30 minute read
First of All, We Have to Stop the Artists from Dying
AN INTERVIEW WITH SEAN DANIELS
BY MICHAEL ROHD
In a generous and compassionate conversation, Sean Daniels, a founder of Dad’s Garage in Atlanta and more recently, the Recovery Arts Project, talks with Michael Rohd about how artists can use the transformative power of theatre to change the national narrative around addiction and recovery.
MICHAEL ROHD | I want to start by asking you, where did you grow up, and what was the family unit that you came from like?
SEAN DANIELS | Both my parents’ families are in politics; we lived in Washington, DC. My parents—my whole family—went to the theatre all the time; it was just part of what we did when I was growing up. They had season subscriptions to everything. We were also Mormon, so it was not until much later in life that I realized not everyone goes to church for seven hours every Sunday and not everyone goes to the theatre twice a week, so—
MICHAEL | I want to make sure that’s heard. You grew up in Washington, DC, in a political family environment, going to the theatre a lot, and you were Mormon and went to church for seven hours on Sundays.
SEAN | That was an exaggeration. But you go for three hours every Sunday and then you do events afterwards, so it takes up a huge part of your life. The Mormon Church is smart in that, if you are in the Mormon Church, it also includes sports activities. My dad was a big sports guy—he always played basketball, he always coached young people. When my parents decided to leave the church, it was such a...you have to really uproot your life.
MICHAEL | How old were you?
SEAN | I was 16 when my parents left the Mormon Church.
MICHAEL | So until then, you had the experience of cultural activity in a big city and a very deeply church-connected life.
SEAN | We moved around a lot. We started in DC, and then we moved to Mesa, Arizona, for seven years, and then we moved to Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Oddly, I’ve continued that triangle of moving. We always went to the theatre, so we were involved in the community. I think I always loved the theatre because I was a husky kid who couldn’t play sports; theatre was a place for the strange and the weird kids to find a home. But that aspect of community organization and connecting with people has always been part of who my family was.
MICHAEL | It seems to me that there’s a relationship between the event of sport, the event of church, and the event of theatre. There’s something happening; there are people gathered, there’s energy. How did your early immersion in sports, church, and theatre affect the artist or man that you’ve become?
SEAN | They’re all story-based. My grandfather had to have heart surgery a couple of times. When he would go to sporting events with my dad, they would have to stop at each level—we weren’t rich, so we sat way up top—and he would have to catch his breath before they could go to the next level. When I went with my father, he made sure that we stopped on every level to honor what had happened with my grandfather, so there was a ritual involved in every part of it. I feel like I understood sports on a level of, we hoped our team won, but also, these are the things we do at the stadium to honor those that can’t be with us anymore.
Maybe all of us, especially Americans, are narrative junkies anyway. But I think when you grow up in politics and Mormon religion and theatre, it’s like the narrative is constantly being explored and reinforced.
Going to the theatre, I used to think my parents were very evolved, but maybe they were also a little lazy; they just took me to any show they were going to. I saw Sweeney Todd as a very young person, and it was scarring. I had the opportunity to tell Stephen Sondheim eventually and he told me, “Get over it.” So I guess I’m supposed to move on from it, but stories were a huge part of what we were.
Maybe all of us, especially Americans, are narrative junkies anyway. But I think when you grow up in politics and Mormon religion and theatre, it’s like the narrative is constantly being explored and reinforced. I can go back maybe seven to 10 generations in my family of exactly who we’re from and when we came over and where we were born. I think that played a role in my trying to understand our place in it all. I think also in politics, at its best, you are trying to figure out how you are of service to the community that you’re in. You’re trying to figure out what is it that is not working and how could you adjust it to go forward.
The Udall family in Arizona is my family. My favorite uncle growing up was the deputy whip of the Republican Party, and then also Mo Udall [Morris King Udall] was a Democrat running for president. So I had relatives on both sides. It’s not like we were a Republican or a Democratic family. It was based on where you lived and what you believed. And, as with any Mormon family, at some point half the people in my family had left the church, so you have different people who feel differently.
MICHAEL | This idea of going back generations and knowing where you’re from—I want to translate that for a moment to the generations of artists that you’re from, separate from family. I want to ask you about college. I think when people hear about theatre artists, they’re often sort of curious—particularly other theatre artists— about, “What informed you?” Was college a meaningful part of your journey toward the kind of theatre artist you became?
SEAN | I went to Florida State University. Part of what happened when my group of friends and I were there—and maybe I should have seen these signs coming for the rest of my career—we were not embraced by the School of Theatre, at all. Part of why we founded Dad’s Garage in Atlanta was that we hadn’t really gotten the roles that we wanted in college, and we believed we had something to say that people were interested in, even if the School of Theatre didn’t.
One of our first reviews, in [the arts and culture newspaper] Creative Loafing, said, “This is not what most adults would call theatre.” We put that quote on the front of our brochure for the next year as though it was the greatest thing that anybody could say about what we were doing. And the theatre took off, so it’s all kind of been bucking the system in terms of trying to figure out, in the best populist sense, what are we interested in doing, what is our audience excited to see; not necessarily, how great would we be in The Miss Firecracker Contest if we could get cast in it.
MICHAEL | In a way, what college gave you was something to react against, you and your friends, and you started this kick-ass theatre company in Atlanta. Why Atlanta?
SEAN | The Olympics were coming, and we thought, “Oh, it’ll be a great place. It’ll be a cultural hub.” We were an improv troupe; we did a kind of improv called theatre sports, and there was no other theatre sports team in Atlanta. But, on a subconscious level— most of us were from Florida. We went to Florida State. Atlanta was far enough away, but not too far away.
What is great about Atlanta is that you can really try out who you want to be as an artist—at least that was true in the ’90s. We made some bad shows, and we lived to see the next time. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution had a phenomenal theatre critic named Dan Hulbert who would come and see our shows and sometimes would call afterwards and say, “This wasn’t your best work, so I’m not going to review it, but I’ll come back again.” And then he would celebrate other things that we were doing on the front of the Arts Section.
We had a couple of early breaks. We applied for the rights to Cannibal! The Musical by Trey Parker and Matt Stone before they became famous, and they said, “Sure.” South Park hit after that, so suddenly, we were doing the musical at the same time. We did SubUrbia by Eric Bogosian, and I wrote to him, “I directed your show, and I think I did a fantastic job. You should really fly down and see it”—which is something I don’t recommend to anybody. But he did, and he brought Richard Linklater, who was going to direct the movie of it. They saw the show, met with us afterwards, and they wrote a letter of recommendation for the theatre.
So we took off pretty quickly in Atlanta. Because Atlanta in the ’90s was not an A-level theatre city, you were allowed to find your way. There was nobody else to get crushed by; it was very supportive. We could grow as artists. We could try out new things. I think the quality of our work at the beginning was not that strong. Actually, what was said about us was that the parties were great, but that the theatre was okay. And then, about seven or eight years later, people were like, “The theatre’s gotten much better, but the parties have really faded.”
MICHAEL | That happens as we get older. How long did you stay there? Where’d you go from there?
SEAN | I was there for nine years, and then I got an opportunity to be resident director and the associate artistic director at Cal Shakes in Berkeley, California. I was only there for about a year and a half before Marc Masterson asked me to come be the resident director and associate artistic director at Actors Theatre of Louisville. When we talk about where we are from, theatre-wise, Marc Masterson was a real mentor of mine, though he would hate that word.
He was the first artistic director who said to me, “Okay, listen, you can direct fine. That’s great. You have to learn how to read an Excel sheet. You need to learn how to read a production budget. You need to figure out how much things really cost. You need to understand what labor is so that you never sit in a meeting and have people tell you that you can’t afford your vision. You need to understand the whole organization.” That was so helpful because at Dad’s Garage, our budget was $600,000–$700,000, and by the time I got to ATL, the budget was 10 million.
MICHAEL | I’ve got to imagine, since we’re going to talk about activism and community organizing, that being a whole-picture thinker and understanding all the various moving parts of the organization and the project and the people and the resources becomes really important in terms of where your practice has gone. How many years were you at Actors Theatre?
SEAN | I was there for five years.
A sneaky thing about addiction, especially in the arts, is that being able to go out with everybody till 4:00 in the morning and still be in rehearsal the next morning at 10:00 is totally celebrated, right?
MICHAEL | Am I right that substance use, alcohol started to become a part of the story of your journey and intersecting with your professional life there? I want artists who are reading this to understand a bit about your own personal journey and how it helped lead to some of the work we’re going to talk about.
SEAN | A sneaky thing about addiction, especially in the arts, is that being able to go out with everybody till 4:00 in the morning and still be in rehearsal the next morning at 10:00 is totally celebrated, right? That’s part of it. Also, there’s a kind of Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac, “It costs something to be an artist, and you have to pay that and that’s the life that you live.”
It definitely started to get out of control in Louisville. I would go out three nights a week, and then, eventually, seven nights a week, and then eventually, I would drink at lunch. Then eventually, by the end, I was drinking in the morning before going into work. When Marc left to become the artistic director at South Coast Rep, and I was made the interim artistic director, I think I was really on a path to be in consideration to be the next artistic director. That’s when my father passed away, and that’s then when the bottom dropped out from underneath me—because I didn’t have any emotional tools to deal with that except to drink more. Eventually, I was let go because I really couldn’t stay sober for longer than an hour.
MICHAEL | When you had that moment, where did that lead you in terms of where you went as an artist, as well as where you went as a person? Where did your health go next? Where did that take you?
SEAN | What I’m always grateful for, I was directing a kids’ musical at the Kennedy Center, and I was at rock, rock bottom. At the time, Lauren Gunderson, who was sort of an unknown playwright at the time—
MICHAEL | Now one of our great playwrights.
SEAN | Now one of our great playwrights. Lauren went to the Kennedy Center and said, “You’re not going to fire him. We’re going to get him through this. We’re all going to step in and do what we can, and then he’s going to go to rehab.” And so, I wasn’t fired. I got paid the full amount to be able to direct a show—which was significant—and I was able to use that money to go to rehab in Jacksonville, Florida.
MICHAEL | Let me use that to build a bridge to the work that you’re doing now with the Recovery Arts Project and beyond. After the moment you described in DC and post-rehab, you’ve continued to have a super active career as a director, also running Arizona Theatre Company for some years in Phoenix and Tucson, moving to Florida and then starting the Recovery Arts Project. So I’m sort of fast-forwarding in a way.
I want to ask you, as a theatre director who’s now leading an initiative that has a larger aim than any single project and that does campaign work around addiction and recovery in a variety of narrative and media formats, how do you think about your work as a theatre director in terms of the amount of time you spend on plays, and the amount of time you spend with the Recovery Arts Project?
SEAN | When we started Dad’s Garage, I thought the most punk-rock thing we could ever do was to start a theatre, and we were going to save the world by doing theatre. We were going to put on plays that we thought were important conversations, and we were going to stick it to the establishment and all these things. Then along the way, at some point, you’re worried about subscribers keeping their seats, and that slightly coded racist board member and how you handle them. And that urge to fix the world gets beat out of you.
I wrote a play called The White Chip, which is about my own recovery, because for me, I was shocked when I learned about brain behavior and things that I had never heard of before, as they relate to addiction. Even now, we’re not really talking about it, but we know so much more about brain behavior and brain disorders and dopamine and neural pathways. But none of this was talked about.
We did a reading of The White Chip in Glasgow, to see about potentially doing a tour over there. There was a woman who came because she had lost her son, and she didn’t understand why. She thought maybe coming to the theatre would help her to understand. And there was a gentleman who brought his family because he thought they didn’t really understand who he was, and he wanted them to see the play. Suddenly, it was like, “Oh my God, this is the thing we were talking about wanting to do with theatre when we were 22.”
MICHAEL | Because individual people were coming for a sense of understanding that they weren’t getting in other spaces in their lives.
SEAN | That’s right. At some point you go, “Oh my God, I think a lot of people could run theatres, but I’m not sure that a lot of people can do this.”
MICHAEL | Do you think of your mission as exploring and working around addiction and recovery for artists, or is that the door that then opens you to doing that work with the general public?
SEAN | I think first of all, we have to stop artists from dying. We have to figure out how to keep them alive and how to be able to keep them safe. That, I think, is the way that you change national narratives. There was some great research done on how national narratives change; they studied gay marriage. Barack Obama was against gay marriage when he ran for president; today you cannot say what he said as a Democrat in Florida and get elected. So there was a study that asked, “What’s different in our lifetime that we’ve changed that?”
The answer was two things. One was the arts. First of all, the roles that the LGBTQ community is allowed to play went from trauma to wacky best friend to support system, to eventually existing in a story where your sexuality does not determine whether you would be in it or not. Ellen comes out. Everyone thinks she’s going to lose her job. Magic Johnson is HIV positive, and everybody thinks he’s going to be dead within a month. He’s currently a billionaire in better shape than any of us.
The other part was changing the story from “everybody has a legal right to be able to marry who they want” to “people are allowed to love whoever they want to love.” It is just a better story. Between those two things, it was like, “Oh my God, we have actually changed a national narrative in our lifetime.” What if we could do the same thing for addiction? But it has to start with artists. It has to start with the people that help us to better understand the world that we live in.
The Normal Heart happened at The Public Theater, and Larry Kramer stood out front and handed out information to every person that was leaving. Because of that, Reagan had to finally talk about what “gay cancer” was—or what he thought it was—and talk about AIDS. We know that the theatre has immense power to be able to change conversations, and I promise you that people are alive today because of Larry Kramer.
How do we do the same thing? How do we look at the steps that the LGBTQ community has taken and put those in place for us? I think we can look to that community to say, “What are the steps we should be taking so that anybody who is interested in getting help knows that it’s possible, that there’s a huge community, and nothing is a death sentence.”
MICHAEL | I want to go back a few sentences and note that as a theatre practitioner, when you told the story of The Normal Heart and its impact, you didn’t just say that The Normal Heart happened, and things changed. You said The Normal Heart happened, and Larry Kramer stood outside handing out pamphlets. So in the story you told, it wasn’t just the play, it was also the activism right outside, adjacent to the theatre that contributed to that change. When you think about the Recovery Arts Project, what shape is your work taking these days that is the storytelling, but also Larry outside the theatre?
SEAN | In a couple of different ways. When we did The White Chip in New York, at the very first preview, somebody came up to Joe Tapper, our lead in the show, after the performance and said, “I’m an alcoholic, but I’m not sober right now, and I came tonight.” Our producers put together 12 QR codes to help people figure out who they can contact if they are interested in these different recovery groups (because there’s different groups depending on whatever it is that you’re struggling with). Two weeks in, that same person contacted us and said, “I have been sober 14 days today since I came to the show, so thank you for that.” After that, after every single performance, somebody came up and said, “I’m ready to get help.”
We started to put together resources for people. We partnered with the Clinton Foundation to have Chelsea Clinton come and speak at the show, and we gave out Naloxone to every person who was leaving the theatre that night, to ask them just to put it in their backpack or take it home with them. While that’s going on, the Recovery Arts Project put together a video for performing arts organizations about how they can be more recovery-friendly.
I did a show in Cincinnati, and before we were allowed to start working, we had to watch a couple different videos. One was how to be respectful to our BIPOC friends and what to do in case of an active shooter. These were important things to understand, but there was nothing about mental health. So we said, “Let’s put together a free video. Let’s put it out there. Let’s work with different organizations to make sure that it’s spot on.”
We’ve worked with the Terrence McNally Foundation to commission artists that are in recovery to write recovery-forward stories. We’re supporting different work. Lauren Gunderson has written a play that’s going to be at Asolo Rep next season, Lady Disdain [directed by Daniels], in which there are people in recovery in the story, and they don’t just exist to have a relapse to threaten the main characters. They just are in recovery, and that affects the choices that they make. We’re trying to work on multiple levels to figure out, “How do you let the average person understand that people in recovery are in the world? That actually, 30 million people in recovery are in the world.”
We worked with the Tampa Bay Rays to figure out how they can make a recoveryfriendly night; how do you walk the tightrope of preaching that “recovery is possible” when the majority of the people who are watching your message are most likely holding a beer at that moment? We’re working with Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation to figure out what their arts and activism future is going to be and how they can lead in those spaces.
We’re trying to, on multiple levels, figure out how to change national narratives. How do we go ahead and do the same thing that The Normal Heart and Ellen and Magic Johnson did, but for changing perception about addiction and recovery?
Next year, I’m only doing one show that isn’t in the recovery world. Almost everything else is recovery-based—not because that’s the only thing I want to do, but I find such power in those stories, and I really see the ability of an audience to change.
MICHAEL | Do you describe the Recovery Arts Project as an initiative? Is it an organization? Is it a program? What is this thing that you are now leading, model-wise?
SEAN | It’s a great question. We started at Florida Studio Theatre, and it was a program. It got too big too quickly, and we moved to a health and human services organization dedicated to addiction, and I was able to spend more of my time on it. Now, we’re partnering with Bigvision Community in NYC [which supports young adults in recovery from substance abuse] so we can accept donations. We’re just finishing up the paperwork, and we’ll have access to 4,000 square feet in New York City to start to really have the first of many artistic homes for artists in recovery. We walked around the space yesterday with Craig Lucas and Jake Brasch. They are the first two recipients of our Recovery Commissions, which were made possible by the Terrence McNally Foundation and Provincetown Theater. Their eventual readings will be presented at Works & Process at the Guggenheim next spring. It was inspiring to think about how we can change national narratives with an additional home in New York City.
MICHAEL | As a director of theatre who is also doing this organizational work, how much energy or time do you spend in a week these days in a show-making mode versus how much are you spending on the construction of this campaign and all the partnership work and coalition building you’re doing? And how are they feeding each other right now?
SEAN | Next year, I’m only doing one show that isn’t in the recovery world. Almost everything else is recovery-based—not because that’s the only thing I want to do, but I find such power in those stories, and I really see the ability of an audience to change. I’m drawn to this type of work right now because it feels like we are going to create a venue where hearts and minds could be changed. Everything that I wanted to do in theatre. I think all of us got into this because we felt like we have something really important to say.
It’s nearly impossible to make theatre. There are so many easier jobs we could have taken. What I love is that I used to have such a high-stakes feeling about everything that we did in theatre; and now I’m in a field where somebody dies from substance abuse in our country every five minutes. We will have lost 12 people by the time this conversation is over. And so, it’s like, “Oh, that’s deserving of high stakes. That’s deserving of big personalities. That’s deserving of figuring out how to fight, to get this across.”
Because for anybody that’s ever lost someone, we also understand that a person lost is not just one person. That is a family. That is a child. That’s a father. That’s a loved one. That is a family that is wrecked, one every five minutes. And even though opioid overdoses have gone down since last year, they still have not returned to pre-pandemic levels. From 2019—this is according to the Washington Post—to 2021, in two years, the number of fatal overdoses in our country surged 94 percent. So it certainly feels like it’s worth it for the long hours, and it’s worth it for the times you missed dinner with your family or the times that you have to take a call at 7:00 at night, because it’s not about the small stuff that used to consume me in our field, but really about actual life-anddeath stakes.
MICHAEL | We’re having this conversation in February of 2025. People will read this conversation in the fall of 2025. The moment we’re in right now includes a fairly fierce attack on public services in the health area, mental health resources, public health officials, research—all sorts of safety nets and support systems are being slashed by the new presidential administration. A lot of people will lose some of the care that has existed that affects the way people deal with addiction and mental health challenges. The arts are under attack as well, and certainly from a federal perspective, being asked to come into much more narrow parameters in terms of what they can and cannot address when federal funding or federal support is involved.
The work that we’re doing— focused on addiction and overdose— is the ultimate bipartisan issue.
So it seems like the kind of work we’re talking about is more urgent than ever because the conversation will be more urgent than ever, and in some ways, it will get harder because of the attacks on services and people who do the work. So I wonder how you feel the work you’re doing will be impacted or if there are any ways you are thinking strategically about it in this federal moment?
SEAN | The work that we’re doing— focused on addiction and overdose—is the ultimate bipartisan issue. Addiction really doesn’t care who you are, and it’s actually one of the few diseases that hits across the board. It doesn’t matter what race you are. It certainly doesn’t matter what gender, or how rich you are. It doesn’t care about your political leanings. It doesn’t care about whether you’re from California or from Florida. So my hope is that we can continue to make the case that this is above it all.
MICHAEL | Let me shift back to being a theatre director for a moment. Something that I am always really interested in is making sure theatre artists understand that their skill set is applicable beyond the rehearsal room and the stage. I wonder if you could talk about how your experience as a theatre director has provided you with skills that you are now deploying in broader and broader ways for broader and broader purposes.
SEAN | I think we always fear that we have this very small specific skill set and can only be hired by one of 72 theatres across the country. In the theatre, we talk about organizing, and we talk about connecting with the community. Honestly, I do the exact same work now that I did then. The only difference is, I do it now with law enforcement and first responders and faith leaders and with Hazelden Betty Ford. It is all actually the exact same work that we’ve always done, which is knowing that a great story is going to be what changes people’s hearts and minds.
And so, we need to figure out not only how do we organize the stories, how do we get people excited, but how do we get the right story to the right people? We started this social media campaign to collect stories about the fact that recovery is possible, and then we geo-target them into areas of Tampa Bay based on who lives there, so that you can always see people that look like you saying that “recovery is possible.” We’ve had great success with it, and it’s funded by Central Florida Behavioral Health, which means it is allocated from the Florida Governor’s office. Again, the ultimate bipartisan issue.
Everything we know about representation on stage and about making an audience feel a part of the experience is exactly the same thing that we understand about representation in terms of recovery. In our geo-targeted social media campaign in Sarasota, they would love for a really old white guy to tell them, “It’s okay to say at 62 that you’re struggling.” In downtown Tampa Bay, it needs to be somebody who’s younger, somebody who’s most likely of color saying, “Recovery is possible.” They don’t want to hear that it’s just a 60-year-old white guy thing. They want to hear that it’s people like them. Everything that we understand about programming and about bringing in new audiences and about how you make people feel at home, is exactly the same for how we do geo-targeted social media. It’s still storytelling. Almost everyone on my team is a theatre person—so when we talk about storytelling, representation, and community, they are already ahead of the curve.
MICHAEL | Right now, you are very focused on recovery. It’s a purpose that, regardless of context or form, seems to be motivating you across how you think about storytelling and how you spend your energy. This could be a lifetime of work. You could work for the next 30 years on this, and there’ll be a need for it. Do you see on the other side of, or alongside, your work with recovery another issue or need in our communities that you could also make a difference in by approaching in a similar way?
SEAN | There are plenty of other issues that I think could be tackled, but before we turned 50, you and I were more likely to die of an overdose than we were of a car accident, of a gun, of cancer, of any of those things. It is the number one killer of people 18 to 49. We have to tackle the thing that is killing the actual workforce of our country. So many people were there for me when I was struggling, and I feel like it’s my job to be of service and try to be there for the next person.
There’s a show that I did 10 years ago, The Lion, and it’s like, of all the shows, it can’t be stopped. The show is about the idea that great things can come from awful things. It’s about a young boy who loses his Dad and is angry at him, and then he gets Stage 4 cancer but is able to beat it. Then, because of being able to beat it, he’s able to reconnect with his Dad. We just did it in Tokyo, in Japanese, and it was amazing to watch a Japanese audience connect with it and be moved by it. It was amazing to be like, “We’ve toured the US. We’ve done it in London, and now, we’ve done it in Tokyo.” And it works everywhere, because we all need to believe that great things can come from awful times.
And so, even though I’m not a cancer survivor, to see how those same principles can be truly universal across the world—it’s inspiring to think about what we can do with other issues.
MICHAEL | That’s a good place to end the conversation. Thank you, Sean, so much for talking about the really beautiful and important work you’re doing. I know it will be really moving content-wise, but also for people to think about a theatre artist working in ways that might surprise them.
Michael Rohd (Sojourn Theatre, Center for Performance and Civic Practice, Co-Lab for Civic Imagination at University of Montana) is a theatremaker, educator, process-designer, writer, and facilitator. He has a 30+ year history of creative practice and projects bringing cultural activity to the work of public engagement, community planning, health equity, and cross-sector coalition building.
