On & Off York Street N EWS FROM YALE SCHO OL O F DR AMA
Mother Courage
01 01 Rachel Spencer Hewitt ’10 and her children looking at a set model with Max Gordon Moore ’11. Photo by Daniel J. Vasquez Productions.
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During Rachel Spencer Hewitt’s ’10 first year as a mother, she intuited that the best way to continue her acting career was to pretend that nothing had changed. And so, she arrived one night at an industry party as if she hadn’t left her daughter with a sitter at a coffee shop, nor swapped her sweats for sequins in a public restroom. Over cocktails, she found herself chatting about the challenges of the past few months. A colleague stopped her: it might be best for her, and her future in theater, if she didn’t talk so much about motherhood. On the long bus ride home, with her one-year-old asleep on her chest, Hewitt replayed his comment in her head. Instead of brushing it off in anger, she committed to changing the conversation. But as she would find out the conversation hadn’t even started. Her research on theaters’ policies about childcare and resources for actors navigating pregnancy and childbirth turned up little. Hewitt started a blog, “Auditioning Mom,” of funny and poignant essays about working and raising a toddler. Inspired by parent artists groups in Ireland and the UK, Hewitt founded the Parent Artist Advocacy League (PAAL) in 2017. The theme of PAAL’s first year was “MotherYA L E S C H O O L O F D R A M A A N N UA L 2 019 –2 0
Snapshot Alicia J. Austin ’20 was the recipient of the 2019 Princess Grace Award. An MFA candidate in Costume Design, her YSD credits include The Tempest, As U Like It, Rock Egg Spoon, Camille, The Guadalupes, Near the Krummholz, To/From Nothing, Conduct of Life, and Bakkhai. Upcoming: Steven Spielberg/Walt Disney Studio’s West Side Story. Photo by Joan Marcus.