desk nominations.

MIA CHUNG’s most recent play Catch as Catch Can is rescheduled to premiere in the 2021–22 season at Steppenwolf. Page 73 produced the play’s world premiere in NYC in Fall 2018.

FRANCES YA-CHU COWHIG is an internationally produced playwright whose work has been staged in the United Kingdom at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Hampstead Theatre, the National Theatre, Trafalgar Studios 2 [West End], and the Unicorn Theatre. In the United States her work has been staged at venues that include the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Manhattan Theater Club, and the Goodman Theatre.

LISA DONADIO is the Associate Casting Director at Playwrights Horizons and an avid jewelry designer.

JEAN ANN DOUGLASS is the playwright of Seneca Falls, The Providence of Neighboring Bodies, and most recently The Fog, a socially-distanced play for a fire tower, commissioned by Montana Rep. LARISSA FASTHORSE (Sicangu Lakota Nation) is a playwright and member of the MacArthur Fellows Class of 2020.

KIM GOLDING is a director, producer, and performance maker from Bronx, New York. She was most recently part of the Performance & Live Programs team at The Museum of Modern Art, where she helped produce Pope.L’s Dressing Up For Civil Rights and Eating the Wall Street Journal (Flag Version).

ADAM GREENFIELD joined the staff of Playwrights Horizons in 2007, first as Literary Manager, and then as Director of New Play Development and Associate Artistic Director. In July 2020, he assumed the role of Artistic Director.

DAVE HARRIS is a writer from West Philly, and currently the Tow Playwright in Residence at Roundabout. His plays will be seen at Playwrights Horizons, Center Theatre Group, and Roundabout in the vague future.

CONTRIBUTORS ZORA HOWARD is the author of several plays, including STEW (2020 Drama League nominee for Outstanding Play), BUST, and AtGN. In 2020, her film Premature opened in theaters following its world premiere at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. She is the 2020–2021 Van Lier New Voices Fellow at the Lark.

JAMES IJAMES is a playwright and performer in Philadelphia, PA. He’s a Whiting and Kesselring Prize winner and Pew Fellow. James is also an Associate Professor of Theater at Villanova University and a Co-Artistic Director at the Wilma Theater.

C.A. JOHNSON is a playwright and New Orleans native now based in Brooklyn, NY. Most recently, her play ALL THE NATALIE PORTMANS was produced at MCC Theater.

HANSOL JUNG is a US-based playwright from South Korea.

Recent works include Wild Goose Dreams, Cardboard Piano, and Wolf Play.

RAJA FEATHER KELLY is an Obie-winning choreographer, a director, and founder/artistic director of dance, theatre, and media company the feath3r theory. Raja has choreographed extensively for Off-Broadway theatre in New York City. Frequent collaborators include: Lileana Blain-Cruz, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Sarah Benson, and Michael R. Jackson.

SYLVIA KHOURY is a French and Lebanese playwright based in New York City. The set of her play, Selling Kabul, has lived in the Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Playwrights Horizons for close to one year. She is completing her medical studies at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

ALISON KOCH is the inaugural Digital Content Producer at Playwrights Horizons, responsible for implementing new and innovative uses of digital media and technology to enhance and reimagine the theatrical experience for its audiences. (She’s also a proud new mom!)

ANGELA LEWIS is an African-American actress, currently based in Los Angeles. She is in her fourth season as a series regular on FX’s hit show, Snowfall, created by the late John Singleton.

CRAIG LUCAS is a playwright, screenwriter, librettist, director of theater and film, and a member of the Dramatists Guild, Director’s Guild, Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, Writers Guild of America, and Democratic Socialists of America. He received the Excellence in Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

ARNULFO MALDONADO is a set and costume designer in theater and opera. He recently received the 2020 Obie for Sustained Excellence in Set Design, as well as a Special Citation Obie as part of the Creative Team of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Strange Loop by Michael R. Jackson.

Actor/Producer J. MALLORY McCREE is a native of Detroit, MI. J. attended Rutgers University, earning a BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts. Some of McCree’s most notable roles include: Sekou Bah on Season 6 of Homeland; Charlie on Quantico; and Cole in Marvel’s The Defenders. Other prominent projects include Show Me A Hero (HBO), The Last Ship, From Nowhere (SXSW 2016 Audience Award Winner), and Who Are We Now (TIFF). J. is currently starring on Freeform’s hit series Good Trouble.

In the late 60s, BOB MOSS directed a number of plays at the Edward Albee Playwrights Unit. In 1970 he took over the running of the Unit until it closed in 1970. At that point he was invited to continue working with new playwrights at the West Side YWCA, which became Playwrights Horizons.

He moved his operation to West 42nd Street in 1975 and the rest is history.

RODRIGO MUÑOZ is a New York-based costume designer originally from Mexico City. He is one of the co-founders, along with Cha See and Kimie Nishikawa, of See Lighting Foundation, a grassroots organization committed to supporting immigrant theater artists during the global pandemic.

ROBERT O’HARA has received the NAACP Best Play and Best Director Award, the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play, two Obies, and the Herb Alpert Award. Broadway: Slave Play. Off-Broadway: Slave Play, In the Continuum, The Brother/Sister Plays (Part 2), Wild with Happy, Bella: An American Tall Tale, Mankind, Bootycandy, and Insurrection: Holding History.

LIBBY PETERSON is the Manager of Student Affairs at Playwrights Horizons Theater School. She is also a facilitator, teaching artist, and freelance producer. Libby has an MFA from Yale School of Drama and a BA from Southern Oregon University.

HEATHER RAFFO is an award-winning actress and playwright whose seminal works focus on the intimate and epic relationship between her Iraqi and American identities. Her new anthology, Heather Raffo’s Iraq Plays: The Things That Can’t Be Said comes out in early 2021.

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CONTRIBUTORS TAYLOR REYNOLDS is a director and theater maker from Chicago and one of the Producing Artistic Leaders at Obiewinning The Movement Theatre Company in Harlem.

EVA ROSA is the Associate Director of Individual Giving at Playwrights Horizons. Eva has over ten years of fundraising experience and focuses her work in fundraising through the lens of equity, diversity, and inclusion. As a native New Yorker and Latina, she understands the long history and heritage of theater with hopes to see it better reflect our community.

TIM SANFORD is the Outgoing Artistic Director of Playwrights Horizons, for which he served as Literary Resident, Literary Manager, and Associate Artistic Director from 1984 to 1995, then as Artistic Director from 1996 to 2020. Tim is an alumnus of the TCG Board of Directors and was honored with Obie and Lucille Lortel awards for Lifetime Achievement in 2020. He has a PhD in Dramatic Criticism from Stanford University.

DON SCARDINO has directed off and on Broadway and in motion pictures and television, winning two Emmy awards, the Producers Guild Award, and the Obie award. He was Artistic Director at Playwrights Horizons from 1991 to 1995.

DIVINIA SHORTER is a queer, Black, Latina writer and freelance dramaturg born and based in the DMV. Divinia was previously Playwrights Horizons’ Literary Fellow and is the Literary Associate at Adventure Theatre MTC. Credits include: Kennedy Center NNPN MFA Playwrights’ Workshop, Bay Area Playwrights Festival, DMV Q-Fests, and Towson University.

LIZZIE STERN is a writer and dramaturg in New York. She is currently the Literary Manager at Playwrights Horizons and a playwright with EST/Youngblood.

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ARI M. TEPLITZ, CFP®, ChFC® is a theater professional turned financial planner. A partner at Teplitz Financial Group, Ari is passionate about helping clients achieve their vision of financial success by improving their financial literacy and empowering them to be better financial consumers. Based in New Jersey, Ari works with artists and arts organizations across the country.

SANAZ TOOSSI is an Iranian-American playwright and TV writer. Her plays include Wish You Were Here, English, and The Persians.

MAY TREUHAFT-ALI is a playwright and the Literary Fellow at Playwrights Horizons. She is also a Writing Fellow at The Playwrights Realm and an alumna of Clubbed Thumb’s EarlyCareer Writers’ Group. She has dramaturged at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Haven Theatre, Ars Nova ANT Fest, and Adventure Theatre MTC. TOMI TSUNODA is an interdisciplinary artist and educator.

She is currently helming the Playwrights Horizons Theater School studio at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

LIBBY ZAMBRANO is the Human Resources Manager for Playwrights Horizons, and has an extensive background in nonprofit business operations, performing arts, and venue management.

DAVID ZINN designs scenery and costumes for the theater. His work for Playwrights Horizons includes Circle Mirror Transformation, The Flick, The Big Meal, Hir, Completeness, Placebo, and For Peter Pan On Her 70th Birthday.

FROM THE EDITOR This is Almanac, an unexpected foray into writing and publishing by a theater that, for the time being, has gone dark. When our stages on 42nd Street suddenly emptied, we felt called to gather in other ways: not just to gather our thoughts but, if possible, to gather together. As Agnes Borinsky reminds us in her essay, the theater has long served as a site of gathering in both these senses. Bereft of such sites, we thought, let Almanac be our new meeting place, a forum for assembly and an occasion, too, to sort out and sift through the vagaries of this time.

Historically, almanacs have brought order to the labors of farmers, sailors, and astronomers.

In lists and tables and calendars, almanacs mark lunations and eclipses, tides high and low, migrations north and south. “When you’re lost at sea, trying to chart a course,” Adam Greenfield notes, “there’s something that can really come in handy: an almanac.” After all, its purpose is practical — which is to say, predictive. These handbooks attempt to anticipate, to forecast, to offer guidance in advance. Like ancient sibyls — or like data analytics — they peer a little ways ahead and report what’s there, drawing, always, from deep stores of memory.

Like its namesake, then, Almanac aims to be of use to practitioners, not by collating dates and statistics but by cataloguing information of a different sort: the feeling of a month, the texture of a moment. In order to introduce our audiences — now, our readers — to the fullest expression of this project, we are devoting our inaugural issue to time and temporality. In the pages ahead, you will encounter accounts of these days as they pass and have passed, chronicles of yesterday and prophecies for tomorrow. Our authors — directors and designers, actors and administrators, dramaturgs and playwrights, creators and critics — variously engage or evince time itself, its patterns as well as its ruptures. Their contributions fill three loose sections, “Pasts,” “Nows,” and “Futures,” which reflect our thinking of Almanac as an offering to our future selves, a time capsule of the present, and, eventually, a record of the past.

Many thanks to Play-PerView for gifting us the means to commission over two dozen artists; to Adam Greenfield and Kyle Sircus for their wholehearted championship and endless wisdom; to Carol Fishman and Jenna Ready for their generous partnership; to Karl Baker Olson, Iman Childs, Alison Koch, Billy McEntee, and Lizzie Stern, our editorial team, for their insight and care; and to Jordan Best, our graphic designer, for his vision, which elevated us all.

Thanks are due, too, to our intrepid contributors, who shared their words and images, their truths and visions, with us this summer and fall without guarantees, really, of what might result. It is my great hope that — in clearing this space for discussion and debate under the auspices of an institution but with encouragement to think widely and wildly — we have honored their trust.

Final thanks are due to you, our readers. We’re so grateful you’re here.

A

Ashley Chang

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PASTS 14 Selling Kabul: In Rehearsal

50 The Center of the World

22 Pardon the Interruption

56 Mr. Burns: Far and Wide

26 A Strange Loop: Portraits of a Musical

60 Looking Back

28 Kirsten

66 Coiled Spring

32 site visit: 416W42

68 The Seeing Place

Iman Childs

Tim Sanford

Arnulfo Maldonado

Kirsten Childs and Robert O’Hara

David Zinn

May Treuhaft-Ali

Jordan Best

Ashley Chang

Will Arbery

Agnes Borinsky

PASTS / 13

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SELLING KABUL: IN REHEARSAL photos by Iman Childs

SELLING KABUL, the new play by Sylvia Khoury, went into rehearsals on February 28, 2020. The production was set to open at Playwrights Horizons two months later. On March 12, however, the theater closed its doors due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Both the rehearsal room and the stage of the Peter Jay Sharp have sat empty ever since. The floor of the studio remains strewn with props — cushions, rugs, biscuits — while, one flight below, the unfinished set gathers dust. In September, Iman Childs ventured into the building to take photographs of these spaces stuck in time. We share these images with you here in two series: first, the rehearsal room, which still looks ready to receive actors back from lunch break (pages 14–21) and, second, the set, which has stood far longer than it was ever meant to and — by now — feels more like a real apartment than mere theatrical ephemera (pages 190–195).

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PASTS / 17

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PASTS / 19

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PASTS / 21

PARDON THE Tim Sanford

MOST PLAYS seek to tell stories that rub up against the world. But plays do not always resonate in ways we expect.

They might start with an originating impulse, but unforeseen factors might lead them to evolve or falter. Other plays seem to accumulate new power when the world changes around them. Look at today. We know that everything is changing, but we’re on hiatus, so it’s impossible to know how, exactly, everything is changing.

For Playwrights Horizons, the change clamped down on March 11, when we closed Unknown Soldier, Michael Friedman and Daniel Goldstein’s soaring, aching musical, just a couple of days after it opened. The process of bringing this piece to New York had been fraught with our grief over Michael’s death as well as our determination to fulfill the promise of this anomalous, truly original work. Opening night was full of friends and family, and tears flowed freely as we felt his resurrected presence. But how would it land with our average theater-goer? We never had the chance to find out. Initially, I felt shell-shocked, like Francis Grand, the eponymous

soldier from the play. A few days later, the brutal irony settled over me that Michael’s life had been cut short by one virus, AIDS, and his show was cut short by another, Covid.

That phenomenon by which well-received musicals gather momentum and accumulate resonance was stolen from us, at least for now. We will need to find closure by other means.

I sense a certain hesitancy among playwrights, if not the general public as well, to mine our circumstances for meaning. Go to our website and check out Will Arbery’s interviews with writers under commission from Playwrights Horizons. So many of them articulate their anxiety about finances and artistic isolation, but almost none of them pressure themselves to write. They talk about having a new relationship to time. “The one thing we’re often obliged to hunt for as artists (space and time!) is suddenly here in spades,” says Brittany K. Allen, “but of course it’s not really free time and space.” They try to stay creative, read, exercise, plan meals, and limit news consumption, but be easy on themselves.

INTERRUPTION

I’ve always been grateful for the ways in which the ongoing work of Playwrights Horizons has afforded me opportunities to make sense of things. But of course what lands for me may not always land for you. And sometimes shows carry unanticipated resonances that one couldn’t have predicted. Perhaps this forced hiatus, as well as the occasion of our fiftieth anniversary, provides an apt opportunity to consider other notable moments in our history when world events changed how some plays impacted us and also impacted the way some playwrights approached their work.

The most dramatic example of a play whose social resonance changed overnight was The Spitfire Grill, a musical by James Valcq and Fred Alley, which began performances September 7, 2001. This modest, tuneful, heartwarming show, sensitively directed by David Saint, about a young woman who chooses to relocate to a small town in Wisconsin after she is released from prison, was blessed with a remarkable cast, including Garrett Long, the late, great Phyllis Somerville, Steven Pasquale, Liz Callaway, Mary Gordon Murray, Armand Schultz, and Stephen Sinclair. Similar to Unknown Soldier, the show lost one of its writers before its New York run.

“PLAYS DO NOT ALWAYS RESONATE IN WAYS WE EXPECT. THEY MIGHT START WITH AN ORIGINATING IMPULSE, BUT UNFORESEEN FACTORS MIGHT LEAD THEM TO EVOLVE OR FALTER.” In this case, librettist Fred Alley died just two weeks before the start of rehearsals at the age of 38. So the production was already carrying a lot of pent-up emotion when it entered its first week of previews. Then the planes hit. We suspended performances, along with every other theater and baseball game in the city. The show was landing sweetly right from the beginning, but something happened when we resumed performances. Our first night back, I remember greeting our audience and thanking them for coming. We took a moment of silence and sang “America the Beautiful,” then performed our show. Somehow, our story of a wounded ex-con hungry for community, poised for redemption, was exactly the show our shattered community needed. It was definitely one of the most healing experiences in my career in the theater. The Spitfire Grill has gone on to become one of the most-produced plays from the Playwrights Horizons canon. And the fantastic, self-produced cast album has enjoyed several re-pressings.

Less than a decade earlier, in April 1995, we produced one of the most topical plays from our entire history: Police Boys by the amazing Marion McClinton, who tragically passed away in November 2019. Best known as one of August Wilson’s favorite directors, Marion was a beautiful, open-hearted man who also directed two plays for us, Breath Boom by Kia Corthron and Carson McCullers (Historically Inaccurate) by

Sarah Schulman. His powerful, cathartic play, set entirely in a police precinct, tells the story of a Black teenager arrested for the rape and murder of a white woman. But it’s really about cycles of violence in the community and the systemic racism that makes young Black men disposable.

Loosely inspired by the notorious Central Park Jogger case, what is notable about the play is that all of the police officers arguing about the fate of this young man are Black themselves. We began performances April 15, 1995. Just a few days later, April 19, Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and killed 168 American citizens, including 19 young children. By curtain time that evening, McVeigh had been arrested. After the show, we had a talkback, and the whole cast participated.

I will admit that, in my mind, the topic of the play and the dangers presented by the bombing were two entirely separate subjects. But the cast felt the correlation keenly. They knew that the impetus behind this violence and the worldview that spawned it posed a direct threat to them as Black people and as Americans. And they expressed such passionate gratitude to be in a play that functioned as a ritualistic cleansing of the bloody legacy and toxicity of America’s original sin. That evening changed how I looked at the world.

I felt grateful for the opportunity to see the world of that day through their eyes. So when the list of victims came out shortly thereafter and confirmed that more than a quarter of the victims were people of color, I felt the violence differently. And, six years later, when the true assailant in the Central Park assault was discovered and all of the sentences of the “Central Park Five” were vacated after having been served, I once again thought of our play. And when the real estate mogul who had bought full-page ads calling for the death penalty for those youths was then asked to apologize to the exonerated ones, and he declined, saying they were all bad kids anyway, I thought of our play. And when that mogul was elected president and declined to condemn the white nationalists fomenting violence and hate in Charlottesville, I thought of our play again.

Sometimes shifts in current events spell bad luck for a play.

In all of the developmental readings of Robert O’Hara’s Mankind, we came to appreciate that the dystopian premise of the play — a world where women have withdrawn into extinction — works best when you downplay its comic excess.

The male denizens of this womanless world are more clueless than vicious. And when a baby girl is born into the world, then dies in infancy, the men pine for her and deify her.

The impact is oddly poignant. We went into rehearsal midNovember, 2017. In the three-month period from October to December, a glut of ugly stories about sexual predators and rapists broke, bringing down Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K., Matt Lauer, Larry Nassar, Peter Martins, and many more. After just a week or so in rehearsal, Robert stopped by one day and said, “The play isn’t funny anymore. The events of the world are more horrible than the play.” We did the best we could just to tell the story and let the satire speak for itself, but the results felt more bitter than cleansing. In retrospect, I think our recalibration missed some options. But I think the main takeaway from the production is the fact that the relationship of a play to current events is fluid. I am confident that future re-readings of Mankind will yield new relevance. The world continues to evolve.

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I programmed Lindsey Ferrentino’s This Flat Earth within weeks of the 2016 election. I interpreted her unsettling story — about a middle schooler who learns, to her disbelief, that a shooting at her school was not an isolated incident — as a plangent allegory about the broken, violent world we have bequeathed to our children. In an interview with me, Lindsey talked about landing on the school shooting theme not to explore gun violence but as an example of the failure of adults to demonstrate accountability to their children. Lindsey made her protagonist quite young, partly to account for her unawareness of previous school shootings, but more importantly to accentuate the horror of her discovery of the true nature of the world, of her expulsion from the garden, as it were. We went into rehearsal just days before the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14, 2018. Suddenly, just like with Robert’s play, the world changed and so did the meaning of the story. Could anyone believe the underlying given circumstances of our play that a middle school girl somewhere might not have heard of school shootings before this? We changed the program to locate the setting of the play in “the recent past.” But the play had taken on the irreversible import of a school shootings play. We embraced necessity and raised awareness about the “Never-Again” movement, in post-performance discussions and in lobby displays, but the parabolic potential of the play will require a future rereader to mine its future resonance.

Looking at these four examples together, I do not mean to imply that the intersection of plays with their worldly contexts is a hit-or-miss proposition. Plays depend upon the engaged participation of their audiences. And I could easily go through recent seasons play by play to elaborate on the various ways our plays have reflected the times. The challenge for playwrights in the Covid era, of course, is that they can’t channel their writing into performance yet. And when performances resume, we assume that the threat of the pandemic should be subsiding. And while we don’t know what form Covid-inspired plays might take, I find myself thinking about the AIDS era and wondering about the conditions that led to the gestation of so many masterpieces during it. Will the Covid era produce its equivalents to The Normal Heart, Angels in America, Prelude to a Kiss, Marvin’s Room, or Falsettoland? Historically speaking, the gay liberation movement was only just beginning to pick up steam when the AIDS outbreak erupted. So the stakes were not just political; they were existential. The great plays I’ve referenced, and many others, are steeped in anger, prophesy, lyricism, and heartache. Stories came with ready-to-go tragic heroes and antagonists and each reflects the individual aesthetic of the writers and their passions. I’m not sure we’re ready yet to define the characteristics of the Covid era or fit its stories into a larger social narrative. It seems clear, however, that the explosion of social unrest that sprang up around the Black Lives Matter movement has become inextricably linked to the stories we tell and will continue to tell about the Covid-19 pandemic in decades to come. It’s also inevitable that the stories of these times will resonate with audiences in the years to come, when we start to put on plays again.

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“I’M NOT SURE WE’RE READY YET TO DEFINE THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE COVID ERA OR FIT ITS STORIES INTO A LARGER SOCIAL NARRATIVE.” When I first got the idea to write this article, I started by re-reading Ben Jonson’s dazzling satire, The Alchemist. Set against the backdrop of a plague-ridden London that has been abandoned by anyone with the means to get out of town, the play charts the shenanigans of the housekeeper of one such vacated home. With two cohorts, a bawd and a would-be alchemist, they plot to fleece their various neighbors, who themselves are hatching schemes of their own.

The cast of characters ranges from gamblers to panders to

grifters to puritans. I learned a lot when I looked into this play again. The early seventeenth century was a heady, dangerous time for theater-makers. James I succeeded Queen Elizabeth in 1603 and proved himself an even more generous patron of the theater than she. Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, of which Jonson was a member, was renamed the King’s Players under James, and an amazing array of plays were produced under his auspices. Some of the greatest plays of this era were produced in the first decade of the seventeenth century.

But London was also beset in that decade by recurring deadly outbreaks of the plague, in 1603, 1606, and 1609.

When the death count in the city reached 30 per week, the theaters were closed. But James paid his company anyway.

Jonson wrote The Alchemist in 1610 and was gaining popularity with the court for his Royal Masques, stately poeticized pageants performed by court members, as much as for his plays, which featured much more rough-and-tumble characters. We also know that Jonson’s life was touched by tragedy.

His son, also named Ben, was felled by the plague in 1603, at the age of seven. His grief, touchingly expressed in an elegiac poem, was no doubt exacerbated by the fact that he

was estranged from his wife and had not been present for his son’s death. It’s not a reliable critical practice to interpret plays or other fiction through a biographical lens, even for contemporary works, much less works four centuries old. But I find it impossible not to admire the self-control of the play’s authorial hand. Jonson skewers greed and hypocrisy, but he does not moralize and he never lets the pall of death that informs the play take it over. What elevates the play, and what exempts it from meanness, is the infectious vitality that courses through every single character. He is an equal-opportunity satirist, and the play stays absolutely true to Jonson’s voice. So if there’s one takeaway from Ben Jonson’s plague play, it’s “be yourself” and “don’t rush it!”

May our toiling playwrights remain undaunted in their search for authenticity and transformation in the years A to come.

Akili Prince as Royal Boy and Richard Brooks as Comanche in Police Boys (1995). Photo by Joan Marcus.

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A STRANGE LOOP: PORTRAITS OF A MUSICAL Arnulfo Maldonado

I STARTED BY LOOKING BACK at the process leading up to mounting A Strange Loop, and what started as organizing research and storyboards turned into an intentional 90s-influenced album-artwork-collage project, not unlike Liz Phair’s The Girly-Sound Tapes or Exile In Guyville. These pieces encapsulate a collection of ideas, coupled with notes from the pre-production phase of A Strange Loop. These collages manifested themselves as a direct correlation to the collage artwork I so admired in records I grew up with, like Liz Phair and Pavement, to name a few. I left the crop marks in to give the pieces a sense of purpose and practicality; the next step in their evolution is cutting these out (or scanning/printing) and inserting them into your A Strange Loop CD case.

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By Arnulfo Maldonado PASTS / 27

KIRSTEN Robert O’Hara interviews Kirsten Childs

“THERE WERE JUST NO BOOK MUSICALS FOR BLACK PERFORMERS. SO I THOUGHT, I COULD EITHER COMPLAIN ABOUT IT, OR I COULD WRITE A MUSICAL.”

ROBERT O’HARA: Where were you born?

KIRSTEN CHILDS: I was born in Los Angeles. Where were you born, Robert?

KIRSTEN: Working at Ideal Belt Buckle. And, you know, doing temp jobs.

ROBERT: Wait, what exactly is “Ideal Belt Buckle”?

ROBERT: In a trunk. On the road. (laughter) I was born in Cincinnati. But I always tell people I escaped at 18. And then I went to Boston. And then I escaped from Boston.

KIRSTEN: It no longer exists, but it was just a place that created belt buckles. And I worked as some kind of secretarial person.

KIRSTEN: Well, you know, there are a lot of places to escape from in this country.

ROBERT: And sometimes you went and danced on sawdust floors.

ROBERT: Exactly. And I can’t seem to escape fast enough from New York. So what brought you to New York?

KIRSTEN: Look, I lived in Hollis, Queens. From where I stayed, I would have to walk to my car, then drive to the bus, and then take the bus to the E or F train, which would take me to Manhattan. Then I would work. Then I would take dance classes at the Ailey school and the Graham school. Then I would go down to Alphabet City and dance.

And then reverse the process to go back home.

KIRSTEN: Well, I was at UC Berkeley, and I was in a modern dance company on campus, a Graham company. And, you know, it was one of those “the first” situations.

ROBERT: The first Black woman? Or the first Black person, period?

KIRSTEN: The first Black dance student, period. And the first Black woman. But at any rate, they would have people that would come in and do these wonderful master classes.

And one day, this young Black woman came in with her one dancer. And she started talking, she started reciting this poetry all about Black women, and her dancer started dancing. I had never seen anything like that in my entire life. I went up to her afterwards and I said, “I want to dance with you when I leave Berkeley.” And she said, “You come to New York, and you can dance with me.” And that was Ntozake Shange.

ROBERT: Oh, really!

KIRSTEN: I used to dance on a sawdust floor at this place called the Old Reliable Tavern, which was down in Alphabet City.

ROBERT: And how did you make a living?

ROBERT: You’re making this up!

KIRSTEN: No, I would! You did whatever you could. You had to use your energy and not think about it. I think it’s probably the same now. You run on fumes when you have to.

ROBERT: What did you tell your parents about going to New York?

KIRSTEN: I told them I was going to New York and I was going to dance with Ntozake and I was going to seek my fortune. I know that my mother was terrified of New York, because New York was a scary place back then. But she was like, do whatever you have to do. They were very understanding.

ROBERT: And when did you become a theater performer?

KIRSTEN: Well, I was a performer all that time because I was a dancer. I was taking Graham classes. I was taking Ailey classes. I was taking ballet classes. I was able to get PASTS / 29

into a dance company, but with the choreographer, I was always second string. I was always waiting to go on. I know that it would have been different if I had “liked” him, but I didn’t like him.

ROBERT: Mhm. KIRSTEN: So, one day, I was in a dance class, and one of the dancers was doing Chicago. She told everybody in the class that Chicago was going on tour, and we should try out for it. I did not know musical theater. The only musicals I knew were the ones that came on the television.

ROBERT: Had you done any singing before?

KIRSTEN: No! But I was so frustrated with that dance company that I thought, well, let me just see what this is about.

I remember I was going out with this guy at the time, and he said, “It doesn’t matter if you can’t sing. Just sing loud!”

So I went to this audition for Chicago. I had on cut-off tights because I was a modern dancer, a baggy leotard, and these Hermes lace-up sandals. I went in there with that outfit on and I thought, I look good! They asked us to sing something from the 20s, and my mother liked this song from the 20s called “Goody Goody.” It was one of those songs where somebody has done you wrong, and now they’re getting it turned on them. So I went in there and I sang at the top of my lungs and waggled my finger at the man out in the audience, and this man was just laughing at me. So I started singing to him and going, “And I hope you’re satisfied, you rascal you!” And I got a callback. I came back and danced, and the man in the audience that I had been flirting with and singing to was Bob Fosse! I think that he really liked the fact that I didn’t know who the hell he was and still acted bold and stupid. I got the job.

ROBERT: So you literally fell into musical theater.

KIRSTEN: Yes! I totally, completely fell into it. I was too ignorant to understand that I should be terrified — and to understand this was really important. So I just bowled along, having a good time acting a fool and getting the job.

ROBERT: Without even adding race into it, folks are very catty, and there’s a lot of jealousy and a lot of rejection. Did you find that people were treating you differently? Like, who was this person who fell into this theater thing?

KIRSTEN: You know, it’s a different time now than it was then — I’m sure that there was jealousy, because I heard people expressing it, but it didn’t have anything to do with me. People would act very nice towards a person and then

“THAT LOVELY, TREACHEROUS, TALENTED, GIVE-YOU-THE-SHIRT-OFFTHEIR-BACK, TALK-ABOUTYOU-LIKE-A-DOG, DANCEAND-SING-THEIR-ASSES-OFF THEATER COMMUNITY.” 30 / ALMANAC

gossip about them behind their back. But there was a civility to it all — they would die before they let that person know what they really thought of them. I decided that I was going to stay out of all the drama and just have big fun. It was important for me to be there, being a part of that lovely, treacherous, talented, give-you-the-shirt-off-their-back, talk-about-you-like-a-dog, dance-and-sing-their-assesoff theater community. Because if I could be there, other Black women could be there.

ROBERT: And what gave you the audacity to think that you could write and compose and do lyrics and the bulk of a musical?

KIRSTEN: Well, I always knew I was smart, but I happened to look sort of nice, and people always assumed that if you looked nice, that was all you were about. That always used to irritate me, because I knew that I could do other stuff.

ROBERT: So people told you you were pretty?

KIRSTEN: Yeah. That’s all you needed to be — just leave it there and be that. I knew that I wanted to do something, but I didn’t know what it was. I was resentful that “prettiness” was the sum total of what I was supposed to be. I was always writing poetry and prose, but sort of keeping it to myself, because I actually believed the bullshit that people were giving me. I actually believed I couldn’t go past the boundaries that other people had set for me.

Then I did a show, The Boys from Syracuse, which is the musical adaptation of The Comedy of Errors, but this was the all-Black version. And, you know, I was the token Black person in Chicago. This was the first time that I had been in a show where pretty much everybody in it was Black.

Heretofore, the shows that I’d seen with Black people in them were usually musical revues that had no book. This show had a book and everybody who was in it was a fabulous actor. I was like, oh my god!

There were just no book musicals for Black performers.

So I thought, I could either complain about it, or I could write a musical.

I had been around theater folk for a while, and there were a lot of arrogant people who were theater folk. Since I was “pretty,” I knew that if I said that I was going to be writing a musical for Black people, somebody would be like, how ambitious of you, but you should really stay in your nice-looking Black girl lane, because I can write a better musical for your people, so step back and let the professionals take over. But, see, that patronizing arrogance would be working in my favor this time. Because then there would be two musicals! That was my Tom Sawyer paint-the-fence strategy to get more people to write vehicles for Black people.

What it really made me do was go, “I really like this!” A friend from an acting class I was taking knew somebody who worked at NYU in the musical theater writing program, and she said that I should go over there and apply. So I went over there, and I applied, and I got in. That’s when I really started to learn the craft of musical theater.

ROBERT: Now, I have tons and tons of stories about things that crazy white folks have said to me. I’m wondering if you have any juicy ones that people have said to you that you’re just like, what? The double-take ones that make

you go, “I can’t believe someone actually said something like that to me.”

KIRSTEN: Oh, gosh. Not really in my experience as a performer. I experienced nastiness, but I also experienced people who were kind and who were protective. For some reason — I think because I was Black — I was either not a threat, or I was never going to go up for the roles that cutthroat white folks centered around. When I did the all-Black version of The Boys from Syracuse, I had always heard that all-Black companies were totally cutthroat, that it was just horrific — and that was not the case! We had so much fun. I don’t know if you know this song called “Lovin’ is Really My Game” by Brainstorm. It’s this disco song, and we used to play it all the time. There were three female leads, and we all shared the same dressing room, and everybody would come into our room and dance to “Lovin’ is Really My Game.”

We just had so much fun.

ROBERT: Did your family have much music when you were a child? Was it a part of your upbringing?

KIRSTEN: Yes. My mother and father really loved music, and they were very eclectic in their tastes. My mother’s favorite classical music was Handel’s Messiah. My father loved all sorts of music, like Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Wes Montgomery, Harry Belafonte, and the Hi-Lo’s. I remember my mother telling me she and my father went to see Pete Seeger at the Hollywood Bowl. Just all kinds of music from all kinds of places. They would sit me, my sister, and my brother down at the TV, and we would watch the live musicals that would come on television. We would watch them like we were watching live theater, because it was live, except it was on television! That was my first exposure to musicals, in a way.

ROBERT: And were you a part of any live theater in LA? KIRSTEN: The first piece of live theater I can remember was The Miracle Worker, and my sister and I played slaves.

ROBERT: No! KIRSTEN: Yes, honey! At the Wilshire Ebell Theatre. Oh my god. I remember my father was sort of a stage father. The girl who was playing Helen Keller was touching and feeling everybody, trying to get in character. So she came over and started touching me. I remember saying to my father, “I don’t want her touching me!” And he said, “Well, all right.

You’re an actor. What would you do if somebody touched you that you didn’t want touching you?” And I said, “I’d push her away!” And he just kind of looked at me like, well?

“I THINK THERE WAS AN ANGER IN ME — THERE WAS SOME RESENTMENT TOWARDS THE IDEA THAT ‘BUBBLY’ IS ALL THAT I COULD BE.” in me — there was some resentment towards the idea that “bubbly” is all that I could be. I also think that my first experience as a musical theater performer really informs the way that I approach things. I think Chicago is deeply cynical and deeply subversive — I admired that there is a way to say what you want to say while making people laugh!

But also making sure that they get your point, and allowing them the freedom to see it or ignore it. I wanted to take that one step further in my own way.

ROBERT: It feels like a lot of your training was very handson, and that you have been involved in things and learned from being actually in it, as opposed to folks that do all of the drama classes and all of the singing classes in college.

And they come to New York, they go, now I’m ready.

KIRSTEN: Right.

ROBERT: And then right in walks this pretty Black girl out to the front of the class like, “Hi, let me sing ‘Goody Goody.’”

KIRSTEN: I think it’s a combination of terror and like, well, what else am I going to do? This is a part of who I am: necessity is the mother of invention, that’s my motto. No­body is going to give this to me. So I might as well go in and try to grab it. And if I don’t grab it, I’ll grab something else. I never expected anybody to hand me anything.

ROBERT: And folks will still say, “Uh, why are you here?“ KIRSTEN: You don’t know how many times I heard, “How did you get that?”

ROBERT: Exactly.

KIRSTEN: I mean, look. I’ll say luck probably has something to do with it — but it was not easy. It sounds like it’s easy.

It’s like when people go to Las Vegas and they win some money, that’s not counting how much money they lost. It was not easy. It’s never easy. But what was easy was A me going: hey, I got nothing to lose.

ROBERT: Fantastic. There’s this idea around your work that’s sort of subversive and satirical. That there’s something underneath the things you put onstage that is much more powerful and insidious. Once you dig into it, there’s darkness, there’s violence, there’s laughter, and joy all at the same time. I’m interested in what you think about that being a part of your work.

KIRSTEN: Because of the way people saw me — the way I “bubbled” along through all of the theatrical experiences I had — I think that I was limited. I think there was an anger

(Page 28) Kirsten Childs as Velma Kelly and Melanie Adam as Roxie Hart in Chicago (1979). Houston Chronicle.

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THE CENTER OF

THE WORLD PLAYWRIGHTS HORIZONS AND 42ND STREET May Treuhaft-Ali

I. IN 1974, Playwrights Horizons lost its home. Located on 51st Street and Eighth Avenue, the building was a residential branch of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), which also hosted a dance school called the Clark Center for the Performing Arts on its second floor. Louise Roberts, director of the school, had one room that was too small for dance classes. In the summer of 1971, she had given this room to Bob Moss to produce workshops of new plays. It was in this building that Moss named his new-play series “Playwrights Horizons,” cultivated an audience, and presented 12 free performances a week. Moss had secured a grant of $22,000 from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) for Playwrights Horizons’ 1974/1975 season, but before this season could even begin, the YWCA was evicted from the building, and Playwrights Horizons with it. Moss suddenly found himself without a theater.

In December of that year, after months of looking for a new venue all over the city with no luck, Moss received a call from Ellen Rudolph at NYSCA, saying that, since he hadn’t yet found a space, she intended to postpone his grant until the following year.

“No, no, no, can you wait five minutes?” Moss said into the phone.

To which she replied, “Don’t do something crazy.”

Moss hung up and walked to 42nd Street.

Despite the fact that 42nd Street was lined with vacant theaters, Moss had never considered it a viable location for Playwrights Horizons. The infamously seedy Times Square district had a reputation as the epicenter of crime in New York. Most of the elegant theater houses built in the 1910s and 1920s had fallen out of use by

PASTS / 51

the 1950s and were now burlesque theaters or pornographic cinemas. Desperate to find a space in a hurry, Moss called the realtor (or in his words, the “slumlord”) who owned all the theaters on 42nd Street and asked to rent 422 West 42nd Street for six months. He then called Ellen Rudolph back and announced that he had a space.

Playwrights Horizons moved into 422 West 42nd Street on January 1, 1975 and opened its first show there on February 1.

To Moss’s surprise, the theater’s new location didn’t deter his audience. As he stood at the door of his new building on opening night and greeted a stream of familiar faces, he remembers thinking: “Wait a minute, the only person that’s embarrassed about this block is you, Mr. Conservative.

Nobody else seems to give a damn. Got prostitutes everywhere, people calling ‘Check it out.’ And the audience is coming through, they’re New Yorkers! We’re on 42nd Street, it’s the middle of New York City, which is for all intents and purposes the center of the world. We’ve got great transportation. Why don’t we fucking stay here?” The next day, he went to his astonished landlord and signed a five-year lease on the building.

It is odd for me to think of Moss cautiously walking down 42nd Street in December 1974, because this is the route I walked to my Literary Fellowship every day without a second thought — or at least, I did before the pandemic. As I made my way from the subway to my desk at Playwrights Horizons, I dodged between tourists and Elmos, but I didn’t fear for my safety. I have lived my whole life in New York City, but I was born in 1995, after local officials molded 42nd Street into the family-friendly tourist attraction it is today. As I walked past familiar logos from global franchises, the 42nd Street Moss describes contrasted starkly with my lived experience. In writing this essay, I was curious about how Playwrights Horizons’ origin story fits into the larger history of its surroundings. How did such a night-and-day transformation take place in the Times Square district?

And what was Playwrights Horizons’ role in it? This is the story of how Playwrights Horizons and 42nd Street changed each other over time.

II. The prominence of petty crime in Times Square predates Times Square itself. In the nineteenth century, when it was still known as Longacre Square, its nickname was Thieves’ Lair. Back then, the area was barren save for a few horse stables and was considered well north of the city proper.

In 1905, The New York Times established its new headquarters on the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Broadway, and the intersection was dubbed Times Square in its honor.

That same year, the first subway line was built, and it traveled from City Hall to Grand Central to Times Square and north through the Upper West Side.

Thanks to The New York Times and the subway, Times Square instantly became an attractive destination for New Yorkers and visitors alike. By 1910, the theater district, which had been slowly inching its way up Broadway from Madison Square Park, formed a cluster around 42nd Street.

Restaurants and hotels opened up around the theaters, including gaudy lobster palaces where theater-goers could catch a late dinner and live cabaret performance after seeing a Broadway show. As the lobster palaces competed to offer the flashiest entertainment, many of their performances began to feature risqué dance numbers. Prohibition 52 / ALMANAC

forced many lobster palaces to close in the 1920s, but some transformed into speakeasies and nightclubs on the side streets of Times Square. Many of these clubs were owned by mobsters who paid the police to turn a blind eye.

Not even the Great Depression or World War II could deter the nightlife of Times Square. In fact, Times Square was extremely popular among the countless soldiers who passed through New York during the war. The opulence of the area lent itself to sexual decadence. Times Square had been a hot spot for prostitution since the early 1900s — sex workers congregated here to pick up both New Yorkers and tourists, and tourists knew they could behave promiscuously here without anyone back home finding out — but, thanks to the high volume of soldiers partying in Times Square, prostitution skyrocketed in the area during World War II. The advent of cars and televisions is responsible for Times Square’s downfall in the 1950s. Car culture prompted middle-class families to flock to the suburbs, emptying the city of its regular theater audiences and tax dollars. At the same time, television changed audiences’ relationship to theater-going. Compared with watching television, going to the theater was inconvenient and pricey, an occasional extravagance rather than a sustainable habit. Live theater had once been the go-to form of entertainment, and when film became popular, many Times Square theaters incorporated cinematic offerings into their programming. But these venues couldn’t compete with the television’s free, at-home entertainment, and dozens of them went out of business as a result. In the 1920s there were 70 to 80 Broadway theaters; by 1969, there were 36. The number of productions halved as well, and revivals became much more prevalent.

Newly vacant theater venues were sometimes converted into offices or, more frequently, repurposed as pornographic cinemas and burlesque clubs.

It was during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s that the crime rate in Times Square exploded. Many viewed the intersection between Seventh Avenue and Broadway as a symbol for all of America’s social ills and moral flaws. Even so, plenty of cultural activity still flowed through the area. The annual ball drop on New Year’s Eve continued to happen each year, and Broadway saw countless hit musicals throughout these decades. Despite the fact that audiences had to walk past multiple porn theaters to reach any Broadway show, this era was a golden age for musical theater. The Theatre Development Fund opened the TKTS booth in 1973, and, in the late 1970s, John Portman of the Marriott franchise contacted Mayor Ed Koch about building a hotel on Broadway between 45th and 46th Streets. This hotel was deeply polarizing in the theater community, because its construction required the destruction of five beloved theaters. Still, many commercial producers supported the construction of the hotel, hoping it would improve the neighborhood and attract audiences to Broadway. This hotel, now the Marriott Marquis, is the most successful in the United States.

By the 1980s, 90% of people who walked through Times Square were adult men. In 1984 alone, there were 2,300 crimes on 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, 20% of which were violent crimes. In the mid1980s, police inspector Ricard Mayronne was appointed to the area. Described by former colleague John Timoney as “a big tough guy, a cop’s cop, and easily the most imposing police commander I’ve ever met,” Mayronne played a major role in eliminating crime from Times Square. He invented new police tactics, and insisted that his precinct

“MANY VIEWED THE INTERSECTION BETWEEN SEVENTH AVENUE AND BROADWAY AS A SYMBOL FOR ALL OF AMERICA’S SOCIAL ILLS AND MORAL FLAWS.” make arrests for low-level crimes like prostitution and drug dealing. Mayor Rudy Giuliani continued this trend by championing broken windows policing, the theory that police can minimize serious felonies by making frequent arrests for low-level crimes. Giuliani also offered tax abatements to big businesses who moved into the area, including Viacom and Morgan Stanley. Giuliani’s most pivotal deal, and his most surprising at the time, was with the Walt Disney Company.

In 1990, Mayor David Dinkins assembled New 42, an organization whose purpose was to wrest theaters from the sex industry and restore their status as respectable venues. When New 42 Chair Marian Heiskell and Disney CEO Michael Eisner met coincidentally on an airplane, Heiskell persuaded him to consider the New Amsterdam Theatre as a possible home for Disney musicals. After a successful New York run of Beauty and the Beast, which was performed in a rented venue, Disney was looking to purchase its own Broadway theater for future productions.

The New Amsterdam, once home to the Ziegfeld Follies, had been out of use since 1937 and would cost $32 million to purchase and refurbish. Eisner negotiated a deal with Giuliani in April 1993: Disney would pay $8 million, and the city government would cover the other $24 million in the form of a low-interest loan. This deal was extraordinary for Disney in financial terms, but extremely risky for its reputation as a wholesome business. Eisner recalls expressing his concerns about the “adjacent nightlife” to Giuliani, and Giuliani responding, “Look me in the eye. They will be gone.”

Disney signed a 49-year lease.

(Above) The newly-dubbed Times Square in 1905, with The New York Times building at the center of the image.

From the Library of Congress.

(Page 51) An aerial view of West 42nd Street in 1952.

Photo by Angelo Rizzuto. From the Library of Congress.

Similarly to The New York Times almost 90 years prior, Disney’s entry into the neighborhood flipped its commercial appeal and opened the floodgates for other businesses to move in. Meanwhile, New 42 restored eight historic Broadway theaters, including the Victory Theater, which had functioned for decades as a burlesque theater. The New Victory opened as a theater for young audiences in 1995, and The Lion King opened in 1997, cementing Times Square’s new family-friendly image. The remarkable success of The Lion King motivated Ford Motor Company to buy and refurbish the Lyric and Apollo Theatres and combine them into the Ford Center for the Performing Arts. This theater opened in 1998 with Ragtime. Roundabout Theatre Company, with the support of American Airlines, renovated what was once the Selwyn Theatre and added rehearsal spaces to create the American Airlines Theatre. In 1997 alone, Broadway had 10.6 million audience members attending 38 shows.

It is worth noting that non-profit theater companies paved the way for New 42’s work and for the entry of companies like Disney, Ford, and American Airlines into the area.

Following Playwrights Horizons’ lead, in 1990, En Garde Arts presented Mac Wellman’s Crowbar at what is now the New Victory Theatre. Andre Gregory’s Uncle Vanya took place at the New Amsterdam shortly thereafter. The success of non-profit productions on these abandoned stages demonstrated to large commercial entities that the Times Square district could be a safe, convenient, and even lucrative location for their theatrical ventures.

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III. Moss was ahead of his time. Sixteen years before New 42’s existence, with no governmental support or corporate funding, Moss stood in front of a vacant pornographic cinema at 422 West 42nd Street. The plumbing had been pulled out, and the wood had been pulled off the walls to make little fires to keep squatters warm. Moss took a do-it-yourself approach to renovating this theater: “I called up everybody I knew and unfortunately none of them were carpenters or plumbers or electricians. They were just artists. And I said, ‘You have to help me. You have to come down and help me build the theater.’ And armies of people showed up. And we built the theater. I mean, people just did it. Because it was a good cause, in a way.” It was January, and the building had no plumbing or heat. But, in just three weeks, Moss and his friends built a stage, put in electricity and plumbing, and made 422 West 42nd Street a functioning theater.

Revitalizing 42nd Street became an integral part of Moss’s mission as an artistic director. If a small group of inexperienced artists could refurbish a building in three weeks, he reasoned, then it should be feasible to restore all the theaters on 42nd Street with some funding and professional expertise. He visited the city’s prominent philanthropic organizations with a proposal to renovate these theaters and thus transform 42nd Street. At the time, his pitch sounded preposterous. “Not one of them believed me,” he remembers, “but they loved hearing it. And, by the way, they would give me a little tip for Playwrights Horizons.” In this way, Moss’s vision for 42nd Street became intertwined with the theater’s livelihood.

One day, Moss was at his desk when he saw three men in suits pointing at his building. He ran downstairs and asked what was going on. They tried to dismiss him at first, but he was insistent. Finally, one of them explained that, in an effort to revive 42nd Street, they planned to tear down the block between Ninth and Tenth Avenue. Moss responded, “Don’t tear it down, I have a better idea.” This man was Fred Papert, founder of the non-profit 42nd Street Development Corporation. Moss gave him his pitch, and Papert was the first person to believe his idea might work.

“THE COMEBACK OF TIMES SQUARE IS ONE OF NEW YORK’S GREATEST SUCCESS STORIES. AND YET, THIS NARRATIVE IS LINKED TO MORE SINISTER CURRENTS IN THE CITY’S HISTORY.”

Broadway at night from Times Square in 1915. Published by the Detroit Publishing Co. From the Library of Congress.

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Papert had made a name for himself in advertising. Most notably, he designed the ads for John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign and was Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s personal publicist. He then transitioned into a four-decade career in urban planning and preservation. With support from Onassis and the Ford Foundation, he led the 42nd Street Development Corporation in saving Grand Central from demolition and cleaning up Times Square. He urged the city to shut down Times Square’s biggest pornography shop, and he helped build new stables for the local precinct’s horses. He is credited with transforming the block on which Playwrights Horizons stands from a string of empty buildings to a vibrant row of theaters. Papert took Moss with him to the offices of the city’s major funders and decision-makers. Together, they would present their vision to reinvigorate West 42nd Street through theater. By working closely with such an influential figure, Moss was able to leave his mark on Playwrights Horizons’ environs. In turn, Papert gave Moss direct access to some of the most powerful people in the city, which bolstered the growth of his young theater company. Meanwhile, the building next to Playwrights Horizons became vacant in 1976. It had been a burlesque club, but the owners never paid their electric bill. According to Moss, Con Edison “came up to 42nd Street with giant scissors and cut the cable to the building, which effectively closed the burlesque.” Moss jumped at the chance to move into a superior building, and persuaded his board of trustees to move the company next door. Playwrights Horizons has been at 416 West 42nd Street ever since.

Across the street from Playwrights Horizons sat an empty apartment complex. Constructed in 1974 by a private real estate firm, Manhattan Plaza consisted of two 45-story residential towers, a row of townhouses, a parking garage, and an elevated courtyard. It was originally intended as luxury housing for middle-class and affluent families, but, when a severe recession interrupted its construction, the developers needed federal funding to finish the project.

The only way to obtain federal funding was to repurpose the complex as subsidized housing for low-income families, but at the same time, the real estate firm did not want to thwart the city’s efforts to make the area appealing to

big businesses. The proximity of Playwrights Horizons and Papert’s burgeoning Theater Row inspired the developers to convert Manhattan Plaza into artist housing. Artists met the financial criteria to move into subsidized housing, but would also elevate the neighborhood’s social prestige.

Manhattan Plaza for the Performing Arts opened in 1977, and is perhaps the most tangible example of how Off-Broadway theaters played a role in shaping the new 42nd Street. In 1995, Papert proclaimed that “the naughty, bawdy Times Square is a thing of the past,” referencing, of course, the title track from the musical 42nd Street. And indeed it was.

IV. On the surface, the comeback of Times Square is one of New York’s greatest success stories. And yet, this narrative is linked to more sinister currents in the city’s history, such as white flight and housing inequality. City officials bemoaned that Times Square had fallen into disarray, without acknowledging that they didn’t regulate the sex industry or invest in the area for decades; they only did so when white families began to return to (and gentrify) New York City in the 1990s. Mayors Koch, Dinkins, and Giuliani redesigned Times Square with the intention of attracting big businesses and affluent tourists, not making the area more pleasant for those who already lived and worked there. For over a century, Times Square has been a garish symbol of American consumer culture, geared toward visitors rather than New Yorkers. But as urban historians Tom Meyers and Greg Young note on their podcast The Bowery Boys, the new Times Square feels “plastic” and “orchestrated.” Its density of big franchises has repeatedly pushed out the beloved local spots that used to add character to a sea of chain restaurants and tourist traps. The area demonstrates a topdown approach to culture rather than an organic, grassroots, bottom-up one. Furthermore, we now know that broken windows policing had profoundly damaging ramifications for urban communities of color, including mass incarceration, police brutality, and racist policies like “Stop and Frisk.” Papert worked to get the Times Square police precinct more resources; in doing so, did he enable officers like Mayronne to treat locals with undue harshness? Many businesses that employed and catered to the city’s elite took a not-in-my-backyard approach to neighbors whom they deemed unsavory. The New York Times, for example, defended the sex industry’s right to exist in its pages, but tacitly supported broken windows policing around its own headquarters.

The city also took an approach of displacing homelessness and poverty rather than remedying it. Before Playwrights Horizons rented 422 West 42nd Street, a number of homeless people lived within. Vulnerable individuals had to resort to vacant theaters for shelter when a brand new apartment complex with 1,689 empty units stood across the street. This staggering irony speaks to the complex web of socio-economic and political factors that make living and working in New York City financially precarious for so many, including artists. When Manhattan Plaza opened, 70% of its units went to artists and their families, 15% to the elderly, and 15% to those living in substandard housing nearby. The developers of Manhattan Plaza never really entertained the possibility of allotting more than 15% of units to housing-insecure families, because they worried that low-income residents would appear unpalatable to the businesses moving into

Times Square. Artists, on the other hand, would generate work that attracted middle-class audiences to the area, and small businesses with them. In this way, developers and city officials strategically capitalized on artists’ dire need for housing and workspace in order to justify the expulsion of homeless people. In return for the space they received, artists were expected to reform the neighborhood, not for their own benefit, but for the benefit of their corporate neighbors in the new Times Square. Though these franchises never migrated west toward Ninth Avenue, their proximity informed how the city distributed resources to artists in Hell’s Kitchen, and on what terms.

The last time I walked down 42nd Street was on the morning of March 12, 2020, a few hours before Playwrights Horizons shut down its offices. Though I don’t know when I’ll walk this street again, I do know that I won’t look at it the same way when I do. The street is a palimpsest that conceals its numerous past identities. Over the course of the last century, it has changed drastically in some ways and remained strikingly consistent in others. The history of how Playwrights Horizons found a home on 42nd Street, and how it grew and evolved with the street itself, is a true A New York story.

SOURCES Ahearn, Charles, dir. Doin’ Time in Times Square. 1990. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzFZyfNiQS8.

Davidson, Justin. “A Walking Tour of 42nd Street.” New York Magazine, April 3, 2017.

Holusha, John. “The Theater’s on a Roll, Gliding Down 42d Street; Fast-Moving Times Square Revitalization Leaves No Stone or Building Unturned.” The New York Times, February 28, 1998.

“Manhattan Plaza Project.” New York Public Library.

September 12, 2012. https://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2012/09/12/ video-art-manhattan-plaza-project.

Maslon, Laurence. “Resurrection of 42nd Street.”

Public Broadcasting Service, accessed June 15, 2020. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/broadway/essays/ resurrection-of-42nd-street/.

Meyers, Tom and Greg Young, hosts. “Times Square: History in stages, chronicled in lights.” The Bowery Boys: New York City History (podcast). December 17, 2010. https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2010/12/timessquare-history-in-stages.html.

Moss, Bob and Tim Sanford. The Birth of Playwrights Horizons.

New York: Smith and Kraus, 2015.

Purnell, Brian and Jeanne Theoharis. “How New York City Became the Capital of the Jim Crow North.” The Washington Post, August 23, 2017.

Stern, William J. “The Unexpected Lessons of Times Square’s Comeback.” City Journal, Autumn 1999.

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17

19

1

21

9 2

14

18

11

3

20

12

15

13

16

4 10

5 6 8

7

SELECTION OF MR. BURNS PRODUCTIONS ACROSS THE UNITED STATES*

* 17

The productions listed here are not ordered chronologically.

18

An Other Theater Company Provo, Utah July 2019

20

State Fair Community College Sedalia, Missouri October 2019

University of Montana Missoula, Montana October 2019

19

University of North Dakota Grand Forks, North Dakota April 2018

21

Mad Horse Theatre Company South Portland, Maine May 2017

1 University Theatre Eugene, Oregon June 2017

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2

6

Capital Stage Sacramento, California October 2014

Stage West Theatre Fort Worth, Texas August 2015

3

7

Selma Arts Center Selma, California September 2016

Obsidian Theater White Oak, Texas November 2017

4

8

Sacred Fools Theater Los Angeles, California October 2017

Baylor University Waco, Texas April 2018

5 The Scoundrel & Scamp Theatre Tucson, Arizona April 2018

MR. BURNS: FAR AND WIDE

by Jordan Best

In 2013, Mr. Burns, a post-electric play made its New York premiere at Playwrights Horizons. Written by Anne Washburn, with music by Michael Friedman, the eerily prescient, post-apocalyptic dark comedy follows a group of survivors as they attempt to recount, and later reenact, an episode of “The Simpsons.� Ever since its world premiere at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, developed alongside Playwrights Horizons, The Civilians, and Seattle Repertory Theatre in 2012, the play has been performed across the globe, its popularity as far-reaching as the animated sitcom to which it owes its existence.

9 Playwrights Horizons New York, New York August 2013

11

15

Theater Wit Chicago, Illinois January 2015

Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company Washington, DC May 2012 *World Premiere

12

Illinois State University Normal, Illinois February 2018

10

Oglethorpe University Atlanta, Georgia October 2017

13

16

Millikin University Frankfort, Illinois March 2018

University of Virginia Charlottesville, Virginia November 2016

14

The Wilma Theater Philadelphia, Pennsylvania October 2018

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Mask from Playwrights Horizons’ production of Mr. Burns. Costume design by Emily Rebholz. Masks by Sam Hill.

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1

2 5

5 3

Almeida Theatre London, United Kingdom Spring 2014

Lightning Jar Theatre Melbourne, Australia February 2019

Silo Theatre Auckland, New Zealand September 2018

18 4

Outside the March Toronto, Canada May 2015

20 6

Bristol Spotlights Bristol, United Kingdom April 2019

5 19

Rough Magic SEEDS Dublin, Ireland November 2017

21 7

State Theatre Company and Belvoir Sydney, Australia May 2017

*

The productions listed here are not ordered chronologically.

SELECTION OF MR. BURNS PRODUCTIONS ACROSS THE WORLD*

5 4

6 1

2

7

3

PASTS / 59

60 / ALMANAC

LOOKING BACK Ashley Chang

I. JUST OVER 30 YEARS AGO, Playwrights Horizons produced the world premiere of Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy, which met with critical acclaim as both a play and a film. Back then, Driving Miss Daisy was a well-mannered comedy, its cast of characters ultimately reconciled and the world made nicer for it. Today, however, Driving Miss Daisy is more akin to a historical document, a dispassionate register of how people once thought — and, in certain cases, still think — about race and racism in the United States. Over the past three decades, the liberatory politics of activists and theorists have seeped into the groundwaters of popular thought, making it easier, now, to see Driving Miss Daisy in terms of its harms: its relegation of a Black man to servitude for a white woman whose moral edification remains paramount, its ignorance of how power governs their relationship, and its imagination of interracial friendship in terms so spurious as to be, for some, fantastical. Since Daisy first crashed her Packard onstage and onscreen, the culture has invariably shifted. These shifts have prompted Playwrights Horizons to consider its relationship to Driving Miss Daisy anew, to ask itself: if a play it produced has caused harm, then how might it make repairs?

That Playwrights Horizons now faces such a question is due to the efforts of theater professionals — writers and designers, directors and actors — who, for years, have testified to the many damages done by performing arts institutions across the nation. Some have taken to Twitter and HowlRound, addressed national conferences, published data, given interviews, held town halls, contributed to articles. Others have written open letters collectively authored.

See, for example, the dispatches from Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) theater makers in 2020; the Coalition of Bay Area Black Women Theater Artists in 2017; members of the Middle Eastern American theater community in 2017; Ferocious Lotus Theatre Company in 2017; and the Not in Our House Chicago Theatre Community in 2016.

Still others have spoken out on their own. Playwright Rhiana Yazzie of New Native Theatre wrote an open letter in 2014, as did director Clinton Turner Davis nearly two decades earlier, in 1997. These messengers, sounding the alarm in communal spaces, blasting trumpets and beating drums, are joined in their efforts by a whole host of others who have conveyed their reports in confidence, preferring carefully-worded emails, slightly-strained conversations, and anonymous surveys over public action. Whatever the route, whether through open platforms or private passages, on TV or with HR, enough messages have finally arrived at their destinations — finally enough! — and, strewn across desks, aflutter in the wings, sown like seeds between each row of red velvet seats, they must now be minded.

To be a theater today is to take seriously these messengers and their messages. But how to begin? Because the harms have been both broad and deep, the road to remedy is both long and winding. This is not a complaint. It is a sincere survey of what’s come upon us; an affirmation that the work ahead is prodigious; and a recognition that the general ends (equity, justice, liberation) are currently more evident than the specific means (behaviors, practices, policies) we might use to get there. Particularly for non-profit institutions, the task of redress will involve proposals and PASTS / 61

presentations, workshops and webinars, announcements and approvals and reallocations — the kinds of things that are subject to schedules, deadlines, delays. As with any bureaucracy, progress slows as if by necessity. It’s not so hard for one person to pivot, or even for ten to ratify a new constitution. It’s much trickier for a hundred people — united less by common experiences than by a shared employer — to make collective revisions to their workplace in response to external calls for change. The management of employees, the administration of programs, and the observation of a mission statement — these dynamics are not easy to amend with speed.

Still, amendments are long overdue. The stone has been overturned and its underside revealed. What this essay attempts to parse, then, are some of the minor details of the revolution, as seen, so to speak, from within the walls of the château under siege — I write from my seat in the artistic department of a theater now coming to terms with its power. Taking a close look at one matter in particular — the relationship between a theater and its past productions — my hope is to illuminate the intricate latticework of commitments and considerations now facing theaters, from the perspective of someone currently staffed at one.

My thinking revolves around Playwrights Horizons’ production of Driving Miss Daisy, a play likely to arouse the ire of many progressive critics of culture, including some working at the institution today. We find ourselves wondering: if our theater’s past engagements have fallen out of joint with its present ideals, how are we to navigate that disjunct? What gets walked back, what sticks with us, and how do we make those calls? To whom are we, the theater, ultimately responsible? To the artists we produce, or to the audiences we serve? Which artists and which audiences?

To be clear, this essay is not a strident defense of nonprofit organizations. Neither is it a barreling take-down. It is, rather, a circumspect account of the questions at hand, the decisions to be made, and the values at stake in the spinous process of accounting for past harms. I’m curious about how change happens at the scale of the institution, and so, holding tight to that query, I’ve found it helpful to slow down a little, to feel for the grooves and notches. I want to see what’s there in the shadow of the rock, wriggling and squiggling in the soil.

II. Driving Miss Daisy premiered at Playwrights Horizons on April 15, 1987 under the direction of Ron Lagomarsino. The cast featured Dana Ivey as Miss Daisy, Morgan Freeman as Hoke, and Ray Gill as Boolie. Awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in Drama, the play was adapted into a film the following year. Directed by Bruce Beresford, and starring Jessica Tandy, Morgan Freeman, and Dan Aykroyd, the film was nominated for nine Academy Awards. At the Oscars ceremony in 1990, it won Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Makeup, and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Set during Jim Crow in Georgia, Driving Miss Daisy tells the story of Daisy, a Southern Jewish woman who’s gotten too old to operate a car by herself. After she crashes her 1948 Packard in the neighbor’s yard, her son Boolie hires a Black man, Hoke, to be her driver. As ornery as she is uptight, Daisy doesn’t take kindly to the idea that she’s too frail to get around on her own, nor to the idea that she’s wealthy enough to afford help. Over the next quarter of a 62 / ALMANAC

century, however, she and Hoke develop a gentle rapport that lasts late into their lives. “You’re my best friend,” she tells him near the end of the film, in the midst of an episode of dementia that Hoke, all kindness and compassion, quells. “Come on, Miz Daisy,” he protests. “No,” she says, “Really. You are.”

Since its production at Playwrights Horizons over 30 years ago, Driving Miss Daisy has become a cultural touchstone. But its renown is complicated. In the decades since its premiere as a play and then as a film, it’s come to symbolize a genteel sort of racism, one that promises progress but smooths over the harsh realities of racial difference.

This is racism dressed up as friendship, with an invitation to tea on the front porch.

There’s an episode of The Daily called “What Hollywood Keeps Getting Wrong About Race,” where host Michael Barbaro talks to critic Wesley Morris about Driving Miss Daisy. Barbaro identifies as Jewish, Morris as Black. The events of the play were inspired by real life: the playwright himself writes that the play is drawn from childhood memories of his Jewish grandmother and her Black chauffeur Will Coleman, whose relationship lasted for a quarter of a century. But Morris calls Driving Miss Daisy a “racial reconciliation fantasy,” a category that also includes movies like The Help — starring Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer alongside Jessica Chastain, Bryce Dallas Howard, Allison Janney, and Emma Stone — from 2011, and Green Book, which won Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 2019. The “fantasy” in all these cases is the idea, Morris says, that “prolonged exposure to a black person is going to cure you of your racism.” Barbaro pushes him on this point, asking, “Doesn’t inherently spending time with people who are different than we are make us more empathetic? And why would that be anything other than a good thing?” Morris pauses, then responds: That’s a deep question. The immediate answer, though, is that it’s on the terms of white people.

There’s nothing mutual about any of these movies, any of this work. It’s not mutual at all. You aren’t going into the houses and lives of these black characters. And they’re presented as so good as to have no agency.… So these are movies that would say they believe in equality, but there’s nothing equal about the races in them. There’s an inherent imbalance. And the fantasy, of course, is just acknowledging that black people exist and giving them some lines and casting a good actor to play them is a kind of argument for equality.

As Morris points out, equality requires mutuality. Insofar as Driving Miss Daisy fails to recognize Hoke’s humanity — his life beyond the terms of his employment — it fails to articulate a vision of true equality. “The relationship,” Morris says, “is entirely conscripted as service and bound by capitalism.” We only ever see Hoke while he’s on the job — while he is compelled, in other words, to appease his employer.

He smiles, he laughs. He is congenial. The story never acknowledges that Hoke’s good nature might have something to do with his professional obligation to keep Daisy content. There are power dynamics at play here, and not only to do with financial solvency. His livelihood is dependent upon her satisfaction, yes, but also: he is a Black man living through a period of American life defined by segregation

“SINCE ITS PRODUCTION AT PLAYWRIGHTS HORIZONS OVER 30 YEARS AGO, DRIVING MISS DAISY HAS BECOME A CULTURAL TOUCHSTONE. BUT ITS RENOWN IS COMPLICATED.” and the systemic disenfranchisement of Black people.

Daisy’s power over Hoke is both economic and racial — both capitalist and racist.

Of course, with Hans Zimmer’s springy score clarinetting beneath and between scenes, at least in the film adaptation, it’s easy to forget all that. It’s easy to forget, for example, that even Morgan Freeman’s immense talent cannot invest the character of Hoke with genuine depth of being, however much Freeman’s agreement to play the part might seem like an endorsement of the writing, and however much his stellar performance might seem to paper over Hoke’s paper-thinness. An actor’s skill is only a pale and partial remedy for a writer’s omissions.

This problem is hardly new: in 2019, scholar Fred Moten wrote in The Paris Review that Shakespeare had “given Negroes a problem” by making great Black performers responsible for bringing respectability to — and finding respectability within — Othello, a Black character sprung entirely from a white imagination. The problem isn’t that Shakespeare wrote outside of his lived experience. The problem is that Shakespeare did it somewhat crudely; Moten alludes to Othello’s “vacancy,” his “soullessness,” his “poverty,” his “inauthenticity.” There’s a good deal of work an actor has to do “to care for such a radically unlovable character.” For the small but growing cohort of Black actors who have assumed that burden (for centuries, including the twentieth, Othello was played by white actors in Blackface), the stakes are higher than Shakespeare knew: for the Ira Aldridges, the Paul Robesons, the Laurence Fishburnes, the James Earl Joneses, and, more recently, the Chiwetel Ejiofors, the onus was theirs to invent and convey Othello’s nobility, dignity, and humanity — qualities that Shakespeare perhaps didn’t know were under question.

Certainly, Black actors could decline the part. But that would mean consenting to Othello’s being played by actors of less stature, or by actors of less grace, or by actors who are white, actors who know little of Blackness as lived (such as Laurence Olivier, Paul Scofield, Anthony Hopkins, Michael Gambon, and Patrick Stewart, who have all assumed the title role). To refuse the mantle of Othello is to risk someone else making a mess of him. In this way, Moten says, “black folks are enjoined to take responsibility for white fantasy and solve a problem not of their own making.” The same is true for Hoke, who became the charge of Freeman, whose artistry makes it easy to forget that Hoke remains incomplete, his life beyond chauffeuring unseen and unknown.

Of course, it’s also easy to forget that the staggering revelation at the heart of Driving Miss Daisy is this: that a white person can warm to a Black person. For Daisy, the unthinkable becomes thinkable. No matter that she remains aloof

to her power and ignorant of Hoke’s world — his yearnings, his regrets, his joys. She calls what they have “friendship.”

They’ve no need to reckon with the many forces that have so differently defined their personal horizons of possibility.

She realizes, at the end of her life, that Hoke is worthy of her love — that the color of his skin can no longer disqualify him from that most fundamental of affinities, which ought to be given freely, with a sense of abundance.

To be sure, many viewers are familiar with these perspectives, and they have been ever since the film first came out. At the Oscars ceremony in 1990, actress Kim Basinger went off-script as she introduced the nominees for Best Picture: “We’ve got five great films here, and they’re great for one reason: because they tell the truth. But there is one film missing from this list that deserves to be on it, because, ironically, it might tell the biggest truth of all. And that’s [Spike Lee’s] Do the Right Thing.” Driving Miss Daisy won, of course, but not without criticism.

What a story like Driving Miss Daisy asks us to contend with is this: does a “racial reconciliation fantasy” do more harm than good? Does its tale of interracial friendship offer false visions of progress and harmony? Would it have been better for the play — and then the film — to never have existed at all?

Or, despite some of its errors, is there value to be netted in its well-meaning sentiments (interracial relationships are good), in its compensated employment of a Black actor (“I make a living doing this, at least,” Freeman told The New York Times in 1987), and even in its knack for starting conversations (here we are, after all)? Actress Mary Lucy Bivins, who was set to reprise her role as Daisy for the fifth time at Barter Theatre in Virginia in April 2020, describes Driving Miss Daisy as “a beautiful story that’s told with heart and humor.” Her love for the play is palpable, and her reasoning recalls Michael Barbaro’s provocation to Wesley Morris on The Daily. “If you care very much about people accepting differences,” Bivins says, “and learning to live together in — at the very least — harmony and — at the very most and best — friendship, then this story is as universal and timeless and important today as it ever was.” Driving Miss Daisy might espouse fantasies of interracial companionship, as Morris maintains, but Bivins isn’t necessarily off-base to treasure the characters’ amity and goodwill.

A more sympathetic reading of the story might also point us towards Daisy’s obstacles as well as to her triumphs. Daisy had spent much of her life assimilating into the norms of a racist social order, norms that would require extensive unlearning. Writing for the Times in 1987, Leslie Bennetts observed that the play — which she called “one of the season’s biggest Off Broadway successes” — tells of “two radically dissimilar people who began their association in mutual suspicion and mistrust and gradually, over many years, developed a profound but almost completely unacknowledged love for each other.” Alongside Morris’s apt criticisms, then, there must be room to recognize the considerable amount of time Daisy and Hoke spent together, earning one another’s trust over the course of two-and-ahalf decades in a social climate that might have foreclosed the possibility of their friendship before it even began. I want to be careful, here, not to exonerate the story of its lacunae where Hoke and his life are concerned. Nor do I want to suggest that Daisy and Hoke’s love for each other is flawless and their trust absolute. But I do want to insist on the significance of Daisy’s cultural conditioning and the PASTS / 63

many years that it took for her to consider replacing old habits of thought with more progressive alternatives. As Uhry told Bennetts, “those stereotypes” of Southern whites “running around being openly hostile and rude toward black people” were not exactly true — that animus was hidden behind “good manners,” simmering “under the surface.”

Given the widespread anti-Blackness of the Jim Crow era, there must be some acknowledgement of Daisy’s barriers to understanding, and some room left for the possibility of her genuine transformation, however modest.

All this said, I admit that I find it difficult to launch a more generous defense of Driving Miss Daisy. Even if Daisy’s change of heart is an important first step, there are good reasons not to celebrate her redemption. The exigencies of justice, made visible by movements like Black Lives Matter, feel too immense to see her growth as anything but too little and too late.

“I WONDER ABOUT THE THEATER ITSELF. DO WE HEAP SHAME UPON OURSELVES BY RECOUNTING OUR OFFENSES ALOUD? DO WE HEAP SHAME UPON OURSELVES

BY NOT?”

III. Of course, no messenger has delivered news of these exact harms to Playwrights Horizons. No one has reached out to our offices, demanding that we reconsider Driving Miss Daisy in light of its dated politics. No, the call to examine our history — and the productions that comprise it — arises from more sweeping calls to account. The “We See You, White American Theater” initiative, for example, articulates its observations in the present perfect tense, a grammatical mode that expresses past actions with present consequences.

“We have watched you,” its authors intone, citing long histories of racism. The work of remedy and reform, therefore, requires that Playwrights Horizons own its former as well as its ongoing abuses, not just in the ways it’s worked but also in the stories it’s told.

At this point, a number of questions come to mind that range across guilt and responsibility, shame and accountability, public atonement and private growth, and the pursuit of justice in practice: I wonder what qualifies as an instance of harm. Which of our stories have done injury? Which treatments of which people warrant apology, and to whom? Must the wounds be of a certain size or severity, or is no wound too small or too slight to receive acknowledgement? Can wounds be measured in such ways at all?

I wonder who is at fault. Is it incumbent upon Playwrights Horizons to name every offense and name itself the offender in each case?

With regards to older productions like Driving Miss Daisy, are we who staff Playwrights Horizons today responsible for the choices of those who were here before us, and if so, then how? Or can we declare ourselves a new theater?

Taking into account new hires and eventual resignations, haven’t we already, over time, become a new theater?

I wonder who determines fault. As the producing organization, is Playwrights Horizons uniquely unsuited to the task of reviewing its own production history? Is this a project better undertaken by a journalist or scholar, someone outside the organization, a neutral party, a bystander? Are our interests and allegiances too many? Are we too close to the problem to be of any use at all?

Or, as the producing organization, is Playwrights Horizons the best candidate to discuss its production history with both reverence and specificity? Who else is balancing these thousands of spiraling concerns? Who 64 / ALMANAC

else cares as much as we do about our values, our artists, and our audiences? Furthermore, who else is responsible for our actions and their consequences?

I wonder what is due to the artists of the productions under review. As we embark upon this work of looking back, should we look back in anger — or with patience? Is complete disavowal necessary? Is compromise possible? Can we give criticism with affection? Or should we sever ties? Is this the time to burn bridges?

Would such an audit be better handled through private conversations with the various parties involved, in order to cultivate an atmosphere of trust, so that admonitions might be better received and vulnerability permitted? Behind closed doors, is there more latitude to handle things with levity and even tenderness? Are private conversations the stuff of lasting relationships and genuine accountability?

Or do private conversations cater too much to the comforts of those who perpetrated the harm?

Is the goal to change the artist’s mind? What if the artist has already recognized the harm? What if the artist has already changed their mind? Can they work in this town again? What if the artist has died? What if we’ve lost touch with them? What if we hope to produce them again someday? Can we?

I wonder what is due to audiences. Are statements of apology empty? Or is there value to saying, “I’m sorry,” in a place where everyone can hear it? Is it not everyone we have harmed, after all, since oppression harms even the oppressors?

Would a moderated panel, with time for questions and answers, be helpful? Should we host a series of debates, held over the course of several months, or even years?

Would we record it? Print the transcripts and post them on a new page of our website and hope people click? Who would speak? What if an artist declined to participate in such a forum (or tribunal)?

Do we even need to look back at all? Is it enough, moving forward, for Playwrights Horizons to uplift the longsilenced and overlooked, to put real effort into programming plays that offer images and ideas charged with forwardthinking visions of society?

I wonder about the theater itself. Do we heap shame upon ourselves by recounting our offenses aloud? Do we heap shame upon ourselves by not?

IV. So here we are. As the theater that produced it 30 years ago, what do we do with a play like Driving Miss Daisy? What responsibility do we bear to ourselves, to the playwright, to the play, and to those it harmed?

At one extreme, there are those who would advocate for its immediate expulsion from canons and syllabi, who would brook no patience for our loyalties to the writer, who would demand that we renounce our ties once and for all.

This approach is swift and sure, its justice protean. Burn the house down and don’t look back.

At another extreme, there are those who would say, “What’s done is done,” or, “Let bygones be bygones,” or, “C’est la vie.” There’s no dearth of idioms for sloughing off the past while, somehow, preserving its norms. Forgive and forget and, whatever you do, don’t look back.

This essay does look back, however imperfectly; and it asks theaters to look back as well. In writing it, I have tried to offer criticisms of one of Playwrights Horizons’ past productions while, at the same time, noting what’s tricky about doing so. After all, who can rightfully give criticism, and to what end? I was not there when Playwrights Horizons produced Driving Miss Daisy; I have not spoken to the playwright; and I cannot presume to speak for my colleagues, let alone for the theater as a whole.

These caveats accepted, what I write towards is the idea that looking back begins the work of repair. I write towards the idea that institutions might revisit their own histories with a spirit of curiosity rather than condemnation; that such revisitations are necessarily fraught but necessary to pursue; and that the path forward depends on our capacity to see clearly the path we’ve travelled thus far. I write

towards the idea, too, that there exist alternatives to tweets and call-outs; that criticism is not the purview solely of critics but also of theaters; and that the end game has less to do with scrambling onto the right side of history than with slowing down and seeing what we’ve left in our wake.

Where this essay lacks some courage is in the object it’s taken for its lesson. Driving Miss Daisy is not a recent headline. With three decades of hindsight, the passage of time has made it less controversial a subject and, therefore, a less acute example of harm. The more urgent work lies in looking back across shorter distances, to those plays in recent memory, which live closer to our present selves.

Still, Driving Miss Daisy has served, I hope, not as an easy target of critique but as a conduit for conversation about harms and how to address them. The violences of race and racism, in particular, are sometimes clear as day but often swathed in shadow and pall. While pieces like Driving Miss Daisy open portals into this strange landscape, criticism allows us to map its topographies, making race something that can be seen and racism something that can be talked about, turned over, and reckoned with. Though criticism might sting, it’s not all bad. To give and receive criticism is to fortify social bonds: these are acts of optimism. Things might feel tense for a while, but the path towards each A other is there, somewhere beneath the rubble.

(Page 60 and above) Dana Ivey as Daisy and Morgan Freeman as Hoke in Driving Miss Daisy at Playwrights Horizons (1987).

Photo by Bob Marshak.

PASTS / 65

COILED SPRING Will Arbery

THIS STRANGE SPRING AND SUMMER, writing in my apartment as the world pivots between horror and majesty, like a glitching aria, I’ve been visited by a lot of ghosts. They sit near me and on me. They press a finger into my sternum. I’ve moved into my own place. My window faces east.

I can watch the moon rise. Oh and in July there were all these great storms.

I’d lie in the dark and heat lightning would flash in these purplish spasms.

I feel — have felt — a war coming. A hunch that I hope is just a ghost in my DNA. Anyway I’m alone.

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I spend my days toggling between extremes. I read the Left and then the Right and then the Left and then the Right.

I read until I see it. See it each way. Then I go back to the opposite. I miss my family, and then get an email from one of them about how Covid-19 is a political coup. I’m lucky to have too much to write — theater and television about conservatism and progressivism, about absolutes, about belief and apocalypse, the haunting of time, about simulation and intimacy, about shame and wonder. I want to create work that exists in the in-between space, that wades into the terror of love. I’m mourning all the times I’ve loved less than fully. I’m visited by the ghosts of everyone I’ve ever been to everyone else, and everyone else. I have this distant, privileged grief that I haven’t died for anyone yet, that I haven’t fallen so fully into what-is-right that I vanish.

I’m grieving that I am. None of this is new. What is new is that I’m also meeting myself, and learning to be okay with him. Finally learning that old song about loving oneself as the foundation for loving others.

And then I learn about Ahmaud Arbery’s lynching. He shared my last name. In Georgia. The state where my father’s white family has its deep roots. The recognition of this — what this could mean — that name, in this country, with its history — ripples through my family. Nightmares of our tight-lipped ancestors. For the first time in my memory, my white conservative family mourns a Black man’s murder directly. We donate. And then we stop.

I can’t stop thinking Ahmaud Arbery Arbery Arbery. I lose twenty pounds. Ghosts of ancestors pin me to the bed for days. I don’t know how to love them. I ask them what they want from me. They ask me what I want from them.

And now George Floyd is murdered at the hands of police.

Time stops. Then it erupts. Now a swirl of reckoning in the country. I get out of the apartment, I march through the park and streets with my collaborator Danya, we shout together. My mother starts a family email thread. Family

members start chiming in from Texas, Wyoming, Pittsburgh, Arkansas, Florida, me in Brooklyn. Everyone’s concerned, but there’s no consensus. I talk about what it felt like to march, and the little I know about prison abolition. My sisters write about the undeniable Good calling out from this movement. Then one brother-in-law suggests that it’s foolish to think we can ever change, says the entire thing is a Marxist takeover. My mom encourages this conclusion.

I text with my sister about wanting us all to meet in the glen of love, and not knowing how to get there.

The absurdity of getting things done in a crisis. And the slow-fast spasms of this crisis. The creases of it. The folding of time — I thought I was moving forward, and suddenly I’m face to face with a too-real past. I’d been traveling up and down a coiled spring. As it turns out, so had my ancestors. We encounter each other at the curved pivot where nightmare meets DNA. There, they collapse onto my body, exhausted from keeping secrets. From hurtling up and down our double helix.

Then I find an old poem of my dad’s, written in the 1980s.

It’s 12 pages, and in it, he meets the ghost of his own father, a chain-smoking veteran from Georgia who died shortly after my dad was born. I read the poem slowly. My dad describes a long nightmare about the South and ancestors and inheritance and his father’s giant bloated skull in the basement and look I’ll tell you all about it sometime, the point is: I can’t believe it. I’ve had the same nightmare, many times, my entire life. I know these precise hauntings. These precise ancestors. These white ghosts. I know everything about this. I know him. I’m angry, I’m angry and I love him. I must try to tell him: I’m angry, I’m angry A and I love you. Anyway we’re never alone.

Photos courtesy the author.

PASTS / 67

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THE SEEING PLACE Agnes Borinsky for Deb Margolin

1.

WHEN I LOOK IN THE MIRROR, I don’t see myself. I was born a boy and that’s not who I am. I have stubble on my jaw and I’m balding. But I’m buying wigs and I’m finding words. I have a pile of those pink Glossier bags that look like they’re made out of bubble wrap in my closet.

Lately I’m the one crying in the pasta aisle. I was never good at one-liners. I’m too sincere for my own good.

When the Israelites were about to enter the Promised Land, Moses sent twelve spies ahead to explore a little and report back.

Everyone else waited in their encampment. When they squinted across the Jordan, they could see a few sheep, grazing on the hillside.

They could hear music playing on the radio in someone’s kitchen.

Then the spies came back. Ten of them said: “The land is beautiful. But also: it’s full of giants. We’ll never make it. If we try to cross the river, we’ll all be killed.”

Two of the spies said they didn’t know what the other spies were talking about. “We’ll survive if we’re meant to survive,” they said. “We saw beautiful things. The grapes were as big as your head and the water was sweet.”

But the Israelites were still reeling from the first, more pessimistic, report. The people quaked. They cemented themselves into their fear.

“We’ll be murdered,” they said to Moses. “Why did you take us out of Egypt? It would be better if we were back there. We were slaves, but at least we had wine and cucumbers!”

I remember in an English class once learning that the word for theater comes from theatron. Which means, the seeing place.

We used to do that all the time. We left our homes and gathered in a room and for a little while, we all sat together, facing the same direction, and looked at people onstage.

Now we don’t go to the theater. The rehearsal rooms are closed and we can’t workshop our plays.

What about our seeing?

Can we workshop that?

PASTS / 69

I’m not talking about realism. “Realism” is a bludgeon used to keep certain people out of the room. It’s an aesthetic school and a management style as well. I could go on about its limitations but I bet you’ve heard that queer ditty before.

Here, look at my quarantine: I am packing cardboard boxes, I am waking in unfamiliar beds. I’m crying in cars and on walks. Crying on couches and in rooms with bare walls and no furniture. I’m limping into the clinic with a swollen foot as I text with my coworkers about a walk-out. I’m beet-red, panting, sprinting back and forth between my car and my nearly-empty apartment with my arms full of things I didn’t have time to sort. I am shouting at my sister and I am slamming the door.

Love asks for separation sometimes. All the old hurts come flooding back.

I did get gifts: A tomato plant. A loaf of bread. A song. Four steaming, hard-boiled eggs, wrapped in a green handkerchief.

Also, look: Hawks dipping behind the treeline on a sacred mountain. Blessed rain battering the walls of a wooden shack.

A line of thimble-sized estrogen bottles lined up by the wall, like dirty glasses after a fairy cocktail party. This, the old mattress where I sleep.

Here’s a manila envelope full of words and pictures that I left on a porch in Massachusetts. Here’s the smell when I rolled the windows down and turned the radio up as the sun slanted horizontal across Los Angeles. Here’s where I head downtown and find tens of thousands of other people in the street.

I do not think the Promised Land is a physical place.

Zionism is too literal. I mean aesthetically. To say nothing of the politics of it.

I think I have to see the landscape of the Bible as internal geography. A river divides our hearts, and some of us never cross it.

To what god or gods are we dedicating our vision?

Jacques Lusseyran, who spent many months in Buchenwald, wrote a memoir where he recalls his childhood memories of light. “I saw it everywhere I went,” he says. “I was eating sun.” Even when night fell. He writes: “Darkness, for me, was still light, but in a new form and a new rhythm. It was light at a slower pace. In other words, nothing in the world, not even what I saw inside myself with closed eyelids, was outside this great miracle of light.”

Lusseyran was blinded in an accident at age eight. He said after that he saw more vividly.

Tisha B’Av is the Jewish holiday where we mourn the destruction of the temple. There were two temples, actually, one built almost six-hundred years after the other was destroyed, but both were destroyed, apparently, on the same day. Now we read the book of Lamentations. I have always loved this holiday, because you sit on the floor in the dark and you listen to someone chanting this gorgeous, painful book.

This year my birthday fell on Tisha B’Av, so I fasted, and I worked my job at the bookstore, answering the phone and trying to help customers find their copies of White Fragility.

This year I thought: it’s about time the temple was destroyed. And I grieved all the years we spent thinking we needed a building to worship the Eternal. It shocked me that I’d never seen the holiday that way before.

When I got home I lay on my bed and stared out the window at the sky, until the moon came out and everything turned purple.

Bring it all down, I thought. Bring it down, bring it down, bring it down.

I am tired of punishing myself for what I see when I look in the mirror. What I fail to see.

Sometimes a new way of seeing can feel like discovery.

And sometimes it can feel like loss. Those of us who have, in whatever way, had to excuse ourselves from the prevailing assumptions of seeing – who have had to find our own words for an experience we weren’t even sure was real – are used to this gut-twisting dance. We slip back and forth between dizziness and homecoming. We are queasy with joy and when we fall in love it’s like panic. The same things that sweeten our lives sometimes destroy us.

Between ‘girl’ and something else I find myself frequently skidding. I am haunted by a learned empiricism, it punishes me. Empiricism, like ‘empire.’ We are never one thing or another because we are never still. Neither are our worlds. We make a home in the movement between seemingly incommensurate realities.

The spies can’t stop talking about what happened when they crossed the river. They are invited to dinner parties.

They are asked to write op-eds in the local paper.

Wait but what was it like? Actually? You said there were giants? What did you see?

“We saw the giants,” they said. “And, believe us, if we were to cross the river they’d squash us like bugs.”

Here’s how they say it in the Bible: “We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.”

Here we start to understand what is “wrong” about their seeing. They weren’t looking at the land. They were looking at themselves. They borrowed the eyes of someone they were too afraid to even speak to, to reveal themselves to, and they looked at themselves the way they imagined themselves being seen. What contortions! And also: we do it all the time.

Mesiter Eckhart says: “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye...”

What would it mean to turn outward with a divine seeing?

What was actually on the other side of the river?

Look: A man kneels on another man’s neck and the man on the ground dies. What is realistic about that? What is unreal?

Were we looking? If we were, what did we see? Did everyone who was looking see the same thing?

I’ve been told many times that certain things didn’t fit where I wanted to put them.

“This play will never work.”

One dramaturg friend, working for a large theater at the time, said to me: “I would love it if a theater did a season

Who, of the spies, saw things truthfully? If that’s even the right adverb. Who saw things “right”? Seeing as a kind of justice.

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of your plays. No one would come and they’d never make any money but it would be wonderful.” What you are writing is nice, she was saying, but it doesn’t fit into the world as I see it.

Look, here’s my philosophy of the theater: Everything fits.

My justification? So it is in the universe.

Enough with these dramaturgies and taxonomies. Enough with these textbooks and how-to guides. Those ways of seeing have not served us. I do not believe in the gods to which that vision is dedicated.

My prayer for theater: May the logic of creation, the logic of divine order, prevail.

There is no fear in that logic. It’s a logic of love.

The choreographer Deborah Hay choreographs in questions. Her questions always start with, What if...? To be in her dances is to put your body inside a new way of looking.

“Turn your fucking head,” she says. Over and over. She insists that you constantly refresh your visual fields. Not get too attached to one image or another. And you never stop asking the question you’re dancing. You ask it every minute, and with every cell in your body. What if where I am is exactly what I need? What if my grief is a form of celebration? And as you dance you feel yourself entering a new way of seeing.

When we see something like the video of the man being murdered – something that makes visible history and systems and hatred and violence – we have to look longer until we can see something bigger than that. Something vaster that swallows it up. Turn your fucking head. Turn your fucking head again.

We do not surrender to whatever the world does to us, and we do not drop our testifying. But we have to slip out of the terms we’ve been given. We have to stop seeing with the eyes of empire.

Or else we turn into grasshoppers.

Seeing is always an act of creation, a collaboration with other creatures and with God.

“ENOUGH WITH THESE DRAMATURGIES AND TAXONOMIES. ENOUGH WITH THESE TEXTBOOKS AND HOW-TO GUIDES. THOSE WAYS OF SEEING HAVE NOT SERVED US.” 2.

Let me be clear. I am struggling, myself, to see with the eyes I know I need.

I did not think I would see so much in the light of gender.

I did not think that mascara and wigs and pharmaceuticals would be given me as tools of the spirit. But I think they

have been, and I’m doing my best. At least, I tell myself, I know enough to see them that way.

My first playwriting teacher, Deb Margolin, used to say: “Ours is a theater of desire. It belongs to those of us ____ enough to claim it.” I can’t quite remember what the word I’m missing was. It’s dropped out of my memory. But the rest of that sentence holds, indelibly. In Deb’s beautiful voice, her magnificent forward lean.

Look: I am FaceTiming with a friend. I am trying to talk about the things I’m just starting to understand. My mouth opens.

I pick up the starts of sentences and I put them down again.

My words crumble. I don’t know how to say the thing that I am learning. The truth of the collapse that is finding its way into me and breaking open my chest.

Poor child, I was raised in the strictures of middle-class white sincerity. My social mouth is my enemy. I can hear the gates clanging shut every time I open my mouth and smile.

When I write, I am running up to the gates with my high-heels in my hand. Trying to figure out how to get to the other side.

But this is FaceTime. “I’m sorry,” I tell my friend, “I’m not there yet.”

I’m talking about my Promised land.

Look at me hang up the phone, stare out the window.

We return to order, to rules, to structures when we are uncertain about what to do. The first time I taught college playwriting I had a student come to my office hours.

“I like all the exercises we’ve been doing,” he said. “And I know that you want us to see all these different ways of writing weird plays. But. How do I write a normal play?

Like, just, a three act play. Can you just tell me how to do that?” He looked at me expectantly and opened his laptop to take notes.

My mouth opened but I didn’t know what to say. Not in a profound way but in a maybe-I-am-not-qualified-to-teachthis-subject way. I had no idea what a three act play was.

I think I made vague reassurances and managed to end the meeting. By the end of the semester I realized what the student had been asking: “I am overwhelmed by the possible.

I don’t know where to start. I don’t know how to choose.”

The next time I taught college playwriting I had clarified my task: help students practice choice-making in a vast field. Teach confidence in the act of taking a breath and running towards the things you love.

Seeing the landscape as your promised land. Don’t look for the right answer. Look for the answer you love. Ours is a theater of desire...

“We don’t know what will happen if we cross the river,” the two dissenting spies said. “But we know that we want to cross it.”

I saw a Q & A with the poet Bernadette Mayer where someone asked her, “Don’t you think it’s important to learn the rules first, before you break them?”

“No,” said Bernadette Mayer, and moved on to the next question.

Consider how desire can direct our looking, can utterly transform what we see.

PASTS / 71

Consider how desire is a structure more sacred than any rule.

But no one ever said it was easy.

Look everywhere and you will see that we are always sending spies out into the future. Professors, politicians, artistic directors. We ask them to go on our behalf when we don’t quite trust ourselves yet.

They pop over and suddenly become authorities on the Promised Land — our Promised Land.

They say: It’s a nice dream, but we’d be naive to think it could be real.

And: We love these ideas, but we don’t think this candidate will be able to win an election.

And: Prison abolition? Pie in the sky. No one will ever take that seriously.

And: We love this play, but unfortunately we don’t think our audience will know what to do with it.

We push back a little, gently. Because deep inside we already know everything we need to know about the Promised Land. We point and say: “We want to go. We want to cross the river.”

They shake their heads and say: We know. But. You artists.

You’re very naive.

But let’s be realistic.

They sprinkle the world with a gentle dusting of fear.

They ask us to think seriously about what might happen.

They say: You might not be able to keep all the nice things you have.

They say: You might have to shake hands with giants.

You might have to tell them why they frighten you so much.

They say: Your life might be simple, and full of uncertainty for a while.

And sometimes we believe them, and stop looking. And forget that we, too, have eyes to see.

On FaceTime, I tell my friend about the spies. I’m trying to articulate what I’m learning from the story. My friend who is considering a new direction in his life.

“The Promised Land,” he says, “rarely looks the way we think it will.”

It’s amazing to me, writing this, how often seeing resembles dissolution. Feels like breaking and hurts like falling apart.

A few people end up settling in different cities here and there. Places that seem nice enough. They save up and buy houses, they have kids.

Eventually they are all dead. All except for Moses and the two spies who shrugged when they were asked what would happen on the other side of the river, who came back and spoke of their desire.

Those spies are old now. And they’ve been very patient with everyone. They see the gorgeous variety of desert plants and animals. They are lovers and they listen to Tracy Chapman on a little walkman as they trek along. They loan each other books. I know these things are true.

Eventually they decide to break up because relationships are hard. But they stay friends. They look around and sometimes they wish they had fought a little harder to persuade everyone else that it would have been possible to cross the river. Sometimes they’re disappointed in the choices their friends and family made, and in some of the choices they made, and they get sad. But other times they feel alright. They don’t dwell too much on the past. They don’t have a lot of money. They let everything fall away.

They trust the light of the blink and they trust the territory of their seeing.

Maybe they’re in the promised land already. Maybe they just can’t see it. Maybe they’re still on the road.

I don’t know if it’s an ending or a beginning.

A

Addendum, 12/17/20.

In a recent email, Deb says: The blank in that sentence that the theater (the seeing place) belongs to whoever is _____ to claim it is demented but all that really means is: Whoever is passionate enough, in love enough, desperate enough, enough in love with God, to cross the river.

Nothing about my life is as I expected it to be. I was looking the wrong direction, I was telling the wrong stories. My vision was dedicated to gods I no longer believe in.

Maybe the right story is the story of an empire falling.

And I didn’t see it till now.

That’s all it means.

God is angry with the ten spies, and with the fearful, complaining Israelites. She tells Moses they’ll have to pack up and head back into the desert. Go wander for forty years, She says, until everyone who saw with those frightened, empirical eyes is dead.

So the Israelites pack up, turn around, and head back into the desert. They look over their shoulders, a little embarrassed, but relieved, since they are sure they are escaping a fate worse than death. In the desert the landscape is endless and monotonous. The food is boring. The company gets old.

This he said 4 years after he directed the construction of the first atomic bomb.

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I remembered it was J. Robert Oppenheimer who said: It is style that is the deference that action pays to uncertainty.

I trust in the power of Desire, which is really Love. I trust I can get across; Love is all that’s ever gotten me across.

People threw rotten fruit at me; laughed as if I were an old drunk. I crossed. I got cancer; I crossed. I gave birth: I crossed. I crossed on a thousand stages, just standing still. [...]

(Page 68) Noah Purifoy, “Adrian's Little Theater” (2000).

“NOW WE DON’T GO TO THE THEATER. THE REHEARSAL ROOMS ARE CLOSED AND WE CAN’T WORKSHOP OUR PLAYS. WHAT ABOUT OUR SEEING? CAN WE WORKSHOP THAT?”

PASTS / 73

NOWS 76 Notebooks

Adam Greenfield and Bob Moss

90 THE WORST THING YOU CAN HAVE RIGHT NOW...IS AN IDEA? Raja Feather Kelly

78 Not Writing Clare Barron

96 A Strange Loop: Portraits of a Musical Arnulfo Maldonado

84 Tellit To Me In My Ear James Ijames

97 Yet Another Reason Patriotism Is A Mistake Craig Lucas

86 Angela & JMM

Alaine Alldaffer, Lisa Donadio, Angela Lewis, and J. Mallory McCree

98 The Broken American Dream Rodrigo Muñoz

106 Remaking Ourselves

126 Intermission (Crossword)

Tomi Tsunoda

Adam Greenfield

110 Organizing In Community

128 Lortel & Obie

Ashley Chang and Libby Peterson

Tim Sanford

114 Check-In

131 That Doesn’t Apply to Me

Karl Baker Olson, Ashley Chang, Libby Peterson, Eva Rosa, Bonita Carol Thomas, and Libby Zambrano

Sylvia Khoury

116 Abundance

Jean Ann Douglass

Lizzie Stern

122 The Freelancer’s Pocket Guide to Budgeting Ari Teplitz

136 Morning

138 A Strange Loop: Portraits of a Musical Arnulfo Maldonado

139 a monologue to my sister because she can’t have a dialog Larissa FastHorse

PASTS / 75

Bob Moss’s accounting notebooks for Playwrights Horizons from the 1970s.

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Adam Greenfield’s notebooks from the summer of 2020.

NOWS / 77

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NOT WRITING Clare Barron

PERIODS OF not writing have always been part of my writing practice.

And when I talk about “periods” I mean like years. I wrote a couple plays in college, then took a break from 22 to 25 because I felt like I didn’t have anything to say. I started writing again at 25 then had a major mental breakdown at 30, was diagnosed with bipolar, went on psychiatric medication, and haven’t written a play since. It’s been four years.

I often think about that period from 22 to 25. And yes, fuck me.

I was so young. Who cares if you don’t write plays from 22 to 25 lol but the important thing is I really gave up on writing during those years.

I decided, “Okay, that’s it! I am not going to be a playwright. I choose a different path.”

And then I changed my mind.

1. It makes me feel good to know you can give up on something, and then change your mind.

2. I really feel like my writing got better because I took that break. And that’s my suspicion about breaks in general.

We’re all kind of on a break together now. Some of my friends are so productive during Covid, and I admire them for using this time. I am not. I’ve been really struggling with mental health. Bipolar, like a lot of mental illnesses, is triggered by stress, so it always flares up at the least convenient times. I feel like all my coping mechanisms are not available to me. Sex. Bars. Dancing. I’m the sort of manic-depressive who craves company. When I’m feeling sick, I drag my body out into the world and put it in spaces with other people who will get me drunk, take care of me, etc.

NOWS / 79

That’s the brutal thing about this pandemic. It puts our various identities in relief. You have kids? Now you’re really gonna feel what it means to be a mom. You’re single? Now you’re really gonna feel what it means to be alone. Who’s getting sick? Our essential workers. Who are our essential workers? Mostly Black and Brown people who are risking their lives and not getting paid what they deserve because racism is a pandemic and people are dying from it every. single. day.

What I want to say is that it’s okay not to write. For this whole year! For this whole next two years! It’s okay to not be a “successful” playwright in your 20s... 30s... 40s... It’s okay to not be a “successful” playwright at all. The systems that govern us are so broken and corrupt. Why do we need them to validate us?

Something I asked myself when Dance Nation was happening amidst the flurry of “teenage-girl plays” that spanned the last few years is, would these plays be as lauded, popular, etc., etc. if they were written by 60-year-old women.

Look at the reviews for those plays. They use words like “voyeuristic,” “raw,” “trembling.” There was a sexual (!!!) excitement around getting to be a fly on the wall and watching these young, nubile creatures (lol) talk about sex, blow jobs, periods, YES, so thrilling to be in a young woman’s private space, a young female writer’s private space...

The American Theater gets a real hard-on for a 27-yearold debut, and it’s impossible to separate the art from this world-premiere fanfare. I’ve played with this whole sexualized image of youth my whole career. It is authentically who I am, but I’m also using it because I know that as a young, white woman in America, this is one reliable way in which I can have power. My youth, my whiteness, my thinness, my Yale degree have all given me permission and protection to talk about whatever the fuck I want and still be taken seriously. These aspects of my identity have gotten me attention, gotten me jobs… They’ve made me palatable to people in power.

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What makes me sad, though, is not just the way that critics and institutions cum for young writers. It’s the way that we, the artists, internalize this and become obsessed with success at 26 or 29… And to be clear! With good reason!

We’re terrified. We need money and security. Success in theater has always been about security. If I’m successful, I’ll get to keep making my plays (actually not true, but that’s for another time lol). If I’m successful, I can teach, or get a TV deal or whatever. It’s fucking hard to live in New York without success. It’s fucking hard to wait 15 years for someone to put your play on. It fucking sucks. It’s not fair.

And it often makes you bitter and depressed and with good reason!

Our need for success makes taking breaks really scary.

Our obsession with young success makes people go crazy and feel less valuable as they get older.

We have to fight both of these things.

I haven’t written a play in four years. I don’t know if I’ll write a play ever again. Who cares.

My prayer for us is simply that we’re not afraid to get old.

My prayer for us is simply that we value the things we learn with time. That as much as we celebrate and listen to young people rising up. We also make space for people who have been living before us. Who have been working before us.

That we do not forget the labor that has already been done.

The things that have already been said. Before #metoo.

Before Black Lives Matter. PEOPLE WERE WRITING ABOUT THESE THINGS AND THE THEATERS WERE NOT INTERESTED. I pray that we lift up the voices that came before us. That we read our old plays and rediscover what’s there. That we allow for people to emerge at all ages. We allow for people to begin at all ages. To quit, and return again. To take breaks. And to come back to us. And we will welcome A them with open arms.

Photos courtesy the author.

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Tellit To Me In My Ear James Ijames

One eye at a time,

You are coming to the realization that you are inside a play. You smile

at this realization because you like plays. Sometimes you

looooove plays. Other

times you would rather not. You become aware of your breath. Haaaaaaaaaaaa. You are excited. You have been waiting awwwwwwll day to see a friend you hadn’t seen in a very long time. You and your friend have shared a birthday and an intense relationship that spans many years. This meeting… is special. Because you have traveled a great distance to get here. You are now in a city that is completely foreign to you. You arrive at the rendezvous location. Just past the church, arooooooooound the corner from the drugstore and across the street from a

BIGOLE TREE that’s both tall and wide. It’s the kind of tree you expect to find in

a movie about magic. You look at the tree. From the root to the last leaf on top. “I been here before?” It feel like a memory of something or someone close to you. That sensation of the familiar creeps up from your wrist and tattoos your skin with chill bumps. You’ve been here before. But you don’t remember why or with whom. You just know that you have been in this very spot. You look at your phone to check that you have the right location. That you have arrived at the right place. “That’s the right time too… I did it right.” Yes. You have. A lace like shadow opens and spreads across your face like a setting sun. You look up from the phone, your friend is standing before you. You sit, arrested for a few moments, peppered by the moving dalliance of light filtered through the tree and your friend. They become one thing to you.

YOU: Hello.

FRIEND: I dreamed of you last night.

YOU: Really?

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FRIEND: Yoooooou were walking along a bridge in the middle of the day and you were wearing green and I thought you looked so incredibly alive and well and recognizable. Like I could completely see you. You looked utterly vulnerable and I wanted so much to yell out to you:

“How do you manage to stay so damn sublime?”

But as I thought I might yell this in my dream I realized that I wasn’t just thinking about yelling it, I was, indeed, in the act of yelling at you. And you stopped and turned and looked at me and in the dream, it was as if you teleported me to the space right in front of you. Because suddenly, we were standing face to face and you took my hand and I opened my mouth to speak. And then I woke up. Soooooooooooooooooooo I had cawwwwlled you, to teeeeeeeeell you that I was thinking of you and that… I had hoped you would find some time to come and talk to me and I was awwwwwlso wondering if you could tell me what you were ’bout to say… you know? In my dream?

Oh no. Oh no. You care very much for your friend. And you want to desperately to be able to give them the answer they are desiring You want to be able to tell them something so they can see what you see You take your friend by the hand and pull them in close to you Ear to lips You whisper something benevolent and wise in your friend’s ear Your friend looks at you You worry that you have said the wrong thing Your friend takes a few steps back… from you. “Is this it?” You think.

Your friend, finally, gives you a bewildered nod and walks away. Good talk. You wait as you watch your friend be swallowed up whole by the horizon line. You wonder if you have broken them.

You open your mouth to speak when— One eye at a time, you are coming to the realization that you… have overslept. Shit. (Blackout.

That’s It.)

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ANGELA & JMM Alaine Alldaffer and Lisa Donadio interview Angela Lewis and J. Mallory McCree

Casting Directors Alaine Alldaffer and Lisa Donadio sat down with married actors Angela Lewis and J. Mallory McCree to talk art, community engagement, and — of course — the story of their relationship, which began during the run of Kirsten Greenidge’s play Milk Like Sugar at Playwrights Horizons, co-produced with WP Theater and La Jolla Playhouse in 2011.

“ONE DAY, JAMAL AND I WERE DOING THE VERY FIRST SCENE OF THE PLAY, WHERE WE WERE ON THE HILLTOP LOOKING AT THE STARS.”

I. LISA DONADIO: I’m curious about why you moved to the West Coast. Can we ever lure you back?

you can learn how to take that on and off, it’s easier to navigate both worlds.

J. MALLORY MCCREE: I guess I never actually planned to go to New York. I went to Rutgers, and then my career started right out of school, so that was my world. I moved to the West Coast because I always envisioned myself here. I like space. I like driving. I like the sun. I don’t like the cold.

II.

ANGELA LEWIS: The first time I went to an audition and then to the beach, I was like, “Oh okay, I’m good, this will work.”

JMM: I will say, I miss Brooklyn — I named my child Brooklyn!

But the goal was always to be global, to be everywhere.

As long as we are on this earth, we can be everywhere.

LISA: Actors constantly ask about the difference between auditioning for film and television versus theater. You obviously bring your theater training to all the work that you do, but as an actor, how do you navigate the two? What do you see as the differences?

JMM: What’s consistent is doing the work. With film and TV, you do the homework as you would when you are tackling a play. The major difference is taking all the energy, minimizing it, and letting it be in you — not having to showcase it. The camera reads it. All you have to do is let it be in your eyes. It’s there. It just has to exist. In theater, you have to reach the audience all the way in the back. But the camera picks up on every little gesture. Everything means something. These eyes won’t lie.

ANGELA: Jamal shared something with me that Timothy Douglas told him. It’s a little explicit, but it’s a game changer.

JMM: “Drop your asshole.”

ANGELA: Relax!

JMM: We were rehearsing a play, and Tim Douglas was like, “J. Just drop your asshole. You are tense. Release. You are the instrument. You’ve done the homework. This instrument is well-tuned. Everything will flow.”

ANGELA: It was such a game changer for me. Once you get comfortable with yourself, you are more believable. “I am enough.” Just trust that. In theater, we learn to put on these characters and disguise ourselves and our voices, but when

LISA: What is the history of your relationship? I’m not going to lie; we feel a little responsible for it.

JMM: To make a long long story short, we’re both from Detroit, but the very first time I met Angela was the opening night of my first play in New York. I was doing Zooman and the Sign at Signature, and she came. I didn’t know that she was actually doing Inked Baby down the street at Playwrights Horizons.

Two years go by, and I haven’t seen — let alone thought of — Ms. Lewis. Then I see her at a Detroiters in NYC get-together. And then, just a couple of days later, I was in the Drama Book Shop and there was this young lady, I couldn’t see her face, but she looked very, very good, and I was like, “Hmm, who is that? Wow.” And she turned, and I was like, “Oh that’s Angela,” and then I had a whole thing in my head, “I’m not going to say anything to her, she won’t remember me, I should say something, no.” Finally, I went up to the counter — she was at the register — and I said, “Hey, I’m Jamal,” and she said, “I know who you are.” I was so enamored with her. I’m walking around the bookshop, pretending to read Shakespeare, and then I turn my head and she’s gone. And I said, “Oh well, that was that.”

ALAINE ALLDAFFER: Way to play hard-to-get Angela!

JMM: You don’t even know! So fast forward, I had an audition for a play for the Humana Festival, and they brought me in for one character, and then they said, we have a whole different project we want you to audition for, so I read, got a callback, and — I didn’t know it was a chemistry test — in walks Ang! So, we do the audition. And neither one of us gets the part.

The next thing: I had been workshopping Milk Like Sugar for two years already, and by the time it got announced that Playwrights Horizons was going to do it, I had no idea who was going to be Annie [his character Malik’s love interest].

So, we go to the reading, and I see Angela in the elevator, and we go to the table read, and she sits next to me, and I’m like,“You’re Annie? Oh wow, you’re popping up in my life.” Then we go to La Jolla and the rest is history. I’ll let her take it from there.

NOWS / 87

ANGELA: One day, Jamal and I were doing the very first scene of the play, where we were on the hilltop looking at the stars. I was talking to Rebecca Taichman [the director] after we finished the scene, and Jamal left. I don’t even remember what she said, but I said, “The scene is so romantic,” and she was like, “Well, I don’t think Annie knows the word ‘romantic’ yet,” and I said, “Yeah, but you can feel it — there are the stars, and this boy standing across from me with these big, beautiful, almond eyes, and you can’t really ignore that,” and I look over and Jamal’s standing at the door grinning. And I was like, “Oh great.”

Milk Like Sugar was my first show in two years, and I was much more nervous about it than I thought. Then, one day, we’re leaving rehearsal, and I go over to my bag, and there’s a box of stress relief tea, and a note: “From almond eyes J.” And I was like, “Aww, okay, that was good.” So that kind of opened the door for conversation.

LISA: Nice move.

ANGELA: Yeah, that was a nice move.

JMM: I’m romantical, what can I say?

Now, when I go to a new city, I love traveling and exploring the city, so I asked the cast, “Do you guys want to go to the zoo?”

ANGELA: No, you said, “I’m going to get on this bus and get lost,” and I was like, “Yes, I like that! That’s adventurous! Okay!”

JMM: And I was like, “For real? Okay.” So our first date was actually at the San Diego Zoo, and we didn’t tell anybody we went. We were travelling all over San Diego while she was the lead of this show.

ANGELA: He did help me get through the play. It was a beast.

III. LISA: How have you been holding up during this time?

ANGELA: This time can be so scary, but I think our daughter Brooklyn is the reason we are getting through it. She keeps you in the present. She keeps me grateful. Also, she’s so funny and amazing. She does something new every day, so as long as I can keep the news at a minimum, she really keeps me where things are good. We take our walks — it’s always good to get some sunshine and some fresh air. We just continue to find fun things to do. It’s been a blessing in disguise for us.

JMM: Also: being able to dive in creatively, actually having the time to work on film projects like The Zoo, finding new ways to develop work that we want to see, and using this crazy time that we’re in to amplify the messages that we want to get out there.

ANGELA: Since having Brooklyn, I’ve found where I want to lend my voice. My birth experience was amazing, but it was really expensive. The resources that I had access to are resources that all women should have — not just women who are doing well. The fact is that more Black and brown 88 / ALMANAC

“WE WANT TO SEE OURSELVES. WE WANT TO SEE A DIVERSE RANGE WITHIN OUR OWN COMMUNITIES.” women die when they are giving birth than any other group of women. That is awful.

It’s something you have in the back of your mind when you are giving birth. You shouldn’t have that kind of stress on top of the stress you are already feeling. They wanted to induce my labor because Brooklyn was a week late. But I didn’t want to take the Pitocin, and I didn’t want to have an epidural, so I was trying to induce naturally. I was supposed to have a water birth — that is what I planned on. I went to an acupuncturist, I had a massage, I went to a reflexologist — all of these things, trying to get her to come on out. She didn’t budge, so I ended up having to be induced. But I think that was perfect, because in having the experience that I wasn’t planning for, it enabled me to understand how much better a hospital birth can be. I chose to go to the hospital where my midwife has privileges, so that I wouldn’t have to be with a random doctor who I didn’t know and get caught up in that system. I had an equation in my mind: this plus this plus this equals death, because so often it does. So, number one: I had my midwife with me to help deliver my baby. Number two: I had my doula.

Number three: when she gave me Pitocin, she gave me very low levels, so it didn’t push my body beyond what was safe, which is what happens so often in the hospital. She gave me an epidural, but she gave me a lighter dosage. I told her that I wanted to be able to push the baby out, because often when you get an epidural, it numbs everything — and you think you’re pushing, and you’re not pushing, and that causes the baby to stress out. I wanted to be able to feel her. So, she turned the epidural off when it was time for me to push, and by the time we got to the time, I could feel everything. That was incredible. Who knew that you could turn the epidural off?

LISA: I had no idea. I’m learning a lot right now.

ANGELA: Yeah! It is crazy. You can even decorate your room.

Who knew? There was a lot that I learned. The actual birthing process was so buck wild. I want to help women know the situation, the realities, the good and bad. That happens when you are educated about your options. That happens when you have midwives and doulas in the room. That happens when you can advocate for yourself or you can have someone advocate for you. I just want to be an educated consumer. I spend so much time researching pacifiers.

ALAINE: You just really want to pay it forward.

ANGELA: Absolutely. So, I’m starting to tap into the birth community in Detroit.

JMM: We have been having talks about how we can go back to Detroit and have an impact on the city that we came from.

ANGELA: This morning, I found a community of midwives there, and one of them happens to be married to a friend of mine, so I’m really excited for this journey. I want to see what they are already doing and what the community has already got going on.

LISA: Was that something you had been thinking about, or do you feel like it was prompted by having this downtime?

ANGELA: Probably a little bit of both. So often, we have to jump back into the work. I was on hiatus for a show, so I said, “I’m going to take my 40 days.” I dedicated that time to healing and nurturing Brooklyn and myself, and really just taking the time that we need. I’ve been able to reflect on how amazing it is that I have a postpartum doula who comes everyday, makes me food, and knows the things that need to be done so my body can heal. Not everybody has that — most people don’t. Most people have never heard of a postpartum doula.

LISA: I think I’m one of those people. Are there organizations that exist that you are working through, or that you would like people to be aware of?

ANGELA: I’m just starting my process, but here in LA there is a center, Kindred Space LA. I went to their breast-feeding class, and it was amazing. They have mommy-and-me groups and daddy-and-me groups, so I continue to go. In Detroit, an organization I came across is Metro Detroit Midwives of Color, and they seem pretty awesome. I’m excited to find the community of doulas and lactation consultants and put everybody together and figure out where my lane is going to be.

LISA: That is wonderful.

ALAINE: I’m excited for you, changing the world. Speaking of the world changing, there have been seismic shifts just in the last few weeks. J., how has that affected your vision and your platform and your work?

JMM: Where do I begin? I’m definitely figuring out what this means being a Black man in this time period with a pandemic-within-a-pandemic. I think you have to come to terms with: what privilege do we, as people of color, have? Once you understand what privileges you have, you can support other people. I have gotten involved with a Mutual Aid Network called Ready to Help LA. We are currently helping get food to those in need. We’ve partnered with World Harvest. Forty dollars gets a whole family a basket full of food. I’m also advocating for undocumented people, because they don’t have a voice. They can’t call the cops, they can’t get government funding and support, so there’s an organization called No Us Without You. We are food-raising and fundraising for them.

I just got off a call earlier today with an organization I support called United Voices of Literacy. They get professional actors to come in and teach young kids from underserved communities how to read. It’s almost like 52nd Street Project, only it’s more tailored to the film industry. You work on selected readings with a student over the course of a month, and at the end of the month, they have a big reading presentation. We are teaching them not only how to read but how to feel comfortable with public

speaking. I’ve been able to rally a lot of my other actor friends and get them involved.

I’m just putting my boots on the ground and being on the frontlines in the best way that I can. What else can I do? How else can I support? I’ve got so many friends who have projects, and we’re donating to them and helping to amplify those voices. And going back to the artwork and being creative. And being the best father I can be at this time. I walk around with this double consciousness: what is my daughter going to say about me when she gets older?

“Oh, my dad, he did this, and my mom...” I’m always thinking about what I can do to lift her up, because she is the seed of all of this. What can we plant so she can blossom?

We spent my first Father’s Day back in La Jolla. I thought, “How full circle would it be to spend my first Father’s Day in La Jolla?”

LISA: It’s so great to hear the things that you are doing to bring your voice to all of these important issues. Where do you see theater and film and the industry in general going from here? How does it evolve? How do we grow?

JMM: Well, obviously we have all seen the pushes for theater diversity. Continuing to do new works by amazing artists of color and the non-binary, gender non-conforming, and LGBTQ artistic communities. Saying, “These are the voices that we want.” Making it more inclusive of everyone — because everyone has a story.

Obviously, this is a business, and it is about the patrons.

I remember, with our show in particular, we tried to get a diverse group of patrons to come and see the show. I definitely think it’s about outreach. That is definitely where to start. That is what will actually have an effect on the plays that get produced.

There has to be diversity across the board. In Hollywood, there’s a petition to make sure that every major studio has a person of color in a position of power to actually effect change. For so long, the people in the executive suites were straight white men, and you were just going to see a reflection of that. There needs to be people of different backgrounds in these positions of power to actually make things happen.

We want to see ourselves. We want to see a diverse range within our own communities. We want to see sci-fi! We are not a monolithic people. We can’t even get people to agree on whether or not to wear a mask, so what makes you think we all want to see the same thing over and over again?

ANGELA: I think that everything is going to change: how many people can gather together at one time, and what does it mean to be in a live space with sweat and spit popping off, and all of the things that make theater really engaging.

When a person is riled up and passionate, things happen, so I am very curious and excited about how human beings find a way to maintain the things that are crucial to our survival. We need to be hugged, we need to be touched, we need to be with each other. How do we do that and still be safe? I’m fascinated to see how we make our way A back to each other.

(Page 86) J. Mallory McCree as Malik and Angela Lewis as Annie in Milk Like Sugar (2001). Photo by Ari Mintz.

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THE WORST THING YOU CAN HAVE RIGHT NOW...

IS AN IDEA? thought by raja feather kelly

Buddhists define eloquence as the telling of a truth in such a way as to ease the suffering of others. The more suffering that’s eased by your telling of a truth, the more eloquent you’ve been.

— Je Tsongkhapa

PROEM

I

don’t know anything about anything. I make it all up. I watch TV or otherwise read poems, memoirs, and self-help books. I never watch the news. I listen to music: sad-core mostly, or rap, rapped by women. Theatre holds a special place in my life… I watch a lot of theatre in order to adopt principles, ascribe to value systems, or otherwise discover rules to live by. I understand theatre, or rather I seek to understand theatre as a means for taking in the world, and I understand that I do that. I and my body love a metaphor.

I especially enjoy the scripting of reality television and the producers that manipulate the stories. How can something so terrible be based on someone’s real life? How can someone’s real life be so absurd? How does the absurd go so far in its own direction that it lands back at the truth?

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People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually, it’s the way things happen to you in life that’s unreal. The movies make emotions look strong and real, whereas then things really do happen to you. It’s like you’re watching television – you don’t feel anything.

— Andy Warhol

I am married, I have a dog, I think I have six sisters. I was adopted, but not legally, my friends are the most important thing in the world to me, and I am writing in a rhythm that matches the cadence of my thinking, and I am afraid that you might not understand my train of thought.* I escaped New York City. In the movie in my mind, COVID (which could be a musical — but not for the purposes of this moment), Black people are at risk of death, but if you’re Black and an artist you are kept valuable as long as you keep creating art. In order for me to do the best job I can, I ran away to a town that has the fewest cases of the virus. I am shacked up; writing, editing, exercising, and otherwise plotting a syllabus for the “re-opening.” I am in a single bedroom, in what appears to be a finished, open-floor attic. I thought I was going to nap. I put on a video of Black people telling stories about their dancing histories and spent three minutes listening to a choreographer who is similar to my age, who was born where I grew up, and whose family moved to where I was born. I know this man, but I don’t know him, and in only three minutes of watching and listening, I understand it’s very possible that we could have crossed paths before graduating high school. We did not.

We also could have gone to the same college. I got a full scholarship to Rutgers University — this is where he went — but I did not accept the ride. I am fascinated by this moment of looking at someone who not only looks like me — sort of,

he’s much prettier — but also who shares a similar journey to mine. Journey to where? I don’t know… but it’s rather uncanny. After a quick google, I am also made aware that he joined the Trisha Brown Dance Company the year after I auditioned for the company and refused an offer. I don’t know why this is important. [My Co-Star app goes off. Your day at a glance: You want to be everywhere.]

Instead of Rutgers, NYU, DeSales, SUNY Purchase, I paid $200,000 in student loans to go to Connecticut College because it was called a baby Ivy and I thought it would be a better story. I didn’t take the job with Trisha Brown that year, or Wim Vandekeybus the year after, or Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker two years before that, because I wanted autonomy. A kind of liberation I am still looking for. Looking at him reminds me of all this. And after three minutes of listening to him, the video stops, the Internet cuts out, and I am left stewing in the wonder of how I got here.

My nose is a bit runny from sleeping with the air-conditioner on. My stomach hurts from eating sub-par BBQ from a food truck, followed by a bowl of Captain Crunch. I’m on a diet. I diet a lot. I am a serial dieter.

I’m confused.

What is the moment I refer to when I say ‘here,’ when I ask myself how I got here? Location? Point in time? Point in space? The moment of a thought? The conclusion of a thought? This weight? This room? Or to think about all this through writing. Right! I’ll write. Alright. Oh. Right. What a terrible idea.

It’s not that I think ideas are either great or all bad. And yet, it is a sad decade when conversations with your friends are mostly about all the things that you shouldn’t do or say, or write, or tweet, or photograph, or otherwise think.

Some of these ideas are the bravest, most honest, most gag-worthy ideas.

There is a great fear of being seen, being called in, being called out, being cancelled, of making mistakes in an effort to learn. Or unlearn? To make a mistake is to bear a Social Scarlet Letter. And if I am correct, we wear that to the grave.

Epitaph: “my bad.”

Is this such a bad thing? We are asked to think twice, speak once, or not speak at all? We are asked to consider who we could hurt, or who we could harm, or who could use the mic more than the person holding it, or who has proximity to it, or who has the means to even hold it. Before you speak, here is a metaphor: consider that you are only as powerful as the most tender in the room.

Everyday, I seem to talk myself out of writing a novel. Because mostly it feels like I’m living one. Do

you know that some people do NOT have an ongoing monologue in their head? Not a theatrical monologue, but an ongoing stream of thoughts and ideas and musings about the experience of living as they are living it? You must look this up — I implore you to look it up. I am not one of those people, in fact I am just the opposite. I am a person who has so many different dialogues and monologues going on in their head, it almost makes me anxious. If I weren’t so interested in it, I would be the most anxious person. Truly.

I don’t sleep much at night, I get up as early as I can without an alarm, and I am constantly observing, evaluating, and narrating the scenes of the world in front of me back to myself in real time.

I’m sitting here, lying here really, on my stomach, not working out because I am so tired, and so worried because the world seems to be crashing in on itself, and I feel so certain that we’re all going to die, explode, or otherwise, and I realize I say ‘or otherwise’ a lot because I like to consider options. My point is that due to the fact that we cannot differentiate the truth from a fact, from a desire, from an idea — we hate ourselves to a degree of debilitation. Whether or not we can recognize this or not. We are some of the most creative living species alive, so creative. Creative in that we are able to weave lies, hundreds of years of lies. Lies that we continue to tell ourselves today. We are so creative.

Creatively imagining and reimagining our existence, thinking ourselves into ideas that take up the time from morning until sleep and then we start over again. Our creativity is thriving. We are a class of creative liars. The truth is disguised in plain sight and the lies are executive producing our press releases. If anyone is making money, it is payment for being complicit in someone else’s lie. Ammiright?

Believe me or think I’m crazy, think me funny or mad. But is a lie such a bad thing? I believe in nuance.

The New Negro sits on my pillow. Where my husband would be if he were here with me. He’s home, in Brooklyn with the dog, working hard. He is a light. The New Negro is a book that… well, I haven’t finished it yet, but the foreword has got me shook because I can’t seem to understand how a book that was copyrighted in 1925, with a new foreword from 1999, can so accurately describe the time we are living in right now. [Timestamp: August 6th, 2020, 7:37 PM] I guess, I have something to write about.

I don’t know. I have to use the bathroom.

I’m back. And here’s what I got…

Fuck You, James Baldwin.

That’s the truth I want to tell. That’s the show I want to write.

I dunno. Fuck you for being so damn smart, and so observant and so slick with your tongue. Thank you for taking up so much space, no one ain’t got no ideas any more. We’re just here unpacking your shit. Unpacking the world you left behind. I mean fuck.

How many fucking emancipations does it take to free a nigga?

Must I leave what I know in order to come free?

What would be of James Baldwin if he had stayed in America through the rise of McCarthyism.** How much time do you want for your progress?

— James Baldwin You must accept them [white people] and accept them with love for these innocent people have no other hope.

— Uncle Jimmy

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

— Mr. B

Someone’s life’s work could simply be just to use their experience of living to flush these quotes out.

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Meanwhile, I am like…

I don’t think I knew I was Black until Obama was ele­ cted president. I mean, there was a significant shift in my Blackness after Obama was elected president. Like being Black somehow became a currency?

Where I grew up everyone was Black or poor. Those tokenized were white girls, who made

an effort to get their hair and nails done to look as much like the Black girls they were hanging out with. No one had a problem with it. In fact, the more these white girls appropriated and assimilated, the more they were accepted.

Anyway, all our parents were drug addicts and everyone called each other a “Nigga” and everybody hated gay people.

While I hate when other people say this, no words are truer: “That’s just the way things were.”

When I went to college, I was class president, I started many clubs, and my Blackness just wasn’t a thing I had to think about. Or I chose not to make it a thing. I knew who I was and where I came from and I had just made my grandmother drive four hours away from home in her Honda CR-V so I could become something other than what many of the men in our town became: Dead, a Drug Dealer, or Diseased.

At least that is how it was laid out for me.

So in 2008, when I had returned from Study Abroad, there was a shift in me, and a shift in everyone else. When I was away, people thought I was Michael Jackson, or Michael Jordan — no kidding — and when I came back, it was difficult not to realize that I was the only Black person in every classroom at my college. Except maybe dance classes. How did I not understand that before? What had I been ignoring, or distracted by?

I was studying poetry — which no one cared about. It’s important to mention that at this time in my life I had lost my moral compass. Having grown up going to church two days a week and having to sit through endless admonitions — admonitions at war with your heart — at some point it felt better to leave morals at the door and live life. And learn from TV. Where everything changes and then ends. I had no idea what was right or wrong at that point, no understanding of God, or any gender or sexual identity that made sense.

Just a penchant for suicide, poetry, and dancing — which I called monster-making in my head. But now, I had to carry BLACK in a whole new light.

I became everyone’s own private Obama. The closer white people got to me and my Blackness, the closer they believed to have gotten to Obama. And I guess that was meaningful to them.

Fast forward eight years to James Baldwin’s timely I Am Not Your Negro on the heels of the end of Obama’s final term as president. It seems, in some ways, we’re back to where we began again, confused, identity-less, and looking.

While I Am Not Your Negro purports to be Baldwin’s personal account of the lives and assassinations of three of his close friends — Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. — it truly is a censuring of America’s failure to redress its humiliating history of racial inequality.

Therefore, I Am Not Your Negro became a campaign.

Blacks all around, UNITE, and plant your flags, disengage, decolonize, expel the whites from your lives, minds, histories, and bodies, for you are nobody’s Negro.

At least this is how the social campaign presented itself.

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So long as I was anybody’s Negro,

I could in fact not be. It seemed. This is to say that your acceptance of me allowed me to be who I wanted to be, to be abstract, to be a thinker, to be a future poet and pop-cultural anthro-pop-nographer novelist trapped in a choreographer/ director, filmmaker, lover, storyteller’s body who happens to love the young white women starlet actresses from the 90s candy-colored wet hot American camp-stamp, and the polished white glam queens the starlets would never become, and the glory Hollywood gay-defining grand mistress-glamqueens who the polished white glam-queens fought so hard to separate themselves from. (Think Christina Applegate < Julianne Moore < Joan Crawford.) Am I their Negro? They made me curious, funny, campy, emotional, thoughtful, scared, vulnerable, and witty. They made me want to go to college, want to have a life, and want to be smart.

But I noticed other Black people in 2008 when Obama was elected too. I met my sister and brother in college.

We locked in our friendships around 2008. I think then we were allowed to be as smart as we wanted to be. Were we each other’s Negros? Were we now allowed to want a future beyond being someone’s edgy Black friend?

Anyway, these are my musings from two out of four pages of the introduction to Alain Locke’s The New Negro.

Or do I give my credit to Trump, Black Lives Matter, Beyoncé, Viola Davis, Being Mary Jane, Michelle Obama, Kanye West, Kerry Washington, or the death of George Floyd?

I saw Act One of Hamilton on July 5th. I didn’t finish it on account of not being able to understand the choreography. But dance on film is hard to watch. This feels related.

It’s become dark since I came to this room, the headquarters of my mind. Housed here in the Vermont getaway,

away from the city, I have been able to escape. In order to survive the made-for-TV (not so, but could be a musical) movie going on in my mind. It has now begun to rain.

I have got a frozen video loaded, and I have only read the introduction of a book, and I had an idea to write, and I’m debilitated trying to understand how I got here. Where am I? Who am I? Today I got a letter in my inbox from an investigator. My company is being charged for discrimination. From a person who used to be a company member and a friend.

The details aren’t mine to go into, but sometimes I imagine that closing my eyes and perhaps never waking up might be a better option than existing in a world where our integrity and our curiosities are on trial daily. I thought theatre was a place where we could escape, where we could radically imagine the lives that we want to live and not the lives that we have to face, and then the curtain goes down.

There must be room for representation, curiosity, and mistakes. There must be room to cast the protagonist as Truth with Ideas as the supporting roles.

I see your radical imagination and I raise you moral imagination.

My nose is still running, and I’m afraid that everyone will think I have Covid-19.

No one wants to be caught Black and with an infectious disease in Vermont. Not a good look.

Can I take a moment here, one more? Are you with me?

Are you on my train of thoughts….

I’m so tired of press releases and descriptions of art projects saying, “in response to Covid-19,” as if Covid-19 isn’t an infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which has resulted in a Pandemic — an epidemic of this infectious disease spread worldwide.

Specifically in the U.S, where the race and ethnicity of 93% of the cases are known, Black Americans continue to experience the highest overall actual Covid-19 mortality rates — more than twice as high as the rates for Whites and Asians, who have the lowest actual rates.

I think about this every time I sneeze and every time someone says that their musical reading, their dance performance, their poem about woodworking, their losing their virginity, or their bread-baking adventures are in response to Covid.

That’s their truth.

I’m a nigger. That’s my truth.

Arguably.

Anyway, I’ve been going to therapy, it’s great. They are like, damn, your parents fucked you up. And I’m like yah… then I went to theatre — cause that’s what they told me to do in New Jersey when life at home wasn’t benefiting. And now I am here and we are tearing theatre down cause we hate ourselves. Cause we don’t want to be anybody’s niggas.

So, if Buddhists describe eloquence as the telling of a truth in such a way that... in such a way that…

* Have you ever seen Pixar’s animated movie Inside Out? If you know me, you know I am not a fan of animation, but what really got me hooked on this movie is perhaps finally having this understanding of my mind. Something I continue to refer to. At this moment when I was writing, I meant to refer to Pixar’s train of thought, but I didn’t. When I later returned to thinking through why a flash of that train came into my mind, it seemed to make sense.

The Train of Thought is a train that travels all over the mind. The train runs on tracks which form in front of it and disappear behind it. It goes all around the mind in an unreliable way and delivers daydreams, facts and opinions, and memories. The train only runs when you are awake. ** I wonder how James Baldwin would have fared during McCarthyism? He was already a Black man, under close watch. Thrilling that he was able to escape America, enough to look back at it and reflect it back to us. Ever-so-eloquently guiding us toward a more nuanced understanding of our most complex issues.

Wait.

“In such a way.” Let’s stop there. Could a lie ease someone’s suffering if we are not able to tell truth from lies? Have we asked ourselves if we know the difference between a truth and a lie that we have hoodwinked ourselves into believing?

My truth is that I truly believe that we are all dumb and scared, and grasping for air. We are our own biggest threat.

We are all sitting in the mess we made, pointing the finger instead of changing our own diapers. We deny that our creativity comes from our ability to sell our own shit.

In such a way that it resembles gold.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

— James Baldwin

The worst thing you can have right now… is an Idea?

— Raja Feather Kelly

FIN.

A

Meanwhile, Warhol was fine. A white man doing as he pleases. Skipping the streets of America, taking on its stink, reflecting it back to us. Ever so eloquently guiding us toward a more nuanced understanding of our most superficial issues.

These two men represent the two sides of my creative brain.

Considering how I got here… the United States was struck by a cataclysmic event: McCarthyism (1949–1952), a political attack that forced artists to radically alter or adjust their lives and values. Some fled the country never to return, some were Blacklisted and forced to stop working, and others simply changed, recanted, disengaged, and shut up. Today, most of us are not aware of the serious consequences of that forgotten catalyst.

(Page 90, overleaf) Raja Feather Kelly, Court Tropico (2016).

Photo courtesy of the artist.

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By Arnulfo Maldonado 96 / ALMANAC

Yet Another Reason Patriotism Is A Mistake Craig Lucas

At birth we’re given native talents, limitations, an array of unasked-for things Then spend a lifetime trying to arrange them, do right by those we like, Rejecting those we don’t, and in the end we say God’s will is what we got That can’t be right Freely-given privilege, bestowed on some and not on others, must oblige us or We aren’t a we, but only I And what’s an I? The thing around which spins a hurricane Malignant bleats and farts of I I I I I I I While lives are flung into the treetops and people spin A storm of lies, deceit “But it’s unfair to take away what someone’s earned!”

Let’s try four hundred years of that injustice Then decide what’s right and wrong The balance never reads at once upon the spirit level New injustice will attempt to redress old Somehow somewhere someone will arrive at last at knowing that Free market capital is not the answer to humanity’s dilemmas And they will find a way to really make a meritocracy ’Til then I’m certain hoarding goods and cash and spinning lies around this dumb Idea of race will not reward a single soul except at Citibank Granting rights by law is not the same as changing peoples’ minds And how that’s done is not yet clear, at least to me; I’ve spent some surplus Decades trying to convince by reason, passion, science, and what’s come around is This resurgence of the worst in humankind—brutality, deception, theft, rape, war— All perfectly embodied in one Mitch McConnell Still even he has children. Please God help us all Keep Mitch McConnell’s children safe from what their father teaches And keep us humble, even me, the Great I am Who wants somewhere someday somehow to be a we

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THE BROKEN AMERICAN DREAM A series of illustrations dedicated to all who have left their home country risking everything for a better life.

To everyone who has felt unseen, to my ancestors, to the people standing next to me and the people coming after me: I see you and I love you.

Thank you for inspiring me and reminding me of the importance of telling our story.

Designed by RODRIGO MUĂ&#x2018;OZ

Special thanks to CAMILA ORDORICA

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REMAKING OURSELVES Tomi Tsunoda Almanac discussed fragility, collapse, and compassionate rebuilding with Tomi, who assumed the role of Director of the Playwrights Horizons Theater School — her alma mater — in July 2020.

ALMANAC: What does it mean to you to be returning to your alma mater, a school where you also served as a faculty member for many years, now at its head?

TOMI TSUNDOA: There is a sense of homecoming about it that feels reassuring. I’ve traveled through different eras of the school from different perspectives, and that creates a strong foundation to orient myself in the project of the school. On another level, though, the school is in a really different moment than when I was a student or when I was teaching there. Playwrights Horizons and New York University are in different moments, the city is in a different moment, the country is in a different moment, the species is in a different moment, the planet is in a different moment — these all are partners in the work. So I’ve tried to meet the school and its community where they are, and bring myself to the table from the truth of where I am, and keep us all in the context of the present. While I’m able to do that with knowledge of and accountability to the school’s history, when it comes to shaping training curriculum and cultural community, it’s felt important to really stand in the now and look ahead.

It’s funny, there’s this huge, important conversation going on in the US about belonging — needing to create a deeper and more authentic sense of belonging for more people. I grew up mostly in the US but also for a couple years in Japan, and a lot of my adult life has been spent working in different cultural contexts and with people from different parts of the world. That all has instilled in me a relentless craving for experiences that throw my sense of belonging into question. When I’m pulled out of the comfort 106 / ALMANAC

of a familiar context, in some place that is foreign to me and where I am foreign, I inevitably confront what parts of who I think I am are actually me, and what are the norms and expectations and habits that are learned, seeped into me like a tea.

So, on one hand, I’m returning to an environment that was crucial in rearing me as an artist and as a person, and because of the pandemic I’m stuck here for a good long stretch, and I worry sometimes about what unconscious ruts I might fall into. On the other hand, I’ve been away long enough that coming back feels like a disruptive adventure, which makes the stuff of myself that was created here a little more visible and strange. It’s exciting to come back to it in that way.

You’ve just spent more than half a decade in Abu Dhabi.

How has your experience of that place, and specifically of the knowledge community at NYU, shaped your approach to teaching, your relationship to art, and your understanding of the world?

Wow, this is an enormous question. The most fundamental impact of the knowledge community — and every professor out there will tell you this — is from the experience of teaching such a multinational student body. In classrooms where it’s rare for any two students to be from the same country or culture of origin, the concept of a canonized curriculum very quickly becomes absurd. Not only are each of them coming from a different background, but they are also all heading somewhere different after graduation.

Some may stay in the UAE, some may return to wherever

home is, or wherever they can get a work or student visa.

You can’t assume any universality in what they need to prepare for a life.

So that program steers away from teaching them what theater is or how it should be made or discussed, and instead asks them to explore what performance has the potential to be, what each of them uniquely might contribute to the contemporary global field. Their education is a lens for how they want to be in the world, rather than merely vocational training for a career in one version of the industry.

The two biggest gifts that came out of that for me were, first, how interdisciplinary and exploratory everything became. Because NYU Abu Dhabi positions itself as both a research institution and a liberal arts college, there was a really delicious focus on how to understand arts practice as a research endeavor, as a way of creating knowledge rather than just a means of expressing or reflecting feelings and ideas. This really shifted not just my relationship to teaching, but how I approach my own practice as an artist.

The second big gift was that the environment really nurtured something fundamental to what bell hooks calls anti-racist pedagogy, the ideal of de-centering the professor as the sole authority of knowledge in the classroom. As someone coming from a predominantly US cultural context, I had to acknowledge the limits of my own cultural knowledge and expertise, and invite the perspectives of the students into the learning with as much credibility and legitimacy as I did my own. The multinational community at NYU Abu Dhabi really forces that consideration, but it’s a good practice anywhere, even when the classroom seems on the surface to be more homogenous. It’s a good practice

“AS TEACHERS, WE HAVE TO KEEP LEARNING IN ORDER TO KEEP TEACHING. THE MORE DIVERSE THE STUDENTS ARE, THE BETTER TEACHER — AND ARTIST AND HUMAN — I HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO BECOME.” for teachers to own their limitations, and consider their classrooms places of learning for themselves as well as for the students, to conceive of a classroom as a co-learning opportunity rather than a knowledge delivery system.

I think this is especially important in the journey of figuring out how to show up for a lot of different students with a lot of different interests and concerns equally well, regardless of how much of their work aligns (or doesn’t) with your own field of interest and expertise. As teachers, we have to keep learning in order to keep teaching. The more diverse the students are, the better teacher — and artist and human — I have the opportunity to become.

The United States is currently gripped by anger and grief — the righteous but painful responses to centuries of white supremacy, police violence, and systemic oppression.

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How are you thinking about the unique challenges of this moment? Where have you found solace?

I’m not sure the challenges of this moment are unique.

These are the challenges that have plagued the United States for its entire history and prehistory, manifesting themselves according to the contemporary moment. I’m also hesitant to pretend I know the full texture of the contemporary moment as someone who has a lot of proximity to Whiteness and who just moved back to the US this summer.

Kathryn Yusoff’s book, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, does an incredible job of articulating how the crises of climate collapse have become more visible and urgent in a mainstream way because they have begun to directly impact White, economically-secure communities, though the same crises have been felt disproportionately in Black and Brown and Indigenous communities for a very long time.

I feel wary of naming the present moment as an exceptional era of crisis because the next question is: exceptional for whom?

Over the last few years, my own work and research have been centered in questions about what it means to build practices for this historical era of collapse. We’ve been in a period of collapsing systems for quite some time, and will continue to be for some time to come — ecologically, politically, economically, socially — everything from “Glaciers are melting irreparably,” to “What is Gender?” The collapsing norms of White centralism and state violence in the United States are part of that larger whole. It doesn’t usually feel good when things that have been normalized collapse, even if they’re harmful things, because every aspect of culture, society, and identity has been built around and through their frameworks. There is and will be more incredible suffering in incredibly inequitable ways; there are and will be more people reacting predominantly out of fear, trauma, desperation. It’s hard work to honor and attend to the truth of that and still keep moving forward.

I came to questions about crisis and collapse out of fear, initially — from a “how do I prepare for the end” mindset — but the biggest thing I’ve come to understand is that collapse is not an ending. It’s a clearing. It’s a moment when something unsustainable begins to crumble, and this inevitably creates space for remaking, an opportunity to build the future in a different and more sustainable way.

That’s where I find solace and also where I find my deepest sense of responsibility, accountability, imagination, and potential for healing. There are a lot of writers who have been leading in this perspective for a long time — Donna Haraway, Joanna Macy, Rebecca Solnit, adrienne maree brown, Octavia Butler, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Anna Tsing, Martín Prechtel, many others.

This election season, I’m thinking a lot about where we, as a culture and society, look for leadership. There’s tremendous existing wisdom in marginalized communities, particularly Indigenous and Black communities, in communities of folx with disability and chronic illness, in Queer community, in communities of undocumented workers, about how to thrive despite systems that don’t account or care for you, how to build networks of mutual aid, how to build family and community and relationship when institutions and governments are working against your wellness, how to navigate crisis with dignity and compassion. I find solace in how much survival and thriving has already been

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“MAYBE THE QUESTION ISN’T HOW TO GET PEOPLE TO THE NARROW SLICE OF THEATER THAT EXISTS IN THE INDUSTRY, BUT FOR ARTISTS TO OPEN UP WIDER ABOUT WHAT THEATER IS AND CAN BE.” possible, and how much knowledge and possibility and care is already available to us if we look for it in the right places.

There’s such temptation here to cut everything into binaries and easily containable boxes of right and wrong. I’m trying to hold onto complexity, to hold both/and instead of either/or, to unsettle things in and around me in compassionate ways.

Something that often comes up for me in teaching is how students think their job is to learn how to do something well so they can get it right, and eliminate feelings of doubt or insecurity or the stress of potential failure in their endeavors. This is actually the opposite of the goal, in my opinion.

The job is to learn how to navigate the space of not knowing as well as possible, how to gain more and more tools for venturing out into the dark space of the unknown so that growth can happen, how to keep your endeavors just out of your comfortable reach, so that you have to stretch, and next time can reach farther, how to do those things with accountability and compassion and patience and grace, how to do it with care and teeth at the same time. How to know when to let go and when to hold on. How to fail well, how to fall down well, how to get back up and move forward differently. This is as important in society and community as in art and learning.

I’m also thinking a lot about how to hold plenty of space for joy, for curiosity, for pleasure, for rest, for wonder, for excitement, for beauty, for humor — both within myself and within communities I feel responsible to. There is so much it’s necessary to fight for, and also it’s unsustainable and debilitating to be in fight mode constantly, indefinitely. I’m interested in how acting out of (and toward) pleasure, joy, beauty, mindfulness, thriving, listening, patience — how these things are also radical and important tools for making a more sustainable, compassionate, and just world.

What does it mean to teach during these fragile times?

Well — again — fragile for whom? Every time is fragile for someone. Times have been fragile for a lot of folx for a long time. More broadly, Higher Education in general is a space of fragile time. So is art making, so is collaboration. I think teaching right now means the same it always means — to meet each student where they are and help them gain the tools they need to make their way forward on their own terms, to contribute to the world and culture they’re a part of in ways only they can. It means creating opportunities for them to build confidence and agency and independence and interdependence and compassion and perspective, despite circumstances that are fragile — because circumstances can be fragile.

In the past year, getting ready to come home for this job, I’ve encountered a lot of people in US academia trying to prepare me for how fragile this generation of students is. In my experience, the opposite is true — the fragility of the moment is far more present in professors and administrators and institutions, as the norms and systems they’re accustomed to, the zones where their confidence is rooted, get interrogated and unsettled. I think what’s often read as fragility in students is actually their mistrust of the systems and leaders who are charged with shepherding them through their learning experience. They don’t want to be treated as glass; they want to be seen and respected and trusted. They want to be able to trust. This generation of students doesn’t get nearly enough credit for how resilient they are, how resilient they are expected to be. For educators to approach them as fragile, I think, does a tremendous disservice to their education because it increases the likelihood that we’ll respond to them out of fear instead of trust, that we’ll operate in ways that are self-protective instead of in service to growth. It makes us more likely to avoid complexity and difficult conversations, instead of modeling how to move through them well.

In arts education, and theater education especially, so much of what we ask of students requires tremendous vulnerability. We have to be willing to lead from our own vulnerability if we are going to expect it of them. And we can’t then criticize the nature of their vulnerabilities when they arise in ways we weren’t expecting or prepared for.

I know you’re not suggesting that the students are fragile — that this question is about teaching in fragile times — but I think it can amount to the same thing if we’re not clear about where the fragility is actually located, or if we’re afraid of fragility, of things breaking, of mess, of process, of collapse and uncertainty, of being very wrong. For me, spaces that deftly face those things, without or despite fear, are the most generative spaces to operate in.

What are your hopes for the school?

The faculty, staff, and I have been really united in looking at what it means to build a training program in 2020. Of course, this means a lot of different things right now. We’ve been thinking about the world and industry we’re training students for. It’s not the same world and industry that we were all reared in. We care about preparing young artists to shape the culture we’ll share for the next 50 years, instead of training them for an industry and set of systems that were established 50 years ago. Even before the pandemic, the US theater industry was precarious — the pandemic and its economic repercussions have really exposed just how precarious. Playwrights Horizons as a theater has always been focused on nurturing new voices, and the school is as well.

One of the core values that emerged across early faculty meetings was to equip the students with the tools they need to dismantle systems they’ve inherited, and to build new ones for themselves and for each other. In the midst of the pandemic and the acute reckoning with injustice happening across the country and across the industry, we are really rooting in the tools students need to move sustainably through this moment, however long it lasts — to train them to work with what they have in the present moment, whatever that looks like, rather than waiting around for things to be different or easy or for things to return to what they recognize from the past. I guess this

all means that my hopes for the school are that we — teachers, students, staff — can have the courage and humility to show up for each other in a way that allows us all to navigate the present moment and catalyze the future we want to build together.

What are your hopes for the theater? What must change?

There is a very little line between my hopes for theater and my hopes for the school. In an ideal world, a training program trains a rising generation to dream and manifest hopes for the future of the field. The biggest thing I keep thinking about is the difference between the future of theater as a field, an art form, a human activity, and the future of theater as an industry, as a collection of institutions. A really great conversation came up in my first class this fall, sparked by a student’s question about how to get people who don’t usually engage with theater to engage with theater. I asked a question about what counts as theater in that equation, and we discussed the fact that theater didn’t start with the Greeks — it started in ritual, ceremony, oral history, community activity. Wedding ceremonies are theater, political campaigns are theater, sermons are theater, lectures are theater, protest demonstrations are theater, presentations to a board of directors are theater, bedtime stories are theater. Theater is everywhere, and people engage with it every day. Maybe the question isn’t how to get people to the narrow slice of theater that exists in the industry, but for artists to open up wider about what theater is and can be, to look at how theater functions inherently as a part of human life beyond a fine art or form of entertainment, and to engage people there. I hope the theater community will look beyond what allows institutions to survive, embrace ways of making work that aren’t standardized, and invest in theater as a means of engaging community, not just as a means of engaging audience.

I think this is all very interconnected with questions about equity, justice, access, and representation. If there are and have been barriers to those things within the existing systems of operation, the entire ecosystem has to be allowed to break apart so it can be reimagined and reconstructed, rather than trying to gradually wedge little bits into what’s already there, or creating more and more regulations and union contracts within whatever cracks can be pried open a little further. We’re in an era of collapsing systems, which means we’re in an era of opening ground and opportunities for remaking ourselves. It would be nice to see the theater community really lead in the A courage of that reimagining.

(Page 107) Photos by James Wyrwicz (2020).

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ORGANIZING IN COMMUNITY Ashley Chang and Libby Peterson

“IN COMMUNITY” is an opt-in discussion group where members of the Playwrights Horizons community can unpack terms like “equity,” “diversity,” and “inclusion,” as well as dive into industry-wide debates over oppression and liberation. We — Ashley and Libby — have taken the lead on co-facilitating these dialogues since late April, when we hosted our inaugural session together.

The idea to start In Community came to us in January 2020, when we first joined the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Working Group (EDIWG) at Playwrights Horizons.

Around the same time, two of our coworkers — Artistic Programs Manager Karl Baker Olson and Associate Director of Individual Giving Eva Rosa — began sharing resources they’d received through “Diversifying Our Organizations,” a training intensive sponsored by A.R.T./New York and facilitated by members of The Raben Group. With well-curated articles about social justice circulating throughout the company, we started daydreaming about “office hours” or “book clubs” — low-key occasions to gather, learn, ask questions, and “mess up” — that would give folks a chance to dive into these materials together. Systemic injustice, white fragility, and decolonization can be hard to talk about, but we wanted to find ways to process these issues and ideas with our colleagues. We also felt we had the skills to hold space for these kinds of conversations. Libby had served as a Program Manager and Facilitator with artEquity, in addition to designing curricula on equity, diversity, and inclusion at Oregon Shakespeare Festival and, more recently, advocating for social justice at Yale School of Drama, where Ashley had joined her in those efforts. Ashley had received training through artEquity and NYU, and in her capacity as a doctoral candidate at Yale, she had gotten to study theories and histories of exploitation and emancipation. We could do this, we thought. By the time February rolled around, we’d formulated a proposal and pitched it to the group. About a month later, we got the green light to go ahead. But then the city shut down.

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During the early weeks of the pandemic, we wondered whether we should press pause and launch the group whenever everyone at Playwrights Horizons could gather in-person again. But we didn’t want to wait, so — with the support of company leadership — we gently modified our plans for Zoom, in the hopes that digital meetings might serve as a meaningful way for us to connect as we all sheltered at home. If the pandemic had never happened, these meetings would have happened in-person, during the workday, at Playwrights Horizons — likely on the fifth floor, in one of our rehearsal rooms — or at the Theater School downtown on Lafayette Avenue. Instead, we’ve convened every other week on our computers for 90 minutes at the end of the work day, distant and remote but in community nevertheless.

Since In Community launched, we’ve let the agendas take shape organically, in response to the aims and interests of those who’ve shown up. Throughout the lifetime of this brave space for celebrating difference as well as agreement, we’ve discussed inequity, privilege, power-sharing, and the term “BIPOC.” When protests against police violence erupted during the summer, we talked about our personal and collective commitments to action. When the letter “DEAR WHITE AMERICAN THEATER” was published, we read it out loud, line by line. When members of staff sought to launch affinity groups and learning spaces, we invited attendees to enter breakout rooms based around shared identities in order to lay some groundwork towards that goal.

Below, in the left column, you’ll find one of the agendas for a past session. We’re excited to share it in the spirit of transparency! Normally it lives in a restricted Google Drive folder, only open on our personal laptop screens during In Community meetings as a handy script for us to follow.

Our hope here is to open up our process and offer some insights into our thinking. In the right column, you’ll find our annotations, which offer additional context about our goals, values, and strategies.

In Community Agenda — Wednesday 8.19.20 Resources for Today’s Session: • We See You, White American Theater: Demands • Baltimore Center Stage: Response to the We See You White American Theater Demands • Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) staff members at The Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York: We Are A.R.T./ New York, and We Demand Better • The BIPOC Affinity Group at The Public Theater: A Letter from the Margin Welcome/Introductions (10 min) • First Name and Icebreaker Question (Drop into chat) (Ashley) • Land Acknowledgment (Ashley) • “Playwrights Horizons acknowledges that our theater, located on the island of Manhahtaan (Mannahatta), is situated on land that is Lenapehoking, Homeland of the Lenape. We pay respect to the Lenape peoples, Lenape elders, and their ancestors, past, present and future.

• As our theater’s work and community extends beyond this island, we acknowledge that the Northeast is the homeland of many Indigenous Nations. Playwrights Horizons pays respect to all Indigenous peoples who have stewarded this land throughout the generations, and to their ongoing contributions, culturally, intellectually, artistically and spiritually.”

• Adrienne Wong of SpiderWebShow in Ontario has written this digital land acknowledgement: • “Since our activities are shared digitally to the internet, let’s also take a moment to consider the legacy of colonization embedded within the technologies, structures, and ways of thinking we use every day. We are using equipment and high speed internet not available in many indigenous communities. Even the technologies that are central to much of the art we [make] leaves significant carbon footprints, contributing to changing climates that disproportionately affect indigenous peoples worldwide. I invite you to join me in acknowledging all this as well as our shared responsibility: to make good of this time, and for each of us to consider our roles in reconciliation, decolonization, and allyship.”

• Drop link in chat (https://native-land. ca/) and invite folx to share where they are presently situated

ASHLEY CHANG: A week before each session, we send an email to Playwrights Horizons’ entire Staff, Board, and Generation PH Leadership Committee (eventually we hope to find ways to include artists and audiences as well), sharing the resources that will be the basis for our discussion.

LIBBY PETERSON: We want to remove the myth of what might happen and what we might discuss. Transparency is key to getting as many people as possible around the table.

People need to know what they’re signing up for.

ASHLEY: This week, we wanted to read a few of the anti-racist statements and letters that had originated at our peer theaters. The work of undoing oppression might look slightly different from place to place, but often there is much in common. So, well in advance, we wanted to let folks know we’d be digging into the activism taking place elsewhere, with the understanding that it might unlock important insights about ourselves and even build a sense of solidarity between arts administrators across the industry.

During introductions, we only ask for first names, rather than organizational titles, to take a momentary step away from traditional institutional hierarchies. We also ask a low-stress icebreaker question. Recent favorites include: Fruits or vegetables? Savory or sweet? Favorite season?

When they’re done answering, we ask folks to “popcorn” the question over to someone else who hasn’t gone yet, which has worked well for us on Zoom.

This year, Playwrights Horizons began practicing native territory acknowledgement. Rooting ourselves in the history of the land, in the history of colonialism, and in the histories of the people who have lived and died here, is so crucial! We have to recognize past and ongoing harms, and situate ourselves in relation to them, if we want to disrupt systems of oppression and realize a more just future. We usually drop the text of this acknowledgement into the Zoom chat and ask for a volunteer to read it aloud. It’s important to us to make room for voices other than our own.

Since we’re gathering digitally, we have also adopted Adrienne Wong’s language about the privilege and power embedded in the technology we use to meet. While this acknowledgement has been such a gift, I’m hopeful that we as an institution can think critically about our particular relationship to technology, and about the relationship between technology and inequity, and come up with our own “digital land acknowledgement,” one that’s specific to Playwrights Horizons. I think the practice of acknowledgement needs to be personal in that way. It should reflect our values and commitments — and it should hold us accountable to them.

Lastly, we recently started sharing this resource, which makes it easy to learn more about native territories and the practice of acknowledgement. It’s so powerful to see where everyone is situated, not just geographically but culturally and historically as well.

NOWS / 111

• Review Agenda (Libby) • Greetings from Seaside, Oregon, the original lands of the Chinook people who are part of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz.

• Please remember that you can continue with your video off or on. And as we move through the session, please adjust as you have need.

• Agenda: • Welcome • Group Agreements Review • Mindfulness Exercise • Define Power Sharing • Personal Reflection • Small Group Discussion (splitting group in half) • Large Group Discussion (report outs and questions for the group) • Closing Group Agreements (5 min) (Ashley) • Briefly review • Lift up: “Be aware of your own power/ influence/authority – you have the ability to either curtail or elevate the conversation” • Anyone can use these in meetings, etc., or use this as a framework for coming up with your own with your coworkers.

• Ask for group sign off Mindfulness Exercise (5 min) (Libby) You can participate in this exercise with or without video.

Take a moment to breathe. Give yourself three good cycles of breath.

Take stock of your inner self.

Notice what you’re feeling.

Notice what you’re thinking about.

Imagine a set of shelves. Take the feelings and thoughts that tug at your current attention and place them there. You can pick them back up afterwards, these shelves are simply a holding place.

Begin to arrive into today’s conversation.

Pour into yourself the courage, honesty, and commitment. Take a deep breath. Root yourself into the earth. Find comfort. Find a secure footing.

You have no place to be but here.

When you’re ready, come back to the group.

Power-Sharing Definition (5 min) (Ashley) • Define “power” • Having influence, authority, privilege, or control over people and/or resources.

• Power can be distributed in these ways: • In the hands of one or two leaders within a top down/hierarchical model with authoritycentered focus, reliance, and practices.

• In the hands of many, sharing the responsibility of leadership and practicing a horizontal model with group-centered focus, reliance, and practices.

• Invite responses/questions.

112 / ALMANAC

LIBBY: Ashley and I take turns leading each section. It’s important to model the movement of racial justice and shared leadership. We wanted folx to see a white person and a person of color working together. We wanted to uplift the power of women in leadership. This is an intentional space and we should be held accountable to our ideals.

So often we see siloed efforts which don’t actually build the Beloved Community that Martin Luther King Jr. talked about. The Beloved Community was King’s vision for the future, which was brought about through reconciliation, love, and the communal, unrelenting pursuit of justice. The Beloved Community unifies all people, especially those at odds with one another, in service of a full expression and experience of humanity.

ASHLEY: At every session, we take a few minutes to go over our “group agreements,” a set of guidelines for respectful engagement that, according to facilitator Mistinguette Smith, help to disrupt inequity, shift how power is used, and foster mutual accountability. We want In Community to be a place where everyone’s particular “social location” — the unique nexus of their collective identities (gender, race, age, occupation, etc.) — is present but their positional power checked. We need to be able to ensure that senior staff members, for example, leave room for others to speak. Being able to refer back to these agreements makes that easier.

LIBBY: Often when we talk about issues of difference, we don’t acknowledge the physical ease needed to enter into conversation and the way we carry tension. Each mindfulness exercise exists to bring calm and centeredness to the body and the mind. It serves as a pause for the group.

ASHLEY: It’s such a gift to get to close our eyes and inhabit this moment of quiet and gentleness that gets us all in our bodies and in the present moment.

LIBBY: Language is powerful and it is also ever-evolving. We want folx to have the words to discuss the issues. We want them to have something to point back to. It’s also powerful for everyone to be rooted in the same concepts. We want to break it down and simplify.

Personal Reflection (5 min) (Libby) • What does power sharing look like for you in your life? Here at Playwrights Horizons?

ASHLEY: Especially when Libby and I lead with an initial offering, we always try to leave space for responses and questions from the group.

Small Group Discussion (40 min) (Ashley sets up, Ashley and Libby facilitate) • Each group (two groups) will have 40 minutes for discussion. We will guide the conversation in these groups.

• Two questions for consideration: (Drop into chat) • What is your emotional response to these resources? How might that shape how you receive them?

• What are the letter writers’ strategies? Why might they have chosen them? How are power dynamics and power-sharing at play here?

LIBBY: Personal reflection time serves as a pulse check for how something is landing on each individual. It’s a moment to distill down a person’s thoughts before jumping in together. It allows another way into the material.

Large Group Discussion (15 min) (Ashley guides, Libby supports) • Share out your reflections.

• Questions for consideration: What themes are emerging? What are your reactions to / feelings about these reflections?

Closing (5 min) (Libby) • Share a resource from Tools for Change: • https://www.bctf.ca/uploadedFiles/ Public/SocialJustice/EquityInclusion/ to%20equalize%20power.pdf • Lift up: “We can make active choices to create the space for transformation.”

• Asks some important questions in support of individual growth and power balance.

Speaks specifically to your personal role in redistributing power and interrupting your own problematic habits.

• We’re all responsible for the maintenance of power sharing, especially those with the power.

• Take a moment to reflect on this conversation.

What learning will you take with you today? Return to your shelves. Pick back up those thoughts and feelings you noted before our session. If something is too burdensome or cumbersome, feel free to leave it behind. These shelves can also be a place of release. Thank you for joining us and for sharing your time with us.

• Next In Community: Monday, 8/31

ASHLEY: Big group conversations can be tricky, especially in Zoom, where you can’t really read the energy of the room.

We often break the large group into smaller subgroups, where it’s (hopefully) less awkward and scary to speak up.

Of course, the risk with small groups is that, without a facilitator, microaggressions or other harms might go uninterrupted, especially when diving into resources revolving around “We See You, White American Theater,” which was sure to bring up a range of feelings. This time, Libby and I served as moderators for the small groups. We didn’t lead the conversations, but we were there to help lend it structure and offer reflections or questions if the discussions came to a pause.

During this session, we wanted the group — first in smaller subgroups and then altogether — to think about how their identities and lived experiences might have conditioned their responses to the various statements and letters we had all read in advance. We also wanted the group to consider why the letter writers did what they did in the way that they did them. Why use the language of “demands,” for example? With what power structures were they contending? Or, why sign these letters as a collective? What is the power of a united voice?

LIBBY: Just like it is important to set the right tone at the top of the meeting, it is equally important to put a button on the conversation. Folx need the opportunity to release the tension they may be carrying and any issues/feelings it may have brought up for them. It’s a way of caretaking and acknowledging the journey and end of the gathering.

NOWS / 113

CHECK-IN

Ashley Chang

Libby Peterson

What worked well?

I’m grateful to be in community with people I respect and trust. Though it’s felt chaotic at times, when I look back at the story of the last two years, I’m proud of our work. There’s been a great deal of progress. It’s easy to take the good for granted. We have a lot to learn and a long way to go.

I’m so nourished by my trusted coworkers, with whom I can be vulnerable about complicated, exhausting, and painful issues. When you have the gift of being real with each other, so much can get done!

Building community as a small but mighty group. It seems like there is space for action items, emotional processing, a difference of opinions/ideas, and accountability. It is a reflection of the Beloved Community that Martin Luther King, Jr. imagined.

Navigating the inherent vulnerability of this work has been challenging, especially during this time of intense isolation. Sustained, open communication has been tough. I’m trying to understand how to balance urgency with patience. How to navigate staying open, and remembering to soften when defense mechanisms roar. At once I feel both wildly disoriented, and incredibly powerful.

It’s challenging to figure out how to get from a place of reactivity to a place of proactivity. This year has felt thick with overdue apologies and after-the-fact responses — to tweets, to demands, to calls for action — because we (the institution) haven’t yet done the necessary internal work that would allow us to call ourselves into community. We’re just not there yet.

As someone on the inside, it’s been both frustrating and humbling to have to walk at the pace of the institution, when I want nothing more than to run.

Sometimes we doubt the contributions this group can make. It is easy to believe that a lack of institutional authority can create insurmountable barriers. I think there is space for us to move beyond hesitation and simply take action. Our practice of thoughtfulness should not inhibit necessary movement and progress for the organization.

How can we sustain our current level of commitment? What will things be like when we get back to the building on 42nd Street? As a white person, how can I take responsibility for shouldering the burden here, while continuing to step back and listen? How can I best work in service of shared liberation? What is a theater company’s relationship to justice?

What does it look like for an organization — a collection of individuals — to practice accountability?

How do we better include voices across the organization? How do we extend an invitation to loop in more staff and increase transparent communication and power-sharing?

Please share a burning comment or question.

Karl Baker Olson

What was challenging?

Karl Baker Olson, Ashley Chang, Libby Peterson, Eva Rosa, Bonita Carol Thomas, and Libby Zambrano

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ESTABLISHED AS AN official department of the theater in September 2020, the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Working Group (EDIWG) at Playwrights Horizons is responsible for advancing equity, diversity, and inclusion throughout the organization. The EDIWG emerged over the course of 2019, beginning with the work of Eva Rosa (Associate Director of Individual Giving) and Karl Baker Olson (Artistic Programs Manager) and select representatives from the Board and executive management. Since then, Libby Zambrano (Manager of Human Resources), Ashley Chang (Dramaturg), Libby Peterson (Manager of Student Affairs), and Bonita Carol Thomas (Data Analytics Manager) have joined their ranks, which now number

15: four Board members, one Generation PH Leadership Committee member, four members of senior leadership, and six staff members. As the EDIWG members who traditionally wield less institutional power than department heads and executive leadership, these six have found special camaraderie with one another. Here they offer some brief reflections about their ongoing work together. It’s a short register of feeling, a check-in of sorts, that borrows its structure from the informal surveys Ashley and Libby P. send out after In Community sessions, taking the temperature of those who showed up and want to share.

I genuinely don’t know how this happened so quickly, but the amount of trust this group has built with each other is incredible. Our ability to dig into the work and have frank conversations with each other — while trying our best to ensure that each one of us feels heard and cared for — amazes me constantly. This friendship and support I will be eternally grateful for. On a practical level, meeting weekly just to “check in” on each other has been super helpful in our work.

It’s empowering to share space with committed colleagues. Getting into the deeper discussions is fulfilling, especially during the times we live in now, where so much is a #hashtag or a tweet.

Working as a group of equals, rather than hierarchically, allowed us to rely on each other’s strengths and experience, and it gave us permission to admit where we needed support. Making room for messy imperfections bonded us. We were able to come to a high level of trust with each other through vulnerability.

We are all different people, from different backgrounds, with our own stories, right? Holding space for all of that, while trying to reach consensus on a point, can sometimes be challenging, but not unachievable. Finding a balance between processing and action is often a hard one for me. I am always ready to go go go, so learning how to slow down has been a great lesson for me.

Unlearning taught behaviors in front of others can be scary. My challenge is learning to be vulnerable.

Learning how to listen with positivity and accept where others are in their journey. No one comes to the work of accountability from the same perspective or exposure. How we pace ourselves and our actions is a constant struggle in group processes. As the old saying goes, “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”

This work, while not easy, inspires me.

My hope is that I can use my time on the EDIWG to affect real change here. I don’t know how much of a disruptor I really want to be in this work, as much as I do want to be a game-changer and do something that lasts. With that said, I wonder not how we can make room at the table for all voices, but how can we have everyone bring their tables together? How do we ensure that what we do today extends into tomorrow, grows, and, most importantly, evolves?

Will racism ever be a relic of the past? It seems natural that humans want to categorize, but when will humans learn to stop harmfully “othering” and weaponizing differences for the sake of power/ money/ego/fear?

The dismantling of a system must be done systematically. It has taken a long road to get where we are, and I wonder how many more times we will dismantle and rebuild as we find new cracks or loopholes where inequity has seeped in. If power is so corruptible of a force, what amazing potential can we unleash with the opposite?

Please share a burning comment or question.

Libby Zambrano

What was challenging?

Bonita Carol Thomas

What worked well?

Eva Rosa

NOWS / 115

116 / ALMANAC

ABUNDANCE Lizzie Stern

THE EXTENDED PAUSE in the theater industry brings a new forced perspective: what is life without theater? Who is the writer without the critic? The institution? The playwright’s work is now for no one else. This is a chance to deepen her relationship with herself. To curl up and let creative expression grow without critique or conformity to anyone else’s ideals.

no product right now — but for her guidance. The gesture goes beyond supporting artists in crisis; institutions are in dire need, too, and their survival requires an infusion of creativity and ingenuity that only artists bring.

Trying to write this essay in that spirit, I’ve retreated to a friend’s house outside the city while she’s away. I’m caring for her rooster and ten hens, who sing while they lay their eggs and then reveal them to me in colorful bundles each morning. The youngest is the loudest and my favorite — she belts her egg-song with all the vulnerability and strength of an eleven-o’clock number. I’m making something, she tells the world, and it might not seem like a big deal... but it is.

In September, Soho Rep announced their Number One Program: hiring eight artists on staff with a salary and benefits through June 2021. In a New York Magazine article, Helen Shaw describes similar initiatives at other small theaters now embracing an employment model. And in July, a collective of BIPOC artists, to whom institutions are now held accountable, released a 31-page list of demands titled “We See You, White American Theater.” It is a path to greater racial equity in the industry — or, as the playwright Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig puts it elsewhere in this magazine, “the most beautiful document I’ve read since the Green New Deal.”

I’m reading a book about self-expression. It’s called Unforbidden Pleasures by Adam Phillips, and it’s pop psychoanalysis about being happier and sharing yourself with the world authentically, which can be so hard. Phillips says, The artist can be conscious of himself only by forgetting the existence of other people.

The evolution of our ecosystem is following a pattern just like any other: conformity, then transformation. We are living through a period of transformation. Of new structures and new moralities that will change the rules that govern us all.

Phillips says, The desire for freedom is the desire for new rules.

And new rules mean new names for things.

Meanwhile, back in the city, theaters are turning more and more to the playwright. And not for her product — there is

I think we’re looking for a new language. And it is the language of the writer.

NOWS / 117

VOCABULARY I started at Playwrights Horizons in 2015 as the Administrative Assistant and Board Liaison. On my first day, I wore a dress with a collar so tight my personality would have to scream to be heard. “Don’t tell them you’re a playwright,” an industry mentor told me. I got a second opinion. “The staff won’t believe you want to grow there, that you want to become a Literary Manager.” I got a third opinion. “There’s only one Literary Manager in the country who’s also a playwright, and I think he’s about to quit.”

But my crush on Playwrights Horizons was all-consuming and I needed a job. By the time I graduated college, a belief had cemented: a happy life is one of unyielding work fueled by passion and, more importantly, stability. In other words, a freelance writing career is a precarious delusion of grandeur.

When I finally came out as a writer at Playwrights, it was not the conversation I’d been preparing for. The Literary Manager at the time was Sarah Lunnie, and I can tell you exactly the words she said because, as is typical of Sarah, their impact was more like a tattoo than a conversation: “You’re allowed to be more than one thing. It is a gift to others to identify yourself the way you want to be seen. Call yourself a writer, and everyone else will too.”

This was a new way of talking. Expansion. Generosity. Selfdefinition that grows from self-contradiction. This is the vocabulary of the artist.

Phillips writes, Extricate yourself, in so far as you can, from the vocabulary that doesn’t suit you, that doesn’t get you the life you want. The vocabulary of the industry had made the life I wanted seem impossible.

Now, the differences between artistic and institutional language are not always clear. The two often blur. They definitely do at Playwrights, as they might at other theaters which, like ours, are run by artists. But they are two different languages; they have different vocabularies and different rules. I’ll explain.

I’m in a playwriting group called Youngblood at Ensemble Studio Theatre. Everyone in it is under 30. Suspended in a protracted adolescence, we are childlike in our curiosity. We like to play. One of us shares something new each time we meet. We read it aloud and discuss, canvassing its beauty and asking questions. A writer says, The structure of my play is the slow turn of a neck.

We ask about the rules of its curve.

“IT HURTS MORE TO WONDER THAN TO KNOW. BUT WHAT GROWTH ISN’T PAINFUL?” 118 / ALMANAC

But in other realms — the realm of the critic, the public, and the institution — we speak differently about both the writer and her work. We speak of “discovering her” as if the writer has not been working for years. We speak of “pitching an idea” as if she is an ad campaign for a consumer product.

We say a play “doesn’t make sense.” This is the language of prohibitive judgment and commodification. Of knowing, rather than wondering. And I get it. It hurts more to wonder than to know. But what growth isn’t painful? And isn’t the alternative pain — the pain of not growing — worse?

CONFORMITY Here, for example, is what unfolds in my office on West 42nd Street: an early-career writer talks to me as the Literary Manager and speaks not of her rules but of the institution’s. She asks these questions: what makes a play right for Playwrights Horizons? How do I get in your pipeline?

How do I write a play that might get produced there?

In 1891, four years before being imprisoned, Oscar Wilde published an essay, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” He envisions an artistic universe without prevailing moralities that are dictated by public opinion or institutions (i.e. as to who an artist is allowed to be and what type of art she is allowed to make). It is, instead, a world self-governed by individualistic aesthetic values, shaped by artists themselves. The alternative, he explains, is deadly both for the artist and for cultural progression: “Whenever a community or a powerful section of a community, or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped.”

I was texting yesterday with a group of friends, all playwrights. I asked about ‘personal statement’ questions. The type that appear in, for example, applications to writing groups at theaters, or meetings with literary staff members. They are intended to be open-ended and generous, but can have the adverse effect of hemming in the writer by inviting her to stereotype herself without meaning to. My friend, the one whose play is the slow turn of a neck, replies to the group thread: “The question ‘What’s your artistic objective?’”

I pause. The generality of this question seems ideal, right?

Maximal freedom for the writer. But it isn’t free, not really.

Our system has power dynamics: the critic, the public, the institution. And each of these structures, in turn, has power dynamics: white supremacy, patriarchy, scarcity mentality, to name only a few of the more forceful. Perceived neutrality, in the form of openness, is just a way for these existing dynamics to dominate. My friend goes on: “Knowing how we think about identity in theater, that question is a set-up to talk about ‘my oppression.’ It’s the idea that the playwright is the play. That each play can be understood through one guiding set of politics. That we’re supposed to ‘get’ a play, not ‘feel’ it. There has to be room for mystery in our field.”

The institution’s invitation to the writer to identify herself on her terms results in the institution identifying her on their terms because she is trying to guess what they would want to hear and then saying that. In a field with so much application and rejection, especially early in the career of an artist, this is painful for everyone involved — not just for the writers, but also for the staff members sifting through piles of rote answers and raking for authenticity. And the art suffers for it. A playwright, in a Youngblood meeting, says:

“IF WE ARE THINKING LIKE THE WRITER, THIS PERIOD ISN’T ABOUT QUICK ANSWERS.

“The need to articulately describe the thing we are making — before we’ve made it — is inherently in contradiction to making the thing. The point of art is for there to be something in it which other people see, which you the writer didn’t see. That while you’re sitting there writing dialogue, something is moving underneath that you yourself don’t understand.”

ABUNDANCE

I’m writing down every word. She continues: “A full articulation of one’s own work is the death of good art.”

TRANSFORMATION If applications or agent-arranged meetings were in the language of the writer, what questions would we ask? My friend in Youngblood said: “I would love questions that demand spontaneous answers rather than the same reheated ones. It could be about anything, an obsession I have. This book about eels I’m reading? Let’s have a new conversation.”

IT IS ABOUT GROWING INTO WHO WE WILL BECOME.” What is at stake, in our period of transformation, is the progression of our art form. And as the “We See You, White American Theater” initiative reminds us, the only way to nurture its progression is to account for the many impediments to its expression — especially those as persistent as the weather.

This is an arid climate.

I’ll take you back to my office, and back to that early-career writer and her three questions: what makes a play right for Playwrights, how do I get in the pipeline, how do I write a play you might produce?

As unwittingly self-annihilating as these questions may be, they’re also totally understandable. Writers don’t need productions only to realize a vision, to make something meaningful from nothing, or to give our true essence to the collective — we need to make money.

I talk to a playwright who’s leaving New York. She says, I couldn’t afford theater tickets or my apartment.

Embracing the language of the writer — in the many ways we talk about her and about her work — would mean the difference between the writer belonging (i.e. being herself) and fitting in (i.e. changing herself to be accepted). In our current system, the writer and her work must try to fit into the institution. This is the conformity of the artist.

In New York’s gig economy and real estate market, financial security is nearly impossible for any artist without independent wealth, so we find work somewhere else. People say it’s the golden age of television, but I think it’s the golden age of playwriting. So many of the most innovative shows are staffed by playwrights who needed health insurance.

But if institutions were to think more like an artist and less like a critic — i.e. wondering not knowing, impressionable not judgmental — they are afforded greater openness to new thought. This is the transformation of the institution.

I talk to a friend on staff at a peer theater. He says, We are on a tightrope not knowing when its end will come.

It’s a place to start, anyway. A new language is, like any learning, really an unlearning: the old rules no longer apply.

And right now that’s just about... all we know about our industry. Disaster brings uncertainty, a combination that makes future-planning a paradoxical bind: solutions are necessary (we must bail ourselves out of this), but impossible to execute (what was true yesterday is no longer true today). At best, plans provide structure for necessary action.

At worst, they are the foot soldiers of prohibitive thought.

I brought a draft of this essay to a Youngblood meeting for conversation. A playwright said, I am so relieved it doesn’t propose any plans. If we are thinking like the writer, this period isn’t about quick answers. It is about growing into who we will become.

Non-profit theaters are under-resourced and under-funded.

With inadequate governmental support and, again, New York’s real estate market, we all rely heavily on philanthropy.

This means that, in order to sustain our existence, we must continually advocate for its monetary value — a method of survival which, in our economy, is chronically draining. We stretch our income like a worn elastic; there is so much that we want but cannot afford to do.

And writers know this. We know that if we, say, write a play for 15 actors, opportunities for its development — and, in turn, for our employment — will be more expensive and therefore more unlikely.

Maybe the writer doesn’t write it.

Or maybe the Literary Manager doesn’t read it for a long time, too long. Because she is overextended. Because our departments are understaffed and, like writers, we love NOWS / 119

“WE STRETCH OUR INCOME LIKE A WORN ELASTIC; THERE IS SO MUCH THAT WE WANT BUT CANNOT AFFORD TO DO.” our work so much we forget to take care of ourselves. We eat tupperware dinners at our desks and schlep stacks of plays on vacations we don’t really take.

And writers know this. And Literary Managers know that writers know this. We read the email, I know you have a thousand plays on your pile so I totally get it if you don’t have time to read this draft.

Maybe the writer doesn’t send it.

If there is virtue in disaster, it might be that it disabuses us of romantic notions. We can see that the playwright’s protracted adolescence is borne not just of the palliative notion of childlike wonder, but of a broken economy in which the trappings of adulthood are a dream delayed.

And in the same way that the starving artist is not a bohemian fantasy, scarcity is not the mother of invention — it is an impediment to our art and to our humanity.

If we change our vocabulary, we can change our form of instruction: our rules of operation, structures, and ways of being.

I’m thinking about something as fundamental as “rejection letters,” which come in response to, say, a submission to a theater or an application to a writing group. Why do we call them rejection letters? Too often, the reason for a rejection is purely a lack of material resources — the agony of we would if we could but we can’t. So if we look past material restriction, “rejection” no longer makes sense as a framework for a response letter. Each exchange of a new play is, actually, generative.

This is just one example of a larger culture in which scarcity dictates not only what we do, but how we do it. And it doesn’t have to be this way. There is so much abundance.

The writer’s language is fertile soil: it yields infinite re-description, ways to create new terms and new rules for ourselves. Curiosity, appreciation, compassion, and care for one another are all essential resources. When we tend to them, when we allow them great power of instruction, they self-replenish plentifully. They keep our ecosystem vital through every stage of evolution.

I know we’re all saying, It feels like we’re staring into the void. I think we really are. And when the writer stares into the void, she sees negative space and the opA portunity to fill it.

The problem feels insurmountable: as long as we look to material resources to foster progressive work and our basic wellbeing, we will always come up dry because those are resources we cannot expand — certainly not right now, anyway. But we can look elsewhere.

Phillips says, Any given vocabulary is a secret and not so secret moralizer of experience... a form of instruction.

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(Page 116) Photo courtesy the author.

Defend something you don’t believe in Please send us a photo of you in a wig

Do you have a favorite family member?

Should one ever finish a play?

What are your plans for tomorrow?

What music do you listen to while you write and why?

What’s wrong with you?

Should public sex be illegal?

When did you first know you were the gender you are now?

If you lived alone on an island, what would you talk to the animals about?

Do you drink enough water?

What’s the last thing you saw that made you jealous?

What really offends you?

What do you wish you could say on national news?

Is it possible to finish a play?

What is the cutest thing you have ever seen?

‘PERSONAL STATEMENT’ APPLICATION QUESTIONS FROM MEMBERS OF YOUNGBLOOD

Who have you bullied?

If you were squatting in a luxury apartment what would you use it for?

What is an actor’s job?

What’s a recurring dream you had in your childhood?

Write your own obituary

Write a short poem called: Anatomy of a Fart

Have you ever fallen in love with a character?

Walk me through your moon landing What will they say at your funeral if it all goes right?

Do you like your work?

Be honest.

If you were a dump truck would you still write?

What do you need help with, just fucking be honest here, what do you need help with?

How would your kindergarten teacher describe you?

Where in your living space do you write?

Please write about celery, anything about celery

What are you obsessed with today?

Confess

Why haven’t you written the play you’ve always wanted to write?

Would you rather write a perfect play or have a perfect child?

If your child wrote a better play than you could write would you be proud of her?

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THE FREELANCER’S POCKET GUIDE TO BUDGETING A NOTE FROM ARI Ari Teplitz

CFP®, ChFC® Partner, Teplitz Financial Group

I LOVE THEATER. Always have. In 2002, I was accepted to the Yale School of Drama Theater Management Program and began the process of turning something I was passionate about into a career. In my career as an arts administrator and producer, I worked at organizations large and small, in non-profit theater and commercial theater, in producing organizations and presenting organizations. One thing that was always consistent — the artists I knew and loved worked passionately to bring their work to the stage, often at the sacrifice of their personal lives.

When I decided to make a career jump to personal financial planning, I knew that I wanted to work with arts professionals and prove to them that being dedicated to your art is not mutually exclusive from creating a life of financial freedom.

One of the greatest partnerships of my career has been my good fortune to work with Lizzie Stern and the team at Playwrights Horizons on the development of a financial literacy program for artists. The goal is simple — empower

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artists to become better financial consumers so that they can achieve their version of financial success. The method — help artists develop the habits they need to make their plans come to fruition.

The first step. When I was at Yale, I took a directing class taught by Liz Diamond, Resident Director and Chair of Directing at the School. She always talked about knowing your given circumstances. Well, the same thing applies here.

The first thing you need to do is establish where you are.

Otherwise, you will never know where you are trying to go.

In the financial world, that means knowing your budget.

How much do you bring in? How much do you spend? And what do you spend it on?

Now this is not my first rodeo. I know how few people understand the ins and outs of their spending. Most people just put their heads in the sand and assume that if there is money left over at the end of the month, then they can live to fight another day. But that is a recipe for disaster. So here are some tips to make it a little bit easier.

HOW TO SAVE MONEY Pay yourself first. When you’re not in a pandemic or financial crisis, a good goal is to set aside roughly 10% of each paycheck for savings. Set this aside first. Don’t spend first and then maybe save a bit of whatever’s left. You aren’t allowing yourself to be in charge of how you spend your money, or making active choices about what is important to you in possibly planning for a larger goal. It’s the financial equivalent of throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing what sticks.

Establish an emergency fund. By setting 10% aside of each paycheck, work to build an emergency fund that could cover at least three to six months of expenses. After you’ve done that, you can put money aside in a retirement fund.

But how? To know how to save your money, you need to know how you spend your money. Which means budgeting.

HOW TO BUDGET: THE MACRO Money in/money out. Make two columns on a piece of paper — and label one “money in” and the other “money out.” Take the past 12 months of your bank statements and put the total amount credited (what you brought in) in one column and the total debits (what you spent) in the other column. In a perfect world you will be spending 80–90% of what you bring in. The rest you are saving.

Most of us do not achieve our goal on the first try, and we have to look at the micro.

HOW TO BUDGET: THE MICRO Categorize expenses. Take the past six months of bank statements, credit card statements, and any other statement from which you SPEND money, and categorize each of your expenses. The list of categories can be endless, so try to keep it simple. For example: each of your fixed expenses (i.e. rent, car insurance), groceries, dining out, entertainment, medical expenses, clothing, household expenses, and miscellaneous. IMPORTANT: don’t take out any expenses, no matter how irregular or weird they are! People always say, “Oh, that will never happen again.” But something that will never happen again happens every month.

At this point, you will have a better understanding of what you spend money on. You will be able to think more critically about whether you are spending money in a way that matches the things you need and the desires you have. My guess, it won’t match. And don’t worry. All of us spend too much in the wrong places and need to cut back.

As a general reference for what a “healthy” budget can look like, take a look at the images on the next pages.

When cutting back on expenses, don’t eliminate what you love most. When you are trying to adjust where you spend money, don’t start by eliminating all of the things you enjoy. Just like a diet that tells you that you can never

have something, you will eventually run out of the will power to stave off your desires. Don’t start by eliminating coffee, or your gym membership, or your Netflix subscription. Start with the things that give you the biggest bang for the least amount of change (I’m looking at you, groceries and dining out).

Invest in a budgeting app that works for you. It is not important which budgeting program you choose, as long as it works for you and you stick with it. Personally, Quicken and You Need a Budget (YNAB) are my favorites. But any will work. And make sure you remember to save. If these past eight months have taught us anything, they have taught us that not every rainy day can be predicted, and a few extra dollars lying around can make a massive difference.

Keep up the habit. As you take the first step towards financial freedom, please remember that this is not a game about success or failure. The current situation will not exist forever. The point here is to develop good habits. Those habits are needed in good times and bad. When you are struggling to get by and when you are at your peak earning stage. It starts with the first step. And you deserve congratulations for taking it.

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• Read a financial publication regularly.

• Trust the process.

• Budget. Budget. Budget.

• Avoid panic and greed.

• Get rid of bad debt.

• Don’t “figure it out tomorrow.”

• Pay yourself first.

• Social security is not a retirement plan.

• Develop a plan and stick to it.

• Remember: TIME is your biggest asset.

BUILDING YOUR FINANCIAL PYRAMID

INVEST IN YOURSELF

You need to put your money to work.

Once you have your emergency fund, you should be saving for the future from the first day of your career until the last.

MINIMIZE TAXES For artists, this means keeping good records and paying your quarterly estimated taxes.

GET RID OF BAD DEBT Credit card debt and personal loans are the albatross that prevent you from achieving all your other goals. Prioritize getting this out of the way.

ESTABLISH AN EMERGENCY FUND Before you get to any of the fun stuff, you have to make sure you can survive a sudden change in circumstances.

KNOW YOUR GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES You have to know where you are before you decide where you are going. Figure out what you spend, and where you spent it, before you do anything else.

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HELPFUL HINTS AND BUILDING A BUDGET

HOUSING & UTILITIES 35% CLOTHING 3%

ENTERTAINMENT 5%

FOOD & GROCERIES

15%

TRANSPORTATION 5%

PERSONAL SAVINGS 10%

MEDICAL 7% THE REST* 10%

* Please Note: If you have debt that can not be covered by “the rest” you should prioritize it equally between the retirement and personal savings categories.

RETIREMENT SAVINGS 10%

Ari Teplitz, CFP®, ChFC® is a partner at the Teplitz Financial Group in Old Bridge, NJ. Views expressed here are his own and should not be construed as specific financial advice for any one individual. To discuss your personal financial situation, please contact Ari at ateplitz@teplitzfinancial.com or visit www.teplitzfinancial.com.

NOWS / 125

INTERMISSION Adam Greenfield

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Answers to the crossword can be found at phnyc.org/crossword.

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ACROSS 1.

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Draper, off-screen Molds a liquid into a solid form Ebenezer’s catch phrase Instrument played by Mr. Lies The fringe, vis-a-vis the surrey Conclusion Song sung by Kirsten Childs, at the top of her lungs (page 30) Problem’s often found under it First for Sotomayor They were straight outta Compton Notable deer Donovan, Liotta, and Romano Like a Nervous Nellie Fungus that grows on rotten logs Something to do on down the road Forge An over-crowded ward in ’20 Rhymer of Napoleon Brandy with Mahatma Gandhi “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ___?”

38. Something that Slave Play, Dance Nation, and August: Osage County do not have in common 40. Scurry 41. Way out in Bordeaux 43. Tokyo, before it was Tokyo 44. Home to Nash.

45. Noted pursuer, in The Winter’s Tale 47. Made like an alligator 49. Like Ned, to Homer 53. Dismiss 54. Lennon, Hayes, and Connery 55. She choreographs in questions (page 71) 57. Dutch island in the Caribbean 60. Scrabble piece 61. A thing earned 63. An opening to prayer 64. Seed of chocolate 65. The talking palomino 66. Measrmnt of the shrpness of an img 67. Proles 68. Match > ___ > games > points

DOWN 1.

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Greedy sorts Peek-_-___ Theme song that goes-lightly Resolve a conflict Minor character Auth. of many psalms Stashes Heretofore Mole High times What makes an Acrobat and a Reader Visionary architect, “Queen of the Curve” (page 175) Water or beer Sisterhood with Divine Secrets Kisses in Cancun Knit hat, gloves, sunglasses Birds of prey Some resorts When repeated, a Filipino treat Author Umberto

32. Home to Ferrari World, and whence Tomi comes (page 106) 34. Museum with a satellite location in 32-down 35. “____ Kleine Nachtmusik” 36. Tear asunder 38. Layers of cakes 39. Its motto: “Saving Lives, Protecting People” 42. Crashed head-on into the side 44. Like twins born in April 46. Become whole again 48. Bulbs suddenly lit 49. Whose farm once occupied 416 W. 42nd Street (page 47) 50. Normcore color 51. Crowns of light 52. “Safety _____” 56. One of Ari’s favorite budget apps (page 123) 58. Sugar source 59. Appends 61. Angel dust, or rocket fuel 62. ‘sups

NOWS / 127

LORTEL Tim Sanford Tim Sanford received Lifetime Achievement Awards at the 35th Annual Lucille Lortel Awards, held virtually on May 3, 2020, and at the 65th Annual Obie Awards, held virtually on July 14, 2020.

Both acceptance speeches are printed here in full.

WHEN GEORGE FORBES called me to tell me the Lortel Foundation wanted to honor me at the Lortel Awards, I have to admit, I did not envision the night like this. I have mixed feelings about Awards Ceremonies — you know, “Let’s rank our art,” and all that. But we theater-makers are a gregarious, affectionate lot, so these nights do give us occasion to hug and mingle and remember the sweet pleasures of making a play together. But we can’t do that tonight, so I’ll just have to pretend for a minute that we’re all here: “Heya everyone! Hey Michael! Hey Will! Hey Stephen, Danya, Raja!

Hey Hamish, Larry, JAM, L Morgan, Zoe, Michele, Montana, Isabella, Justin, and everyone! I love y’all.”

But it’s no good trying to pretend away the circumstances that have led us here. I expect everyone listening to me talk right now has lost someone to this disease. And we haven’t even had proper memorials for them. So feelings are bound to run very raw for some of us. And maybe we’re not all ready to try to bring some perspective to the devastation. Much less a little lightness. But I’m going to try.

There are a lot of unhinged conspiracy theories about Covid-19. Let me counter them by offering up an audacious paradox. From my blessedly insular perspective, Covid19 looks like it came to earth in order to destroy theater.

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Think about it. How do we make theater? Real living people gather in a room and make art out of human beings. What’s the opposite of social distancing? Maybe... theater-making? We can’t make our art without each other. And that’s precisely the attribute of theater that makes it so necessary and powerful in our digital world. But Covid-19 wants to suppress that story. It wants to be the star of our show and hog all the airwaves and make us all talk the same. And what’s more is that it uses the tools of our art form against us. Just one case of the disease can spread to dozens, hundreds, thousands, in short order. But hey, wait, look over here! That’s how plays work. A play starts with a writer alone in a room. But it comes to life through the same kind of exponential transmission of experience the disease uses, only the theater gives life and the virus steals it. You can see this equation in the list of shout-outs with which I started this speech. Both A Strange Loop and Heroes of the Fourth Turning began with writers: Michael R. Jackson and Will Arbery. And the vision of love and anger and grief and exaltation that animated their visions and their creations spread exponentially, first to the other artists who brought their works to life, and then to the audiences that took that ride with them. These productions then became hotspots of

artistic, emotional, transformative contagion. And I know these shows will go on to spread life and light in future productions to future audiences in years to come.

There was an article in the Times several weeks ago that broke down, step-by-step, in remarkably clear and thorough detail, exactly how the Covid-19 virus works, and it side-barred about which steps in the chain might prove vulnerable to medications or the host’s immune systems.

What struck me about the article was the devilish intricacy with which this microbial invader uses our own metabolism against us. It essentially changes the biochemistry of the host. But our body’s response is just as remarkable.

The host changes its processes in response and internalizes them.

Are you familiar with Harold Bloom’s book, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human? His theory is one that I have increasingly come to embrace. Our playwrights toil in the laboratories of the human soul. They take the ingredients of our humanness, and their own experience, and passion, and wisdom, and stir them into the crucible of our art form, and fashion truth and beauty out of it all. This truth and beauty flows through them and into us. This artistic transaction is metabolic and occurs exponentially. That’s why I’ve always thought that the work we do, the opportunities we give writers in workshops, in rehearsals, and in productions actually

spreads throughout our community and the whole country. Their work, our work, defines us and becomes part of us and changes us.

In my career at Playwrights Horizons, I have been privileged to bear witness to and, to some extent, facilitate the artistic combustion of over 200 productions, over 150 of them as Artistic Director. I am proud of this work but humble about it, too. I have always striven to put playwrights at the center of what we do, to trust them and champion them while at the same time challenging them to aim high and dig deep. I move on to the next phase of my life with these 200 or so plays deep inside me. Maybe I will work with some of them again in my next endeavor. I will say that the last month or so has given me renewed admiration and reverence for the special alchemy that occurs between a writer and a blank page in solitude. I don’t know how they do it, frankly. But what I’m sure of is that our very best playwrights are using this time to digest what we are going through and finding ways to transform it into new work that will utterly surprise and motivate and redefine us.

I want to thank the Off-Broadway League and the Lortel Foundation for bestowing the great honor of this award upon me and, in doing so, giving me the opportunity to share my thoughts about the importance of what we A do. Goodnight.

I HAVE TO ADMIT, it makes me kind of sad to receive this award this year in this way. I’ve gone to a lot of the Obie Awards. In the last 25 years, I’ve hardly missed one, even when I’ve known we weren’t “winning” anything. This is my community. You are my most cherished friends and revered colleagues. Receiving this award is absolutely the dreamiest dream come true and the highest honor I could imagine.

But receiving it in this way, in the vacuum of streaming media, robs me of the opportunity to share it with all of you who have had both a direct and indirect hand in my career in the theater. I’m especially grateful to the writers who won Obies with us on my watch. I truly would not be here tonight without them: Adam Guettel, Jeanine Tesori, Chris

Durang, David Cale, Kirsten Childs, David Greenspan, Craig Lucas, Lynn Nottage, Annie Baker (twice!), Kirsten Greenidge, Lisa D’Amour, Robert O’Hara, Lucas Hnath, Clare Barron, Michael R. Jackson, Will Arbery. Looking at these writers together might beg the question of what these writers have in common besides their coolness. I’ve appreciated the recognition for them because it’s always been a primary objective of mine to make Playwrights Horizons a place where Downtown and Uptown theater meet. But, in point of fact, this cohort of 17 Obie winners does not differ so radically from all of the other 133 or so writers I’ve produced.

As Marcel Proust said: “There are as many original individual styles as there are artists.”

OBIE

What is he talking about? Why do we care about style?

Because style represents the unity of form and content. We care a lot about content these days. Rightly so. The politics of representation commands us that we ask ourselves, “Whose stories are we telling?” But the content of our stories alone does not make them art. The artist shapes the content of their story through their particular point of view and through the way they tell their story. Again, Proust said it: “Through art alone do we emerge from ourselves to see the universe through someone else’s eyes.”

I want to hammer away at this connectivity of art a bit.

Playwrights Horizons does not have a house style. We care about the originality and the artfulness of the writer. We do not hold up any particular writer just because of what demographic they belong to. We lift them up because of the originality of their voice. So the unpredictable eclecticism of our seasons is actually a reflection of our aesthetic philosophy, an aesthetic philosophy that is also a moral philosophy. An aesthetics of individualism embraces the truth that form is the gateway to content. It is the gateway to beauty. It is the gateway to feeling. The duality of form and content is like the duality of wave and particle in quantum physics. Both light and art depend on the paradoxical unity of its components.

So I believe in duality. That’s different from the binary.

We don’t like binaries because we think they limit us to either/ors. And maybe also because binaries are the digits of computer language. But here’s the thing: without dualities, without opposites, without dialectics, we have no theater. I took acting classes with the great author, teacher, and casting director Michael Shurtleff. He taught that every scene begins with the central question: “What am I fighting for?” And the next question is: “What is the opposite?” And then the paramount commandment: “Find the love.” Love gives the scene its stakes. Do you want an example? Let’s look at the song “Periodically” from A Strange Loop. Usher’s mother calls him on his birthday after one of the most painful, humiliating evenings of his life. We feel the enormity of her love for him and of his need for that love and affirmation. But as the song progresses, she cannot restrain herself from trying to save him from his sin of homosexuality. And that, of course, just feeds his self-loathing. Every scene is a love scene. And therefore every scene is dangerous.

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I have a story about Bruce Norris. He acted in Christopher Kyle’s Plunge in my second season as Artistic Director, and I often invited him to Opening Nights thereafter. I can’t remember what play it was — it might have been a Keith Bunin play — when, after the show, he said, “Ah, I get it now. You believe in redemption.” It was like he threw down the gauntlet. I wanted to say, “No I don’t!” Instead, the very next year, I produced his play The Pain and the Itch, one of the most caustic, provocative plays I have produced. Its effectiveness lies in its humanness and its humor. You’ve never met a cast of characters so convinced of their own virtuousness. Nor, I would say, have you encountered a cast (save maybe The Duchess of Malfi) as naked in their venality. But, however you look at them, they are human.

Annie Baker once said at a talkback for The Flick: “Theater is the art form best equipped to explore ambivalence.”

Shurtleff would always tell actors in scene study classes: “Add. Don’t subtract. Always add.” Human beings are complicated.

So here we are today. When the pandemic first hit, I thought, “Here is an opportunity. Maybe as we all stare death in the face, we will find our common purpose and reaffirm what is essential and precious to us. Maybe we will remake society out of this experience. And maybe we will remake theater by being forced to strip away extraneous components and affirming the primacy of the human beings at the center of our art: writer, text, actor, space, audience.

But then I turn on the news. Here I am searching for redemption, and all these Bruce Norris characters are running around, angling for an advantage. And I just get angrier and angrier.

You’ve heard of “virtue signaling”? Well, what about “outrage signaling”? God forgive me, I am guilty of that one. It is, as we say in the theater, a “negative choice.”

So what is the positive choice?

If I was a better singer, I would sing “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding” a capella. But I’m not, so I will quote Ingmar Bergman instead, the epilogue of Fanny and Alexander. Gustav says: “The world is a den of thieves and night is falling. The poison affects us all. No one escapes. Therefore let us be kind, generous, affectionate and good. It is necessary and not at all shameful to take pleasure in the little world.”

A Go in peace. Make beauty.

That Doesn’t Apply to Me Sylvia Khoury

The PHQ-9 is the validated questionnaire employed to screen patients for potential depressive disorders in a healthcare setting. It consists of nine questions that interrogate how often a patient experiences certain behaviors (such as tearfulness) or emotions (such as hopelessness) in a given two-week period. The patient is meant to rank the frequency of such behaviors/ emotions on a scale of 0 (“Not at all”) to 3 (“Nearly every day”).

The following is based on the notes I scribbled down as a third year medical student on the subway ride back from clinic one night. I had just administered the PHQ-9 to a patient in her seventies who had been experiencing several months of fatigue. In this particular clinic, the PHQ-9 was typically given as a sheet for the patient to fill out themselves, but this patient had forgotten her reading glasses at home. I’ve altered any identifying details to preserve her anonymity, but have strived to faithfully render the spirit of our encounter.

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How many times in the last two weeks have you been bothered by the following?

1. Little interest or pleasure in doing things?

2. Feeling down, depressed, or hopeless?

Now, here’s the thing.

I do the things I need to do.

I wake up, I take my medications.

I don’t take them all at once.

I know the doctors told me I can take them all at once.

Well, I don’t like that.

So I have seven or eight pills, I take one every half hour.

And the reason I do that is so that I know, If something goes wrong, Which one of them is to blame.

You understand?

Which pill is to blame.

No, see, now hopeless?

That doesn’t apply to me.

No. I don’t let myself do that, No, I do not.

I tell myself, What is the point of dwelling on my troubles?

That is to say— I don’t think about those things.

So if you’re saying hopeless Or depressed, No, I wouldn’t say that applies to me.

And then, once I’ve done that, I have to check on my cat.

You ever had pets?

Oh, so you know.

I have two cats.

Clover and Stella.

One of them, Stella— I don’t really call her Stella, I call her The Cat— Anyways, once a month she gets sick And by sick I mean she shits everywhere Blood, vomit, shit, All over my apartment.

So in the morning I’m hunched over, Looking everywhere she might have gone to the bathroom in the night.

I have to check every corner.

That cat, she will find the strangest places, And she will shit all over them.

Now, do I like doing that every morning?

No, I don’t like doing that.

But it’s the morning and that’s what I have to do.

Not at all (0) More than half the days (2)

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Several days (1) Nearly every day (3)

You know I see some people on the street With their sad, mopey faces Looking like they got all the trouble in the world.

Now those people are hopeless, You know what I’m saying?

Or depressed.

But me, when I go out to play the numbers, I’ll have a little conversation with the people I meet, I’ll be friendly and such.

That’s who I am.

I don’t let things bother me too much.

I say, why would I let things bother me, When I can’t change them?

And down?

Down, let’s see.

Yeah, maybe I feel down sometimes.

But that’s just because of other things.

That isn’t being depressed, You understand?

If I feel down it’s because of my elbow Or my hips Or my cat, Having to clean up after her all the time.

So yeah, maybe I feel down But it’s because of other things, you understand?

So I would say those words don’t apply to me.

Not at all (0)

Several days (1)

More than half the days (2)

Nearly every day (3)

How many times in the last two weeks have you been bothered by the following?

3. Trouble falling or staying asleep, or sleeping too much?

Ooh, yeah, I don’t sleep very much.

That’s been my whole life, No sleep.

Sometimes I would look at my husband when he was sleeping and think, How does he do that?

Can someone teach me to do that?

Please, Lord, teach me to sleep!

You know, I take some gummy bears I think they are— What do you call them?

Antacids?

But they also have this chemical, I don’t know what it’s called.

Anyways I take that.

Yeah, yeah, that’s it.

Melatonin.

That’s it.

So maybe that helps.

Actually, it probably doesn’t!

I don’t sleep at all, do I? Well, I do sleep a little.

Maybe without the gummy bear— Without the— What was it?

Melatonin, yeah.

Maybe I wouldn’t sleep at all.

More than half the days (2)

Now what do you mean by little energy?

Because, you know, It don’t matter what’s going on, If I slept or not, If I’m sick— I still do everything I have to do.

I wake up, I fix myself something to eat— Well, that is, after I’ve taken my one big pill The doctor, she told me not to eat with that.

I take that pill, I eat, And then I go looking for any mess the cat made.

Well, I already told you about that.

And then I fix myself something to eat, A fruit and those Belvita biscuits.

And then during the day I clean.

It’s hard to get under the couch with the broom, With my elbow.

I’m so sorry, What was your question?

Little energy?

I don’t think that applies to me.

I’m tired, yeah I’m tired, but I do everything I have to do.

I am tired.

You could say I’m tired.

My husband still sleeps really easy.

I hear him waking up in his room, I look at the clock and it’s eleven o’clock!

Eleven o’clock in the morning!

Do you know how many times I’ve already cleaned up after the cat?

I’m here with my bleach, hunched over, And he’s getting out of bed at eleven in the morning.

Not at all (0)

4. Feeling tired or having little energy?

Several days (1) Nearly every day (3)

You know, I never got good at taking my licks with grace.

Someone told me that once.

But I always do what I have to do And I never complain.

You know when we were talking about sleep, Sometimes it’s cold in my apartment, Which used to make it hard for me to get comfortable.

So I got this plexiglass, And I put it over my window.

And when it gets really cold, I put plastic over that, too.

So that’s not really a problem anymore.

If only I could put plexiglass over my cat, right?

Ooh, she would hate that.

You know, cats.

Not at all (0)

Several days (1)

More than half the days (2)

Nearly every day (3)

NOWS / 133

How many times in the last two weeks have you been bothered by the following?

5. Poor appetite or overeating?

See, I eat.

I eat, I wouldn’t say too much.

Or too little.

With the diabetes, the doctor says I should be checking my sugars, But I told her last time, My machine is broken!

And she told me she would send it to the pharmacy.

Well, I got there, to the pharmacy, And they told me all they got was those little What are they— Alcohol wipes!

Now, what good are alcohol wipes going to do, if I don’t even have a machine?

And I waited there a long time, you know?

I don’t complain though.

No, I do what I have to do.

I told you about my cat.

My neighbor tells me, Why don’t you get the cat put to sleep?

But the thing is, After each time she gets sick, She bounces right back!

That doesn’t seem right, you know Put the cat to sleep, when she’s bouncing right back.

I won’t do that.

Oh, and sometimes I do eat things I know I shouldn’t.

Like last night I had three pieces of candy.

Ooh, they were sweet.

They were so sweet that I didn’t eat any snacks in my bed.

Normally I do that.

I guess it was good those candies were so sweet, right?

6. Feeling bad about yourself, or that you have let yourself or your family down?

My family.

Ha. I don’t feel bad about that— I’ve done everything for them!

Not at all (0) More than half the days (2)

134 / ALMANAC

Several days (1) Nearly every day (3)

My husband and I, You saw he just came in here Interrupting because what—?

I’ve been here forty minutes?

I tell him, you will bring me to the doctor.

You’re everyone else’s chauffeur, aren’t you?

You can be mine for the doctor at least.

He’s selfish, you know.

I go to his doctor with him all the time.

I never complain, Even if it goes for hours and hours, I do what I need to do.

And I’ve been here— What, a little longer than he thought?

And he’s coming in the room, Interrupting the doctor.

You know, I thank God my niece has calmed down.

Thirty-two and she’s been acting like she’s twelve.

You know, the whole bathroom cabinet is filled with her things.

I don’t know what they are, I don’t snoop around.

But because she has all those things, I close the toilet seat before I flush.

Maybe that seems strange to you, But she has all those things, so I want them to be clean, So before I flush the toilet, I close the seat.

The problem is, I feel like I’m losing my mind (My memory, more like) And I can never remember if I flushed.

Now sometimes it’s an hour or two later, And I’m doing something else— Cleaning, Or running after the cat— And I think, did I flush the toilet?

Then I have to go check.

And it would be okay if it was just one of those habits.

But you know— Sometimes I didn’t flush.

And I would say that bothers me.

Not at all (0)

Several days (1)

More than half the days (2)

Nearly every day (3)

How many times in the last two weeks have you been bothered by the following?

7. Trouble concentrating on things, such as reading the newspaper or watching television?

Me? No, I focus on the TV just fine.

I love the TV. I get wrapped up in all those stories.

Now I got a TV in my bedroom.

My husband has one in his, But he’s always sitting in the front room, On his chair, Watching his sports, And I figured, I should have one in my room, too.

But I don’t do much reading.

I would say that doesn’t apply to me.

8. Moving or speaking so slowly that other people could have noticed? Or the opposite — being so fidgety or restless that you have been moving around a lot more than usual?

Hmm. Now that’s an interesting question you’re asking me.

It’s funny, you asked me that question!

I would say my niece and my husband— They say opposite things.

My niece, She’s always saying, You know— Ma, stop rushing to clean under the couch!

Ma, stop rushing, your elbow!

But my husband— He would say things like Why you moving so slow now?

Hunched over like that, Like an old woman.

You saw him!

He always thinks there’s somewhere to be.

You know, He wants me to be Wonder Woman.

You know, my husband, He’s a stubborn man.

Our relationship?

I’d say our relationship is more like— Companions?

No, Roommates.

That’s what I’d say.

He has his room, I have my room.

Not at all (0) More than half the days (2)

No, no we don’t eat together.

He fixes his food, I fix my food, My niece fixes her food.

Because he eats so much earlier than everyone else!

He wants dinner at five.

Tell me, who wants dinner at five?

Not me.

I feed the cats around four.

You know, I give them a hard time, but they’re good cats.

I guess I’m probably talking about my cats too much.

I’m sorry about that.

They take up a lot of my day.

9. Thoughts that you would be better off dead, or of hurting yourself?

No, no.

I’m telling you.

I don’t let negative thoughts stay in my head.

I don’t do that.

But yeah, I had those thoughts when I was younger.

Much younger.

I was thinking, why me?

Why I got this body?

This family?

That was before I learned not to let myself think about things.

But you know, Some things do bother me.

When I look out of the window, I see the little kids on the playground, People strolling around, enjoying the weather.

I don’t know.

That bothers me.

Some things do bother me.

But I wouldn’t say I’m depressed.

Because there are reasons, you know.

I’ve told you my cats, The pain in my elbow.

So, no.

I would say that word doesn’t apply to me.

Oh, you can put zero.

Zero for all of these questions.

They don’t apply to me.

Several days (1) Nearly every day (3)

Not at all (0)

Several days (1)

More than half the days (2)

Nearly every day (3)

NOWS / 135

Morning

The first thing I say is:

And he says:

But our eyes are still closed. It’s a sweet little thing we But ourdoing thing started TheThe firstfirst thing I I eyes areeven still smell is coffee without smell is coffee closed.about It’s a because talking because wewe gotgot sweet of those coffee it, kind little of thing oneone of those coffee we started makers gross, shut doing makers thatthat youyou setset Tho without even night before It was a birthday up, where we up up thethe night before goin talking about it, andand kind of use present It wasfrom a birthday say good cancan kind of use me to cha kind of gross, alarm. fromI like me to morning just likelike an an alarm.

It It himpresent but I think to w shut up, where feels feels decadent it more him but before so so decadent thanI think he I like it bec we say good we’re a bed does. more than he does. opening our likelike we’re at aatbed He’s never app morning just breakfast every minded He’s getting never minded eyes so we andand breakfast every up plat beforethe opening dayday a little getting up inbut theI know andand a little in the morning Don’t tell my colo our eyes silver man with morning I have very first so we silver man with a a have such abut hard journal,Don’t I’ve tell my of m knoweach the very faraway accent such a hard time. I journal, I’ve thing of faraway accent time.

I feel like I’ve convinced it that it thattwo I’m firstsees thing lives counter been feellying like here I’ve been us in each lives on on ourour counter for I’m veryconvinced productive very productive and of us sees in the to get to get things ready tenlying here but for ten pret the morning things ready seconds and hellbent on hellbent morning guests, in really seconds but really an say is each is each forfor us,us, hishis guests, an hour has One One moremore achieving my on other. the morning. morning. hour wasted Stei other. in the gone by.has gone by. wasted hour.hour.goals. achieving my goals.

Morning.

Morning.

136 / ALMANAC

myhad room had And we’re we’re here I’mI’m waking When When I was We moved a myAnd So I And notnot justjust waking I was a a We moved to toAnd room one window already. actually teenager father a new new house one window here already. up up I’veI’ve actually teenager mymy father house that thatover like BAM FUCK been lying awake would would to me thatwhenwhen out been lying awake saysay to me I wasI was in in was likewas BAM YOU I’M I’M THE SUN grade and them forfor oneone andand a a thatthe theearly earlybird bird tenthtenth grade FUCK YOU the the moment the befo sun quarter years catches worm and for months I THE SUN quarter years by by the catches thethe worm peeked over the fall o I would didn’t thetime timeshe shespeaks, andand I would saysay I’mI’m months I have any moment the sun but she a bird DAD curtains on a speaks, butdoesn’t she notnot a bird DAD I I didn’t have in my peekedhorizon. over theSo I’d be DAD I need knowknow that. It’s don’t want room because wok doesn’t that.my don’t want anyany any curtains horizon.like Sodad I’d be he’d be thing. I WORMS old venetian mor It’sprivate my private WORMS andand he he in mythe room like dadblinds DAD and I like I’m going after pretend to sleep. would I was because blinds I had had bac thing.

I pretend to I would tell tell meme I was the need blinds and on Friday to thinkI think I’m pretty directionless before actually that sleep.

I’m directionless andand old venetian he’d bework like I’m Home Depot calm good at it,atshe’s would wind belonged our after So I pretty good it, would wind up up blinds I had to going work down and I’d be whe like never noticed. pumping old house. Not she’s never pumping his his gasgas for forhad before on Friday to Home I’ll calm down when of my to us. Certainly to w noticed. thethe restrest of my life life actually Depot calm down come which isn’t not totome. and I’dyou which isn’t truetrue belonged be like I’ll home wou with when BLINDS which because now he’s our old but because now he’s calm down godhome knows how lying dead dead andand alsoalso I I workhouse. Not to you come long it which actually took in an office.

So. work in an office. us. Certainly with BLINDS him to buy because So. not to me. god knows how that guy was always long it actually doing something took him to buy besides doing because that guy anything nice for me was always doing that’s for sure. something besides doing anything nice for me that’s for sure.

that ductive on y

m had that M ’M e sun the ’d be DI and ’m work Home down e I’ll when ome which ow ly buy guy doing esides ng hat’s

Jean Ann Douglass

Though tonight I’m going out with Sarah so chalk one more day up to wasted youth because we always get appetizer sampler platters and unnaturally colored drinks the size of my head which are two things that I’m pretty sure you can’t say about Gloria Steinem.

When I get home I’ll yell “I’m home honey” and then whoops ha ha it’s actually “Honey I’m home” but he won’t respond. So at this point I will know that something lifealteringly terrible has happened to him. And I will panic.

So I tried putting t-shirts over my face to block out the light. I’d put them there the night before but then they’d fall off. So I’d put them on again when the sun woke me up in the morning and try to get back to sleep. But at that point I’d be awake.

So I’d lie there. And when my dad came in to wake me up he would think I was asleep but I wasn’t. I was just lying there.

I had been.

But it will just be that the TV was on too loud.

He will be asleep in front of it, slightly to the left of the permanent indentation he’s made in the couch.

Most of the day is just blah blah blah same same and you’re going and going and you look up and it’s 4 o’clock already.

Why? Because you’re busy or interested or having a good time or just doing something so time is going to go.

I’ll tell him “you scared me” and he’ll say oh my god I was just watching TV I can’t control what scares you and and I’ll lose it. I’ll yell that he’s selfish and boring which has nothing to do with this moment but everything to do with the shitty couch his gaming system his constant napping his bad presents that are passive aggressive nudges for me to get a different career and then I’ll say I’m sorry I’m kind of drunk I’m sorry I’m sorry I’ll go to bed.

But lying here awake, early, when no one knows, feels at least like what a week should feel like, and sometimes, like today, if I do it early enough, it feels like more than a year.

And they’re my best years. The rest of it goes by so quickly it doesn’t even really count as my life.

But right now I’m smelling his hair and my own breath and somehow the sunshine. And thinking that it would be so nice if time would just stop.

So nice if we could stay here all day all week all month all season all year-

You’re the best.

I’ll get the coffee.

NOWS / 137

By Arnulfo Maldonado 138 / ALMANAC

PASTS / 138

Larissa FastHorse

Fight, my sister.

Fight for your life.

I would do it for you if I could. I cannot. I cannot touch you. I cannot visit you except on a screen and now we all know how incredibly inadequate that is.

Fight.

Fight for your life or you will lose it.

I know it has been 40 days on the ventilator. I cannot imagine what that feels like inside your body. I understand why today you wanted to stop.

But fight.

For the first 20 days as the 11am update loomed I got sick inside. “Is this the day that they tell us you died? That it is already over. That I have been eating oatmeal and complaining about my face mask fogging my sunglasses when I go out into a sun that you will never see again.”

But you woke up. You smiled. You said your back hurt. You asked for ice cream. All without a voice. Because you don’t have one. Because of the vent, the endless vent.

You gave me hope.

You have survived so much. Covid cannot be the one that takes you.

It’s absurd.

Fight.

I promise I will not make you call my husband to tell me something because I never answer my phone. No matter how busy I am I will rejoice when I see it is your call because I get to hear your voice.

Fight.

Fight.

I need you to fight.

a monologue to my sister because she can’t have a dialog Written on the day she no longer wanted to fight, 5/5/20.

NOWS / 139

FUTURES 142 Double Take

160 Bob & Adam

Mia Chung

Adam Greenfield and Bob Moss

144 A Strange Loop: Portraits of a Musical

166 The Future of Theater

Arnulfo Maldonado

145 Eleven Thoughts (In Order) Adam Greenfield

150 The Artistic Directors

AndrĂŠ Bishop, Adam Greenfield, Bob Moss, Tim Sanford, and Don Scardino

Brittany Allen, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, C.A. Johnson, Hansol Jung, Heather Raffo, and Sanaz Toossi

176 Dave

Taylor Reynolds and Dave Harris

180 HANG TIME (an excerpt) Zora Howard

155 A Strange Loop: Portraits of a Musical Arnulfo Maldonado

156 The Dream and the Delivery System Alison Koch

182 Well Past Time

Kim Golding, Divinia Shorter, Lizzie Stern, and May Treuhaft-Ali

190 Selling Kabul: On Stage Iman Childs

140 / ALMANAC

DOUBLE TAKE Mia Chung

ACT 1 March 12, 2020.

An email informs me that next week’s photo shoot is cancelled.

—

(sigh of relief)

Out of an abundance of caution, I have my class meet on this thing called Zoom. At the end of class: —

Um, Cuomo just shut down Broadway.

The next day I buy a few hundred dollars’ worth of shelf-stable groceries and look forward to a one-week retreat: I will finally have time to finish the revision. While I’m unpacking groceries, my sister who has a house with a furnished attic calls: —

You can come today, tomorrow, or in two months.

Before she is done talking, I purchase a train ticket. As I pack for a two-week visit, I find myself putting everything I can fit into every bag I own (including the groceries) because some part of me realizes I am moving out of New York City.

ACT 2 His watch tracks him getting an average of two hours of REM sleep each night. He consults a doctor: — —

Why are the CDC and the WHO saying that masks won’t stop infection, and yet masks are in such dire need at the hospitals?

Because people touch their faces so much with unwashed hands and don’t wear masks correctly anyways, so masks are useless, and the burn rate of masks and gloves at hospitals is so high that hospitals are running out.

He doesn’t understand and now he also feels stupid, like a guitar string in his brain has snapped, so he takes another nap. Food is delivered; the only thing his wife doesn’t wash is the cheese, which she wipes with disinfectant. He gets a sleep score above 90 for the first time ever and then writes to their landlord about uncertainty. They feel drowsy, so they take a walk: —

(smile, brief wave) Hello

But the couple strides past them silently, frowning, with tunnel vision, which makes him believe they associate him with China. At home he puts on headphones and she takes a nap. She wakes up and reads four histories of the Chosun Era and finally understands that due to the stability of this period of Confucian orthodoxy, Korea let its foot fall asleep and then couldn’t keep up when Change barged in with guns. His work is not considered essential, and if she could just stop worrying about toilet paper, he would not have slammed the door in her face. She wants them to get a dog, but the shelter is empty.

A white police officer presses his knee into a Black man’s neck; a white woman with a dog files two false reports against a Black man watching birds — and cities across the country and around the world begin to wake up.

142 / ALMANAC

ACT 3 So much is finally so clear to so many for a moment. With the next exhale, they send statements and she hosts conversations and he fills out surveys and we send money and dispatch reading lists and form focus groups and list demands and yet the only thing Bella really wants to do is go outside.

Wesley logs in on Monday and re-schedules the webinar with London, but now that it’s Friday, he’ll send the email after the weekend and take the rest of the day off even though it’s Monday because forgetting to mute and forgetting to unmute for five hours straight is his limit, and on Friday he steps outside for the first time all week and vows to make virtual cardio a daily commitment starting on Monday when — but after three solitary months in Brooklyn, Wesley routinely talks to himself out loud and eats cereal for dinner and overreacts when there’s a slow connection (but will we ever go back now that there’s no commute?) and the public has thickened the streets with airborne anger and neutrality has been outed as supremacy, and now, now he no longer feels safe. So he takes a test, confirms he is negative, breaks his lease, puts on a mask, flies across country to his parents’ home, and prepares to sit this one out in peace and quiet in Portland, Oregon.

Bella goes outside because she prefers dying by virus over the death of staying safe. She is tired of educating friends and sick of policing allies, but then she realizes that what is set in stone can be taken down and removed from public view, even if it has been polished for decades and has a loose resemblance to a former president. She can gather and rally and march and be a living, breathing monument. Could it be that exposure to tear gas, rubber bullets, and accusations of looting can lead to a lasting health?

ACT 4 The earth gets hotter and vegetation dries up, a gender is revealed, lightning strikes, and then unquenchable flames paint the sky orange and smoke blots out the sun, summoning a nuclear winter or a scene from Mars. Mars squares the stationing Saturn on Tuesday. On Wednesday, John receives his mail-in ballot; two days later, he receives a second, identical ballot. In a neighboring state, Pearl’s mother considers each option, configuration, philosophy, and question (including “what is kindergarten actually?”) in balance with sundry risks, expenses, and drawbacks — on an hourly basis; after all, what really hangs in the balance is not the acquisition of friends and skills, but the future personhood of Pearl.

— —

Pearl, do you want to pod with Aliya? You’d be going to her house and / you’d— I promise I’ll wear a mask all the time, Mama! Yes, I want to go, please, I promise!

Instead of fighting fires for $1 an hour, the people in prison are fighting a virus instead, and so houses burn. A wedding is held outside a nursing home so her grandmother can attend through a window. Another Justice dies, then Decency follows in mere hours — and no one is surprised. His Hippocratic Oath now also means he must keep patients from their families and stay away from his own. Natives could swing Arizona if they can secure rights to a street address. Halloween has come early and will stay late. Nothing smells true. Whales have taken to flying through the air. Given such circumstances, John asks himself if he should vote twice. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma because Juan with that lawn sign down the block might have received three. Nothing can be heard because the birds are making a big racket due to the flying whales. After they click “Leave Meeting,” Pearl and Aliya go to the park and get stung by bees.

ACT 5 Summer 2021 or in three years — depending on who you trust.

You open the window to hear the resilient hum of the city.

You think about washing your hands, but this moment might pass, so you reach out and hold the side of their face. Later: —

I touched the window, but I washed my hands just before.

They laugh and the future and the past are breathing in this present, this only-connect moment for which nothing could prepare us and that we will each remember differently and the same.

FUTURES / 143

By Arnulfo Maldonado 144 / ALMANAC

ELEVEN THOUGHTS (IN ORDER) Adam Greenfield

1

IT’S OCTOBER 17, 2020. Playwrights Horizons is marking its fiftieth birthday this year under circumstances that are stranger, more harrowing, and more mysterious than we could have imagined.

I just learned something interesting from the Old Testament, thanks to my friend Miranda who started going to church: per Leviticus 25, a fiftieth anniversary marks a Year of Jubilee. It says: You shall count off seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the period of seven weeks of years gives forty-nine years. Then you shall have the trumpet sounded loud; on the tenth day of the seventh month — on the day of atonement — you shall have the trumpet sounded throughout all your land. And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants.

It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family. That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you: you shall not sow, or reap the aftergrowth, or harvest the unpruned vines. For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you: you shall eat only what the field itself produces.

And it goes on, commanding that, in the fiftieth year, “You shall not cheat one another,” and, “If any of your kin fall into difficulty, you shall support them,” and, “You shall not cheat one another, but you shall fear your God,” and, “In this year of jubilee you shall return, every one of you, to your property,” and, “Throughout the land that you hold, you shall provide for the redemption of the land,” and, “No one shall rule over the other with harshness,” and, “The land will yield its fruit, and you will eat your fill and live on it securely.”

This seems worth noting.

2

For a month, this essay has loomed overhead.

I compose sentences in the shower, and while making my morning coffee. But every time I carve out an afternoon, a weekend, a minute to write, the time gets lost to the vortex of Zoom meetings that comprise my life mid-pandemic, and the prose I set down struggles to cohere.

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, my hero Jane Jacobs wrote, “There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and be served.” She’s talking about the design of cities, appealing for urban planning that arises from and untethers what’s organic and unpredictable about human patterns, rather than from the attempt to control or restrict them.

Sometime in May, two-ish months into the pandemic, before my title changed to Artistic Director, I wrote to myself in the margin of my notebook a thought that I keep coming back to, and which must have formed in some relation to Jacobs’ idea: don’t move against the chaos, move with the chaos. In keeping with this, and moving with the moment rather than against it, I’ll just let this essay take the form that it wants to take: thoughts in the order I think them, typed in those moments between, when I have the brainspace to write.

3

What is a “Year of Jubilee,” if not an invitation to return to formative questions, to challenge assumptions, to confront your practices, and to stare deeply into the mirror and ask, “What do I believe?” In terms of theater, this ritual we usually love but seldom understand why, which is uncannily rendered off-limits in a world of social distancing, some hot questions arise: What are we, when the act of gathering in a room, the very thing that makes theater theater, is neither safe nor legal? Theater, at its essence, is to me as Peter Brook describes it: an actor, a stage, an audience, and — for Playwrights Horizons I feel honor-bound to add — FUTURES / 145

a text. When theater goes digital, are we advocating for our continuance, or our extinction? Are we pleasing the gods? Angering the gods? Or do the gods understand we’re just in a pinch? Facing a massive economic blow, with no clear sense of a timeline for rebuilding, what level of sacrifice should we be prepared to make? How do we undo the systems of inequity and oppression we’ve upheld in our practices, and how do we reckon with our past? What is your responsibility to the present when you learn that, in the past, what you had thought was progress was in fact anything but? What of the rising ticket prices, edged ever higher by a struggling producing model? What do we need theater to be when we reopen? What do we want theater to be when we reopen? How will this year of collapse affect our psyche in the long run, and what can theaters do in response? What is our role in the city? To nurse wounds? To throw down gauntlets? To raise flags? To numb pain? To inflict pain? To forge paths?

4

My train of thought races back to other moments I felt lost, and it stops in March, 2007, when I moved east to New York to join the Playwrights Horizons staff as Literary Manager — a time of profound disorientation. All I had wanted in life was to land here, but when I arrived I became undone. I was overwhelmed, beset, depressed; I was a pig in the city, squinting at Mapquest printouts, prey to every Scientologist who said hello in Port Authority, getting lost on rerouted trains, bumping into literally every person on Bleecker. I was chronically unable to hail a taxi. I figured, “I’ll give the job three years to save face and then escape to Montana to open a food-truck-bookstore-yoga-barn.” The city felt like a giant

146 / ALMANAC

Model of the Plan Voisin for Paris by Le Corbusier displayed at the Nouveau Esprit Pavilion, 1925. machine, totally oblivious to my existence, and uncaring, like a Fritz Lang nightmare vision from Metropolis. It seemed impossibly complex, disordered, out of control.

And I thought, if I can just understand the city better, maybe it’ll open itself to me. I dove into books, into podcasts. I wanted to know where our tap water comes from, how it gets here, and how our waste water leaves, and how is the city powered, and where are all of the wires? Why are the subways routed the way they are, and why do they serve certain neighborhoods but not others, and how are the traffic lights timed? Who chose the width of the sidewalks, and the shape of the curb, and how did Broadway get diagonal when the rest of mid-Manhattan is a grid? In defiance of the city and the crowded, sweaty subway commute, I got a bike because, as I recall thinking, “The city doesn’t want me to ride a bike and therefore I will!”

And something happened, which I didn’t expect: I fell in love with the place. The more I got to know New York, traveling through its streets and neighborhoods by bicycle, dodging cars and pedestrians, alternating routes to see new angles, fed by the appreciation I learned from reading about its internal engines, I began to feel attuned to how it works, its rhythms and mood swings, its mercurial attitude. I gasped at the way sunlight bounced off of windows looking eastward toward the city at sundown, and I looked forward with disproportionate glee to my descent into Chinatown biking across the Manhattan bridge in the morning, and the smell of fish and exhaust that accompanied it. I heard “Rhapsody in Blue” played on a steel drum in Union Square, and tears sprang to my eyes.

5

That last bit made me think of another thing that Jane Jacobs wrote. She said:

The trust of a city street is formed over time from many little public sidewalk contacts.…

Most of [these contacts are] ostensibly utterly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all. The sum of such casual, public contact at a local level — most of it fortuitous, most of it associated with errands, all of it metered by the person concerned and not thrust upon him by anyone — is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in a time of personal or neighborhood need. The absence of this trust is a disaster to a city street.

Its cultivation cannot be institutionalized…. A lively city scene is lively largely by virtue of its enormous collection of small elements.

And I think: The theater is a city. The city is a theater.

6

Long, long before I felt lost in New York City and then fell in love with it, I felt lost in my life and then fell in love with theater. I don’t remember much about being a kid, except feeling pretty embarrassed and ashamed: I was supposed to be a developing Jew but found little there that was simpatico; and I was supposed to be heterosexual but knew that was a sham and that my future guaranteed only disease and loneliness.

Because I was neither of the things I most needed to be, I spent many years having no sense of existing much at all.

I have no idea why, but it was only through plays that I began to feel present. For some bizarre reason this ritual of watching human stories unfold in time, in space, in worlds imagined by these Gods, these playwrights, to expose life’s paradoxes, to suggest an alternate worldview, to present life idealized and those ideals corrupted, to grieve, to celebrate, to expose psychology, to craft poetry: they pumped painful, challenging contradictions into my years of teenage melancholy, and wrestling with these shaped who I am.

Aunt Dan and Lemon. The Crucible. The Road to Mecca.

Into The Woods. Merrily We Roll Along. (All of Sondheim).

Rhinoceros. Loot. M. Butterfly. The Skin of Our Teeth. Two Trains Running. The Maids. Prelude to a Kiss. Machinal. Reckless.

Dutchman. Cloud Nine. Antigone. The Importance of Being Earnest. The Bald Soprano.

When the Dionysian cultists of the seventh century BCE, minds blasted by ancient Greek wine, donned their goatskins to dance the dithyrambic chorus — the ritual that led, ultimately, to Athenian tragedy — it was to please a cruel and mysterious god. When the acrobats and musicians of eighth-century China introduced the popular religious Sangaku ceremony to Japan, it sparked the origins of Noh drama, a ritual that engages Buddhist dogma to confront the moral contradictions inherent to the human experience.

And across the diversity of cultures in Africa, performance rituals are sewn into the fabric of society as far back as history can reveal: rituals that uphold values essential to a community’s physical, ethical, and spiritual health.

This work sprang organically from human need, to help us see the world; to help us understand our place in the cosmos. It can expose irreconcilable questions, show us how little we know, bring us together as a community, as a city, one audience at a time, in pursuit of these things. It’s an analog, artisanal, bespoke, hand-made public offering that, when it wants to, can add more life to the experience of being a person. It can make the world a better place — by which I mean a deeper place, a more interesting, complicated, mysterious place. It’s supposed to help us. It helped me. And the way it helped me is what made me want to spend my life making it for other people who need it like I do.

I’m no longer on social media — I never really understood how to use it? — but sometimes lately (I can’t help myself) I look at the Comments section of the online news sources I read, where avatars of people have typed things like, “I have news, everyone, live theater is over,” and, “The only salvation for theater is to go digital.” I can’t agree. If this is indeed a Year of Jubilee, a time “for the redemption of the land,” I think it must be a time to become that melancholy teenager again and tap into that first love, to find my awe and fight for it, and to dismantle the barriers of access to it.

7

It’s October 23, the morning after I wrote that last part, Thought #6, and my pre-meeting computer-clicking led me to the IRS’s “Charities and Nonprofits” site.

Even though the US government shows no particular indication that it believes theater is of value to the culture, it has managed to classify our work as tax-exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, provided we remain organized and operated exclusively for “exempt purposes.” And when I click through the link, the IRS offers this definition: The exempt purposes set forth in section 501(c) (3) are charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals. The term charitable is used in its generally accepted legal sense and includes relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged; advancement of religion; advancement of education or science; erecting or maintaining public buildings, monuments, or works; lessening the burdens of government; lessening neighborhood tensions; eliminating prejudice and discrimination; defending human and civil rights secured by law; and combating community deterioration and juvenile delinquency.

Before there was an IRS, before there was a republic of united states, there was a tax-exempt sector. Absent a government, European settlers formed voluntary associations (hospitals, fire departments) to serve the public. By the early twentieth century, the 501(c) code was established to fill a gap in public welfare program support when the US government’s own efforts were insufficient. And to assure the public that these service organizations are operated with integrity, in good hands, and true to our exempt purposes, the government stipulates oversight by a Board of Directors.

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“In this year of jubilee you shall return, every one of you, to your property.”

Above all, our existence is a debt to the public trust. I will tattoo this on my eyelids. I will write it on a carrot and dangle that carrot in front of my face from a dowel that’s connected to my hat. I will reduce it to a powder, mix it into my kool-aid, and then drink. Oh my god, the presidential election is in eleven days. Looking forward to our fifty-first year, and to whatever metamorphosis this fiftieth year is sparking, our primary pursuit is the public trust. From the midst of this pile-up of crises and awakenings that the year 2020 has brought, a mandate is screaming at me: Your purposes must be exempt! It says, Figure out how you’re not serving the public, all of the public, and then serve the public.

After the Federal Theatre Project was terminated, Halie Flanagan said, “We know now what many doubted four years ago — that great numbers of people, millions of them, who had never gone to the theatre, or had stopped going, want to go to the theatre if the plays are good and the admission reasonable.”

8

Here’s a picture of my bike. It’s mangy, and I love it. Last week, someone stole the seat and broke the seat-post clamp, so that’s a new seat.

And the handlebar grips are new, too. One of the old ones had split and I was using duct tape for a while as padding, but I finally got these new ones yesterday. I think they’re kind of ugly, which makes me love them more.

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9

It’s impossible to consider the work of Jane Jacobs, and the life of New York’s city streets, without also considering the foil to her grassroots, community-based vision of the city: Robert Moses, widely revered in his time, widely criticized in ours.

A man equally wealthy in capital, political power, and bluster, Moses found inspiration in the feverish utopianism of modernist architects like Le Corbusier, whose “Radiant City” project aimed to impose symmetry and order on the patterns of city life, emphasizing raw geometry over decoration of any sort, and separating a city’s design from any whiff of a preexisting culture. Le Corbusier envisioned a city that would function as machinery, built to behave in the most efficient way possible. A product of the industrial revolution, he envisioned a city design that could essentially be mass-produced. Le Corbusier considered Manhattan obsolete, describing it as “utterly devoid of harmony” and “a storm, a tornado, a cataclysm.”

Robert Moses’s entrance into the field of urban planning coincided with the rise of the automobile, which may explain why his own utopian vision was so car-oriented, envisioning New York City from the vantage point of the driver, not of the pedestrian. Having placed himself among the city’s politicians in a position of great influence, Moses became instrumental in the construction of the Triborough, Throgs Neck, Bronx-Whitestone, Henry Hudson, and Verrazano bridges, as well as the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Staten Island Expressway, the Cross-Bronx Crossway, and the Belt Parkway, among many others, all of which made a fortune for the city, and for himself.

Like Le Corbusier, Moses favored the eradication of the “blighted landscapes” — a popular expression at that time — where lower-income communities lived, suggesting they should be destroyed and replaced with high-rise public housing towers surrounded by parkland. “When you operate in an overbuilt metropolis,” he said, infamously, “you have to hack your way with a meat ax.” Under Moses, historic neighborhoods and communities were bulldozed to make way for idealized, controlled housing plans across the city, many of which still stand today: the housing developments on New York’s east side waterfront from 14th Street clear down to the Brooklyn Bridge, all built under Moses’s oversight, reflect the strictly symmetrical, nearly totalitarian order that the modernists espoused. At the time, this ordered combination of tower and green space, set back from city traffic, promised an idyllic, safe vision of city living. Over the decades, though, these gated utopias, closed off from the city street, proved instead quite efficient at nurturing vandalism and crime.

In the 40s, Moses set out to create the Lower Manhattan Expressway (the “LOMEX”), which would connect the Holland Tunnel to the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges and demolish Washington Square Park, as well as much of SoHo and Little Italy. And Jane Jacobs, a resident of the cozy, labyrinthine West Village, was pissed. Mobilizing the communities who called these neighborhoods home, and inspiring the support of the independent press, she raised a grassroots army against Moses’s plan. She decried the short-sighted, top-down, utopian approach of modern urban planning in favor of a city that’s built from the actual, living patterns of its residents.

“Human beings are, of course, a part of nature,” Jacobs wrote in 1961, “as much so as grizzly bears or bees or whales or sorghum cane. The cities of human beings are as natural, being a product of one form of nature, as are the colonies of prairie dogs or the beds of oysters.”

The seeming chaos of New York City — the “cataclysm” that Le Corbusier maligned, and “the overbuilt metropolis” that Moses set out to tame — was, to Jacobs, the key to its greatness. The vibrancy and potency of this city, a font of culture and commerce, a cacophony for the senses, is made from the people who live here, by the accidental symmetries and unplanned encounters that make up our daily lives here. “There is no logic that can be superimposed on a city,” she said, “people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.”

To Jacobs, what makes a safe and livable neighborhood: small, close, walkable city blocks; a density of people, and a diversity of people; a mingling of old and new buildings; and a mixed-use landscape that integrates cultural, commercial, residential, and institutional functions in close proximity.

She says, “homogeneity or close similarity among uses, in real life, poses very puzzling esthetic problems. If the sameness of use is shown candidly for what it is — sameness — it looks monotonous. Superficially, this monotony might be thought of as a sort of order, however dull. But esthetically, it unfortunately carries with it a deep disorder: the disorder of conveying no direction.”

She saw a happier city life in the co-existence and trust of neighborhoods, where residents looked out for each other while finding access to all the cultural offerings of the metropolis.

10

More and more, this decades-old battle over the future of New York has framed my thinking about theater. Replace the word “city” with the word “theater,” and I start to picture the theater that should exist, the one I hope to make: potent, safe, unexpected, a mixed-use landscape, filled with a density and diversity of life, and — above all — a theater made of and by people.

Broadway is a street that slashes diagonally through the grid of New York City, creating public squares where people meet, where communities form. How can our theater, too, be a diagonal slash?

11

Now it’s October 27. The election is in seven days. When you read this, we’ll know what happened, and we’ll both think I sound naive; and we’ll feel a year older than we

do today.

There’s so much I don’t know about what the next year will look like. When can we return to Playwrights Horizons?

What will the colder months be like in this lockdown? What’s the financial outlook? When will it be safe to start doing all the work that I’m so hungry to do in this new job?

I see people, friends, going a little crazy. I feel like I’m going a little crazy too. The margin of my notebook still says, don’t move against the chaos, move with the chaos. That’s how I learned to love New York, and the city is the theater, the theater is the city.

The theater doesn’t feel like the city right now, so that’s the first thing we do. Figure out who you’re not serving, and serve them. Be awesome at being 501(c)3.

“For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you.”

This essay turned out longer than it was supposed to be.

My other hero, Charles Ludlam, wrote a manifesto for his theater, the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. It begins, “You are a living mockery of your own ideals. If not, you A have set your ideals too low.”

(Page 148) Photo courtesy the artist.

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THE ARTISTIC

DIRECTORS André Bishop, Adam Greenfield, Bob Moss, Tim Sanford, and Don Scardino Almanac spoke to Playwrights Horizons’ five Artistic Directors.

Their individual responses have been organized into the roundtable conversation below, which has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Bob Moss (Founder, 1971–1981) André Bishop (Artistic Director, 1981–1992) Don Scardino (Artistic Director, 1992–1996) Tim Sanford (Artistic Director, 1996–2020) Adam Greenfield (Artistic Director, 2020–)

“WITHOUT A CULTURE OF THEATER — WITHOUT A CULTURE OF SHARED EXPERIENCE, OF LOOKING AT WHO WE ARE IN TERMS OF EMOTIONS, IN TERMS OF HISTORY, IN TERMS OF THE HUMAN CONDITION — WE’RE SUNK.”

ALMANAC: How do you read plays? What do you read for?

ANDRÉ BISHOP: I sit down, I usually take my glasses off, and I read the play from beginning to end.

Even today, because of my early life as an actor, I read plays as an actor. In the old days, and maybe now still, if you go into a hallway with a bunch of actors waiting to audition for a play, you’ll often see their lips moving as they read the text because they’re processing how they would say their lines. I tend to like plays that are highly performative. I like theatricality. I don’t like plays that require you to work to hear them. I like plays that have big, juicy roles for people. The bad thing that I never really conquered was my lack of interest in structure. I’m old-fashioned, and I quite like well-made plays — though “well-made” today is very different from what it meant when I started out, with three acts, like a sonata with a beginning, middle, and end.

Things like structure and progression didn’t excite me as much. What excited me was the juiciness of the language.

I’ve been seduced by that many times — sometimes it was good, sometimes it was not good. By the time I started working at Playwrights Horizons, many plays had become two-act plays; and I suppose about ten or twelve years ago, maybe more, we got into the 90-minute, no-intermission thing. When we get plays reviewed, I greet the critics, and the first thing they always ask is how long it is. If you say “90 minutes, no intermission,” they say, “Great!” I find that quite depressing. I love 90-minute, no-intermission plays. You can do a lot in that amount of time. But you can also not do a lot in that amount of time. There’s something about a play that’s given the time to develop at its own pace — that is important.

ADAM GREENFIELD: It often feels like theater is just for theater people. Like it’s a closed loop. I feel that in order to be a really good reader of plays — and in order to be a really good curator of plays — you need to spend more time absorbing non-theater art forms. It’s about immersing myself with new painting and sculpture, new music, new nonfiction and essay-writing — basically trying to cultivate a true, generalist, Renaissance-person experience of the world, and bringing that full compendium of experiences you’ve amassed into everything that you read.

There are a few cases where you read a play and you just love it and you don’t know why. Sometimes the writing is just sharp and leaps off the page and captures you.

Sometimes it finds confluence with other things that are happening in the world — sometimes I’ll read a play and realize I just read an article about the same thing, and the same idea was at work in this exhibit I saw at PS1 two years ago, and you listen to the radio and there’s an NPR story or a podcast episode about a similar idea, and you realize this play is hitting a current thought bubble in the culture. So sometimes that’s the thing I look for — that feeling of confluence.

But, more often than not, the feeling I get when I’m reading a play I love is, I don’t know, this sense of somebody being true to her or his or their authentic writing self.

A writer in a room, trying to write through a problem in real time. That’s a quality in writing that energizes me. I’m not really into perfection in a play. I’m not really into perfection in dramaturgy. I’m more interested in the ways in which a play misbehaves.

I think my experience directing plays also makes me a better reader. It helps me read the play as an event, FUTURES / 151

unfolding in time and space, in front of a paying audience, who’ve all come to the theater having had all kinds of different sorts of days. I’ve sat through enough harrowing previews of plays as a director — and I am a profoundly nervous sort of director — to be able to picture myself sitting there while I’m reading. And that helps me read with solutions in mind, not with problems in mind. So much of a dramaturg’s job is to identify problems. So much of what a director does is solving problems — your job is to make the play work.

TIM SANFORD: When I’m reading a play, I’m looking for the seeds of the story — the desire, the tension, the human friction between different people. I never thought of plays as literature. They’re blueprints for performance. True playwrights enter into a loaded situation and don’t pussyfoot around. They know where the story lies, and they lay down the mystery.

Theater is a microcosm of life, in that it has a beginning, middle, and end. Its whole life cycle is right there before you. And every play you say “yes” to has a ripple effect, and you don’t see that ripple effect until later. I look at the guiding philosophy of the first plays I picked, and I see how critic-centric I was. “Which of these might a critic like?”

You’re actually thinking that way, which is a dirty secret. But I quickly learned there’s no predicting what critics might like. So you might as well just pick what excites you. And that means the writer as much as the play.

A watershed moment for me revolved around the play Wit by Margaret Edson, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Wit seemed very much like a Playwrights Horizons play — it was all about language and it had a droll humor to it. But when Doug Hughes at Long Wharf called me up about producing it, he said, “Well, I’m sure she’ll never write a play again.

She’s a school teacher, and this just came out of her.” That proved to be true. At the time, though, I had to ask myself, “Do you do a play at Playwrights Horizons if it’s a really good play, but you don’t believe it’s the work of a playwright?”

On one level, Wit is, of course, the work of a playwright — it’s a play. But I felt it was important to commit to a writer who really wanted to write.

DON SCARDINO: My orientation to reading plays totally comes from having been trained as an actor. I chart each character’s arc. I see how the play is broken up into beats.

I approach it in a very physical way. It’s not an intellectual process for me — it’s more of a physical process, an emotional and instinctive process. Coming into Playwrights Horizons, I was very fortunate to have Tim Sanford there.

Tim would school me as to the emerging playwrights — why he liked this one or that one, why they were important in terms of the theatrical canon. I learned a lot from him in that way. I used to say to him, “One day, Timmy me boy, this’ll all be yours.” And, you know, I meant it. I insisted that he take over because he was ready for it, ready to identify the new writers — and look at all the great work he’s done, my god. The theater started under Bob, and it really crystallized under André. For the person who comes in next, it’s rough because you’re going to want to change it up a little bit, do it your way. But it’s also necessary for the gears to shift, to set up the new paradigm that the theater has to embrace. It was clear to me coming in — and clear to me as we worked together — that Tim was the perfect fit because of

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his approach to the playwright and his approach to playwriting. And he carried it through. He’s done it.

How would you describe your theatrical values, principles, and tastes?

TIM: Proust was really important to me. The transcendental movements of the final chapters of the final book of Proust’s work is all about style and voice. He had a pretty bleak view of human relations, but he thought you could understand another person by getting inside their art. It’s the idea that the art object and the art subject are aligned.

This is why I harangue about form and content. It’s like particles and waves — you can’t have light with just one.

My working philosophy is that you need to hold up style in addition to content.

DON: My own taste runs towards the more theatrical. I like work that can only take place in the theater. I like naturalistic plays, too, but I tend to prefer a play that can only be done in the theater — a story that can only be told in the language of the stage.

ANDRÉ: Tastes change — not just one’s own taste but fashion in the theater. There’s no question that, in my career at Playwrights Horizons and at Lincoln Center Theater, there’s been an enormous change in terms of the kinds of plays that people like or that get produced. I’ve always been drawn to highly individual, highly idiosyncratic writing, where not just the language but the world of the play is very clear. Only Bill Finn could have written March of the Falsettos in this witty, urban, angry voice. Only Chris Durang, the preeminent satirist of my generation, could write so scabrously about the Catholic Church and nuns.

The work of Albert Innaurato was vividly imagined and highly operatic. I was always attracted to writers who — however influenced they might have been by someone else — clearly possessed their own voice. Fortunately, over the years, my interests and tastes broadened and changed.

Had I known then what I know today, I might have concentrated on a larger number of writers than I did in those very early years. But it was those writers who gave the theater focus. In those days, the non-profit theaters that were worth a damn were led by the writers. The work of Circle Repertory was completely defined by the work of Lanford Wilson. The Magic Theatre in San Francisco was completely defined by the work of Sam Shepard. Playwrights Horizons was not completely defined by one writer, but it was completely defined by a group of urban writers, often comic in tone. But then we moved on — we didn’t stay stuck there.

Nowadays, writers of all ages can write any kind of play they want. People will come and see it, and people will understand that this is a play with a form, and this is not a play with a form, and all of that, I think, is good. There’s more variety to what was a rather formulaic way of writing 50 years ago.

ADAM: To me, it’s about surprise — not being able to understand quite what a play is doing. I mean, I want the play to know what it’s doing, but I want it to stay two steps in front of me, so that even if I think I can predict what will happen next, it surprises me. It changes the game. I think about Adam Bock’s play A Life. You think it’s one kind of

experience, and then it changes radically about 40 minutes in. Or The Flick, which constantly asks you to look closer, even when you think you can’t. Or Iowa, which seems to be modeled after the dramaturgy of web surfing. I remember the feeling of reading playwrights like Ari Stess for the first time, or, more recently, John J. Caswell, Jr., and thinking I’ve never encountered a play like this before. That’s what I gravitate towards. It might be a hazard of the profession that I have to see so many plays — or, sorry, that I get to see so many plays — but, as an audience member, I find myself frequently feeling like I’ve seen this, or like I can quickly associate a play with other plays I’ve seen.

And then there are plays that knock you off your guard. And that’s the feeling I crave.

But I’m not talking specifically about formal invention, although I do love a fun game. I also think that this pursuit of newness, of disarming the audience, is about offering up a dangerous idea to play with. There’s a moment at Playwrights Horizons I’m deeply proud of, when we had Bootycandy by Robert O’Hara running simultaneously with Grand Concourse by Heidi Schreck. Those were both plays I was scared of. With Bootycandy, I didn’t know how the audience was going to respond — it’s a very live wire. With this very palpable sense of danger at the end of the play, and the way Robert makes himself so vulnerable after such a wild ride, it all felt really electrifying and unpredictable.

Then, upstairs, at the same time, we were running Grand Concourse. There’s a unit set, unlike Bootycandy’s carousel set; there were four actors all playing the same roles, unlike Bootycandy’s carousel of performers; and the play was, more or less, a realistic, psychologically-driven play.

It had none of the formal invention of Bootycandy, and yet Grand Concourse scared the bejeezus out of me because it’s about a nun, played beautifully by Quincy Tyler Bernstine, who begins to question her capacity to forgive. In the end, she breaks, and she finds liberation in no longer bearing the responsibility of forgiving this woman who has hurt her so deeply. That scared the crap out of me. The first time I read the play, I thought that maybe she would learn the value of forgiveness, and that forgiveness is that height of yadda yadda yadda. But Grand Concourse pulls that right out from under us. It’s about finding the limits of forgiveness — and I find that to be a terrifying conclusion ESPECIALLY because, without the moral compass of a nun, who I completely rely on to be better than me, more evolved, wiser, more advanced, I’m suddenly lost at sea. Ethically, that play casts me into darkness. I remember feeling really proud that Playwrights Horizons could do two plays that were both so challenging, but which took such vastly different shapes.

As we look to the next 50 years — from this moment of real reflection and disruption — where do you see theater going? What are your hopes for the form? For the field?

For Playwrights Horizons?

ADAM: You do see trends. I remember there was a time — around 2008 or 2009 — when people were writing about the end of the world with greater and greater frequency, imagining plays that take place in a post-apocalyptic setting. And then in like 2012 or 2013, I began to notice that that vision of the end of the world was moving from being a far-off, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome kind of world to being a lot closer to where we were presently living. It was our world, not some sort of imagined future dystopia. The

“THE THING THAT THE THEATER HAS ALWAYS HAD, THAT ARTISTS HAVE ALWAYS HAD, THAT HUMAN BEINGS HAVE ALWAYS HAD, IS HOPE.” dystopia was just on the other side of right now. That’s what Mr. Burns was: that story could be set in motion the very day we were watching the play.

I remember thinking it made sense that writers were writing this way, because the number of ways in which the world could end were becoming more and more real to us. And what’s interesting about this moment we’re in, in 2020, is that the world kind of did stop. The unthinkable did happen.

This is going to change us. I don’t know what’s going to be on the other side of it. But what I hope for, what I imagine, and what I will optimistically predict is that there will be a cultural reimagining of what the event of theater can be.

We are living our lives in ways that we never could have imagined we would be living. It’s my hope that once we’re able to move into real life again, that when we get into a room with audience, we’ll be experiencing new dimensions of love and admiration for the simple fact of being in a room together. I think people will find other people fascinating again. Maybe plays will begin to interact with audiences in new ways. Maybe plays will learn how to breathe more closely with audiences and move through space with audiences in a different way.

But I feel like my job as an artistic director — as a curator — is not to have the answers, but to make my antennae as sensitive as possible, so that I can be attuned to what artists are doing and thinking and making, so that I can follow the most innovative and the most adventurous and the most urgent and electrifying voices who are out there making work. This word “metamorphosis” keeps coming to my mind. We are in the cocoon right now, and when we get out of the cocoon, I picture some birth into a new creature. Maybe it’s naive to think that.

ANDRÉ: I hope that this is a time of reflection. I’m not so sure that it is. Just because people have a lot of time on their hands and not much to do, doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily reflecting. I think a lot of people are depressed, anxious, scared, nervous. We’ve never been through a time like this — and I don’t just mean the pandemic. The upcoming election is crucial for the future of this country, and if change doesn’t happen… I don’t want to think about the future. The thought of it is too terrifying to me now.

Had you asked me this question six months ago, my answer would have been considerably different. I tend to be a nervous kind of person, a very anxious person, but six months ago, I would have said that we’re in a Golden Age of American playwriting, and even more. The work on the stages has gotten more diverse. Everything is exploding in a way that is energizing, in a way that reflects the country.

50 years from now, the theater might be the most astounding hall of mirrors that you could ever possibly find in your entire life. If the country survives, there are so many incredible theaters — not just in New York City but all over the country — and they’re run by people who, for the most part, care, and by communities that are proud of these theaters.

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So, six months ago, I would have been buoyant and hopelessly optimistic and excited. Now, given what we’re going through, with no end in sight, I don’t know. This year may have completely changed this country — and the world and millions of people — and therefore the theater. I don’t think life will ever go back to what it was.

My answer isn’t gooey and dreamy-eyed, but I don’t see how you can be alive today, in this country, with what’s going on, and with what’s facing us now, and be these things. Of course, young people have their whole lives ahead of them.

They should be dreamy-eyed and optimistic. That’s one of the great advantages of being young. But for somebody like me — who’s worked in the theater for 40 years, who’s run two separate theaters in New York — it’s a little daunting. All the things that we took for granted that maybe we shouldn’t have taken for granted — the funding, the struggle, the happiness, our survival — we can no longer take for granted.

We just don’t know. We hope. The thing that the theater has always had, that artists have always had, that human beings have always had, is hope. It’s when we have lost all hope of a better world, a better future, that we have lost.

The thing about Playwrights Horizons is that there’s a motor running under it. There’s a reason for it to exist, and that reason today is the exact same reason that it existed when Bob took it over in 1971, when I took it over ten years later, when Don took it over, when Tim took it over, and, now, Adam. There’s a motor: the development of new American work, the production of new American work. It’s only when theaters lose their point of view or their reason for being that they get in trouble. But working with writers, giving them opportunities — that is what you do as a responsible producer. The mission of Playwrights Horizons, which is written into the bylaws and into the playbill, has barely changed in the past 50 years. Even if the style has changed, even if the personalities have changed, the forward movement of the theater has remained exactly as it always was.

It was needed in 1971 and, in a different way, it’s needed in 2020. Playwrights Horizons was never about the Artistic Director. It’s playwright-driven. As long as the world goes on spinning, I feel very optimistic about Playwrights Horizons.

BOB: I hope theater is going to come back.

DON: It’s crucial to get theater to survive the next year and a half of the pandemic.

If I had a theater today, I would make the physical space very flexible, so that it could be modified to be in the round, or a thrust. We’ve got to figure out how to let people sit in twos and threes, with social distancing and ventilation.

Without a culture of theater — without a culture of shared experience, of looking at who we are in terms of emotions, in terms of history, in terms of the human condition — we’re sunk. It’s great that we have BroadwayHD, but those plays that inspire the playwright’s imagination and encourage the audience to come along — those plays that encourage audiences to take the same risk that the playwright has taken — can only really happen in a theater.

BOB: I would say a couple of things. I’m very proud of the fact that Playwrights Horizons is more heavily involved with the Theater School. And I think Adam is going to be terrific.

I know he is. He’s so smart, and I love reading his essays.

What are my hopes? That the theater will continue to do good work and continue to challenge audiences. You have 154 / ALMANAC

“I NO MORE BELIEVE THAT THEATER WILL DIE THAN I BELIEVE THAT LOVE WILL DIE.” to work at that. There’s a way to have audiences understand that Playwrights Horizons is about taking a chance on writers. Even if you hate a play at Playwrights Horizons, you know that it was an honest impulse, and you know it’s going to be challenging, so if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t make you angry. Nobody’s trying to put one over on you.

Playwrights Horizons wants to be the shining example of how one does this. You have to care about the people: the audience, the artists, the interns, the backstage, the characters in the play, the characters they talk about who aren’t even in the play. If you’re not comfortable with people, you can’t be good at the theater, because all the theater is about is people. We put on plays because we think seeing this play will be valuable for you. You’ll have a good experience. And if done well, and done lovingly, people warm to you. And if they warm to you, that warmth will spread everywhere.

TIM: There are a lot of naysayers, thinking that theater’s doomed, that it’s never coming back, and I just think it’s bullshit. The bottom line is, I think theater is integral to connectivity. I no more believe that theater will die than I believe that love will die. Humans are wired to be with each other, and theater is the art form of love.

My hope is that theater will exist in 50 years, and I A feel confident it will.

By Arnulfo Maldonado FUTURES / 155

THE DREAM & Alison Koch Almanac spoke with Digital Content Producer Alison Koch about Soundstage, Playwrights Horizons’ scripted audio series of new plays and musicals.

ALMANAC: Playwrights Horizons is, much as its name suggests, a theater. How did it find its way into the world of audio?

ALISON KOCH: Like a lot of us good, liberal New Yorkers, Adam Greenfield has been a fan of public radio for a very long time. I think he’s even said, “If I wasn’t in theater, I totally would have done something in radio.” I can just imagine him hanging out with Ira Glass.

So, a little over three years ago, Playwrights Horizons was invited to apply for a grant through the Scherman Foundation’s Katharine S. and Axel G. Rosin Fund. They were like, “Hey, pitch us your big ideas!” I believe we pitched two ideas, one of which was very straightforward. The other one was this amorphous, wild, large thing: we’re gonna build a digital engagement program. Of course, the plan that was the biggest swing at the outfield was the one that they liked. So, I was hired, and we were like, “Okay, we’ve gotten this multi-year grant for not an insignificant amount of money. What do we do now?”

There were a couple of different approaches we could take. We wanted to think about creating media that was in support of the stuff that we were doing on stage, because we’re a theater first. How do we support the physical productions? How do we stay true to who we are, just using new tools?

But we also wanted to explore commissioning new original works. We wanted to investigate the idea of “digital native” theater. With digital native theater, the intention is not to write a play that could be performed in a theater for a live audience and just release it as an audio experience. We wanted it to be about taking a digital tool or delivery system and asking, “How do I write a piece for this medium specifically?” You can never truly recreate the experience of a live event, so we set out to make something totally different.

We wanted to give playwrights an opportunity to dream outside the proscenium boundary. In non-profit theater, it’s an unfortunate reality that sometimes you can’t afford projections, or there’s too many set changes, or it’s too expensive to break that window every night. But with audio,

THE DELIVERY 156 / ALMANAC

SYSTEM

when you remove everything physical, you get to dream bigger. Audio lets you change the scene instantly, in the space between two words. With Soundstage, the hope was to specifically make things that would never, ever work as a stage production.

In addition to wanting to break out of the conventions of live theater, I made a joke early on about avoiding the hokey radio drama sound: the last thing we wanted from our pieces was a dude banging together coconuts to make the sound of horse’s hooves. It needed to feel sleek and produced and professional and layered and rich and complicated. Our beacons were things like War of the Worlds, like Janet Cardiff, like Joe Frank, and even creative audio journalists like Scott Carrier and Kaitlin Prest, instead of, you know, A Prairie Home Companion. So much scripted fiction and audio theater out there is wonderful, but I find some of those performances too big, too broad, calibrated

“WITH SOUNDSTAGE, THE HOPE WAS TO SPECIFICALLY MAKE THINGS THAT WOULD NEVER, EVER WORK AS A STAGE PRODUCTION.” for a large theater rather than your earbuds. We wanted Soundstage to feel different — a window into something intimate and narrative and thoughtful and personal.

Originally, before I got to Playwrights Horizons, the thought was, “Let’s just get a couple people sitting in a dressing room downstairs and hit record.” People think of podcasts as super scrappy, but this was going to be more like making a feature film. We quickly expanded the scope of our vision. And we needed to see who in our community would be willing to fail forward with us and try something big and new. We brought in theatrical directors. We brought in theatrical sound designers, some of whom had worked in the podcasting space, some of whom had not. We brought in lots of actors, some of whom had dipped their toes in this water, but all of whom were, first and foremost, theatrical performers. We also reached cross-culturally, beyond theater folks, to a post-production company that specialized in audio guides, and we brought in colleagues who run a music recording studio in Brooklyn. This was something that our theater had never done before, and it wasn’t going to happen unless we admitted we needed help and were willing to take some big leaps of faith. It definitely felt a little like we were building the plane as we were flying it.

So it was terrifying, but it was also new and wild and fun. It has been such a journey of collaboration and “yes, and” — nothing is more theatrical than that.

Thankfully, playwrights are not faint of heart. They bring such a high caliber of writing and observation and orchestration. Playwriting is not an easy medium. We knew that giving them a weird challenge like this, they’d be like, “Oh, yeah!” And they did not disappoint. So we feel pretty vindicated in our original assertion around this program that playwrights are the greatest storytellers of our time.

So, first, once we got the script, we would ask each of the playwrights we commissioned what they wanted the audience to feel or know or experience or see or understand,

and then we’d figure out which tools get us to that goal. I love sitting at the middle of the Venn diagram between the content side and the execution side. One of my favorite puzzles is matching the dream to the delivery system. So, the playwrights got to dream and write their scripts, and then we got to look at all of the options for how we might put it all together. There were no parameters other than length and medium. We basically told them there was no way for them to disappoint us. We wanted to make their wildest dreams come true.

What’s different about live theater versus these scripted audio experiences?

The liveness of theater is incredibly unique. The magic of live theater is that anything can happen at any moment. As soon as you record it, though, it’s like you’ve collapsed the multiverse into something really flat.

There were ways in which we tried to remain true to the liveness of theater. The more people that were involved in something, the more live it felt, just because there were more variables. With Milo Cramer’s piece, “Boy Factory,” which is a monologue that he delivered himself, we needed to-the-millisecond precision, perfectionism. But with Heather Christian’s piece, “Prime,” bringing in 15 people who performed as a chorus of very human voices, the day felt so wonderfully unpredictable, and we wanted to capture that. It wasn’t about exactness or polish, it was about capturing something real and visceral, so in that sense it felt more like capturing a live performance.

Going through the birthing of the first season, though, we did learn a couple things. Theater in and of itself is often a spectacle, right? There’s something really special about being in a room, with this sort of heightened suspension of disbelief, where you’re willing to go along for a ride. People talk about theater being an intimate medium, but, you know, sometimes it isn’t intimate at all. Sometimes it is big and it is about how you reach the person in the back of the room.

So one of the things that we learned about audio is that it is an incredibly intimate medium — and it is slightly unforgiving. You can, in a way, paint with some broader strokes in a live performance, because it’s so ephemeral, and the audience is willing to jump from one moment to the next, leaving any fumbles behind to the inertia of the live experience. But as soon as you start recording something onto tape — it’s wild — a tiny verbal stumble all-of-a-sudden becomes huge. It can ruin a moment and take you completely out of it. You know what I mean? Audio is like surgery. It’s so microscopic and granular. None of the production — or post-production — processes for these episodes were simple. Some of these pieces took months to put together,

“IT WAS TERRIFYING, BUT IT WAS ALSO NEW AND WILD AND FUN. IT HAS BEEN SUCH A JOURNEY OF COLLABORATION AND ‘YES, AND’ – NOTHING IS MORE THEATRICAL THAN THAT.” FUTURES / 157

with the amount of layers and edits and just the level of care and intention that went into making a short piece of audio. Every moment got a lot of attention. Each episode was artisanally created.

At the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is tell a story. So the most important thing we’re listening for is whether this is a journey that the audience is going to enjoy going on. Does it make sense? Does it have stakes? How are we differentiating the characters from each other? What environment might this conversation happen in? Do we need to create that environment in our physical recording space?

Or is that something we’ll create in post-production? For us, it was about letting the words dictate the envelope. It was about the writing. It was about the performance. It was about the timing and the space and just making sure that there was a there there.

What was fun was watching directors and actors work with this new kind of clay. For example, some of the theater directors really loved the discovery of being able to EDIT! To revisit one small moment again and again and again, and sculpt it. In an analog experience, the job is to craft a performance to be repeated live night after night.

Working with a recording becomes a different kind of craft.

An actor could deliver a line three, four, five, fifteen times until the delivery was exactly what the director wanted. So Soundstage really became about embracing smallness.

Everybody came in and realized that the microphone is only two inches from your face, so you can whisper, you can project, you can make these really specific choices.

Also, you’re only working with one sense, so you definitely have a smaller palette. But at the same time, constraints can be freeing. You don’t have three dimensions — you only have one — but it can feel more expansive. In a weird way, it explodes the box!

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“YOUR DIGITAL WORK SHOULD CRACKLE AND ENGROSS IN THAT WAY THAT THEATER DOES IN A ROOM.” Has anything changed for Soundstage since the pandemic started?

This sort of work is meant to be experienced in your own personal space, and often alone — which is not at all what theaters do. We’d been working on these pieces for over a year, so in a strange and crazy way, we were uniquely prepared for this moment of losing our physical productions.

Not only because we had this content to release, but also because we’ve been doing the work over the last three years of really interrogating what it means to be a theater trying to make meaningful, quality, true-to-ourselves digital content.

If, as an industry, we want to continue playing with digital forms, I think we have to embrace the differences between what happens in a room versus what happens through a mediated platform. Your digital work should crackle and engross in that way that theater does in a room. How do you translate that to audio and video and even virtual reality?

Can you? All of these media delivery systems require their own fine-tuning. You can’t just airdrop what happens on a stage into these different buckets. It’s my main soapbox when it comes to creating digital content: Always choose the digital medium that best serves the message, or A match the right message to the chosen medium.

The new podcast from Playwrights Horizons featuring Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s favorite storytellers. Now, theater is wherever you are.

Episodes available now by:

Kirsten Childs. Heather Christian. Milo Cramer. Jordan Harrison.

Lucas Hnath. Qui Nguyen. Robert Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Hara.

Coming soon in season 2:

Eboni Booth. Agnes Borinsky. Sheila Callaghan. The Debate Society. Sarah Gancher. David Greenspan. Miranda Rose Hall.

Trish Harnetiaux. Dave Harris. Julia Izumi. Melissa Li & Kit Yan. Tommy Pico. Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig.

Available wherever you get your podcasts.

soundstage soundstage soundstage soundstage soundstage soundstage

BOB & ADAM A conversation between Bob Moss and Adam Greenfield

“IN THE TWINKLING OF AN EYE, I HAD REAL ESTATE, CON EDISON, ELECTRICITY, TELEPHONE, SECRETARIAL, ELEVATOR, JANITORIAL. AND THAT’S HOW PLAYWRIGHTS HORIZONS STARTED.”

I. THE NEED TO INSTITUTIONALIZE ADAM GREENFIELD: Okay, so it’s 1970 and you’re a director in New York City— BOB MOSS: ’71 if we’re talking about Playwrights.

ADAM: —and there was no idea yet, anywhere in the ether, of this theater you’d be running. What was the first time you heard anything about the theater that became Playwrights Horizons? Was it a phone call? A conversation?

BOB: We have to go back a little bit, because I was a freelance director — that’s where I came from — but I imagine that on Day One or Day Two of running the Playwrights Unit for Edward Albee, I had a visceral recognition that this was where I belonged. I felt that my natural habitat was stalking the halls of a theater: going to a rehearsal, going to a casting session, stopping in at the set shop. That was my role.

Even though I’d never done it, when I put it on, it was so comfortable. I felt absolutely content.

Then, at the end of that season, or near the end of that season, Edward decided that he didn’t want to do it anymore. He had started it ten years earlier, because there seemed to be this burgeoning interest in creating safe spaces for playwrights. Edward thought that they were all youngsters — the blind leading the blind in these ratty basements, these weird places — and Edward thought he could bring maturity to it. So we had sets paid for, and there was an audience of actual theatergoers. I had everything I needed. I had a little salary. I don’t even know what it was,

but it was enough, and I was able to work 24/7. But he decided to close it. That was a shock to me, because I thought it would be forever.

But one of the things I had done was, I had started making the Speech, which became an integral part of our theater in a way — and very important. Anyway, when I told the audience during the Speech one night that we weren’t going to do the Playwrights Unit anymore, they were like, “Oh, no!” And one of those people was Louise Roberts, who ran the Clark Center Y. She called me in the middle of the summer to come up and see her — she didn’t say what it was about — so I went up. When I got there, she said she had this room that was too small for a dance class. She wanted me to recommend some playwrights who could use it, and I said — these are my exact words — “Well, nothing will ever come of that. Why don’t you just give it to me?” And she did!

So in the twinkling of an eye, I had real estate, Con Edison, electricity, telephone, secretarial, elevator, janitorial. And that’s how Playwrights Horizons started.

ADAM: And there was clearly a need for it, right? My understanding is that there were a handful of organizations popping up to develop new and emerging writers, like New Dramatists, but there wasn’t a real support network in the way that there is today.

BOB: Actually, they were all over the place. By 1971, there were honorable establishments — Caffe Cino, Ellen Stewart was helping playwrights, Theatre Genesis was making work.

FUTURES / 161

There were all of these spaces. They were making work all over town, but it was not well-known. Every theater had its own coterie of audiences, you know.

ADAM: So what was the specific role that you saw the Playwrights Unit — which then ultimately became Playwrights Horizons — playing? What was the need that wasn’t being served by others?

BOB: Well, one thing was that I was older than everybody else, so I could say things with some authority. Maybe not older than Ellen Stewart, but I was older than most of the other people. I had also been a Broadway stage manager, so I had a certain amount of professional expertise. I thought that what I could bring to the young playwright was a certain maturity. That was my role. I don’t even know how to describe it, because I wasn’t really dramaturging the material, but I thought in terms of producing their play, taking care of them, and seeing that they had what they needed.

I could do that. Yes, I could do it in a way that had some maturity to it.

On top of that, I could provide a real audience — not just your friends and neighbors and lovers and what-haveyou, but middle-class people who like to go to the theater.

People who were sort of smart. Mostly Jewish. I think we had a lot of people from Bergen County, because I had this mailing list that I stole from the— ADAM: Playwrights Unit.

BOB: Yes, so I had an instant add water, you know? I walked out of the Playwrights Unit with the mailing list under my arm. I stole it. I did. I took it. Nobody ever asked me where it was — and it was valuable! It was a list of four or five hundred people who wanted to see new plays.

So, in the beginning, our value was real estate. I could give a playwright a room and an audience. The playwright could see his or her work up, moving around in space, in front of an audience. That was all.

ADAM: Did you have any sense of what you wanted this to be long-term? Did you have a vision for how long this theater might exist, or what it could grow into? Or were you very much focused on the present?

BOB: Adam, I had no vision whatsoever. The idea that Playwrights Horizons is 50 years old is mind-boggling. I had found a safe home. I had this audience. I had no need for money. I had everything I needed.

After about two or three shows, I went to the woman who ran the Y — not Louise, who was an old Jewish rebel, she didn’t care — but I thought the woman who ran the whole building might find certain things objectionable. The Y is a Christian organization. So I told her, “I’m not planning anything, Iris, but let’s head it off at the pass. Supposing I was to do a play with every foul bit of language in the book, and it’s vile!”

She said to me, “Well, Robert, if you think it’s an important play, then we should do it.”

“Okay.” I thought, Let’s go for the final thing. “Frontal nudity. Male and female. Yeah.”

“Are you listening to me? If you think it’s a good play, then we should do it.”

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“I COULD GIVE A PLAYWRIGHT A ROOM AND AN AUDIENCE. THE PLAYWRIGHT COULD SEE HIS OR HER WORK UP, MOVING AROUND IN SPACE, IN FRONT OF AN AUDIENCE. THAT WAS ALL.” II. THE TROUBLE WITH INSTITUTIONS BOB: You’re going to laugh, but in the early days, I used to believe that money would taint the arena.

ADAM: Can you say more about that?

BOB: If it starts being about money, it’s not going to be about the play anymore. I mean, the first time Playwrights Horizons did an audience survey, I was already gone, but I was horrified. I thought, “What the fuck do we care what the audience thinks?” Well, that was naive, of course, and you couldn’t have gone on like that, especially once you move to 42nd Street and you’re in the arena with everybody else. It is competitive.

But back then, I did not care what anybody thought.

ADAM: It sounds a little bit like the problem of art-making in a context that is capitalist, right? The question of, “Is this thing a thing that’s worth my money?”

BOB: I understand that we had to start charging. The reason we started to charge in 1975 or 1976, whenever we did, was because I couldn’t do the Speech anymore. I was out in Queens a lot. If I couldn’t do the Speech and somebody else did it, they wouldn’t do it well. I had a thing about it.

ADAM: Can you give me the Speech now?

BOB: (pause) I can give you the beginning… and the end.

I used to say, and you’ll know this, “‘All for your delight / We are not here.’” Then I would explain, “Some of these plays might not cohere happily, and that’s important for the playwright to know. There needs to be an audience, and that’s what your job is — to laugh or cry or be bored or blue or whatever — so the playwright gets to see how his play’s being received. The reason you don’t pay for it is because I’m not sure that it’s going to be good. I don’t want you to pay for it, because that would be bad of me as a manager, to be selling shoddy goods. On the other hand, the play has to happen, and you have to see it. So what I do want you to do is donate to the theater, and you can do that on the way out.” And I stood in this very narrow doorway at the Y, with this humongous white plastic bag, and people put in TDF vouchers, joints sometimes, and money.

Everybody put in money. That allowed me to pay for the props for the next show.

I always tried to be funny, because it’s not onerous and, of course, I wasn’t selling anything. I didn’t sell subscriptions. I didn’t tell them to buy tickets or anything. I was just

talking about the process, and people liked that. I realize you can’t do this nowadays, but you could do it then. This can sound wildly egotistical, but it’s profound: what I realized, Adam, is people were coming to “Bob’s.” Right? They weren’t coming to a building, or a room. They were coming to Bob’s, and they would have a fun night, even if they hated it. And it was free!

I did the same thing at the Hangar Theater, when I ran it, and I did the same thing at Syracuse Stage. If you like people, and you like talking to people, and you like sharing what you’re doing, people feel that, and they feel welcomed.

I’m there at intermission, and they can say, “Bob. This is terrible.” And that’s okay! Because in Syracuse, unlike New York City, I was doing audience development in the aisles of the big Wegmans grocery store. People felt that I was friendly. They’d say, “Bob. We like Syracuse Stage, but that last play was rotten.” I would take my hands off the cart and say, “Would you tell me why?” Then we’d have a conversation. We could talk about dramaturgy. We could talk about plays.

ADAM: So, building a real connection with audiences has been — and continues to be — a major priority for Bob Moss, artistic producer.

Right now, that’s not often what it feels like to have an Off-Broadway theater institution. We’ve built up these buildings, and we’ve created a lot of packaging around the production of plays that, I think, becomes a physical barrier between us and our city. I just wonder — from the theater that Playwrights Horizons was when you were beginning it, when it was Bob’s theater, to the theater culture that we live in now — have you clocked a big difference?

BOB: A couple of years ago, at The Flick, there were people in the audience who hated that opening blackout. I can hear their questions now — what’s this, and, oh my god, and, say something, and, what’s going on? — and I was laughing because I got it right away. I understood what was going on, and it was cracking me up. But there were people in the audience who hated it. Huh? I thought, “Why are you at Playwrights Horizons? Everything that’s going to be produced here is going to be unusual. Instead of just letting it wash over you and seeing what happens, you’re already judging it and finding it wanting.”

I think what I mean is, I don’t know that the world is so different now than it was then. When Edward saw me do the Speech at the Playwrights Unit, he said to me afterwards, “Why are you doing that?”

I said, “Well, I think it’s interesting for people to realize what it means to come to a show here. I’m telling them what their responsibility is. They haven’t paid for anything, so I can tell them that, and they’re interested, and it’s friendly.”

He said, “Well, it’s not professional.”

I said, “Yes. So what does that mean?”

“They don’t do it on Broadway. It’s not professional.”

“Do you want me to stop? You’re the boss.”

“No, you do whatever you want.”

So I kept doing it, and it connected me to Louise at the Clark Center. People loved it. It made a big difference. It was personal, and that personal touch softened their resistance to something that they were unfamiliar with.

ADAM: That makes so much sense to me. And what I’m piecing together from this conversation is that there was

this culture — when you were running the Playwrights Unit and then Playwrights Horizons — where play development was happening, and new play support was happening, but it was all happening at a much more community-based, anarchic, grassroots kind of level. But then in the late 70s and 80s, there was a rush to institutionalize it and professionalize it. So, for me, growing up in the 80s, the theater that I grew up into was one that had become institutionalized and professionalized. I grew up into a world that always felt too tightly regimented, too hemmed in, without much room for real community connection and crazy-ridiculous artist impulses.

BOB: I used to say that the 60s was a time of innovation and crazy people in basements, and the 70s was the institutionalization of those impulses. We all got staffs, we had mailing lists. We had to grow up.

I remember the night that it happened. We were still on the Showcase code, and it was the play about Dallas Murphy. We’re all sitting there at midnight, onstage, thinking, Something’s not working, and we figured it out. We realized we’d have to rehearse tomorrow, but we couldn’t call actors because of the fucking Showcase code. André and I decided at that moment — this is a turning point in the history of Playwrights Horizons — that we had to pay the actors something more so we could call them in to rehearse when the playwright did rewrites. That’s what our purpose was.

We were giving the playwright what the playwright needed.

We had to do it.

III. BEYOND AND BEFORE INSTITUTIONS ADAM: I feel this call to go back to the anarchist, freewheelin’, live, vibrant spirit of creation. I read things like the Patti Smith memoir [Just Kids], and that’s the world that I want to live in. When I look back at the earliest seasons at Playwrights, you were producing 20 plays. That feels so exciting to me, a theater that is full of surprises all the time, that you have a personal relationship with, that comes with no sense of a set package or template.

It’s a grab bag. I think that’s missing from our lives in the theater world.

I grew up in Southern California. I was right behind South Coast Rep, in Costa Mesa, watching these plays that Jerry Patch was programming. As a kid, I got to know the ensemble of actors and see them play all these different roles — I felt like I knew them all personally. I would see them in a Wallace Shawn play, and then they were doing Eric Overmyer, Athol Fugard, Caryl Churchill, Craig Lucas.

It felt like my home. It felt like a place where I could go, as a sort of melancholy teenager. It gave me a sense of belonging. That is a thing that I have always craved from theater.

I think the theater can and should be that sort of civic and spiritual center. But when you remove the person from it, it just becomes a venue. Just a building where you go to see plays.

BOB: Yes, a theater is not an institution. Playwrights Horizons is now going to be Adam’s Playwrights Horizons, not André’s, not Don’s, not Tim’s. You’re going to love the plays that interest you, and the theater should reflect that in some way.

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ADAM: Yeah. I feel that my job is to make myself as broad and adoptive of as many perspectives as possible, so that I am armed with as many perspectives as I can be informed by, so that my own tastes are never homogeneous but stay actively eclectic. I’ve always had very eclectic tastes, and I get very meticulous when it comes to what I think is beautiful — but I have to be able to find beauty in as many different possible things as I can. All the time, to expand the range.

BOB: Yes. Yes. Yes. But you also have to be the link to the audience.

ADAM: Going back to The Flick, we got a lot of very angry letters from audience members. And shortly after that, we produced another beautiful play, by Melissa James Gibson, called Placebo. It’s a stunning play about a woman who’s studying the placebo effect and ultimately comes to wonder if her whole life is a placebo; and essentially, you get this sort of retroactive clarity about the story in the final scenes of the play. Between those two plays, we got a ton of letters. Audiences were saying, “Well, that’s not the way theater should behave. Plays shouldn’t behave like that.” I remember, at the time, getting angry and saying, “Well, what is the way that theater should behave? Is there a way for theater to behave? Are there, like, rules? It’s not like going to the ballet and studying the perfect example of a grand jeté. It’s not like going to a dog show and seeing the perfect example of a poodle. You’re going to see the ways in which theater has organized itself in the mind of a specific playwright.” It was so bizarre to me that audiences were viewing it in this very narrow way.

But then I thought, I can’t get mad at them. It has to be our job — our responsibility — to bring them along. I see museums doing that. I see other media doing that better than theater. I think that theater can do a better job of saying, “Here’s what I believe, and here’s why, and let me open it up for you, let me curate for you, let me contextualize for you, so that you can understand why I love this.”

So, I guess, my question is: Do you have any words of caution for me as I’m looking to try to embody some of the values that you were bringing to your work?

BOB: There’s the Bulletin that you send out for each play — the pamphlet — but it’s not the same as you in the flesh. I did the Speech for 15 years at the Hangar. I chatted people up, and I was always funny. One night, there was a woman in town — a judge — and I said, “You were here last week.

You saw the show. Did you see it again?”

She said, “Oh, my mother-in-law died, and my husband went to the funeral, and I just needed to be someplace friendly, so I thought, I’m going to go to the Hangar.”

Bingo! Bingo! That’s it! The power of the personal cannot be measured. If you are friendly, people feel that, and it has value.

ADAM: It’s what breaks my heart the most about the culture right now: the lack of the personal that we have on social media, which is the illusion of personal contact. It’s the opposite of social, why do we call it that?

But. So. This is a moment of great change for the culture, in so many ways. Everything has stopped. The unthinkable happened. The world is paused. Who knew that could ever be possible? It’s also the occasion of our theater turning 50 years old, as well as a leadership transition. I’m curious — 164 / ALMANAC

“THEATER NEEDS TO BRING THE PERSONAL BACK. TO CREATE SPACE FOR THE PERSONAL CONVERSATION. THE HONEST DIALOGUE.” what do you most hope for the future for the theater? Not just Playwrights Horizons, but for all theater? What are the things that break your heart, and what are the things that would mend it?

BOB: I’m really glad right now that I’m not running a theater, because I don’t know what I would do.

Early on in my life in New York, I was hanging around the HB Studio when Herbert Berghof was still teaching.

Every Sunday, Herbert would invite some working professional to come and have tea with him in front of whatever students wanted to come. I went to every one of them because I thought, “Somebody is going to say something that’s going to be the magic key.” Of course, that doesn’t happen, and it doesn’t exist. But I was a kid. I still have my notebook from those conversations.

You could do something, maybe even once a month, where you invited not all the subscribers but A through F. “You don’t have to pay, we’ll give you some coffee, and we’ll talk.” Who’s going to turn you down on Sunday afternoon at three o’clock? What else are they doing?

ADAM: Like a town hall.

BOB: They would get to meet you. You’re the person they need to connect to, because you’re going to pick the plays, you’re going to supervise the casting, you’re choosing the directors. All that is coming from you. It isn’t that they’re going to tell you how to do it. You’re going to tell them. This is going to be instructive for them, but they won’t know it.

Package it so they can complain to you, and then give them the gift of having met you.

ADAM: I think that’s really smart. A couple of years ago, we did this beautiful play by Anne Washburn called Antlia Pneumatica, and we did this symposium where we brought all the designers onstage, and people from the audience came and sat on the set. The set designer Rachel Hauck was able to point to specific things, saying, “I labored over the choice of that pot hanging on the wall, and this specific countertop, this stool.” We also had the sound designer there. The audience didn’t realize it, but there was a soundbed that was running underneath the entire production. We turned all the lights off, and the audience sat and listened to the soundbed for just 90 seconds — and they were amazed, because they knew the play made them feel like they were outdoors, but they had no idea how that was being done.

Once you turn your audience into insiders, once you make them understand that every play is a million decisions that could go any which way…

BOB: Yeah, they should be there. They should be able to watch tech. If people could watch an hour of tech, or come

to a working rehearsal, they’d be astonished. In the rehearsal room, they’d see that it took half an hour to get an actor from stage right to stage left with the line. It takes half an hour to do that.

ADAM: What we’re getting at in this conversation, I think, is that theater needs to bring the personal back. To create space for the personal conversation. The honest dialogue.

The professionalism of new plays and play development has resulted in larger venues producing more new plays all the time. New plays are now part of every flagship theater season. Fighting for the importance of that is no longer the hot struggle that it once was. I think the struggle now is to get back to the roots of what theater is. People in a room.

BOB: I always loved Tom Stoppard’s line, “If you get the right words in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.”

It’s what those of us who are serious about the theater think

we can do, right? We can surprise somebody with an image or an idea. We can open somebody’s mind. Maybe we can nudge them a little. That’s what we believe. That’s why we do all this. It’s not going to happen every night. It may not happen every season, but we keep trying. The work has to matter, and if the work matters to the people who make it, I bet you it’s going to matter to somebody sitting A out there. That’s what we hope, isn’t it?

(Page 160) Bob Moss, circa 1978. Photo by Nathaniel Tileston.

(Above) Adam Greenfield, 2012. Photo by Jordan Harrison.

FUTURES / 165

THE FUTURE Brittany Allen, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, C.A. Johnson, Hansol Jung, Heather Raffo, and Sanaz Toossi

The following questions were submitted to six playwrights during the summer of 2020. Almanac collected their responses â&#x20AC;&#x201D; as well as their comments, shown here in red text â&#x20AC;&#x201D; via Google Docs and organized it into the conversation below.

OF THEATER

“I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT WHAT THEATER DOES. WHAT IS GOOD ART SUPPOSED TO DO?”

ALMANAC: How are you right now? How does this moment find you? And is theater anywhere in your thoughts?

HANSOL JUNG: It’s such a difficult question — how am I. I keep writing and rewriting this section. Maybe it’s hard to be honest, when writing in dialogue with other writers that you admire but don’t really know.

When you’re together in real time, you just say things, and you can’t delete it, so you just suffer, but this format is definitely different.

How am I. I am definitely overthinking everything underdoing anything.

SANAZ TOOSSI: Me too. I have very little focus right now. I try to write every day, but I’m lucky if I can focus for more than five minutes or get through one page. Theater is definitely in my thoughts, though. I weirdly (or maybe it’s not weird) miss our medium so much and have an urge to write plays and nothing else. Maybe theater feels extra shiny to me these days because it’s been taken away. That makes me sound like a child.

Anyway, my answer is that I write one page a day and spend the rest watching The Real Housewives of New Jersey.

BRITTANY ALLEN: Some days are better than others, and this one is hard. I am often unfocused and anxious and sad, but get these frantic spurts of energy sometimes, in which I’ll sign up for, say, seven free poli-ed teach-ins, or freewrite six angry genreless pages that later prove unintelligible. I’m looking for places to put the energy and the rage, and I’m looking to feel helpful, but my creative musculature is really not rising to the occasion so far. Things that help: yoga, reading a lot of Black feminist and Black Marxist history, taking classes, binging The Good Fight (so good, you guys!). Things that hurt: spending too much time in the ouroboros of the internet.

HANSOL: I had to consult the ouroboros of I haven’t had a lot of room in my heart for theater in the internet myself to look this word up! It is the wanting-to-write sense — it feels really painful to rethe same symbol as the cover of NeverEnding visit right now! — but I have begun to frame these days Story — the amulet that gratifies Sebastian’s as a gathering period. I’m thinking deeply about what immediate wishes for the price of a cherished memory... seems fitting.

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needs to be said, and questioning personal, professional, and artistic patterns in ways that feel productive.

C.A. JOHNSON: Well I don’t even know if there is much for me to add after these responses. I feel so much of the same. I am feeling a gargantuan amount of anxiety and depression these days. In my usual fashion, I don’t sink too low and instead find ways to fill my hours with outlines for pilots I will never write, playing The Sims on my Xbox, and watching endless amounts of film and TV. It’s a dark but entertaining time in my Brooklyn abode, but I’m making it work. Have to say that theater has felt very far away these days. Maybe I’m too sad to write without knowing it will land anywhere that it will feel valued? Or maybe this is what we’re meant to do? Stop and just witness? I’m not sure. But I saw this Charlize Theron movie on Netflix that really rocked my world. So for now I’m going to hunt that feeling. And family phone calls. And laughter. Please.

HANSOL: How are you all writing? What are you writing? Is it for theater? Is it for self?

Is it that you aren’t writing at all but spending most of your time playing Bejeweled like myself?

BRITTANY: Oh yes, praise this question! I am so curious about what other people’s brains look like right now. I’ve been writing, but not for theater. Working on a fiction project at the moment, for self. I have complete control over it, and it’s creatively engaging but doesn’t feel tethered to sad questions re: when the industry can open back up on its own terms. I’m also reading a lot, and I’m taking a class via the Brooklyn Institute of Social Research (Philosophy of History! Big fun!) and another creative writing class, through Catapult, and a bunch of poli-ed teach-ins from assorted leftist non-profits.

Feeling like a student has been my main pathway to feeling productive, curious, and galvanized in this moment. But then also — I’m questioning the kind of productivity that’s been drilled into us. I’m moving and thinking very slowly, which feels right? And yeah, The Good Fight…

SANAZ: I am dying to know how/if/what others are writing. I’m writing plays. I think it’s for me? It may or may not be? At the beginning of quarantine, I was like… okay, Sanaz, you have a lot of time now and who knows what the C.A.:I actually managed this at the top of quaranNew World will look like so write like you used to tine. Wrote a play I truly love that is batshit crazy write before you ever even had the notion to send and doesn’t care about all the crap development your play to someone else to read. When you would come home from work and write because it was fun? has shoved into my work. Finished it. Had nowhere A hobby? I could barely bring myself to write “write to send it. Crashed into a wall of defeat. Now I because it was fun” just now. My thesis here is that play The Sims? we should all sit down and play Bejeweled.

SANAZ: 1. I’m really emboldened knowing FRANCES YA-CHU COWHIG: I am writing because, that you created something maybe raw but for better and worse, my most powerful coping mechconnected to joy, and 2. Yes to The Sims, I’ve anism in the face of uncertainty and anxiety is esbecome a master landscaper, and 3. I created capism through (a) learning new skills that help me Jordan and me in The Sims, started playing create imagined worlds, and (b) creating imagined us, and it wasn’t even the darkest moment worlds. However, I really benefit from a feedback of quarantine. loop, so right now my days are occupied with (a) online visual arts classes, as I am working on learning how to ‘write’ with pictures, so that I can grow into a writer-illustrator. It is fun to see how the skill-sets of playwriting really translate into my illustration assignments to create character sheets, antagonists and protagonists, etc. — and being back in ‘school mode’ where I am getting weekly critiques from my teachers and fellow students is keeping me motivated and focused in that realm. Also, (b) when the workshop production of my musical The New Planet got cancelled at the Guthrie, my composer, Michael Roth, and director, Maija Garcia, decided that we were just going to keep on developing the piece amongst ourselves. So, while I have no interest in ‘Zoom Theater,’ having weekly ‘Zoom Workshops’ with my collaborators has been very helpful in terms of keeping me engaged in the rewrite process.

This moment is actually finding me in the midst of a big life transition, in that I decided about a week before the pandemic began rolling through China, near the end of December, that I needed to get out of three abusive relationships that were crushing my soul and making me feel hopeless about my life and my future: (1) full time academia, (2) car culture and the year round fire season in Southern California, and (3) a creative 168 / ALMANAC

life centered around institutional new-play development — so a month ago my partner and I drove our van with most of our stuff in it cross country, and we are in the midst of a move to Providence, RI, where I plan to pursue a much more localized walkable life, and growth from writer to writer-illustrator via coursework at the Rhode Island School of Design.

This move is certainly complicated financially by the evaporation of all upcoming productions, but I’m frankly feeling grateful about the timing, and so happy to be back in mostly full-time learning mode for awhile.

BRITTANY: I have to say that reading Frances’s story of brave rupture made me smile so much! The possibilities, the bravery! (Oh my god, can we all just up and move to New England and escape unhelpful environments? SHOULD I???)

HANSOL: This my dream FRANCES: It is hairy in pandemic, though I think I haven’t seen the sub $2/gallon gas prices that we saw since the 90s. My husband wanted to be super cautious, so we drove across the nation during pandemic without ever using a public restroom — just our trusty cassette toilet, though I was also equipped with one of those REI lady pee-funnel things that lets ladies pee standing up, just in case... Apparently rock climbing ladies use them a lot.

BRITTANY: FYC, it’s so nice to “meet” you, and congratulations!! Reading this amazing exodus story filled me with hope and light and energy, way to change your life?!

HEATHER RAFFO: I’m so inspired by you all. I want to be in school with you! I was deep in a project FRANCES: Hi Brittany! So nice to meet you about migration and the global economy when the as well! Cutting out all the bullshit in one’s pandemic hit. The play was trying to uncover our life right away is amazingly soul-energizing, relationship to human value, by dismantling our evI highly recommend it! er-present relationship to economic value. As much as I wanted to drop everything and just be a mom and grieve the loss of my father, I did find I had to keep writing this piece, because the very web of interconnectivity I was trying to map, was suddenly laid bare for all of us across the world.

It’s funny, but right now these feel like conflicting questions: ‘How am I’ and ‘is theater in my thoughts’?

This is so personal, but with my particular DNA, I feel like it is 1990 or 2003 again; like it is another acute moment where America is behaving individualistically, not collectively. Only this time, we are at war with ourselves.

At my most hopeful, I feel we will embrace our potential to create equity, care, and human-centered safety nets in every aspect of our national, local, and personal lives.

At my most pessimistic, I see everything getting profoundly worse. I suppose I don’t see much in between. I believe this is a moment of such great consequence, and one to which we must give ourselves entirely. With stakes this high, I wonder about the place of theater at all. Is theater vital? Can it be?

The reinvention of theater has always been in my thoughts. Decades ago, I graduated with my MFA into a business that did not represent Middle Eastern artists or even have a genre of Middle Eastern American theater, so I had to both invent and dismantle cultural norms. I soon found tremendous colleagues, also in the process of invention.

We worked intently to create a movement, through 9/11, through America’s wars with Afghanistan and Iraq, through decades of occupation, intensifying conflict, and rising phobias surrounding all things Middle Eastern. Although our desire was to focus on creation, much of our work was (and remains) spent on viability and value. In 30 years of professional work, I’ve rarely had a moment to turn my focus from unspoken traumas, uncomfortable representations, and the need to create a vital national conversation.

So yes, theater is in my thoughts because the stakes are yet more critical.

Mostly, I’m wondering what is globally possible in this collective moment? I’m hoping it brings an end to our national obsession with individualism and exceptionalism. Then, I find myself recognizing (I’m screaming from within) that, in five months of lockdown, I have not had a moment alone, to close a door, to deal with personal grief. I essentially want this to be a time for the collective and the communal, to rewrite the rules of what it means to be part of humanity. But I also understand we must reckon with individual needs. Like most of my life, I’m hoping there is a place where incommensurable worlds can meet.

In mid-May, critic Charles McNulty asked 25 theater artists, “What will the post-pandemic stage look like?” The piece, published in the LA Times, ranges over the artistic and political possibilities of a theatrical landscape reimagined, from a “theater of junk and reclaimed nooks” (Quiara Alegría Hudes) to a “theater that looks like its community” (Luis Alfaro). How has the pandemic transformed your relationship to

FUTURES / 169

the theater, particularly given that the virus has “ruthlessly exposed all longstanding, preexisting inequities in our world” (Michael R. Jackson)?

SANAZ: All I can say right now is I’ve been struck by my own lack of imagination in what our field could look like, feel like, etc.

FRANCES: I would love for our society to stop making being an ‘artist’ a primarily professional path, and shift towards finding ways to nurture the artistic sides of all people, so that there can be more original plays written and produced on the community level, by people who BRITTANY: I love this. are also teachers and social workers and janitors.

Instead of theater being produced in a few cities and then ‘trickling down’ to smaller towns and rural areas, I dream of a world in which everyone has time to make art and grow in their artistry and share it with others in their community — and perhaps some of that production will travel and be seen in larger cities, but it should be decentralized and grounded in community.

This is also the kind of theater that is not ecologically C.A.: Yes! I feel like community-grown theater is catastrophic — because, let’s be honest, people flying eco-conscious theater and we NEVER talk about it. around the world to see plays and rehearse plays (and I include myself in this indictment) are doing far more harm ecologically than good.

HEATHER: I’ve been wanting a Green New Deal for the theater. It’s an unsustainable economic model. A musing of mine, but if there were a universal living wage, might the theater be transformed? Would artists be able to create, irrespective of sponsorship?

Or as Frances articulated, could it free people in all kinds of different walks of life, to express themselves through art? Would there be an explosion into different platforms?

Some days I don’t know what I mean by ‘a new platform.’ But in saying it, I feel I am in pursuit. I’m in pursuit of a more direct interaction with audience. An audience that comes from the different worlds we all navigate, not audience cultivated through a few voices at the NY Times or who can afford a $100 ticket. I think this time of quarantine offers access to new conversations with people across locales. I like to build my work in community, but building community with our work might be more possible now that we can communicate from our living room into our audience’s living room... and with their extended family, who might be listening in to something they never would have been exposed to before.

C.A.: I’d like a theater more interested in ensembles of like-minded creators. I’m just tired of walking into new buildings with new producers that I have to convince that my version of theater is worth financing. Wish we had financial models and government funding that supported putting production into the hands of like-minded artists who want to build something together. It could mean artistic ensembles built around queer and POC community. I personally have been craving that so deeply lately.

In June, following a string of state-sanctioned violences against Black bodies, righteous protests and calls for justice erupted across the nation. Numerous theaters issued public statements in support of Black Lives Matter and made promises of action, with some taking steps like raising funds to benefit anti-racist organizations, opening their lobbies to protestors, and issuing awards and commissions to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color artists. How did you find yourself processing all of this?

SANAZ: I was a little prickled by the lack of specificity, the vagueness in a lot of the theater BLM statements… and part of me really craves specific acknowledgements of anti-blackness, racism. Do you all think it would be healing for theaters to basically say, “hey, this production we did” or “this play we chose” or “this all-white creative team” was not okay? Can theaters call themselves out without throwing some of those artists under the bus? How would you feel about theaters taking responsibility for that explicitly?

FRANCES: I just read the 30-page Demands Document issued by We See You W.A.T. — which is the most beautiful document I’ve read since the Green New Deal! I’ve been thinking about the concept of ‘Transitional Justice’ — which, as it applies to the institution of theater, might include Truth-Seeking, Reparations, and Reform.

In terms of Truth-Seeking, I think it is very difficult for people inside any given institution to see themselves and their collective and historic actions with clarity — 170 / ALMANAC

and I think this idea of ‘self-confession’ can actually be used to hide larger systemic problems, by bringing to light smaller, flashier issues. I think that it would be much more helpful for theaters to submit to external reviews and trainings from organizations like artEquity — where the process of self-reflection and calling oneself out is housed within a more deep-tissue process that also includes work on Reparations and Reform. Given that the goal is structural change and transforming individuals who (perhaps unknowingly) helped uphold the structures of white supremacy, I would be inclined to be very careful (and conservative) about the ways in which the shaming of self or others is used in public discourse. While it might play well with optics and the media cycle, in the long run it might not be more productive than institutions doing the deep work themselves, at every level of their organization, in active partnership with an equity-based organization.

BRITTANY: I feel complicated about all this! On the one hand, I say bravo to initiatives like the open-your-lobby push, which seemed to have a concrete goal and tangible effect: in a very physical way, theaters could be helpful in a moment of rupture. (Though it’s worth saying, I feel like that initiative was completely architected by artists pressuring institutions, right? I heard about it first from the writer Jeesun Choi!) On the other hand, and speaking broadly, I find myself suspicious of the speedy responses to this latest iteration of the BLM fight, which seem to me to have a lot in common with a larger, performative, corporate response that’s nominally “woke” but lacks both specificity and material goals. It galls me that this fight is as old as the existence of police, but so many have “just woken up” to systemic injustice against Black bodies, or feel the need to frame their solidarity statement in such terms. But even THAT is all bound up in the Covid-exacerbated aspects of this moment, in which many of us, for the first time, are sitting with the sorts of insecurities that the most vulnerable people in this country encounter daily (i.e., unemployment, food insecurity). I am one who feels more politically engaged in this moment than I have been in recent instances of police murdering Black folks, in part because I have this time and anxiety; this time, I am reading the abolitionist texts and feel compelled to find a foothold in the larger, longer work of what I hope is a revolution. But then I’ll talk to my Dad, a fifty-something Black man, and hear the weariness in his voice when he says he hopes that “something changes this time.” It’s... a lot.

This is all to say, I’m trying to balance — in both my own body and in the larger, physical bodies of our industry, the country, the world — the invitation in this moment, where so much good listening seems possible, and my skepticism as to how or if ultimately corporate bodies, like our beloved theatrical institutions, can meaningfully contribute to all the great cultural undoings that need to take place. I’ll also say: I prioritize the battle of the state brutalizing Black people above the battle of diversifying institutional theater, and though it’s OF COURSE all bound up in the same social ill, I worry sometimes about how discourse collapses these fights. I love theater. I know I will be looking to my favorite artists for help processing these contradictions for the rest of my life, and I think the way I can contribute to the conversation will be through art. But I think less SANAZ: yes. this kills me a little bit, but i think you’re right. and less that art alone will save us.

FRANCES: I agree. And as a (former) theater professor, I often looked at all my incredibly passionate, enthusiastic, charismatic, earnest, loving students and often thought: shouldn’t I be encouraging all ya’ll to go into public policy instead? Because we really need to stop having only old white men in their seventies run for president — and I admit, as someone who initially went to college wanting to study public policy but got sucked into artistic expression because politics made me increasingly cynical, I feel like in a way I fell victim to an insidious PSY-OP (psychological operation) — which essentially mobilizes cynicism as a way to keep huge swaths of people out of wanting to devote their lives to public policy and the political process.

“I PRIORITIZE THE BATTLE OF THE STATE BRUTALIZING BLACK PEOPLE ABOVE THE BATTLE OF DIVERSIFYING INSTITUTIONAL THEATER...

...I WORRY SOMETIMES ABOUT HOW DISCOURSE COLLAPSES THESE FIGHTS.”

HEATHER: I am so strongly pulled to how cynicism keeps people disenfranchised from participation. And cynicism is so deeply contagious. I’m very watchful of how my young children are exposed to cynicism in kids programming too, it’s all over youth culture.

I’m vigilant.

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FRANCES: I am finding myself inspired by this uprising and how it is spreading globally — and contributing to worldwide conversations around the legacies of colonialism. But I’m frankly a bit cynical about the sudden eruption of the term BIPOC, and have complicated feelings about the idea of diversity and what it means to try to cultivate it. One of the most useful ideas I was exposed to during my five years in academia was from the campus Diversity Officer, who made it very clear that during hiring conversations, the only way diversity could legally be considered was through the lens of contributions to a diverse field, work/education environment, etc.

— that we should not consider a person diverse beHANSOL: This is very interesting. I would say: cause of something they had no control of (i.e. their though one doesn’t have control over the race/ethrace/ethnicity/country of origin.) So I’m wondering nicity/native country/economic class one is born how one might bring to this idea of creating these into, these identifications bear a strong weight in the kinds of experiences that build a perspective. platforms a lens of what individuals have done as advocates and citizens and community members, How would such contributions be measured rather than just knee-jerk attempts to commission legally? And by whom? I am not really of the acapeople who will look good in photographs for their demia so this is totally fascinating. grant material, and make the commissioning/awarding institution appear ‘woke.’

FRANCIS: In my experience in academia, the contribution to diversity measure is only BRITTANY: I think there’s a lot more to say about taken into account as ‘bonus point’ for merit Frances’s point about how we frame conversations review and hiring — so it is a ‘bonus point’ around diversity, particularly to include intellectual that can give you an edge (or get you a salary diversity in addition to (or over?) race, gender, etc. bump), but legally we are not allowed to Right now, I’m wary of that point because I resent mention someone’s race, ethnicity, counhow intellectual diversity and census diversity is try of origin, marital status, etc. during hiring often framed as mutually exclusive (to Hansol’s q — conversations. if your ideas matter more than your race or gender, what to do with the fact that your race and gender HEATHER: I agree. I find this deeply fascinatare often constitutive of your ideas?) — but I do aping, and perhaps this will become the norm preciate the call to think creatively about what a truly of the future, when we can get more intimate motley community could look like. Out with the box, and holistic in how we consider who people really are. in short! Fuck the box!

As a recent beneficiary of professional attention by dint of being a Black lady artist, I’m also trying to unknot the double-bind that such attention will always prompt so long as white people are giving out the awards, i.e., is this because I deserve it, or because I check a box? Related: Kiese Laymon recently spoke on a podcast about the perils of the anti-racist reading list (he was referencing a Lauren Michele Jackson piece, which I quite love) and went beautifully deep on this idea that we — let us say Black artists — don’t want to be read chiefly as empathy-enriching machines. I think eventually this conversation about how to un-racist theater will have to find ways to encounter that point, so as to liberate Black artists and other ostensible “box-checkers” from the onus of spending their careers proving they exist.

HEATHER: I want to advocate for how theaters will care for Black artists in the present.

The theater must take this time to commit to a future of more fully supporting and upholding the work that Black artists are doing. Yes. Yes, and, what if support also means not asking them to create and articulate in the middle of trauma and upheaval? How can the theater embrace an artist’s whole self, no matter if that individual is full of articulation and ready to be the voice of the moment or is in deep contemplation, becoming instead the voice of the future? How can we all offer up space to listen now, while also reserving space for the work of tomorrow? Because creating in the midst of trauma can be both actionable and retraumatizing for an artist. I know this personally, because after 9/11 those of us in the Middle Eastern theater movement didn’t have time to consider our full voice, the times were too imperative. We were racing to protect our at-risk communities, hoping to create political impact while simultaneously trying to use the stage to redefine the narrative of war. Theaters became primarily a place of censorship. They did not easily welcome or offer respite until it was deemed ‘safe.’ As someone who came of age as a playwright through America’s decades of war and occupation, I’ve learned that care for the person, not just their work, needs to be one of the support systems on offer.

I want theaters across the nation to do everything possible to be part of necessary change, but the theater is essentially a marketplace for narrative, so I think we need to remain vigilant to the narratives put forth, and vigilant to what actions follow. Being vigilant with the marketplace also means we need a rigorous look at how capitalism 172 / ALMANAC

“I FEEL THE URGE TO BOTH BRIDGE-BUILD AND BRIDGE-BURN. I THINK IN ANY MOVEMENT THESE THINGS CAN HAPPEN SIMULTANEOUSLY.”

influences every aspect of our lives and art and decision making. I want this to be a watershed moment.

Personally, I feel the urge to both bridge-build and bridge-burn. I think in any movement these things can happen simultaneously. What’s the saying? When an artist sees a fire, they run straight into it. Artists need care to do the visionary work.

C.A.: Oof. I worry my thoughts about this won’t be the most positive. Likely because I, too, have wondered a lot as of late whether art can save us. And if so, will it be art as we currently know it, or some new art that we’ve yet to find.

Speaking specifically to the theatrical conversation, I’ve started tuning out this debate among artists about how exactly artistic institutions should establish anti-racist policies — not because I don’t think it matters — but because Black people are literally dying in the streets. The issues are getting conflated and theaters are patting themselves on the back for publicly saying, “We agree that Black folks shouldn’t be dying,” which feels... idiotic. Shouldn’t the answer be anti-racist institutional movement to unite their artistic function with political function, by centering social justice in their missions and creating artist activists in the process — not just saying, “We promise we’re nice.” It all just makes me think more POC artists are being brought into PWIs to be mistreated — only now it’s under the guise of new commissions and well-intentioned (but mostly misguided) PR statements.

Additionally, lately I’ve been really trying to remind folks that theater as we know it is a capitalist endeavor. It’s built on money from the top (white) earners in any given locale and the requisite boards they put together. So something feels oddly hilarious to me about waving our fists and demanding these people care about Black and brown bodies. What reason do they have to do so now, if they never did before? Good PR? Being PC? Feels flimsy. And I think I’d rather spend my time calling a senator and tracking the courts.

While theaters are shuttered, what do you want them to learn, to rethink, to remember, to embrace anew?

C.A.:I really just hope every theater-maker who has received a complaint, a letter, a voicemail, or even a tweet from an artist they harmed, is taking that complaint seriously.

And I don’t mean reading a bunch of books and praying you’ll become a better person.

I mean thinking critically about institutional change, institutional apologies, and not begging that artist to show you the way forward. Figure it out. Do better. Be better. And never pull that crap again.

FUTURES / 173

SANAZ: I have a small request. Do not subject your artists to talkbacks unless you are absolutely prepared to mediate and protect them from what are often extremely racist, demeaning questions.

Brittany speaks to something beautifully in the question above — about the danger of using Black artists “chiefly as empathy-enriching machines.” This got me thinking about my answer here. I have terrible thoughts sometimes that the reason I’ve received work as a theater artist is because I am the “right” kind of Middle Easterner. I write about Iran.

I write about immigrants and Muslims. I feel sort of gross and lucky that my writing sensibilities line up with what the white American imagination thinks a person who occupies my identity should write about. And so I want theater to think more capaciously about identity so we don’t have to be successful on just their (read cis-white-hetero) terms.

HEATHER: Since we have gotten on the subject of empathy (the excessive focus on which, for those that know me, is my great criticism of the American Theater), I would like the theater to stop centering empathy as its reason for existing. In other artistic genres, empathy is not considered a prerequisite to making art. Empathy keeps artists in service. Creating empathy is not the same as creating value. Empathy asks audiences to feel for another but not to see them as equals. I’m not sure in the ‘liberal’ theater if empathy is the watershed we make it out to be. I think value demands more of an understanding of the role we actually play in each other’s lives.

I am also concerned with any future business model of the theater post-pandemic.

Is it viable? Was it ever? How will we nurture institutions, audiences, or artists when economic inequalities become ever-more pronounced? Theater, for me, has always been a financially impossible conundrum, especially as a parent. The hours (even under lockdown) that I have been absent from the needs of my children in order to ‘create’ does not equate to being able to provide for their present or future. I’ve long been wondering if working in the theater, as a parent, is an act of negligence. More so now, I wonder, post-pandemic, who can afford to make theater? Who can afford to support or fund theater? And who can afford to go to theater?

HANSOL: If we’re talking about theaters as institutions, venues… I hope the people who run them are having some deep dive spiral existential crisis about why these institutions exist. What community are they serving, to what end. Where do they stand in the pipeline of new play development to commercial profit-making through story? Who are they including as their community and who are they excluding? To that end, do they still need to exist?

As for the artists who make theater… I am trying to remember why I do it. Who I am trying to reach?

Where is the line between professional development and deepening my artistry? What does it look like if there is no line, but the two things are merged, and merging this trajectory becomes my priority — not “what is my next commission” or “where am I submitting these plays to”?

What do you think theater does in the world? When has it done that in the past? Or when could it sometime down the line? In thinking about the future of theater, is there anything from the past (yours, the theater’s, the world’s) that feels vital to carry forward?

C.A.: Word. I keep thinking about an artistic director who once told me that institutional theater exists primarily to support the jobs of their fulltime employees. And a literary manager who once told me “our audience wants stories that confirm what they already believe to be true.” I’ve also been thinking of how low my standards have gotten for what I expect from a theater — what is that movie where a girl says, “All I want is someone who says bless you when I sneeze?” For me as a playwright coming off what has felt like a series of abusive institutional new-play development relationships, I feel like my standards and expectations have gotten so low, to the point where I would feel taken care of simply by having a literary manager who responds when s/he says s/he is going to respond, and if s/he doesn’t have the information, just writes a simple email telling me they don’t have the information. I have had a few of these precious, golden relationships, but they are few and far between.

HANSOL: The intimacy of physical proximity… feels suddenly so potent.

FRANCES: I have zero interest in Zoom Theater, haven’t watched any, don’t want to watch any, and would rather just wait ’til live theater is back, and would also happily switch to a lot more outdoor theater, drive-in live theater, festival type theater — which is all much more in line with the type of theatrical rituals I grew up seeing regularly as a kid in rural Taiwan, where I still think that what we think of as theater in the US/Europe is largely irrelevant because of all these crazy-vibrant Chinese Folk Religion type festivals that are going on around all the gods’ birthdays. There are puppet shows for the gods, 174 / ALMANAC

strippers on truck beds dancing for the gods, giant bobble-headed gods on scooters...

Participatory theater, created by and for specific communities, is vital to carry forward.

SANAZ: Physical proximity, which I guess I think of as the ritual of gathering, has never felt so sacred to me. I sometimes joke that gathering is “all we have” in theater. But not sure why I ever knocked that. That togetherness really is sacred.

C.A.: I think this discussion of proximity and hugs is everything. Theater before the pandemic was getting a bit cynical for my tastes. I wanna see more plays about big earnest emotions and people striving for touch. That’s all there is right? It’s all we’re craving?

Put it on more stages and stop making me watch stories about jerks.

HANSOL: Is theater one of the few things that requires people to gather, and have communal feelings? Like church. Good theater always BRITTANY: Echo! feels like church to me. Creating a communal space that is physical as well as emotionally bringing together a group of strangers… so we might emote together, and feel like we as individuals share so many things with other individuals.

The individual recognition of self on stage, while experiencing all these other individuals in the other seats having those emotional recognition, destroys the notion of loneliness for a while.

C.A.:Gotta echo Hansol here. Theater is church for me. It makes me feel like if I’m standing in a crowd, there are at least a handful of people feeling the same emotions I’m feeling. And if we’re brave we just might wave our hands a bit or have a good cry. That feels big and positive. Does it enact change in the world? Yes and no? Once I saw this super sad lady on the train who wouldn’t give up her seat to an older woman next to her, and I was pissed. I mean I was fuming. But then I really looked at her, and I realized she didn’t even see the older woman. Not because she was an asshole, but because she was so deeply sad that I don’t think she could see her own two hands in her lap. How did I know this about her? I thought she reminded me of an Annie Baker character — those plays taught me something about the dangers and pains of sad white people who can’t see the hands offering them love from every direction. They deserve some compassion every now and again. Even on their worst, privileged days, they need a little help. So I let her off the hook. That being said, I think tons of MAGA people love Hamilton but still vote against the interests of POC Americans. So… HEATHER: I think, in theory, I echo proximity and theater as church. It was why I went into the theater. But I realize I haven’t actually felt that way at the theater for a very long time. Not in NYC. Not since the last recession.

I want the theater to remain a place of vital creativity. Of truly visionary possibilities. I aspire to thinking of the theater as Zaha Hadid thought about architecture — she envisioned shapes and structures that only became possible decades later, when innovation in construction could finally articulate her vision. I think the theater will eventually catch up to the artist’s vision for it. I want us to carry forward our innovative collective ambition.

SANAZ: I’ve been thinking about what theater does. What is good art supposed to do?

Does good art enact political change? I want to say that it is rare for a play to enact political change, and so no — I don’t think that political change is a prerequisite for good art. Or I’m being too restrictive in how I conceptualize political change — maybe seeing your history, or your family, or your bad behavior onstage does lead to political change.

OR theater, as it is today, is not set up to incite political change. I don’t know how to tackle this question, and maybe I’m trying to answer a different question.

I can’t answer right now what theater does in the world, but I can answer what it’s done for me. At its worst, it has made me feel completely alone and erased. At its best, I suppose it does the opposite. It’s not just that it makes me feel seen, but that it names and points to my secrets, confuses me, muddies my worldview, and stays welled up in my throat after I go home. Good theater always feels messy to me and makes you sit in that mess.

HEATHER: Theater in my opinion speaks what can’t be spoken. In doing so, sometimes it is censored. Sometimes, it is so ahead of its time, people have to learn how A to listen. Sometimes, it is able to create a national conversation.

FUTURES / 175

DAVE Taylor Reynolds interviews Dave Harris

“IN ALL MY PLAYS, I’M TRYING TO FIND LANGUAGE FOR SOMETHING THAT SCARES ME.”

TAYLOR REYNOLDS: Playwrights Horizons and Center Theater Group have decided to co-produce Tambo & Bones in the year 2021 — which is dope as hell — so I’m interested in hearing the origin story of Tambo & Bones and all of that.

What is the aesthetic of a Dave Harris play?

Let me give you my answer first. I say “Dave Harris play” but also want to fully acknowledge that you are a poet.

You are a performer. You’re everything and everything.

I find that, with your work, there’s a consistent questioning of tearing systems down — but working within the system to tear it down — but then becoming part of the system — but then realizing, oh shit, I’m part of the system.

It feels very much like being alive in our current moment.

I think everybody’s finally realizing that they’re racist as hell — that the systems we are born and raised into are for the most part racist, that racism is born into us, and that there is an unlearning process.

DAVE HARRIS: In all my plays, I’m trying to find language for something that scares me. I start with some fear — that’s the heart of each play — and then I ask what’s the most fun way to get to the core of this. Once you have language for something, you gain agency. All my characters have to figure out how to deal with the consequences of their own agency.

TAYLOR: One of the many things that excites me about Tambo & Bones is that the play makes us question what is really happening onstage, and then it also has the actual playwright admit, onstage, that maybe the audience shouldn’t trust him, or that maybe he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s

doing. I think that’s a deeply vulnerable — but also bold — place for a playwright to go: to put yourself on blast in the play itself. It’s certainly freeing as somebody who gets to work on your plays, but I wonder if it feels as freeing for you to put yourself in it?

DAVE: For me it’s liberating. It makes it possible for a certain kind of internal work to take shape. I feel this way about all art, but I think playwriting especially is so inherently about ego, so inherently capitalistic. And I don’t mean that purely in the sense of money but in the sense of: theater artists all create something in order to gain something from the audience. The thing I’m always trying to confront is: what do I want by putting myself here?

Throughout my life, I’ve found myself continually in white spaces, and continually rebelling against white spaces, and continually finding that that rebellion has also led to me gaining in some way. I used to do spoken word poetry, touring and performing in front of these white audiences who are snapping. I’m onstage, doing what I believe is conveying pain, performing authenticity, and these people fucking love me. So because of that, my relationship to the story I was telling gets corrupted. For me, then, the next level of work requires that I dig into what that corruption is. I literally ask myself: what am I doing here besides trying to gain the currency of laughter, or the currency of someone thinking that I’m cool for writing this? Am I putting this up for an audience just because I want an audience?

FUTURES / 177

“I THINK THERE MIGHT BE MORE INTERESTING CONVERSATIONS THAT WHITE SUPREMACY DISTRACTS FROM AND I WANT TO HELP CREATE MORE SPACES WHERE THOSE CONVERSATIONS COULD HAPPEN.” Tambo & Bones started from these questions. What do I want by being here? What do I want by telling this story in this space?

TAYLOR: It’s awesome to hear you dig a little deeper into the play’s relationships with and to whiteness. And it’s not just that we are being held down by specific white people who have enslaved us — it’s also capitalism. The play puts capitalism on blast and I am so intrigued to see what the response will be from Playwrights Horizons’ audiences.

Tambo & Bones is fascinating because it deals with white supremacy intersectionally. Tambo and Bones have different ideas of how to sell themselves to get to the top of the game. Finally, they get what they want, but they never really get what they want.

I’m wondering: what are Tambo and Bones’s utopian visions of the world? And what is Dave Harris’s utopia? We’ve talked privately about burning the world down, getting rid of white people, destroying the systems. But what happens after we destroy everything? What does rebuilding look like?

DAVE: When the most recent slate of publicity came out around white violence, and white people murdering Black people, I spent a long time trying to figure out whether I was feeling anything new. Was it grief? Was I bored? Was I galvanized? In one sense, it was anger — you know, to be Black and to be conscious is to be angry all the time. Like, yes, real, AND also there’s a certain point when that form of anger stops feeling useful because it’s repetitive.

I went back and reread a lot of old Black literary criticism and a lot of old Black plays that should have been canonized. It gave me this feeling that none of this is new — none of the conversations in theater around criticism, or representation, or what we want to say in front of white people, or what we don’t want to say, or what space or whose space. All these things are so storied and so repetitive in a way that made me feel very sad. We’re still having the exact same conversations.

But I also realized, too, that none of this is special — and I don’t mean that in a diminutive sense. I mean, we’ve gone through this over and over again, so who am I to think I’m experiencing something revolutionary? If everything is repeated in one way or another, and we haven’t actually grown in the past 400 years, or the past thousand years, then what should we strive for?

This is why the third act of Tambo & Bones took so many forms — there are a lot of different drafts of that part. I had to keep reckoning with what it meant to push toward some idea of “better,” knowing that that idea of “better” probably looks exactly the same as it does now. I kept wondering, 178 / ALMANAC

have I failed to do the imaginative work of envisioning, of creating an idea of “better” and orienting myself towards that? I don’t think that’s true, but I had to let that possibility lie. Whatever future I imagine, it’s one where people would feel much safer and more secure. Where my mother feels safe. Where my friends feel safe. Where I feel safe because they feel safe. At the same time, I think the emotional reality of living in that situation would be very similar to what it is now — which scares me but also makes me feel connected to everything that came before.

TAYLOR: I’m thinking about the idea of the future and the idea of true systemic change in society — dealing with racism and transphobia and misogyny. It takes a long time.

Unlearning is generational unlearning. It takes time to heal and process intergenerational trauma. My wildest dream is for us not to have intergenerational trauma.

I think the path forward is, perhaps, based in sacrifice.

You know, releasing some of your privilege so that a POC person can step into a leadership role. That’s difficult because people feel like they’re losing something DAVE: I’m wondering if sacrifice feels like it’s a part of your art.

TAYLOR: What a great question. Totally. Being a theater artist is just inherently difficult and problematic, because the systems that exist in theaters are so broken. We should stop using them and figure something else out — and if people don’t like working collaboratively, then I don’t know where you go, but you can’t be in my theater.

As an artist, the way I operate is so collaborative, and everybody is so dependent on each other. At The Movement, the five of us do everything non-hierarchically. I bring in collaborators who want to have a voice, who want to serve the play, and who have strong dramaturgical thoughts — because the shit that I like to work on is insane. I need multiple actors and a full design team and a playwright in the room all the time. I like works that are impossible to know what to do with, that require multiple people trying to figure it out — and by the end of the run, maybe we’ve gotten 75 percent of the way there. To me, that’s what makes it worth it — working on the challenge and the impossibility of it.

DAVE: I’m still thinking about utopia and the future, and about cost and sacrifice, and how all of that affects existing in this industry and in this country. It’s probably all the same conversation. But this is why I think capitalism is so hard, so internalized, and so impossible to root out. How do we imagine processes that cost us less? Each cost does, in some way, have its own reward. For example, the ways I learned to excel within white spaces cost me something, in the sense that this norm replaced an old norm. But the reward was the safety afforded by those spaces. The cost of that came with the reward of being able to exist in the space I decided I wanted to exist in.

TAYLOR: The costs. The costs to speak, the costs to say things, and the costs to receive responses from predominantly white institutions. I love the predominantly white people working there — I have really positive and supported relationships with them. But feeling comfortable in a predominantly white space and feeling comfortable in an organization run by people of color are just different

experiences. It’s not like code switching, because it’s not that conscious. With PWIs, in the back of my mind, there’s a little part of me that says, just be aware, watch what you say. Because you never know. Maybe you’ll get a little too comfortable. Maybe they won’t be able to relate to you because you’re a Black woman sitting in front of them instead of just Taylor.

What is your vibe about PWIs? What’s it like trying to pitch your work to PWIs? What’s your hot take in this time where POC-led initiatives are releasing lists of demands?

The conversations I’ve found the most enlightening are those that reckon with the cost of writing. Writing has a cost — and people will love you for paying it. I could write the most boring play about police brutality, and someone would do it and love it — so it would have done something, but it also would have brought me acclaim as a writer. I can’t divorce those impulses from one another. So in this search for newness, in all this language and fear, what’s the cost that I’m paying in the work of each of my plays?

And how will I contend with the reward?

DAVE: My hot take probably isn’t that hot. I didn’t read all the demands because I was tired and I can guess. And this was coming off being deep in two theater-related coups that resulted in problematic white leaders being removed.

If I read it, I’m sure I would agree with most of it. But also, white supremacy is such an easy target. I don’t mean to discredit the work we have to do to tear it down. I just haven’t been surprised by a white person in a really long time.

It’s so rare something that feels new or surprising happens on that level.

I think there might be more interesting conversations that white supremacy distracts from — and I want to help create more spaces where those conversations could happen. I’m more interested in the internal conversations and lineages of dissent within Blackness. Tambo & Bones came from the idea that there’s no way for me to divorce theater and capitalism. I can sign a list of demands and I can still want to be in this space because we’re doing this show. Those things co-exist.

TAYLOR: Right. The work costs something, and I think being willing to give that something — whatever it is, emotionally, physically, mentally — is part of the sacrifice. Just to do that much is hard and takes skill. And then, on top of that, to address these insanely unsolvable issues that exist within global societies and now a pandemic is just — this is why I can’t send emails. You know? I woke up and A that’s enough.

(Page 176 and above) Portraits by Zack DeZon. FUTURES / 179

HANG TIME (an excerpt) Zora Howard

180 / ALMANAC

BLOOD Pretty day.

Three men hanging from an old, wide tree. They shoot the shit.

BLOOD Hot. BIRD Good weather for growing greens. ... Cabbage. ... Callaloo.

Hotter than usual for the season, though.

BLOOD Yeah?

BIRD Mmhmm.

BLOOD I can’t call it.

Guess it’s hard to tell this close to the water.

BIRD Mmhmm.

BLOOD Nice either way.

BIRD Mmhmm.

BLOOD Real nice. (pause)

Ever been down there?

BIRD Down where?

BIRD grunts.

BIRD grunts.

Pause.

BLOOD The water.

BIRD Nope.

BLOOD Slim?

SLIM Nah, ain’t never been.

BIRD All these years living by it, never been in it.

BLOOD Oh.

Ever wonder where it goes?

BIRD S’pose it go to some ocean.

BLOOD And after that?

BIRD After that?

SLIM After that?

BIRD No idea.

Beat.

BLOOD You know in Asia they got a black sea? Water dark as nighttime.

And in Africa, they got a whole river pink. Rose River or something

like that, I think. And a red ocean somewhere too. Water look like a jewel.

Must be some kind of clean to bathe in red water. Or pink.

SLIM No such thing.

BLOOD Well, better be. Cause I’m going.

Already got a thousand dollars saved up too.

SLIM A thousand dollars!

Where you get a thousand dollars?

BLOOD Said I been saving.

SLIM sucks his teeth.

BLOOD Man, you don’t gotta believe me. I believe me. I’m tryna see some

shit, you know? (pause) Most people round here, they ain’t tryna see nothing

but right here. They just wanna know the same people they been knowing, live

on the same block they been living and walk they same streets they been walking

they whole life. Most exciting thing they got to look forward to is Easter service

at church when they get to put on they nice shoes and have everyone say, “Them

some nice shoes.” And good for them. But that ain’t me. No sir. I can’t live my whole

life waiting on my whole life. (pause) Just let me get there.

Once I get there? Man. Beat. Cicadas.

SLIM Sound like a nigga who ain’t never had no nice shoes.

BLOOD Man, whatever.

BIRD Red ocean.

Huh. * HANG TIME (an excerpt) by Zora Howard * Setting: Anytime. All the time. * Place: Under an old, wide tree. *

Characters: * BIRD (M): Black, 60s * SLIM (M): Black, 40s * BLOOD (M): Black, 20s * Dedication: For Claude and Alex Howard & Zachary Butler. My menfolk.

In 2020, there have been at least five cases of Black men who have died by hanging: in Houston, TX; Bronx, NY; Palmdale, CA; Victorville, CA; and Newark, NJ.

* HANG TIME (an excerpt) by Zora Howard * Setting: Anytime. All the time. * Place: Under an old, wide tree. *

WELL PAST TIME Kim Golding, Divinia Shorter, Lizzie Stern, and May Treuhaft-Ali On July 1, Almanac hosted a conversation — entirely via group text — between three former Literary Fellows at Playwrights Horizons: Kim Golding, Divinia Shorter, and May Treuhaft-Ali. Part I was moderated by Playwrights Horizons Literary Manager Lizzie Stern.

“IN THIS MOMENT, WHICH IS A TURNING POINT BOTH AT PLAYWRIGHTS HORIZONS AND IN OUR COUNTRY AT LARGE, I’M INTERESTED IN DISCUSSING HOW WE CAN HARNESS THAT POWER TO SET THE PATH FORWARD, ONE PLAY AT A TIME.”

I. LIZZIE STERN: We’re here to explore some of the ways that literary management and submissions processes can be a better tool for equity in the field, through your experiences in the literary department at Playwrights Horizons and elsewhere, and as freelance artists. To get us started, I’d love to hear from you about why you said yes to doing this.

DIVINIA SHORTER: I was excited to hear about a response plan for the evolution theater is having right now that was focused on mindful conversation and community-building beyond the immediate email and social media responses that were accumulating. Something that also involved the artists beyond and outside of institutions. I’m hopeful to hear how literary departments are truly the start and window to equity in theater and on our stages, and that we reckon with how that does and doesn’t get accomplished when the literary department or thought circle isn’t diverse itself.

MAY TREUHAFT-ALI: The exciting thing about working in a literary department is that, by helping decide which plays the theater will produce and develop, you get the chance to affirm (or challenge, or redefine) the theater’s values with each new season. It all starts with us! In this moment, which is a turning point both at Playwrights Horizons and in our country at large, I’m interested in discussing how we can harness that power to set the path forward, one play at a time.

KIM GOLDING: For me, I oscillate between being devastated and hopeful about this moment — a moment, I hope, that builds on and continues the work of previous movements. It has been such a privilege to watch artists and arts

workers shine a critical light on the industry’s producing systems, structures, and models. They have very graciously given us tools to reimagine the future of this collaborative practice. I think some of that work can start with literary departments. With our collective dramaturgical skills, we can help facilitate conversations around equity, but also bring other people in when we don’t have the answers.

LIZZIE: You’ve all worked in the literary department at Playwrights Horizons as well as at other theaters. And you’re all artists. Playwrights Horizons has an open submissions policy. It’s a beautiful ideal. A way to mitigate some of the more transactional and inequitable aspects of agent culture by offering an open door to people who do not have an industry advocate, and to encourage the act of writing itself.

But of course it is not really an open door if its threshold is known and welcoming only to some. In other words: in order to get your foot in that door, you already need to be in-the-know and have a sense of permission to enter, and trust that your work will be well cared for. There are infinite barriers for so many writers. What are some of those barriers, as you’ve witnessed or encountered them?

DIVINIA: This is such a tough question Lizzie, only in that it hurts to think about the answers. There are so many different social and economic barriers, but the barrier that really eats me alive is the insularity of theater culture. In my own experiences, and from those around me, a common barrier to the “open door” is that the room is full, and full of people who’ve been in it for a long time, who got brought in by someone else who’s been in the room for a long time, who was brought in by someone else, and on and on and on. I see (and am myself fighting) this ingrained habit to FUTURES / 183

reach for who you know, to say, “I know that artist and they’re great,” to look at the writers you know are “capable” or “successful” and program seasons and send out commissions from that circle within your own circle. It’s easier to invest in what you trust, to look in your own “backyard” rather than go and find other options. But then when people wonder why they see the same artists or work or styles, when they wonder why they have to search for that “fresh voice” every few seasons, they make the same choices and continue to keep a closed loop. I don’t know how we break that cycle.

MAY: Reviewing scripts from our open submissions policy reveals a lot about the socioeconomic inequity in the theater industry. Time and time again, I receive submissions from people who wanted to be playwrights from an early age, but couldn’t afford to support themselves on an artist’s income, couldn’t afford training, or didn’t have enough connections to succeed in the theater world. They pursued another career, and then returned to theater later in life. When you read countless stories like this, it becomes starkly clear how theater is only a viable career for people with a fair amount of socioeconomic privilege, and those without get edged out. I wonder if or how literary departments might address this root problem.

LIZZIE: Fostering more financial literacy within the artist community is a place to start.

KIM: I think it all starts with having a frank conversation about what it means to be a working playwright, especially for early- to mid-career writers. We need theaters to use their platform to highlight free / low-cost training programs — both in NYC and outside NYC — and share information on where to find microgrants or support services.

LIZZIE: In theory, the open submissions program is meant to serve that purpose, but it rarely seems to in effect.

DIVINIA: The way regional theater is centered around New York theater is so complicated. It’s something I think about often, and something that I think is limiting work nationwide.

The open submissions policy’s inability to break that cycle speaks back to the issues of financial freedom, education, *and* instilled confidence that you can insert yourself in any room no matter what.

KIM: It may start with where we’re spreading the word, you know? Who has access to Playwrights Horizons? Who knows that there are people in the literary department eager to read your work? And who knows that Playwrights Horizons is rigorously thinking about the ways in which they read work?

MAY: I think this is where human connections really come into play. In an industry where it is easier to offer resources to those you trust than take a chance on someone you don’t know, one answer is to expand and diversify the circle of people whom you know and trust. And I’m not talking about networking, I’m talking about long-term mentorship and mutually beneficial artistic exchange.

DIVINIA: Would be perfectly happy if networking as a term and activity died forever. It’s so uncomfortable and 184 / ALMANAC

“I’M HOPEFUL TO HEAR HOW LITERARY DEPARTMENTS ARE TRULY THE START AND WINDOW TO EQUITY IN THEATER AND ON OUR STAGES.” vulture-like! To the ones who have to do it and to the people who are trying to be connected to!

LIZZIE: It’s all so transactional! Just like workshop/reading culture. Workshops can be generative for artists when the experience is process-oriented, over a period of several days or weeks. But one-day readings tend to be, I find, problematically different. They’re also more common because they are less expensive and easier to organize. A writer and director have only a few hours in a room to read the play cold with actors, and then “present” it to a room of industry professionals. But what are we presenting?

There hasn’t been time for the creative team to develop a shared language or sense of play-world, or for the writer to have a revision process. It can feel more like an auction than a workshop. “Who wants to buy this product?” I’m not about it. Let’s talk about longitudinal process and the spread of trust.

MAY: The spread of trust happens when you have a diverse literary staff and you consult the opinions of people who have real human connections to various communities around the city, country, and world.

DIVINIA: I’m also thinking about the longevity and practicality of submissions processes. In a perfect world, where the word is spread equitably and the writers who need that open door can enter it, how do literary departments meet the demand that that brings? How do you build connections, meet writers where they are, and encourage writers beyond those the institution wants a professional relationship with? And, as is often the case, how do you do that with what’s typically only a staff of one to three people?

KIM: Especially at smaller theaters, I think it starts with being up-front and managing expectations.

MAY: Something I’ve been unpacking for myself is how my own aesthetic tastes are informed by both my cultural background and my (Western-canon-focused) education.

For example, when we use words like “believable,” “eloquent,” “realistic,” and “polished,” to describe plays, we have to remind ourselves that our definitions of these words are subjective and culturally informed. When I read a play and I don’t respond to it, it can be really difficult to tell if that’s because the play needs more work or because it’s working in an idiom I don’t understand (and wasn’t taught to understand). When you three read a play that you don’t have the lived experience or expertise to fully understand, how do you check your assumptions and meet the play where it’s at?

LIZZIE: I inherently default to a hunch that I am missing something that is in fact there. So I try to equip myself with a deeper understanding of where the writer is inside their process, and how they are constructing the world they are building. Whenever in doubt (often), I am so grateful for collective reading, to share the play with my colleagues (you).

KIM: Yes, same for me. Checking my assumptions means having several conversations with other colleagues and talking about the work out loud. Because I know what I am responding to, or not responding to, may be different for others.

DIVINIA: I’ve been reworking my understanding of the language that is seen as more “jargon” and “institutional” and considering what impact it’s having. Those words are shortcuts created for efficiency and consistency, but when we make a set language for talking about plays, we set a boundary for our own understanding. I wish I had a solution, or that I could say, “Here’s the way I avoid falling into a trap of my own particular mindset,” but I honestly don’t think it’s entirely possible. For me, the biggest gift we give ourselves is understanding subjectivity. Sometimes something you don’t like has nothing to do with craft and everything to do with personal taste. That’s the way I meet a play where it’s at. I have a good grip on knowing what I personally favor, so as I’m reading something and wondering how far it can go and what the story wants to tell me, I like to keep in mind that I’m not the voice or taste that matters. I have to keep the writer’s voice and desires at the forefront. Reading for their intentions and their story, and not the story I want to see or think would be best. And then, in any dramaturgical work that may come, focusing on their goals. The Playwrights Horizons phrase I find myself repeating to playwrights and myself is that they are the expert in the room where their play is the center of attention, because they know it inside and out, even if it’s still in its development.

MAY: You all answered my question so beautifully. The only thing I’d add is that I’m trying to get better at knowing not only what I do and don’t like, but why I have those preferences, and what they might reveal about my biases. I’m trying to understand the broader storytelling traditions of other cultures (particularly the ones I didn’t learn about in school!) so that I can expand my own definitions of what makes a good story.

DIVINIA: One thing I feel happens in a strange way, if it happens at all, is the sharing of ideas and writers between literary departments. Have any of you been part of a work culture that actively engaged and participated in sharing and spreading work between theaters?

LIZZIE: I think, at Playwrights Horizons, the resident company program does practically scaffold a version of that — and has the potential to do more.

MAY: Yes we love the resident companies ♥ DIVINIA: Playwrights Horizons is unique in having such a built-in and DIRECT connection to three other theater groups, and from what I saw in my time there, the exchange of information has the ability to flow without the need for guardedness.

LIZZIE: Y’all I have to go into another meeting which will be way less interesting than this conversation. Keep going.

You are brilliant and this is the best thing I’ve read in… ever.

“I OSCILLATE BETWEEN BEING DEVASTATED AND HOPEFUL ABOUT THIS MOMENT — A MOMENT, I HOPE, THAT BUILDS ON AND CONTINUES THE WORK OF PREVIOUS MOVEMENTS.” II. MAY: I wonder what an inter-theater culture could do to dispel scarcity mentality (especially between artists of color) rather than reinforce it. Part of the problem is that a young playwright of color will often become the “it” playwright that all the theaters are fighting over for a season or two, and then they all abandon that person and move on to someone else. This might help a select few playwrights in the short term but ultimately fails to set them up for sustainable long-term careers. It also instills a sense of competition between early-career playwrights that hinders solidarity and community.

KIM: Look to your interns and fellows! What we have seen in the last few years is an attempt from the industry to increase institutional diversity through internship and fellowship programs. There have been many issues there around support and labor, but on the most basic level — pay your interns well, and make them meaningful partners in your work.

DIVINIA: Oh, we’re opening the intern/fellow can of worms now? Let me sit down.

KIM: They have access to knowledge, information, and communities that career theater administrators may not have.

If we are moving past diversity and turning our thinking towards equity, inclusion, and justice, then we know interns and fellows need to be a part of the conversation.

DIVINIA: There has definitely been a push to increase diversity amongst interns and fellows, and I have feelings about that since they are often the least paid workers in the business yet work as much as full-time staff. But despite that, they bring valuable perspective and so much expertise — in field experience, education, and their own artistry.

MAY: It’s such a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I’m SO GLAD that many literary managers are making a conscious choice to mentor a more diverse next generation of future literary managers. On the other hand, it can be really scary to speak up and bring your expertise to the table when you’re the least powerful person in the room (even when you know you’re right)!

KIM: Let’s just be clear that without the work of interns and fellows, the industry could not work.

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“IT’S WELL PAST TIME INSTITUTIONS STOP LEAVING THEIR ARTISTS OF COLOR HANGING, SURROUNDED BY WHITENESS.”

DIVINIA: AMEN MAY: YES KIM YES DIVINIA: I’m so happy to have diverse interns and fellows in theater, and I was one myself, but I’ve felt the weight of those layered power dynamics. Not only was I bringing into the room my own weight of being a queer Black Latina in white spaces, but when you add the dynamic of being “just a fellow,” speaking up becomes a gargantuan effort.

KIM: I think it also starts with programming. Where and how are these theaters giving their interns and fellows a space to show their expertise?

MAY: I think that, as theater administrators think about what they can do to make their institutions more equitable, one thing they can commit to is choosing more consciously who they bring into the room and actually being a good mentor to those young people. I feel very lucky that I have had very attentive, respectful supervisors at all my internships and fellowships, but not everyone has that experience.

DIVINIA: Can we also speak to the EXPECTATION of what being a non-white non-cis-male fellow entails? The expectation that you are the diverse perspective in the room, that you know other writers from your “groups” and culture just because you’re part of that culture? I’m experiencing this now, in my current work, and I’m not even a fellow anymore.

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MAY: I feel such a complicated relationship toward that expectation, Divinia. Because I DO have opinions about all of the MENASA plays and Jewish plays I read, and I DO want to share them.

KIM: Honestly, my response depends on the day. Because I am not nor will I ever be the final word on the Black experience. I can only speak to what I, Kim, am responding to.

MAY: This gets back to how intertwined culture and personal taste are. Because, ultimately, my cultural background is one of the many assets I bring to any theater I work at.

And I want to bring that asset to my work, but I don’t want there to be an expectation attached to it.

KIM: But at the same time, if there is no one else in the room — what is my responsibility?

MAY: Your responsibility is to yourself and to your integrity as an artist/dramaturg/thinker!

DIVINIA: I try to hold myself to that May, but there is a weight and guilt that says I MUST make some kind of change that helps out other artists of color if I’m the only one in the room.

MAY: One piece of advice I got once that has always stuck with me is, “You’re only in the room because somebody took a risk and went to bat for you. So now, you have the

option to go to bat for someone else.” I try to think deeply (and critically) about which artists I’m using my position at Playwrights Horizons to go to bat for.

DIVINIA: It’s a weight that our white colleagues don’t have to feel, and it’s frustrating. I’ve found myself in groups of well-meaning people who want to acknowledge the different circumstances that are affecting art and welcome new artists, but no one feels they’re in a place to say something.

Then I end up volunteering because the alternative is not saying anything at all, but truly, that is such a burden to take on. It’s tiring. Like Kim said, I don’t speak to the experiences of a vast and diverse collective of people, even if I’m part of that people.

MAY: If you’re comfortable sharing, do you mind talking about a time when you had to volunteer to do that, and whether it was rewarding or exhausting?

DIVINIA: I can share my most recent experience, in my work with DMV Q-Fest, and maybe my willingness comes from the fact that it was a rewarding one. While drafting the press release for the festival happening this past June, which was centered on uplifting writers of color, the fact that it was Pride month got overlooked. No one knew the best way to acknowledge both while also making sure the focus stayed on writers of color, but we knew something needed to be written. As non-queer people, none of the leaders of the room felt comfortable taking on that task.

I volunteered myself and added a simple note welcoming and reinforcing that queer artists of color had a voice in the festival. While adding that Pride statement to the release, I also added an acknowledgement of the difficult circumstances affecting the Black community (police brutality, grieving George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, We See You WAT posts, and more). Work, especially creative small-gig work, was secondary at the time. So a number of us were missing out on this opportunity — and many others — solely due to the struggle of being Black in the face of white supremacy.

While I didn’t want a statement pretending to rectify that, I did want the loss acknowledged. I wrote a recognition and validation of the circumstances that might prevent Black artists from joining, and promised that the institutions involved in the festival would further their outreach to Black artists by creating more chances like this (a promise we’ve kept!). When I sent out the adjustments, I told the festival’s leadership team that the statement had to be present in the release. They moved forward with no issues, so that felt like a small victory.

MAY: That’s awesome! Did it feel scary to ask for those two adjustments, or did you feel empowered and supported?

DIVINIA: Oh it was terrifying. I was supported and endorsed once they received the adjustments and my request, but I hadn’t told anyone I was adding the statement for Black artists. When I sent that out, I demanded it be included. It was open to edits, but the message that some statement had to be made wasn’t up for negotiation, and I didn’t ask permission to include it. Taking that strong of a stance on my own was new for me.

MAY: What would a workplace culture look like for you where you felt comfortable making those adjustments,

and where it didn’t feel like an expectation or power dynamic was attached?

DIVINIA: Honestly it’d have to be the unicorn of jobs, where I’m surrounded by people who look like me and I’m not the lone person in the room to speak to these experiences. It’s a job where I wouldn’t have even had to volunteer for that moment in the first place, because it would’ve been taken care of already.

Let me correct something in that statement as well. It’s not where I’m surrounded by people who look like me, but that the room is full of people who carry a variety of experiences and, like I said before, I’m not the only person in the room who feels like they can be a voice for certain experiences. Rooms where I don’t have to be the queer dramaturg, the Black dramaturg, or the Latinx dramaturg, because those labels are used to make up for the perspectives a room lacks.

MAY: I would love to see the “quota” method of season planning banished. You both know this, but it’s worth stating in this context that having a season of half-white playwrights, half-POC playwrights isn’t equity or equality in any real way, because it gives white playwrights three times as much of a chance of having their work produced, and because it pits writers of color and their stories against each other.

KIM: (Y’all — how controversial can we get here?)

MAY: I feel like Lizzie will use her judgement and edit out anything that she feels is too controversh??

DIVINIA: Speak your truth, honestly. We get nowhere avoiding what pricks the skin of the theater world.

KIM: Give over your money, time, and space. Program seasons with only BIPOC writers or only Black writers, if I’m being honest. Period. Make sure you have the infrastructure to support their artistry. If you don’t, hire additional staff who can. This talk of “quota” is a tool of white supremacy.

MAY: Kim you fixed it!!! You fixed theater!

DIVINIA: I really want to highlight this part of what Kim said: “Make sure you have the infrastructure to support their artistry. If you don’t, hire additional staff who can.” It’s WELL PAST TIME institutions stop leaving their artists of color hanging, surrounded by whiteness while their play is (and often was brought in for being) the antithesis of whiteness.

MAY: Re: reaching out to early-career artists and interns in a way that prioritizes inclusion, I wonder where you two feel that young, early-career, white theater artists fit into all of this. Of my former classmates, the ones who are still working in theater aren’t former department darlings or student theater club stars (most of whom are white), but the kids who had to fight tooth and nail for every opportunity they got (most of whom are students of color). I wonder if the current climate does a disservice to white early-career artists by giving them entitlement and false expectations.

How do white artists participate in dismantling a system that hurts everyone? Or should they just step back to make room for other people’s voices? To be clear, I’m less interested in taking care of the feelings of people like that, and FUTURES / 187

more interested in working together to dismantle scarcity mentality among young artists.

apply to Playwrights Horizons, I would literally not be having this conversation with y’all.

DIVINIA: I think theater education certainly has a role to play in correcting the false sense of entitlement you mention by preparing ALL of their students to be rigorous self-advocates. I do still think about the personal work that all privileged (via class, race, gender, sexuality, and their intersections) students — and people — need to be doing.

The entitlement you mention leads to privileged people’s disappointment in not landing work under the impression that the jobs are going to marginalized people instead of the best candidate. The attitude that you belong in any job simply because you have a degree, or are part of the class(es) society favors, is what I feel needs immediate dismantling. That work has to begin with themselves and can then be led further by their education, if education is an avenue for them. For some artists it’s not, and we can’t leave it up to education to dismantle systems that exist in, as much as around, all of us.

I’ll also touch on something a little deeper within this.

Looking specifically at people of color, we aren’t getting more jobs and positions of power now simply because we’re people of color and it’s a trend. Taking over these positions and putting us in these spaces is essential to theater’s survival. There would be no need for this shift if it wasn’t. There has always been a push for more diversity in theater, but now there’s consequences — and profit loss — for not living up to that demand. Theater was INCREDIBLY comfortable with its white spaces and institutions and tokenism, until it saw the monetary value that diversity has. When a theater expands their season with playwrights of color, when you add new hires and interns and fellows that are people of color, those institutions serve themselves by expanding their network and reaching new audiences and new levels of monetary success. I don’t say this as an expert on the numbers, but I do find myself seeing a pattern. So the idea that we have only been included for diversity, without acknowledging the vital resources that we add and are expected to bring to an institution, is nonsense.

KIM: Knowledge and access and support, I cannot stress it enough.

KIM: I think the answer lies with outreach. What we need to do is connect and share information with colleagues and organizations SPECIFICALLY championing the work of BIPOC students.

Additionally — to add to Divinia’s point — we MAKE culture. Just look at America’s cultural landscape — the songs we’re listening to, the books we’re reading, the movies and TV we’re watching, the plays that are resonating. We deserve to have several seats at the tables for which folks are “determining” cultural output and, in tandem, start building our own.

MAY: I upvote Kim’s point that theaters need to be reaching out to colleges and arts organizations that specifically nurture the voices of artists of color. And not just theater programs! There are probably plenty of prose writers and poets out there who could write a damn good play if anyone ever prompted them to!

KIM: EXACTLY! DIVINIA: That was me. If not for one very specific mentor pushing me to stay in this, the same mentor who made me 188 / ALMANAC

DIVINIA: Theater is going to live or die by outreach after this. If we don’t start advocating for artists of color now, we’ll get nowhere.

MAY: Yeah!!! We’re missing out on the brilliant plays of so many people who don’t know that playwriting is an option because no one ever took them to see a good play or gave them a good play to read! There’s a lot of important outreach work that literary departments can and should do, but we cannot do the job of an education department.

DIVINIA: I didn’t know about dramaturgs or literary departments until someone who had been a dramaturg (again with that insularity and also theater’s lack of transparency around the existence of literary work) saw that in me and guided me to this path (re: my mentor). Lack of shared theater knowledge is biting literary departments harder than anyone — this is also the perspective of someone outside of New York, where the attitudes are very different. How can we establish our vitality when no one actually *knows* what we do, how we do it, and, frankly, how awesome it is to do?

KIM: As my final text, here’s what I am asking for in the re-imagination of the theater. Open your space. Open your purse. Open your ears. Give over your keys. Maintain transparency. Share resources. Share knowledge. Commit to continuous education. Don’t run from critique. Re-evaluate access on a daily basis. Identify and remove elitism from all areas of programming. Make sure you have the infrastructure to support artists of color. Flatten decision-making structures and institutional hierarchies. Unionize! Connect with other organizations, colleges, and collectives that are already supporting BIPOC writers — both inside and outside NYC. Ask if they would be willing to partner with A you or how you can materially support their mission.

“OPEN YOUR SPACE. OPEN YOUR PURSE. OPEN YOUR EARS. GIVE OVER YOUR KEYS.

MAINTAIN TRANSPARENCY.

SHARE RESOURCES. SHARE KNOWLEDGE. COMMIT TO CONTINUOUS EDUCATION.

DON’T RUN FROM CRITIQUE. RE-EVALUATE ACCESS ON A DAILY BASIS.

IDENTIFY AND REMOVE ELITISM

FROM ALL AREAS OF PROGRAMMING. MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE INFRASTRUTURE

TO SUPPORT ARTISTS OF COLOR. FLATTEN DECISION-MAKING STRUCTURES

AND INSTITUTIONAL HIERARCHIES.”

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YOUR SEAT

MISSES YOU

Our Mainstage Theater has sat empty for months, but we’ve been busy developing bold new plays and musicals for the future. To celebrate our 50th anniversary season, and our return to sharing stories in person, we hope you’ll consider naming a seat. Whether it’s named for yourself or a loved one, your seat supports another 50 years of new work from emerging and established writers.

Seats in our Mainstage Theater are available by making a tax-deductible $5,000 donation, which can be paid over up to 5 years. Each donation includes a 40-character inscription placed on the back of your seat.

Upon purchase, we will contact you for text.

Reserve your seat today and it will be waiting for you when we get back!

For additional information, please contact Eva Rosa, Associate Director, Individual Giving, at erosa@phnyc.org.

Almanac Batch 2 Print & Review Version