SDC Journal Summer 2019

SUMMER 2019

LIESL TOMMY

Opening the Pathway CURT COLUMBUS + PATRICIA YBARRA Training the Whole Theatre Artist BUILDING BRAVE SPACES

Liza Gennaro Sharon Ott Nicole Hodges Persley + Evan Yionoulis

STAGING INTIMACY

SDC EXECUTIVE BOARD

SDC JOURNAL

OFFICERS

MEMBERS OF BOARD

MANAGING EDITOR

SUMMER 2019 CONTRIBUTORS

Pam MacKinnon

Saheem Ali Christopher Ashley Melia Bensussen Walter Bobbie Anne Bogart Jo Bonney Mark Brokaw Rachel Chavkin Desdemona Chiang Liz Diamond Marcia Milgrom Dodge Sheldon Epps Liza Gennaro Joseph Haj Linda Hartzell Anne Kauffman Dan Knechtges Mark Lamos Kathleen Marshall Sharon Ott Lisa Portes

Kate Chisholm

Jesse Berger

PRESIDENT

John Rando EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT

Michael John Garcés FIRST VICE PRESIDENT

Michael Wilson TREASURER

Evan Yionoulis SECRETARY

Seret Scott SECOND VICE PRESIDENT

Leigh Silverman THIRD VICE PRESIDENT

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Laura Penn COUNSEL

Ronald H. Shechtman HONORARY ADVISORY COMMITTEE

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

Lonny Price Ruben Santiago-Hudson­ Bartlett Sher Casey Stangl Eric Ting Chay Yew

FEATURES EDITOR

Jeremy Stoller GRAPHIC DESIGNER

Dominic Grijalva

DIRECTOR

David Bridel DIRECTOR + CHOREOGRAPHER

Pia Catton WRITER

EDITORIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Stephanie Coen

Jo Bonney Graciela Daniele Sheldon Epps Liza Gennaro Thomas Kail Robert O'Hara Ann M. Shanahan Leigh Silverman Evan Yionoulis

DRAMATURG

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

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

Kathleen M. McGeever SDCJ-PRS ASSOCIATE BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Emily A. Rollie SDCJ-PRS SENIOR ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Anne Bogart Anne Fliotsos Joan Herrington James Peck

Charles Ney DIRECTOR

Robert O’Hara DIRECTOR

Sharon Ott DIRECTOR

Oz Scott DIRECTOR

Ann M. Shanahan DIRECTOR

Randy Skinner DIRECTOR + CHOREOGRAPHER

Molly Smith DIRECTOR

Whitney White DIRECTOR + ACTOR

SUMMER 2019 SDCJ-PRS CONTRIBUTORS

Julio Agustin UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI

Patricia J. McKee NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY

SDCJ-PRS PEER REVIEWERS

Donald Byrd Jonathan Cole Thomas Costello Kathryn Ervin Liza Gennaro Travis Malone Sam O’Connell Ruth Pe Palileo Scot Reese Stephen A. Schrum SDC JOURNAL is published quarterly by Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, located at 321 W. 44th Street, Suite 804, New York, NY 10036.

ISSN 2576-6899 © 2019 Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. All rights reserved. SDC JOURNAL is a registered trademark of SDC. SUBSCRIPTIONS + ADVERTISEMENTS Call 212.391.1070 or visit www.SDCweb.org.

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SDC JOURNAL | SUMMER 2019

The Good Negro at the Public Theater, directed by Liesl Tommy PHOTO Joan Marcus

SUMMER CONTENTS Volume 7 | No. 3

FEATURES 25 Staging Intimacy BY

44

A CONVERSATION WITH CURT COLUMBUS + PATRICIA YBARRA

STEPHANIE COEN

BY WHITNEY

32 COVER

Opening the Pathway LIESL TOMMY IN CONVERSATION WITH OZ SCOTT

39

Building Brave Spaces: Leading Theatre Programs Today

T raining the Whole Theatre Artist

49

WHITE

PEER-REVIEWED SECTION

raving the Challenges of B Re-Envisioning the Classic Musical for a New Audience

BY JULIO

AGUSTIN

A CONVERSATION WITH LIZA GENNARO, NICOLE HODGES PERSLEY + EVAN YIONOULIS

MODERATED BY SHARON OTT

SUMMER 2019 | SDC JOURNAL

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5

6

FROM THE PRESIDENT

BY PAM MACKINNON FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

BY LAURA PENN

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IN YOUR WORDS

What I Learned...

BY ROBERT

O’HARA

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hy I Made That Choice W

BY MOLLY SMITH

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BY PIA

Pre-Show/Post-Show

BY CHARLES

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Step Forward

BY DAVID

NEY

BRIDEL

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20 Questions on Theory + Action

WITH ANN

M. SHANAHAN

SDC JOURNAL | SUMMER 2019

CATTON

The “Mr. Abbott” Award Acceptance Remarks

BY VICTORIA

TRAUBE

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THE SOCIETY PAGES

Arts Advocacy Day

Seattle Member Night Out

Chicago Member Night Out

Chicago Panel Discussion:

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SDCJ-PRS BOOK REVIEW

A Director’s Guide to Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis

BY JAMES

THOMAS REVIEW BY PATRICIA J. MCKEE

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IN MEMORIAM

Remembering Alvin Epstein

BY JESSE

BERGER

Remembering Mark Bramble

BY RANDY

“Reimagining the Classics”

Center Theatre Group’s Going Pro

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SDC FOUNDATION

The 2019 “Mr. Abbott” Award Gala

+ The SDCF Agnes de Mille Commissions

Career Fair

Edie Cowan Mentors High School

Students in NYC

Semi-Annual Membership Meeting

LA Member Night Out

Chita Rivera Awards Nominee

Announcement Reception

Atlanta Member Night Out

Spring Summit in Seattle

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SDC LEGACY

Helen Tamiris

SKINNER

Frozen – Live at the Hyperion at Disneyland, directed by Liesl Tommy PHOTO © Disney

FROM THE PRESIDENT I dropped out of a PhD program in political science at UCSD in 1992, came clean with my advisors, and proceeded to use my still-valid student ID card to sign out theatre department spaces to direct in. I assisted both MFA grad students as well as professional directors—Anne Bogart and Des McAnuff, to be precise. I also directed MFA and undergrad actors in Russian Futurist plays in parking lots and stairwells on the border of La Jolla Playhouse and UCSD. In short, the academic campus—though I never actually enrolled in the theatre program—jump-started me into a theatre community that to this day lasts, surrounds me, and holds me up.

I went from dropout to participant to member to director in no small part because I was on a campus.

Now, decades later, I find myself the Artistic Director of A.C.T., a LORT A theatre with an acting conservatory at its center. I am back on a campus of sorts. I am in frequent discussions about training and how that intersects with mainstage programming and the vision of our theatre and American theatre writ large. As a director surrounded by acting students, I want these actors to take responsibility for storytelling, be front-footed, and think about context and why they are telling any story here and now. I hugely appreciate A.C.T.’s core faculty members as they go from studio spaces with our students and then come into my or guest directors’ and choreographers’ rehearsal halls. They are additional eyes and ears, at the ready to assist with a vision, say the thing that will open up an actor, making them more willing and able to reveal themselves, to take a leap.

As someone who never studied drama formally but for one class senior year of high school, instead of physics—much to the chagrin of my parents—I do recognize that my work as a director is informed by collaborators who have and do. I recognize that research and development in academia directly influences and energizes the field. I recognize that our field gets pushed forward by the very conversations and work that takes place in training programs, whether it’s the use of intimacy choreographers in rehearsals and in new play development, the actions taken to bring and fully support greater diversity on our stages, debates over casting and the continua of authenticity and transformation, questions about where classics—largely European—fit into the conversation today, social justice and community engagement in our institutional theatres—I could go on. And the Union is listening. We can hear the millennial students and professionals no longer asking or suggesting but demanding that we in power—whether that be in individual rooms and rehearsal halls or at the helm of organizations—listen, take note, speak up, and change the field. Onward!

In Solidarity,

Pam MacKinnon Executive Board President

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FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Someday, I may go back and see how many of these letters I have written while flying across the country. I am always inspired following an intensive visit with Members and, once in flight, I start to process all that has just transpired—the energy and enthusiasm, the questions raised, the new insights provided—all while considering next steps. During this latest trip to Seattle, 60 directors and choreographers gathered for a day of discussions followed by a public dialogue with Tony Taccone (who is retiring after three-plus decades as Artistic Director at Berkeley Rep). The day involved two in-depth conversations, one sharing first rehearsal practices and the other exploring staging intimacy. Both were dynamic and complicated, with agreement and disagreement in equal measures, once again illuminating the changing and growing needs of our Members (and the world), all of which is what makes our work at SDC such a joy and a challenge.

The Board and staff at SDC are becoming increasingly conscious of the need for the Union to find the intersection between how you practice your crafts and how that practice may or may not be changing in this recalibration of our cultural norms. When I think about associate/resident directors and choreographers on Broadway, or fight choreographers, or development work, I am very aware that while our efforts today are successful, we have in fact had to play some catch-up. There was a time when, while we were focused on a series of priorities, other forces were reshaping the industry. Today, as we experience such a rapid rate of change, we are committed to not only being a part of but also leading the establishment of best practices within the changing field, whether it be the role of our Members in the electronic capture of live theatre or educating collaborators about the unique and essential role of directors and choreographers in the development of new work. One of the most acute industry shifts right now is in the discourse around staging intimacy. This issue of the Journal provides a glimpse into some of the wideranging approaches and responses to this rapidly evolving movement.

Executive Board Members have been educating themselves to better understand new approaches to staging intimacy and are committed to being a central voice in the development of best practices. We have broadly summarized the areas of exploration into three areas that include: recognizing directors and choreographers who have long been successfully staging intimacy and finding opportunities for other Members to learn from their experiences; serving as a resource for Members interested in receiving training and developing tools and vocabulary with one of the established intimacy choreography collectives today; and opening networks and making introductions for Members who want to partner with an intimacy choreographer to realize the requirements of a play. In this issue, we share perspectives from all those vantage points and more. You’ll hear from Robert O’Hara on his experience with Slave Play. Writer Stephanie Coen spoke with Members as well as leaders in the intimacy staging community who are developing techniques and approaches. And we have voices from academia—a collection of Members, women, who find themselves in leadership positions at academic institutions wrestling with this work and other challenges in the academy. This discussion, while not brand new, is now in play with a heightened sense of urgency, and we are pleased SDC Journal is able to serve as a catalyst and a convener.

We take great pride in knowing that our relationship with higher education is anchored with our Peer-Reviewed Section (PRS), and we celebrate PRS Co-Editor Ann Shanahan’s recent appointment as the Chair of the Department of Theatre at Purdue University. As much of this summer Journal focuses on academia, we delve into the cross-disciplinary approach to theatrical training for acting and directing offered by Curt Columbus and Patricia Ybarra in the Brown/Trinity MFA programs. And it is rewarding to see the PRS continue with an insightful article from University of Miami’s Julio Agustin, who shares in detail his approach to reimagining Guys and Dolls through a Latinx lens at Theatre Under the Stars in collaboration with Dan Knechtges. It is fascinating to flip between this piece and Molly Smith’s reflections on bringing Anything Goes to Arena Stage’s audiences of the 21st century.

No less timely is the story at the center of this issue—Liesl Tommy, a Member on the forefront of expanding what it means to be a director, a director of color, a woman director, a woman of color. She is breaking through boundaries while forging a sustainable life for herself. In this interview, Oz Scott takes us through a thoughtful, funny, insightful, important conversation.

I would be remiss if I didn’t call out our expanded Foundation report on this year’s “Mr. Abbott” Award. Honoring Victoria Traube and celebrating founder Agnes de Mille, it was a night to remember. Vicky, an unsung hero in the theatrical community, was long overdue for recognition and it felt just right that SDCF would honor her with the first special “Mr. Abbott” Award for dedication to and advocacy of directors and choreographers, as Vicky is also the daughter of founders Shepard and Mildred Traube. And Agnes. While we could never do enough to honor Agnes, we came close. Five choreographers—Al Blackstone, Raja Feather Kelly, Kitty McNamee, Jenn Rose, and Katie Spelman—went all-out. I expect Agnes would have approved! We hope you enjoy this issue. Happy summer.

In Solidarity,

Laura Penn Executive Director

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IN YOUR WORDS What I Learned...

Why I Made That Choice Pre-Show / Post-Show Step Forward 20 Questions CONTRIBUTE If you wish to contribute to IN YOUR WORDS, would like to respond to any of the articles, opinions, or views expressed in SDC Journal, or have an idea for an article, please email Letters@SDCweb.org. Include your full name, city + state. We regret that we are unable to respond to every letter.

Paul Alexander Nolan + Teyonah Parris in Slave Play at New York Theatre Workshop, directed by Robert O’Hara PHOTO Joan Marcus

WHAT I LEARNED…

BY ROBERT

ROBERT O’HARA has received the NAACP Best Director Award, the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play, two OBIEs and the Oppenheimer Award. He directed the world premieres of Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play, Nikkole Salter and Dania Guirira’s In the Continuum, Tarell McCraney’s The Brother/ Sister Plays (Part 2), Colman Domingo’s Wild with Happy, Kirsten Childs’s Bella: An American Tall Tale, as well as his own plays, Mankind, Bootycandy, and Insurrection: Holding History. His recent plays Zombie: The American, and Barbecue world premiered at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and New York Shakespeare Festival, respectively. His recent directing projects include Kirsten Childs’s Bubbly Black Girl at City Center/Encores! Off Center, the Universes’ Uni/Son, inspired by the poetry of August Wilson at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth at Denver Center for the Performing Arts. He holds a Directing MFA from Columbia University.

O’HARA

When I was hired to direct Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play at New York Theatre Workshop, I was strongly encouraged to hire an intimacy director because of the explicit nature of the play. Most of my work over the years has dealt quite explicitly with intimacy, and I’d never worked with an intimacy director, so I was at first rather skeptical. But after having an informative conversation with Claire Warden, all my fears disappeared. I spoke candidly to Claire about my concern that I didn’t want this to turn into how we were going to try and figure out how “not to do the play” or how to “water down an explicit moment.” Claire made it clear that her role was quite the opposite.

She was not concerned with the “comfort” of the actor; rather, she was there to make sure they were “safe.” We began to jive on this very important distinction, because much of my work in the theatre is “uncomfortable,” and rightly so. There should be nothing “comfortable” about depicting acts of racial and/or sexual violence, and I’d always made it a point to create a safe space for the artists in the room to explore the uncomfortable nature of the work. But Claire brought new techniques—much like that of a fight director, which she also functioned as—that could be implemented for the further safety of the artist. This was terribly exciting.

Claire and I worked as a team much like I would with a choreographer or a fight

director. She insisted on coming to as much of the table and scene work as possible. I felt comfortable giving over the room entirely to Claire, allowing the actors to form a relationship with her that didn’t rely on the approval of the director. This increased the level of critical rigor that I think is vital when one is exploring physical and emotional intimacy. It was important that we populate the room with many female artists so that there were a variety of intelligent ideas in our brain trust.

Claire ended up pushing our intimacy into extremely exciting places, and we developed a shorthand that incorporated the actors’ and my input throughout the process. I remember vividly the opening moments of connection that she required of each person to have with their partner in an intimate scene: stand facing one another, breathe in and out once, slap their palms on the other in a sort of “high five” motion. This was to contain the upcoming experience. And locate it in a safe space. And it was to be repeated as soon as possible after the intimate moment was done as a form of release. This way the actors didn’t have to carry the trauma of the acts through their days or even through the rest of rehearsal. It allowed containment and release. It remains a profound teachable moment for me as a director.

SUMMER 2019 | SDC JOURNAL

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Christopher Shin + Julio Cantano-Yee as Luke and John in Anything Goes, directed by Molly Smith PHOTO Molly Smith

E C I O H C T A H T E D A M YI

WH

Times have changed.

It’s funny—every time I face directing a new production, a series of fears emerges inside me. Not the bone-crunching kind, like when I was starting out in my twenties (“God, how do I get them to do what I want?”). Directing is always about collaboration. Any director who tells you it’s about control is a fool.

When I first started directing musicals 18 years ago, there was much about the form and structure of musicals to be learned. My fears now have to do with content and how to tell the story. To reinvent the gold-standard musical, one needs to see the story from today’s point of view. The darker side of these musicals becomes apparent because they mirror the sexism and prejudice of the times in which they were written. Many eras were not the “good old days” for everyone.

So why produce Anything Goes now? We’re in an “anything goes” moment in America.

America today mirrors the topsy-turvy world of 1934. Criminals like John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde were sensational celebrities; mobsters walk among us and are celebrated like kings. The rise of the one percent as the nation was just pulling out of the Great Depression is much like America coming out of our Great Recession just a decade ago.

Anything Goes is about America’s obsession with celebrity and how con men can fool most of the people most of the time.

However, Anything Goes has racial stereotyping of two Asian characters as an important subplot integral to the storyline.

The musical came out in 1934, had a major rewrite in 1987, and a bit in 2011, but these characters remain stubbornly, racially insensitive. Originally portrayed as converts named Luke and John, they were costumed in coolie hats—yes, you get the picture.

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SDC JOURNAL | SUMMER 2019

LY SMITH

BY MOL

So how did we do it? Through an unusual combination of my artistic team at Arena, a committed company of wonderful actors and collaborators, and a writing team intrigued and eager to make changes.

First: casting. In the original and most productions of Anything Goes, major characters are cast as white. In looking at the passengers of the SS American ship as a microcosm of America now, we cast actors of color for principal roles in the production— Billy and Reno with African American actors, Hope and Mrs. Harcourt with Asian American actors for the first time at a major regional theatre—as well as a diverse ensemble. This is not unusual for our productions at Arena Stage—we were the first theatre to cast a multicultural Oklahoma! almost nine years ago.

Second: interpretation. We added John and Luke into ensemble scenes they had not been in, including them as part of the masquerade, as interlopers hitching a “free ride on the swankiest ocean liner” to England, rather than being separate from the others.

Timothy Crouse, writers of the 1987 book revision, we focused on problematic lines.

Fully on board, they have rewritten lines supporting new character interpretation for Luke and John, changing them from comic stereotypes to ready and willing collaborators with the rest of the company in pretending to be someone they aren’t. Weidman, Crouse, and the Cole Porter Estate will incorporate these changes into future versions of the script licensed through Tams-Witmark for other theatres to use.

As a company, we have been creatively challenged by reimagining this musical to bring it into the 21st century. Without this type of dramatic revisioning, the gold-standard musicals risk being relegated to the past. Arena has a history of these contemporary casting choices and interpretations, from My Fair Lady to Carousel. As a theatre focused on American plays, American stories, and American artists, we take the reinvention of the gold-standard musical as a clarion call.

And oh boy, what a thrill it is! Times have changed. To energize our art form, many of our classic musicals need to be rethought, reevaluated, and made new again.

MOLLY SM

ITH has been a le ader in new play developmen t for over 40 Through energized and passionate years and has served as A rtistic Direct tablework with the actors, we found or of Arena St since 1998. Sh age e led the rein comedic ways to reinterpret and vention of A through the rena Stage, cr eation of the subvert the text without changing architecture Center for A of the Mead merican Thea dialogue. For example, I added ter and posi as a nationa tioning Arena l center for A Stage John and Luke to the final scene, merican artis Power Plays ts. She create Cycle, which d the w dressed in the swanky jackets ill commission years on stor 25 writers ov ies of Americ er an 10 traded with Billy and Moonface, po the present, litics and po wer from 17 one play per 76 to decade. Her who are now dressed in credits at Are most recent na include A directing nything Goe Chinese clothes. Instead of just Carousel, Oliv s, Snow Child er!, The Origi , So vereignty, na hearing Billy and Moon with the list, and Fidd directorial w ler on the Ro ork has also of. Her be en Mandarin accent, John and Luke se en on Broadw of Autumn), at 59E59 in N ay (The Velo city whisper the accent in their ears ew Yo Old Globe, A rk (The Origi solo Repertor nalist), The making sure the audience sees y, The Glimm Berkeley Repe erglass Festiv rtor y, Trinity al, them as complicit in the ruse.

Repertor y, an at the Shaw d in Canada Festival, Tarr agon Theatr Centaur Thea e, and tre. She foun Third: line changes. Through frank ded and ran Perseverance Theatre in Ju conversations with John Weidman and neau, Alaska, from 1979 to 1998 .

PRE-SHOW / POST-SHOW WITH

CHARLES NEY TEXAS STATE UNIVERSITY

I became a director because… it brought together my interest in several art forms— art, music, literature, and performance. I had dabbled in art, written poetry, and took years of piano lessons. I also was an actor. I remember the moment when, like a bolt of lightning, it hit me that directing was what I was meant to do. When I directed, I realized I could actively tell a story. I could help form a visual environment within which the story took place. The piece could have rhythm and tempos and its own music. Action could be shaped and relationships revealed in a series of pictures. I could observe the results of my direction along with the audience. I no longer had to choose which art form to favor and which to exclude. Directing encompassed all of them.

A teacher who was instrumental to my artistic development was… Burnet Hobgood. Participating in summer directing colloquiums that he produced, I watched 12 professional directors work with the same acting troupe on scene work—sometimes the same scene. I discovered that directors work in diverse ways from each other and, more important, there is a difference between personal style and craft. I realized directing wasn’t about imitating what someone else was doing. A director could be an artist with something to say, someone who could develop technique and craft to theatrically tell stories more effectively. My work could spring from my personal artistic values.

The best thing about working on a college campus is… watching students discover possibilities, realize the power of their choices, work through mistakes and defeats, and celebrate breakthroughs. The impact of new knowledge is physically manifested on their faces and in their bodies.

It also affects their hearts and souls. And it delights me.

As a director, I am drawn to scripts that… explore the darkest and lightest forces of human nature, as well as what lies everywhere between these extremes. It matters little whether plays take the form of tragedies, comedies, farces, or melodrama. I love working on new plays that are trying to become what they are meant to be. I equally

love directing classical texts that have been explored many times and relish the challenge of wondering what else they might have to say about our world today.

I think it is important for the American theatre to… continually innovate and explore, and push boundaries, while speaking to both new and old audiences to ensure a prosperous future. We must also be relentlessly disciplined and continuously hone our craft.

I sometimes worry that we will become too insular and play to the audiences we already have, or to our friends and those who we think like us—and ignore the rest of the world. Our work must come from a vulnerable place inside, but it must also resonate with others.

At the same time, I believe we must honor our history, our roots. Many of us do not know that history—and yet there are rich lessons to be learned in it. A director almost entirely forgotten today is Margaret Webster. She wrote books on how to do Shakespeare in the 1940s and 1950s full of excellent advice, but today hardly anyone knows who she was. Webster directed Othello—the longest-running Shakespeare on Broadway—a record still unbroken today.

Her first production on the Great White Way was an unexpected hit: Richard II. She holds several other Broadway records for longest Shakespeare runs.

One of my favorite courses I teach is… the Director/Designer Collaboration.

It is a challenging class to prepare for and teach. Jointly taught with my colleagues in design, we sometimes disagree and the student feedback doesn’t always sync with my response. Sometimes the design teachers disagree with each other. It creates an interesting tension that keeps us all on our toes, and honest in our feedback and critiques. Taught in the first year of the MFA program at Texas State, students often react emotionally and defensively. We hope they realize later, after working on productions in the second and third year, and perhaps later in their career, what the real lessons of

CHARLES NEY teaches directing and acting in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Texas State University.

His books Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices and Directing Shakespeare in America: Historical Perspectives were published

by Bloomsbury’s Arden Shakespeare in 2016 and 2018. Directing credits include Manhattan Clearing House, Working Man’s Clothes Theatre, Illinois Shakespeare Festival, Texas Shakespeare Festival, and Idaho Repertory Theatre. His Richard III received seven nominations from the Austin Circle of Critics and his A Midsummer Night’s Dream was named one of the 10 best Austin productions by the Austin Chronicle. His Top Girls was invited to the Kennedy Center.

the course are: confronting your fears and demons publicly and in collaboration with others.

The work I am most proud of is… work that my collaborators are proud of.

I balance my work and creative life by… getting away from the theatre and the university. I go to a humble family place in the country outside of Fredonia, TX, that my mother’s family homesteaded. I look out the window and take walks. The countryside teaches me much about myself, the world, work, and what really matters.

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STEP FORWARD

BY DAVID

BRIDEL

A movement class at USC PHOTO Gus Ruelas

The modern actor faces a dizzying array of performance opportunities and venues, from traditional stage, film, and television to streaming platforms, animation, immersive theatre, web series, motion capture, voice-over, audio drama, virtual reality, video games, YouTube, etc. The modern actor-training program, therefore, must prepare its students for a landscape that is diverse, evolving, and wildly unpredictable. In the midst of this 21st-century revolution, do 20th-century modalities of movement training—Laban, Lecoq, Michael Chekhov, Viewpoints, Meyerhold, Grotowski—still apply?

At USC’s School of Dramatic Arts, through professional partnerships and visiting artists, we’ve created classes, workshops, and career events that introduce our students to as many facets of the new performing industry as possible—including those mentioned above. We want our young artists to embrace technology and enter their early careers with real-time exposure to these brand-new vocabularies under their belts. But traditionalists, don’t lose heart.

Regardless of the speed of change in the contemporary profession, when it comes to the movement studio, we believe that the flexibility and longevity an actor requires in this erratic business are created from a timeless artistry.

At first, our movement training consists of a dedicated investigation of connectivity and resistance between the inner experience of the individual and its outer manifestation or expression. Students explore memory, imagination, emotion, and thought, and seek to integrate these aspects of their internal life with a series of externally directed forms, rhythms, and architectures, frequently inspired by the great practitioners I listed earlier. Slowly, it becomes apparent that the work is difficult. It is not easy to engage the inner and the outer in tandem. I am continually amazed at the students’ capacity to split their attention between the task at hand and the anticipated response to the completion of that task, which, of course, interrupts all potential for fulfillment. Hidden psychic breaches begin to emerge: this student doesn’t believe in herself; this student is trapped in shame or grief; this student is refereeing his own progress. It becomes increasingly impossible to commit to a physical action when a little voice (or a loud one) is compromising the integrity of the execution, sabotaging commitment by sowing division. Surprisingly, the solution is not to cut out what appears to be the dissenting voice but to welcome it into the process; not to excise the dysfunctional part of the self but to incorporate it. Dissolving the wall between divided identities— doer and watcher, creator and critic, id and superego—is, to me, the single most important accomplishment of any theatrical training. And when this integration occurs, when mind and body are married in identity and intention, being and doing, then the actor is catapulted into a dynamic presence. Anxiety, conceit, and self-analysis evaporate, replaced by engagement, impulse, and

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SDC JOURNAL | SUMMER 2019

courage. Now the actor’s instrument is available for character, text, and story. From this point, it becomes a question of practice within differing structures, from ancient to futuristic, Greek tragedy to augmented reality. Skills training begins, and sequencing—through clown, commedia dell’arte, Shakespeare, melodrama, 19th-century naturalism, farce, 20th-century drama, modernism, musical theatre, and contemporary authors—leads onward into camera, devised work, writing, and performance projects, and, sure enough, new technologies and brave new worlds. By the time the student actor graduates, they have built, on the foundation of their presence, fortified by their skills, a first edifice of classic and contemporary performances, played out in a multitude of contexts.

The multi-hyphenate has taken over our creative industries. Artists conceive, write, direct, perform, and produce their own material. The notion of the actor as simply interpreter of character is challenged as never before. What the world needs now, we’re told, is initiating artists, those who create their own projects and relentlessly accumulate followers until a critical mass is reached, and popularity ensues. It’s all true. The modern actor must find a hitherto unimaginable degree of Protean-ness to survive. But education must be vigilant, even as technology, media, and commerce beckon.

At its best, the study of acting—body, voice, psyche—is an exercise in integrity and wholeness. To meet the future, we resolve the past and live unconditionally in the present. That’s what a movement training should accomplish.

DAVID BRIDEL is an award-winning playwright, director, choreographer, performer, and teacher of acting, movement, clown, and related arts. David’s work in all these disciplines has been seen across the US and the world in major theatres, opera houses, and festivals. His plays I Gelosi, Lunatics & Actors, and Sublimity are published

by Original Works Press.

He is the founding director of The Clown School in Los Angeles and serves as the Head of Movement for the MFA in Acting and the Dean of the University of Southern California’s School of Dramatic Arts.

20 QUESTIONS ON THEORY + ACTION WITH ANN M. SHANAHAN As part of this issue’s focus on what’s happening in the academy, SDC Journal spoke with Peer-Reviewed Section CoEditor Ann M. Shanahan, who taught at Loyola University Chicago for many years and is now Chair of the Department of Theatre at Purdue University. She explains how she puts theory into practice in her creative and scholarly work.

Describe your professional identity in two words.

Scholar-artist, teacher.

Why did you become a director?

I chose to pursue my MFA in directing because I knew early in my life that I wanted to teach theatre at the university level, and I needed a terminal degree to do that. Of the options—PhD or MFA—I chose the MFA, since it was an applied degree, and of the various designations, directing seemed the most holistic. I suspected this broad, interdisciplinary training would serve me well as a teacher—and it has.

To answer openly, I wanted to know it all, to do it all—put theory into action and action into theory. I chose to pursue theatre because that path allowed me to study—with my whole self: mind, body, spirit—everything for the rest of my life, and teaching in higher education allowed me to do that alongside experts in all fields, and with students who, like myself at the time, see theatre as a way to contribute the most of themselves to the world.

I went to a unique undergraduate program— the Residential College at the University

Bethy Poulikis + Eliza Stoughton in Hedda Gabler, directed by Ann M. Shanahan PHOTO John Flak c/o Loyola University Chicago, Department of Fine and Performing Arts

of Michigan. All three faculty were Brecht scholars, and there was a company in residence there, the Brecht Company, devoted to producing plays by Brecht and those that could be informed by his theories. I jokingly say I was “suckled at the teat of Bertolt Brecht,” which is a somewhat perverse but accurate description of how my training in Brecht’s theories shaped me as an artist and how in some ways I’ve used his techniques against themselves, combining feminist strategies with his to expose bias and privilege and to dismantle these through theatremaking.

What are some of your favorite projects you’ve directed?

Fefu and Her Friends (three times), Hedda Gabler, A Doll’s House (twice), Orlando.

Describe a directing project that changed how you approach your work.

Ten years ago, I was asked to direct Hedda Gabler and Medea in the same year at a crucial time in my tenure “clock,” as it’s dubbed in academia. Directing these two plays together with a view to how this creative activity could inform more traditional scholarship for tenure purposes, I was prompted to draw parallels between the two

plays, written millennia apart. I saw similarities in the stories of two powerful, creative women characters ending in self-destruction, in one with child-killing and in the other suicide (when pregnant). I was struck by how Euripides and Ibsen rendered these similar events on stage, drawing attention to spatial dynamics within the conventions of their respective periods. This inspired a line of inquiry I’ve traced through every production I’ve directed (and many I’ve seen) since of the relationship of women characters to spaces, specifically domestic spaces. This has expanded over the years to consideration of gender and space more broadly, and to development of a theoretical framework for understanding and staging plays with these subjects.

What do you love about working in the academy and with students? How does it feed you as an artist?

Teaching is a deeply creative act. Teaching forces me to get clear on ideas in order to communicate them; to see gaps in my knowledge, holes in my thinking, and blind spots in my points of view. Teaching in higher education helps me embrace the dialogic and interdisciplinary nature of theatre. My richest experiences lately have been in women’s studies and gender studies, with faculty from history, nursing, communication, classics, social work, art history, sociology. I work with a group of scholars who were brave enough to perform Fornés’s Fefu and Her Friends in a mansion on campus a few years ago.

Medea, directed by Ann M. Shanahan PHOTO Donald Hood c/o College of DuPage

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We wrote about that project as a model of interdisciplinary research. Through this group, I was introduced to bell hooks’s pedagogical strategies, based in part on Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which aim to reduce hierarchies in the classroom so that students and teachers become equal partners in learning. These methods have impacted my approaches to directing: I’m exploring feminist practices that decenter the director in the process and foster more collective meaning-making than traditional models.

What are your main passions and interests as a director/scholar?

I’ve become invested in exploring the relationship of gender to space. I’ve found that as you track plays with these subjects across time, the dramaturgy almost always leads to “liminal” spaces—in the fictional setting of the plays, between styles, genders, actor and audience. These liminal spaces— liminal coming from the Latin word limen, meaning threshold—is a space between.

Borrowing from anthropology (Victor Turner) and “liminal phases,” these spaces are potent for change.

How does your scholarly framework of gender and space inform your work as a director?

As I’ve staged a number of plays about women and houses, I’ve seen common motifs. I’ve developed a series of strategies for pointing out and perhaps even easing oppressions inherent in the play—its time of writing, its fictional setting, and those that arise in contemporary production. I’ve come to understand the depiction of women and houses—in plays from the Oresteia to A Doll’s House, Part 2—as inherently theatrical, such that the rubrics developed can be applied to understanding spatial dynamics in virtually any play, even those that do not overtly contain women and houses as subjects.

I’ve also found that, while I can understand plays through this rubric by reading them and by seeing the choices a director makes in production, the theories manifest fully only by physically staging the plays with actors and designers in real time and space. I would argue for this unique symbiotic relationship between theory and practice for almost any line of inquiry in theatre, but I’ve found it especially potent with these subjects.

How does reflection impact your work?

Coming recently from a Jesuit institution where reflection is part of a cycle of living, I love that you used that word. What’s key here, though, is that the reflection happens in action; they are not distinct processes— reflect, then act—but symbiotic: I think while and in doing. This way of knowing resonates

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with the growing field of Performance as Research (PAR), which advances theorymaking through performance. It’s also why I wanted to work in higher education, because it’s here we can do the thinking, experimenting, developing. Stages, studios, and classrooms are laboratories—no less valuable to the world than the lab spaces where my colleagues in the sciences develop cures for cancer.

We hear you are working on a few books.

Can you tell us a little about them?

This year, I’ve had chapters published in three books: “Making Room(s): Staging Plays about Women and Houses” in Performing Dream Homes: Theater and the Spatial Politics of the Domestic Sphere, edited by Emily Klein, Jen-Scott Mobley, and Jill Stevenson; “Pirated Pedagogy: Performing Brecht as Radical Teaching Demonstration” in New Directions in Teaching Theatre Arts, edited

by Anne Fliotsos and Gail Medford; and “Teaching Maria Irene Fornés’s Fefu and Her Friends” in How to Teach a Play: Exercises for the University Classroom, edited by Miriam Chirico and Kelly Younger. I am a volume editor in a new series from Bloomsbury Methuen, Great North American Theatre Directors, edited by Jim Peck. I’m editing the book on Meredith Monk, Richard Foreman, and Robert Wilson, and I’m writing one of the chapters on Meredith Monk, entitled “Creating Interdisciplinary Spaces.” I’m longing to gather the articles I’ve developed on gender and space into a book-length project.

What are some of the fruitful intersections between SDC and the academy?

I’ve been honored to be a part of this conversation since 2014, first with Sharon Ott and then Laura Penn when we met at ATHE conferences and set plans to start the Peer-Reviewed Section of SDC Journal along with members of ATHE’s Directing Program.

SDC had recently done a survey and was looking to respond to the needs of the near30 percent of its Members working in the academy. This percentage can be explained in part by economic realities directors face today in making a living; many directors and choreographers combine sources of income to include work in higher education, as I have done.

However, I think the reasons for the large number of directors teaching connects to the similarities in teaching and directing that drew me to

both fields. Directors are communicators on a grand scale; so are teachers. The most fruitful intersections between SDC and the academy are those that reflect and support this simpatico—that don’t promote the deadly old adage “those who can’t do, teach.” My confidence and artistry as a director has grown exponentially since I began co-editing for the Journal, joined the editorial advisory board, and became an Associate Member (as did many of my colleagues in the academy). I love knowing that I can apply for an Observership, that outlets to develop artistically are right there, that I can call on this professional community to help work through things— from the practical to deeply challenging issues; I love that I can offer ways to connect students to the resources of this professional community, in career development and as artistic inspiration. That SDC is a labor union, with a roster of Members including all the directors I’ve observed and admired and whose work I teach, gives meaningful practical context to everything I do. As I face challenges in the classroom or rehearsal hall, among colleagues, even with academic administration—when I experience joys, successes—I think about them now in the context of this community and the long history of our field; I am bolstered and made braver being part of it. What SDC offers by reducing divisions between the profession and the academy is genuinely fruitful in this potent liminal space that many of us occupy.

“Interdisciplinary” and “multidisciplinary” are currently big buzzwords. What are the advantages of being multidisciplinary?

I think of theatre as the perfect interdisciplinary art, in an embodied, communal form, and in that theatre artists and teachers have a lot to contribute to the conversation. The work I do in women’s studies and gender studies is rich because of the interdisciplinary exchanges. The old model of disciplinary silos is not working; our culture is recognizing that we won’t solve urgent problems by approaching them from one perspective.

Betsy Jones Hemenway + Ann M. Shanahan in Fefu and Her Friends PHOTO c/o Loyola University Chicago, Department of Fine and Performing Arts + Room(s) Theatre

However, the academy isn’t yet set up to support interdisciplinary work; the means and spaces for this to occur haven’t been created.

One can exhaust oneself trying to do it within the old pervading structures.

Have you seen major shifts in approaches to theatre training in the last 10–20 years?

One shift in the last couple of decades has been a recognition of the value of applied work, the rise of the MFA degree, and, more recently, a reconsideration of the proliferation of programs that has generated. I think we are in the most significant shift I’ve experienced right now—starting about two years ago. The biggest revolutions are in long-overdue, accelerated advances toward equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI).

How are revolutions surrounding EDI impacting theatre departments?

Folks are finally looking at the biases inherent in traditional models: who has been privileged and who has been marginalized.

Efforts to reduce inequities and biases are thankfully rocking the old systems across the board. This impacts season selection, hiring, training methods, skills taught, casting practices, texts covered, pedagogies, rehearsal protocols, and etiquettes, to name only a few.

What role can theatre departments play in these big conversations and changes?

Because of the interdisciplinary nature of theatre, the communal aspects, and especially the involvement of real bodies, the theatre discipline puts us at the front of these conversations and changes. Issues we encounter staging a scene involving intimacy or violence are different (though related) to issues one might encounter reading that material in a work of fiction or an archival document. We face questions and challenges on a more complex basis and can serve as leaders in creating holistic means to respond to them that might be useful across disciplines.

Who do you think leads change in theatre practices, the academy or the profession?

There is not one answer to this; it’s circular.

On the one hand, I’ve heard the argument that work in the academy is prompting pressures for changes in the profession.

This sometimes seems under-laced with an idea that lofty ivory-tower idealism leads to unreasonable demands that can’t be met in the “real world.” It’s certainly true that universities are filled with the artists and audiences of the future, and that those folks carry the zeitgeist of that future better than those of us in middle or late career. On the flip side, I have also heard repeatedly arguments against changes in training methods because of realities of the

profession, because they correspond to the professional norms.

Do you think directors are suited to take on leadership roles in theatre departments?

Absolutely, yes.

Directors are leaders, and our field intersects with all aspects of the theatre arts and the study of them.

David Towne, Londen Shannon + Jessie Ellingsen in A Doll’s House, directed by Ann M. Shanahan PHOTO Jackie Jasperson c/o Loyola University Chicago, Department of Fine and Performing Arts

Speaking of leadership, congratulations on your new position as Chair of the Department of Theatre at Purdue University. What are some of the challenges and opportunities that this new role brings?

Thank you. The new position is really thrilling—overwhelming at times, but engaging and exciting always. After coming from a liberal arts-based institution in Chicago, it’s exciting joining the faculty at a Research 1 institution known primarily for engineering and agriculture—as they sometimes say, here “in the middle of the cornfields in Indiana.” But the seriousness of the research is exciting, and in some ways that’s augmented by the location. The university supports research and creative work as part of its mission and in recognition of the need for support because of the location.

Purdue’s theatre department has a great reputation nationally because of the work of colleagues such as Anne Fliotsos (Founding Co-editor with me of the SDC Journal PeerReviewed Section) on women stage directors, and Rick Thomas, my colleague in sound design. But even local folks aren’t familiar with the department, in a school so well known for engineering. The challenge and the opportunity is to work in the tradition of my colleagues to position the arts as one of the areas in which we can realize Purdue’s mission of “moving the world forward” in a culture prone to seeing the arts as the “sprinkles on top” instead of foundational to any great endeavor.

Do you have any reflections on being a woman in a theatre leadership position during this moment in time?

I am grateful to be taking on a position of leadership at a time when the culture understands the need for equity, at least in philosophy if not yet fully in practice. I feel prepared to navigate multiple demands by

my experience living in the world for 51 years, identifying as a woman. I hope that my experience navigating the systematic biases and individual blindnesses to privilege by folks historically in power gives me the insight to recognize my own as a white, cisgendered, middle-aged woman. I draw daily on role models I’ve watched over the years who give me skills in the “shape-shifting” required of women in leadership roles. I also have to say that shape-shifting is sometimes exhausting, and one of the most valuable ways I draw on the examples of role models is in observing how they take care of themselves and each other.

What will you miss about Chicago?

I miss ready access to the professional theatre and the artists working in it. Writing this, I realize too that many Chicago directors are PhDs or coming out of performance studies programs. Activism, collectivism, physical theatre, and scholar-artists are more common in Chicago than in some regional theatres or in New York. Living there for 27 years, I was really shaped by those aspects of the theatre culture, and it’s only in leaving that I see that so clearly.

What are some of your hopes for your students and for the future of undergraduate and graduate theatre training in the US? I hope that the training methods and mechanism that correspond with equitable practices and access are the unquestioned norm; that students are trained as I was to see theatre as a powerful tool to change the world, to expose biases and privileges, and to dismantle inequities where they find them. I hope that students will continue to use this training in theatre to examine theatremaking methods themselves, and that all students will feel free to be fully themselves and to engage with honesty and love with the material and methods they encounter and generate.

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Victoria Traube

SDC FOUNDATION SECTION

THE 2 0 1 9 “ M R. A B B O TT” AWA R D GALA

BY PIA

The 2019 “Mr. Abbott” Award dinner, held on March 29 at the Metropolitan Club and the French Institute Alliance Française, may be remembered as the hardest-working gala in show biz.

In just one night, there were three major milestones for the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF) to celebrate, as well as the annual work of the gala: raising funds to support the Foundation’s key mentoring programs.

The night began with a cocktail reception that brought together seemingly all of Broadway, a fitting start to a gala that kicked off SDC’s landmark 60th anniversary year.

Over dinner, SDCF made history by giving its first Special “Mr. Abbott” Award to an individual who is neither a director nor a choreographer. The honor was bestowed on entertainment lawyer and industry leader Victoria Traube, “an unsung hero in our

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CATTON

industry and one of the greatest friends to all directors and choreographers,” said Sheldon Epps, President of SDCF.

“Without your mother and father, we wouldn’t be here tonight,” said Lapine. “Nor would you be.”

In presenting the award, James Lapine (the 2015 “Mr. Abbott” Honoree) saluted the Union for celebrating Traube and took a moment to broaden what the award signifies.

“It represents all the folks who are behind the scenes of what we do as directors. There are people who stand behind us for support, whether for a contract or showing up the first night of a show, who don’t get awards,” said Lapine. “We appreciate it, as we appreciate Vicky and recognize her tonight.”

Indeed, Traube told the dinner crowd how she quite literally grew up with “the family Union.”

“SDC was like a third sibling to my sister, Betsy, and me,” Traube shared. “We would report at the dinner table about our days at school, and our parents would report on the gestation, birth, and growth of the Union.”

Lapine also joked that Traube and the Union share a common heritage: her father was Shepard Traube, the first President of SDC and one of its co-founders; her mother, Mildred Traube, was Executive Secretary from 1968 to 1984.

As a young adult, Traube chose a career in law and turned to the family business of protecting theatre artists’ rights after realizing a key point, she said: “To be a good business lawyer, you had to care about the business, and the one I cared about was show business.” (See Traube’s full remarks on p. 22.)

And if anyone could understand that sentiment, it was the people gathered at this gala, which featured an august lineup of speakers, including SDC Executive Director PHOTOS

Walter McBride

Laura Penn; the gala evening’s director, Jerry Mitchell (2013 “Mr. Abbott” Honoree); Mrs. George (“Joy”) Abbott; and Kathleen Marshall (2005 “Mr. Abbott” Honoree).

Over dinner of a crisp tricolore salad and Black Angus filet with vegetables, followed by an array of cookies, entertainment was in no short supply. Nicole Fosse stopped by to pay her father’s back dues of $7.87, Laura Osnes performed “I Have Confidence” from The Sound of Music, and Mandy Patinkin sent his regards via a video tribute shot in Morocco.

The evening’s live auction brought in $50,000 under the gavel of a comic duo: SDCF Board Vice-President/Secretary Mark Brokaw and SDC Member choreographer Sam Pinkleton.

The funds raised support the work of the Foundation, particularly its Observership Programs, in which early to mid-career directors and choreographers are given paid opportunities to shadow a master director or choreographer. The Shepard and Mildred Traube Fellowship, which since 1999 has provided an Observership during a Broadway show, is also supported by funds from the evening.

generations of storytellers who will delight, entertain, and challenge us through the special lens of live theatre.”

Marshall commented that “The Foundation, through its programs, allows us the chance to engage with one another at all stages of our careers.”

After dinner, guests walked to Florence Gould Hall for the second half of the gala evening for the presentation of five commissioned world premieres in tribute to choreographer and SDC co-founder Agnes de Mille, inspired by a nearly forgotten letter.

As Laura Penn explained, while cleaning out its archives, the Union recently found an unopened envelope sent in by de Mille.

Postmarked December 1963 and sealed with gold wax, the envelope had been preceded by a separate note, found pinned to the envelope, instructing the then Board Secretary as follows: “Under separate cover, I am mailing you a manuscript in a sealed

“The Observerships,” said Mitchell, are not a one-way street: “Every time I am fortunate enough to have an SDC Foundation Observer on a project, I am reminded of Mr. Abbott and my fellow ‘Mr. Abbott’ Award winners, who dedicated themselves to mentoring the next

envelope. Please file it unopened, with the date carefully noted. It is the outline for a play, and I have no means of copyrighting it except this way. The material is eminently steal-able and I’m discussing the matter with people of similar ambitions.”

What play did that turn out to be? What material was so “eminently steal-able?” That remains a mystery.

“For over 55 years, SDC has honored Agnes’s request to protect the letter,” said Penn.

“Tonight, for the first time, this very intriguing letter comes out of the safe and is making its stage debut. De Mille’s fierce belief in an artist’s right to ownership of their work remains a pillar, a foundational principal of the Union across all our contracts to this day. It is in that spirit, in recognition of our commitment to artists and the work they create, that tonight, after nearly 60 years of safekeeping, that on behalf of the SDC Executive Board and all our choreographer and director Members, I am privileged to present this letter to Anderson Ferrell and the estate of Agnes de Mille.”

Upon accepting the letter, Ferrell, who is Director of the De Mille Working Group, stated, “This serves as a reminder that de Mille was passionate about protecting the intellectual property of artists, which led her to co-found the Union. It is fitting that Agnes entrusted her good idea to the care and protection of SDC. It is an organization she helped to found and enthusiastically supported.”

Charlotte St. Martin + Robert E. Wankel

Laura Penn + Nicole Fosse

David Hyde Pierce

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The mystery behind the letter became the creative spark for the works on the evening’s program. In 2018, SDCF invited Member choreographers to apply for a special commission: create a choreographic work of no more than five minutes, inspired

by Agnes de Mille and what might be in that 1963 letter.

A field of 41 choreographers submitted applications, in which they wrote essays in response to one of three questions regarding de Mille. Five choreographers were selected by a panel of their peers last fall.

All five works were then presented at Florence Gould Hall, and if a five-part program of anything sounds like a challenge, it was exactly the opposite under the direction of Mitchell and the comedic timing of host David Hyde Pierce, who took to the podium once during the show with a letter opener and then again later with night-vision goggles. He was outdone only by Jack O’Brien (2002 “Mr. Abbott” Honoree), who wheeled a clothing steamer onstage, asking why Pierce called for it to be sent to his dressing room.

Joy Abbott + Jerry Mitchell

But no implement was used to open the letter. Because, as Pierce intoned in his signature deadpan, “That would be wrong.”

Ultimately, as the representative of the de Mille estate, Ferrell did not share the contents of the letter onstage.

It wasn’t wrong, however, to imagine the contents or to be inspired by de Mille’s thinking. And here’s a look at how the five selected choreographers created their world premieres for SDC.

Laura Osnes + Philip J. Smith

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Jack O’Brien, Victoria Traube + Ted Chapin

T HE SDC F AGNE S DE MIL L E C O MMISS I O N S Raja Feather Kelly “Disruption: A Dream Dance”

passages. It’s not a ton of homework, but I had been plugging in little seeds.”

Before creating “Disruption: A Dream Dance,” Raja Feather Kelly thought deeply about the early 1960s. What hot topics might have been foremost in the fertile theatrical mind of Agnes de Mille, so much so that she carefully protected the idea in the now-famous note she sent to SDC in December 1963?

In rehearsal, Kelly, who describes himself as a downtown experimentalist, brought in de Mille’s 1952 book Dance to the Piper. “She writes about technique and craft,” he said.

“For my company, it’s all about the ‘how,’ not just what are you doing. It’s about how you do it. We found some kinship.”

Kelly’s thoughts went to the assassination of John F. Kennedy Jr. on November 22, 1963, as well as to the growing influence of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who in August 1963 gave his “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington before more than 250,000 people.

And so, armed with thoughts of 1963 and dancers thinking in a de Millian mode, plus his own long-standing knowledge of her gift for dream ballets, Kelly began experimenting and crafted a work about dreams that are disrupted today.

Taking the intersection of world leaders, gun violence, civil rights, and a society that is distracted and disrupted, he shifted the themes to the present. “I wanted to think about that in our time,” he said.

With that in mind, he also began sharing thoughts about Agnes de Mille via text message with dancers in his Brooklyn-based company, the feath3r theory (TF3T). “The company is on a text message thread,” he said. “We have a daily report, with rehearsal schedules and things to read, quotes or

Set to Franz Schubert’s String Quintet in C, “Disruption: A Dream Dance” introduces a happy, innocent world. Perhaps more of an outdoor frolic than a dream per se, the dancers (Alexandria Giroux, Sara Gurevich, Amy Gernux, Rachel Pritzlaff, Candace Taylor, Collin Ranf, and Aaron Moses Rubin) move as a cohesive group participating in games and a social swirl—all with the precision of a de Mille ballet.

Simple movements, such as waving, pointing, or watching something in the sky, combine with contemporary dance. In one recurring

step, dancers bent one knee while extending the other leg straight and to the side, bringing the foot flat against the floor in slap.

They held the pose just enough so the length of their extended leg suggested the chute of a sliding board.

But the sweetness doesn’t last.

With one gunshot, all the sickening violent crimes committed against innocent children meld into one shocking moment onstage.

Schubert’s lovely strings give way to the sound of a gunshot, then a gunshot in reverse and the high-pitched ringing sound associated with tinnitus, followed by chaos and a news reports.

Sound designer Emily Auciello created a mash-up of breaking-news reports that span from JFK’s assassination to the massacre at Columbine High School to Trayvon Martin and more. “It’s about one minute, but they overlap. It becomes white noise,” said Kelly.

Without that harsh disruption, the seven dancers moving to Schubert is a glorious thing. But Kelly designed the jolt for maximum impact: “I wanted to make a dance that seems like it is just a dance, until it is disrupted.”

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Kitty McNamee “The Farewell” In Kitty McNamee’s duet “The Farewell,” two lovers are in the midst of a passionate goodbye.

Their romance, though, is a secret. He’s black. She’s Asian. And he’s going off to fight in Vietnam.

McNamee chose themes of race and war for her SDCF commission not only because of events that might have inspired Agnes de Mille in 1963, but also because de Mille would surely have applied those themes to characters who possess a sense of urgency.

“She was extremely culturally activated. She wasn’t afraid to champion for people who were under-represented,” said McNamee. “This idea of a secret love, something that is risky or frightening to the people involved, was in line with what Agnes de Mille worked with.”

To develop the work, Los Angeles-based McNamee chose two dancers with whom she has worked frequently, Stephanie Kim and Raymond Ejiofor. Together, they started the creative process with long discussions about their own experiences about race in America today and memories of taking risks or going against their parents’ expectations.

“I like to dig deep with dancers and not just give them steps but treat it as a mini-play we are creating together,” said McNamee, who has collaborated with composers, filmmakers, directors, and writers in addition to running her own company, Hysterica Dance Co. McNamee studied modern dance, and not only performed but also choreographed her own work as Dream Laurey in Oklahoma! during high school. She reacquainted herself with de Mille by rewatching classic works and interviews. “I really tried to keep my eye on the simplicity and clarity of her work.

Anything extraneous, she took out.”

For “The Farewell,” McNamee drew upon a vast vocabulary of movement, so just when it

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seems we’re watching a pas de deux between contemporary ballet dancers, little gems of character-driven gesture and abstraction pop up.

Among them is a movement for Ejiofor that she called “Atlas” because “the weight of the world is on his shoulders” even before departing for war: with raised arms, he pulses his shoulders in a twisting motion back and forth, almost as if asking, “Why?” For Kim, McNamee created a repeated “wrist shrug,” she called it, in which the dancer flicks her hands away from the body, a movement inspired by the idea that the character will soon be reading letters sent from the soldier and trying to digest painful emotions.

Playful moments take the couple back to happier times and add a dream element that pays homage to de Mille, as does a surprising partnering sequence: instead of having Ejiofor do all the lifting, McNamee had Kim lift Ejiofor, too, transforming her into the one guiding the couple’s movements.

The notion of a love duet created by a woman, from a woman’s perspective, drove McNamee throughout the piece as part of a link to de Mille. “Her perspective was from the female gaze,” the choreographer said of de Mille. “It’s her point of view.”

And in keeping with her respect for de Millian clarity and simplicity, McNamee also discarded a few ideas along the way.

Initially, she thought of the work as a trio, but with only five minutes, as stipulated in the application, developing a third character may have felt forced.

This piece also started with boots on the ground: Ejiofor’s costume initially included boots, but when the surface raised some safety concerns, McNamee decided to forgo footwear and have him dance in bare feet, along with Kim. Which was all to the good. Ejiofor has turns for days. “He just kind of kept them going. I said, ‘Yeah, you can just do as many as you want!’” McNamee said.

Al Blackstone “Anna” Before Al Blackstone received the commission from SDCF, he knew Agnes de Mille’s work in detail: he choreographed Oklahoma! for Music Theatre Wichita and watched the movie Carousel repeatedly as a child. “I know it’s dark and depressing for a kid, but I loved it,” he said.

With the SDCF commission in hand, he spent about a month reading de Mille’s books.

“I felt like I got to spend time with her in this process,” he said, noting that her 1962 book To a Young Dancer is still “completely relevant” today.

The readings led him to consider a piece celebrating de Mille’s role as a teacher, which is half of his own career, he said. In addition to directing and choreographing, Blackstone teaches theatre dance regularly at Steps on Broadway and Broadway Dance Center. He also comes from a family of dance teachers; his parents ran the Denise Daniele Dance Studio in New Jersey for 45 years.

“I connected with de Mille on that level of wanting young people to be smart and to get better and wanting to leave things in dance better than the way she found them,” he said.

The result is “Anna,” a work of dance-theatre that “tells the story of a shy young lady and the artists she encounters on a walk through the park,” as the program note conveys.

The shy young lady (Brianna Kim) at first encounters a tall, majestic singer at a microphone (Khori Petinaud). The youngster tries singing, but it is not her gift. Along comes a mime (Ricky Ubeda), whom she mimics without success. Then, on a park bench, she encounters a kind woman (Mary Page Nance), who leads her through dance phrases and poses, helping Kim’s character find her own voice in movement.

Nance and Kim have a charming duet in which they take turns transforming pedestrian movement into dance, even as simple as sitting on a bench in a creative way. Nance also conveys how to do a Martha Graham torso contraction, which plays for a good laugh, but the central point is the young girl already has the artist spark within.

“What Mary Page’s character sees is that she just needs to be herself and use her body,” said Blackstone. “It’s just about having someone encourage you. The idea of people passing on the love of dance is a big part of how I grew up.”

Blackstone cast Nance, a Broadway dancer who studied modern dance at SUNY Purchase, because he knew she understood the lineage of modern dance and the importance of passing on knowledge.

He discovered the 16-year-old Kim in a children’s pre-professional dance program where he gave a class and worked out some ideas for the piece. “Brianna had a beautiful innocent quality, and once I met her, I continued to develop the idea around her,” said Blackstone.

In creating “Anna,” Blackstone also realized that not only was the content about sharing knowledge with the next generation, but also the cast was putting that into practice with Kim, who was shocked to be dancing with Ubeda, who won Season 11 of So You Think You Can Dance.

“The first day, she didn’t know it was going to be Ricky, and he’s so popular with young dancers. She was so nervous to be dancing a duet with him. He was so generous with her,” said Blackstone, who saw the dynamic extended throughout the cast. “She was so supported by everyone, which is beautiful because that’s what the piece is about.”

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The dance begins in silence, with dancer Melanie Moore wearing a pink satin bodysuit, heels, and pearls. She pulls on a full, tea-length skirt that makes her look ready for a sophisticated party.

Soon, the three suited men (Adam Perry, Kyle Brown, Fred Odgaard) behind her turn out to be puppeteers, controlling her movements with invisible strings.

Katie Spelman “simone”

it. I started to think about what I could do if I could do anything,” she said.

Creating a dance work before the music is composed may seem like doing it all backward. But it worked for Katie Spelman, who initially created “simone” with five dancers in silence. Composer and performer Claire Wellin watched about five rehearsals, then created music to fit the dance, adding sounds or beats to accommodate the dancers.

She brought in Wellin, who performed in Once, and the result is a piece of music perfectly tailored to a dance.

The unusual collaboration came about partly to serve the work’s main statement, drawn from Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique: for too long, women have adapted themselves to ideals of perfection created by men.

“I became enamored of her. She did all these things that defied her time,” she said. “She was a leader in her field. She was a highprofile public figure. She wrote all these books about her feelings and her experiences.

She was passionate and combative in the rehearsal room.”

“I tried to find music that I enjoyed and that suited the piece. But I could only find male composers, and that felt like a huge misfire,” Spelman said.

And there was more to it. Spelman saw the SDCF commission as a chance to break out of the standard process she is used to, having worked as an associate choreographer for Broadway (Amélie, Once) and Off-Broadway (Joan of Arc) productions.

“So often, I am handed a piece of music that exists already and told to make dance inside

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Spelman, who has choreographed Oklahoma! twice regionally, has been a devotee of Agnes de Mille since her teenage years when she danced in a Carousel production that used the original choreography.

Later, when Spelman created choreography for Carousel in college, she researched the choreographer hoping for some artistic guidance: “Choreographing a dream ballet is such an undertaking, and she was the master.”

In the last few years, Spelman has been exploring how the presentation of women in popular culture affects the way women are treated. And “simone” provides ample food for thought.

Along comes a second woman (Lily Leyva) in a similar pale blue costume, and Moore begins controlling her. But what she’s dictating is not original. “The woman in pink is instructing the woman in blue to do things, but her hands are being guided by the men who created her,” said Spelman.

The woman in blue chafes against the system, though she doesn’t fully rebel. In the end, the woman in pink has her own moment of discovery and it offers a way out. “She takes in the men and realizes that she’s been pushing this woman into something that is not her creation, so she puts herself in between the woman in blue and the men,” Spelman said.

For Spelman, building a clear story is paramount. “I always focus on the narration.

I want to make sure that I understand what is going on,” she said.

And in this case, her combination of highly stylized and pedestrian movement fit the music perfectly, seeing as it was custom made, including with requests the dancers gave to the composer.

“It became this crazy wonderful collaboration.

The dancers would say, ‘Can I have two more seconds before this note happens?’ Or ‘I can’t find the downbeat here.’ And Claire would say, ‘Why don’t I give you a swoop of a violin here so you can know it’s coming?’ I just sat back and watched them talk it through.”

Jenn Rose “No Other Way” When the curtain opens on Jenn Rose’s “No Other Way,” seven female dancers (Sam Assemany, Samantha Barriento, Melanie Comeau, Brittney Dunbar, Michaela McGowan, Suzie Rzecznik, Hannah Seiden) are lying facedown on the floor, with their hands behind their backs.

baby, and when it doesn’t work, she reads aloud passages from the book in her hand, The Feminine Mystique: “The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.”

Then, to the tune of her previously hummed lullaby, Eisenhower adds de Mille’s words, worked into song lyrics such as:

“I was trying to find an image that was the most buried, the most suffocated,” said Rose.

Rise out of yourself Lift into the air Be larger more beautiful

From that low point, “No Other Way” depicts inspiration, uplift, and collaborative work leading to women’s independence and equality.

The world will crack open Take leap after leap in the dark

The choice to focus on feminism came after Rose explored what material Agnes de Mille might have been inspired by in her 1963 letter to SDC. “I did a lot of research on that year. The Feminine Mystique was published February 1963, and the Equal Pay Act of 1963 was signed in June. I kind of ran with it,” she said.

Rose wanted to celebrate these historical moments in the women’s movement while also highlighting the words of the famously erudite de Mille. To incorporate her writing, Rose collaborated with composer Dan Kazemi and selected quotes to weave into the lyrics of an original song.

“They can only get so high alone,” said the choreographer.

In creative sessions, Rose said she had the dancers work collaboratively to serve the idea of reaching new heights as a group. “We tried to see how high we could get without cheerleading stunts,” she said.

For Rose, who, as a dancer, focuses on tap, the choreographic style is project-dependent when working in musical theatre, which she has extensively. “I try to figure out what is the style that best serves the story,” she said.

As Eisenhower sings and enters the area of the dancers, they begin to respond. “They remained in their own plane until Jennie Eisenhower enters their world. She inspires them,” said Rose.

In this work, the group partnering effort also required physically strong and adventurous dancers. In casting, Rose looked for strength as well as much diversity as possible. “I wanted it to be representative of all women,” she said. “I wanted there to be a sense of collaboration. I was not looking for perfect execution.”

The dancers awaken and move upward, away from the floor. They’re surging and pushing their hands against an invisible barrier above them, a reference to the glass ceiling.

By the end of the piece, that collaborative spirit has been achieved. They have not quite broken through the glass ceiling, but the mother is clearly changed.

The group swirls around the floor, gradually shifting to their knees or popping up from some primordial soup. At times, they reach for one another, and gradually, they help each other up, turning themselves into steps.

As she walks across the stage with her child, the dancers follow her out, all looking upward, knowing that they’ve come so far.

“That ceiling is so high,” said Rose. “The last look up is that we are going upward.”

“Leap After Leap” is sung onstage by performer Jennie Eisenhower, whose presence is a catalyst in “No Other Way.” She walks on stage, wearing a work dress, with two carefully chosen props: her baby and a laundry basket of her husband’s shirts.

“I wanted to have the male presence on stage,” said Rose, who also had Eisenhower address the baby by name, Betty. “I wanted it to be clear to the audience that the baby is a girl.”

Eisenhower hums a lullaby to the fussing

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THE “MR. ABBOT T” AWA R D A CC E P TANC E R EMA R K S BY

VICTORIA TRAUBE

This is a very special “Mr. Abbott” Award. I am here tonight for reasons different from my predecessors’. I am here because of my parents, Shepard and Mildred Traube, whom you have already heard a lot about tonight—and will hear more. The SDC was like a third sibling to my sister, Betsy, and me.

We would report at the dinner table about our days at school, and our parents would report on the gestation, birth, and growth of the Union. Actually, we got kind of bored with the subject, but we knew we had to pay attention to our sib from its birth in 1959 as it grew up to become an important force in the American theatre and, this spring, to attain its 60th anniversary. These are among the threads that connect me to this evening—my parents and the family Union.

First, my parents. Shepard Traube, one of the founders of SDC and its first President, was a wonderful man. He was brilliant; he had a great sense of humor that some people never figured out, which added to his amusement; and he had a passionate sense of right and wrong. He was a gentle man, although occasionally irascible. Indeed, his family nickname was “The Bear,” which he tolerated cheerfully. As a founder of SDC, it was his job to wrangle and cajole important, busy men and women to make common cause for the protection of directors and choreographers.

At his side were the other founders: Agnes de Mille, Hanya Holm, and Ezra Stone. Ezra, who played Henry Aldrich on the radio and directed the stage version of Irving Berlin’s This Is the Army, is dear to me because, later, his daughter Francine Stone and I became close friends at college. As for Agnes, she was a genius and a force of nature, or perhaps I should say a “force of theatre”—yet more threads that connect me to this evening.

My mother, Mildred, had the same quick intelligence as my father, along with beauty and vivacity, and she shared his sense of right and wrong. She also had the fierceness of a lioness protecting her young—yes, there is an animal motif here—which she transferred to her directors and choreographers when she became the first Executive Secretary of SDC in 1968. And make no mistake, she was indeed formidable—one brief story will give you the picture. When I was in college, some of my friends came down to visit, and since this was the ’60s, the sleeping arrangements were coed, of which I tried to inform my mother. She looked at me balefully and replied, “Victoria, don’t confide in me.” The

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message was clear. She would have been a force to contend with on the other side of the negotiating table.

The last thread that brings us to this evening is the path my parents helped me find. I grew up going to the theatre regularly. My father and I would do something we called “show shopping” on the occasional Saturday afternoon. I will never forget walking with him into the Mark Hellinger to stand in the back of the house for “The Ascot Gavotte” in My Fair Lady. Nor will I forget the breakfast table conversation after the opening of West Side Story, which my parents recognized as a paradigm change for Broadway and promised that my sister and I would see a matinee soon. My first Shakespeare was [Franco] Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, which overwhelmed me with its immediacy and passion. I was also privileged to see a multitude of turkeys, almost all of which were educational and even thrilling for a child falling in love with the theatre. I owe that love to my parents, who also taught me the importance of working hard in the service of what you love. This led to my “misspent” college career, where my courses took second place to producing and stage managing plays, then to law school, and then, strangely, to the practice of corporate law, from which I awoke one day to the incredibly obvious realization that to be a good business lawyer you had to care about the business—and the one I cared about was show business.

Since then, I have been blessed to work with people like my mentor, the extraordinary Sam Cohn, who taught me almost everything I know, including that paper is not a reliable source of nutrition, and with the remarkable Ted Chapin, my colleague of more than 23 years, the mastermind of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization. And since July 2017, it has been my good fortune to work with great new colleagues at Concord, who are with us tonight. A shout-out to Steve Smith, Scott Pascucci, Jake Wisely, and Sean Flahaven, the guys at Concord who have embraced Rodgers & Hammerstein and brought lots of other exciting theatre projects into our world.

I also want to recognize the awesome Laura Penn, Executive Director of SDC, who shares my mother’s fierce intelligence and devotion to the Members of the Union. I wish Shepard and Mildred had known you, Laura. They

would be ecstatic to find the SDC in such good hands, and they would have loved you.

I have known and worked with many of the previous recipients of the “Mr. Abbott” Award—Hal Prince, Mike Nichols, Tommy Tune, Gene Saks, Susan Stroman, Jack O’Brien, James Lapine. It is an honor to be in their company, in this very special way. Thank you so much.

Jenn Rose, Katie Spelman, Raja Feather Kelly, Kitty McNamee + Al Blackstone

Sam Pinkleton + Mark Brokaw

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TH E 2 0 1 9 “ MR . A B B O T T ” AWA R D SP O NS O R S Thank you for attending the 2019 “Mr. Abbott” Awards and honoring Victoria Traube and the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF).

SDCF programs rely on the generous support of individuals, government agencies, foundations, and corporations.

Every gift makes a difference!

On behalf of SDCF, we very much appreciate and value your ongoing support!

Sheldon Epps President

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Concord Music Group, Inc. The Shubert Organization

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Staging Intimacy

BY STEPHANIE

COEN

Chelsea Pace leading a boundary establishment practice at Chesapeake Shakespeare Company PHOTO Molly Prunty

“I like to say that the way we talk about intimacy is deeply unsexy.”

Chelsea Pace is talking to me over the phone from New Mexico about her work as an intimacy choreographer and “intimacy recipe writer” for Theatrical Intimacy Education (TIE).

This is one of two professional organizations I’ve reached out to for this article about the burgeoning field of intimacy choreography for the stage. (The other group is Intimacy Directors International, or IDI, represented

by Houston-based intimacy director Adam Noble.) Pace is one of the founders of TIE, along with fellow theatre educator and director Laura Rikard, and she’s telling me how she got started in the field nine years ago, when she was coming up as an actor.

“I started asking questions about why there wasn’t a system for staging intimacy,” Pace says. “I wasn’t worried about any of it; I don’t have some great trauma that all of this stems from. I was a very happy actor. But the lack of clarity was surprising to me. I was starting to become interested in stage combat, which is so formalized through the Society of American Fight Directors and Dueling Arts International and other organizations that train fight choreographers and fight directors.

It was strange to me that there wasn’t anybody whose job this was.”

Today, Pace is a Baltimore-based director and educator who regularly choreographs intimacy and teaches workshops on the subject—as well as classes on movement and acting—around the country while also serving on the faculty at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. When I ask her to describe how she works with directors, she tells me that there are three options. The first is that the director says exactly what she or he wants. The second option is that Pace and the director work together with the actors to find what a moment should be. And in the third, Pace comes in to choreograph the moment as she thinks best serves the play.

“Option two is always my preference,” Pace says, “because I’m coming into the room as a collaborator. But all three of these options are responding to how the director wants to work.”

Intimacy choreography as a codified system extends back to 2006, when the term was first used by Noble’s colleague Tonia Sina. Sina created the Intimacy for the Stage method and serves as Executive Director of IDI, which she co-founded with Alicia Rodis and Siobhan Richardson. But, like Pace, many people I speak with tell me they first heard about the practice around 2010. Now—especially in the wake of influential men falling from power

and the rise of the #MeToo movement— intimacy choreography has become an increasingly widespread tool for the theatre field and for theatre training programs.

What exactly is intimacy on stage? One could borrow a phrase from Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart and say about intimacy: “I know it when I see it.” Noble sends an email response to this query: “In brief, intimacy refers to the close, personal (and often private) interactions that occur between lifeforms.” The term might encompass, without being limited to, such actions as eye contact, a kiss, a grope, a grab, nudity, or a sex scene. Intimacy directors are also often called upon to stage scenes of sexual violence.

Directors and choreographers, of course, have been staging intimate—and often provocatively sexual—moments since the beginning of theatre. Recently, Mark WingDavey introduced a class called “Sex on Stage” at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (where he is Chair of the Graduate Acting Program) and taught it himself. “I’m used to staging scenes like that,” he told the New York Times.

But in the past, it seems, actors were often left to figure intimate moments out themselves—to fumble and find their way.

“I remember being an actor and being in scenes, and kisses and embraces were never SUMMER 2019 | SDC JOURNAL

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that. It’s just like a show that has a single slap in it. If the director has got some experience with stage combat, they can stage a slap. The first step is for people to recognize when they do and do not need a pro.”

“There are certain moments in a play in which somebody might push or shove somebody else, and I might feel comfortable as a director staging that moment. There are also certain scenes that would require me to bring in a fight director,” Yionoulis says. “I think of intimacy choreography in the rehearsal process in the same way. There are plays in which the graphic nature of the intimacy, as indicated in the text, might require someone with special expertise doing work of that kind.”

Melia Bensussen in rehearsal for A Doll’s House at Huntington Theatre Company PHOTO Nile Scott Shots/Nile Hawver

choreographed,” Seema Sueko, the Deputy Artistic Director at Arena Stage, tells me. “It was like, ‘Well, you’re human, you should figure out how to do it.’”

“Actors were supposed to just ‘go for it’ or negotiate with each other through hand signals and raised eyebrows,” Evan Yionoulis, the Richard Rodgers Director of Drama at The Juilliard School, agrees. “It was unfair to put actors in that position. And I can’t believe that it resulted in better theatre.”

and to have that written down so that there is documentation,” agrees Dan Knechtges, Artistic Director of Theatre Under the Stars (TUTS). “On this page, on this word, you are supposed to touch this person’s breast; you are supposed to kiss this person at this moment. Especially on a long run where things evolve, and one of the actors says, ‘Oh, this doesn’t feel quite right.’ The stage manager knows whether the performers are actually doing it the way that it was choreographed.”

“The first step is for people to recognize when they do and do not need a pro.”

One of the key things about intimacy choreography is that it is recordable and repeatable.

“It really is choreography,” Pace says.

“The stage manager can write it down. So if it starts getting weird on opening night or three months into the run, the stage manager can come back to it—just like it’s blocking— and say, that’s not where this cross is, that’s not how this kiss goes. So it is all about empowering the actor by having a technique for actually staging intimacy, but it’s just as much in service to directors because I’m bringing into the room a system that allows them to have the kind of process they want to have with the result that they’re looking for.”

What’s clear is that intimacy choreography is a tool. It is much like fight choreography, which is probably the closest analogy—and a useful one. “I think we all understand enough about fight choreography at this point that we don’t expect anybody to actually punch anybody else and we assume a fight choreographer will be in rehearsal,” Melia Bensussen, the newly appointed Artistic Director of Hartford Stage Company, says.

“When an actor reads that there’s a slap in a script, the actor doesn’t have to worry that the director is going to insist that he really be slapped.”

– Chelsea Pace

“As the director, it’s really helpful to communicate to the stage manager what the choreography is in the intimate moment,

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Even intimacy choreographers, however, are quick to say, as Pace does, that “not every production with intimacy in it needs an intimacy choreographer. I 100 percent believe

In a series of interviews, I spoke with intimacy specialists, directors, choreographers, and educators to talk about this work. Several directors spoke with me after participating in workshops with IDI and TIE, organized by SDC and its Executive Board this past winter.

An equal number of directors declined to be interviewed—reflecting, perhaps, the field’s uncertainty about intimacy work.

Barbara Wolkoff, SDC’s longtime Director of Member Services, has seen many changes to best practices in her 21 years as a member of the Union’s staff. “This is a big, heightened conversation that can explode into a new way of thinking or working or open up a door,” she says of the emerging discipline. “And not all directors want—or need—to use an intimacy choreographer. The Union’s role is to be a repository for all points of view. As a responsible leadership group of directors

and choreographers across the country—and, to an extent, across the world—this Executive Board felt, and feels, that it’s important to know what ideas and tools are out there.”

The intimacy specialists and many of the directors I speak with all teach, and they go easily back and forth between describing their work in the classroom and the methodology they use in the rehearsal room. Pace’s system is called “The Ingredients.” Noble calls his method “Extreme Stage Physicality.” Yionoulis talks about “containers,” and Sueko describes a process of “scaffolding.”

The words that people use to describe intimacy choreography are different, but what becomes very clear is that this new field is deeply connected to a language of boundaries and consent. Boundaries are established and reinforced; consent (or nonconsent) must be given and renewed. And actors are now being encouraged to speak up about how, and when, they are comfortable being touched. As Laura Rikard from TIE puts it, “I often say we’re trying to teach how

Adam Noble working with Kyle Clark + Catherine Thomas on an intimate scene in The Debasers at University of Houston

to have a ‘positive no’ in a ‘yes, and’ creative process.”

Wolkoff notes, “Safety in the rehearsal room is something that all of our Members are concerned about. But there are different kinds of safety. There’s safety in knowing you can take a risk—and there’s the safety of knowing that the skill in the room is going to allow it to be safe in a way that the work is potent and real without anybody having a concern for their ultimate well-being. And the person with that skill might be the director or an intimacy choreographer or a fight director or a choreographer. Safety is a collaborative word, not a protective word.

“The nature of what our Members do is to bring the skill of permission and boundaries to a room,” Wolkoff continues. “There are a lot of our Members for whom this skill translates directly into intimacy work because there’s an understanding of the tension between permission and boundaries. They understand where the limits are, where the boundaries are, and where the borders are.

And that happens because there’s enough skill in the room, and enough permission in the room, to talk about what’s comfortable and what’s uncomfortable.”

At The Juilliard School, Yionoulis created protocols for “Rehearsing Material with Sexual Content” for Juilliard students, based on guidance from IDI and following the example of Yale School of Drama, where she previously taught.

Laura Rikard leading a Theatrical Laura Rikard leading a Intimacy Education Workshop Theatrical Intimacy Education Workshop PHOTO Brian Offidani PHOTO Brian Offidani

“In a training program, we have students working on their own, doing scenes without a director. Clear protocols are necessary for them to be free to do their work within

certain boundaries,” she tells me. “Directors also need to know how to do this work in a way that allows a story to be told through choices that do not violate the actors themselves as they embody intimate events in their characters’ lives.”

“The idea of consent is very important,” Yionoulis says. “Let’s say there’s extended kissing or intimacy in a scene. We need to open up a conversation. The first step in all of this is talking about what the moment is. Who’s initiating this act? Does the other character want this or not? And how do we tell that story physically? As a director, I would have a conversation with the actors determining what the moment is about, establishing a container of consent around where are we touching and where we aren’t, and then allow for free exploration within those parameters. Intimacy training stresses that consent has to be renewed each time we rehearse something. Today, I feel comfortable with you touching my breast. Tomorrow, I might say, could you not touch my breast?

I think that’s a useful part of our working process.

“However, as a director,” Yionoulis continues, “I do feel that once we’re nearing or in performance, there is a professional expectation that consent will not be unnecessarily withheld. Of course, in some situations, modifications could be made that wouldn’t undermine the telling of the SUMMER 2019 | SDC JOURNAL

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Seema Sueko in rehearsal for Vietgone at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts PHOTO John Moore

story, just as you would modify a combat moment to accommodate injury. But if, for instance, nudity is absolutely required for the telling of a particular story, with precasting notification, as Equity requires, or if a particular kind of touch is necessary, if an actor is not able to do that or does not feel comfortable doing that—then that might be a situation where one would need to find another actor to fulfill the requirements of the role.”

“I do think a lot of focus has gone into, ‘Well, intimacy directors and intimacy coordinators are just helping actors say no,’” Noble allows.

“But this work is about serving productions, and the intimacy choreographer is someone who, as a part of your design team, can help you tell a story.”

Lisa Helmi Johanson + Glenn Morizio in Vietgone, directed by Seema Sueko PHOTO AdamsVisCom c/o Denver Center for the Performing Arts

“I was not open to it at the very beginning, and I still have some reservations about it, to be completely transparent,” says Knechtges.

“My concerns are about still allowing the organic nature and style that many plays and certainly some musicals have, and allowing the actors to organically develop moments.

And I worried that that would be completely killed. But I learned from the workshop that it’s just another tool. It’s not meant to kill any sort of organic process.”

Every intimacy specialist I speak with stresses that the work they do is not about shutting down or limiting the creative power of the director. “There are directors and choreographers who have been hesitant about this,” Pace says, “and who think that this means they’re going to lose some of their creative agency in the room, and so they’ve been resistant to it. And I get that. They’re starting to see why it’s so necessary. And it’s always fun for me, the moment when the directors and choreographers and educators in the room realize that I’m not trying to make their lives harder. I’m actually trying to give them tools so they can get exactly what they want in a way that everybody’s going to feel good about it.”

“It’s really asking permission and communicating and making sure everyone is clear on what is allowed and what isn’t,” Knechtges continues. “As dancers, our bodies are our instruments. We are so used to displaying the body, to having the body touched, and to having the body manipulated. A lot of partnering work happens where hands are oftentimes on sensitive areas, the groin or around the chest or a situation like that. So it is challenging because it is requiring us to assume that everything is okay with that.

It is a conversation first that doesn’t need to be a lengthy one, but there is a process of conversation that happens instead of just jumping right to it. It does give people working in the room more tools to be able to be creative in a safe way.”

“I found what was most enlightening about the training sessions that SDC provided were the language options to increase my vocabulary and desexualize the direction of sexual moments,” Bensussen tells me. “You really can find other verbs, other ways of expressing similar ideas that get you to the same result but do not engage you in what might be triggering verbs or adjectives. The training gave us a useful set of tools to add to our kits, in order for actors to feel more open and comfortable in exposing themselves to these complicated moments of staging and emotional impact.”

Sueko also finds storytelling value in giving actors a specific, shared vocabulary to say no.

She first encountered the term “intimacy choreography” in 2010, when she ran the Moˋolelo Performing Arts Company in San Diego and brought Colleen Kelly in from the University of Virginia to teach a workshop on theatrical intimacy. (Kelly is one of only four women who have earned the professional designation of Fight Director of the Society of American Fight Directors and specializes in the development of physical techniques for staging scenes of intimacy, abuse, and sexual assault.)

But it wasn’t until 2018 that Sueko first worked professionally with an intimacy

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choreographer, on a production of Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. “The playwright writes things like, ‘She straddles him. She rips off his shirt. They kiss passionately. They kiss with more meaning,’” Sueko tells me on a break from a rehearsal of The Heiress at Arena Stage. “There’s a lot of contact that’s written in the stage directions. As soon as I saw that, I said to the folks at Denver Center, ‘I think I’m going to need an intimacy consultant on this.’ They didn’t miss a beat, because they were very fortunate that one of their house managers, Samantha Egle, is a fight director and is apprenticing as an intimacy choreographer with IDI. They signed her on board as my assistant fight director and intimacy consultant.”

The Vietgone process began with a contextualizing conversation between Sueko and Egle, followed by a workshop where Egle led the actors through what Sueko describes as “a series of consent exercises” with the actors “facing one another, making eye contact, breathing, asking permission to step forward, and then the person at the other end either being able to give consent or practice saying no. And that was really powerful, especially practicing saying no— because we don’t normally say no in the rehearsal room.”

The workshop exercises then “scaffolded” into a process through which the actors took inventory of where they did—and did not— want to be touched. Sueko describes the process this way: “May I take your right hand and place it on my elbow? May I take this and put it on that? Then we added duration: May I do that for two seconds? For 10 seconds?”

As they continued to “scaffold up,” physical actions—a hug, an embrace—were added.

And, at each moment, the actors were asked to give consent or not.

“An unexpected benefit of all of this was after we did that workshop, it ended up creating a vocabulary that also permeated the scene work,” Sueko says. “Often, in scene work, we’re making offers of ideas and/or an idea is offered to us and we need to be able to ask the questions about it, navigate it, give consent, or find a way to say no if it’s not an idea we’re interested in. The vocabulary that arose out of the intimacy workshop ended up being vocabulary that the actors naturally used in scene work. That was incredible, and the ability to ask for consent, give consent, receive consent, or receive non-consent—the opposite of consent—was very easy. People could say no, and nobody felt bad about it.”

Noble says, “Unfortunately, there are still a lot of actors who feel that speaking their

truth or saying no to something makes them the problem in the room. People are more willing to speak up in a fight rehearsal; I will have actors and actresses say, ‘This is really making me uncomfortable. That sword feels like it’s really close to my head. I don’t know about this move.’ They’re willing to do that with a fight, and for the most part, directors say, ‘We’ll change it because it feels unsafe.’

And yet, when we get to the intimacy side of it, people are less willing to state that they’re uncomfortable because they don’t want to be seen as a problem or prude or damaged.

I tell people, it’s never wrong to speak your truth and say, ‘No, that’s not something that I will do.’”

“It’s a sliding scale of input. If you’ve got an intimacy director in the rehearsal room, then it can be more direct. The director says, ‘I want them to kiss here and slide onto the couch with him on top and then X, Y, and Z.’ Maybe there’s not any problem, and that’s fine. That’s what the actors do, and we’re great. But if I have spoken to both of the actors and I know that she has issues being pinned down, then I might just ask, ‘Hey, would it be all right if she’s on top?’ to try and figure out how we get the director’s vision, the story, and the blueprints that we’ve set up and be true to the performer’s boundaries while delivering the story.

Evan Yionoulis in rehearsal for He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box at Theatre for a New Audience PHOTO Gerry Goodstein

Noble’s work has three layers. The first is the story—what the playwright is trying to say, what the director is trying to say—and getting everyone on the same page. The second layer, he explains, “is character. And that’s where the actors get to say, ‘Well, this is what I think my character would do. This is how I think my character would respond in these circumstances.’” The third layer is the audience and what they are to do, feel, or understand from the moment.

It is in working on the second layer, Noble says, that he insists that every actor has some boundaries. “But I’ve found that some actors and actresses can get shut down by the boundary process,” he tells me. “‘I’m not allowed to touch you there and I’m not allowed to touch you there.

What do I do?’ Each scene partner then offers permissions that are about the communication of consent and knowing what the actor is okay with, as well as what they are not okay with—so they have a starting point for exploration of places where the actor would like to be touched or that they think would serve the scene.”

“I just think,” Noble offers, “we can tell better stories if we are careful with people, if we are putting them in a safe space where they can offer you their best work.”

On its website, Intimacy Directors International includes a note on the role of the intimacy director that includes this statement: “The Intimacy Director takes responsibility for the emotional safety of the actors and anyone else in the rehearsal hall while they are present.”

It is statements like this, it seems, that point to a divide in how intimacy choreography is being received by directors and others in the profession. (TIE does not subscribe to this idea.)

“I think when we start framing it that specialists need to be brought into rehearsal for the actors’ protection,” Yionoulis says, “we start implying that actors need to be protected from the process, and I fear that can infantilize actors and imply that others in the production process, namely directors, are people they have to be protected against at all costs.”

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Bensussen puts it this way: “As a director, I am very comfortable being responsible for everything that happens within my rehearsal room. I see some of the language around responsibility for each other exceeding the boundaries of what we’re required to do professionally. Even in the intimacy choreography workshop—and our coaches were terrific—there was some language around actor self-care and how to support the actor in their self-care. I don’t see that as our job as directors. I see our job as directors to make the room one in which the actor can thrive. But that’s different than advocating, mandating, supporting, sculpting, even mentoring a professional actor outside of a rehearsal process.

I think these are interesting distinctions that we’re going to have to make. I’ve done a lot of teaching and I’ve seen the change happen in students. I think it will be interesting to see how the profession helps actors feel empowered in the rehearsal room but also independent outside of it and not dependent on the director to take care of things beyond what should be the director’s purview.”

many people have ignored—but in addition, there’s a different view of actor/director relationships, of what it means to lead a room, and to feel safe or feel empowered. All of this is changing, so being exposed to the next generation’s language and training is crucial.”

I spoke with Knechtges at the end of a rehearsal day in Houston. “A lot of it to me is less about the surrounding pedagogy around intimacy,” he says. “It does give people working in the room more tools to be able to be creative in a safe way. I’m in rehearsal right now with Mamma Mia!, which sounds kind of light and fluffy. And it is. But there are many moments where people are kissing, pulling one another, or touching one another intimately.

It has caused me to relate information to our actors who are now asking for permission on how to do that.”

“...we can tell better stories if we are careful with people, if we are putting them in a safe space where they can offer you their best work.”

“What is also helpful about this training—as it permeates all the training programs and, specifically, actor training programs—is that directors need to know the language the next generation of performers is being taught,” Bensussen continues. “There is a generational shift now, not only because of the #MeToo movement—which has been such a great ray of light into these dark corners that too

– Adam Noble “The approaches that I’ve been learning as a director through my connections with training institutions, first at Yale and now at Juilliard, have made me feel more equipped to handle moments of sexual intimacy,” Yionoulis offers. “But as directors, our job is to tell a story. It’s not our job to find out what an actor’s personal past history might be. And therefore, actors do need to be empowered to speak up, and directors need to provide a context in which actors are able to speak up, as we figure out together how to tell the story using their bodies. It is a practice of respect and collaboration that just strengthens the fact that we’re all working for the same goal, and that everyone’s contribution matters, and that actors’ agency is invited in the work.”

Sally Wilfert + Berklea Going in Mamma Mia! at Theatre Under the Stars, directed by Dan Knechtges PHOTO Melissa Taylor

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If a frothy musical like Mamma Mia! lands at one end of the spectrum, Slave Play by Jeremy O. Harris—which was cited by many people I spoke with for this article as possessing what Yionoulis calls “a certain boldness and explicitness about intimacy appearing in some contemporary writing for the theatre”— lands at the other. The website of New York Theatre Workshop, which produced the play under the direction of Robert O’Hara last winter, offers this advisory: “This play contains nudity, sexual content, simulated sexual violence, and racially violent language.” (See O’Hara’s reflection on p. 7 about working with an intimacy director on this play.)

In between those two extremes might be a play like The Heiress, which Sueko was rehearsing when we spoke. “There are a few embraces and kisses in The Heiress,” she says, “so I did a mini-workshop based on what I learned from Samantha so that we could have a vocabulary to build those hugs, embraces, and kisses. Every embrace is very specific dramaturgically. That seemed appropriate for me to do in a show like The Heiress, where it’s set in 1850, even though the type of physical intimacy is different from Vietgone.”

“When we’re in the rehearsal room, my goal is to get the intimacy staged in a way that everybody in the room feels fantastic about it, and that it can be directed and tweaked as it needs to be because it’s been staged with language that’s actually directable,” says Pace. “It’s just bodies moving together in space to tell a story. And that gives a lot of power to the director. It also gives a lot of power to the actor. I think there’s this idea that by empowering one group in the room, somebody else has to be giving something up. And I think if the tools that we’re bringing into the room are actually making space for everybody to get what they want, then there’s no downside.”

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O P E N I N G THE P A T H W A Y LIESL TOMMY

IN CONVERSATION WITH

LIESL TOMMY has demonstrated a remarkable range in her directing work, from new plays to Shakespeare and world-premiere devised theatre to reimagined musical classics. She has mounted productions in regional institutions, on Broadway (including her Tony-nominated direction of Eclipsed), and at Disneyland, and gracefully made the leap from stage to television. Now, she’s moving into film directing with the in-development Born a Crime (based on Trevor Noah’s memoir) and the recently announced Aretha Franklin biopic.

Liesl Tommy + Oz Scott PHOTO Genevieve Marie

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OZ SCOTT

SDC Journal invited Tommy to discuss her craft and how she has navigated a career across disciplines with the estimable OZ SCOTT, whose decadeslong directing career likewise includes major credits across media—notably, the original production of Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf—and who has earned numerous honors, including the NAACP Image Award, a Drama Desk Award, and an Obie Award. Scott currently serves as Executive Producer of the CW television series Black Lightning, has served in multiple leadership roles for the Directors Guild of America, and is a former Secretary of the SDC Executive Board.

OZ SCOTT | So...let’s start.

LIESL TOMMY | I feel like I should be interviewing you. You’re so fancy.

OZ | Oh, please. I was reading a lot of your interviews, and I said, “Okay, she’s talked about all this.”

LIESL | Say all the same shit over and over again.

OZ | You’ve talked about this before, but let’s start with South Africa. I love South Africa.

I love Cape Town. I had a great time when I was there.

LIESL | Cape Town is one of the best places on earth, isn’t it?

OZ | Yeah.

LIESL | I’m biased, obviously.

OZ | You grew up in Cape Town.

OZ | So when you came here...

LIESL | I was a teenager, and it was still during apartheid. I’d never really spent time with white people, to be frank. And then suddenly I was surrounded by them. I grew up in a pretty poor “colored” township, where we had a handful of outfits that we wore. You had your school uniform; you came home and changed into your after-school outfit. Then you had an outfit for Sunday and then maybe another one. That’s what we packed when we came to America. And suddenly you’re in a school where students wear different clothes every day and people are judging you on those clothes.

Looking the way I look and having this accent and claiming to be African was confusing to a lot of people. It was a rough transition. And then, the one black teacher came up to me in the hallway and said, “Would you like to be in a play?” I was like, “Sure.” She said, “We’re going to do an hour-long version of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf.”

OZ | What character?

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My father ultimately became an urban planner and my mom worked for architects, so there were a lot of design books around the house because they were trying to educate themselves as they were thrown into these worlds and these lives and these conversations.

So there were all these books and magazines that represented a life that we didn’t live, but I absorbed all the images. I honestly think that everything I know about composition I picked up from these books. An understanding of how to frame and how to stage. I didn’t go to directing school. It came from a passion for images that began really early. I enjoy collaborations with designers because I always have a vision for all that stuff.

LIESL | College was different because my father, being a very typical immigrant, didn’t want me to study theatre or acting.

He thought it was insane, a crime against humanity that I would want, after all the sacrifices, to come to this country and do something like acting. A group of teachers tried to convince him that I had a lot of potential. He said, “Fuck potential.” I was so mortified that he cursed in front of them. He said, “Potential is for white students, for white people. We cannot afford potential. We have to succeed.”

OZ | Listening to what you’re saying about that process makes me think about when I was at NYU [for a master’s in directing]. I said, “Okay, I’m here. I want to do film, too.” They said, “We don’t do crossover.” I had a friend whose boyfriend was the advisor for the firstyear graduate film program, and he told me I could audit the entire first-year program. So I was doing both. I was taking a theatre design class, a dance class, acting classes. All sorts of stuff. But then I was taking sound and editing.

And shooting my first-year graduate film—I was cinematographer for a classmate’s film.

I had to find the courage to go against him. It was hard because I was a very obedient and a good child that way. You don’t do that. But it was impossible for me to not pursue it.

OZ | And he came around?

LIESL | Of course he did. Now he’s the proudest person, the biggest fan. Both my mother and my father.

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LIESL | My father, from my youngest memory of him, had a camera. He was always taking photographs and teaching himself. I grew up sitting on the ground in front of bookshelves looking at photography books. He used to have these books about photographers who had chronicled the Civil Rights Movement in America and who’d chronicled unrest in Europe in the ’60s. My mother also had this super-fly style, which I found very inspiring.

OZ | You were directing throughout college too?

LIESL | Yeah.

Sun in the

OZ | My father was a minister, so I always say I carried on the tradition of entertainment.

But I think our parents give us a lot that we draw from that they don’t even know. Where do your influences come from?

LIESL | I did Lady in Brown, the Toussaint monologue. Which is perfect for a young girl. I so related to it, being from South Africa, being a political person. It was like someone gave me a gift to end all gifts. That teacher came and saw a production I did at the Huntington of A Raisin in the Sun. She brought a busload of 60 people! I ran into her outside, and we fell into each other’s arms. It had been more than 20 years since we’d seen each other. At the curtain that night, I dedicated the performance to her. I talked about just how meaningful it was for someone to reach out and create opportunity.

What I ended up doing was, every Black History Month at that high school, I would direct something. Sometimes it was a period’s worth of poetry by black poets. I was experiencing racism in the theatre program at the high school in terms of what roles they would let me do and so on. But that window was when I could do whatever I wanted. Even though I went on to be an actor for a long time, that was the beginning of directing for me.

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LIESL | I so envy that immersion in both worlds because, of course, each one informs the other.

OZ | One of the things I want you to talk about too is bringing your culture into this.

I remember when we took For Colored Girls to Australia it was a shock because the first audience we played for—we were working.

We got nothing, absolutely nothing from them. The entire piece. We got to the end—“i found god in myself & I loved her.” And the audience erupted. We were like— LIESL | Oh, you’re with us!

OZ | Because culturally it’s different. What do you think you bring from your South African experience?

LIESL | I have a style of directing; I tell a lot of stories. I tell stories the way an African person tells stories. That oral tradition is a huge part of how I was raised and taught and how my moral center was grown. And I trust it. I don’t ever feel like I’m taking time. It always pays off. I can always see when it drops in, when they understand what the story I’m telling is and how it relates. I don’t even know how not to do that.

And the other thing is, I’ve done a lot of plays here in the US that touch on the Civil Rights Movement, around the Black Panthers or the revolutionary movements in this country. I guess it’s because it’s the closest work to my life, in that I actually grew up with “whites only” signs. So that period of American history feels very close to me. It’s not just history; it’s actually a lived experience.

What it feels like to take to the streets in protest, I know what that is. What it feels like to have police come at you when you’re a child, when you’re a teenager, I know what that is.

I remember in directing The Good Negro where I felt like we were in a place where all the research had happened and all the grueling work, and the performances had become a little bit intellectual. So I gave this big speech about what it actually feels like to be told, “No, you cannot come in here because you are not white.” I fucking went for it. I opened up a part of myself that I had kept pretty much locked down for a very long time. Everybody listening—stage managers, actors, crew—they were all bawling. My voice was shaking, but it was time. That’s the thing about directing, there’s always that moment where you have to take the leap, too. It’s all in previews where you realize they have gotten as far as they can get if I don’t go there with them.

we always think and hope is true: that they understand that having a black director telling a black story actually does make a difference.

OZ | Would you like to go back to Cape Town to direct something?

But I also think that Americans can be quite xenophobic. Even so-called progressive people have a very insular worldview. If you look at what is programmed on American stages, how many international plays do you see? None, unless it’s British or Irish. Do you know how hard we had to push to get Eclipsed into the world?

“THAT’S THE THING ABOUT DIRECTING, THERE’S ALWAYS THAT MOMENT WHERE YOU HAVE TO TAKE THE LEAP, TOO.”

-LIESL TOMMY LIESL | Born a Crime, the movie I’m doing based on Trevor Noah’s memoir, will most likely partially shoot there. I’m psyched.

OZ | I was shooting Fame up in Harlem, and I was back at home, and there were hundreds of people watching on one side. I was doing this big dance number in the middle of Strivers’ Row, and I heard somebody yell, “Ozzie?” I said, “Oh, boy. Somebody from high school.” It’s fun going home.

LIESL | When I was doing the press after the announcement for Born a Crime, I was doing a lot of South African radio. People were incandescent with joy that a South African person was finally going to be telling a South African story. It was so humbling because it’s what

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OZ | There was some criticism of Trevor Noah when he began on The Daily Show, that he wasn’t an American. I’m wondering your take on all of that.

LIESL | Listen, there’s always going to be criticism. And, really, it comes down to the work. Are you doing the job? Are you delivering the goods? Are you being funny?

Do you have a political point of view that resonates? The answer to all those things is yes.

OZ | Yes. It’s so hard.

LIESL | And that’s not even getting into the economics of it. As a theatre director, I feel like I’ve worked myself almost into an early grave, and I finally realized I need to move out of this studio that I’m living in, in Harlem.

I could barely afford to pay my taxes. I’d never, ever take a vacation. This reality makes no sense. How hard I’m working, how well trained and qualified I am—any other field would equal way more money, to be crass.

There’s a point where it doesn’t make sense anymore. I could have gone the artistic director route or the adding-teaching-to-myworkload route. I have worked regionally with designers who have to fly back to New York on their day off to teach their class. These people are working nonstop.

OZ | Nonstop.

LIESL | That’s a really intense reality. We just accept it. We’re so used to it. We just assume that that’s success, right? Teaching gig and then a professional life.

OZ | I was talking to a playwright who teaches to make ends meet, and he says, “Oz, I can’t afford to go to a Broadway play. Sometimes I can’t afford to go to an Off-Broadway play unless I know the writer or know somebody.”

I’m very concerned because back when I was growing up, my mother would take me to Broadway plays. My school would take me to Broadway plays. I saw the original Marat/ Sade.

LIESL | Wait, your school took you to Marat/ Sade?

OZ | Yes, they did.

Let’s talk process. How do you decide which projects you’re going to do? Do you have a type of project that you feel you’re better at? I don’t limit myself necessarily, but it’s a question I sometimes ask myself.

LIESL | I’m asking myself this question more now that I’ve moved into the television realm.

I worked very hard in theatre because I’m a woman of color. You’re told “no” more than you’re told “yes” in this life, in this business. I didn’t want to let myself be pigeonholed. So I have directed Shakespeare and new plays, musicals and new musicals. I have never taken any job where I didn’t feel really passionate about the material, because in the theatre, you’re not making enough money to be phoning it in.

OZ | Do you find they try to pigeonhole you?

LIESL | Not anymore.

OZ | But in the beginning they would do that a lot?

LIESL | Yeah. Some of the people offering me jobs, I didn’t really know them. They were just offering it to me because I’m black. I have to tell them who I am; I can’t let them tell me who I am. If I do a season of deep regional black plays, and they’re black plays that I don’t necessarily know that I love, then I definitely will get pigeonholed as that. I’m happy to be pigeonholed as a person who directs black plays. That’s not the issue.

OZ | No, I get it. I’ve had the same thing where you get offered plays and TV just because you’re black and that’s what you must be good at.

LIESL | My agent would call those people up and say, “She’s not available for that, but what else have you got for her?”

OZ | Let’s talk about the rehearsal process.

Some directors come on the set extremely prepared. And it’s not that I don’t think we should be prepared, but my question is how much freedom do you allow your actors?

How much freedom do you allow your creators?

LIESL | It’s interesting. One of the great shocks to my system was when an assistant director told me, “The perfect world: you rehearse for eight minutes, we mark it, and you’re shooting in the first hour.” I’ve come to understand that the AD’s vision of life is not the same as that of the director or DP [director of photography]. But it was good to have a goal.

But in rehearsal for a play, for example, for that first move up from the table, I always let the actors do the first pass because I’m interested in seeing what they do physically, when they’re not in their head yet and they don’t know the rules of the space. I always have a plan, but part of the fun for me, in theatre at least, is seeing what they do.

In film and television, I know exactly how I want the frame to be, I know exactly the shots that I want. I have found when I would do my prep, the DPs would go, “Well, we’ll see what the actors do.” And I’d be like, “The actor’s going to do what I told them to do.” But I’m never going to tell a person to walk to the fridge and open the fridge and then stand and give a line for no reason. It’s always going to be motivated by the events of the scene, and that comes from my theatre background.

In television, there’s something fun about having that much control over the image. I don’t want that for theatre. I want there to be flow and space and life and for it to feel dangerous and un-choreographed. That’s my taste in theatre.

OZ | You keep it very much open. And I’ve watched Lloyd Richards do this too, where you sit back. I remember August Wilson telling me once that he wanted Lloyd to tell an actor to make an adjustment. Lloyd waved him off. Two days later, the actor did it, just like August wanted. He was like, “But Lloyd, you never told them.”

LIESL | Just opening the pathway.

OZ | I had one actor who walked across the stage as blocked in rehearsal, and I yelled, “Stop. What are you doing? Why didn’t you kick the chair?” He said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “You wanted to kick the chair, didn’t you?”

LIESL | Following his body.

OZ | Yeah. He said, “How did you know?” I said, “It doesn’t matter. You’re up on that stage, I’m not.” It’s finding those things in the actors. I’ve seen some directors who want to block it immediately. I’m thinking, “I can’t block it if I can’t hear it.”

LIESL | That’s right. It’s like I have to watch them live their life first, and then it reveals itself. This is the thing I tell young directors also: there’s a certain amount of trust you have to have in your collaborators in those early days of rehearsal. You have to open your eyes and see what is happening. You have to be as available, energetically, as you want them to be. You can’t come and sit behind your table and just play the chess piece. I mean, you can, of course—people do it. People are deeply successful doing it.

But it seems to me that because it’s the live experience and there’s energy, that has to be created.

OZ | What was your experience like on Frozen?

LIESL | It was the first stage adaptation of the film. I did it at Disneyland at the Hyperion, a 2,000-seat theatre. It was enormously challenging for all kinds of corporate reasons.

And enormously fulfilling because I had access to resources in terms of design that we don’t normally get in not-for-profit theatre.

I was using technology that no one had ever used in a stage show before. And I was able to execute a really ambitious proposal because the high-level Disney executives responded so positively. I was like, “Oh, this is what it’s like when you’re working with a producing team that actually wants something that’s going to blow their minds.”

The more bold I was in terms of the vision, the more they loved it. That was so fun.

One of the biggest struggles on that show was getting diversity outside of just the ensemble and into the principals. Historically, park production tended to replicate the film experience almost exactly.

Finally, I was like, “I think I’m going to have to quit if I don’t get this.” One of the things for me has been always to ask myself: are you willing to walk away over this? Invariably, the answer is yes. They kicked it up to [Disney CEO] Bob Iger because he was the only one who could make the decision, and he said, “Yes, she’s right. We should do this.” When we opened, we opened with an African American Elsa, and we have had every color of the rainbow playing those principals. In the end, all of us were so proud of what we accomplished.

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vocabulary that I did not understand. I was Googling constantly while I was on set. I don’t know what person could have made this transition before the time of Google.

OZ | How has the transition been to film and television?

OZ | How about the crew? A lot of times I have to fight for diversity of the crew, too.

LIESL | The crew was actually very diverse because people who work at the parks are very diverse.

OZ | How did you prepare for Frozen, especially with technology you’d never worked with before?

LIESL | You spend a lot of time with the Imagineers in the beginning, and you get inundated with what the options are. And I chose designers who were at the cutting edge of the field, people who weren’t just doing theatre, who were also doing rock concerts, and who had access to more technology than a person who’s directing and designing only theatre. Because we really needed to have a different kind of vision to fill that space and make use of the opportunity.

There was a lot of educating me on the options and what this could achieve and the way we could save money with that. We used this kind of lighting where we implanted chips into the costumes so the lights found the actors and just followed them around.

It halved our programming. We did a lot of video, and there were all these different kinds of materials, like invisible sheers that you can project on. You have to stage everything so it is connected to the technology. But that also means you can’t change the blocking all of a sudden, because there’s $30,000 worth of technology that’s been put in that spot.

OZ | How long was the process?

LIESL | Two years of development.

OZ | How long was the rehearsal process?

LIESL | In that way, it was a very traditional musical. We did a series of workshops. We did a crafting workshop, and then we did a staging workshop, which was about a month and change. And then we rehearsed for a couple of months.

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LIESL | Terrifying. One of the hardest parts of our business to break into, for some reason, is television directing. I had already started the process in 2016 of working with a television agent at my agency. We had started going on meetings. I’d planned on taking the fall of 2017 off and shadowing. Then the great Ms. Ava DuVernay offered me a slot on Queen Sugar. She saw Eclipsed on Broadway, and I knew her through Sundance. I panicked and I turned it down at first because I had theatre gigs.

“...IT WAS MY YEAR TO DO THE SAME THING THAT I DID IN THEATRE, WHICH WAS CREATE A BODY OF WORK SO THAT NO ONE COULD SAY, ‘YOU CAN’T DO THAT.’”

-LIESL TOMMY And then I called around. Called Lynn Nottage, Tracey Scott Wilson, and other people, and they were like, “Do you know how hard it is, especially for people of color, especially for women? You have to do that television episode.” Also, Ava provided a safety net, saying, “The fact that this is your first time is not a liability. We are creating an environment where you can succeed.”

So I did it. But I went there a month early and I shadowed [frequent series director] Julie Dash, and she was incredibly generous.

[Director] Cheryl Dunye was also there. Ava was like, “Girl, you do not need to come out for a month. That’s crazy. You can come out for a handful of days and you’ll get it.” I said, “Listen, there is no way that I’m going to let you give me this chance and then in any world underperform or be underprepared.”

And it was great. There was a point where I thought, “Okay, I understand what that is.” I found all the parallels. There were moments of terror because it was literally

OZ | I’ll tell you how we did it. I sat there, and they said, “You want a star filter?” I said, “Absolutely.” No idea what I was talking about. They finally put it on, and I said, “Oh, wow. That’s neat. That’s cool.” It was bluffing.

LIESL | I mean, there’s a certain amount of that. Thank God I gave myself that month because I just accumulated so much vocabulary on set.

OZ | What TV shows would you be interested in doing?

LIESL | I love Master of None. I love Atlanta.

You know, this year I did a lot and it was my year to do the same thing that I did in theatre, which was create a body of work so that no one could say, “You can’t do that.”

But one of the great reliefs for me in the beginning of working in television was not being responsible for everything the way you are in theatre. And coming off of Frozen, a $30 million Disney endeavor, and then Eclipsed on Broadway, there was something refreshing to be like, “I’m just going to come in and I’m going to come out. I’m going to say some things to the writers about the script, but it’s not on me.”

I had been in that grind for so long in the new play premieres. It’s really, really stressful.

When you do new plays, you take on some responsibility for the future of that play. If that play is successful, then that playwright gets it done all over the country and they can live off that.

OZ | How do you feel about dramaturgs?

How do you see the position between the director and all the dramaturgical work?

LIESL | It’s got to be the right fit, and I have certainly been accused of running dramaturgs out of the room. But I also know that there are dramaturgs who’ve loved being in the process with me because if they’re the right fit and they know what they’re talking about, I will listen to and empower them.

OZ | So you like doing your own dramaturgical work?

LIESL | Yeah. I mean, if you’re doing new plays, you have to be a “dramaturgical director.” I understand from writers that not all directors are dramaturgical directors. I didn’t know that, actually. I thought that if you’re working on new plays, then you have to be a person who can do that.

“Which is the real one?” One of these lines is a lie. It’s extremely stressful because I feel like I can’t rely on this thing that people who aren’t in the business keep telling me is happening, when you look around at how tenuous our safety actually is.

OZ | Oh, yeah.

OZ | That’s what I thought. That’s the way I was raised.

LIESL | It’s a strange sensation, and I feel like I’ve got to take advantage of it while I can because I can’t trust it. At this point, I seem to have more access in the film and television world than I do in the theatre world, which is where I spent the bulk of my career. No one’s presented enough statistics and lawsuits to commercial theatre producers to make enough change there. You know?

I want to get into the color issue. I know what I’ve gone through in this business. I think things have changed, but I’ve seen things change before and I’ve seen things go back.

I’d love your opinion on all this. Where do you see yourself in here?

LIESL | I have been very fortunate this year in terms of the work that I’ve been able to do. I always, from the very beginning, set short-term and long-term goals for myself.

That’s how I’ve stayed on track and kept my sanity. Because if you just float through this business, you lose your mind.

OZ | Yes. Because we’re still struggling, still pushing.

LIESL | In 2016, I was the first woman of color to be nominated for a Tony Award for best direction of a play [for Eclipsed]. People kept asking me about that, and I would feel this rage that I wasn’t allowed to talk about process because I had to talk about that.

I’m looking forward to the film part of the next year, and I’m also looking forward to developing shows, being a producer on a show—coming in early and being part of the creation. It was a nice respite to just hop in and out of these television shows. But the thing that brought me into directing was developing work from scratch, and I feel like that’s just who I am. That will have to happen again in the film and television realm. That’s one thing.

OZ | I did a movie for Disney in ’85, ’86, somewhere in there. Remember the Sunday night movies back in the day? My producer said to me, “Oz, we just found out that you are the first black director that’s ever worked for Disney. Should we use this as our publicity?” I said, “You know, I think it’s kind of embarrassing. If that’s true and I’m the first black director that’s ever worked with Disney, let’s leave that alone because I don’t want to talk about it.”

I feel like I have had access because everybody suddenly got slapped upside the head and presented the statistics and lawsuits. There’s this incremental change that’s happening, and I happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right credentials—and also the drive to make it happen. However, as a woman of color and an immigrant, I have never felt more unsafe than I do in this moment in this country. I have this feeling of impending doom at all times in my actual life, and then this thing where people keep telling me that I’m so lucky to be in this moment. I’m like,

LIESL | Yes. They just kept bringing it up, and I was almost like, “What do you want me to say? It’s an honor? In 2016??? NO! Look at yourselves.” It’s part of our work, as people of color. We have to do that, talk about that. But I always worry that we never get to talk about being artists, which is why I’m loving that you’re asking about process and diversity.

Liesl

OZ | Where does color limit us? If I get stuck thinking about racism, I stop. But I have to find these workarounds. Lloyd Richards watched me one time get very angry at a writer who had a brilliant first act and I thought had lied in his second act. He said, “Oz, you’re a large black man. You have to be very careful about losing it because you’re intimidating.”

LIESL | Workarounds. Yes. There are definitely times when I have found myself dialing it down a little bit.

I recently worked on a show; I walked in on day one, into the director’s office, and I still have my bag on my shoulder, and one of the producers came up to me and said, “You got a big episode. I usually direct these episodes.

I also direct.” I was like, “Mm-hmm.” “It’s a big episode. I hope you can handle it.” I said, “Oh, I’m sure that as a group, we’ll all make it work.” Again, he says, “I usually direct these episodes.” I was like, “Yeah. I’ve heard that.”

Then he said, “Well, we’re here for you.”

Then he leaves, and another one comes in.

Again, I’m still standing in my room with my bag on my shoulder. He says, “You got a big episode.” I said, “Yes, I understand that.” He said, “You know, I directed your episode last season.” I was like, “Amazing.” He says, “I was supposed to direct this season, but you know, politics.”

OZ | Yeah. It reminds me of a guy coming to me and saying, “What does it feel like getting an episode just because you’re black?”

LIESL | Someone dared to say that to you?

OZ | We teach our children to be fair, to have manners, to do the right thing, to be a credit to your race. I know it’s just stupidity we are faced with, but part of me is like, I’m tired.

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LIESL | It is exhausting. In terms of feeling like we have to be perfect, and it’s just not possible.

LIESL | No, of course not. But you have to protect your livelihood.

You know, after that, there was a series of events that I could only describe as sabotage. I would never say that word, but then somebody on the crew said it to me. “You are being sabotaged, do you know that? They want you to fail.” It was unfathomable, but it was so clearly what was happening. I thought, “I can’t complain. I can’t call the producers.” I had brunch with two brilliant black women directors. I was like, “Ladies, I need you. I need advice.” One of them who’s been in the game for decades said, “It’s real, you’re not crazy. Simplify all of your blocking so you will make your day no matter what they do to you.” So I did.

LIESL | I just let my life force out. I was like, “Oh, this is what it feels like to be a white man in this world.” You just let it all out and you don’t worry about being called intimidating, and you don’t worry about not being grateful.

They clearly wanted me to not be able to make my days. And then I did.

I made my days. I got every shot that I needed.

I did not complain.

What I started doing is not giving a fuck. I didn’t watch my tone when I talked to people or asked for things. I was not afraid of being scary or intimidating.

At that point, it didn’t matter anymore. They’d already decided the worst about me, that I was unqualified, I was a diversity hire or whatever. So I ripped the veil away, and I hadn’t done that ever.

I just walked around that set how I wanted to.

OZ | What I’ve had to do sometimes is totally ignore, shut down, not say anything until I have something to say, which is not the way I like to work.

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OZ | Yes.

OZ | Right. That’s a big word, grateful.

It’s interesting—I feel like I have a sense of responsibility. I want to do the right thing.

Sometimes I’m sure I don’t. I think I’ve lived my life in fairness. There was a female director on a show I was working on, and the production designer was being cruel to her.

She and I were talking. I was just a director.

And I took it upon myself to go up to him and say, “No, you don’t do this,” in front of everybody.

LIESL | I’m the same in that way. You have to advocate for people who can’t advocate for themselves. As directors, we are in a position of power, whatever our race or sex is. We are in charge. So we can’t let things like that happen. We have to call it out. I do know these directors who are so worried about their own territory that they don’t lead all the people they’re supposed to lead. They just lead for themselves.

OZ | They protect themselves.

LIESL | From very early on in my theatre career, when I didn’t have any collateral and I certainly had no business opening my mouth, I would ask for people of color on the design team. There’s always this leadership position that thinks, “Okay, she’s a young director. Let’s surround her with experienced designers.” And “experienced designers” means white men. If I’m working on shows that are political, that are about black experience, and I’m surrounded by older white male designers, it’s a problem. So very early on, I would say things like, “You’re not going to surround me with white men only, are you?” They’d go, “Well, you know, we just want to make sure there’s a nice balance of experience.” I was like, “Let’s find some experienced designers of color then, or experienced women.”

I want to ask you—this is something that I’ve struggled with a lot. I was Associate Artistic Director at Berkeley Rep for a period of time. There have definitely been moments where I could have stepped into an artistic directorship role at a theatre. You’ve been affiliated with theatres. You’ve maintained your television career. I don’t know how you would be able to run a theatre and then also

pursue the television stuff in this day and age. Or go and shoot a film. Do you think that’s possible?

OZ | I think it is. But that’s me. I was shooting an episode of a show, and I was directing a play at night and on the weekends, and I was doing The Cosby Show, and I directed a play in Philadelphia.

LIESL | That’s insane.

OZ | It was insane. But it’s what we do. I think theatre has got to find a balance of these things that you’re talking about: being an artistic director, doing a film. We’ve got to create a new business format for theatre, a new paradigm that allows you to blend the art forms.

LIESL | Absolutely. I always thought that becoming an artistic director was where I was headed. And then other things happened. In my head, I thought, I’ll teach, I’ll run a theatre, and I’ll develop work. But the truth is that I like to be creative 100 percent of the time. I want to be directing all the time. It might change. In fact, it will change. There’ll be a point when I’ll want to produce, for sure.

OZ | I think the last thing I want to ask you is: are you happy?

LIESL | Very. The happiest I’ve ever been.

PHOTOS

Genevieve Marie

Building Brave Spaces: Leading Theatre Programs Today

A CONVERSATION WITH LIZA GENNARO, NICOLE HODGES PERSLEY + EVAN YIONOULIS MODERATED BY SHARON

OTT

In an ever-evolving cultural conversation, it is the students, faculty, and chairs of our theatre programs who often lead the way in addressing issues and practices that will affect our industry in the years to come. Sharon Ott, Chair of the Department of Theatre at Virginia Commonwealth University, recently sat down with three other leaders of theatre programs around the country—Liza Gennaro (Manhattan School of Music), Nicole Hodges Persley (University of Kansas), and Evan Yionoulis (Juilliard)—to discuss how they guide and respond to these conversations.

About the Participants

SHARON OTT became the Chair of the Department of Theatre at Virginia Commonwealth University in the summer of 2017. Before coming to VCU, she was a professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design and served as the Artistic Director of the Department of Performing Arts. She was the Artistic Director of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre for 13 years, and the Seattle Repertory Theatre for 8 years. Ott has directed theatre and opera around the country. She is a member of the Executive Board of SDC representing the Southeast region.

LIZA GENNARO is Director of Musical Theatre at Manhattan School of Music.

Contributor to The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, and the upcoming The Routledge Companion to the American Stage Musical: 1970 and Beyond. Choreography: Broadway and Regional. She is a Member of the Executive Board of SDC. NICOLE HODGES PERSLEY is an award-winning Associate Professor of Theatre and the Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the University of Kansas. She is a professional actor and director with credits in theatre, film, and television. An artist-scholar and arts activist, Hodges Persley creates bridges between the entertainment industry and academia.

EVAN YIONOULIS is an Obie Award-winning director and Juilliard’s Richard Rodgers Director of the Drama Division. She previously served 20 years on the faculty of Yale School of Drama and as a Resident Director at Yale Repertory Theatre. She serves on the Executive Board of SDC as Secretary.

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Liza Gennaro teaching at Manhattan School of Music

Nicole Hodges Persley + student at the annual KU Theatre Award banquet

SHARON OTT | While all of us have mixed our professional careers with careers in academia, most of us are new to our positions of academic leadership. As SDC Executive Board Members, Liza, Evan, and I have been dealing quite a bit with issues of workplace conduct. As professional directors, because of the #MeToo movement and general increased awareness, we’ve begun to redefine the rules of engagement between directors and actors. I think there are parallels in the academic world, particularly in relationship to professors and students. I am a member of the baby boomer generation and was a college student in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I was politically active in college, but I have come to realize that my sense of political activism is much different from that of my students. This is not surprising to me, but I do find that I have to be careful to not just apply the norms that I remember from my twenties, but truly see the world through my students’ eyes.

EVAN YIONOULIS | Current students are much more attuned to issues of identity, and they’re asking questions that I don’t think people even 10 years ago asked. So many things are up for reexamination.

How can we

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diversify the material we work on in class or present to the public? What is a classic? Who has the right to play certain characters? Do I need to learn an accent for characters I don’t ever think I’ll play? In actor training, we’re in the business of asking our students to bring themselves to the work and also to transform.

So, we’re right at that nexus between identity and transformation all the time. I think the things that are facing my students at Juilliard (and at other institutions of higher learning) are very much the same as those facing our industry as a whole.

You mentioned the #MeToo movement.

At Juilliard—and at Yale, where I taught previously—we have developed very clear protocols about rehearsing material with sexual content, in the classroom and in the rehearsal hall—what happens when you have a director or professor in the room, what happens when you don’t. These protocols (which I’m certain are being instituted by universities nationwide) mirror what is happening, or needs to happen, in the professional world.

SHARON | Nicole or Liza, do you find any points of similarity in your universities with what Evan is saying?

LIZA GENNARO | I absolutely find the same discussions arising. I’ve been dealing most specifically with issues of identity, gender, and authenticity. How students identify and how students intend to move forward in a profession that is in the process of transforming. How do we train actors to be transformative and versatile so they can work and make a living while honoring their individual sense of authenticity? That is a big challenge for me right now.

SHARON | I’ve been at VCU for a year and a half, and I would say there is a big difference around issues of identity between students at VCU and my former students at the Savannah College of Art and Design. I’ve pondered whether that has to do with being a public vs. a private university, or whether there has just been a real shift in the last few years.

LIZA | I began as Associate Dean and Director of Musical Theatre at the Manhattan School of Music in July 2018, and was at Indiana University for six years before that. I find that there has been a huge change in student attitudes in less than a year’s time since I switched institutions.

SHARON | There was a David Brooks article in the New York Times last year that posited that one of the underlying differences in the political worldview of the millennial generation vs. the baby boomers was that boomers were motivated by the cause of equal access and millennials were motivated by the concept of inclusion. I was working through a casting issue that had arisen with my production of The Wolves and a debate about whether the #12 character should be performed by a student who identified as lesbian, and I found this lens to be a helpful one as I examined my own assumptions in contrast to the assumptions of many of my students. Do you have thoughts on this, Nicole?

NICOLE HODGES PERSLEY | I am a Gen Xer, and so, from that standpoint, I think I’m part of the generation that helped start the conversation about intersectional positions of identity, whether that be from a scholarly standpoint or from an artistic standpoint. We refuse the notion that we have to lead with one part of ourselves, whether that be our gender identification, sexual identification, racial identification. Positioning is always complex, always interesting, and always overlapping.

RIGHT

Juilliard drama students in class Todd Rosenberg

PHOTO

BELOW Evan Yionoulis with Juilliard drama students PHOTO c/o Juilliard

“How do we train actors to be transformative and versatile so they can work and make a living while honoring their individual sense of authenticity?”

– Liza Gennaro

As a result, the children of my generation are a lot more equipped to have discussions about who they are in relationship to those various positionings. I think for the first time—in the academy and in the profession— you’re seeing actors who understand the disruption of binaries in a very different way and have a fluency about different identity positions. And the material that we’re teaching or the ways we teach that material hasn’t always caught up with that—nor have our colleagues in both academia and the profession.

I came to the University of Kansas (KU) in 2009 from California—a very progressive arts space—to a space very much needing to vacate some of its old ideas and practices.

Now I am the artistic director of one of the only African American theatre companies in Kansas City. It’s very interesting to watch this Midwestern market catch up to movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. Both have had a very big impact on the demand that the space can no longer hold the old ideas. At my university, the students won’t let things happen the way they have been happening, and at my theatre, the actors don’t want to rehearse in some of the ways they always have, don’t want to be cast the way they have been cast in the past. They welcome disruption.

SHARON | I want to talk a little more about a point you bring up, Nicole, about this “intersectional space,” and your students being able to live in that space and your faculty perhaps being not so easily able to do

so. Then there’s the fact that your students, as you put it, just don’t want to put up with certain things anymore. The same way actors, I think, want a real change in the ways directors work with them. How are you all navigating this? It’s tough to do when everything is in such flux.

have so many observations, but when you speak this new language, you feel like a child.

That’s the frustration I’m watching manifest.

People have so much to say, have so much they are feeling, but haven’t yet gained enough fluency to be able to articulate those feelings.

LIZA | We’ve come up against several challenges in terms of casting productions as well as classroom work. I’m meeting with faculty and doing a lot of research and trying to figure out some faculty guidelines because we’re at the very beginning of this process.

I’m at the point right now where I really don’t know what to think. I don’t think my instincts are necessarily correct. I’m leaning heavily on my diverse faculty. And, honestly, that’s not fair to them. I’m reading everything I can get my hands on—trying to understand how to proceed training students in a field where certainly the thinking, at least in terms of identity, was rarely considered before.

EVAN | I think one of the things is making space in the work for conversations in ways you never really did before. So that if you, say, cast an African American actor as Angelo [in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure] and a white actress as Isabella, or a white Angelo and a Latinx Isabella, what is being read by an audience and what is being felt by the actors as they play those roles?

NICOLE | The idea of identity, and particularly race, ethnicity, and gender, are at the core of my practice as an artist-scholar. So what I see working at predominantly white universities, or working in a theatre company that is situated in a city as a “multicultural theatre company,” is that patience is what we will need if we are going to help allies that are interested in doing this work but may not have the tools or the language to be fluent enough to self-present in a way that feels confident to them. My goal is to be a bridge builder to help those colleagues, artistic and academic, really identify places where they can supplement or gain the tools they need. I always liken it to fluency when you’re learning a language that is not your own. You understand so much, you care so much, you

NICOLE | I see that with my students of color, that they’re always negotiating and having to reflect on these things when they’re being cast. Whether it be through colorblind casting or in texts that they culturally don’t see themselves in, ever.

And so they are always having these debates.

They may not have them publicly out loud with professors, because they want to be part of the group, and they don’t want to be marginalized, but nonetheless, they do have those discussions. So some of this is not shocking to me.

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A student production of Welcome to Arroyo’s at the University of Kansas, directed by Nicole Hodges Persley PHOTO c/o KU Theatre

SHARON | I like your point, Nicole, that it is true that people of color, students of color, have had to negotiate these spaces for a long time, so it’s not shocking. It is a great thing that what has been suppressed is now debated openly.

So, casting is one point of discussion at our institutions. I would hazard a guess that the question of dialects in the pedagogy of voice and speech is another, right?

Where does the traditional RP [received pronunciation] or the accent broadly known as “general American” fit into the world our students are inhabiting?

EVAN | Well, I think it’s great, that we’re— SHARON | Questioning all that.

EVAN | It’s about time that these discussions are happening and that we’re opening up the plays that we’re producing. I find that the practical struggle is finding material where students of many backgrounds can work together on projects. And I look forward to—one can’t dictate what writers write, but I think it will be wonderful when writers write plays where the possibility of a lot of diversity in casting exists without it being Shakespeare, you know?

SHARON | Right, I know exactly what you mean.

NICOLE | Yeah, but I want to jump back in about the RP note. I think it’s really important for us as artists and scholars not to put limitations on expectations, that RP applies across the board for most of the work that you might be hired to do. It’s a version of standard English, right?

SHARON | Well, according to my voice and speech colleagues, RP actually doesn’t truly exist regionally anywhere in the UK; rather, it is a class-based accent.

NICOLE | Right, but to not acknowledge the other variations of standard English as legitimate forms of accent and dialect work is what I find problematic. An African American actor might be just as often asked to do Idris Elba’s accent, for instance—a regional form of English—as they would RP. So I think it’s really important that the completion of what a body and the history that body is bringing is not assumed. I think we try to standardize language in a discipline or practice [where] we really have to look at how those standards are racialized.

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“It hopefully will get us to a more just world, where everybody can feel included and do their best work, and be challenged, and fly. And soar.”

– Evan Yionoulis

EVAN | We’re teaching facility with dialects so that students can then pick up any accent that they need. What I’m finding is that some students are limiting themselves.

We grew up with colorblind casting, with the idea that “everybody should be able to play everything.” Now we’re practicing color-conscious casting. But that impulse— that arises, after all, from a desire for more mindful inclusivity—I hope won’t mean that students will now feel again that certain dialects are not for them, especially in our global world.

SHARON | I do find some of my students to be self-limiting. A fair number of my African American students have to be persuaded to learn RP, for instance. And, yes, if we’re teaching accents and dialects properly, we’re teaching students how to learn any accent or dialect. But students have to be persuaded that the world is a place where they should know that accent. Because it’s not necessarily where they want to live as artists.

NICOLE | That’s the hard part of having really honest conversations with young actors about that reality check that our business is not necessarily the wonderland of your dreams. We can try to reflect the realities that we wish were true and deflect the ones that we want to subvert. But if you have a solid RP accent, it will help you get into most of the festivals, because this is the language of the festival, not necessarily the world. Not to say that we should center the conversation that way, but it’s the truth.

SHARON | Liza?

LIZA | The issue of self-limiting is one of the challenges we’re having. We’re working with the musical theatre canon, so that also brings along its own baggage. But I agree with everything Nicole just said. And if I’m understanding you, Nicole, part of the struggle is we’re all very open to embracing

student self-identification and making them feel safe in the rehearsal room and the classroom spaces, but where it becomes complicated is when we are asking them or they are choosing to take on specific roles or work on specific material. They may resist working on that material because of self-identification or pressure from their classmates who take issue with that choice of material.

It’s coming from every direction, and it becomes a question of, well, who has the right to have an opinion about what this person is doing? So that’s where a discussion is critical right now, and there aren’t really any answers I’ve been able to locate. I mean, there are many essays and articles, but the answers aren’t apparent. None of this is apparent. And since we’re at the early stages of grappling with these issues, I don’t think there can be any answers. I’m not really looking for answers, but I’m craving guidance.

SHARON | And maybe my institution is different than yours, but I bet not. It seems to be very hard to find the space to—I think Nicole used the word “patience”—to have the discussions that are truly necessary. And what often happens—just given the world, the way it is right now, and the students’ feelings that the world isn’t changing fast enough for them—is that things bubble up to a crisis point very quickly, and we don’t yet have the language to cope.

EVAN | Yeah. These conversations are just beginning to evolve. I think we’re all learning, and we’re trying to figure out how to learn together. The faculty have to learn from the students and the students’ experience of living in the world.

LIZA | It certainly happened for me in the first four months I was in my job. There have been issues that required intervention and full student body meetings and discussions that

were complicated and difficult to resolve. As students’ issues and concerns arise, we have a wonderful opportunity and responsibility to teach and be taught. Open communication and a willingness to engage in hard topic discussion is essential.

EVAN | I’m finding that this has to be a daily practice. I’m used to just going into the classroom and saying, “Who’s your character and what do they need from the other person, and now let’s talk and listen through the scene.” And now there’s a lot more space that has to be made. I know that with every director or visiting faculty member who comes in, I have a conversation with them about the department’s feelings about equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging, and about things that I imagine might come up in the piece that they’re directing, and how we, as a community, want to be having these conversations so that we can have brave artistic spaces, where we can all venture out of our comfort zones without being unsafe.

I also talk about our protocols for rehearsing material with sexual content, and I discuss how they might approach these scenes not so that people are afraid to touch each other but so that people are free to touch each other.

So, it’s a lot more work. But it’s important work, and as Nicole was saying, everybody in the community needs to be educated in the way to speak about all of this. The voice teacher, the movement teacher, the acting teacher—everybody. Because you can’t just have an equity, diversity, and inclusion person talking about this.

SHARON | As we begin to wrap up this wonderful conversation, I want to talk about what is exciting about working professionally and in the academic world right now, because it is exciting, yes? I find it to be such hard work, such demanding work, and as Nicole said early in our conversation, sometimes I feel so awkward and clumsy learning this new language, but I also feel exhilarated and challenged in the best possible way. Where do you think this conversation will get us?

SHARON | —is that it’s not true.

EVAN | That it’s not true, and that people were suppressing parts of themselves, or that it wasn’t that space for everyone, and that people were leaving parts of themselves behind. And other people weren’t aware that they were.

SHARON | Yes. And we’re finding in the academy and in the profession things of which we were not aware.

NICOLE | Actually, I would say people were aware—some people were aware. We are watching the fallout of the trauma people have been suppressing for years. Women suppressing who they are, putting themselves in particular frames or boxes in order to succeed. Now, it’s all being undone—people are refusing that. This is an industry that is struggling with its sexism, with its racism, with its homophobia. In order for us to actually work to heal our rehearsal halls, our classrooms, and make safe spaces for women, for actors of color, for the LGBTQ+ community to work safely, we need to continue to have this conversation out loud.

I think there’s an awareness, the fact that they—young actors and directors and producers—walk into their work from an inclusive standpoint. When it’s happening in a good way, it’s shaming people into action.

It’s shaming people in a way that is positive because this is the generation that’s going to hold the keys to the kingdom.

SHARON | That’s right.

NICOLE | I think that this is a very bold conversation to be having, where folks can say, “Hey, I have a different position, a different standpoint. I’m from a different generation, but I want to be inclusive. I want everybody to fly. What is my part?”

LIZA | It’s incredibly stimulating and fantastic to have the opportunity to look at, particularly in my area, musical theatre, to really be able to look at these shows in such different ways, with all the enormous amounts of possibilities available to us now to enliven these shows.

It’s exciting creatively. And learning from the students is an enormous piece of this, making sure they feel safe to express themselves and safe to ask for what they need from us, and then we’re challenged to figure out, “Okay, how do we actually keep this consistent? How do we stay aware?” I think that’s really where the challenge lies; how do we live within the world that is their world—and, as you say, will be their world?

NICOLE | It would be really great to have an ongoing forum of people, when they do want to weigh in, to be able to have discussions or meetings about this work, as directors, choreographers, educators.

Because having these discussions is how we change infrastructures, by listening to one another, and getting new ideas or new tips, or listening to someone’s challenge and helping to find a strategy.

LIZA | I really believe that this kind of coalition building is what helps us feel less alone and more supported. It’s about amplifying and supporting and helping one another, and not judging.

EVAN | Michael McElroy and Chanel Ward, who are working with us at Juilliard on matters of inclusion, talk about rather than calling people out, calling people in.

NICOLE | I absolutely agree with the “call in.” That’s how we build coalitions. We need everybody.

EVAN | It hopefully will get us to a more just world, where everybody can feel included and do their best work, and be challenged, and fly. And soar.

LIZA | That’s so good.

SHARON | I think we always wanted that, but now there’s an urgency about helping create the space for that.

EVAN | Yes, and I think that we thought everybody was soaring. And what we are hearing is that—

Students perform Two Gentleman of Verona at Virginia Commonwealth University, directed by Sharon Ott PHOTO c/o Virginia Commonwealth University

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The Brown/Trinity MFA Class of 2019 PHOTO c/o Brown/Trinity Curt Columbus

Patricia Ybarra

TRAINING THE WHOLE THEATRE ARTIST A Conversation with Curt Columbus + Patricia Ybarra

BY WHITNEY

WHITE The Brown University/Trinity Rep MFA programs in Acting and Directing are unique in their combination of a cross-disciplinary approach to theatrical training and emphasis on real-world experience—and, as of the 2018–19 academic year, their free tuition. The training they offer has been the backbone of some of the most exciting artists working today. Alumni include Liesl Tommy (interviewed in this issue on p. 32); the founders of Fiasco Theater; Tiffany Nichole Greene (resident director, Hamilton); Laura Kepley (Artistic Director, Cleveland Playhouse); Taibi Magar (Blue Ridge at Atlantic Theater Company, Underground Railroad Game at Ars Nova); and Whitney White (What to Send Up When It Goes Down at The Movement Theatre Company, Jump at PlayMakers Repertory Company). White spoke with Curt Columbus, Artistic Director of Trinity Repertory Company since 2006 and Artistic Director of the Brown/ Trinity MFA programs, and Patricia Ybarra, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University, about their approach to educating student artists.

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PATRICIA YBARRA | Marcus is astounding.

I directed his play And Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi with undergrads. With that piece, you can’t direct it without teaching yourself the history of gospel and African American spirituals. You literally can’t do it unless you’re in the Smithsonian music database, which Brown owns.

WHITNEY | I’m so proud of [longtime Brown/Trinity associated artists and black odyssey co-directors and lead performers] Jude Sandy and Joey Wilson Jr. I want to commend you for giving these actors the opportunity to collaborate as directors and take the reins over the process in the way you do. Not many artistic leaders are able to do that. They’re afraid.

I’m always saying it: Trinity truly changed my life. I went in thinking that I could be no more than an actress—and there’s nothing wrong with that—but I had these skills, and I knew I wanted to do more with myself, but I had no idea how or where to do it. Brown and Trinity really changed all that for me.

I’d like to ask you both something I’ve always been curious about, which is how your two institutions function together. How have Trinity Rep and Brown made it work so well?

CURT | Patti, do you want to start?

The Brown/Trinity MFA Class of 2019

WHITNEY WHITE | Thank you for waking up so early to chat with me. Curt, you’re rehearsing Macbeth. How’s that going?

CURT COLUMBUS | It’s been a great collaboration. I’ve got all these former Brown/ Trinity folks working on it. Zdenko Martin is doing the fights, and Nate Dendy is doing the magic. Both are graduates of our MFA Acting program. Oona Curly, who was a Brown undergrad, is designing my lights.

PATRICIA | Okay. It’s not always easy, to be honest. Because the institutions are really different things on some levels. We do make it work, and I think we’ve made it work better recently. But at the end of the day, Brown is a huge institution that has grown into having MFA programs. I finally feel like we understand what an MFA program is and how it works in terms of being an education that

has all its aesthetic and intellectual rigor, as well as a professional training program at the same time.

CURT | I always liken Trinity to being a flea on the body of a giant. Brown is a huge international research university. The great good fortune is that our work is inflected by the presence of that kind of legacy institution.

We’re not nearly 300 years old [like Brown]; we are 50 years old (54, actually, this year).

The real key has been leadership. I’ve been here 13 years now. We have worked diligently to make the program rise to all the academic standards that Brown has. But what’s really changed in the last four years: Patti as chair of the department, Christina Paxson as president, and Rick Locke as provost.

You have this perfect leadership team that understands what it means to have an MFA conservatory-based training program at a research university. There’s a dissonance there in that very conjugation. It’s only because we’ve had this leadership that so understands how we’re different, and embraces our difference, that it’s been possible to go that extra mile that we’ve gone in the last five, almost 10 years.

The collaboration between institutions is informed by an ongoing conversation around a life of practice and a life of the mind.

Brown is a really open and collaborative environment, where intellectual rigor is valued as well as a broad worldview. That’s what we prize in the professional theatre, so there is an alignment in that way.

PATRICIA | In terms of what Curt is saying, I would frame it as “creative and intellectual experimentation and practice” just to get rid of the binary—but it’s the same idea.

Cloteal L. Horne + Joe Wilson Jr. in black odyssey, directed by Jude Sandy + Joe Wilson Jr. PHOTO Mark Turek

WHITNEY | And Marcus Gardley’s black odyssey is running at Trinity Rep now, right?

CURT | They’ve done such a wonderful job.

They really treated it like they were doing one of the great canonical writers instead of working on a living playwright’s play. The language is so rich and beautiful. Marcus has taken The Odyssey, and he has made it into this metaphor for the journey for the soul of the African American man. And the actors are giving it all its due. The audiences stand up every single night.

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Thom Jones, Head of Voice and Speech, teaching a class PHOTO c/o Brown/Trinity

Given that Brown is thinking about both arts research and arts as research, the dialogue seems crucial.

WHITNEY | Could you talk about the move to go tuition-free? Has it put the program on a whole other level?

CURT | Well, we’ve doubled the number of applicants. Patti has said from the day she walked into the office that it’s unconscionable to charge tuition to MFA students, period. So she pushed that change. I’ve been saying this since I arrived 13 years ago. And then we had a provost who walked in and said, “You can’t charge tuition.” So it’s literally the conjunction of the stars.

WHITNEY | That’s amazing.

PATRICIA | Yes. When you don’t have to be so need-aware, the diversity of your class changes. The number of first-gen students and low-income students can change. There are very few top-ranked programs that give this kind of aid. So that’s a radical change.

The provost, Rick Locke, has done a lot with the graduate programs. The undergrad programs here are also now loan-free for students on financial aid.

WHITNEY | Wow! PATRICIA | So that means that the students do have work study and often have a summer contribution, but they do not have loans in their financial aid packages. That is part of a larger push against debt.

CURT | It’s consonant with the driving aesthetic-philosophical principle of the program, which is about training the whole artist. The kinds of artists we can bring

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Brian McEleney, Head of MFA Acting, teaches an acting class PHOTO c/o Brown/Trinity

into this program now has become really complicated in a rich and interesting way. It’s also consonant with all the “JEDI” work we’ve been doing. I’m going to credit my friend, Mark Valdez, for coming up with that term, which is EDI [Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion] + Justice. There is a big push for this at Brown as a university, and it inflects the training at Brown/Trinity.

, “I M CHALLENGED BY MY STUDENTS EVERY DAY. OUR COLLABORATORS AT BROWN MAKE US , BETTER ARTISTS. IT S A GREAT PRODUCTIVE COLLABORATION.”

–- Curt Columbus WHITNEY | In terms of the training, it’s interesting, Curt, you said this thing about a natural dissonance to a research institution with a conservatory-based MFA. But I think that that dissonance, from my experience here, reflects our student body at Trinity.

Could you talk about the crossover between the artistic, transformational development that you do with the students and the practical skills? And also the further learning, research, and development? In my time there, all three areas were really encouraged, which resulted in me and lots of my classmates working in a multidisciplinary way. Which is like a magic trick.

CURT | It’s the strength of the program. I brought the phrase “training the whole artist” with me from my time in Chicago, where

multidisciplinary theatremakers have been the norm for years. Watching the work of playwright/actor/directors like Tracy Letts, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Mary Zimmerman, Amy Morton—the list goes on and on— shaped how I thought about theatrical training.

We have a strong basis in conservatory training at Brown/Trinity, focusing on the fundamentals of each discipline, but then we encourage our actors and directors to train up their skills in other areas as well. All actors take playwriting and directing; all directors take acting and playwriting. Whitney, you are a great example of the virtues of training the whole artist, since you’re still acting, still writing, still directing, all professionally.

PATRICIA | Basically, we have always assumed that educating artists (or scholars, for that matter) is introducing people to modes of thinking and making that allow them to transform over the course of their careers. An example is Brown undergraduate [alum and Tony Award-winner] Steven Levenson, who is now a playwright but did a lot of acting at Brown and found his way into playwriting in part by performing his own solo show that he wrote in Lowry Marshall’s solo performance class.

CURT | That’s what makes Brown/Trinity artists distinct. They are creators of the whole event; no matter what role they may be playing in a particular production, they are contributing, forcefully, to the creation of the whole. And that’s where the affiliation with a world-class research institution is so vital to the program, because in order to contribute to the whole, you need to have an understanding of the whole.

Curt Columbus rehearses Macbeth at Trinity Rep PHOTO Mark Turek

PATRICIA | And I think we need to think about theatremaking as much as research as craft. This is crucial, so that we do not think of arts education as only “professionalizing” rather than as a process of inquiry. The latter creates the whole artist, in my opinion.

And you’re right, our program fosters multidisciplinary work, but it’s actually the way people are going to continue to make theatre. More and more actors and directors are developing new scripts, or they’re doing devised work that might have a research base. And that kind of researching to make aesthetic choices, and to create work, is something that I think we train well for. But also, the field is transforming.

There are expectations that there’s less of a difference between an actor and a director and a playwright now, and that people work together. There are people who went to the Brown/Trinity acting and directing program who have become playwrights. More and more, we’re seeing people move between those roles rather fluidly.

CURT | We’re also seeing a change in the hard boundary between stage event and audience. And you know that that’s a big part of the Trinity aesthetic, the erosion of that boundary so that audience and event are in the same room. You’re seeing that out in the field so much more.

WHITNEY | That saved my life. People came to see my New York debut, What to Send Up When It Goes Down, and they couldn’t believe it. There is no barrier between spectator and what was going on in the piece. I learned how to reinforce that while I was at Brown/Trinity.

CURT | That’s the extension of what Patti’s talking about, the erosion of this “I’m an

actor, or I’m a director, or I’m a playwright,” in favor of “I’m a theatre artist.” But then you also have the erosion between the audience and event, which means that we’re all citizens. If you proceed from that as the first principle—we’re all citizens coming together around ideas—then we have a different conversation going. And that’s where being partnered with a research university pushes us in a different direction.

WHITNEY | Yes, truly.

CURT | There’s a better world for the making of theatre pieces where it’s a collaborative environment. The old model, which is the model that privileges lots of abuse, has a hierarchy in it. And the hierarchy is something you can’t ever move. But if we’re all just collaborators making something happen, well, then, suddenly we’re all equal. And so that old patriarchal power structure goes away, and you have a different kind of conversation.

When I talk to colleagues around the country, I realize that they’re much further behind in all the EDI conversations that are happening in the academy in these really robust ways but aren’t happening yet out in the field.

And so I think I’m just so fortunate to be immersed in this because it’s changing my work. It’s changing how I work. It’s changing how we all work. And it will ultimately deeply and profoundly change the field.

PATRICIA | On Brown’s campus, at least, I feel like a lot of the work of the Diversity and Inclusion Action plan on campus came out of the protests in Ferguson [and elsewhere].

And frankly, it was really out of the activism of the Africana Studies graduate students on campus that made it happen. They led.

And I want to make sure that that part of our history is put forth.

That being said, the university did act faster than it’s acted before. And it’s hard. It’s really great to do the JEDI work, but I want to acknowledge (that’s my son you hear in the background, he thinks I’m talking about actual Jedis) that it’s wonderful and generative, but it’s grueling. I think the professional theatre in some pockets is trying to do this work, but it’s needed some turnover. It’s needed artistic director turnover.

And so you have [people like] Maria Goyanes and Stephanie Ybarra, who are moving into these moments of leadership [at Woolly Mammoth and Baltimore Center Stage]. And there are many more. That’s going to change things.

WHITNEY | I know how hard you work, because institutional collaborative educational training is hard. I always wonder, what keeps you going? What keeps you committed to fostering this opportunity for people like me? What keeps you going when you’re in these meetings, when you’re fighting it out to get a tuition-free program?

PATRICIA | At the end of the day, it’s for the students. We’re lucky to have good administrators right now. But you don’t do it to work with the administrators—you do it for the students because you know the students are going to benefit. I don’t have an MFA. I have a PhD, and that was all for the best.

But the reason I don’t have an MFA is there was no way for a person like me—first gen, working class, bicultural—to do it. I couldn’t figure that out. A traditional directing program, I wasn’t quite right for that. I was a dramaturg who’s a director sometimes. But SUMMER 2019 | SDC JOURNAL

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MFA dramaturgy programs had no financial aid, so I didn’t do it.

CURT | I did the same thing. I made it through undergraduate and I couldn’t figure out how to swing the debt of MFA programs.

I was fortunate to have time in the academy, and to be in Chicago, which was an incredible place to be a young artist. So I got lucky.

For me, it’s just like with Patti. It’s always the students. I want to create structures so that students don’t have to get lucky.

If they’re good, they can just get it. Over the decade or so before we went tuitionfree, I can’t tell you the number of talented people we turned down because we couldn’t support them. I remain hopeful, in spite of everything that goes on in the world right now, that humankind gets better with every passing generation. I’m working for that next generation.

PATRICIA | Yes, and I think debt is immoral. I have to be honest. I mean, I say that and I see people blanch a little bit. My more moderate self can say excessive debt is immoral. But I actually think educational debt is immoral.

Sure, at the end of the day, what that practically means is you want a small debt, or you hustle a little bit around the edges, but it shouldn’t have to be that much of a hustle.

So that’s why I do it.

CURT | But also, Patti and I have fun together.

Which is another answer to your question.

You get to collaborate with people who enjoy being challenged. I can’t imagine running a regional theatre that didn’t have bunches of young people walking in and wanting to tear down the walls and shake the whole place up.

I’m challenged by my students every day. Our collaborators at Brown make us better artists.

It’s a great productive collaboration. And

Rachael Warren + cast in Macbeth, directed by Curt Columbus PHOTO Mark Turek

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as with Macbeth, that Brown collaboration extends into my work as a director all the time.

WHITNEY | No, it’s real, I have no garden!

WHITNEY | Curt, speaking of your directing work, I know you’re not always running class and doing administrative work. You’re also an artist that’s very active, and you direct a lot.

Can you talk about how you maintain that?

How do you maintain the artistic juice with the practical demands of running a building?

WHITNEY | I need a garden.

“THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO WENT TO THE BROWN/TRINITY ACTING AND DIRECTING PROGRAM WHO HAVE BECOME PLAYWRIGHTS. , MORE AND MORE, WE RE SEEING PEOPLE MOVE BETWEEN THOSE ROLES RATHER FLUIDLY.”

- Patricia Ybarra CURT | Well, we have to take time away to recharge. That’s the real key. When you’re in the middle of it, there’s literally no rest, and the days are 12 to 16 hours. Patti and I are on email at 5:30 in the morning. And we go until we collapse at 10 or 11 or 12 at night.

And then, when I take time off, I really take time. I always tell young artists that they have to think about where they grow their garden.

And I know that sounds like a Hallmark card—

CURT | It’s real.

CURT | We can’t, as artists, forget to have a life. Because if we forget to have a life, then we’re missing 80 percent of the reason we make art in the first place. So where is your comfort? Where is your peace? Where is your joy? The older I get, the more I retreat into those spaces when I need to reenergize.

That’s really something that I’m trying to practice for myself and continue to talk to folks about, young folks like you.

PATRICIA | Curt’s right. I had to retreat for a good 10 days and not engage. And, weirdly, I wrote something for the first time in a while.

CURT | See, there you go.

PATRICIA | I’d been asked to do something, and I was like, “Oh, I’m never gonna get that done.” And I asked the person, “Can it be 500 words?” And she said, “Yeah. Anything.

Anything you want.” And then I wrote something that had a real length, about 4,500 words in a few days. Just because I wasn’t on email.

WHITNEY | I so appreciate your taking the time to talk with me. I hope you have beautiful days.

CURT | I’m going to go rehearse Macbeth.

PATRICIA | I’m going to hang out with my little Jedi for a little bit.

WHITNEY | I need to grow a garden. I literally just wrote that on a big sticky, and I put it on my wall.

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Michelle Aravena and Las Chicas at the ¡Papa Caliente! (i.e. Hot Box Nightclub) in Theatre Under the Stars’ Latinx-inspired musical Guys and Dolls PHOTO Melissa Taylor

FIG. 1

In our fields today, lively debate continues about whether productions should edit or even produce certain older, Golden Age musicals that contain material that is offensive within our current cultural context. Certainly, many revivals and new productions engage this material from a contemporary lens in hopes of making them more resonant and timely for new audiences. Casting is an arena that can allow a production staff to re-conceive such material. In his essay below, Julio Agustin explores the intentions, value, and reception of helping to create a new production of Guys and Dolls at Theatre Under the Stars in Houston that featured an all Latinx cast and re-conceived setting for this well-known classic.

INTRODUCED + EDITED BY

DAVID CALLAGHAN + ANN M. SHANAHAN

Braving the Challenges of Re-Envisioning the Classic Musical for a New Audience

BY JULIO

AGUSTIN, UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI

“We in leadership positions need to do everything we can to reflect the world we live in.”

– Bill Rauch, Artistic Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, to the New York Times

INTRODUCTION In what has become one of the most divided periods in US American history since the Civil War, fear and suspicion of “the other” pervade the not-so-“United” States of America. Residents voice intolerance of differing viewpoints. These expressions are no longer reserved for closed-door conversations between family and close friends, when relationships might supersede ideologies, nor are they limited to online trolling. Instead, biases are openly expressed, often without regard to civility. Residents of this country are frightened of each other and a quiet sense of panic invades the cultural space.

Given that the arts often reflect real life, it is no surprise that there has been an increase in the writing and production of plays about important and what some consider controversial subjects, such as immigration, women’s rights, Muslim heritage, and the concerns of LGBT communities. Starting in the 1970s, Augusto Boal aimed to combat oppression and incite social change with his Theatre of the Oppressed; he argued that theatre is “a platform whereby actors and audience can be ‘indirect activists,’ addressing their own individual and social issues, resolving them and thus contributing to the achievement of a better world” (Hassan). Boal asserted that all theatre is political and mirrors its community by prompting the “audience to become stakeholders in the play’s action and recognize the problems it presents as ones they encounter in society” (Schroeter). However, not all theatre is poised to be politically useful. Tony Kushner argued in an essay on political theatre that, aside from the rare theatrical box office hit, the “increasingly creepy spectacle” of commercial theatre is no longer the place where the greatest political impact is made (Kushner). He asserted that, with such long-running spectacles as The Phantom of the Opera and the myriad of animated film-to-

stage productions by Disney, it is in the regional houses where a call to action most often materializes. Hence, one method in which theatremakers of the regional circuit combat contemporary forms of inequality is by re-envisioning some of the most produced classic musical works with the needs and sensibilities of a contemporary audience at the forefront.

With this in mind, I decided to examine a recent professional collaboration as a case study in the challenges that come with re-envisioning the classic musical for a new audience. I was invited to choreograph the quintessential Golden Age musical Guys and Dolls with a Latinx “twist” at Houston’s long-running, not-for-profit institution, Theatre Under the Stars (TUTS), under newly appointed artistic director Dan Knechtges. The motivation for this Latinxinspired production of the classic musical stemmed from the previous season’s ultra-successful hit production In the Heights directed by Nicholas DeGruccio. Not only did the TUTS production cast twenty out of its twenty-three company members with Latinx identifying performers, but the theatre also successfully expanded its audience base as a result of its outreach in Houston, Texas, the country’s fourth largest Spanish-speaking city (Mitelman). Upon receiving approval from the estate, Knechtges and DeGruccio were emboldened to continue the momentum of the previous season by introducing the theatre’s bilingual audiences to the classic American musical Guys and Dolls. DeGruccio chose Guys and Dolls because its setting “lined up perfectly with the big influx of people to New York City from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. (Maines). Additionally, aside from providing opportunities to the Latinx theatre community, Knechtges and DeGruccio sought to honor the musical’s inherent traditions while simultaneously embracing the theatre’s objectives of education and outreach (Fig. 1).

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In terms of design elements, the look of the TUTS production was close to what one might expect from a typical production of Guys and Dolls and was lauded for similar reasons. In fact, the skeleton of the set was that of the national tour, adapted by our designer with, among other subtle elements, the insertion of bilingual signage that included “¡Papa Caliente!” in place of “Hot Box Nightclub.” The costume design, too, was careful not to veer too far from the traditional, yet was more authentic in patterns and details, especially in the scenes set in Havana and the Hot Box. Given that diversity in our production included the multiplicity of sizes, shapes, and hues representative of the LatinAmerican community, individual costumes celebrated a company that featured an actor who is also a little person dancing side by side with an actor standing 6’3” tall. Ultimately, the world of the play as created by the design team was highly successful in melding the two worlds of 1940s Times Square with the feel and flavor of the Caribbean and Mexican communities that frequented the Latin Quarter Nightclub.

culturally “other” at the time of production. Several early principal actors were, for example, Jewish, and Italian- and Irish-American, including Leila Martin (née Leila Markowitz) cast in the role of Sarah Brown, Robert Alda (né Alphonso Giuseppe Giovanni Roberto D’Abruzzo) in the role of Sky Masterson, and Helen Gallagher cast as Miss Adelaide. Over the musical’s history, actors with German, Irish, Russian, Spanish, Haitian, and Chinese or background have graced the stages of both Broadway revivals and in some of the nation’s top regional houses (Fig. 2).

Another more audacious approach to diversifying production is what I call “blanket race” casting—the exclusive casting of one race or ethnic group in a production. Examples of blanket race casting in theatre include the 1976 revival of Guys and Dolls starring Ernestine Jackson and Robert Guillaume, and more recently the 2009 Yale Rep production of Death of a Salesman, both of which featured companies cast solely of African American actors.

One important challenge to address when For this production, which reviewer Pnina experimenting with blanket race casting is Topham saw as a model for making classic delineating what entertainment journalist Nina musicals accessible to modern audiences, we Shen Rastogi calls “legitimate diversity versus identified goals in the following challenging FIG. 2 Alphonso Giuseppe Giovanni crass tokenism” (Rastogi). Playwright/activist areas: casting, choreography, community Roberto D’Abruzzo (Robert Alda) stars as Sky Masterson in the original Broadway Harry Newman reminds: “Non-traditional engagement, and critical response. The production of Guys and Dolls casting does not of necessity imply tokenism success of the project required casting a PHOTO age fotostock or loss of identity. It’s about having all artists majority of Latinx actors in a well-known, considered as individuals with individual classic musical, testing the potential criticism qualities, apart to belonging to groups based that such a project would encounter in the on often arbitrary distinctions such as skin color or ethnic origin.” media. The production faced head-on the issues of tokenism and Since its debut on Broadway in 1950, Guys and Dolls continues to be negative representations; strengthening the connection between touted as one of the most beloved theatrical musicals of the Golden community and the theatre; and reflecting a diverse audience Age era. Musicals of this period, considered to extend from 1943 community by embracing the varied textures of its language and until around the mid-60s, contain cohesive plots, as well as songs movement. In taking on this work, many practical strategies were and dances by developed characters that propel the story forward. tested and new strategies forged for re-imagining the classic musical Consequently, any changes to the show’s familiar conventions can as a way of making the stage a more inclusive and welcoming place often leave an audience feeling confused or even betrayed. However, for all. the show’s depiction of raucous neighborhood hijinks (illegal gambling), the fear of commitment (Nathan/Adelaide), and the thrill CASTING of the chase (Sky/Sarah) might be considered “universal” and not As a member of an ethnic minority making my way through New particular to any one race or ethnicity. These common themes provide York City’s mostly white musical theatre scene of the 1990s, very few opportunities for exploration with inclusion in mind. opportunities existed that did not perpetuate negative stereotypes, or as Hamilton’s Anthony Ramos puts it, “Pedro-the-drug-dealer” One challenge one might encounter in re-envisioning this classic roles (Reyes). This resulted in the frequent rejection of projects that musical is the misconception that inclusive casting is hard to did not align with my personal integrity. Yet despite the gains of the accomplish. Sadly, the fallacy regarding the scarcity of talent does not past twenty years, diversity in casting continues to be a problem exist solely within our industry. Alex Blumberg, CEO of Gimlet Media, that perplexes many in the industry. One approach to solving this was interviewed regarding the problem with homophily in expanding issue is the practice of non-traditional casting, i.e., “the casting of his digital media company’s network of connections: “We are a largely ethnic, minority and female actors in roles where race, ethnicity white organization in a historically pretty white industry. If we just sit or sex is not germane to character or play development” (Taylor). around and wait for people of color to apply for the jobs we post, we Regrettably, this statement leaves room for interpretation. Indeed, are going to stay that way” (Burkus). “We do a lot of scouting,” says much has been written by both critics and scholars on the merits of casting director Blanca Valdez regarding strategies for finding up-andnon-traditional casting. Theatre critic Ben Brantley’s 2015 review of coming Latinx talent. And writer Quiara Alegría Hudes advises that the blockbuster musical Hamilton, for example, discussed its relevance outreach and partnerships are also essential (Tran). In fact, the number and appeal, while writer/composer Lin-Manuel Miranda emphasized of talented triple-threat performers of Latinx ethnicity that attended the importance of having a “cast [that] looks like America looks now” our Guys and Dolls invited and open auditions was inspiring. Casting (Brantley). director Duncan Stewart of Stewart/Whitley Casting was aggressive in his efforts to reach out to the Latinx community: “Today, more It is a misconception to imagine that our casting project is a than ever, presenting a diverse pool of talent to our creative teams is contemporary innovation. There is a rich history of casting Guys paramount.” Stewart insists that “We have to conduct rigorous and and Dolls with immigrants, first- and second-generation Americans, extensive outreach and not just rely on (or expect) that this unique and actors of religions, races, and ethnicities that were considered

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pool of talent will come to us.” Through his efforts, the creative team was, indeed, graced with the attendance of many of Houston’s local Equity and non-union actors, as well as alumni of the Southwest’s best training institutions. Additionally, working professionals from such previous Broadway productions as In the Heights, On Your Feet!, West Side Story, and A Bronx Tale, in addition to stunning Latinx dancers from the Mark Taper Forum’s recent production of Zoot Suit, all vied for the chance to participate in our experiment. As the choreographer, I was honored by the turnout of superior talent and felt fortunate to have so many strong casting options.

CHOREOGRAPHY AND DANCE A major aspect of the dance callback process was ensuring that every person cast could handle the demands of the various movement styles incorporated into our production. Considering the stylistic intentions and shared skills of many of the actors from Houston’s Cuban, Mexican, Honduran, and El Salvadoran communities, we aimed to include as many authentic ballroom and social Latin dance styles as possible, as well as traditional theatre dance, in our version of the musical. The entire company in our production had to dance, and except for the characters of Sarah Brown, General Cartwright, and Lieutenant Brannigan, all had to be strong musical theatre performers in order to manage the demands of traditional theatre dance in the show. Additionally, the twelve-member dancing ensemble and various members of the Mission Band had to have strong abilities in ballet and jazz as well as experience in salsa, samba, and tango partnering styles.

As is typical with most professional choreographers, research began months in advance of the auditions and included pre-production work with a small team of dancers. Some initial inspiration was garnered from researching the work of Augustin Eggie Rodriguez and Margot Bartolomei, better known as Augie and Margo, a popular 1950s dance pair from the days of the Palladium known for their technically intricate, yet facile mambo moves.

During the audition, dancers were paired and asked to perform various lifts during the callback appointments as a way of testing their ability, chemistry, and energy. As a choreographer, I consider it essential in this type of project to push a dancer past their comfort zone during the callback process. Careful observation as to how a dancer handles the pressures of working closely with another performer is key to casting the “right” group of people; this is something many choreographers agree is an essential part of creating a safe and creative space for themselves and their corps of dancers (Fig. 3).

necessarily creating dance steps, but instead constructing partner dances that are both authentic in the particular Latinx style (salsa, samba, and tango), and also that replicate traditional pictures and patterns of the era. As a solution, the repetition of motifs with slight variations were incorporated throughout the dance numbers. This attention to detail ensured that an audience of mostly people who did not identify as Lantinx could relax into the familiar without becoming overwhelmed by the “exotic.” Additionally, the complicated and intricate weaving of arms, legs, heads, and torsos had to follow a natural progression so as to be teachable to a group of complete strangers on day one of rehearsals. Pictures were created to include circles of kerchief-swinging men around shimmying women, or unison box steps where the dancers’ individual arm-ography was enough variety to relay authenticity. All of this was accomplished by pairing couples whereby every man was assigned to dance with the same woman throughout most of the production. Again, this repetition allowed the audience to experience a sense of familiarity, and to relax into the story as told through dance.

As a veteran Bob Fosse dancer, I was also motivated to include my own conceptual twist by melding traditional Latin isolations with the whimsical unpredictability of Fosse’s vocabulary. An example of this was our mischievous, explosive, and audaciously cheeky nod to “The Rich Man’s Frug” from Sweet Charity, which was incorporated into our big everybody-dance number “Havana.” I was also inspired to include the Afro-Brazilian martial art movement capoeira and found the perfect location for this in the second act’s high-stakes betting number “The Crapshooters’ Dance.” This was accomplished by incorporating quick footwork and many changes of direction into the callback material, whereby these prospective gamblers were encouraged to showcase simple tumbling, off-center floor work, and arm-strength choreography. Ultimately, each dancer’s strengths were recognized and individually utilized in the capoeira-inspired “Crapshooters’ Dance.”

In daring to confront the challenges to re-imagining the classic musical for a new, more diverse audience, the final casting decisions made in our production of the Latin-inspired Guys and Dolls were to create a more multicultural company than originally anticipated; bilingual performers of Puerto Rican, Chilean, Cuban, Mexican, and Filipino descent were employed, as well as actors of Native American, African, and Western European heritage. In part, this decision was our way of avoiding exclusionary results in a project that aimed for inclusivity. Sadly, until our industry has moved beyond “whiteunderstood” casting and until a non-white person is no longer considered “diverse,” the need for productions such as ours continues to be paramount in advancing diversity in casting.

The greatest challenge, perhaps, in choreographing a musical with a short rehearsal process (ours was two weeks plus tech) is not

The Gamblers performing Capoeirainspired movement in “The Crapshooters’ Dance,” Guys and Dolls at TUTS PHOTO Melissa Taylor FIG. 3

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COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT Aside from providing more actors with the opportunity to portray some richly written and coveted roles of the Golden Age, one mission of TUTS’ Community Engagement Programming is to expand the community of theatre-goers through audience development, “by attracting more people of the surrounding ethnically diverse neighborhood(s)” (Harlow). This type of programming empowers the surrounding communities with “more people see[ing] themselves and their stories being portrayed onstage,” a process that has been deemed indispensable by artistic directors throughout the country towards the purpose of expanding and solidifying their audience base (Wong). The decision of director Nick DeGruccio to cast “Hispanics in nearly every major role is representative of our fast-growing population. In doing so, DeGruccio helmed a production that looks like the great tapestry of America today” (Topham).

Many top regional theatres throughout the country establish partnerships with multicultural institutions as a way of deepening the legitimacy and community engagement of their work. Geva Theatre’s 2017 production of In the Heights, for example, partnered with the community’s established Hispanic institution, the Rochester Latino Theatre Company. Additionally, there are also such longtime organizations as the Hispanic Organization for Latino Actors, Del Valle Casting, and Elsie Stark Casting that offer decades of experience representing bilingual performers at various levels of skill to producers seeking them.

In addition to engaging “non-traditional” audiences through casting and partnerships, our production also extended educational outreach in engaging younger community members. Sara Brunow, Director of Community Engagement at Theatre Under the Stars, coordinated a workshop between the young people of Houston’s Crespo Elementary Fine Arts Magnet School and various members of the Guys and Dolls company. Children ages six to fourteen who participated in the summer program were treated to a lively dance workshop in which they performed a number from the show, and then improvised steps showcasing their talents and personalities. “An incredibly important piece of arts education and arts engagement is recognizing, reflecting, and responding to the communities that surround us” reflected Brunow. “The cast members from Guys and Dolls who came to work with the young musical theatre performers at Crespo Elementary not only bonded over the love of an art form, they also had an in-depth conversation of what it means to them to be a Performer of Color in the industry today…. They talked about perseverance and knowing who you are, about strength and vulnerability, about being open and challenging those around you to tell the stories that need to be told.” One of the workshop facilitators, cast member Cedric Leiba Jr., expressed how moved he was through his interactions with the youth of Crespo Elementary: “These beautiful, talented young people were able to interact in fellowship with performers who looked like them, spoke their language, knew their culture.” Ultimately, approximately forty children and parents attended that evening’s performance in which they got to experience a classic musical performed by familiar faces that resembled their own (Fig. 4).

CRITICS The fourth consideration in re-imagining a traditional production for a contemporary audience is the response from the critics. Fortunately, a strong and versatile company of performers was cast that could execute the styles, energy, and athleticism of the distinctive dance vocabulary utilized in our production with excellence. Ultimately, the company of TUTS’ Guys and Dolls introduced audiences to the theatrical conventions of communities in which dance is integral to everyday life. The neighborhood we created was one where people danced for no reason, and for every occasion. Although not all critics

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FIG. 4

considered the casting revolutionary, the company was celebrated nonetheless: “The ensemble cast is sexy and fantastic in all the numbers, and I think that alone made this one of my favorite things I have seen at TUTS in terms of sheer talent” (Wilson).

One reviewer revered the use of the “Latinx casting to infuse exciting dance numbers that are so energetic and well-executed you feel at times that you are watching the finals of Dancing with the Stars,” while another observed that the preshow announcement informing the audience of the Latinx-inspired choices seemed more like a warning to the “traditionalists about the brown people with accents” that they were about to encounter (Wilson, Chen). The need for the later caution is remarkable, given that the 2001 Arena Stage production of this musical with multicultural casting was reproached as being “hardly new these days” (Jones). There were still other critics who criticized the production’s “Latin flair” as vacillating “between being a grating, overzealous attempt at fashionable diversity and a rare opportunity to see non-white performers express the kind of sexuality, complexity, humor and agency rarely (almost never) granted to them during Broadway’s Golden Age” (Chen). One of the less successful elements in our production was use of dialects; unfortunately, the coach was brought in later in the process. Reviewers commented that the regional, national, and ethnic dialects were distracting (Topham).

Ultimately, the negative criticism that came post-production was superseded by positives in favor of the work. Such contradictory responses confirm the need to continue developing this type of project. Not every decision will yield solely positive responses, but a lack of change simply perpetuates a status quo—something we cannot afford.

CONCLUSION In braving the challenges of re-envisioning the classic musical for more audiences, I learned that careful planning, flexibility, and openness are crucial; that any socially conscious attempt at disrupting traditional theatre is best approached as an experiment.

In our production, the areas of casting, choreography, community engagement, and critical success all depended upon the melding of the traditional approaches with new ideas inspired by our mission.

As the choreographer, I found it was essential to avoid being heavy handed in my work, and instead to allow myself to question my choices, knowing that the “right” answers might not yet exist, and that even the “best” solutions might not become apparent until late in the process (if ever). This method of working paid off in both audience reception and critical response. We were committed to asking how to honor a work of art while infusing it with relevance for a contemporary audience. In our attempts to answer this, I am confident that we suggested antidotes to the inequality that exists in our professional industry today. By introducing a classic work to a new and more inclusive generation of theatre-goers, we were successful in embracing Augusto Boal’s directive—addressing our “own individual and social issues, resolving them and thus contributing to the achievement of a better world.”

WORKS CITED

Brantley, Ben. “Hamilton Young Rebels Changing History.” New York Times, 6 Aug. 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/08/07/theater/ review-hamilton-young-rebels-changing-history-and-theater. html. Accessed 14 July 2018.

Brunow, Sara. Personal interview. 12 Oct. 2018.

Burkus, David. “Resist Homophily.” Friend of a Friend…: Understanding the Hidden Networks That Can Transform Your Life and Your Career, 1 May 2018, pp.170-71.

Chen, Wei-Huan. “Don’t Think Too Hard and TUTS’ Modernized ‘Guys and Dolls’ Works.” Houston Chronicle, 15 June 2018, www. houstonchronicle.com/entertainment/arts-theater/article/ReviewDon-t-think-too-much-and-TUTS-12998902.php. Accessed 7 Aug. 2018.

Harlow, Bob. “Staying Relevant in a Changing Neighborhood.” Musical America, June 2016, www.musicalamerica.com/specialreports/ AUDIENCE-DEVELOP_2016.pdf. Accessed 13 July 2018.

Hassan, Dima El. “The Role of Theater in Promoting Social Change.”

Hariri Foundation, 21 June 2016, www.hariri-foundation.org/therole-of-theater-in-promoting-social-change/. Accessed 13 July 2018.

Isherwood, Charles. “The Oregon Shakespeare Festival Focuses on Diversity.” New York Times, 2 Sept. 2015, www.nytimes. com/2015/09/06/theater/the-oregon-shakespeare-festival- focuses-on-diversity.html. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.

Jones, Chris. “Guys and Dolls.” Variety, 5 Oct. 2001, www.variety. com/2001/legit/reviews/guys-and-dolls-12-1200553496/.

Accessed 7 Aug. 2018.

Kushner, Tony. “Notes about Political Theater.” The Kenyon Review, vol.

19, no. 3/4, Summer-Autumn 1997, pp. 19-34. JSTOR, www.jstor. org/stable/4337551. Accessed 24 Oct. 2018.

Leiba Jr., Cedric. “TUTS Cast of Guys and Dolls Visits Crespo Elementary.” YouTube, 18 July 2018. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=7RAjDrxR-Xw. Accessed 12 Sep. 2018.

Maines, Don. “Out Director Puts Some Latin Twists on a Classic at TUTS.” Out Smart, 27 Sept. 2018, www.nickdegruccio.com/singlepost/2018/09/27/Out-Director-Puts-Some-Latin-Twists-on-aClassic-at-TUTS. Accessed 24 Oct. 2018.

Mitelman, Josh. “Harris County Has 2nd-largest Hispanic Population in U.S.” Houston Business Journal, 4 Sept. 2013, www.bizjournals. com/houston/news/2013/09/03/houston-brazoria-metro-areahas.html. Accessed 24 July 2018.

Neman, Harry. “Holding Back: The Theatre’s Resistance to NonTraditional Casting.” TDR, vol. 33, no. 3, Autumn 1989, pp.22-36.

JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1145985. Accessed 29 Oct. 2018.

Rastogi, Nina Shen. “Please Submit All Ethnicities.” Slate Magazine, 30 July 2012, www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/07/ casting_and_race_the_tricky_business_of_writing_casting_notices. html. Accessed 21 July 2018.

Reyes, Raul A. “Broadway Latinos Succeed on the Great White Way.” NBC News, 8 Jan. 2016, www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/ broadway-latinos-succeed-great-white-way-n475546. Accessed 11 June 2018.

Schroeter, Sara. “‘The Way It Works’ Doesn’t: Theatre of the Oppressed as Critical Pedagogy and Counternarrative.” Canadian Journal of Education / Revue Canadienne de L’éducation, vol.

36, no. 4, 2013, pp. 394-415. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/ canajeducrevucan.36.4.394. Accessed 28 Oct. 2018.

Taylor, Clark. “Non-traditional Casting Explored at Symposium.” Los Angeles Times, 29 Nov. 1986, www.articles.latimes.com/1986-1129/entertainment/ca-16057_1_traditional-casting. Accessed 13 July 2018.

Topham, Pnina. “A Modern Twist on the Classic Tale – Guys and Dolls at Theatre Under the Stars.” BroadwayWorld.com, 17 June 2018, www.broadwayworld.com/houston/article/BWW-Review-AModern-Twist-on-the-Classic-Tale-GUYS-DOLLS-at-TheatreUnder-the-Stars-20180617. Accessed 7 Aug. 2018.

Tran, Diep. “Whitewash In the Heights? Chicago, You Can Do Better.” American Theatre, 27 July 2016, www.americantheatre. org/2016/07/27/whitewash-in-the-heights-chicago-you-can-dobetter/. Accessed 18 July 2018.

Wilson, Doni. “Talent Triumphs over Type in TUTS’ Guys and Dolls.”

Houstonia Arts and Culture, 15 June 2018, www.houstoniamag. com/articles/2018/6/15/guys-and-dolls-review-tuts. Accessed 18 July 2018.

Wong, E. San San. “How New Audiences Came through Our Doors.”

Barr Foundation, 22 July 2015, www.barrfoundation.org/blog/ boston-arts-audience-diversification. Accessed 13 July 2018.

JULIO AGUSTIN, choreographer, is author of The Professional Actor’s Handbook: From Casting Call to Curtain Call (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). Award nominations include Audelco (Sweet Charity at New Haarlem Arts Theatre, NYC), Houston Press (Guys and Dolls at TUTS), and Syracuse Area Live Theatre (In the Heights at Hangar Theatre).

Performing credits include featured roles in the Broadway musicals Chicago and Bells Are Ringing (revival), in addition to appearing in the original Broadway companies of Fosse, Never Gonna Dance, Steel Pier, and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Julio runs a monthly audition studio in New York City (www.JulioAgustin.com). He holds an MFA in Directing from Penn State University and is an assistant professor at the University of Miami. Julio is a member of SDC, AEA, SAG, AFTRA, VASTA, and ATHE.

PRS BOOK REVIEW A Director’s Guide to Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis

By James Thomas Including the Formative Essay on Active Analysis by Maria Knebel BLOOMSBURY, 2018; 167 PP. $29.96 PAPERBACK James Thomas’s A Director’s Guide to Stanislavky’s Active Analysis offers a systematic look at theories of Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863–1938) on stage direction, which developed later in his life. In this short volume, Thomas weaves together disparate ideas, illuminating the Russian director’s unified approach to stage direction.

Contemporary champions of Stanislavsky often contend with bias against his system based on misperceptions that have built up over time. In this tradition, Thomas begins with a common refrain: “[Stanislavsky’s] ideas have transformed acting and directing… and have contributed to the psychological depth and continuing vitality of the modern theatre as a whole. His ideas are also blamed for scores of the modern theatre’s excesses and eccentricities that have arisen since his time” (xii).

According to Thomas, ineffective translations, misunderstanding, and misinterpretation all contribute to biases that form when artists and scholars read about Stanislavsky generally, rather than engage in the careful study of his original texts. Further complicating the issue in relation to Active Analysis—Stanislavsky’s system of directing formulated in his final years—is the fact that his later thinking is recorded sporadically, especially as it pertains to the rehearsal process.

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shifts. A Director’s Guide to Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis attempts to remedy these concerns with an authoritative account of what Thomas argues is the culmination—not the revision—of Stanislavsky’s theories on directing.

Although unquestionably valuable, the book is difficult to navigate structurally as the reader must pay tediously close attention to prefacing remarks and introductory passages to identify the voices of the book’s two authors. Furthermore, the close relation of the term Active Analysis to Action Analysis requires the reader’s unwavering diligence to keep them distinct. The book is written in two parts, both with multiple chapters. Thomas indicates that the parts may be read out of sequence based on the needs and desires of the reader.

“Part One: A Director’s Work with Active Analysis” offers a practical illustration of the system though analysis of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; this section is particularly useful for stage directors wanting a step-by-step guide for putting Stanislavsky’s program into practice.

“Part Two: Active Analysis of the Play and the Role,” articulates the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the system, using Thomas’s translation of Maria Knebel’s formative essay on Active Analysis. An influential director and teacher, Knebel was one of Stanislavsky’s prized students, with whom he worked closely near the end of his life.

Veteran stage directors will be familiar with the recommendations outlined early in Part One, but a less experienced director would do well to study these with care. For example, while a beginning director might take genre for granted—working from the assumption that it mainly governs style or idiom—Stanislavsky considers genre relational and active. This valuable insight has useful implications for a director’s approach to design and rehearsals.

In chapter three of Part One, Thomas outlines the preliminary step that Stanislavsky thought directors must take with actors before entering into rehearsals. This work, referred to as Active Analysis, begins with a relatively short period of “around-the-table” work; the shortness reflects an important change instigated by Stanislavsky who previously, along with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and the Moscow Art Theatre, had insisted on extensive, meticulous table work with the actors. Thomas uses Knebel’s codified expression of action analysis—itself based on her work with Stanislavsky during his final years. This process recasts literary terms like plot and theme as actable formulations. These formulations, like through-action, comprise a necessary shared language that helps directors and actors together “think eventfully” about what the play means.

After some idiosyncratic remarks by Stanislavsky himself, Thomas introduces the etude process, the bona fide entry point into Active Analysis. An etude is an acted sketch with an improvised text. A clear action analysis is important for this process because it allows for an actor to improvise text based on reliable analysis of the circumstances of the play. Creating etudes enhances the actor’s imaginative encounter with the text, assisting them to develop more specific, nuanced behaviors on stage tied directly to the Action Analysis.

While this might sound like an actor’s technique, it is for the director, who is obliged to have his or her attention simultaneously on the actor, the text, the working analysis, and the director’s staging plan in order to guide the actor. Directors will find this a challenge to orchestrate, but the reward is great. According to Thomas, “Etudes ensure that the actors comprehend and express what lies beneath the text and not merely on the surface of it. After all, beneath the text is where behavior exists” (55). Or, as Knebel puts it in her essay, “These etudes, or sketches, serve as stepping-stones that lead the actor towards creative assimilation of the author’s text, that is, to the author’s words as the principal means of stage expressiveness” (87).

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From a directorial perspective, this process marries text and action in a way that renders a deeply meaningful performance for everyone participating in the theatrical experience.

Although the etude is at the heart of Active Analysis, Thomas also addresses blocking and physical characterization within Stanislavsky’s methodology, and throughout the text, he provides exercises that anticipate practical questions from the reader. Thomas offers some concluding remarks about realities of using Active Analysis in rehearsals, within the time constraints of a Western straight-run system of theatre production.

Part Two contains Thomas’s translation of Maria Knebel’s account of Stanislavsky’s later rehearsal practices. Knebel was a Russian actor, director, and teacher who trained with Stanislavsky, as well as with Nemirovich-Danchenko and Michael Chekhov. She is considered the pioneer practitioner of Active Analysis and one of the most important Russian theatre practitioners of the twentieth century.

Like Thomas, Knebel begins by defending the great Russian director.

She accurately identifies the “crude simplifications” that work to “undermine Stanislavsky’s once-experimental technique” (86). Knebel also criticizes theoretical conclusions unsupported by “practical examples of how we actually work” (86). Throughout the essay, Knebel accounts for how she understands and uses Stanislavsky’s later developments when making theatre herself. Nonetheless, Knebel’s discussion also satisfies readers seeking the theoretical and historical underpinnings of Active Analysis.

Thomas provides a practical illustration of Active Analysis via the rehearsal of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Part One, while in Part Two, Knebel contextualizes the technique from within the theoretical framework of Stanislavsky’s ever-developing approaches to rehearsal. Knebel offers practical insights into the technique, while retracing Stanislavsky’s rationale for rethinking and further developing his earlier work. For example, as previously noted, later in his career Stanislavsky reconsidered the usefulness of extensive table work. While an actor’s and director’s meticulous analysis of the meaning of the play became a hallmark of Russian theatre practice under Stanislavsky’s influence, Knebel explains that in his later years “Stanislavsky rebelled against the earlier way of preparing a performance, which he helped to originate himself, and he began instead to defend passionately a new way in which the play is analyzed in action, in etudes [sketches] with an improvised text” (94).

Thomas’s text helps illustrates that this shift in approach does not work at cross-purposes with Stanislavsky’s previous methods. Instead, Active Analysis marries the mental and physical work of the actor as the very mode by which the director best approaches and interprets the playwright’s text for performance.

A Director’s Guide to Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis is not an easy text for beginners. While there are salient concepts and methods the emerging director should begin to employ, the text offers advanced practitioners useful insights and techniques. The reader will find the text challenging to navigate. In the end, however, what Thomas offers for directors of varying experience is well worth sifting through the structural difficulties of the book.

PATRICIA J. MCKEE NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY

REMEMBERING ALVIN EPSTEIN

BY JESSE

BERGER

Cameron Folmar + Alvin Epstein in Volpone at Red Bull Theater, directed by Jesse Berger PHOTO Carol Rosegg

We were all worried. It was first preview. Alvin had not yet been able to get through a runthrough of the play without going up on his lines. This was a fast-paced Jacobean comedy.

What were we going to do?

breaks, earning his trust and running lines.

(Lucky him, I thought! He gets to hear some of the great stories of the American theatre.)

Cameron learned both his and Alvin’s lines in their biggest scene together, just in case.

When the message came via his agents that Alvin Epstein was interested in playing a role in my production of Ben Jonson’s Volpone, starring Stephen Spinella in the title role at Red Bull Theater, I didn’t believe it. “The Alvin Epstein? Seriously?” I wrote Stuart Howard, our longtime casting director. “YES” was the reply. Alvin accepted our offer to play the hilarious Corbaccio, the rich but deaf “crow” hoping to make a killing on Volpone’s fortune—among a few other vultures played with delightful mendacity by Tovah Feldshuh, Michael Mastro, and Rocco Sisto.

Once, on a break from rehearsal, Alvin was sitting on a chair near our giant prop bed.

The rest of the cast had dispersed to the green room, but Alvin had stayed on the taped-out rehearsal room stage. I asked Alvin how he was feeling. He said something like, “I wake up and feel like a young man.

It’s only when I stand up and feel the aches and look in the mirror that the wrinkles tell me differently. I’m glad to be working. This is fun.” That made my day. It still does. There the great Alvin Epstein was, in his eighties or nineties or five hundreds, assaying a role in Volpone, feeling young inside, and glad to be part of the fun.

From the first day of rehearsal to our last performance, Alvin was our Yoda. (How old was he? Eighty? Ninety? Four hundred? He was clearly an elder, but his spirit seemed as youthful and playful as Puck.) Alvin wouldn’t push his wisdom on anyone, but he was never shy with a wry remark and remarkable insight. Time and again, we would look to Alvin in a moment of confusion, and he would cut to the chase with an observation to settle it all, delivered with his gentle yet decidedly acerbic wit. We were all proud to be working with a man who carried half of modern American theatre history with him, but we didn’t spend time on that—we had a play to do.

Hurricane Sandy blew through New York in the middle of our rehearsals. Half the cast were stranded for days, some without running water or electricity at home.

Somehow, we managed to keep it together through tech. But Alvin still wasn’t able to get through the play. He knew all the lines; he just couldn’t get them all out in a single run. Cameron Folmar, the wonderful actor playing Mosca, spent extra time with Alvin on

But there we all were, at rehearsal on the day of our first preview, worried. Plenty of other things in the production needed to be made better, and we were working on them all, but even so—would the play be stopped dead in its tracks during Alvin’s big scene?

It brings a big grin to my face to remember that performance—Alvin hit every mark, nailed every line, got every laugh, and, I’m pretty sure, got the biggest laughs of the night. Volpone was on its way to becoming one of our biggest successes at Red Bull. And, as I remember it, from the moment Alvin had a real audience to play for, he was at the top of his game. Ah-ha, I thought—the master still knows when to turn it on. Our worries were banished. He was there for us, and the audience, right on cue. We were lucky to have him.

Bravo, and thank you, Alvin.

ALVIN EPSTEIN, a classical stage actor and director with a six-decade career, died on December 10, 2018, at the age of 93.

Born in New York City, Epstein began music studies at Queens College before serving in the army in Germany during World War II. After the war, he studied dance with Martha Graham and mime in Paris.

He performed with Marcel Marceau on Broadway in 1955; then, in 1956, Epstein played the Fool in King Lear on Broadway opposite Orson Welles and originated the role of Lucky in the Broadway premiere of Waiting for Godot. He soon earned a reputation for being a master interpreter of Samuel Beckett’s plays, both as a director and actor, and performed numerous Beckett roles, including all three male roles in Endgame. He was also a consummate actor and director of Shakespeare and Brecht.

Epstein became a founding member and Associate Director of the Yale Repertory Theatre, under Robert Brustein, in 1966. In the late 1970s, he served briefly as Artistic Director of the Guthrie Theater, then rejoined Brustein when he established the American Repertory Theater (ART) at Harvard. He acted in more than 50 productions there and directed more than 20 plays. His 1975 Yale Rep production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with a cast that included Danny Brustein, Christopher Lloyd, Carmen de Lavallade, and Meryl Streep, was remounted in 1980 as the inaugural production at ART, starring Cherry Jones, Tony Shalhoub, and Carmen de Lavallade (who also served as choreographer). It became a signature piece of ART and toured Europe and China.

Epstein’s other Broadway acting credits include From A to Z, No Strings, The Passion of Josef D., Postmark Zero, A Place Without Door, and The Threepenny Opera.

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REMEMBERING MARK BRAMBLE

BY RANDY

It’s hard to believe that I knew Mark for nearly 40 years. And it’s also hard to believe that he’s gone, his life taken so suddenly this past February. We were all shocked and saddened as telephone calls were made during the several days following his death. Mark was both a wonderful friend and working colleague, and together we shared many productions of 42nd Street, from the original production in 1980 to the 2001 Broadway revival to the recent West End revival. I am so pleased the show was filmed near the end of its run in London and there will be a lasting record of the final version Mark directed.

British Equity allows the “swing” dancers to be on stage as part of the cast when they are not filling in and replacing another dancer’s track. One day during our London audition sessions, I mentioned to Mark that this would be the biggest company in the history of the show. On the opening night of April 4, 2017, every ensemble member and swing dancer was present and able to perform. When the curtain rose on “The Audition” number,

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SKINNER

we had 42 dancers plus the characters of Andy Lee and Annie Reilly tapping on the stage of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

It was really something to behold. Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, was in attendance, and Mark did a beautiful job of presenting her at the curtain call. It was a very memorable night for all who were present, and Mark was absolutely glowing with joy.

Together, Mark and I traveled to many cities and countries, and we witnessed many times over the joy that 42nd Street brings to performers and audiences. I will always treasure those memories and experiences with him. Mark will be remembered and greatly missed by all who were fortunate to know him and work with him.

MARK BRAMBLE, a director, author, and producer best known for his contributions to the Broadway musicals Barnum and 42nd Street, died on February 20, 2019, at the age of 69. He was a three-time Tony Award nominee: Best Book of a Musical for Barnum

(1980) and 42nd Street (1981), and Best Direction of a Musical for 42nd Street (2001).

Bramble began his theatrical career as an apprentice in 1971 in the office of David Merrick, for whom he worked on many Broadway productions. He made his Broadway debut in 1978 as the book writer on the Jerry Herman musical The Grand Tour.

Next, he wrote the book for the Cy Coleman musical Barnum and co-authored 42nd Street, which won the 1981 Tony for Best Musical and ran for nearly 3,500 performances. His other librettos include The Three Musketeers, Pieces of Eight, Fat Pig, and the Off-Broadway opera Elizabeth & Essex.

Bramble directed the 2001 Tony Awardwinning Broadway revival of 42nd Street, as well as productions in London, Sydney, Shanghai, Tokyo, Amsterdam, and Vienna.

His recent 2017 West End production ran for almost two years and was nominated for an Olivier Award.

THE SOCIETY PAGES SDC MEMBERS @ WORK + PLAY

Jonathan Moscone and SDC Director of Communications Joyce Friedmann represented SDC at Arts Advocacy Day in Washington, DC, on March 5. There, they joined Union partner representatives from I.A.T.S.E., SAG-AFTRA, AEA, AFM, and the Department of Professional Employees, AFL-CIO (DPE)/Arts Entertainment and Media Industries (AEMI). Together, they advocated for federal arts funding, intellectual property (IP) protections and copyright policy, and modifications to the qualified performing artist (QPA) tax deduction in the 2017 tax reform bill. Moscone and Friedmann met with senators and aides from numerous Senate offices across the country, as well as representatives from Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office.

Senator Kamala Harris’s office with aide Kendrick Davis, Jonathan Moscone, Joyce Friedmann + colleagues from Northern California

LEFT

BELOW Maryland Senator Ben Cardin + Union advocates

SDC hosted a Seattle Member Night Out on March 27 at the Village Theatre in Issaquah, WA. Seattle-area Members and Associates gathered for a pre-show reception, where they were welcomed by Artistic Director Jerry Dixon and Associate Artistic Director and Seattle Steering Committee Member Brandon Ivie. The gathering was followed by a performance of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (LEFT), directed by Dixon.

PHOTO

Tracy Martin

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SDC Chicago-area colleagues were joined

by Director of Member Services Barbara Wolkoff and Contract Affairs Representative Adam Levi for a Chicago Member Night Out on March 31, which included a pre-theatre social hour, followed by Ike Holter’s Lottery Day, directed by Lili-Anne Brown, at the Goodman Theatre.

Also in Chicago, SDC presented a panel discussion entitled “Reimagining the Classics” on April 1, moderated by (TOP) SDC Executive Board Member Lisa Portes and featuring Ron OJ Parson, Lili-Anne Brown, Jess McLeod, Chuck Smith, and Barbara Gaines.

Randy Anderson + Adam Levi

Lisa Portes + Michael Wilson

SDC hosted a table at Center Theatre Group’s Going Pro Career Fair on April 20 at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Co-presented by LA STAGE Alliance; the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television; Chapman University College of Performing Arts; and the USC School of Dramatic Arts, the event was geared toward undergraduate and graduate students interested in a professional theatre career. SDC LA Steering Committee Members Allison Bibicoff, Gregg Daniel, Elina de Santos, and Janet Miller represented SDC at the table while other local Members participated in mentorship sessions and provided audition feedback throughout the day.

Gregg Daniel with resource fair attendee

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Allison Bibicoff + Elina de Santos

Original Little Shop of Horrors choreographer Edie Cowan mentors students at Harvest Collegiate High School in NYC on staging their production of the show.

The Semi-Annual Membership Meeting, held on April 22, enjoyed a large audience of SDC Members, Board Members, and staff, both live at Sunshine Studios in NYC and via video streaming across the country. President Pam MacKinnon opened the meeting by welcoming new Members and Associate Members and recognizing the Regional Representatives for the organizing and events occurring around the country.

She then presented the State of the Union, noting the Union’s growth over the last 10 years, citing the increase from 2017 to 2018 in both contracts (up 4%) and Membership (up 3%). Executive Director Laura Penn gave a preview of the Union’s 60th anniversary planned events; Director of Contract Affairs Randy Anderson reported on upcoming negotiations, including the Broadway Agreement, Off-Broadway Agreement, and ANTC Agreement, among others; Contract Affairs Funds Liaison Suzette Porte, along with Penn as a Funds Trustee, reported on upcoming changes in Customer Service for the SDC-League Funds; Director of Finance Cole Jordan, Board Treasurer Michael Wilson, and auditor Michael Van Sertima gave an overview of the financial standings of the Union and confirmed a clean audit for fiscal year 2018; Rebecca Hewett was welcomed warmly as the new Executive Director of the SDC Foundation; and Director of Member Services Barbara Wolkoff gave a report on Member activity throughout the country. The meeting ended with a conversation regarding a proposed By-law change and a Q&A with MacKinnon and Penn. Following the meeting, Members joined staff at the SDC Offices for a toast to SDC’s 60th anniversary!

LEFT Suzette

Porte

Cole Jordan + Michael Wilson

Mark Martino, Shea Sullivan + Pam MacKinnon

CENTER

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Gus Kaikkonen, Edie Cowan, Nick Corley + Mark Martino

RIGHT

BELOW

Sarah Young + Matthew Earnest

BELOW RIGHT

ABOVE RIGHT

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Ines Braun + Artur Makaryan

Diana Van Fossen + Lisa Pelikan

Laura Penn + Pam MacKinnon

SDC JOURNAL | SUMMER 2019

On April 29, the Los Angeles Steering Committee welcomed Members to an LA Member Night Out, which included a cocktail hour followed by a performance of Cicely Hamilton’s Diana of Dobson’s, directed by Casey Stangl at Antaeus Theatre.

Tim Dang, Allison Bergman + Lewis Wilkenfeld

LEFT

CENTER

Lillian Groag + Kate Jopson

RIGHT Paul Millet, Emily Chase, Casey Stangl + Michael Arabian

George C. Wolfe will receive the 2019 SDC Director Award for Exemplary Collaboration with Choreographers on Broadway at the Chita Rivera Awards. Wolfe was joined by Marcia Milgrom Dodge, SDCF Executive Director Rebecca Hewett, and Chita Award nominees at the Chita Rivera Awards Nominee Announcement Reception on April 29 in NYC. Congratulations to this year’s SDC Member Chita Rivera Awards nominees: For Outstanding Choreography, Broadway: Warren Carlyle, Kiss Me, Kate; Denis Jones, Tootsie; David Neumann, Hadestown; Casey Nicholaw, The Prom; Sergio Trujillo, Ain’t Too Proud For Outstanding Choreography, Off-Broadway: Joshua Bergasse, Smokey Joe’s Cafe; Raja Feather Kelly, If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must Be a Muhfucka; Rick and Jeff Kuperman, Alice by Heart; Lorin Latarro, Merrily We Roll Along; Shea Sullivan, Neurosis: A Musical That Gets in Your Head For Theatrical Release (film choreography): Choreographer Christopher Gattelli and Assistant Choreographer Jon Rua, Isn’t It Romantic; and choreographers Rob Marshall and John DeLuca and co-choreographer Joey Pizzi for Mary Poppins Returns.

The Prom choreographer Casey Nicholaw + Chita Rivera Award-nominated Oustanding Ensemble PHOTO Christopher Duggan

ABOVE

LEFT

George C. Wolfe + Joe Lanteri Christopher Duggan

PHOTO RIGHT

Marcia Milgrom Dodge + Rebecca Hewett

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Regional Presence Committee Member Kate Warner and SDC Director of Member Services Barbara Wolkoff were joined by Atlanta-area Members for an Atlanta Member Night Out on April 30 at the Aurora Theatre, hosted by Justin Anderson.

Members enjoyed a social hour, followed by a performance of Karen Zacarias’s Native Gardens, directed by Daniel Jaquez.

Justin Anderson, David de Vries, Kate Warner, Daniel Jaquez, Anthony Rodriguez + Barbara Wolkoff

ABOVE

LEFT

Jamil Jude + Barbara Wolkoff

On May 6, SDC hosted a Spring Summit in Seattle at the Seattle Repertory Theatre. The day was designed to facilitate a space for directors and choreographers to engage in conversation with each other around the craft, to raise the profile of Northwest directors and choreographers, and to encourage increased community through SDC. Members, Associate Members, and their invited guests participated in two afternoon conversations entitled “Approaches to First Rehearsal” and “Approaches to Staging Intimacy.”

Attendees were later joined by the general public for a conversation with Tony Taccone, Artistic Director of Berkeley Repertory Theatre, entitled “Leadership: Making Theatre & Shaping Communities.”

Moderated by SDC Executive Director Laura Penn, this conversation explored the balancing of artistic leadership and individual artistic ambition, and how that dynamic can build strong institutions and contribute to a community’s cultural vibrancy.

ABOVE LEFT

Desdemona Chiang + summit participants

Laura Penn + Tony Taccone Austin James

PHOTOS

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Choreographer HELEN TAMIRIS, a founding Member of SDC, was one of the great pioneers in the development of modern dance in America.

Born and raised in New York City, Tamiris trained at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School and danced professionally with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet Company for several seasons. She went on to co-found the Dance Repertory Theatre with Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman. Tamiris eventually formed her own School of American Dance, where she taught and performed for 12 years. In 1960, she started a new dance company with her husband and dancing partner, Daniel Nagrin.

As the first president of the American Dance Association, Tamiris played an integral role in making dance a part of the Federal Theatre Project under the Works Progress Administration (WPA). She served as the Federal Theatre Project’s chief choreographer in New York from 1937 to 1939. Her concert piece How Long Brethren? ran for six months and earned her a 1937 Dance Magazine Award.

Much of her work used dance to explore social and political issues, including prejudice and discrimination. She is best known on Broadway for her choreography for Up in Central Park, Annie Get Your Gun, Touch and Go, By the Beautiful Sea, and Fanny. She won the Tony Award for choreography for her work on Plain and Fancy in 1955.

“

My aim is to define the vigor and intensity of contemporary American life by means of the dance.

” SDC LEGACY HELEN TAMIRIS 1905–1966

PHOTO

Photofest

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Taber • Anthony Taccone • Rebecca Taichman • Paul Takacs • Daniel Talbott • Linda Talcott Lee • Tony Tambasco • Peggy Taphorn • Dana Tarantino • John Tartaglia Chris Tashima • Nadia Tass • Ashley Tata • Jason Paul Tate • Lars Tatom • Michelle Tattenbaum • Richard Tatum • Gregory Taubman • Vida Tayebati • Sonya Tayeh Michelle Taylor • Regina Taylor • Lynne Taylor-Corbett • Danya Taymor • Julie Taymor • Ashley Teague • Teller • Paul James Tenaglia • Susan Tenney • Laura Tesman 64 SDC JOURNAL | SUMMER 2019 Twyla Tharp • Ginger Thatcher • Jessica Thebus • Eric Thibodeaux-Thompson • Missy Thibodeaux-Thompson • Cynthia Thole • Laurie Thomas • Sheriden Thomas...