TCG Gala: Our Stories - Celebrating 60 Years of TCG

TCG GALA

MAY 18, 2021 THEATRE COMMUNICATIONS GROUP

Celebrating TCG’s 60TH ANNIVERSARY PLUS: PERFORMING ARTS ALLIANCE with Dr. Michelle Ramos, Board Chair RICARDO KHAN INSTITUTION-AS-ARTWORK

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TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S MAY2021

20 MICHELLE RAMOS: CHANGE FROM WITHIN A former dancer, now on the board of the Performing Arts Alliance, Ramos is on a mission to redistribute the nation’s cultural bounty. By Brittani Samuel

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RICARDO KHAN: AT THE CROSSROADS One of the regional theatre’s founding generation, he’s now back at the 43-year-old New Jersey company he co-founded.

By Marshall Jones III

INSTITUTION-ASARTWORK

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We may not have realized we were building long-lasting institutions to make theatre.

But now that we have them, what should we do with them?

By Zelda Fichandler

EVENT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS TCG would like to thank the following for their help in making this event a success: Dedra Bailey Anne Ciarlone Monet Cogbill Ryan Crane André De Shields Ciara Diane Austin Donohue Trey Ellis Rachael Hip Flores Murray Horwitz Shawna James Marshall Jones III Jane Lui Sibusiso Mamba Samuel Morreale Dick Nurse Earnest Offley, Drinks With Your Enclave Board of Directors of Oregon Shakespeare Festival Erica Lauren Ortiz Joe Rossi Corinna Schulenburg Peg Schuler-Armstrong Emilia Smart-Denson Natalie Smith Suzanne Tobak Carol Van Keuren Clara Vaughan

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

Teresa Eyring

D E PA R T M E N T S 2 WELCOME eresa Eyring, Adrian Budhu, T Nikkole Salter

4 PROGRAM 6 TCG LEADERSHIP HONOREES

8 RICARDO KHAN

1 0 THE PERFORMING ARTS ALLIANCE Dr. Michelle Ramos

1 2 ENTRANCES 1 8 HONORARY COMMITTEE 30 ROLE CALL 4 4 ABOUT TCG

DEPUTY DIRECTOR AND CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER

Adrian Budhu

THEATRE COMMUNICATIONS GROUP, THE NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR THEATRE, LEADS FOR A JUST AND THRIVING THEATRE ECOLOGY.

WELCOME

Eyring

Budhu

60 YEARS AGO, TCG WAS FOUNDED BY A GROUP OF theatre-makers with an audacious vision. They dreamed of a resident theatre movement taking root in communities across the country, liberating artists from the commercial constraints of Broadway to bring theatre to the people. Back then, envisioning 30-40 such theatres seemed bold. Today, almost two thousand not-for-profit theatres connect more than 38 million audience members to 21,000 productions annually. On stages large and small, in rural areas and cities, in parks and in the streets, the resident theatre movement has brought people together to reimagine a more perfect union.

It was also around 60 years ago that the Civil Rights movement won some of its most significant victories. Our movements have always been intertwined, with artistry and activism feeding each other to create a more just and thriving society. At the heart of that intersection stands Crossroads Theatre Company, the Tony-award winning Black theatre co-founded by L. Kenneth Richardson and tonight’s honoree, Ricardo Khan. Since its founding in 1978, Crossroads has produced over 100 works, many of which were premiere productions by the world’s leading African and African American artists. In addition to his work at Crossroads, Ricardo is a beloved director, writer, and educator who also served as president of TCG’s Board. He has profoundly shaped our theatre movement for the better, and we’re grateful to honor him tonight.

Artistry and activism are also at the core of our other

Teresa Eyring Executive Director/CEO 2

Salter

honoree, the Performing Arts Alliance (PAA). Here at TCG, we’ve been proud to partner with PAA to address the two most-pressing opportunities we face: reopening and recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, and building an anti-racist performing arts movement. With PAA’s leadership and through our collective efforts, we’ve secured the largest federal investment in the arts since the 1930s, and fought for accountability to anti-racism in our arts advocacy efforts. In her role as PAA president, Dr. Michelle Ramos, the Vision Keeper of Alternate ROOTS, has been an extraordinary leader in those efforts.

What would those founders think if they could see us today? Would they marvel at the virtual tools that bring us together? Would they beam with pride at the flowering of their movement? Surely they would mourn with us at the losses of the past year. And surely they would lift a glass and cut a living room rug with us as we celebrate with Shequida tonight!

Because in spite of the losses of the past year, our theatre movement is still here and in many ways stronger than before. For while our stages were dark, our movement reckoned with racism and other systemic injustices that have kept us from our full strength for too long. When we reopen, we’re not going back to the way things were before. We’re dreaming something better. Thank you for joining as we celebrate Ricardo Khan and the Performing Arts Alliance, and together envision the next sixty years.

Adrian Budhu Deputy Director/COO

Nikkole Salter Chair, TCG Board of Directors OURSTORIES MAY21

ACTING DIRECTING

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May 18, 2021 tcggala.org

HONORING The Performing Arts Alliance Dr. Michelle Ramos accepting on behalf of PAA

Ricardo Khan

HOST Shequida

ANNOUNCING TCG Artist Relief Fund providing $500 relief grants to theatre artists experiencing critical needs or financial hardship due to the COVID-19 pandemic

FEATURING PERFORMANCES BY Market Theatre Laboratory based in Johannesburg, South Africa

Cambodian Rock Band introduced by playwright Lauren Yee

TCG would like to offer our gratitude to tonight’s generous sponsors for their support of this important event.

To support TCG and the forthcoming Artist Relief Fund, please visit tcggala.org.

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VISUAL ARTS 5

TCG BOA R D O F D I R ECTO R S TCG Board members represent a broad cross-section of the American theatre field and professional perspectives.

They are united by their belief in TCG’s mission and dedicated to building a bond between TCG and the national theatre community.

Nikkole Salter, Chair

Mara Isaacs, Vice Chair Eileen J. Morris, Vice Chair Meghan Pressman, Vice Chair Angela Gieras, Treasurer Lisa Portes, Secretary

May Adrales, Theater Director; Milwaukee, WI Raymond Bobgan, Executive Artistic Director; Cleveland Public Theatre, Cleveland, OH

Jeremy B. Cohen, Producing Artistic Director; The Playwrights’ Center, Minneapolis, MN

Will Davis, Director & Choreographer; New York, NY Snehal Desai, Producing Artistic Director; East West Players, Los Angeles, CA

Kelvin Dinkins Jr., Assistant Dean/General Manager; Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, CT

Teresa Eyring, Executive Director; Theatre Communications Group, New York, NY

John Fontillas, Planner, Architect, Partner; H3, New York, NY Cynthia Fuhrman, Managing Director; Portland Center Stage at the Armory, Portland, OR

Mara Isaacs, Founder and Executive/Creative Producer; Octopus Theatricals, New York, NY

Laurie McCants, Co-Founder; Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble, Bloomsburg, PA

Johamy Morales, Director of Education; Seattle Children’s Theatre, Seattle, WA

Eileen J. Morris, Artistic Director; The Ensemble Theatre, Houston, TX Lisa Portes, Head of Directing; The Theatre School at DePaul University, Chicago, IL

Meghan Pressman, Managing Director/CEO; Center Theatre Group, Los Angeles, CA

Anthony Rodriguez, Co-Founder and Producing Artistic Director; Aurora Theatre, Lawrenceville, GA

Ellen Richard, Executive Director; Laguna Playhouse, Laguna Beach, CA Nikkole Salter, Actress, Playwright, Educator, and Arts Advocate; Bloomfield, NJ

Nataki Garrett, Artistic Director; Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland, OR Angela Lee Gieras, Executive Director; Kansas City Repertory Theatre,

David Schmitz, Executive Director; Oregon Shakespeare Festival,

Derek Goldman, Co-Founding Director; Laboratory for Global Performance

Hana S. Sharif, Artistic Director; Repertory Theatre of St. Louis,

Kansas City, MO

and Politics; Director, Playwright/Adapter; Professor, Washington, DC

Jamie Herlich McIalwain, Director of Development; Seattle Repertory

Ashland, OR

St. Louis, MO

Harold Steward, Producing Co-Executive Director; The Theater Offensive,

Theatre, Seattle, WA

Boston, MA

N AT I O N A L CO U N C I L FO R T H E A M E R I CA N T H E AT R E Composed of leading trustees from member theatres across the country, the National Council for the American Theatre guides TCG’s programs on governance and board development, and serves as a “brain trust” for the organization.

For information on joining the National Council, please contact Adrian Budhu, Deputy Director and COO: abudhu@tcg.org.

Judith O. Rubin, Council Chair, Playwrights Horizons

Eve Alvord, Seattle Children’s Theatre Ralph Bryan, La Jolla Playhouse James L. Chosy, Guthrie Theater Bunni Copaken, Kansas City Repertory Theatre Sophie Cripe, South Coast Repertory Brad Edgerton, Geffen Playhouse, Center Theatre Group

Mindy Ellmer, ZACH Theatre Kiki Ramos Gindler, Center Theatre Group

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Laura Hall, Coterie Theatre, Kansas City Repertory

Ruth Hendel, Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center Cynthia Huffman, ACT Theatre in Seattle Bruce E.H. Johnson, Seattle Repertory Theatre Carole Krumland, Roundabout Theatre Company Myla Lerner, Lean Ensemble Theater Gail Lopes, frm. Oregon Shakespeare Festival Lynelle Lynch, La Jolla Playhouse Ruby Melton, Long Wharf Theatre David Moore, Jr., Guthrie Theater

Julie Morris, PlayMakers Repertory Company

Eleanor Nolan, Seattle Children’s Theatre Toni Rembe, Magic Theatre Deedie Rose, Dallas Theater Center Jeremy Shamos, Curious Theatre Company

David E. Shiffrin, Arena Stage Diane Whatton, Lookingglass Theatre Company

Diane Yu, Oregon Shakespeare Festival

OURSTORIES MAY21

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Ricardo Khan RICARDO KHAN IS A DIRECTOR, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR, WRITER, EDUCATOR AND THE TONY AWARD RECIPIENT for the history-making African American theatre company he co-founded, the Crossroads Theatre Company.

For two decades Khan nurtured and guided the creation of well over one hundred new works that have forever enriched the cannon of the American theatre, while launching countless careers for writers, directors, designers, composers, managers and actors of color. Through Crossroads he worked with and provided a creative home and premiering stage for Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, George C. Wolfe, Anna Deveare Smith, Melba Moore, Leslie Lee, Denise Nicholas, Kathleen McGhee-Anderson, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Mbongeni Ngema from South Africa, Rani Moorthy from Malaysia, Linda Nieves-Powell, former United States Poet Laureate Rita Dove and many more. As the originating producer of the groundbreaking “The Colored Museum” and “Spunk”, both by George C. Wolfe, “Black Eagles” by Leslie Lee, “The Love Space Demands” by Ntozake Shange, “Sheila’s Day” by Mbongeni Ngema, and “Two Ha Ha’s and a Homeboy” written and starring Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis and Guy Davis, Khan established Crossroads as a major creative force on the American theatre scene. Khan was the originating producer of the production of “Paul Robeson” starring Avery Brooks, which went on from Crossroads to Broadway in 1988, and in 1998, the Tony Award-nominated Broadway musical, “It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues”. And shortly after the passing of esteemed playwright August Wilson in 2005, Khan returned to Broadway to write, stage, and together with co-producer Woodie King, Jr., present the New York tribute to August Wilson in the Broadway theatre that now bares Mr. Wilson’s name.

Mr. Khan’s New York directing credits include works at the Negro Ensemble Company, Manhattan Theatre Club, Lincoln Center, the Signature Theatre and the world famous Apollo Theatre. He was Associate Producer for a number of Crossroads productions at the New York Public Theatre with the late Joseph Papp, and in 2006 served as Associate Director for “Hot Feet!”, a Broadway musical developed by Maurice Hines with legendary songwriter Maurice White and featuring the music of Earth, Wind and Fire. In 2009 he co-wrote “FLY” with Trey Ellis about the esteemed Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, which has been produced in numerous major cities across the country and most recently, for its Pasadena Playhouse engagement, received the prestigious NAACP award for Best Theatre Production in Los Angeles, 2016. “Satchel Paige and the Kansas City Swing” followed that, a play inspired by myths and stories from Negro Leagues baseball and American jazz. Khan’s latest projects, “Freedom Rider” and “Letters From Freedom Summer”, will both receive world premiere productions at the Crossroads Theatre Company in 2021 and 2022. And of his most proud achievements recently, Ricardo Khan was the Producer and Director of the highly acclaimed opening night gala ceremonies for the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC on September 24, 2016, with performers and creatives that included Yolanda Adams, Daniel Beaty, Dave Chappelle and Frederic Yonnet, Ava Duvernay, Savion Glover, Oprah Winfrey and Stevie Wonder.

Ricardo Khan holds an MFA in both acting and directing from Mason Gross School of the Arts, and an Honorary PhD from Rutgers University where he is also in the University’s Hall of Distinguished Alumni. He served as President of the Board of Theatre Communications Group, the national organization of America’s professional theatres, from 1995 to 1998, and is proud to have been named Artistic Director Emeritus at his celebrated Crossroads Theatre Company.

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ricardo khan Welcome home, Rick Introducing Crossroads Festival Theatre at New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, New Brunswick, NJ Our inaugural season, under its new name and under the artistic directorship of Ricardo Khan, will debut September 2021. Each festival will boast two first-class productions; new free family programming; a nightly community reading series; and more. It’s a whole new experience in arts-going!

All under the direction of the person who first conceived of a theatre company whose sole purpose was to center, support, and celebrate the work of Black artists from around the world.

Crossroads Festival Theatre is thrilled to welcome the return of cofounder Ricardo M. Khan as its Artistic Director.

THE PERFORMING ARTS ALLIANCE is the national policy advocate, leadership forum, and learning network for America’s nonprofit performing arts organizations, artists, and allies.

The Performing Arts Alliance envisions a United States in which the diverse ecology of the performing arts is deeply-valued and supported, adequately and equitably resourced, and where participation is accessible to all.

The Performing Arts Alliance is uniquely able to achieve this mission and vision on behalf of the nonprofit performing arts sector: n through the directors who lead our coalition, and through our highly- skilled staff and government affairs directors who implement the advocacy work of the Alliance; n by coordinating federal advocacy efforts and aligning interests among organizations, artists, and allies in the nonprofit performing arts sector to create a more powerful, unified voice before Congress, the White House, and federal agencies; n by operating as a learning organization where our Board members, staffs, and member networks are engaged in sharing and building knowledge for an informed performing arts field; n by exploring how the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion affect the work of PAA members and the field; the policies for which we advocate; the leadership learning agenda through which our directors share and build knowledge; and PAA’s operations and activities.

Our Key Advocacy Issues Center Around the Following: n Timely visa processing for foreign artists; n Federal support for arts education; n National policies that encourage international cultural exchange; n Nonprofit charitable giving incentives; n Protection of wireless technology in the performing arts; n and Pandemic relief funding opportunities.

DR. MICHELLE RAMOS​ applies critical race theory and lived experiences to disrupt long standing white supremacist structures and systems. Her work focuses on shifting power to black, brown people through pushing boundaries, challenging the status quo and reflecting values of equity and justice in her day to day practice. Before leading Alternate ROOTS, she worked as Managing Director for the Vera Institute of Justice New Orleans and Program Officer for the Women’s Foundation of California. She serves on the boards of Dance/USA and Performing Arts Alliance.

A licensed attorney with a PhD in Cultural Psychology, she has significant organizing experience and has committed her career to serving communities and individuals adversely impacted by issues of race, gender, disability, class, socioeconomics, inequitable laws and systemic oppression. She has consulted for over 20 years nationally and internationally.

She is the proud mother Broadway choreographer, Ellenore Scott, and since retiring from her own dance career, Ramos has continued to teach dance, has competed as an Ironman triathlete and now enjoys her southern New Orleans lifestyle.

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is proud to honor Our Members: The Performing Arts Alliance one of its founding member organizations is deeply grateful to Alliance of Artists Communities Theatre Communications Group Alternate ROOTS for this honor, for recognizing American Composers Forum for its dedication to federal advocacy on behalf of the value and importance Association of Performing Arts organizations the artists and arts nationwide Professionals of our collective work, and for Chamber Music America being a long-time member.

THEATRE COMMUNICATIONS GROUP

Chorus America

Dance/USA Early Music America Folk Alliance International The International Association of Blacks in Dance League of American Orchestras National Alliance for Musical Theatre National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures National Performance Network Network of Ensemble Theaters New Music USA OPERA America Theatre Communications Group

The Performing Arts Alliance is the national policy advocate, leadership forum, and learning network for America’s nonprofit performing arts organizations, artists, and allies.

We envision a United States in which the diverse ecology of the performing arts is deeply-valued and supported, adequately and equitably resourced, and where participation is accessible to all.

ENTRANCES

tival, La Jolla Playhouse, City Theatre, Merrimack Rep) and The Great Leap (Denver Center, Seattle Repertory, Atlantic Theatre, Guthrie Theatre, American Conservatory Theatre, Arts Club, InterAct Theatre, Steppenwolf). Honors: Doris Duke Artists Award, Steinberg Playwright Award, Whiting Award, Steinberg/ ATCA Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters literature award, Horton Foote Prize, Kesselring Prize, Primus Prize, Hodder Fellowship, #1 and #2 plays on 2017 Kilroys List. New Dramatists, Ma-Yi Writers’ Lab, Playwrights Realm alum.

TV: Pachinko (Apple), Soundtrack (Netflix). BA: Yale. MFA: UCSD. www.laurenyee.com

Shequida

Shequida is a very witty, multi lingual, Jamaican born, Juilliard trained performer.

She has performed in Hong Kong, Berlin, Sydney, Paris, Norway, Tel Aviv, Amsterdam to name a few. She played the first ever recurring drag character, Wendi Mercury on the ABC Soap Opera, One life to Live and performed on America’s Got Talent. She also wrote and starred in two very successful, award winning Off-Broadway shows. She is currently hosting and performing her weekly shows in NYC. IG: @Shequidahall n

Jue

tours with Run River North, DANakaDAN and Magnetic North & Taiyo Na. Drummer on Magnetic North & Taiyo Na’s album, Home: Word. Music band affiliations: IXS, Monroe St., The Blazing Rays of the Sun, Former Faces, Fyke, Ruth + the Library, Priska, Surrija. Music Producer: Priska (State Change), SGLA (Be Thou My Vision). TV/Film: Good Sessions (CBS pilot).

Jasyn’s Theme (YouTube).

Education: MA in Spiritual Formation and Soul Care from Talbot School of Theology. Instagram: @0abrahamkim0

Francis Jue received a Lucille Lortel Award and a Drama Desk nomination for Cambodian Rock Band. On Broadway, Francis has appeared in M. Butterfly, Pacific Overtures, and Thoroughly Modern Millie. Other favorite theatre credits include Soft Power (Outer Critics Circle Award, Drama Desk nom), Wild Goose Dreams (Obie Award), Yellow Face (Obie and Lortel Awards, Drama Desk and Drama League noms), Love’s Labour’s Lost, Coraline, Falsettoland, A Language of Their Own, The Language Archive (Bay n

Kim

Abraham Kim is a Korean-American actor, drummer, and music producer best known for originating the role of Rom in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band. Regional: Cambodian Rock Band (Pacific Playwrights Festival, South Coast Repertory, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, La Jolla Playhouse); Son in LA Riots (CafeClub Fais Do Do). Music: National and International

Yee

n Lauren Yee was the second most produced playwright in America for the 2019/20 theatrical season (as per American Theatre Magazine). Her plays include Cambodian Rock Band (South Coast Rep, Oregon Shakespeare Fes-

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BEOWOLF SHEEHAN

n

Area Theatre Critics Circle Award), King of the Yees (BATCC), In the Next Room… (AriZoni Award), Cabaret (BATCC), Red, Kiss of the Spiderwoman (Drama-Logue Award), A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Film/TV: Joyful Noise, “Madam Secretary,” “New Amsterdam,” “Hightown,” “Good Wife,” “Law & Order: SVU.” Proud member of Actors’ Equity, SAG-AFTRA, and UK Equity.

Lui

Jane Lui is an American songwriter, actor, arranger, and music producer with four studio albums. Her new critically acclaimed album, SURRIJA (Self-titled), was Kickstarted by fans and is currently nominated for Best Pop Album at San Diego Music Awards 2021.

Recent theatre credits includes Cambodian Rock Band (Arranger, Pou, keyboard, percussion) at Off-Broadway Signature Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, & South Coast Repertory, All’s Well That Ends Well (Composer, Maudlin) at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Vietgone (Huong) at East West Players, and Secret In The Wings (Music Director and n

OURSTORIES MAY21

Composer) at Coeurage Theatre Company. Her music works on YouTube Channel has earned features in Huffington Post, CNN, Boing Boing Virgin America In-Flight, MAKE: Mag, Uppercase Mag, Reddit, Jezebel, with Best Music Video award at Dublin Web Fest 2016. She has worked with Felicia Day, Jason Mraz, Jon Baptiste, and looks forward to playing live again soon. Surrija.com

Joe Ngo is an actor/writer/musician who most notably originated and developed the role of Chum in Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band, with productions at South Coast Repertory, La n

MAY21 OURSTORIES

Ngo

V/O: Funan (gKids) As a writer; his work is primarily geared towards solo performance/devised theatre and include: Words, Words... (Leviathan Labs, BarnArts/BarnFest NYC).

Education: MFA (UW Seattle) Joe-Ngo.com

Courtney Reed is best known for originating the role of ‘Princess Jasmine’ in Disney’s smash Broadway hit Aladdin, in which she received a Grammy Nomination. She was last seen in Lauren Yee’s award winning play Cambodian Rock Band at The Signature Theatre.

She also had the honor of being a part of the closing company of the Tony Award Winning Musical

Reed

n

Jolla Playhouse, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Off-Broadway at the Signature Theatre in NYC for which he received an OBIE award for his performance. Other notable credits include: Regional: White Snake (Center Stage/Baltimore), King of the Yees (ACT/Seattle, Center Stage/Baltimore), Vietgone (Studio Theatre, DC) TV: Crashing (HBO)

In The Heights, in which she played ‘Carla,’ u/s ‘Nina’ and ‘Vanessa.’ She made her Broadway debut in Mamma Mia! Favorite Regional: ‘Andrea’ in Once on This Island at Papermill Playhouse directed by Thomas Kail. Television: Liza on Demand, Search Party, The Affair, Law & Order: SVU, White Collar, NYC 22, and CSI: NY. @RhodesReed

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ENTRANCES

Moses Villarama was recently seen in Cambodian Rock Band at Signature Theatre in New York, La Jolla Playhouse, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. His other Off-Broadway credits include productions with Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Play Company, and Ma-Yi Theatre Company. Moses is a proud company member of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, performing with this prestigious repertory company for five seasons. Other regional credits include productions at Alliance Theatre, Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Denver Center, and Pig Iron Theatre. Training: MFA, National Theatre Conservatory. BA, University of San Francisco. @themightymos n

Market Theatre Laboratory The Market Theatre Laboratory, a division of the Market Theatre Foundation in Johannesn

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About Camagu The song in this piece is titled Camagu, which is an IsiXhosa word which can be translated as be honn

Shozi

oured, or thank you, or I have heard. The song expresses gratitude to parents for their teachings, love, and respect, and to the black nation as a whole. It is an veneration of the lineage and legacy of African people. The spoken word performed in the piece is spoken in two South African languages, IsiXhosa and IsiZulu. The first speaker acknowledges the ancestors, and the role that they play in our lives.

The second poet names, praises and honours his own ancestors. The work as a whole represents the Market Lab’s processes, in that it is performed by students studying theatre and performance, an alumni of the course, and a teacher of the same programme.

Through putting artists at various levels of experience together, we believe that creativity and learning flourishes.

Sbusiso Shozi Sbusiso Shozi is a producer, director, actor, singer, song composer and vocal coach. He is a Durban born artist who has vast experience in performance, most notably in theatre. His love for music started at an early age and he was fortunate enough to be disn

covered by Mbongeni Ngema who nurtured his talent to become a professional performer. He has worked with a number of household names, including William Kentridge, Gregory Maqoma, Nhlanhla Mahlangu, Mbongeni Ngema, Sello Maake kaNcube and many more. He has also played lead roles in television shows like Operation Certain Death and Jinda Guluva. His theatre production credits include African Exodus and Uhambo Imizwa noMsindo.

Phuti Mojela

Teresa Phuti Mojela Phuti was born and raised in Ivory Park and Limpopo Province. She is a performer, choreographer, teacher, mentor, director and producer. She is also the founder and director of Phuti Pedi Productions and the Children’s Saturday Dance Classes.

She started her acting and dancing career in 1999 with a community group called Township Mirror Theatre Group based in Tembisa under the leadership of the late Oupa “China” Malatjie.

From 2010 to 2014 she was a senior dance company member at Vuyani Dance Company under the leadership of Gregory n

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ZIVANAI MATANGI

Villarama

burg South Africa, aims to build a creative, inclusive and brave community that contributes to the theatre and performance field through learning, exchange, experimentation, research and making - primarily for the benefit and development of emerging theatre-makers from subaltern (marginalised) backgrounds between the ages of 18 and 35. The Market Lab’s programmes are inspired by the notion of practice-led learning, and how the word ‘laboratory’ informs a particular approach to performing arts education. The ultimate purpose is to help emerging theatre-makers become fearless storytellers, critical thinkers, ethical practitioners, and versatile, confident creatives. Working and training with professional performing arts practitioners in stimulating and challenging projects and processes gives them the skills, knowledge and confidence to enable them to build sustainable careers and thus free themselves from the cycle of disadvantage and poverty that often determines the future of young South Africans. The Market Lab also has its own theatre specifically to provide a platform for emerging artists, community theatre, student work, experimental work, and showcases in a variety of genres.

Wonder Ndlovu (Assistant Choreographer) Wonder Ndlovu, born and bred in KwaZulu Natal, is a 22 year old performer, theatre-maker, director, writer, facilitator and co-owner/director of a theatre company, Black Dot Theatre Fusion. In 2017, he won the ACT| DALRO| NEDBANK Scholarship in the category of Acting, and was awarded Best Actor at the KwaZulu Natal Art Celebrations Awards. In 2018 he gained admission into the Market Theatre Laboratory full-time theatre and performance course and had the privilege of working on many different productions including n

Ndlovu

Maqoma, and was a dance teacher for the Outreach Children’s program and Vuyani Saturday Academy.

In 2015 she joined Moving Into Dance Mophatong as a teacher and dancer. Phuti has worked with several acclaimed choreographers, directors and writers, including James Ngcobo, William Kentridge, Robyn Orlin and Javeier Valazquez Cabrero.

Thandeka Nheke (Producer) Thandeka was born and raised in Sharpeville in the Vaal Triangle. She studied Musical Theatre at the Tshwane University of Technology TUT and she has over 12 years of experience in arts administration. Thandeka is currently the Projects Officer at the Market Theatre Laboratory in Johannesburg, South Africa. She administrates and co-ordinates all the Lab’s major international and local production tours. Thandeka Nheke has produced several award winning productions at The Market Theatre Lab including Hani The Legacy, Eclipsed and Noord!, to mention a few. n

Nheke

Le Journal, which won the Best Actor and Best Writing Awards on the student platform at the South African National Arts Festival. With all the experience he has had the liberty of gaining throughout his time in the arts, he still believes that one can never stop learning, and this keeps his insatiable passion forever growing.

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MAY21 OURSTORIES

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Vaughan

Jefferson Tshabalala (Writer) Tshabalala is the Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year for Theatre (2020).

He is a multi-skilled creative, with multiple entrepreneurial ventures, and he has a keen interest in radically transforming the current landscape of the arts in South Africa. He believes that more needs to be done to give a platform to young artists, and he has used his influence to develop and provide opportunities for relatively unknown practitioners who have gone on to have good careers in the arts industry. n

CHRIS DENNIS ROSENBERG

ENTRANCES

Lab she brings together diverse theatre-practitioners and other artists to collaborate in various learning/making/experimenting/researching processes, with an emphasis on emerging artists and subaltern experiences, voices and identities.

While the roles she plays in the arts environment are diverse, her artistic and pedagogical practice is motivated by an interest in process, curiosity about alternative or experimental ways of learning and making, rigorous research, and collaborative creative methods.

Ndumndum

Sibusiso Ndumndum (Lighting Designer and Stage Manager) Sibusiso started to get involved in theatre back in 1996 as a performer.

In 1999-2000, he studied drama at the Market Theatre Laboratory and performed in a student production called Fong Kong at the National Arts Festival in 2000. Between 2001 and 2003, he was a trainee stage manager at the Market Theatre Foundation.

In 2004-2013, he worked as a freelancer, touring Europe and the Middle East as a lighting designer for the dance production Karohano. He has n

Clara Vaughan (Curator) Clara is the Head of the Market Theatre Laboratory in Johannesburg, South Africa, and a theatre-maker, arts facilitator, arts manager, and writer. The thirst that people have to create and tell stories and to share their humanity with others through performance; the capacity of performance and storytelling to witness us and to make it easier and richer to live, is what she finds endlessly compelling and rewarding about theatre, and arts education. At the Market n

16

Trust, Nomcebo Khonoti Nonhlanhla Sadiki, Omolemo Magabe, Philani Mhlanga, Richard Ranhlakgwe, Zevangeli Mampofu

Ngwabe

been working at the Market Theatre Laboratory as a Venue Technician since 2014.

Khanyisile Ngwabe (Lead Performer) Khanyisile Ngwabe is an actress and singer originally from the Eastern Cape, but based in Johannesburg. She began her artistic journey with a number of community theatre productions. After received her qualification in performance at the Market Theatre Laboratory, her professional acting debut was in a play titled Itsoseng under the direction of Lesedi Job, which was presented at the Market Theatre. She has also worked under the direction of Leila Henriques in Hani: the Legacy, Mwenya Kabwe in No Easter Sunday for Queers and Clara Vaughan in The Little Prince. n

The chorus is performed by the second year students of the Market Theatre Laboratory’s Theatre and Performance Course: Aviwe Dasha, Buntu Ceza, Kefentse Mokoena, Kenneth Mosebi, Lerato Ndlovu, Lungile Mabaso Mncedisi Hadebe, Mthobisi Gasa, Muzi n

Translation by: SiveQha and Jonathan Lefenya Costumes by: Dimakatso Maega

TCG’s annual Our Stories Gala supports vital programs and services for the theatre community. The 2020 Gala honored Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang and the National Black Theatre Festival of WinstonSalem, a program of the North Carolina Black Repertory Company. The evening’s programming included performances from A Strange Loop and Soft Power, featuring Billy Bustamante, James Jackson, Jr., and Alyse Alan Louis. Past honorees at the TCG annual gala— now in its ninth year— include playwrights Tony Kushner, Lynn Nottage, and Danai Gurira; theatrical artists and leaders Rick Miramontez, Martha R. Ingram, Brian Dennehy, Kenny Leon, Ming Cho Lee, Jules Fisher, Stephen C. Byrd, Alia Jones-Harvey, Ruth and Stephen Hendel, Judith O. Rubin, and the creators of War Paint (Scott Frankel, Michael Greif, Michael Korie, and Doug Wright); and arts patrons the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, The Vilcek Foundation. n

OURSTORIES MAY21

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MICHELLE RAMOS:

BY B R I T TA N I SA M U E L

A former dancer, now on the board of the Performing Arts Alliance, Ramos is on a mission to redistribute the nation’s cultural bounty.

PROFESSIONAL BALLET DANCER. LICENSED ATTORNEY. Doctor of Cultural Psychology. Project director at the Vera Institute of Justice. If this résumé sounds like it could not possibly belong to a human being, that is because it does not. It belongs to an Ironman—a title Michelle Ramos (she/her), board chair of the Performing Arts Alliance (PAA), earned in 2010 after completing the long-distance triathlon, which spans over 140 miles of water and ground. (The PAA is a 2021 Theatre Communications Group Gala honoree.)

The discipline, determination, and grit needed to complete a feat this epic are not just traits of Ramos’s personality—they are her superpowers. They’re the same powers she wields in the face of another seemingly insurmountable task: breaking down the well-groomed, white-centered structures that hold up the American arts. Her efforts to uproot and redistribute control to communities of color go beyond adding an additional bullet point to 20

that mighty résumé—she has personal skin in the game, as a retired professional dancer, teacher, and mother of a Broadway choreographer. It is this intimate tie to artists that guides her advocacy work in any and all of the positions she has held.

Today, in addition to serving as board chair of the PAA, Ramos is the executive director of Alternate ROOTS, a cultural advocacy group composed of 18 nonprofit arts organizations based in the Southern United States. Since its founding, the PAA remains “the premier advocate for America’s professional nonprofit presenting and performing arts organizations, artists, and their publics,” according to its website, which details its many services: funding for arts education programs, advocacy against congressional attempts to decrease NEA funding, visa processing for international artists, and, more recently, COVID-19 resources. The work is shared with the Alliance’s network of members, including national arts organizations such as Chorus America, Dance/USA, and TCG. OURSTORIES MAY21

MEL CARDONA

CHANGE FROM WITHIN

Alternate ROOTS is also a part of this group. Since being appointed executive director—alternately referred to as Vision Keeper—of the regional service organization in 2012, Ramos has remained committed to the mission of championing social and economic justice for artists and cultural organizers in the American South, namely Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, and Washington, D.C. Ramos’s personal roots are planted here as well: Since joining ROOTS and moving to New Orleans, she has traced her father’s side of the family to Louisiana and Mississippi, while her mother’s side comes from Michoacán, Mexico. Lived experiences as an ambitious Afro-Latina artist continue to inform her advocacy work. In fact, the racial discrimination that plagued her early years as a ballet dancer might have watered the first seed.

“I went to a summer program at one of these big, prestigious ballet companies, and all the Black and brown dancers got cut after the first exercise,” Ramos said. “I remember sitting in the dressing room and all of us looked at each other, like, ‘Did that just happen?

Did they just cut every brown dancer in the room?’ We were looking through the window, and yeah, that’s what they did. Everybody out there was white. Moments like that stick with me.”

Clocking injustice became a pattern, then a profession. And in a year that inspired artists and artistic institutions alike to become more political than ever—with renewed public interest in a Federal Theatre Project, the virality of policy-backed social campaigns like #SaveOurStages and #BeAnArtsHero, and calls for government relief, with the Payment Protection Program (PPP) and Shuttered Venues Operators Grant (SVOG)—the tireless efforts of advocates like Ramos continue to be essential work.

I had the chance to speak with the Ironman herself on Zoom about taking a social justice approach to theatre, the need to affirm and prioritize artists, and how theatre’s shutdown activated the Performing Arts Alliance.

SAMUEL: You have worked at, advised, and serviced a great

array of organizations throughout your career. What drew you to the Performing Arts Alliance?

You started out as a ballet dancer. Did you know then that your dreams for an artistic career would go beyond performing?

Not at that time, because I was so in love with ballet it’s all I could see. Even when I ran up against all the racism that the ballet world shelled out to me—this was during the ’70s and ’ 80s—my love of the art form wouldn’t allow me to stop. Ballet is such a body-centric art form, you know, and it is pre-designed to be aesthetically conducive to white bodies, not Black and brown ones. I certainly had a passion for the art, but I never would have thought I’d eventually be a lawyer, doing advocacy work, and standing on the front lines as well.

Dancers are one group of performing artists who have had their livelihood decimated for what has now been over a year. This stretch without live performance is the longest our industry has ever seen, but many artists are adamant not to return at all if the performing arts landscape is not improved. What is most essential for you right now as an advocacy worker trying to improve this landscape?

So often the artist’s voice is not at the table. There is this assumption that the artists are just gonna come back, but nobody’s talking about what is safe for them. In the case of Alternate ROOTS, when conversations about “going back” started to happen pretty early in July and August, I had to gently remind people to wait. You may have been hanging out on Zoom, having meetings at home, doing your thing, but I’ve got people down in Alabama who don’t have a roof over their head. Ice storms hit Texas and Mississippi. I’ve got people who are living out of tents. I’ve got artists whose family members were taken away by ICE. We’re still dealing with real-life stuff down here. I don’t care anything about your butts in seats; let’s have a conversation about the difference in your world and mine, where our artists are still just trying to survive. I want to remind folks that your reality and the world that you live in aren’t the same for everybody around the country. And there’s a good chance that they aren’t the same for your artists.

Expand on that a little with regards to your role at PAA. What are you all working on right now to keep artists’ safety in mind?

RAMOS: I came to PAA because of Alternate ROOTS—the past executive director joined the Alliance a little before he stepped away and he told me, “Hey, we’re a member of this national advocacy organization, and we have to be at the table because there just aren’t a lot of organizations of color that are a part of this body. Our presence is important, so make it a priority to stay engaged.” He was honest with me and said that it is a tough, challenging environment, especially as one of only a handful of people of color there. I hear warnings like this and I’m like, ooh, opportunity! I’m the one who asks, how can we change this? How can we make this a better place?

When I got in the room at PAA, I listened first, but then started to ask questions and ruffle a few feathers, so people were naturally like, “Oh, you should lead us! You’d be a really great chair.”

There are a couple of member organizations that are a part of PAA that lack the consciousness of artists in that way, right? Almost everybody in the room is an executive director, government affairs person, or administrator. Those of us that represent the smallest organizations in the Alliance tend to be that voice for the artist.

We have a really strong presence. When negotiations were going on with [Capitol] Hill around SVOG grants and PPP, we would go to all those meetings. You know, even language is so important. I remember looking at a document at one point, I think it was a PPP piece, and the opening paragraph listed off the various categories of artists: musicians, singers, dancers, and I remember yelling, “And culture bearers!” Because our folks down here do not always identify with those titles, right? We have culture bearers, community organizers who identify as artists—

Did you immediately jump at the opportunity?

Memory workers, griots—

I actually wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure that the organization during that time really aligned with who I was and what I stood for, but I also knew that one of the best ways you can make changes is to get on the inside.

Exactly! We had to be sure that that language was in the documents we were submitting so that all folks could be included. We also fought for individual artists because, for example, when the CARES Act funding by the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) came out

MAY21 OURSTORIES

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MEL CARDONA

flows. I have no reason to expect philanthropy to stay interested in race and equity on a long-term basis.

I do think the beautiful thing that has come out of this time, and to directly answer your question about where should an artist go: Look in your backyard. There are many collectives doing ground-up fundraising right now and seeing much success. We are attached to one called the Southern Power Fund and what we have been able to accomplish during the pandemic year, the amount of money we’ve been able to give out—$8 million—without philanthropy is amazing.

Aimee McCoy, Paige Herutin, Clarissa Crawford, Wendy Shenefelt, Michelle Ramos, Ashley Walden Davis, Nicole Gurgel, and Mel Cardona at a 2019 Alternate ROOTS staff retreat Look in your backyard, because there are a in Rosemary Beach, Fla. lot of community-based and communitycontrolled funds that have emerged all over it was for organizations, ones that had previous funding from the the country. You might be surprised at what you have access to with NEA. Well, what about artists that do not have an organization to little or no strings attached. attach to? What about them?

It’s really about being that advocate on the front lines with our That’s great advice. And this TCG gala honor certainly government affairs folks. Having those smaller organizations—like feels right on time.

ROOTS, like the International Association of Blacks in Dance, and I know I’m named as the recipient, but it really is an honor for the now the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures—be the Performing Arts Alliance. It’s about the ways PAA has been a model voice in that space made a huge difference. for the field of what it looks like when a whole bunch of predominantly white institutions come together and do the work of being an ally, I’ve been reading a lot about Lorraine Hansberry lately. and what it means to lead from behind when supporting artists As the artistic landscape becomes increasingly political, and organizations of color. I came in as one of only a few Black or interest in her work beyond playwriting has come back into Latino organizations at a table of 20. I have seen that change and the ether in a beautiful way. Like yourself, she was a true then ended up becoming board chair. The trajectory we’re still on arts advocate! Do you think we should always be this loud is a great model for understanding how long this work takes and about our politics? the commitment you have to make to it.

We have to be. What people lose sight of so often in advocacy is the In a pandemic year where we collected no money or dues from people. The work that we’re doing is really for human beings, and anybody, had a deficit budget, and had no idea how long the panI’ve never really understood how one can bifurcate the art and the demic was going to be, this board still went, “You know what, we artist from the human being. have to do this equity work, pandemic or not, in-person or not, If I know that a big majority of my constituency are affiliated because it is important to who we are at the core. So allocate the with or attached to immigrants, there’s immigration policy hapmoney, take the money out of the cash reserves because we are compening on a local or state or federal level that’s impacting my peomitted to doing this equity work.” We are better as an institution ple, right? If you are representing immigrant artists, you have to on the other side of all of it. care about immigrant legislation. There’s no way you can’t. It’s so essential to imagine advocacy work further than we know it to go.

What do you still dream about accomplishing?

What are the best resources for artistic communities, especially those Or—I won’t even say dream, because I have no doubt that that have historically and systemically been shut out of funding, you will make it happen. searching for sustainable support? If you were still a professional I know where my mom’s side of the family is from in Mexico, but dancer, where would you go first?

I’ve never stepped foot in that place. I have a lot of excitement We’re in this window of time where, blatantly, people care about eventually doing that exploration and research, being in the about Black and brown people now. More than they ever have in space and feeling the cultural tie to the land there. There’s a lot of the past. So philanthropy and all the foundations and government beautiful art in Mexico, a lot of beautiful artistry. And if I can use money, everybody’s like, “Oh, race, equity, race, equity, let’s give my tools, my resources, my skills, my knowledge, to help Mexican money to Black and brown people!” Which is great. And probartists, well I would love the opportunity to do that as well. But I got lematic, right? Because y’all should have been doing this all along. to get better at my Spanish! I’m working on one thing at a time.

Great that you’re doing it now, but we also know it’s not gonna last forever. So my message to communities is to take advantage of this Brittani Samuel (she/her) is a writer currently based window that we are in right now because it’s closing. It’s going to in New York. Bylines can be found at Zora, OkayAfrica, close. And I don’t know if we will get it back again. I hate to sound InStyle, Backstage, and a few other places on the Internet. pessimistic, but I’ve been around a while and I’ve seen the ebbs and She can be found on Instagram at @brittaniidiannee.

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OURSTORIES MAY21

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Christopher Marshall, Benjamin Heath, Jennean Farmer, Caleb Byers, Te’Juana Johnson, Rachel Brunner, 2020 Month-Long Intensive, Photo by Stephanie Craig

NICK ROMANENKO

Marshall Jones III with Ricardo Khan in 2014.

RICARDO KHAN:

AT THE CROSSROADS

One of the regional theatre’s founding generation, he’s now back at the 43-year-old New Jersey company he co-founded.

BY M A R S H A L L J O N ES I I I PEARL BAILEY AND CAB CALLOWAY HELPED ALTER the trajectory of Black theatre in America—not from the bandstand but from the Broadway stage in the winter of 1967, when a young high school boy from Camden, N.J., observed in amazement Black people populating the stage in a groundbreaking production of an all-Black Hello, Dolly!

“The Jack & Jill organization took us to this show, and what always stuck with me is, after the show, the actors came on the bus and thanked us,” says Ricardo Khan, once that awestruck teen, now a storied director and theatre founder. “That was an early definition of service. My mother always says: each one, reach one.”

It’s an ethos that Khan would carry with him through his long and illustrious stage career. But as impressed as he was by that production, he wasn’t sure from the start that theatre would be his 24

career. He initially applied to colleges to study architecture, he told me recently in a wide-ranging conversation—though he did have an alternative in mind.

“The plan was to go to Syracuse University because they had both: architecture and theatre,” Khan recalled. Ultimately, though, he went to Rutgers University, located in his home state of New Jersey, because it was “closer and cheaper.” Also close by: New York City.

“I could travel to the city in a short train ride,” Khan recalled with a glow. “I always loved that city. I even had a subscription to The New Yorker. At RU, I auditioned for The Hostage by Brendan Behan. I was so happy that I got cast, and I really embraced that feeling of community.”

The topsy-turvy social climate of his early college years can be summed up in a series of images: “We went to the moon. The Mets OURSTORIES MAY21

won the World Series—the Mets! Kent State and the bombing of Cambodia. The loss of Dr. King. Pan-Africanism. Many things were happening, so we felt we could do anything. And my thinking became more political.”

Meanwhile, Rutgers was creating a special school specifically for the arts. The founding dean, Jack Bettenbender, suggested that Khan stay to continue his theatre studies and get a Masters degree.

“The Vietnam War was still going on, so I needed to stay in school,” he recalled. After a summer of painting houses, he was supposed to go to Howard to study law, but he ended up at Rutgers for grad school.

It was there that he formed one of the most important bonds of his career, working with fellow student Lee Kenneth Richardson; they did several shows together including Romeo and Juliet (as Benvolio and Tybalt, respectively), as well as Ceremonies of Dark Old Men and Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Banzi Is Dead.

Khan has fond memories of touring Sizwe around Middlesex County in central Jersey with Lee during their final year of grad school.

“The set was in the trunk of my car,” Khan said with a chuckle. Little did either man realize at the time that that tour was merely the “dress rehearsal” for the still-to-be-born Crossroads Theatre Company.

Another spur for the founding of the company: the kinds of roles on offer.

“One of my first gigs out of grad school was this movie, Squeeze Play,” Khan recalled. “The director asked me to do some outrageous, coon-like behavior. I knew right then and there I needed to control my artistic destiny.”

130 MEMORIAL PARKWAY Lee and Rick wrote the plans for a new Black theatre company on the back of a napkin in a downtown New Brunswick restaurant. They next reached out to all the major stakeholders in the area: Mayor John Lynch, George St. Playhouse producer Eric Krebs, respected director Harold (Hal) Scott, and an old classmate from Rutgers who had also been a star on the basketball team, Gene Armstead. Armstead operated the Middlesex County CETA program (Comprehensive Employment Training Act), signed into law under the Nixon Administration. CETA provided a substantial government subsidy to get Crossroads off the ground. (Indeed, nearly every major Black theatre organization was initiated by significant government and/ or foundation grants.)

This self-described “ethnic theatre project” provided actors, directors, designers, production personnel, etc., a yearly salary. “We were receiving government money, so we couldn’t discriminate in our name,” Khan said, meaning that the theatre couldn’t have “Black” in its name. Then one day Khan’s classmate and future resident stage manager, Ken Johnson, noticed that the theatre was “between two major roads—everyone meets at the crossing of those roads,” Route 27 and Memorial Parkway. Hence Crossroads.

Initially shows were presented to the public for free. “We filled a critical need at that time,” Khan said. “There were no opportunities for Black theatre in central Jersey. The audience was there, though, just waiting for us.” It wasn’t just a local shortfall, either, he said. “Outside of the Negro Ensemble Company and Joe Papp at the Public, no regional theatres were doing works by Black artists in our early days. So we had the market all to ourselves. We were inspired by Douglas Turner Ward at the NEC—we wanted to strive for excellence.”

MAY21 OURSTORIES

It was Richardson who discovered the location, on the second floor of an old sewing factory, quickly expanded in capacity from 60 to 120. The surrounding neighborhood was a bit dodgy, as urban life in New Brunswick in the late 1970s could be treacherous. That didn’t stop audiences from flocking to the upstart Black company.

“We were advised against moving there because there were development plans for that area, but we felt artistic freedom there,” Khan said. “It was our choice, which means we were beholden to no one. Heck, the landlord lived in the building, so it was safe.”

When Richardson and Khan saw James Earl Jones perform on Broadway in Phillip Hayes Dean’s Paul Robeson, they knew Crossroads had to produce the show—and they instantly knew who to hire to direct and star. Given Robeson’s status as perhaps the most wellknown alumnus of Rutgers University, casting their old classmate Avery Brooks in the title role under the steady hand of Hal Scott was a no-brainer. (Indeed, both men were teaching at Rutgers at the time—I was their student.)

I vividly recall climbing the steps to the second floor theatre and sitting in the packed house, in awe as Brooks delivered one of the most profound performances I’ve ever seen. He summoned the regal power and authority of Paul Robeson, yet captured his vulnerability as well. I recall Hal saying this production was one of his proudest achievements.

It also put Crossroads on the map. “NYC theatre people... started coming down to see our work,” Khan said, “which felt good.”

After five years and nearly 40 productions, Crossroads had worked their way through most of the canon of major works by Black authors.

They knew their future lay in original works. “CBS offered us a grant to find the best American play. Lee read The Colored Museum and said, ‘This is it!’ I agreed, although we both knew it would be controversial.”

And it was. I remember a respected Black theatre professional from an older generation who was livid at George C. Wolfe’s show, particularly the biting opening monologue lampooning clichés about the Middle Passage, and “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” which parodies plays like A Raisin in the Sun. “It’s too bad that they didn’t understand that the play is satire,” Khan said of the play’s critics. “Using humor has always been a part of our storytelling nature, whether you’re talking about African trickster folktales or Day of Absence by Douglas Turner Ward.

What they didn’t realize is how well-crafted George’s play was.

We’re not surprised it’s now considered a classic work. I’d say it has held up pretty well.”

At the time it established Crossroads as a major player in newplay development, and put a then-unknown writer/director on the map. It led to Wolfe engaging Joseph Papp, and before long succeeding him at the Public Theater (Wolfe was artistic director there from 1993 to 2004).

THE GLOBAL MAJORITY In the mid-’80s, Khan was getting more interested in international theatre, particularly that of South Africa. Nelson Mandela was still imprisoned, and Khan was interested in linking the plights of Black South Africans and Black Americans. That led to one of the theatre’s signature coups: During the height of the oppressive apartheid regime, Crossroads somehow secured artistic visas for six South African actresses, as well as playwright Duma Ndlovu and director 25

Mbongeni Ngema, to work on a new play in New Jersey with six American actors.

“Their technique was similar to A Chorus Line, with the actors talking into a tape recorder to develop storylines,” said Khan. The result was Sheila’s Day, a powerful story fusing traditional African storytelling with the Southern blues and gospel. The 12 women in the cast bonded over the similarities between domestic workers in the American South and South Africa.

To this day, I believe Sheila’s Day had the potential to be as powerful Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls…, but at that time it never played outside New Brunswick, in part due to immigration and union issues. Khan said that Joe Papp showed interest in moving the play to New York, but “Equity said we were taking jobs away from Black Americans. But just because your skin is dark doesn’t mean you have the same cultural outlook as an African. Their language, food, music—it’s all different. We wanted authentic South Africans.

And this was before Disney got an exception like with Lion King.”

In 1988, Richardson, Khan’s founding partner, left Crossroads to pursue other opportunities. So Khan decided to challenge his staff to create a five-prong organization—what Khan describes as his Palm Theory.

“There were five core staff, so each one represented a distinct aspect of our development process, which we’d solidified by then,” Khan recalled. “Sydne Mahone handled our literary department, Bingo Johnson handled marketing, Louise Gorham handled education. Kenny Johnson was responsible for touring shows with InRoads. I was the fifth spot—probably the thumb.”

Another aspect that completed artistic personnel was the Associate Artist program, which began in the theatre’s 1989 season. The roster of artists included George C. Wolfe, Anna Deveare Smith, Ntozake Shange, Ossie Davis & Ruby Dee, Avery Brooks, and Hal Scott. “That was one of my favorite seasons—every show was a world premiere,” Khan said. “We opened with Sheila’s Day, then Spunk, written and directed by George, And Further Mo’—the sequel to the long-running One Mo’ Time, and then Tod, the Boy Tod. Plus we started our new-play festival: Genesis, along with Sangoma, a women’s collective; our touring division InRoads was running on all cylinders.”

All the while the theatre was planning its next big move.

7 LIVINGSTON AVENUE If Khan had a recurring theme through our nearly four-hour conversation, it was the importance of the relationships he formed over the years. When the new facility for Crossroads was in its initial stages, some men in power wanted to relegate Crossroads to a back street, away from the town’s other theatres. But the founding dean of Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts, Jack Bettenbender— the same gentleman who once convinced Khan to forgo law school and come back to Rutgers—insisted, no demanded that Crossroads will be located on Livingston Ave., next to the State Theater and the George Street Playhouse.

“I will never forget how he stood up for us,” Khan said. “As Black people, others will try to marginalize you so often, so it’s great when those who have power have your back, like Jack did then.”

To prepare for the new theatre, he would hold monthly “Khancept” meetings in his home. From these emerged the New Horizons campaign, designed to retire the theatre’s debt and create a reserve fund. “We raised $1 million dollars with $400,000 in reserve, but 26

we did not know how much the new theatre would cost. We found out, though—it cost a lot more than our old space.”

In September 1991, the marching parade from the old theatre to the new one was a happy day. “The weather was beautiful,” Khan said. George Street Playhouse had a sign reading “Welcome to the Neighborhood,” and subscriptions grew from 1,200 to almost 3,500.

Also at that time, The Cosby Show was the most popular show in the country, and its star personally requested to be the first act to open Crossroads’ new space. He sold out performance after performance.

“Cosby joked about the paint still being wet in his dressing room,” said Khan. “No one knew this at the time, but we didn’t have our Certificate of Occupancy, so in the spirit of teamwork, the fire department parked their truck outside the theatre for our first few performances to make sure we were up to code.”

THE GROUND ON WHICH THEY STOOD In 1980, Crossroads did not have the funds needed to send their leaders 26 miles south to McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J., for the Theatre Communications Group conference. But on June 26, 1996, when playwright August Wilson delivered his famous keynote speech urging Black theatrical self-determination, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” Khan proudly stood on the stage alongside Wilson, representing TCG as the president of its board.

Reflecting on that historic speech, Khan marveled, “Listening to him onstage was fascinating, but watching the audience was stunning. The audience was enthusiastic and the applause was universal, but the next day was a different story. Several theatres raised issues with what August said about color-blind casting and other things. It started to divide people over the course of the next month. But it was an extraordinary night. August called them out on a national platform. The theatre community was divided about funding.”

Indeed, in one of the signature lines of his speech, Wilson proclaimed, “Black theatre in America is alive, it is vibrant, it is vital… it just isn’t funded.”

He also pointed out a stark reality: that “of the 66 LORT theatres, there is one that can be considered Black.” The one Black theatre he was talking about: Crossroads.

And while Wilson’s plays got plenty of productions at predominantly white theatres, as well as on Broadway, he refined his carservice play Jitney at Crossroads in 1997. “I have fond memories of August and Constanza (his wife) during that time,” Khan said.

More national attention came to theatre in 1999, when it won the regional Tony Award. Khan took the opportunity for a sabbatical on the island of Trinidad, the homeland of his father, Dr. Mustapha Khan, where he reflected on his past and pondered his future.

“Walking across that stage to get that statue was exhilarating,” said Khan. “To think a boy from Camden could reach that point. So I felt it was a good time to move on.”

But while he lay on Trinidadian beaches planning his next endeavor, Crossroads unexpectedly closed the following 2000 season, overwhelmed by a nearly $2 million debt. The unexpected closure stunned and disappointed Khan, as well as the theatre industry.

Still, he was looking forward to working as an independent director.

“I would get jealous when I hired directors and they would come in, do their gig, and just leave,” Khan said. “They didn’t have to worry about boards or ticket sales. I wanted that too.”

He also wanted to follow his passion for working with playOURSTORIES MAY21

wrights on new work, and not just American playwrights, but writers from around the world. “I started the World Theater Lab, which was initially funded by two TCG travel grants,” he said. Khan connected with writers at London’s Royal Stratford East and at South Africa’s Market Theatre.

He continued the development of these international writers by partnering with such respected theatre institutions as the Lark and NJ Performing Arts Center, working with 40 writers on more than 150 pieces.

Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of observing Khan as he continually collaborated with institutions, much like a director collaborates with his creative team, expertly using the strength of one organization to complement another. He was on faculty as a visiting artist at the University of Missouri-Kansas City with the specific purpose of developing new work over a two-year arc so that students could play an integral part in the development of a world premiere.

He then used organizations from the World Theater Lab, Crossroads, Lincoln Center education, New Victory, and more to further develop these new works.

president’s home, Price told Khan about “a big thing about Black culture that’s going to be happening in D.C.” Almost 10 years later, Khan got a call from Lonnie Bunch III, the director of the then-gestating African American Museum, who happened to be good friends with Price (those relationships!), asking him to work on the museum’s opening ceremony. It took another 13 years for it to occur, on Sept. 24, 2016. Khan remembers it fondly: “We had a full soulful symphony orchestra. My parents were college sweethearts at Howard, so to have their university choir was special.” George Wolfe and Savion Glover, Oprah Winfrey, Stevie Wonder, and Dave Chappelle were among the celebrated guests who were part of that “special night to celebrate our history and culture.”

Meanwhile back at Crossroads, the story wasn’t over. In 2000, Richard Nurse had just retired from his position as a senior administrator at Rutgers, and he said that driving past the darkness of the closed Crossroads Theatre brought tears to his eyes. So instead of retiring, Nurse rolled up his sleeves and nearly single-handedly reduced the debt hanging over the organization,with Khan back on board as an artistic consultant. Slowly but surely Nurse and Khan brought Crossroads back to life, staging the groundbreaking rap show History of the Word, as well as Yo Soy Latina, featuring a thenunknown Gina Rodriguez (Jane the Virgin).

In 2007, I entered the story, hired as a full-time producer at Crossroads, and Nurse was finally able to enjoy his retirement.

Khan continued his writing and directing career, parlaying his various relationships to partner with several organizations and deliver

MAKING HISTORY Returning to the theme of relationships, Khan fondly remembered Dr. Clement Price, a pioneering board member of Crossroads in the early days, who later proved valuable in connecting Khan with the Smithsonian’s National Museum for African American History and Culture. In 1997, Rutgers University awarded Khan an honorary doctorate, and at a celebratory dinner afterward in the university’s

THANK YOU! for 60 years of telling OUR STORIES

Ricardo Khan &

The Performing Arts Alliance FROM JULES FISHER, JOSHUA DACHS & THE FISHER DACHS TEAM

PROUD THEATRE CONSULTANT AND COLLABORATORS WITH Alley Theater, Houston | Arena Stage, Washington DC | BLUEBARN Theatre, Omaha Chicago Shakespeare Theater | Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park | Gutherie Theater, Minneapolis Hartford Stage Lincoln Center Theater | Old Globe, San Diego | Pittsburgh Public Theater The Public Theater | Seattle Repertory Theater | and more.

MAY21 AMERICANTHEATRE

27

several searing new shows to regional stages throughout the land.

These included a pair of shows about the Tuskegee Airmen, developed in partnership with Lincoln Center Education, and originally conceived to tour schools throughout New York City. Khan recalled first seeing a photo of the famed fighter pilots of World War II in the home of Dr. Price, staring in amazement at these regal Black military figures. He was flabbergasted that he had never been taught this chapter of U.S. military history, and became committed to sharing their courageous story with the world. In 1989, Crossroads produced Leslie Lee’s Black Eagles, which toured the country, including the historic Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., where the audience included a World War II veteran, President George H.W. Bush, as well as a Vietnam vet, Gen. Colin Powell.

Khan’s embrace of the brave Tuskegee Airmen continued with Fly, which he co-wrote with Trey Ellis. The inspirational show has had numerous productions over the years, including at Off-Broadway’s New Victory Theater and at Pasadena Playhouse, where it won the prestigious NAACP Theater Award for Best Production.

One of my fondest memories in the theatre was Fly’s opening night in October 2016 at D.C.’s Ford’s Theatre. I sat in the balcony, only a few feet from the location where President Lincoln was shot.

I looked over the railing to witness dozens of distinguished Black men, Tuskegee Airmen to be exact, in their 80s and 90s, proudly wearing their signature red jackets.

Khan’s evolving artistic vision focused on elevating overlooked African American heroes in scripts that use a non-realistic, Brechtian style. Fly introduced the innovative concept of a Tap Griot—a hiphop-style tap dancer who expressed the inner feelings of the pilots.

In Satchel Paige & the Kansas City Swing, also co-written with Trey Ellis, there was the Bluesman, who musically captured the soulful experience of playing baseball in the Negro Leagues.

Khan also developed a pair of shows about the famed Freedom Riders, college students who bravely traveled in 1961 to the Deep South to challenge vicious segregation laws and integrate lunch counters. For Freedom Rider, Khan commissioned four authors to write the story from the personal characters’ perspective. These included Kathleen McGhee-Anderson, whose mother was a Freedom Rider; Murray Horowitz, who wrote the character of a Jewish activist; Nikkole Salter, who wrote a character from Los Angeles; and Nathan Louis Jackson. A production of this important new work is scheduled to launch the reopening of postpandemic Crossroads.

Letters From Freedom Summer is a sort of sequel to Freedom Rider. Several of the original Freedom Rider characters appear, but the main focus of this play is a summer love affair, set in 1964 against the backdrop of the voting rights struggle in Mississippi. For this effort, Khan teamed up with a pair of writers: Sibusiso Mamba, a South African writer/actor who created the character Mandelenkosi Vitus Mkhize, and Denise Nicholas, from the ’70s TV series Room 222, who was once a roommate of Civil Rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer. A production of Letters from Freedom Summer at Crossroads is in the works.

SUCCESSION AT LAST All roads come back to Crossroads: After a 13-year run at Crossroads, I resigned at the end of December 2019, not long after the theatre opened a new state-of-the-art building next to the State 28

Theatre of New Jersey. Then came the early months of 2020, which were transitional for all theatres, not just those with changes in leadership. All through the dead of winter, a silent and lethal virus was spreading, and would ultimately wreak havoc on the world and our industry. In a day that will live in infamy, March 12, 2020 was the day the lights went out on Broadway, and at most theatres in the U.S. as well.

“At first, it was a hard decision about whether to come back or not,” Khan admitted of his return to Crossroads. “COVID was happening, and we couldn’t produce shows. Nor did we know when we would be able to produce, so I wasn’t sure what I’d be coming back to. Then Cheryl died.”

He means Dr. Cheryl Wall, an eminent Rutgers professor and Zora Neale Hurston scholar, who had been Crossroads’ first board president, whose signature adorns the theatre’s incorporation papers.

She first started teaching at Rutgers in 1972, and her smiling face and warm heart was a constant presence at Crossroads over the years.

She died on April 4, 2020 at the age of 71. A month later, Walter Dallas, a Philadelphia director who had worked at Crossroads several times over the years, passed at 73. And then, on May 24, 2020, Crossroads co-founder Lee Richardson died.

“Maybe they were trying to tell me something,” Khan mused.

“Maybe their passing was urging me to not let anybody take away what we started. Or misinterpret what we started. I thought a lot about Cheryl. About Lee. So I came back here for legacy. Not mine.

But ours. I want the center of our work to be what it always was: the artist. So that’s why I’m back—for Cheryl, for Lee.” Khan has confided that his biggest regret was not being sufficiently prepared for succession in 1999 when he set off for his sabbatical in Trinidad.

“Look, the model is, let the board handle selecting the leader,” he said. “That’s what happened when I was president of TCG; we had the daunting task of replacing a founding executive. But now I realize some of those lessons that work as models aren’t necessarily right for my culture, Black culture. I did that when I first left Crossroads; the executive leader was supposed to stay out of it. So I distanced myself.

“That was a mistake. I would’ve preferred to name my successor. Listen, I never wanted to do it all by myself. I always had a partner, even after Lee left. I had my palm strategy, with the five of us. But the model that works for one organization or generation may not work for the other. I look back and I would’ve preferred to use every once of my capital toward finding the right AD who’s right for our mission.

“No matter the organization, replacing a founding leader is hard. But for Crossroads, institutional history is so important. Our culture. How we connect and communicate. You can’t teach someone to know this. You gotta feel the heartbeat of an organization like ours, and I don’t know if board members can truly understand that.”

So is Khan going to be involved in selecting his successor this time?

“Definitely. Without a doubt.”

Marshall Jones III (he/him) was producing artistic director of Crossroads from 2007 to 2019. Since 2002, he’s been professor of Theatre at his (and Khan’s) alma mater, the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

AMERICANTHEATRE MAY21

1500+ LIVESTREAM TITLES AVAILABLE dramaticpublishing.com/browse/livestream

PEOPLE TO WATCH BECKY BIRDSONG (she/her) Profession: Major gifts officer at Pasadena Playhouse, actor Hometown: Dallas Current Home: Los Angeles KNOWN FOR: After working in children’s

theatre and storefront theatres in Chicago, she began fundraising for a nonprofit social service agency and never Birdsong looked back. She still acts in the occasional commercial. “You might see me on your TV or smaller screen selling cereal, bratwursts, or giving financial advice,” she said.

WHAT’S NEXT: Having moderated the Playhouse’s virtual member events throughout the pandemic, she and her development team look forward to “intimate, socially distanced gatherings” for donors in the Playhouse’s historic courtyard, and

DANIELLE BIGGS (she/her) Profession: Fundraising and marketing, dance and fitness teacher Hometown: South Brunswick, N.J. Current Home: Woodbridge, N.J. KNOWN FOR: The membership manager

Biggs

at New York City’s Public Theater since 2019, Danielle previously worked in individual giving at McCarter Theatre Center, and served in the inaugural cohort of Majority Leaders with the Supermajority Education Fund, which made it possible to learn from social justice icons transforming communities through organizing and activism. She also “teaches a killer Zumba class,” raves fellow fundraiser Reynaldi Lindner Lolong WHAT’S NEXT: While maintaining her role at the Public, this fall she’ll pursue an M.Ed. in Education Policy & Leadership

DEANNA GONZALEZ (she/her) Profession: Theatre administrator Hometown: Chesapeake, Va. Current Home: Chicago KNOWN FOR: Currently the develop-

ment associate for Collaboraction Theatre Company, Gonzalez describes herself as “a very operational, detail-oriented event planner and house manager. I’ve successGonzalez fully trained large groups of staff members in front-of-house procedures on Broadway, as well as at regional and nonprofit performance venues.”

WHAT’S NEXT: At Collaboraction, Gonzalez is planning a “25Year Moonset Sunrise’’ fundraising event to celebrate the start of the theatre’s 25th season in June. She’s also been working on a new monthly CollaborActivist membership initiative.

WHAT MAKES HER SPECIAL: Elsa Hiltner, director of devel30

to the theatre’s return to in-person performance.

WHAT MAKES HER SPECIAL: The Playhouse’s artistic director, Danny Feldman, called Birdsong “an extraordinary fundraiser and all-around wonderful human being. She has made tremendous impact in her time here at the Playhouse, restoring trust with our core supporters and rebuilding our annual fund. We simply wouldn’t be the organization we are today without her.”

TELL THE STORIES: Birdsong remains committed to helping build a theatre field in which “each and every one of our voices is heard. As an African American arts administrator and actor, I want to work in a theatre field that better represents the diverse world we live in. I’m hopeful that the recent light shed on the importance of equity, diversity, and inclusion on and off our stages opens doors for more BIPOC artists and administrators, and I’m looking forward to seeing the incredible new work that will emerge from this pandemic.”

from American University (Washington, D.C.).

WHAT MAKES HER SPECIAL: Jared Fine, the Public’s director of marketing, said he’s been struck “from the first moment meeting Danielle” by her “dedication, passion, and care in developing meaningful relationships with audiences. It has been inspirational to see her innovate and deepen her work with our communities over this past year to continue to grow and engage with them.”

STRONG AND BRIGHT: Biggs recalls a performance of West African drumming and dancing at the Children’s Center of NY for Black History Month in 2020, in “an auditorium full of students with similar hues of brown skin as mine, who looked limitless as they danced onstage.” In that moment, she says, “I felt my fire to create a limitless world for them burn stronger and brighter.” Despite the intervention of the pandemic, she remains inspired: “I am the leader I have been waiting for, and I was made for this moment.”

opment at Collaboraction, conceded that “so often the development office is the last aspect of an organization to move beyond traditional power structures.” That’s one reason she’s grateful for Gonzalez, who approaches development work “from an inclusive, accessible, and anti-racism lens. Her method and view are so important to building and maintaining a theatre company and community that embodies social justice...and the art Collaboraction makes.”

FINDING HER PEOPLE: “Extreme stage fright” kept Gonzalez from attempting to be part of an art form she’s always loved, but her career has given her a different way to be part of it. In a post-college job as an administrative assistant for a theatre in Washington, D.C., she said, “I knew I found my people and my calling.” She’s been glad to see a growing “call for awareness and equality,” and adds, “I want to continue to be a part of this movement of transparency, solidarity, and security within our community, where everyone is supposed to be welcome.”

OURSTORIES MAY21

MEENA MALIK (she/her)

WHAT’S NEXT: Malik will be presenting at the 2021 Emerg-

Profession: Arts consultant, cultural

ing Practitioners in Philanthropy Virtual National Conference in June.

WHAT MAKES HER SPECIAL: Derek Schwartz, NEFA’s program coordinator for theatre, marvels at the way Malik manages “to cultivate change and uplift the people around her.”

Malik’s own artistic work, he notes, “morphs between music and theatre,” and her artist’s lens has led to a National Theater Project “that is really designed with the artist’s perspective at its core.”

PASSION AND PRIDE: Her passion for supporting devised ensemble theatre ensembles and projects was kept alive through the difficult past year thanks to “the inspiring ways these artists are expressing their voices through their work despite the challenges....I feel proud to be able to provide resources to artists in order for them to create theatre in ways they want to.”

organizer, artist Hometown: Chiba prefecture, Japan Current Home: The traditional lands of the Kizh, Gabrielino, and Tongva, colonially known as Torrance, Calif.

KNOWN FOR: Malik, currently program

manager of theatre at the New England Foundation for the Arts and an alumna of artEquity’s facilitator training, organized and led “Beyond Orientalism: The Boston Forum,” part of a national initiative designed to explore the topics of misrepresentation onstage and in the media. Her stature in the field of anti-oppression work in the arts was recently recognized with a nomination for the 2021 APAP Sidney R. Yates Award for outstanding advocacy on behalf of the performing arts.

Malik

PAULA TAYLOR (she/her) Profession: Chief development officer, Arizona Theatre Company Hometown: Born in Boston, grew up in Tucson, Az. Current Home: Phoenix KNOWN FOR: Before coming to ATC,

Taylor

Taylor produced professional fashion shows with her company, with such brands as Project Runway and Bill Blass NY. At ATC, she has connected marketing and development to craft successful campaigns through the pandemic, which “helped sustain us during this time of our stages being dark, and dependent on contributed income only.”

WHAT’S NEXT: “With a smile on my face, I can share our entire company is working toward opening night in October,” Taylor effuses. For her that will mean planning and executing a series of

WESLEY MOURI (he/him)

WHAT MAKES HIM SPECIAL: Mouri has “the heart, empa-

Profession: Development director

thy, and activism to invite others to support our mission,” said Mu artistic director Lily Tung Crystal. Managing director Anh Thu T. Pham noted that Mu’s “experience as an artist shines through in what he does as our development director, whether it’s playing host on a virtual game show or putting together a Broadway-style cabaret. This job isn’t about making money, but how we can tell our stories.”

NO LONGER INVISIBLE: Inspired by Mu’s mission, Mouri has become an outspoken advocate for representation. “As we navigate this racial reckoning in America,” Wesley commented, “I plan on using my position to amplify and empower the AAPI community, which has been invisible for far too long. We must deconstruct and rebuild fundraising from the ground up, just as primarily white institutions are being forced to do with their programming and personnel. Money and mission must come together to form a more equitable future for the arts.”

at Theater Mu Hometown: : Rockford, Ill. Current Home: Minneapolis KNOWN FOR: After nearly a decade as a

Mouri

performer in the Twin Cities and abroad, Wesley transitioned to the development field in April 2020, just in time for the pandemic. As part of the #MuSquad, Wesley helped produce 40-plus virtual events amplifying Asian American voices and stories, reaching audiences from 45 states and 10 countries.

WHAT’S NEXT: Theater Mu’s New Eyes Festival: Un(scene), a response to rising violence against Asian American communities, comprising 10-minute virtual plays by local and national creators with ties to the Twin Cities. It runs May 21-22.

MAY21 OURSTORIES

donor appreciation parties and season announcement events.

WHAT MAKES HER SPECIAL: ATC’s artistic director, Sean Daniels, said of Taylor, “She doesn’t just raise money for us, she’s a thought partner. She sees the big picture, she understands what is true excitement and civic pride in a way that inspires me to do my job better.” What’s more, with her background in fashion, he said, “She is deeply smart when it comes to brands, messaging, and encouraging me to wear nicer shoes to all our meetings.”

DISMANTLING DIFFERENCE: Working in development through a year like the one the field has just endured “is not for the faint of heart,” she concedes. But Taylor’s longtime love for the arts is not easily shaken, and she’s especially inspired by the way live performance can connect people across gulfs of disparity. “Within the theatre walls, we can dismantle differences, if only for a couple of hours,” she says. “I think that alone is worth waking up for each day.”

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INSTITUTIONAS-ARTWORK We may not have realized we were building long-lasting institutions to make theatre. But now that we have them, what should we do with them?

PHOTO COURTESY OF ARENA STAGE

BY Z E L DA F I C H A N D L E R

Tom and Zelda Fichandler during construction of the Kreeger Theater at Arena Stage in 1971.

This piece was originally published in January 1986.

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

start to write on Aug. 16, Arena Stage’s 35th birthday.

I have brought my notes with me, they are spread out on the big bed in a smallish hotel room on the Strand in London. I have already seen two plays at the National Theatre, one at the RSC, another at Stratford-on-Avon and got here just in time to enjoy, though jet-lagged, the opening ofJohn Houseman’s production of The Cradle Will Rock at the newly done-up Old Vic. The rain out32

side closes in my thoughts of companies, beginnings, economics, governance, the endlessness of the tasks, the nature of growth and change, leadership, the problems ahead, the distance come, signaled by the number thirty-five. The lines from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets are fresh in mind, for I used them in my opening remarks to the new/old acting company, which, on year-round contracts for the first time, assembled at Arena on July 2 to begin a summer of exploratory work before rehearsals late in August.

The words of Eliot move me. They seem to pierce the exact moment of this birthday and pin it down. They speak not only to me personally, but to the nature and needs of a movement that began over three decades ago and now, middle-aged and in some turmoil, seeks redefinition, seeks to “know the place.” I hear them— in a way that is both inspiring and practical—urge all of us who OURSTORIES MAY21

are a part of this movement, first, to get on with it and second, to go back to find it.

With curiosity, I reread the program note for our opening production, Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, Aug. 16, 1950.

I want to check out what was on our minds then, to test the present against the past: Arena Stage plans to bring to its audiences the best of plays both old and new as well as worthwhile original scripts on a permanent year-round repertory basis. Local in origin, it was founded in the belief that if drama-hungry playgoers outside of the ten blocks of Broadway are to have a living stage, they must create it for themselves. Arena Stage was financed by Washingtonians—students, teachers, lawyers, doctors, scientists, government workers, housewives—who love theatre and who want to see it flourish in the city in which they work and live. Its permanent staff of distinguished actors and technicians, many of whom have come to Arena Stage via the stages of other cities, now all call Washington their home. Arena Stage invites your participation in the excitement of the first production of Washington’s playhouse-in-the-round.

We (Tom Fichandler, my drama professor Edward Mangum and I) had raised, via a series of meetings with like-minded community members, $15,000 for stock in a regular profit-making corporation, set up a Voting Trust arrangement to be sure we retained artistic control, collected a cadre of actors and helpers through auditions and interviews and from among friends, and converted an old movie house in a slum area of Washington to a 247-seat theatrein-the-round. (We wanted the symbolic intimacy of that form and to save money on scenery.) With our “investors,” we scraped the chewing gum off the seats, hung the lights, laid the carpet, painted the walls, scrubbed the johns, and on a budget of $800 a week set out to achieve our goals. I ran the publicity campaign to open the theatre, designed the sets that were built in the alley, helped in the box office, directed seven out of seventeen shows we did that first year, slept many nights on the carpeted stage floor and, along with Mangum, made $65 a week.

The actors made $55, and from there the pay scaled to zero.

We put on 55 productions—nonstop, without a break—in the five years at that first location, had many successes and sometimes played to under a dozen people, on several occasions had a bank balance of under $100 and ended up the five-year period with $25,000 more than we started with. The actors doubled in brass as well as brought forth new roles every two or three weeks in a range and variety that remains vivid for me still. The rest, as they say, is history.

A recent interviewer asked me what made me think it would work and I said, truthfully, “I was young, I had no doubts, I was sure people would respond. Believe me, we didn’t do any marketing surveys.” In the early fifties, I read Margo Jones’s book called Theatre-in-the-Round, in which she outlined her dream of a nation with forty (sic!) resident, professional companies performing new plays and classics and I knew that she, the mother of us all, could not be dreaming in vain.

This is not only “My Story.” It is the story of several of us who began theatres way back there when. Most importantly, it is the story of our heritage, even those of us who began life later, on MAY21 OURSTORIES

a grander scale. I do think we were the only theatre to experience life—for seven years—as a so-to-speak “profit organization,” an experience I have never regretted, and the only theatre to pay its own way, on box office income alone, for 15 years. That gives me a special edge when I have to explain to newcomers why our theatres have to be nonprofit.

When I read our initial program remarks—to be called in a later, more evolved time a “mission statement”—I am astonished that they prefigured most of the potential as well as the pitfalls that our movement was (is) to achieve and would encounter, is encountering. Most of the themes and, implicitly, the counter-themes are there: “audiences”; “local in origin”; “plays old and new and original scripts”; “permanent”; “repertory”; “outside of Broadway”; “create it themselves”; “financed by the community”; “where they live and work”; “permanent staff’; “distinguished actors and technicians”; “Washington their home”; “participation”; “excitement.”

And when I reach back through the years to our initial organizing principles and the labor of the earliest years, I find some real wisdom there: the need for artistic control; the need to take responsibility for one’s own vision; the value of an ongoing collective; the centrality of an acting company; the fundament of contact between play and playgoer, of a continuing dialogue with the audience; each individual theatre being a part of a whole theatre; the ever-presence of budgetary tension and of the success/failure see-saw; the primitive yet sophisticated power of selflessness and faith in the dream.

In our innocence, in our knowing yet not-knowing—Eliot’s Quick, now, here, now, always—a condition of complete simplicity (costing not less than everything)we sketched in with fairy-tale boldness the outline of the whole story, the principal characters and the underlying themes.

How far we have come! We should allow ourselves our amazement and our pride, if only for a moment. The size of the achievement is not diminished for me even here in London, across the bridge from the National Theatre with its three stages (although the Cottesloe is now closed for budgetary reasons), its five companies each with about seventeen actors, its elaborate and for the most part splendiferous physical productions held in repertory and brought back at will, its heavy subsidies and affordable ticket prices, its bars and buffets and bookstalls, its intense and responsive audience queued up in the hopes of a returned ticket at the last moment. Progress is a snail that jumps. Our growth has seemed to us slow, so very slow, as fretfully, sometimes exhaustedly, we have hung on to existing circumstances and waited for the next transformation to occur, either to us (private foundation support in 1957, the coming of the NEA in 1966) or, aggressively, with our own hands (building theatres, devising subscription plans, forming companies). But, in objective truth, ours has been the fastest-growing art form in history.

Thirty-five years ago there was Broadway and the Road. Today, there are more than 250 theatres (What would Margo think?) of varying shapes and sizes and styles, and our national theatre no longer operates within 10 blocks of Broadway but across 3,000 miles of melting-pot America. While the level of work and the extent of enterprise and courage vary greatly from theatre to theatre, and no single theatre as yet stands as a pinnacle of artistic achievement, 33

the overall sense is of individuality, energy, quest and growth. Our many theatres now offer more employment weeks to actors than does Broadway, gradually year-by-year realigning work patterns away from New York and changing the way actors can lead their lives and make their living. Community after community has had its hunger for live theatre responded to or even awakened for the first time; taste has been elevated, discrimination sharpened, life itself enriched through the perception of life-made-into-art. People have come to want their theatres and their arts and will pay money—in taxes, at the box office and in contributions—to have them.

A career in the theatre, though hardly a sure thing, has come to seem plausible (even noble, to certain enlightened parents). In these few decades the arts as a profession, and theatre high among them, have lost some—not all, but certainly some—of their historic aura of aberration, dropout-ness, illogic.

The proof has been in the pudding: Most of the gifted actors in the country have come the resident theatre route and could not have evolved without the continuity and stretching that years of on-the-boards experience provided; many of them come back from films and television to stretch some more and test themselves against the demands of a classic role and a breathing audience. And where would our writers be, and our directors and designers, without these congeries of work places, these sites for experimentation and development? Would we, indeed, even have this enviable pool of American talent without these places?

One wonders where these artists would have gone to see their work evolve, to become who they are. For Broadway has been priced out of the market for risk-taking and, irony of ironies, has come to take so for granted its dependence on regional theatre “product” and talent that it points the finger at us when we don’t come up with enough of it.

I clipped a front-page article from the May 20 New York Times headlined, “Broadway Economic Season Is Called Worst in a Decade,” to keep as a symbol and a sign of the times. One of the producers, asked for an explanation for the slump, cited the high cost of road tryouts of musicals and, then, the failure of the non-commercial theatres—which have been able to “provide Broadway with a stream of notable plays”—to do the same in the area of musicals, Broadway’s staple money-maker. “The nonprofit theatres have never paid attention to developing musicals,” the spokesman said. “There’s no place for young directors, young songwriters, young singers to learn. In addition, few non-commercial theatres can afford the stagecraft demanded for contemporary Broadway musicals.” Do you hear the gigantic turn-around, the wad of social history stuffed into that complaint?

The achievements that I list are obvious and well-known and have been listed before. I list them here again on this birthday, as a taking-off point and a surround for other thoughts. And as an admonition (to myself, first of all) that we not take for granted the fact of it, the very existence of it, and the transformation it—this movement—we have made in our cultural landscape. Our theatrical world will never be the same again. The changes were radical, we committed a revolution that is irreversible, and attention should be paid to that.

What is particularly remarkable to me, looking back for one moment more, is that it took place without models, from within. We had no teachers except the environment, our own mistakes and each 34

other. We did have each other (Mac Lowry put us together 25 years ago and TCG has kept us there). And we had some good gleanings from the outside that were crucial. I recall how astonished I was in the mid-’50s by the craft level at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario and how deeply our production standards were influenced by my visit there. And also how much we learned from the Berliner Ensemble’s trip to London in the mid-’60s—both about the repertory actor (Ekkehard Schall as both Coriolanus and Arturo Ui) and about the physical aesthetic—Brecht’s “Reality is concrete.”

I can still visualize the long, silent moment at the beginning of the Moscow Art Theatre’s production of The Cherry Orchard as the family, back from Paris, re-embraces the house. As a director and a producer, I was opened to a totally new level of possible stage behavior. It changed our work.

But chiefly, and especially in our organizational forms and institutional development, we had no models. We taught ourselves out of our own impulses which, made into deeds and thus objectified, taught us back what to do next so that we could stay alive and progress. It has been a revolution made of many and diverse feelings and viewpoints, all discharged more or less simultaneously (in the eye of history, 35 years is but a blink!)—a kind of collective artwork, like a quilt, a “something” truly surprising, truly unique. As we grapple with current ambivalences and try to solve our problems, we should not forget where we started and not diminish what we made.

We experience and read about “artistic deficits,” a term which evidently first appeared in a report by the National Endowment for the Arts last year. An artistic deficit represents the distance between what one would want to do in one’s theatre and should do there, and what one can afford to do; it is the shadow between intention and reality. The term has come into wide acceptance very rapidly as a term whose time has come. It names our disease. It seems to explain our feelings of dissatisfaction and longing for something better. It says what ails us.

And, of course, it is true that our theatres are underfunded and our artists underpaid. And it is true that in order to remain solvent some theatres pull in their horns in terms of predictability of repertoire, size of casts and production costs, and channel funds into fund-raising rather than onto the stage. And the art itself suffers and we fail to meet our own standards and, feeling that it is time for a ripening, we rail against our fate or become weary and say, “If not now, when?!?” And surely there is a positive correlation between Art and Money and our complaints are justified (“Art needs comfort, even abundance,” wrote Tolstoy). The current episode of our national story, told in numbers, is discouraging indeed. With expenses up 71 percent over the past five years and, despite record attendance and box office income, a doubling of the economic deficit last year alone, is it any wonder that we have this sense of our reach forever exceeding our grasp, and seek to find our salvation somewhere in that interlocking system of economic/artistic deficit? ft is logical to do that and it feels right.

Without minimizing in any way the seriousness of our economic situation and its direct effect on our power to produce art at the highest level, I think we must look into other areas of our being, where the problems may be less immediate, less visible, less easily identified, but potentially even more corrosive. For while poverty of means can, of course, lead to poverty of ends—and often does— still, courage within can sometimes prevail over negative forces withOURSTORIES MAY21

out, passion over penny-pinching and “four boards” over an extravagant set. At least for the time being. And over the longer haul, who knows? Times change. Someone may come to rescue us or we may think of something on our own. Artistic deficits have been with us from the beginning. They seem more painful today because we are older and feel we should be “There” by now. But what if there is no “There”—at least in our lifetime?

Be that as it may, no theatre can ultimately survive the dry rot of institutionalization, the absence of versatile and committed actors, timid and visionless leaders or a troubled, unresolved relationship with its forces of governance. Let’s speak about these four hazards of our middle years.

What our early, innocent “mission statement” omits is any reference to the fact that we were about to create an “institution” or, indeed, that such a mechanism might be necessary to do the things we intended to do. We simply didn’t think about it. I suppose we knew about institutions (schools, prisons, families, museums), but we didn’t think we were one of those. We thought we were a theatre, something else again. Who could have imagined 35 years ago how elaborated all this would become—that one day we would live in our own building, make five-year plans(!), have a budget hovering around $7 million, write grant applications and hardly know ourselves for all the baggage we had collected.

At the time, we proceeded very simply and directly: “What needs to be done?” was followed by the direct doing of it, preferably by someone who knew how but, if necessary, by someone who learned it as he/she went along. It is not that we were naive. We were

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tough and smart and painstaking and we would not be stopped. We set up a box office and ran it well, informed and enticed a public, paid our bills and wrote our contracts, selected and hired actors and directors and designers, put together a repertoire that was exactly the one we wanted and made a myriad of difficult decisions—both artistic and managerial. But out of poverty and out of our early evolutionary position we saw a simpler connection between needs and filling them. And from these needs to “each according to his ability” seemed a logical and direct route. Such evolved concepts as job descriptions or even discrete jobs, departments of this, that and the other, tables of organization, etc. could then not even be projected. And while this was a hectic, often misshapen and, in the end, impermanent way of doing things, it did, I must confess, hold its own kind of magic.

There was never any question of what was of primary concern, which way the arrows of energy were directed; the work on the stage was central and we lived, breathed and slept (no, we rarely slept!) with that in mind. And there were surely no communication problems—all you had to do was stick your head out and yell.

Also, although everyone suffered overwhelming fatigue, for about the first 10 years (until we moved into the newly built Arena building) we felt that we could hold the whole animal in the palm of our hands and touch it directly. I remember the sensation of knowing— both empirically and philosophically—everything at once: the sentence and the story, the pebble and the beach, every corner of our little world. When I speak of “institution-as-artwork,” I find that my clearest image comes from these earliest years when things were

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most frantic and yet most whole. They serve as a reference point for maintaining a sense of unity within the theatre as it is today— 175 people; three stages; the divesting, sharing, delegating that is essential for running a large, theatrical institution.

Unless we get it right, this “institution business” is going to kill us. Something began to feel uncomfortable around the end of the ‘60s, but by that time the thing had already happened to us; by the time we looked up and noticed, it had been done to us, we had already been institutionalized. No, I’m not saying that right: I exaggerate the degree of passivity involved. In point of fact, we were not force-fed. We wanted what we got, we just didn’t realize where it was taking us. We vigorously, implacably tracked down our subscribers, making a kind of fetish of the yearly subscription brochure; feverishly raised money for new buildings and, using ingenuity, skill and new knowledge, built them; with zealous alacrity we developed and engaged administrators, P.R. people and business managers; we added the concept of production managers as our artistic leaders got more involved in fund-raising and the like (still later, we added the concept of associate directors and literary managers/dramaturgs as theatres grew and artistic directors got still more involved in fund-raising and the like); we created development departments to meet economic deficits (later they were, in some instances, to grow as large or larger than the artistic staff); and, in general, we poured a lot of money away from art and into making more money in order to make art. Quite recently, we computerized. Computer technology, someone said at a recent staff meeting, holds all our operations together. I suppose he’s right....

In 1967, I spoke about our mood on a panel called “The future of the Resident Professional Theatre in America”: Push, promote, maneuver, advertise, finagle, operate. The story of our lives. “Getting and spending we lay waste our powers”....I think we will not be overwhelmed only if we refuse to give ourselves up, only if we can experience ourselves as autonomous.

For me this means leaving the wheeling and dealing to others and going back to where I came from, to the theatre as an art. And we may be overwhelmed anyway. But, then, let them take us while we are doing our own work and not at a fundraising dinner. It is not a personal thing at base. It is a matter of whether we are, after all, to be theatres or constructions that put on plays as against ones that manufacture washing machines.

We must achieve a sense that some real power resides in us within the very art we make, and not altogether within the techniques of manipulation, marketing and promotion with which we tend, in the battle for survival, to become over-absorbed.

Later, in 1969, in an article entitled “Theatres or Institutions,” I articulated a personal feeling that I believe was shared: In my own mind now these two words exist in a kind of uneasy tension, a kind of dialectic opposition, where once they seemed to me to be one and the same word. It seemed to me until quite recently that when a theatre finally stopped being on the way to what it was supposed to become and actually became it, then it would be an institution.... But it has not turned out this way. A seduction is what it really was, a leading-from-the-self. I wonder why.

The artistic director of a large regional theatre wistfully, ironically remarked to me a few months ago, “They wouldn’t even notice 36

if I disappeared—the administrative machine would go on grinding.

No one would stop to see that there was nothing in the grinder.”

But I am speaking too negatively. I should not leave this idea with so sullen a view. Our institutional structures are necessary to us.

Compartmentalization, specialization, clear and clean procedures and good personnel policies, a strong middle as well as top management structure, the best of promotional and development techniques, budgets that define and defend values and provide guidelines for growth as well as survival are all absolutely essential to us.

It isn’t 1950 anymore, and our budgets aren’t $800 a week; we have heard other voices and lived in other rooms since that time. You can’t go home again and no one wants to.

On the other hand we do want, do we not, to avoid the tail wagging the dog or—a worst-case situation—the tail becoming the dog? We do want our institutions to organize themselves around the spiritual/aesthetic life they exist to nurture and not have that life made subservient to the demands of institutional paraphernalia. We are acquainted with the notions of foreground and background and first things first.

A theatre is the enclosing, the enfolding of an idea—a vision— something imagined that has the possibility of finding concrete embodiment. It is simultaneously an imaginative act and a place.

When the institutional machine ceases to support the imaginative act and begins to encroach upon the place; when it constricts rather than releases the flow of creative energy by its labyrinthine demands, its busy-ness; when the accumulation of resources, the dissemination of information, and the marketing of the “product” take more focus and absorb more power than what we are making and the conditions under which we make it, then the institution must be dismantled and reconceived along better lines. An institution cannot have a life of its own, be a thing in itself. Its life is derived from the animating Idea, and each and every one of its actions must flow from this Idea and contain a piece of it. When we say that “the business of art is art and not business,” we don’t mean that there is no business in making art (surely, there is!) but that the function and purpose of the business is not itself, but the making of this art. If we fail to get this crystal clear, the institutions we created will become blind mechanisms (the trend is already clear in a number of theatres) instead of sentient organisms, and eventually they will petrify and crumble due to the absence of living tissue. An active recollection of our origins can help us to “know the place” in a new way.

And all shall be well and All manner of things shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.

I write now from New York. My apartment overlooks Washington Square. From the windows facing fast I can just see Broadway where the new building for the Tisch School of the Arts is located.

I’m currently chairing the graduate department of acting there. I have had a longstanding interest in the American actor: the growth and development of the professional actor and the training of the young actor. I am interested in their inner technique (how to produce living behavior), their physical technique (voice, speech, movement), and no less in their mind, psyche and how they see themOURSTORIES MAY21

selves and the part they are to play in shaping the American theatre, for worse or, hopefully, for better. And I’m interested in the connections among these three aspects. I’m grateful for the fresh outlook this new post is providing me.

“See that the players are well bestowed.” Indeed, we must. The actor stands at the center of the art of theatre and always has. Before there were literary forms at all, when there were only rituals and embodied myths, it was the actor—the en-actor—who performed the deeds, represented the human situation and stood in for those who, like himself, were seeking to find out who and why. The theatre is and always will be a special place—a differentiated, imagined, moral place—that a society sets aside in order to examine all that fascinates it and all that it seeks to understand. We are endlessly curious about our world, and especially about ourselves. It seems a biologic necessity, a means of survival even, that we ask the questions and act out even what is unanswerable. A society without a theatre is a society that is in the process of disintegration.

Theatre: Teatron: a place for seeing. Camus wrote, “If the world were clear, art would not exist. Art helps us pierce the opacity of the world.” In his struggle for his own truth, in trying to pull away the life-mask, the actor lets us see ourselves. Through his ability to be himself and yet walk in the footsteps of another, to show himself and still be faithful to the truth of another, the actor teaches us who we are. The theatre can make do without anything but the actor.

So why do we deal with him or her in so desultory a fashion? The theatre of our beginning took for granted that the actor came first and therefore that the company came first, because the company is

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the natural habitat of the actor. No one taught us that. It seemed to be simple, organic knowledge and we just acted on it. Perhaps it came from what we knew of the Berliner Ensemble, the Moscow Art Theatre, Shakespeare’s company or Moliere’s, or from our own idealistic attempts—Eva Le Gallienne’s Repertory Company and the Group Theatre of the ’30s, for example.

In the early years of the ‘50s we chose plays that suited our particular company, assigned roles with the growth and development of our individual actors in mind, cast to the furthest, not the nearest, limits of an actor’s talents (with very little “cosmetic” casting from the outside) and looked upon our companies as our greatest asset.

While some of this might have been adventitious (we wanted the productions to “look good” and we were short of money), I recall our choices as being more purely motivated. The fact that young actors played older characters and that so-and-so who “just wasn’t the right type for the role” played it anyway proved itself out. At least for us at Arena. And not only were major, individual talents developed by these choices but later, when actors moved on to other work, the whole American theatre became enriched. I have carefully checked myself out. I’m not looking at the past through the blur of revisionist remembering.

The output of a theatre is always more than the sum of its parts.

Its level of expressiveness (I prefer this phrase to that other one, “professional standards,” which I find elusive) depends most of all on releasing the energy and creativity of a whole group: on shaping and sending out a collective consciousness, in a general sense, as in “the spirit of the collective,” as well as specifically, in an inter-

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pretation, a viewpoint toward any single production. Since a play is its own world and since the chief ingredient of any world (fictive or real) is the pattern and timbre of its human interrelationships, the interior meanings of the play stand a better chance of being revealed by a group whose members know each other, relate well to each other and have found a way of thinking together, playing together (a play is play) and approaching their tasks in a mutually understood way, have a common vocabulary. That is to say, by an acting company. At the same time, the individual actor always develops best within a continuing group.

It is sometimes quite astonishing to see the flowering that can take place when failures can be outlived, successes are not blown up out of proportion to what life can consistently offer, continuity is assured, casting is sometimes offbeat—for the benefit of the actor, not the management—and friendly faces permit experimentation, a “what-the-hell” attitude toward work that everyone really knows is very serious, and a de-emphasis on quick results.

I wrote an open letter to Robert Prosky in 1978, the anniversary of his 20th consecutive year as a company member at Arena Stage. I spoke about his achievements, about the roles he had played, about the way that he worked. Then I spoke about his personal life, his wife and three sons, and about other sources for his evolution over the two decades into a major American actor. Here is something from this letter that relates to the development of the actor within a permanent, company situation: Since it is life that we show in the theatre (sometimes I think we play variations on only one theme: that we are all more simply human than otherwise), life is what the actor has to know about. And no actor can show more than is in him to show. The actor’s talent is fed by his life or it dries up and grows thin. You have grown fuller and fuller with your life. You say you came to Arena with three suitcases, intending to stay eight weeks.

Your stay expanded into 20 years, and there aren’t enough suitcases to hold what has happened to you, what you “own.”...

I think you have evolved into who you are because you have had a creative home and the opportunity for the continuous exercise of your skill.. . . You have been able consciously to structure and layer your abilities in a way not given to many actors in this country. From play to play, from season to season, it has been possible for you to experience and to examine the building blocks of your craft—its laws of inner technique, aspects of physical embodiment, and the relationship between the two— in a systematic and progressive way. And not only to experience and examine, but also to incorporate and use—immediately, not later, when the learning has already cooled. You have had the privilege to be the continuous and conscious maker of your own instrument. What is so destructive about discontinuity in an actor’s life is not simply that it eats away at his sense of self, his ego, which is the raw material from which all else is made, but that he is prevented from “getting it all together.”

His body forgets from one experience to another what it has found out. And it is hard, if not impossible, for him to accumulate enough knowledge about himself and about his work to reach the peak of his powers and stay there. His creative bursts tend, then, to be sporadic and in mid-career one won38

ders what he could do if he had the chance. You have avoided the waste of discontinuous creative work.

Despite the advantages to the actor (and therefore the art) of continuous, creative work, all kinds of justifications came forward over our long, middle years for the virtual abandonment—except in a few key places—of the company idea: the audience got tired of the same faces; actors just wouldn’t stay, the lures of TV and film were too overpowering; productions were shortchanged by limited casting possibilities; it was cheaper to job in actors for each production, and money was needed to build up the administrative machine and especially to raise funds for sheer survival. All were justifications with some truth to them. The Devil can cite Scriptures. But whenever a real commitment was made to the idea of company and to the individual actor, the actors stayed. (Christopher Morley once said, “There is only one success—to spend your life in your own way.” There are numbers of actors who agree.) And because they stayed, the work of that theatre gathered momentum and opened up, expanded beyond itself. Again, the proof is in the pudding.

The best move the National Endowment for the Arts ever made was its recent Ongoing Ensembles program, which seeks to retrace an earlier time when work centered on an acting company and, by extension, the artists—playwrights, directors, designers, trainers, artist/administrators—who surround that center. Like monogamy, the acting company is now “in.” The terms of the grant were stringent, yet 51 applications were received in the first round and another largish number (I think around 28) in the second. Something was bothering the folk out there about the nature of the work and the feeling-tone of their work/lives. The Theatre Program picked up on this negative national mood, or helped to spotlight it, turned it around and made a change in the dominant method of production in this country a real possibility. That’s good.

More must be done to weave our past creatively into our present and on into the future. The kind of training program we had in the late ‘60s, for which our actors were not ready but now are, needs reinstituting at several theatres; actors need to have more involvement in the running of their artistic lives—at Arena they already have a large say in the roles they play (often choosing one over another that runs concurrently), and the right to refuse any role, but they should have increased input into what plays are done.

Guaranteed year-round salaries (just instituted here, thanks to the Ongoing Ensembles grant) should become more the rule than the exception. Actors are observant and they care about their institutions in an overall way. With some creative thought, they could and should be brought more fully into the working operation of the theatre, even beyond those areas that management might at first think appropriate or of concern to them. I recommend periods of exploration and sheer process, freed from focus on a specific production, as enormously enlivening to a company. The Arena Stage just spent six weeks of summer in this way, three of those weeks in residence at Colorado College both teaching and on our own group search, and now, back in rehearsals, the benefits can be felt in the more improvisational, more open nature of the work.

Twelve years ago our company took two productions to Moscow and Leningrad on a three-week tour. It’s not the only tour we’ve taken, but it was special because of the company tradition o fthe Russian theatre. It was (would you believe it?) in Moscow and then OURSTORIES MAY21

Leningrad that we first saw ourselves as we imagined we might be, where we were first recognized as an ensemble of artists with our own style, our own viewpoint. And there has never been that same kind of acknowledgement since. Perhaps in the next 12 years, if there are enough companies and they are strong enough and speak loudly enough in their own voices, America will catch on and catch up. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

I said that the theatre can make do without anything but the actor. I don’t want to retract that statement, but I must confess it to be a more ideological than practical truth. In the complex theatre world we live in, someone has to chart the course and steer the ship. We call the person who does that by various names, the most frequent being “artistic director.” It is a title that can send a shudder through the body of any gifted, sensitive, insightful, responsive, politically minded, knowledgeable, curious, growing, searching, young (or middle-aged?) director who is exactly the right candidate for the job, but who really wants to spend time on the stage with a group of actors evolving the life of a play and not dissipate physical and psychic energy planning one season after the other, gathering up and retaining artists, overseeing the work and developing the talents of others, informing, educating, exhorting and stimulating a board, and representing a theatre to its own members, its community, its world. Gather together a group of artistic directors, succumbed personal artists, all of them, and you have gathered together a group of weary, tormented humans who suffer from the Jimmy Durante syndrome: “Did you ever have the feeling that you wanted to go and yet you wanted to stay and yet you wanted to go... ?”

Stay, some of us do. Although there has been of late such a fever of movement into and out of and among theatres that the American theatre scene has come to resemble a South American country living out its political destiny! I happen to have on my desk the June and September issues of American Theatre magazine, and under the heading “Entrances and Exits,” one can perceive at one fell swoop the contemporary theatre scene in all of its uneasiness, shifting patterns and causes of complaint. This is surely not the way it was in the old days. In the old days, the theatre was its artistic director. It was the artistic director, propelled by a vision of burning (and blinding; it was not the time of farsighted five-year plans!) intensity, who brought the theatre into being, assembled the meager economic and physical resources (in our case the theatre was a $1.98 cardboard file-box for many months), persuaded into existence a small board, and collected or already had available a group of artists ready to set out on a journey of undetermined length to a vaguely determined destination. The artistic director had no contract as such, only one with him/herself and that was unwritten and, therefore, binding, more or less until death do us part. “Poetry attaches its emotions to the idea; the idea is the fact,” wrote Matthew Arnold. In that sense, our theatres were poetic.

There are still a few theatres left of that original kind. But the more typical situation is that a second or even third generation of leadership heads the theatre, and that he or she has been brought there by a board of directors and has been commissioned, as it were, to create an artwork for the community. Commissions, know, are a viable way to bring artworks into being—history shows us that-—

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but for many reasons the analogy tends to break down in the instance of the atres/institutions. In the first place, the new artistic director usually doesn’t begin with a clean canvas; there is usually a sketch, there may even be a fairly elaborate design inherited from the past, and a number of clear-cut expectations as to pattern and shape.

Since an artwork has to start from an internal impulse, a personally held view of a portion of reality, the commissioned artist begins the labor already at a disadvantage.

In the second place, any artist needs a clear run on the artwork and needs to follow his own nose as it develops. Renewing a contract every two or three years, over “evaluations” by the board as the artwork progresses, input coming from all over the place (in one instance, a publicity department sent a memo to an artistic director criticizing the proposed list of plays and suggesting alternate titles that would better suit seasonal needs and the interests of group sales, and look better on the brochure), and kibitzing along the unending route to completion of this piece of art (about subscribers: don’t lose them; about money: take in more, spend less; about repertoire: be daring but hang on to audiences; about failures: by all means have them, but only two out of eight)—none of this is conducive to a sure hand or a free play of instinct, both necessary to the creative process. And in the third place (which may be the first place), the board, despite its care and concern, might have selected someone from the wrong genre altogether; they may have picked an action painter when what they really meant to have was an abstract expressionist or a representational artist whose specialty was landscapes. After a while, the discrepancies and divergences become obvious either to one party or the other or to both, and separation, usually very painful, becomes the only way out.

I am describing the nature of things, how things are. The pressures are real on both sides. However, since the artist is primary to the artwork, which is to say, we can’t have a theatre without an artistic director and, indeed, the theatre derives its life from within him or her, it seems that we should scrutinize with great care and revamp where necessary this “commissioning” process, starting from its inception and following it all along the way. I think there is no going back to our beginnings here. Because of current economic pressures, I doubt that there will be many new theatres starting up from scratch with the old insistence, the old do-or-die. And because of the very fertility of the field, born out of the success of the movement over the past decades, there are so many seductive opportunities out there that turnover in leadership is bound to remain the prevailing mode and a persistent problem. The closest we can come to perpetuating our personal visions, those of us who came down on the side of “feeling that you wanted to stay,” is to train our successors from within the institution we are still making.

I received a letter from a distinguished management consultant firm outlining the criteria for selecting an artistic director for one of our major theatres:

I think these are excellent criteria and I wish with all my heart that they are met by an available visionary who will leap forward to take up the challenge. I hope it is not inappropriate or too forward of me to add to these five points, or to flesh them out. With this man or woman, young or older, American or from the world at large, I would like to share these suggestions, born from my own long journey.

1. Appropriate scale of work 2. Commitment to, and experience with, classics 3. Ability to develop a resident ensemble of artists 4. Long-range planning and vision and ability to lead the board 5. A personality and style suitable to institutional leadership, especially as it relates to developing the ensemble and community support.

A necessary though seemingly antithetical demand is that you make your own all the conditions and circumstances that other people see and that, indeed, are there.

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People have more power over their own lives and the lives of others than they think. This power is not necessarily theirs but comes from the idea that inhabits them. (Margo Jones put it this way: “If you have a million-dollar idea, you can raise a million dollars!”) The world has more cracks in it than substance; more or less everything and more or less everybody are constantly slipping through them. If you marshal your ideas clearly, know as much as you can know about what you want, your foothold will be strong.

Until you are sure enough, put up with the pangs of aloneness. If you have a friend or two with whom you can share your doubts, you are blessed. Boards, foundations, the community at large will not be smitten by your doubts (to them, they will look like more cracks in the universe), even though they may be the most creative thing about you. Know your position inside and out; when it is ripe, share it.

Also, know your territory. Incorporate into your vision deep, experiential knowledge of its tastes, hungers, presences and absences, past, dreams, pocketbooks, proclivities and, of course, its theatre board and especially the president of it. If the knowledge, when incorporated, despoils the vision, don’t go to that place, go somewhere else or do something else. There won’t be time to change things very profoundly. The long run doesn’t exist anymore.

Hang on to your obsession for dear life. If they pry it loose from you with their caution and precautions, you have lost and become a functionary. In order to lead you have to be a leader, which is to say, someone obsessed with a vision that propels you over and under all obstacles and through the inevitable periods of despair and fatigue. If “other considerations” begin to tip the scales away from the permeating vision (except, perhaps, in the very, very short term), the battle has been lost; you just haven’t gotten word.

Be a genius. If you aren’t a genius, try harder. No board would dare encroach upon Picasso, Frank Lloyd Wright, Stanislavski or Balanchine. If you try and still can’t be a genius, be a strong, committed working artist. If your work is original enough, yours enough, it is unassailable. But even this won’t be sufficient. You must also stand firm with it. You must hold to your point of view, your way of seeing things, and compromise only in the scheme, in the details.

If you permit open spaces around the center of the impulse, other forces will rush in and occupy them.

The constrictions of budget must be felt as your constrictions; only then will you not resent them and retain the power to burst them open. The recalcitrance of the audience; the difficulty of assembling a repertoire that satisfies both you and your associated artists, OURSTORIES MAY21

as well as your audiences; the hazards of limited time for rehearsal and contemplation; the unending demands made on you as the head of an institution—you must feel them as coming not from outside yourself but from within, or they will deplete you to the point where you are powerless to manipulate or change them. Claim the place, with all its problems, as your own. Face up to the fact that you don’t have five years to prove yourself, the world is moving too fast and things cost too much. You have to deliver the goods—produce—in the present tense. In an interview this summer in The Washington Post by drama critic David Richards, Liberace was quoted as saying, “With out a show, there’s no business.” That’s tough, but it’s real.

Artistic directors should not expect coddling because that expectation won’t be fulfilled.

And, if you possibly can, come in with collaborators, artistic associates with whom you have worked before and who share your vision. The job is now too complex to be a one-person show. And learn to plan. Live in the moment, as if you are an actor on stage, and plan as if you were the director of an opera company. Rub your belly while you pat your head.

“These things being subscribed to, you may, by degrees, dwindle into—an artistic director.” Given an inclination to take it on, plus the requisite touch of fire, artistic leadership can be taught and learned.

It’s no longer a mystery. I have been urging for 20 years that a training center be organized for artistic directors, funded by a foundation and probably based at a university. A combination of study and

apprenticeship could provide us with six or a dozen people groomed for the hazards and, yes, the exhilaration of making an artwork of an institution. As it is now, we are doing too much reshuffling of our existing leadership resources and dampening the possibility of reaching the highest artistic achievement in any one place, or, one can hope, any two or three places. Or four.

Back in Washington now, I look for the July/August issue of American Theatre which contains Peter Zeisler’s editorial entitled “A National Agenda.” I am interested in reading again what he has to say about the increasingly important role of the board of trustees over recent years in view of greater responsibilities both for fund-raising and for hiring artistic and managing directors for the next generation of their theatres. Zeisler states that participants at a recent meeting of representatives from the various arts disciplines unanimously identified the relationships between staff and trustees as the most pressing problem facing arts institutions today, and notes that we are still exploring the role of trustees in their governance. He also lays the groundwork for a project to develop a “national artistic agenda” for the nonprofit theatre: to hammer out goals and examine the ways in which barriers to artistic growth can be overcome.

In the September issue of the magazine, trustee Suzanne Pestinger is quoted: “Share with us your ideas, beliefs, visions. Educate us so we can help.”

I am moved by this sincere and heartfelt request, and it should be responded to in full measure. And I empathize with the heavy burdens placed on the shoulders of theatre trustees who volunteer their time and concern, often at the expense of their own work and

JOURNEY 2021–2022 SEASON

N E B R A S K A R E P.O R G

11.10 - 11.21 d o n t re l l , w h o k i s se d t h e s e a

MAY21 OURSTORIES

9.29 - 10.10 a midsummer night ’s dream

2.23 - 3.6

t he way to the way

10.21 - 10.31 shakes fear

4.13 - 4.24 our town

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private pleasure, for an endeavor that, after all, does not stand at the center of their lives as it does ours whose profession it is. I salute and thank them. The demand, again and yet again, for more and yet more money for expanding artistic needs must be wearying indeed.

And holding in one’s hands the very definition of a theatre institution through the choice of an artistic or managing director must surely be experienced as awesome.

But the responsibility to raise money and the responsibility to find new leaders do not take care of describing the relationship between staff and trustees or the increasing importance that relationship is coming to have. Underneath these responsibilities, and affecting them, lie other matters—questions of attitude and feeling that should be probed and illuminated. If we can do this creatively, perhaps we can improve upon what exists. Perhaps a deeper understanding of our separate positions would lighten the burden on both staff and trustees. My remarks are made in the spirit of exploration and not final wisdom since I, too, am in changing waters.

Arena does not have a “money board,” and given the choice of that kind of board and the other, I prefer it this way. The board, many of its members hard working and deeply caring, has limited fund-raising capacities in a city notorious for its lack of philanthropic yield; the development department of the theatre has always borne the main responsibility for closing the deficit gap. We chafe at this a little and wish the board could do more. And so do they.

But both Tom Fichandler and I believe that a theatre is most artistically free in this society when it can earn as much as possible by its own devices—box office on the regular season, special events, interest on reserves and investments, royalties and the like. We account for 75 percent of our expenses in this manner. For years the theatre management, with only one or two minor exceptions, has balanced the budget and showed a surplus, sometimes quite a hefty one. We have been fortunate enough and, yes, insistent enough to do the repertoire of our choice and although, because of enormous competition in the city, we don’t have as many subscribers as a number of other theatres around the country, we play, fairly consistently, to around ninety percent of capacity. From the trustee point of view, the theatre has not posed a lot of problems, it pleases me to say.

Tom and I have been the sole leaders from the beginning, so the question of continuity has not been a weight upon the board.

Indeed, we both feel it our responsibility to provide choices for our own successors in order to maintain the Arena tradition to which both board and staff subscribe, and that was recently elaborated on, in joint deliberation, in our mission statement. Further, we have been, if anything, over-assiduous in sharing our “ideas, beliefs, visions.” If nothing else, I am a talker. If talking can do it, the board knows what Arena stands for, what it needs and means to do further and how much it will cost. The staff has also provided the future thrust of the theatre: Our five-year plan contains motion and intentionality, it is not just a chart of numbers concocted to satisfy one funding instrumentality or another; it is ours, the theatre’s, and it is subscribed to by the board, which has taken shared responsibility for its fulfillment.

Where, then, is the rub?

In 1959, Jacques Barzun wrote, in The House of Intellect: Many directors of corporate foundations and some univer42

sity trustees handle money for research and education not as if they were engaged in a nonprofit enterprise, but as if they were engaged in an enterprise that was failing to make a profit.

In other words, they do not see where the actual profit lies. It being intellectual, and they not, it is to them invisible.

Replace the terms “corporate foundations” and “universities,” and note that Barzun says “many” and “some” (we all have trustees who are intellectual), and that’s a statement worth pondering. I suggest that, still, after decades of empirical proof, it has not been accepted—viscerally accepted—by boards of trustees, however much it has been hammered at, however much it is intellectually “understood,” that Not-for-Profit is really a benign and affirmative idea and not a negative and death-dealing one. And that to be not for profit is less defining than to be for something else: something more transcendent than economic profit and in another category altogether; a mode of human transaction entirely other than the one about money. I wonder if this attitude can ever be dug out from the subconscious of our governors—lawyers, doctors, accountants, builders, businessmen—whose daily lives are lived elsewhere and in another way. “As a man lives, so is he.” (One does not want to typecast here: There can be skinny butchers, homely lovers, leftwing millionaires, and politicians who write poetry. Nonetheless, I share what I have experienced.)

I would be overjoyed to find a trustee (am I not sending out strong enough signals?) who, on some one issue, would position himself on the other side so that we could switch and have a fresh look at things. I am able to take his position and often do; why is he not able to take mine? I wait expectantly, hopefully, for that Special One who will plead with me to consider lowering ticket prices, or raising salaries of underpaid technicians or non-competitively paid middle managers, or prod me to expand our playwrights’ wing or our advertising budget, or to take the company on tour, or to spend more on the artistic product. But the pressures back and forth are always predictable, they never surprise. The tug-of-war is played over and over again in just the same way. Art against money, how much nonprofit is too much?, us against them, our eyes raised up in aspiration, theirs cast down to the bottom line in anxiety and imminent dismay. They are for us and for our dreams. And in locked combat over the Good, they often come over to join us. But why will they not embrace the First Principle: that it is the Art that makes the Money (earned income at the box office and “unearned” income in more intangible ways)? Does it not feel to them, in the deepest places of their hearts, that—when all is said and done—the nonprofit really costs too much? We use the term “partnership.” Can we truly be partners across this philosophical divide?

I admire greatly the statement made by Chloe Oldenberg, trustee from the Cleveland Play House, at a TCG national conference in Costa Mesa last spring: “If we can’t raise questions of ethics and aesthetics with you, we might as well go out and raise money for the American Cancer Society, where everybody agrees that it’s a good thing to cure cancer.” I admire it because it shows involvement in the deeper issues, a concern for the things that even money can’t buy. However, I understand, a bit sadly, the limitations in such an exchange of thought. For aesthetics is our business, our profession (ethics, I suppose, are a shared concern). Surely we are open to discuss them with you and even to be affected by what you say— OURSTORIES MAY21

This is another great philosophical as well as psychological divide.

The board wants to squirrel away resources against the winter. The theatre wants to use them now, thinking that if they are used well, there is a chance of a perennial spring. I suggest that the board’s way of thinking is contradictory to the world’s oldest wisdom, which teaches us that if we are not fully alive in this very instant, there is no life at all. I say to our board that risk-taking is not a line item in the budget but a style, an attitude toward living, but no one hears me and that makes me sad. Perhaps I am not saying it well enough.

A 1965 Rockefeller Board Report on “The Performing Arts: Problems and Prospects” states: Good business brains and performances are essential to the successful operation of these organizations, but more than these are required, for the problems are unique. Artistic judgments defying business calculations enter at every step.

PHOTO COURTESY OF ARENA STAGE

Bottom-line thinking doesn’t always get to the bottom of things.

An artistic director lives in dread of getting out of touch with his/her subconscious sources. An institution is a work of art: feats of deliberation, strategy, craft and cunning derive from powerful, unconscious motives. I have said what I think artistic directors should do.

If boards of trustees could offer up their trust, especially on key forward moves and, of course, totally on artistic choices, perhaps the great divide would narrow.

Architect Harry Weese with Zelda Fichandler and the model for the original Arena Stage.

all subjects should be open to discussion. But trustees must understand that while we can come together for a time on such issues of our profession, ultimately we must become separate. Just as we cannot, in this brief lifetime, understand the ins and outs of your particular profession, ours, too, has its special province.

And after we discuss aesthetics, we must go back to the theatre and put them to work, following our own way, often a lonely and blundering way, but one with its own underlying laws and interior logic.

Taking this a step further: We need help and advice on many things—the law, investments, buildings, contracts, many things.

Finally, though, a theatre is a self-contained organism, a creature in its own right. And by now, usually an effectively adaptive one. For survival, our work must be tough-minded and precise, both in its artistic and its managerial aspects, both with time and with money.

Boards must trust our competency, for it is there, and demonstrate that trust by not taking on responsibilities that they need not take on. The idea that artists are playful children, whimsical creatures of the night, has long outlived itself.

To go back to Chloe Oldenberg’s statement: Curing cancer is certainly a priority. But would it not be helpful if each trustee felt that “everyone agrees it’s an (equally) good thing” to know ourselves and our world through the formal constructions of art? Please support us because we matter in the abstract—matter extravagantly and immeasurably—in the long, evolutionary process of mankind; support us because we are an instrument of civilization; and for no smaller or more personal reason.

A board tends to think more of the future of the institution and to be terrified of its death. A theatre tends to think more of its present and that it will only die because it is ready for it and should.

MAY21 OURSTORIES

Bertolt Brecht tells us in The Caucasian Chalk Circle: Everything should belong to whoever is best for it— Children to the motherly, so that they shall thrive, Wagons to good drivers, to be well driven, And the valley to those who will water it and make it fruitful.

The board must be accountable to the community for the honesty and integrity of its theatre, for the perpetuation of its leadership, for its overall policies in the broadest sense and for resources of all kinds, including funds, to assist it in its stability and growth.

But “the sand takes lines unknown.” The board must also support the elusiveness of the creative enterprise. If there is to be a partnership, it must be one of the spirit as well as of the pocketbook.

How we, at 35, resolve these four questions—the one about institutions, the one about artists and especially actors, the one about artistic leadership and the one about staff/trustee relationships—will determine how we will look five years from now. After 40, someone said, a man is responsible for his own face.

Zelda Fichandler cofounded the Arena Stage in 1955 and served for decades as chair of the Acting and Directing Department at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She was a founder of TCG in 1961, and she served as TCG’s Board President from 1993-1995.

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About TCG Theatre Communications Group (TCG) is the national organization for theatre, with a membership network of 500+ member theatres and over 250 university, funder, trustee, and business affiliates, and over 7,000 individuals. TCG reaches over 1 million students, audience members, and theatre professionals each year through its programs and services.

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AMERICAN THEATRE MAGAZINE

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and Partnerships Joshua Smalley, Institutional Giving Associate

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International Programs Juli Hendren, Dr. Kerry English Global Connectivity Manager

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PUBLISHING Terence Nemeth, Publisher Kathy Sova, Editorial Director, TCG Books;

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OURSTORIES MAY21

WE PROUDLY SUPPORT THEATRE COMMUNICATIONS GROUP’S 60TH OUR STORIES GALA

in honoring Ricardo Khan & The Performing Arts Alliance

New Titles from TCG Books

What the Constitution Means to Me

by Heidi Schreck

He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box and Other Plays

A Strange Loop

by Michael R. Jackson

The Welkin

by Lucy Kirkwood

by Adrienne Kennedy

Linda Vista

by Tracy Letts

Gloria

by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

The Thanksgiving Play/ What Would Crazy Horse Do?

by Larissa FastHorse

Forthcoming Titles Caryl Churchill

Glass. Kill.

Bluebeard. Imp. AND OTHER SHORTS

Mlima’s Tale

by Lynn Nottage

Is God Is/What to Send Up When It Goes Down

by Aleshea Harris

The Long Revolution

by Zelda Fichandler

Glass. Kill. Bluebird. Imp. and Other Shorts

Visit the TCG Bookstore at https://shop.aer.io/tcg

by Caryl Churchill