Bi Jean Ngo, Melanye Finister, Joseph Ahmed, and Danielle Leneé in BACKING TRACK at Arden Theatre Company.
The Rebecca Wright directed production of R. Eric Thomas’ Backing Track at the Arden Theatre made the case that finding queer love in a banal suburb is possible, a radical opinion for some, and that processing grief can also be a joyous practice.
The show is episodic and paced by a mixtape of songs and quotes that lay out the process of how a family has come to terms with the loss of their co-matriarch, Mel. The show carried the energy of a live sitcom recording and I was happy to be part of the laugh track.
Thomas’ swears that this play isn’t autofiction but that the show’s gay romance is fan fiction. It’s easy to see what he means when you watched Avery (Brenson Thomas) and Abraham (Carl Hsu) find love in spite of their scrolling through the abyss of headless torsos. When they first meet on Grindr, Abraham is shrouded in darkness, his face unabashedly hidden despite their texts conveying an emotional intimacy that some would assume requires at least two talking heads. Watching Abraham go from carefully curated angles of his biceps to typical suburban gay man that shops at Target, was refreshing. You wouldn’t believe that this could happen especially, with Avery guarding his heart, which is very much on his sleeve, but their romance is insistent and endearing.
Even if the play was fan fiction, we got into the very real politics of the queer Philly scene. I was shocked to learn that Woody’s had a computer station for you to dutifully check your Adam for Adam profiles. I didn’t realize how much of a technological slow burn it was to reach our current state of queer dating apps, an oversaturated market that seems to take us farther and farther from human connection. Can’t wait until I can go to Woody’s on the Metaverse.
You can catch Backing Track at the Arden Theatre through April 10th or can stream it online from April 11th-24th. Buy tickets here.
Alexi Chacon: You’re writing, and this particular play Backing Track deals a lot with memory. In this show, you flesh out the process of grief and memorializing someone after death. Your biography on Representative Maxine Waters’ life, cements legacy while the person is living instead of memorializing someone after the fact. Did you have a different approach to writing about memory for each of these works?
Eric Thomas: That’s a really interesting question. One of the things that animates Backing Track is that Miriam, the character who has passed away before the play begins, is such a huge presence in these people’s lives. The grief that they are dealing with is separate from her, which is one of the stumbling blocks that they come around to realizing. When working on the book about Representative Waters, I had the opposite challenge. People started calling her Auntie Maxine, based on something that I wrote and the challenge that Halina and I had in the book was trying to not lean into stereotype and instead uplift everything that she had done while making it present for the reader in in the moment. We wanted to give her, her flowers while she’s alive.
AC: This show also focuses a lot on property ownership. It’s one of the first plays I’ve seen where two people of color own property, and are not, like in Raisin in the Sun, working towards property ownership to achieve that “American Dream.” Was that an intentional kind of departure from how people of color are portrayed in relationship to property ownership?
REC: I’m very much always trying to touch the hem of the garment of Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, and August Wilson. I grew up, reading and going to see those plays and understanding myself as a Black person in that world. As I became an adult, and I started to go to the theater, then I was seeing plays like Clybourne Park, and I wanted to have a conversation because there was something missing. It’s partially about the way that we structured how we understand contemporary theatre to work and how we think those characters are supposed to exist in the theatrical world, particularly characters of color. I wanted to upend that apple cart. If Esther as a character, who is your neighborhood association president is a white woman, comes in and demands that the yard appear cleaner, it’s a very different context. But it’s one that we expect. We expect white characters on stage to represent a sort of maintaining of order or to have the upper hand. That tone changes by making Esther a person of color in the show.
AC: The show has an Airbnb owner, Abraham played by Carl Hsu, who encroaches on the neighborhood by snapping up homes left and right. Does making Abraham a person of color justify his neoliberal girl-bossin’ success at the expense of our own community? Do you think that conversation starts to be supported by the play itself?
REC: As a playwright, I’m not necessarily interested in judgment, but I am interested in the conversation that you have when you get dessert after the play. The American Dream is about hanging your shingle. Well, that’s not the big bad, but the idea that we have to take things, take property, take pieces of land, and turn them into money in order to prove our worth in this country is explored in the play. I think the play opens up both possibilities, where Abraham can be grappling with the implications of him pursuing the American dream while also being humanized as the romantic lead. He’s Meg Ryan in “You’ve Got Mail” and he’s also Tom Hanks.
AC: I loved Avery and Abraham’s relationship. It was refreshing to see queer romance that was not based on intense yearning. It was just two people living life in the suburbs who fell in love. But of course, they are gay and so they met on Grindr. Understandably, Avery kept internally wondering whether romance was dead in our queer hyper-sexualized culture. What would you tell him? Is there is there hope for romance in hyper sexualization, as we experience it, within queer culture?
REC: The way that Grindr works in this play is so ridiculously romantic. Avery and Abraham show that it is absolutely possible to have a delightful tête-à-tête with somebody on the apps. But I’m a huge fan of being in the room and staying in the room with people, I am going to make myself sound like the old queen sitting at a piano bar in Province Town, but when I first started going out, I would go to Woody’s, which back then was a gay bar, and just talk to people. Then they started having computers at Woody’s that you could go to, to check your online profiles. Some people would stand at those computers all night checking their profiles instead of talking to people. When the apps came out, they got rid of the computers because everybody had the computer in their hands.
It’s deeply scary to strike up a conversation with somebody, it’s very scary to say this is this is who I am on the inside. But instead we’ve traded it for this is who I am on the outside. It is so strange to send yourself out piecemeal over the internet. Here’s a here’s a chest, here’s other things. And here’s my face if you need that. I get it. I’m a person. But one of the things that is really exciting to me about this play is that it highlights inherent and insistent romance. The conversations that Avery and Abraham have are conversations that I think so many of us are yearning for. I knew that some of my friends in Philly would see the show and they would see the romance that we dreamed about, that we talked about, that we wished for. Avery and Abraham work because they are two people being 100% themselves. They think they have nothing to lose because they think this app is just body parts. And then they fall into it, in love.
AC: I had no idea that Woody’s had computers to check your profiles. What if you spilled your drink on the computer?
REC: Our computer literacy was so underdeveloped that we might have not realized that water breaks computers. The smaller bar looked like a FedEx Kinkos and people would send messages on Adam for Adam. You’re at Woody’s right now, just turn around and meet someone?
AC: I’m picturing a desktop computer on the piano at Tavern on Camac.
REC: The first produced play I had in Philly was called Time Is On Our Side and is essentially about Tavern on Camac and ultimately how we find each other as queer people.
AC: I’m definitely going to read that; Tavern is one of my favorite places.
Miriam has such a huge presence on the show even when she has no speaking lines, and no physical presence on stage. I wanted to delve deeper into Miriam as a character. It’s clear that Avery gets his humor and wit from his mother Mel. What parts of Avery come from Miriam?
REC: Oh, that’s a great question and I thought about that a lot. Even though Avery is cantankerous in the way that Mel is he’s also a community maker in the way that Miriam was. Miriam was a member of the neighborhood association and helped create that community. He creates these cabaret-karaoke communities on his cruise ship gig that people keep booking because he is a showman and pulls people toward him. Oh, I love Avery. He’s just so great.
AC: A lot of this play spoke to the Black queer experience and the Black familial experience. Was any of it autofiction?
REC: You would get a very different answer if you asked my parents this. They would say oh, yeah definitely. None of it is autofiction and some of it is fan fiction. It’s about the way I wish my dating life had gone. I’ve made people mixtapes but never got them. I would have killed to have a conversation as delightful as Avery and Abraham’s. Avery is not me. Avery is a character that I play on the internet sometimes. But Avery is so much bigger than I am. And I don’t write about problems that I have, that I haven’t already worked through. That’s how you get messy plays. If there’s any sort of similarity it’s the portrayal of a family that has really sharp idiosyncratic relationships with each other.
Justen Ross currently plays Pharus in the Jeffrey L. Page directed production of “Choir Boy” at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre. Pharus is a student at Charles R. Drew Prep School for Boys, an institution with one mission: to ensure that all students obediently fit into an outdated conception of masculinity, which is readily enforced by Headmaster Morrow (Akeem Davis). The show focuses on five students who are in the school choir, led by Pharus, who is anointed as the best singer in the group.
This coming-of-age story centers on Pharus accepting his queerness and figuring out if he can express that side of himself while also still being a “Drew” man. His classmates have decided that those two sides of Pharus cannot co-exist and are determined to make Pharus choose between the two.
I spoke with Ross to discuss the parts of himself he brought to his portrayal of Pharus. Our conversation was healing, and you can get tickets to his performance here. Choir Boy runs at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre until March 13th.
Read our conversation below:
Alexi Chacon (AC): When I saw the show, I noticed that there was a large emphasis on what it meant to be a “Drew” man, and how it was steeped in some regressive conceptions of masculinity. Do you find yourself challenging those same regressive, outdated forms of masculinity in your own day to day life outside of your character?
Justen Ross (JR): Absolutely. Growing up, my father was an assistant principal of a charter school named Charles R. Drew. I went to a Catholic high school, so I know what it’s like to be in an all-black, all male institution where piety is at the center of its values. It had a big influence on me, especially having a father figure like Headmaster Morrow play out in real life. I know what it’s like to constantly have that male gaze that oppressive dated, gaze of masculinity on you. I know what it’s like, and I am on my healing journey. Now, as a queer man, I’m figuring out what’s the value in being a man if there’s any.
Growing up, it was survival. You wear the Jordans’ and a hoodie and a hat. For me, that’s how I survived, instead of being loud with my crop top. That’s how I maintain my status and my safety within the community that I was brought up in. To this day, I still struggle with wanting to wear certain things and wanting to talk a certain way, but I have to keep my safety at the front of my mind. But as I’m healing, I’m learning that I’m beautiful the way that I am in whatever way I want to express myself. But it does take a little extra work to feel safe in those expressions.
AC: You brought so much of yourself into your portrayal of Pharus. How did you take care of yourself after a performance where you had to re integrate yourself into a prior mindset and then play out the worst outcome of navigating those really dangerous environments?
JR: Thank you, first of all, thank you for asking that. Theater has been co-opted by white supremacy in so many ways. And one of the ways that theatre has been co-opted is we as actors are taught how to prioritize warming up, but we aren’t taught how to prioritize warming down, and how to come out of something. So I appreciate you for asking that. When I was younger, I was more straight passing, and it was because I changed myself and I tweaked myself. When Headmaster Morrow says tighten up, I tightened up and I tightened up so tight, my muscles are tight, even now I’m struggling to release them from all the years of carrying that baggage of just sucking it in. So coming to the role of Pharus has been so liberating. There is a lot of myself in it. And I would say a lot of myself that has been lying dormant. This has been a process where I’ve been able find my voice truly and find out what the voice sounds like when it is loud and proud and warming down.
When I warm down I daydream a little bit and give myself three things that Justin is grateful for in his life right now. So at the moment, I’m grateful for my mother in ballroom and how often she checks in. I’m grateful that my three friends who are here and staying with me. And I’m also grateful that I got through that show safely. That’s a little bit of what warming down looks like to me. And then I walk back into the world as Justin, and I feel safe, and my cast mates help with that. They’re just the best.
AC: I wanted to ask more about the cast as well, because in the play, within this group of students there are clear divisions based on homophobia despite their shared experiences as black boys. They’re so afraid to be emotionally intimate with each other. I assume that didn’t translate over to the friendships you developed as a cast. Tell me more about that. How did the rapport develop?
JR: I was doing the first the first week of rehearsal on Zoom. I was at home while all the boys were rehearsing in Philadelphia. I felt isolated from the boys in the same way that Pharus feels during the show. The moment I touched down in Philly, the boys said let’s meet up. And they asked if we could sing through some songs and just instantly the melody was like butter. When we were together it was like The Temptations or the Jackson Five, it was beautiful.
We hang out every night after the show, we watch movies together, we see other plays together, we go out to eat together, we share stories about our life, we are family, those are my brothers. It makes this show much easier because we have a lot of intimate moments on the stage, cursing slurs, intimate touch. And it makes it so much more comfortable because we all really love each other. And we’re invested in each other’s well-being offstage.
AC: I want to touch back on mentorship. It’s clear that Headmaster Morrow in this show both deeply cares and recognizes some of the best parts of Pharus. But, in an effort to protect Pharus also tears down aspects of himself that are integral to who Pharus is. It was painful to watch some of that mentorship, play out on stage. Can you tell me maybe about some positive mentors in your life that built you up, who recognized the best aspects of yourself and amplified them?
JR: I gotta give the trophy the black women in my life. My mother, my auntie, my Nana, my mentor, Jade Lambert Smith. The first person to tell me that I was enough was a black woman. The men in my life, they like to bring that structure and the realism in their guidance, they want to make things tangible. And the women in my life taught me how to dream. They taught me how to value myself and value things that I can’t see or can’t feel. That’s so important because in the show Pharus is having his dreams snatched from him, time, and time, and time again.
One person I’d like to highlight in particular is Jade Lambert Smith, acting coach, and teaching artist in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the reason that I’m here today. She’s the first person to tell me that I could do it. She trusted me. A lot of kids need that. She’s the reason for it all. I have about 1000 Moms Alexi and she’s one of them. Black women are my rock.
AC: It’s so important to, to dream, especially for communities of color, because to dream is an act of resistance. I have my own people who have taught me to dream and to not be afraid. I was going through the playbill, and I read that y’all have an Equity Diversity and Inclusion Officer and Intimacy Consultant, which I think is so critical to the topics being explored in this play. How did she make tangible changes in the show to make sure that everyone felt safe?
JR: I don’t know if we would feel as comfortable and as safe in the show if it was not for Miss Noelle. This black woman who came in and was the rock and held it down. What she did. She came in and made sure we were all in agreement on what our community guidelines were. What do we expect from each other when we’re working on stage and off? What parts of our bodies are okay to touch? You can come to me, and I can share anonymously, if you ever have a problem with something. That was her job. And our director Jeffrey L. Page is somebody I love working with, but he can move really quick. Her job was to make sure that in the midst of all of that urgency, that we were moving at the speed of trust with one another, so that we don’t move too fast, slip up and harm one another. And if there was ever a day we were uncomfortable, she had a plan B for us. She’s so important.
AC: What’s next for you? What can we expect?
JR: I’ll be doing a short film with Donja R. Love, an amazing HIV-positive playwright, the first week of April. I think that’s all I can disclose. ‘m writing a television series/web series. It can be done in many mediums. I write poetry and I’ll be in Atlanta performing at poetry slams, and I’m also a ballroom girl so I’ll be practicing my voguing as part of the Juicy Couture Chapter in Atlanta.
Harriett D. Foy currently plays Patrice Woodbine on P-Valley, the new television show on Starz. It’s her first series regular role, and she plays the mother of Mercedes (played by Brandee Evans), one of the main characters on the show. Mercedes works at the Pynk, a Black-owned strip club in Mississippi, which throws her into conflict with her mother, who is ultra-religious and wants to lead her own church.
Foy knows Patrice isn’t the most likable character, which is why one of her pleasures these days is reading the Twitter comments after every episode. “There was one where they were just like, ‘I hate her. I wanted to jump through the television and beat her,'” said Foy. “And I was like, “Bring it, ‘cuz Patrice ain’t no punk.'”
She takes it all with good humor of course. “It doesn’t affect me. I just feel like I’m really doing my job then if this is how people are seeing her,” she said. In addition to her impactful performance in P-Valley, Foy’s stage resume is impressive: She’s been on Broadway in Mamma Mia! and Amelie, and Off-Broadway, she was a standout in the 2018 Off-Broadway play The House That Will Not Stand by Marcus Gardley. Plus she’s played the legendary Nina Simone on stage, twice(!), in the play Nina Simone: Four Women by Christina Ham.
On Aug. 18, Foy is going to play another historical figure: Suffragist Mary McLeod Bethune, as part of Finish the Fight, a new play by Ming Peiffer about the overlooked women of color who fought for the right to vote. The play will premiere of The New York Times’ YouTube channel.
Below, Foy talks about creating in quarantine, the joy of working on P-Valley and her pre-theater ritual.
You are going to be in Finish the Fight which is a play that Ming Peiffer wrote. I was like mind blown to think that a century ago women couldn’t vote and right now our voting rights are in so much danger. Can you talk us just a little bit about why you wanted to be part of this?
Well for me, it’s exactly like what you’re saying. It was like a history lesson. When I started looking up Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, I was like, Wow, I didn’t know she did all of that. You get one little snippet [in school]. And then I thought, well, how important is that, that we’re still fighting for some of these same things [and] that 100 years ago, we couldn’t even do it. And yet Black women were still at the back and women of color. So I was like, man, I have to do this piece, because there’s a history lesson for people now that they need to know, the younger generation and some of the older generation.
What’s it been like rehearsing something remotely, especially if you’re rehearsing a new play remotely because we see a lot of classics being done. But this is a new piece.
I’ve done a couple of readings. So I kind of had a vibe for it. The New York Times sent the equipment. So there I am trying to unfold the background. I took over my mom’s basement. I was in Maryland for seven months just because of the corona and everything. So I do it, I set up the lights, and I’m all ready to go by the time they come on. I’m literally doing like the lights like what you would have your crew do.
It was really, it was really cool. And I felt actually more free in that way just to create and do it. I had a good time. Of course there’s nothing like being in a live theatre and getting that immediate response. But I think this will last a lifetime and you can always go back to it and use it in school as a tool to teach.
Did you ever think you were going to be doing a new play in the midst of a pandemic?
I did not. So when it came about, I was like, wait, we’re gonna do what? How? I’m down. Let’s see if it works. And it did. I think it’s gonna be a really great experience. I think people will be amazed at the look of the piece. And editing is key in this, which I want to learn more about. And it just makes me want to learn more about this medium, because it seems like that’s what we’re going to be using for some time. I think you can focus more on these women who are the unsung heroes. I think you can focus more on their story, because you’re going to be up close and personal.
I want to talk about you know about that moment in The House That Will Not Stand, you know which moment. It’s always electrifying. And after watching you on stage, I wondered, knowing that you did this part for five years, how do you do something like that every night? And how do you then cleanse and release yourself from a character like that? [Eds note: we’re not going to spoil it for you, but Foy gave an electric performance as Makeda, a slave in a Creole household in the 19th century.]
That’s a great question. Thank you. When we were doing it at New Dramatists, that particular monologue wasn’t in there. So we came to the rehearsal. And Marcus came in. He always called me diva. “Diva, I got something for you.” And I was like, What? So he gave it to me. It was a five-page monologue. And I read it. I connected immediately with the words. I had never looked at it, and people thought I had looked at it the night before. And it was because it was our history. It was like every ancestor spoke to me and I could connect to it in a grounding way. It was like I was in the pocket and it just came—the rhythms that you heard, that’s how I spoke it, because I could hear the drums and all that.
At New York Theatre Workshop, I would be exhausted after the show. And Joniece [Abbott-Pratt], who played Odette, we would walk home after the show from New York Theatre Workshop. I live in Midtown and she lives in Jersey. I needed that time to decompress. And I didn’t want to be like enclosed on a bus or enclosed on the train and we would just walk and gradually release it. Because you do have to release it, because it was such an emotional journey playing Makeda, from beginning to end, being enslaved and then getting that freedom, and then trying to take care of this whole house.
I would get to the theater early and warm up; always say a prayer before I start each show. And I always celebrated one of my ancestors, as if I imagined that they watch me every night. So I call a name particularly before I started a show, and say, “This one’s for you tonight.”
Harriett D. Foy, Joniece Abbott-Pratt, and Juliana Canfield in “The House That Will Not Stand” at New York Theatre Workshop. (Photo: Joan Marcus)
I think that a lot of people especially outside of New York, if people haven’t seen you on stage, are gonna get to meet you now that you’re a series regular in P-Valley. And I mean this as the utmost compliment, but Patrice is so terrifying.
Katori [Hall, the show runner and playwright] has given us the writers room, they gave us some really great lines. What I love the best about Patrice and how she’s resonating is that everybody hates her. [laughs] And Katori says, “I want you to dislike her. But I also want you to understand where she’s coming from.” I literally want to do a thing where I read mean tweets, or what they say on their reviews: “Honey, she would eat concrete. If it was me, I would have punched her dead in the face.” I’m like, what??? And so I’ll comment sometimes and they get a kick out of that. Listen, honey, Patrice is no joke.
You know, I was doing a show when the audition came, and I just really couldn’t focus the very first time it came through. I was doing Nina Simone. Then I was doing another Marcus Gardley play, A Wonder in My Soul at Baltimore Center Stage and it came around again. I said, Oh, you better pull this together. My cast mates helped me audition and stuff like that. Then I got the call: Come to New York, audition, call back.
I came to the callback. It was very emotional. I felt again, the ancestors were there with me, it was something like I’ve never felt before—I literally felt it all over. And in my mind, I was like, I think this is your part. I’ll start to cry if I think about it too much, because that’s how it felt in the moment. Katori got up and gave me a hug because I literally was overcome. And the fact that the song they asked me to sing was the same song I was singing in A Wonder in My Soul: “I Know I’ve Been Changed.”
I feel like all the roles that I played leading up to her—Princess Peyei in Amazing Grace [on Broadway], Dr. Nina Simone, Odessa [in The Young Man from Atlanta Off-Broadway], Makeda— were all forming me and shaping me to play Patrice, my first series regular.
GIF courtesy of Starz
Every time I see Patrice, I want her to come slap me and tell me that I should be ashamed of myself or something like that. I love the shows specificity. Everything feels so, like, someone showed up with a camera and just captured everyone and everything. Can you talk about what the environment is like and what it takes to create the kind of very lived-in experience, especially within the show.
That’s all due to Katori and the people that she brought on the team in terms of the crew, producers, and the cast. She was very specific about what she wanted, down to the directors being all female, which made for a very safe space that you knew you were going to be cared for, especially for our ladies who had to be in very skimpy clothing and really do some very intimate scenes. We had an intimacy coordinator—we were having problems, they would come and we’d have a conversation about it and how it was going to be shot. It was a very open space in terms of Katori listening to us and how we thought about our characters.
It was just a really wonderful time. Being at the Tyler Perry Studios was great. And the scripts, and the way [Katori] defined these characters is just like nothing else I’ve seen in a while, except for Marcus Gardley, of course, because you know, I’m partial.
There’s nothing like it. And everybody feels that way. Everybody in the cast feels that way. We talk about it all the time. We call ourselves family. We have our own little private group that we talk to each other constantly. We get along, we love hanging out with each other. So I’m just saying it was all love. So it makes your job easy. It wasn’t like work.
Since you live between both worlds of stage and television, I wonder what from the stage that you love would you bring to TV. And what from TV that you love would you bring to theater?
From stage to the TV, I think it’s the discipline. That is the key for me, this is how I live my life, in terms of a body, in terms of voice, in terms of how I prepare, and I think that helps with the amount of time that you have to spend setting up a shot. So you’re always ready every time they say, “action.” I think of it as that’s always the take. For me, that eight shows a week, every time is the take.
The last episode that you saw [Eds note: episode 5 where Patrice finds herself in prison and she starts sermonizing and singing], I specifically did not want to pre-record it. I want it to be in the moment. Even if she’s tired, even if we do it for the 12th take and that’s her voice, that’s her truth in that moment. Because it wasn’t gonna work if I’m trying to sing to a track, and I’m trying to take you through this emotion to give you the history of Patrice in P-Valley. Such an emotional episode.
From television to [theater], I think really focusing on that internal, just being in that moment—just real and not judging. And there’s a little more freedom in that. I mean, it’s the same work. It’s the same work and time: how you have to prepare, how you have to create a background for your character, create a book, you know, all that kind of stuff.
“I miss New York, and I live here.” That’s the lyrics to one of the songs that BD Wong sings in Songs From an Unmade Bed. That show was first performed in 2005 Off-Broadway and it’s always been one of Wong’s favorites. So while he was bored and trying to be creative in quarantine, Wong realized that some of the lyrics in Songs From an Unmade Bed, about a lonely gay man living in New York City, were newly resonant in the time of COVID, such as the song “I Miss New York” which has the following lyrics: “I miss the nights of getting home at 5 a.m., and many friends, it’s true, I do miss them.”
During COVID times, that ennui and sense of being removed from the world is now universal. “I started to feel a sense of resonance in the songs, like, ‘Oh, wow, this song actually today, really applies—this song about wanting to go out and not being able to go out,'” said Wong.
The last time Wong, a Tony winner for M. Butterfly, did a Broadway musical was in Pacific Overtures in 2005. Songs From an Unmade Bed was a stretch for the performer in many ways. For one, Wong usually plays supporting roles, such as his Emmy-nominated turn in Mr. Robot or Awkwafina’s dryly hilarious father in Nora From Queens on Comedy Central (next week, Wong flies to the UK to film Jurassic World: Dominion).
Another stretch was how it’s produced: Songs From an Unmade Bed contains 18 songs, all of them filmed in Wong’s apartment and edited by his husband, videographer Richert Schnorr. It will be streamed at 8 pm on Aug. 10 to benefit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS’ Emergency COVID Assistance Fund. The video will be up until Aug. 14, though Wong hopes you’ll tune in on Monday and support relief for theater workers.
“The rug has been pulled out from under the theater,” Wong said. “So a lot of the performers and the artists—not just actors, not just people on stage, but people backstage (hair, makeup, wardrobe)—many of them are struggling.”
Below, Wong talks about how the project has stretched him creatively, and the state of gay POC representation.
What was the impetus for the project? We know that artists are trying to figure out ways to be creative right now. Meanwhile, you haven’t done a musical in a really long time.
I’d always love this particular song cycle [Songs From an Unmade Bed]. It was done at New York Theatre Workshop in 2005. It’s a one-man show or solo show with 18 songs, one lyricist and 18 composers. And it touches on a gay man, living in his apartment, and he’s kind of ruminating on his romantic life. But it doesn’t have a plot. It’s just all different songs about different guys or different situations or different emotional circumstances. One of my best friends was one of the 18 composers. I went to see it and I loved it. And some of the songs are very challenging and I’ve often used it as part of my vocal workout.
I was doing that during the beginning of March when we were starting to quarantine. And I started to feel a sense of resonance in the songs, like, Oh, wow, this song actually today really applies—this song about wanting to go out and not being able to go out. Song after song kind of had a double meaning. So I thought, I really would like to explore this material. And I had also been talking to the lyricist Mark Campbell, who’s the creator of the piece. I said, “I’d like to make a movie of this.” I had done this last year. And so I went back to him in March and said, “Hey, remember I said I wanted to make a movie of Songs From an Unmade Bed? What if we made videos in our apartment in quarantine, and then the goal would be to use the videos as a charity for something?” And he loved the idea of it.
And I played the songs for Richert, my husband, and he loved the idea. And we started to think, could we really make 18 videos in our house? And we started doing it. We started rearranging the furniture, and we bought some lights and we borrowed some sound equipment and we started recording the songs and then we started filming them. And the challenge became, as we went on, how to make them different and interesting and to have them have a point of view, or an aesthetic or a visual life that was different from the others.
So this is my version of theater made in my home. What else can we do right at this point in order to do an entertain people theatrically? There’s a theatricality to some of the songs. And that’s nice. I feel like artists were kind of struggling to figure out what to do next. And that one of the things that was happening was people were doing a lot of self-made content, playing instruments in their bathtub or whatever. And I thought, well, that’s not going to stay interesting that long.
It was wonderful when people doing it and the outpouring of content that has been happening. That’s really exciting and people are not accepting the fact that they’re having to stay home. They’re being them. I’m a musician, so I’m going to play. I’m a singer, so I’m going to sing. Nothing would stop them. But at the same time, there were limitations that were really strong and are really strong. And I think if this continues on, as we see that it’s going to, we’re going to see people pushing forward and changing the limitations that they have.
We’re all becoming self video makers. It’s self-produced a lot. And what I think is that through costume and things that are in your control, that you wouldn’t normally push to the next level, if people start doing that, the content can become really interesting. So this was our attempt. This is our attempt at that, like saying, “Okay, I’m not just gonna wear my regular clothes, I’m gonna put something on that goes with the song. And I’m going to do my hair to go with the song.”
And there’s a kind of poetic-ness to the the fact that we’re in quarantine making this thing about someone who’s trying to connect with the outside world with other people.
The last thing at the theater I saw you in was The Great Leap by Lauren Yee Off-Broadway at Atlantic Theatre Company, which you also directed the next year at Pasadena Playhouse. In that play, you played a character who felt like a follower and not a leader. And at the end of the play, he learns how to like speak up for what he believes in, not to spoil a play.
And to act for him on his own behalf, for his own wishes and for what he wants.
Just thinking about that play, have you been thinking about it, about The Great Leap, and about how something that you did in a year ago, it’s so relevant now to us, in people finding courage to speak up.
Yes. You know, I haven’t really concretely touched on the play with regards to current events or the way that people feel now. But it is absolutely a play about what’s happening now to people in the world. And does relate to that. And I do, I think that’s why the play’s such a good play, because these things are always threatening to be our plate. There’s a pendulum that swings, and we’re in a place in the pendulum where the pendulum is swinging to this place where people are speaking up and saying things that they did not say before. There’s more of a culture of it and there’s more of an understanding of it and an acceptance of it that actually raises consciousness.
People who were very numb, people that don’t understand, people that were closed down to the whole idea of what, for example, #MeToo was all about, now some of them kind of go, “Oh, I see. I see how that the math is added up, and how I play a role in that math. Or something that I observe is there that really needs to be spoken up about.” Rather than silence. Silence is actually complicity.
And for such a delightful play, because Lauren has written a lovely play, that’s a very deep thing just to witness the character go through. And I think that is one of the reasons why I did the play three times: I did it once in New York, once in San Francisco at American Conservatory Theater, and then I directed it at Pasadena Playhouse just last year.
I think that’s the reason why I keep coming back to it, is to talk about those themes of what it means to put yourself on the line, and how integral that is to being human. And in some ways, you’re robbing yourself of one of humanity’s greatest opportunity, or aspects of being human, by not speaking out. That’s a thing that humans can do. And if you turn out to be the kind of person who doesn’t do that, you’re not really experiencing your full humanity. And so a play like Lauren’s, that really always bring people in touch with that. And that’s really, really wonderful.
BD Wong in “The Great Leap” at Atlantic Theatre Company in NYC. (Photo: Ahron R. Foster)
It’s very hard to think about any art about queer Asian men that doesn’t involve BD Wong. And I wonder, since you’ve started, what has changed the most when it comes to queer representation that doesn’t involve gay white men?
Well, let me think about that for a second. There’s one song in Songs From an Unmade Bed, [“The Other Other Woman”] which was about a very specific kind of relationship, which is a relationship between a guy and another guy who has a partner. And how the guy that he’s messing around with takes on a third person. And so then he’s saying, “Well, I didn’t really mind being the second person, but I don’t want to be the third person.” There’s a drawing of the line.
And the reason why I’m telling you this is because I was adapting the song to us making a video of it. And I was trying to figure out how. The part of the thing about making these videos is that you don’t have other actors that you can interact with. If you are going to bring another actor in, you have to have used them remotely and figure out a way to use them remotely. And you may have them make a self tape and share it and you have to cut it together. It’s very complicated.
And so in interpreting the song, I was trying to figure out a way to say what I felt about that phenomenon of being grouped together with someone else, of being the third person. And what it reminded me of is the kind of racial profiling that happens in gay dating. And it’s great that people have their preferences, but when I find out that someone I’m dating only exclusively dates Asian people, it’s always disappointing to me. That’s all you see in me? The fact that I’m Asian? Like, what about the fact that I’m so…dot dot dot? Don’t you like that?
I’m not gonna say I don’t see color. But when I’m dating someone, that’s not really a salient aspect of what I’m looking for or I’m initially attracted to. It’s other things. So I find it personally for me a little off putting, that’s my own personal thing. So I took the song and I made the song about not a guy that has two other extracurricular relationships, but 16 and all of them are Asian guys, and I’m trying to, in a whimsical way, describe this phenomenon that happens. That only an Asian guy like me would really know understand. When I brought these gay Asian musical theater performers, from Broadway and TV, and put 16 of them together in this number, not one person said, “I don’t understand what that is.” Everybody knew the phenomenon that we’re talking about.
What I’m saying is a project like this, I wouldn’t have made it five years ago or 10 years ago. I’m in a place now where I’m self-generating material. And I’m actually using my own point of view and my own thoughts and not editing it. I mean, if I stopped for a split second, I might have thought, “Well, does anybody else care about this? Does anybody understand it?” And I didn’t care. I thought, this is something to share. I’ve realized that being very specific in my own work and expressing myself as a writer is essential.
I didn’t always feel that way. If you’re asking me what’s different about the queer point of view and what I’m doing with that and what I care about, it’s evolved. My coming out as a public person was clouded earlier on with doubt, or worry about what would be the outcome of it. And now there’s none of that at all. There’s just no fear about it or anything. In fact, there’s a liberation that will not be foreign to people. The coming out process is a liberating process, there’s no question about it. And I believe that strongly and I have seen the proof of it. And I love that.
And that is different. That is an evolution of my own sensibility that has happened over the years. So now what I’m saying is that it’s involving my actual expressive work. Because I am a writer who also acts or an actor who also writes, that usually means that as an actor, I’m just playing someone else’s part that they wrote for me, and I’m bringing to it whatever I can. But it doesn’t often allow me to be particularly specific. And something like this [Songs From an Unmade Bed], is a really good example of something really specific that is able to be mined from it.
If you know any children between the ages of 7-12, chances are you’ve heard them rave about Dog Man, he’s the half-man/half-dog hero of Dav Pilkey’s eponymous graphic novel series. Although he’s committed to fighting crime, Dog Man often tends to attract chaos in his pursuit of justice. His approach to cases being as messy as what happens when a dog’s head is transplanted to a police officer’s body.
Pilkey’s inventive series combines multiple genres and relies on simple illustrations to teach its young readers about the power of imagination and the importance of treating everyone with kindness, even those who sometimes fail us.
In 2019, TheaterWorksUSA produced a stage version called Dog Man: The Musical, featuring music by Brad Alexander, and book & lyrics by Kevin del Aguila. Although at first, I attended the show simply because I wanted to take a friend’s son – he’s a huge fan of the books – I found myself completely captivated by the production’s DIY aesthetics, the energy of the ensemble (so many BIPOC actors!), the references to classic Broadway shows (most of which most likely flew over kids’ heads), and the songs.
I went to the show once more last summer, downloaded the cast recording when it was released, and there hasn’t been a day since when I haven’t sung “Go! Dog Man is go!” at the top of my lungs.
This summer, TheaterWorksUSA is letting kids be part of the magic by hosting Dog Man: The Musical Camp, an immersive virtual summer program where children ages 8-12 can take part in the magic of the show. Participants take master classes with costume designers, set designers, and vocal coaches, leading to a digital opening night where parents can delight with a performance of highlights from the musical.
I have never resented being an adult as much as I did when I realized I was too old to attend Dog Man: The Musical Camp.
Continuing TheaterWorksUSA’s commitment to providing equal opportunities to BIPOC artists both on stage and behind the scenes, I was keen to learn more about the camp from musical director, Jarred Lee, the 25-year-old gay Black man, in charge of introducing children to how to sing on stage. We spoke while he spent quarantine in London.
What does a typical day at Dog Man: The Musical Camp look like for you?
This has been definitely a learning process for all of us, because I don’t think anyone expected to have to be running a virtual theater camp this summer. But we’ve made the absolute best of it and our students are such a pleasure to work with. My job is teaching the music and how to perform that music with an instrumental track. For an adult or seasoned performer, it may not be that difficult, but our younger students tend to have some issues singing with an instrumental track that doesn’ have a vocal guide, or someone else singing along with them.
Within that period of time, I’m also able to throw in some really cool vocal tidbits about singing and posture, and other cool things that they can just add on to their summer plate of knowledge throughout the camp.
Courtesy of Jarred Lee
How did you end up working in Dog Man: The Musical Camp?
I got the job with TheatreWorksUSA when they were looking for musical directors. I was recommended to them by my friend Rachel, who I’ve worked with at Pace University. We directed a production of Guys and Dolls this past fall. When I got the job, I have to be honest, I didn’t know what Dog Man was. I’d never heard the book, but I listened to the cast recording and I immediately fell in love.
It’s a kids’ show, but it’s honestly a lot of fun. Most of all, it was really cool seeing the kids interact with it and the connection that they have to this material. Seeing that alone definitely inspired me. I’m just having so much fun watching them love this material as much as they do.
I can not get enough of this musical. I sing “Dog Man is Go” 24/7!
The writing of it is so catchy! My roommates here have all been singing the songs as well, just from hearing me teaching it. It’s just so easy for it to get stuck in your head.
What’s a song that you particularly love teaching the kids?
I would have to say the opening number, and I know that sounds really cheesy because in your classic musical theater, the opening number is all about setting up the story. But I happen to love classic musical theater. I love that cheese, so that that song was definitely right up my alley.
Courtesy TheaterWorksUSA
You’re 25 right now, what were some shows like Dog Man that you loved when you were your students’ age?
I should preface this by saying that my musical theatre background started very, very late in my life. I was a freshman in high school and they were having auditions for the big drama, which was Oliver! At the time, I was a sports guy, I didn’t imagine myself ever doing a musical and I ended up loving it. I started by trying it out for fun and here I am all these years later in my career doing professional musical theatre.
I would have to say in terms of something similar to Dog Man, I think High School Musical might be that. High School Musical didn’t have the books that Dog Man has, but it had the movie which at the time was so relatable.
I loved High School Musical too, and I’m much older than you. I wonder if you ever felt the need to justify yourself when you went from sports to theatre? Kids can be quite cruel with their peers who show any interest in the arts.
Throughout high school for sure, I definitely was able to manage doing both sports and musical theater because the schedules didn’t really conflict that much. There was a point when I got to senior year, or end of junior year rather, where I was starting to look at colleges and where to apply. At that point, I kind of stepped back from sports so I could focus on music. Even though music was something I had started doing for fun, I just kind of wanted to stick with it and see how far I could go.
Do the kids call you Mr. Lee, or Mr. Jarred?
It is so strange being a teacher and also being young. I’ve worked in so many situations where the students call you by your first name, and it’s super chill. I never mind but I like to gauge it off of the vibe of the company. TheatreWorksUSA is a very professional company and right from day one, we were Mr. Jarred, Miss Lisa…every adult had a handle on it just because these are young kids and that’s what they’re used to. So for these kids I’m Mr. Jarred.
The other day a teenager called me sir and I clutched my pearls so hard I almost choked myself. Like you, I started doing what I love from a very early age so I want us to talk about mentors. As BIPOC people in the arts, we tend to grow up without any mentorship and especially without the mentorship of other BIPOC artists. People don’t expect a 34-year-old gay Latino to show up when they hear a theatre critic is coming and I’m sure when people think about musical directors they instantly assume it will be an elderly white man. To some of these kids, even at 25, you will be like Yoda! So when you were growing up did you have mentors? Or was mentorship, something that you craved?
At this moment, looking back, I don’t really think I had much of a mentor in my life when it comes to music and theater, just for the sheer fact that my family is not a musical family. They’re all about sports. So when I kind of found that I was good at music, I kind of carved my own way and path to get to where I am.
Obviously I’ve had help from several people, but I can’t say that there’s been one person that’s kind of been around that I looked up to through the entire process. I do take the position I hold very seriously being a gay person of color. I know for a fact that I am not what these kids are used to seeing, as a teacher, as someone working in musical theater, as someone playing a violin. That is not something they’re used to seeing. So it makes me feel so great to know that I might be the first person that this kid has ever seen, do what I do that looks like me.
Being able to change those stereotypes and what the norm is is great because this is the generation to do it with. It makes me really, really happy to know that I can have that effect on these young people. I think because of that, I definitely try to hold myself to a very high standard, not only when it comes to my own work and performance, but also just as a human, following rules and the law. I know eyes are on me so I want to try to be a good example for all these kids that I end up teaching.
I know for a fact that I am not what these kids are used to seeing, as a teacher, as someone working in musical theater, as someone playing a violin.
jarred lee
People never get to see the music director unless they’re working in the show. So giving visibility to positions like these, that again people never imagine anyone but a white man having is so exciting.
What I can tell you is that teaching was not something that I’d seen on my to do list as an adult. At this point in my life, I thought I’d be working a little bit more on Broadway full time playing in musicals. But a big chunk of my yearly income comes from teaching. I teach at an elementary school in Brooklyn, and also do short term projects at various elementary schools and high schools throughout the Tri State Area. I never saw myself as a teacher but knowing that I’m breaking those barriers for those kids is what keeps me in the career of teaching.
What is one thing about being a music director that people get wrong, that even probably you didn’t know was true until you started doing it?
I think a lot of people think the music director is just the guy who plays the piano. I’ve heard that quite a few times. I could go down the checklist of all the other things that we have to do [Laughs] There’s just so much more to it. At times I find myself being a life coach all of a sudden, because when you’re working with actors sometimes we’re in a one on one situation where you have that vulnerability with someone, and a lot of things can come up. All of a sudden, they’re talking about a home situation, because the song that they were singing really brought back a memory. So there’s just a lot of different hats that we have to wear while also being the guy playing the piano.
Because a lot of people assume that you’re kind of like a human karaoke track, right?
Oh, all the time. But what I’ve always loved about music directors is that I have seen them at work. They’re the people who sometimes convince the artists and the performers that this part, or this song, can be for them, and about them with a key change or with some tweaks and stuff.
I wonder if you have any particular experiences where you’ve maybe rediscovered something about a performer and about yourself because of a slight change in a key?
The key thing happens quite often and it gets really tricky when you’re dealing with licensed work with changing keys because nowadays you have to go through the licensing company to request the key change. They send you all the additional orchestra parts in the new key. It becomes a bit of an ordeal rather than just having someone that can just do it on their own that’s on your team. But legally we have to go through the licensing agencies.
I worked on a production of Guys and Dolls at Pace University this past year, and our Nathan had a lot of difficulty singing the songs in the original keys. It was really, really messing with him. It wasn’t like sitting right, but he was so right for the part. So what we were able to do was change all those keys to make it something that would make him feel very comfortable and really in his body singing it. The day when we changed the keys he couldn’t even stop crying, he was just so happy.
Luckily, because TheatreWorksUSA owns the rights to all of their shows, working in Dog Man has made life a lot easier for doing those types of edits. So far, we haven’t had to change any keys for the songs for our kids. But there have been several moments where a child is getting upset because they can’t hit a certain note. So I will do my best to coach them there. But sometimes it’s just out of their range, so what we do is we’ll create a track that’s in the same kind of range of what we’re going for. Watching these kids make that transition, they’re just so happy to know that we can modify the music to make them feel good and feel comfortable.
[Music directors are] the people who sometimes convince the artists and the performers that this part, or this song, can be for them, and about them with a key change or with some tweaks.
jarred lee
I wish I could be in this camp. Is there a piece of musical theater or a piece of music specifically that you wish that you could live in forever?
Okay, it’s gonna sound crazy, but I think it has to be my favorite musical, which is Wicked. That was the first show I ever saw on Broadway. It was the first Broadway album I ever listened to, right at the very introduction of musical theatre in my life. I’d read the book, but when I saw Wicked on stage, I’m sure a lot of people have a similar story, but it was just such an out of this world experience. They made Oz seem like such an amazing place.
Should parents and adults who might want to send their kids to the camp need to worry about their kids not being baby Audra? Is the camp welcoming to those of us who can’t sing to save their lives?
Oh, absolutely. I will say one of the things I’ve loved about this is the fact that we make every single child involved in our shows feel special. We find the place where they fit in perfectly, whether it be a little bit more singing, less speaking part, or more speaking parts with less singing. We’ve worked really hard to make sure that we can accommodate every child. We make sure they’re engaged the entire time during the camp process.
You know, a lot of us have had our first online teaching experiences. I know my first was this past spring when everything was moved online on teaching music at my elementary school via Google Classroom. There are times where you’re not being spoken to directly and it is so easy to lose focus, and kind of just be staring at a screen which is, as you know I’m sure, absolutely exhausting. With this camp, we make sure that every second these kids are engaged and that they’re doing something so that they’re not bored. And that they can truly, truly have fun with the material.
And the last thing I’ll ask you for now is: who’s your favorite character in Dog Man?
It’s got to be Petey. I love a good villain.
For more information on Dog Man: The Musical Camp go here.
Clare Barron has been dating during quarantine, or at least trying to. “For a long time, it was all virtual,” she said. “It started with the fantasy, like, ‘Tell me what your fantasies are.'”
Dating is what inspired her newest play, What This Will Be Like When It’s Over. “Do you want to tell me what you’re thinking about?” is the first line of a new short play she just wrote, and it’s available now as part of issue one of The Flashpaper, a new theater journal that features theater artists writing original essays and plays. And for every issue of The Flashpaper sold, a portion goes to the contributors, including Barron.
Dating and writing has kept Barron occupied since quarantine started. Her adaptation of Three Sisters starring Greta Gerwig and Oscar Isaac was supposed to play at New York Theatre Workshop in the spring and it’s been postponed until further notice. Barron is also the playwright of the Pulitzer Prize finalist play Dance Nation and You Got Older.
Below Barron talks about how she’s able to get super personal in her plays, that time she was at the Javits Center during the 2016 election, and why she’ll never write nudity into her plays ever again. This conversation has been edited and condensed.
OK, Clare, I have to tell you, you’re responsible for the most uncomfortable I’ve ever felt in a theater, which was during I’ll Never Love Again at the Bushwick Starr. You were in that play and you get eaten out during the play and it’s a very uncomfortable experience for your character.
One of my best friends who is a playwright was like so mad at me. She saw the play and was just like, “I really did not want to like see you do that.” I feel like people have such different reactions to that scene. This is how early sex and sometimes late sex felt to me, and so they appreciate it. And then other people are like, I really did not want to watch that on stage.
When you work with the Bushwick Starr, at least when we did in 2016, you’re still self-producing. That’s why I cast myself in that role. I was just like, I hate fake sex on stage. And so I’m just going to cast myself with someone that I feel comfortable doing this for real. And he actually fisted me and he actually ate me out. And we did it every night and no one stopped us. That actually happened.
I have had sex in public before. So I have a high comfort level with that kind of thing. But it was very surreal. And in some ways, it’s the most fun I’ve ever had acting because I had such a clear physical task in front of me that I really wasn’t stressed. So in some ways it was like very liberating.
Intercourse itself is so performative, right? I feel like most human beings are always like trying to put on a show. I wonder if knowing how intercourse would play out because you wrote the scene made it empowering even more because you remove that whole performative aspect of intercourse.
Because the character is so young, she’s 15. I’m 34, I just had sex last night and you learn how to make those sounds and dirty talk. When I was 15, oh my gosh, I don’t think I could have made a sex noise to save my life. I wrote that whole play; it was made up of my actual 15-year-old diary.
I grew up like really Christian and wanted to save my virginity for my husband. I grew up with a lot of sexual shame and I ended up in this sexually abusive relationship with another playwright. And so I wrote that play because I was like, how did I go from this extremely virginal person—the story of the relationship in the play, the only thing they ever do is kiss. So the scene that we’re talking about, is what she does with her second boyfriend, which I feel like is so classic, where you keep your virginity safe for someone and then they break your heart, and you’re like, fucking anyone who comes in the door. Even though the scene was traumatic, it was therapeutic for me to go through it in a weird way.
I find men and male characters so boring and so stupid and predictable and I have always loved seeing empowered female characters on stage, on screen and reading about it. I felt so empowered by the pussy monologues in Dance Nation. And I was wondering if you can talk a little bit about that, because I feel that because your writing is so urgent, but also so funny and so human, and real.
I’m going to say something like about that pussy monologue at the end.
I feel like if you are a person who has a vagina, and you are penetrated by a penis or by an object or whatever it is, it’s extremely vulnerable. And I also think for a lot of women, it’s painful. In addition to losing my virginity late, I have something called vaginismus, which is essentially just painful sex. So when I waited like all these years to have that penis in my vagina, and then it fucking hurt so bad, it hurt for years, like excruciating pain. So for me, sex and pain have always been one, which I think is a very foreign concept for a lot of cis men, where it’s just like a pleasure experience.
Something that I would love for cis men is like, the emotional, spiritual experience of like being penetrated of like, knowing what it feels like to be penetrated. And this is where I start to sound a little crazy, but I love ass play on man. That’s something that whenever I have sex with cis men, I’m really into. Even if it’s just with a finger, having that vulnerable relationship with a cis man and being inside him and penetrating him—I think that maybe all of us, no matter our gender, and no matter our anatomy, if we all were penetrated in some way that it would actually make us all more empathetic or better sexual partners.
I don’t know if I sound crazy, but that’s my sexual dream for the world, is that everyone can experience being penetrated. And through that experience of being vulnerable, be more generous, giving and careful sexual partners. So yeah, I want men to celebrate their pussies is what I’m saying.
Clare Barron
When I was reading, What This Will Be Like When It’s Over, and your very first line, “Do you want to tell me what you’re thinking about?” How do you get in people’s heads like that, Clare? Do you have like a formula?
Something that’s been really interesting about, dating during COVID is that I’m now seeing people in person, but for a long time, it was all virtual. So you started with the head. It started with the fantasy, you know, like, “tell me what your fantasies are,” like back and forth, like over and over again.
The inspiration for this piece was this 42 year old playwright I met who, I just felt like he was so selfish. He expected me to just sort of give him pictures of my tits and my pussy and my ass but like, nothing came back. And he had initiated every single aspect of our encounter. He had looked me up, he had asked me out, he had initiated the texts, he initiated the calls.
And we get on a Zoom call to have zoom sex and the first thing he says to me is, “Hey, just so you know, just because we’re doing this virtual thing doesn’t mean I ever want to fuck you in real life.” That was like his opening line. And I was just like, “Fuck, you pretentious, presumptuous piece of shit.” It just made me so angry.
And yet there was something really beautiful about us sharing our fantasies over texts and sharing our fantasies over phone calls. Something that I’ve learned from COVID that I’ve forgotten about sex is just how much fun foreplay is—that like delay is actually so delicious and amazing. Those are some of the things I was thinking about when I was writing that piece.
When someone devalues you or someone, like that Zoom jerk, for instance—how do you then go, let me take this experience and see if I can turn it into art?
I think it’s so personal. My first playwriting teacher ever was Deb Margolin and she talks about the theater of desire and really writing from like what you need to say. She always said, “Say today what you need to say if you were to die tomorrow.” Like, anytime you write, really think about, what do I need to get out. That’s why all my plays that have ever existed are essentially about trauma.
But I think for me, it makes me feel better to write about it. It makes me feel like I’m taking back power. I think it’s related to that upbringing of being raised really Christian where I felt like I had to repress my dark thoughts. And I’m also bipolar, so I have a lot of dark thoughts. So there’s something about theater and playwriting, it gives me permission to say the things I’m afraid to say.
But you know, it’s interesting, I haven’t written a new play in four years. And so part of being a writer is that when I’m feeling it, I write, and if I’m not feeling it, I just don’t. I just don’t write, you know? I’ve been very lucky because essentially what happened is, in my late 20s, and when I was 30, I wrote a bunch of plays very quickly. And what’s happening is they’re slowly getting produced as I’m older. So people think that I’m writing but the reality is I wrote four plays within 18 months, and then haven’t written in four years. And I think that’s maybe my process. Like I sort of feel like maybe I’ll be 38 and write four more plays between 38 and 40. Every writer is different and so I never force myself to write or push myself to write. I write when I want to.
I wonder if going back and seeing productions or a play that you wrote four years ago, in any way serves like a time machine. When you’re sitting in the dark, maybe looking at the rehearsal, and you’re like, “Oh, that’s such you know, 29-year-old Clare.”
Yeah, for sure. There’s this play that was supposed to happen next year, and I don’t know if it’s gonna happen. It’s the last play I wrote. I wrote it in 2016. Before the #MeToo movement, and it’s about an experience of sexual assault inside of a dating relationship. It’s only 70 minutes, so it’s a really weird play. So many theaters passed on it because. I just want to make it so badly. Because it is about this really traumatic chapter in my life. And I just want to go through the catharsis of fucking making it. And I’m supposed to direct it too, which is a thing I’ve been wanting to do for a long time.
So I was diagnosed with bipolar when I was 30. It’s actually a funny story. I had a pretty serious mental breakdown a few days before the 2016 election. I was pretty incapacitated, and my friend who worked on the Hillary [Clinton] campaign knew about it. And so she came to my house and picked me up and was like, I have a surprise for you. We’re going to the Javits Center tonight, you’re going to see the first woman elected president.
So I was like barely functioning, like truly incapacitated and she took me to the Javits Center and then it was just like being on the Titanic when it was like the most depressing place in the entire world to be trapped that night! Like at the Javits Center, sitting on the convention floor and then they’d see us all sitting down like crying and they’d be like, “stand up, stand up, stand up, cheer.” Because they didn’t want images of us upset on the TV. I haven’t written a play since that breakdown. Which I think is related. But also this old play, I want to make it. But also as a human, I want to make it to move on, because I don’t feel like I’ll ever fully move on until I get to see it through. So we’ll see what happens.
Well, we both love your work so crossing my fingers even if it’s through Zoom and no one can touch each other, I’ll watch anything that you do. Since 2017, there has been a big conversation around intimacy directors and making sure people feel safe. And so when you’re in the room, what’s part of your process, in terms of just making sure people feel comfortable speaking up if they don’t want to do something?
To be honest with you, I feel like I’ve made some mistakes. There was nudity in Dance Nation, and I still wonder if that was like the right choice. When we did the production in London, I think it’s the biggest mistake of my professional career. I handled it really, really badly and I feel really bad about it.
It was like a breakdown of many things. Nudity is written into the script. So the actor should have been aware of it. But I think there was a breakdown in conversation with the agents, I don’t think the right conversations happened. And then the director in London, he didn’t really feel comfortable having this conversation with the women. So he kept asking me to have it—me asking them is a lot of pressure.
And then there was also a cultural problem where the women in [the New York productin], when we talked about the nudity in New York, they let us know very clearly how they felt about it. They were like, “Yes, no, we’ll do this. We’ll not do this.” But these British women, they didn’t say anything. Their silence was a no, it was an emphatic, “No, we are not doing this.” But I feel like I misread it and like didn’t understand. Or maybe I wasn’t listening. Well, I take full responsibility. I feel like majorly fucked up.
I’ll to be honest with you, I don’t think I will ever write nudity into a play again that I’m not personally performing. I don’t think I’ll ever ask another woman to get naked on stage. Again, even though the nudity in Dance Nation, it’s meant to be like subversive because it’s like multiple people getting naked at the same time as they’re changing [clothes]. It’s not sexualized. I wrote it into the play because I was interested in non-sexualized female nudity. But I don’t know, I just started to feel like it’s not worth it. The thought of making any actor who’s working with me uncomfortable makes me feel like shit. So I feel like I won’t do it again.
Take one look at producer Arvind Ethan David’s credits on the Internet Movie Database, and I dare you not to have the word “adventurous” instantly pop into your mind. He’s behind an award-winning film starring a famous footballer, the television adaptation of a quirky book series by Douglas Adams, and a touching comedy about a Muslim man who discovers he’s actually Jewish. And that’s only the work he’s produced onscreen. David has also managed to write a play, several short stories, and delivered a TED Talk for the ages in which he drew parallels between his journey to become an American citizen and his work as the lead producer on Jagged Little Pill.
Oh yes, he’s also a Broadway producer, a solicitor, a comic book writer, an escape room creator etc. etc. etc.
Name a hat, David has most likely worn it. If none of his works seem to have much in common, they are united by an undeniable thread: their producer’s unique vision and what appears to be a total lack of fear.
As one of the few BIPOC lead producers on Broadway, it’s no surprise that David has become one of the loudest voices in the industry when it comes to representation and diversity. The book for Jagged Little Pill, which he commissioned from the Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody, breaks the mold of the jukebox musical by taking Alanis Morissette’s iconic album and turning it not into a bio-musical, but a study of the many issues that plague upper middle class American society.
When Broadway went dark, David immediately found ways to keep the show in the minds of fans and potential new audiences by creating You Live, You Learn: A Night with Alanis and Jagged Little Pill, a special event that reunited the cast of the show and featured a performance by Morissette herself. But less than a week after the Jagged family had celebrated the power of music, we were reminded that America often grieves but never learns, as a white police officer in Minneapolis, murdered George Floyd, a Black man who had allegedly tried to use a counterfeit $20 bill in a grocery store.
The protests and social uprising sparked by Floyd’s murder led David to put his time in quarantine to organize #WhileWeBreathe, a benefit for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Bail Project, and other organizations that seek racial equity in the US. I spoke to the producer about how he put together an all-star event in the midst of a pandemic, his take on streamed theatre, and his moral responsibility when it comes to creating art.
I am really curious about what it’s like to put together an event like #WhileWeBreathe in the middle of a pandemic and what the challenges of something like this are for a producer?
Let’s do the why first. It was the weekend after George Floyd had been murdered. It was the start of the protests. And like, everybody else, certainly everybody of color, in America, we were profoundly depressed. My wife and I are immigrants, she is black, I’m Indian, my daughter’s biracial and we moved to Obama’s America, but the last four years have been a very painful repudiation of a lot of our hopes and dreams. I got an email from Brian Moreland, my partner who I’ve been friends with for a while, he’s one of the only Black producers working on Broadway. And he wrote not just to me, but to about seven or eight lead producers from the senior leadership of the board. He wrote this brutally honest letter about the headlines and the news about George Floyd, and laid out his own experiences as a Black man. He said, “we have a position of power, we need to do something.”
I got that and then everybody started putting out statements, every show, every institution, made a statement. But I knew we could do better than a statement, I texted him back and I said, “I think we should do something, I don’t know what it is yet, but if we do something we’ll do it together.” He wrote back and said yes.
At the same time, I was texting with other friends, one of them was Neil Brown Jr., who’s a great actor, and I knew he’d be angry and depressed that weekend. I said to him, “ if I write something about this moment, and how I’m feeling, will you act it?” He went “Yes, thank you, I need this.”
As a writer, I needed to write something about this moment. And as a producer, I knew I could put something together. And so that’s how it literally came out that night with a bunch of friends. A bunch of producers of writers, and actors of color, being depressed and angry, and texting each other. By the next morning, I wrote #WhileWeBreathe. And everybody was like, “Yes, we’re in.” Then we started emailing friends, and friends emailed friends, and people posted on Facebook groups and WhatsApp groups and suddenly we have a cast of I think 20 actors, a full production and post production team of another 25, 11 writers, 9 directors. Suddenly we have a company.
Almost everyone in our company is a person of color, this doesn’t happen in a normal production where we’re usually the only Black or brown faces. Suddenly, it’s us running the show and it’s glorious.
arvind ethan david
George was not the first person to be brutally killed by the police in front of cameras. He’s not the last even. But the difference is this time, because of the pandemic, everyone was at home, and they had to watch it. Everyone was at home, but they couldn’t just go to the office, or go to the bar, or shrug it off and be sad for two minutes and then move on to their lives. We’ve all been forced to sit at home and feel our emotions. And frankly, you know, a lot of people have lost their jobs and even people who are lucky, like me, who can work from home. I’ve also lost my Broadway show, my escape room business. Those things aren’t happening and I don’t know when they’ll happen again.
So people have a lot of emotions and they have time. So actors were available, directors were available, writers were available, and they had a lot to say. The usual outlets of how we would say it were not available to us because of the pandemic but in a way there was also a moment of opportunity, where a bunch of enormously talented people with something to say, if we offered the platform for them to say it, we didn’t have to deal with a hundred agents and the usual gatekeepers. Almost everyone in our company is a person of color, this doesn’t happen in a normal production where we’re usually the only Black or brown faces. Suddenly, it’s us running the show and it’s glorious.
The trailer for #WhileWeBreathe
How do you describe the work a producer does?
The easiest answer I found is I say I’m the lead entrepreneur. I’m the chief executive of the organization. It’s my job. In my case, normally it’s my job to have the idea and then it’s my job to assemble the team to execute on the idea, and then to protect them, defend them, and steer them. And that’s how I’ve always worked. Jagged Little Pill was an idea that I had in the shower 10 years ago,
In the shower?
I was in the shower, my then-girlfriend now-wife remembers me coming out dripping wet and going, “Hey, I think Jagged Little Pill wants to be a Broadway show.” She went “you don’t work on Broadway.” I was like “no I don’t.” She said “you don’t work in the music industry?” I said “no, I don’t.” She said “do you know Alanis Morissette?” I said “no, I don’t.” She said “OK,” and went back to whatever she was doing. During opening night in Boston, she said “that’s from the shower.”
So what tends to happen is I just have an idea and then try to build the best team around them and then protect them and fundraise for them, and market. This is me personally, but I’ve never been a co-producer, Jagged was my Broadway debut as a lead producer. I don’t know how to be a co-producer, I generally say no because I think I’m not going to add value.
Is the shower usually where inspiration strikes?
[Laughs] I don’t know if there’s a place. Yoga, often is where I’ll have an idea. Jogging, doing exercise. I only have a few things that can take my brain off the thing in front of it. I’m very present, very focused.
I was reading your Wikipedia page and you’re also a solicitor. What about your training in business and also in law has contributed to make you a producer?
I’m used to negotiating deals, right? That’s the training of a lawyer. That’s a lot of what a producer does, it’s constant deals, whether it’s talent, marketing or financing deals. I went to business school, I have an MBA. So I know enough in every discipline to know how to manage people who are good at it. I know enough about marketing to manage a marketing team. I know enough about operations. I know enough about finance to ask the right question. A producer also has to be a journalist.
But I also say because I’m a lawyer, I think about legal solutions, I think about structural solutions to problems. So it’s why when we had the idea of #WhileWeBreathe, I called the Legal Defense Fund and wanted to partner with them, because I believe that racism doesn’t change, just because people make statements. Racism changes when we have the structural, legal, statutory, regulatory solutions we need. And so that’s why they’re our partner, and we’re hoping to raise a lot of money for them and raise attention to their specific programs in the specific focus of police reform, voting rights, and districting.
I think structurally about solutions to any problems, including problems about representation, and inclusion and racism on Broadway, or whether it’s about the bigger issues of race in this country, or whether it’s just the practical issues of how do we structure deals that are fair for our cast and investors on any project that we’re doing.
I come from a family of lawyers, and even though I honestly, I didn’t like being a lawyer, I am proud to belong to that fraternity because that’s the fraternity that is fighting for civil rights and due process, protecting voters not only in this country, but in every country in the world. I’m proud that I have that background.
What about the process of producing #WhileWeBreathe is something you wish you can continue to do if we go back to seeing theater in community?
One thing that’s really interesting is the perceived wisdom on Broadway that audiences of color will only turn up if it’s specifically a show about them. There’s a very frankly hackneyed, and slightly racist way of marketing to Black audiences. Audiences of colors are left uninvited from Broadway. Not just as audiences, as financiers too. There’s a feeling, no, I don’t think anyone’s had any feelings about it. It just hasn’t happened. It doesn’t happen because they can get by without it. Because you can fill 1000 seats with white people from New Jersey every night. You can do that.
When I got into Broadway, that was really surprising to me because I come from film and TV, and in film and TV, you don’t get to ignore 45% of the population. You don’t get to do that. I can’t put a show on television and say I don’t care about marketing to half of half of America, and two-thirds of the world. I don’t get to do that and I wouldn’t want to. It’s not an option. Netflix doesn’t have that option, which is why Netflix has entire marketing teams and divisions, and entire programming divisions focused on this. And when I turned up to Broadway I wondered how come Broadway doesn’t do this? The answer is because they haven’t needed to. Because it’s only 42 theaters, and only 50,000 people a night. That’s not that many people.
I think one of the interesting things about this moment of COVID, is the realization that everyone is sort of having, that the audience is bigger and it’s everywhere, and it’s more diverse, and it will turn up on YouTube. The Broadway Advocacy Coalition had a three-day, three or two hours a day series of discussions with no marketing, just an email blast, and 5000 people turned up every day, and sat for two hours on YouTube to listen to people talk about race and Broadway. That’s a lot of people turning up for three days in a row. That’s like, sold out Harry Potter for two weeks, right? That’s gonna start to tell you something.
It’s always a risk to do something that might kill the golden goose and Broadway is a golden goose.
arvind ethan david
We did a live broadcast of Jagged to raise money for the Actors Fund, and we got two million views in five days. So there’s an audience out there, that will come that is different from the traditional Broadway audience, and they are not that hard to reach. You might have to use different methodologies than you’ve been using day in day out for the last who knows how many years, but they’re not necessarily more expensive to reach. They’re not necessarily that much harder to reach. We just need different thinking and different people doing the thinking.
Unfortunately it’s going to be a long intermission and there’s going to be a long period where all of us whether it’s commercial producers, or not for profit houses, in New York and around the country, are going to have to find ways to continue to connect with our audiences, and continue to give them experiences and stories that move them, and fulfill them because that’s our obligation both morally and commercially.
Then maybe when it goes back to being 42 buildings, hopefully, one more building if the Apollo succeeds in becoming an official Broadway venue. Even when it goes back to that, hopefully everyone will remember that there’s another way of reaching an audience, and another way of selling them tickets and bringing content to them. We can have Broadway Plus.
Credit: Matthew Murphy
I grew up in Honduras watching movie musicals, and for instance, the first Broadway musical that I ever saw was Chicago. I saw it as a teenager after I had seen the movie version a gazillion times. The big myth that producers tell themselves is that if you see the movie version, or a recording of the show, you won’t want to see it on stage, which is a lie. When you put together the Jagged streamed performance did you ever think: oh, no! No one’s gonna want to see my show now because they saw it online? That sounds like BS to me.
Yeah, look, I think it is BS. I think the data would agree with you, and I agree with you. The data is actually pretty clear. When ThePhantom of the Opera came out as a movie, ticket sales for Phantom around the world went up, when the Les Miserables movie came out, the show restarted in a bunch of cities, including on Broadway. The only one that really hasn’t done that is Cats, and that’s a whole different story.
The data is there, so I think the reason that a lot of producers haven’t embraced that is that they don’t need to. They’re making so much money off ticket sales. In a way, it’s a bit like a pandemic. It’s a low probability, but high impact event, right? So if there’s a low probability, let’s say even if you believe 80% likely, or 90%, likely that a movie will sell more tickets, but there’s a 10% chance it will be Cats. And then if you’re making a couple of million bucks a year, by not making a movie, and making a movie could lose you that, there’s a 10% chance that could lose you that, then don’t make a movie. You know what I mean? If you’re rational, it’s purely commercial. It’s always a risk to do something that might kill the golden goose and Broadway is a golden goose. Once you have a long running hit show it’s a golden goose.
I’m not speaking for anybody in particular, but I would guess that that is the concern. The concern is simply that they don’t need it. I have my show running in four cities already, it’s netting me X a year. If the movie’s not gonna make you as much money, normally a big movie deal might make you a million bucks as a fee. But that’s nothing if you’ve got a show running for five years in five cities. And if there’s a small chance it might hurt you, why take that chance?
My position is starting from the opposite, which is I’m a movie and film guy. I’m not happy with only 1000 people a night seeing my work. That’s not enough. I’m not happy with only people that can pay $200 seeing my work. I want Jagged Little Pill seen by people who live in Minnesota, Alaska, New Mexico, and Mexico, India, and Malaysia where I grew up. I want them to see it and if they can’t get to Broadway, then I want them to see it on the screen.
From day one, we’ve been clear about that, and my partner’s of that mind. Diablo Cody who wrote it, is a movie writer, so is also of the same mind. From day one, we’ve been very open to every alternate form. Even though the show is down at the moment, we’re going to have our book come out in October, we might be the first Broadway show, to bring out a companion book whilst the show isn’t on stage, but we’re going to do it. We believe our fans and audience are hungry for it. We’re bringing out an audiobook at the same time to go with the book, and we’re working on a bunch of other stuff that I can’t announce yet.
We are great believers that a good story deserves to be out there. I think Hamilton has just resoundingly proved it. Does anybody believe that Hamilton ticket sales will be negatively impacted by the Disney Plus experience? If anyone believes that I got a bridge that I can sell them.
You mentioned having a moral responsibility which isn’t something that I hear very often. The book for Jagged Little Pill touches on subject matters that liberal audiences in NYC are familiar with. But when you mentioned making the book available and having people all over the world read about subjects like sexual abuse, prescription drug abuse, and all the topics in the show, by default, you’re educating people. When did you realize that as an artist you had a moral responsibility to your audience?
I’m a storyteller first and everything else second, but the truth about stories is that, like Roger Ebert said, stories are empathy delivering mechanisms. A story is the world’s most efficient machinery for injecting empathy into people. And I think that’s incredibly true. That doesn’t mean that empathy can’t be negative, it can be propaganda. A propaganda story created the view that Jews were evil and needed to be exterminated. That’s how Goebbels won the propaganda war. That’s how powerful stories are. They can make people behave differently. They can make people believe differently. In the debate, we’re seeing now about the police, how culpable are 40 years of dirty cops being glamorized on television and in the movies? What responsibility does everyone who has told those stories have to bear? What responsibility does the producer of The Apprentice bear for the state that the whole country is in today?
Listen, if when we made Jagged we were thinking purely commercially, if we didn’t have a moral dimension or at least an artistic integrity, what commercial producer sets out to say: I’m going to take one of the biggest selling albums of all time and I’m going to make a show about sexual assault, opioid addiction, rape, race? Who does that?
Those are not decisions informed by commercial imperative. We were being informed by what the story wanted to be, by what the music was telling us. By what Alanis was telling us were the themes of her life and the themes of her music. I remember my first conversation with Diablo, who was the only we called to do this. We said to her, you need to come up with a story that is as confrontational, as honest, as brave, as shocking, as fearless as this album. And she did, because that’s who she is.
Once you have that and you see its impact on people, when every night from the day we opened in Boston to the day we went on intermission in New York, you have after every performance, not one, not two, but dozens of survivors of sexual assault coming up to the stage door, or reaching out on on social media. When you have dozens of people of color, people who grew up in white communities, people who were cut off from their own identity, people who were adopted, reaching out and going, “you’ve told my story.” When you see people who struggled with their sexuality or their gender expression, coming out and saying, “I feel seen and I feel known by your show.” When that happens every night, how can you not have a moral responsibility towards those people? How could you not feel?
I’m one of those people, I’m someone who found solace and found identity and found friendship through art. I was the geeky, only immigrant kid of color in my high school. Not terribly too clever, not sporty at all, I spoke with an accent. Am I saying anything you feel familiar with?
Yes sir.
Not until I wrote and directed the school play in my senior year, did I suddenly become cool, found friends and purpose. I know what a good show can do to change your life. So I feel responsibility to those people. To speak to what you’re saying about education and the issues, the book is so much more than a normal coffee table book. It has the making off and behind the scenes of course it does. But the centerpiece of the book is a 20-page guidebook to activism and how to be an activist. We worked with a bunch of great NGO partners and with our cast, all of whom are extremely politically committed young people, and we put together a pamphlet, a kind of how-to guide to be a useful citizen in this time.
Credit: Matthew Murphy
There were things in Jagged Little Pill that for obvious reasons didn’t resonate with me specifically. But while I was watching the show I had all these flashbacks of being in Honduras in 1995 and hearing “You Oughta Know” blasting from buses in the streets. I’d see other brown people like me rocking to this song not even knowing what it said. This made me realize how art can resonate with people thousands of miles away from where it was created. So I’m very curious to know what is your own personal memory of the album and the time when it came out?
So this will be a more revealing answer than you probably intended it to be. Alanis and I are almost exactly the same age, like within six months of each other or something. So I was in my second year of college when it came out. My first reaction was this is great, this music is good. But also it’s incredibly literary, and I was a very literary kid. There’s a line in “All I Really Want,” which is possibly my favorite line in pop music ever, it’s certainly my favorite line in the album and in the show. “I’m like Estella, I like to reel it in and then spit it out,” I remember listening to that line and going, “hang on! Did she just reference Charles Dickens in a pop song?” I was like, you’re not allowed to do that.
I thought this is someone who is as clever as me and they found a way to make that clever cool and mainstream. That honestly felt like a gauntlet being thrown down and then I discovered she was my age. I went “Jesus, I’m still in college and she put this out?” So I kind of took it as a challenge and I was very pleased like 20 years later to be able to feel I had risen to the challenge that Alanis, unbeknownst to her, had set for me.
In 1991, Dr. Barbara Ann Teer, the founder of the National Black Theatre in New York City, wrote a letter that she called, The Letter to the Future. In it, she wrote about what she hoped for Black people in the year 2000. “Although we came to the new world in slave ships, by now I’m sure we are leading the world in a righteous direction. We are the power source, the energy machines need[ed] to keep souls alive in the world,” she wrote.
These words, written almost 30 years ago, are gaining so much more urgent meaning now, in light of the renewed conversation around racial justice and increased support for the Black Lives Matter movement. So when Teer’s daughter Sade Lythcott, who has been the CEO of National Black Theatre since 2008, was trying to figure out how NBT can still fulfill its mission during the COVID-19 shutdown, she turned back to her mother’s words.
“When we look at the history of the National Black Theatre, and what my mother was building, you know, 50 years ago, there’s so many similarities,” Lythcott said. “So how do we use the blueprint of Dr. Teer, teachings and the blueprint of Dr. Teer’s activism, to create a modern, 21st-century manifesto for what the future can be for Black liberation through theater arts.”
NBT was in the middle of its production of Skinfolk: An American Show by Jillian Walker when New York City shut down on March 12. Then in June, the outside of the theater was the site for one of the many Black Lives Matter protests in NYC (it’s situated in Harlem on East 125th Street). Then in the past few weeks, in honor of Founder’s Month celebrating its 51st anniversary, NBT has been hosting virtual conversations with Black artists such as musician Toshi Reagon and playwright/actor Ngozi Anyanwu. And on July 14, NBT was the recipient of an Obie Award for its work in developing Black artists and advocating for the Black community (full disclosure: I was an Obie judge this year and a longtime fan of NBT’s programming).
Below, Lythcott talks about NBT’s current fundraising campaign, how optimism can be a powerful force and how she’s keeping hope alive right now.
Can you tell me about the digital programming you have coming up?
In NBT’s radical commitment to human transformation, and bettering our communities, we’re really looking at this November as probably the most important election of our generation. And so we’re doing a micro commission of seven black, self-identified women artists in a series of micro conditions in the fall called Unbossed and Unbought. It’s kind of building on the legacy of Shirley Chisholm and her famous quote, and that series Unbossed and Unbought: Reclaiming Our Vote will be seven micro-commissions that deal with, and interrogate, our rights, our voting rights.
We will couple that with a civic organization. Right now we’re looking at When We All Vote, Michelle Obama’s organization which we’ve partnered with before, to couple the artistic output with civic engagement and really putting in people’s hands, not only amazing new work, but a call to action of how we can empower ourselves as we reclaim our vote in November. So those are some of the micro-commissions coming up.
That’s really looking at fortifying our organization from a capacity standpoint, building capacity, investing in the infrastructure of NBT. As we look towards launching a capital campaign [Ed note: NBT was in the middle of constructing a new home when COVID hit], it is to amplify the voices that we do currently support. One of the things that became acutely clear for us is that so much of the artists community, our gig workers, our artists are the ones who are being forgotten to some extent—they don’t have a voice at the table. And so NBT really is looking to double down on the investment in Black artists during this period of time. So commissioning, engaging more, creating deeper impact in the our residency programs. So the fund will support that.
And then we are looking to also raise money for an archival project. NBT is more than a half century old. And we sit in this very unique space in history, where we presented some of the most defining voices of the Black Arts Movement. Through that we have evolved two generations of work that really captured the American experience of black theater. And so what we want to do is raise money to properly archive the work and our history. As the old African proverb goes, and what my mother used to always say to me, “If you know the beginning well, the end will not trouble you”. And for us, there’s a real service that NBT’s archive can have not just for our organization, but for the public to really learn about Black theater in such an intimate and powerful, impactful way. So those are like the three buckets that the vision forward fund is supporting.
What do you think about the conversations going on right now around institutional racism in predominantly white organizations? Do you think Black and POC-run institutions are being left out of the conversation in terms of, these are the places where we should direct our resources, instead of trying to fix white spaces? After all, BIPOC-led organizations are still underfunded in comparison to white organizations.
We’re all using the same words, but we’re defining them all very differently. For almost a decade there have been initiatives for diversity, equity and inclusion and we’re all using these words. And yet what we can see is systemically and structurally, they mean different things to different people. And one of the things that I think NBT really works hard at is coming to the table with a value proposition that isn’t based on deficit. I think a part of the reason why marginal communities stay marginalizes is that the dominant culture perceives anything as charity. Or, you know, you should be so lucky to have this because you’ve been underprivileged, under-invested, all the unders.
And as a Black community, I say immediately, we need to get over being under. And so how do we communicate that equity is important, not in service to whiteness, but in service to humanity? When we say equity, we don’t mean a few new programs here and there. What we mean is a fundamental dismantling of structural racism, in order to build a new table. We don’t want more seats at your table, we want to imagine collectively create a table, by which each and every one of us can come to the table as our full selves. And so this is going to be a hard period of time.
I’m not a Pollyanna about what this moment is, because I think that the discomfort of this moment really scares folks away from systemic change. And I think systemic change is possible, but we have to be talking from that perspective, and not just aesthetic, in which one extra person gets invited into the room. I don’t know if that answered your question.
But I think that it’s an exciting time because people are listening differently. And I think if you can tell your story—not the story they’re familiar with, or the story they feel comfortable with, or the story they want to hear—but really tell your story, in the fullness of your value proposition, there’s more of a chance today that it will be heard, and that change can happen. I think that you have to keep banging on the door.
I think the other thing is: we as artists of colors, institutions of color, we have to be very strategic. We have to think smarter, not harder. And I think that there is a banal beat to the drum of oppression. Everyone’s responding to it, but it isn’t necessarily a different beat than the drum that was beating in 1968, when my mother founded the National Black Theatre. The difference was in 1968, she built the theater, right? And so it’s inviting our funders to build, not just to say, “You haven’t been doing that.” So we should get these reactionary dollars, but really paint the picture of what one deep investment looks like and why it’s essential. And through that lens point out we’ve been under-invested in or divested in—NBT has been divested in, from a space of real philanthropic support.
And how do we use our digital platforms, like what we’re doing with Founders Month, to create conversations because in one way, we will not gather for quite some time. In another way, we’ve seen with all of our conversation series with our artists is where people would gather in our theater. We are now getting 1000 people per conversation. So really looking at, wow, there’s a real opportunity to speak to a broader audience about the work that we do. And that can be very powerful. So really like figuring the digital space out, figuring out really, instead of calling people out.
I think that some of the challenge with what we’re seeing in this day and age with cancel culture, and calling folks out—NBT is really leaning into calling people in. So this is how we’re going to call the funding community. This is how we’re calling our audience. And we’re not going to call you out because there’s so much shame attached to that. And there’s some reactionary behavior attached to that. But if you feel invited in, we’re calling you in, we’re pointing out where we fell short in the past, or where they fell short in the past. This is new for us to like, right-side our relationships with each other.
I was raised thinking that there was no limit or no possibility, no limit to possibilities in terms of what we could accomplish.
Sade Lythcott
What I’ve always noticed when I’ve heard you or artistic director Jonathan McCrory speak is how both of you kind of glow with this positive energy. Would you say that was a positivity you inherited from your mother, and also from not having to work in white-dominated spaces?
So I never actually worked at NBT while my mother was alive. I mean, maybe I costume designed a couple shows. My mom and I were best friends. I’ve lived in other places, but I always kept the majority of my stuff here in the house. I was acutely aware that I was a support system for my mother that she didn’t have anywhere else. So I absolutely grew up in a household and had a best friend that did not see any lack in our culture or our people or our communities. I mean, I grew up in Harlem in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. I saw crack, I saw AIDS, I saw gang violence. And yet, Harlem was and is, continues to be, a mecca for me.
I mean, it really takes fortification just to preach the love supreme of your people, to be able to always see the rose instead of just the concrete. And so I would just say I was raised in a way that I always saw that. And I also was raised on the front lines of understanding that being able to see our culture through those rose-colored glasses was a privilege. And that if we could just find as many rose-colored glasses to give our own people, in order for us to believe in ourselves and invest in our communities ourselves, that we can all experience this net gain.
NBT obviously is not the most resourced organization and 100% of what’s poured into the organization goes directly to the work which we’re working on. It’s like at some point, you have to put your oxygen mask on yourself, and hopefully that’s what this capital project will be—us putting the oxygen mask on ourselves in a different kind of way. Because, you know, everyone at the theater is a liberating force.
And so I would just say, yes, I was raised thinking that there was no limit or no possibility, no limit to possibilities in terms of what we could accomplish. And that the importance of a free Black space outside of the lens, or the judgment, of white American dominant culture was the only way to truly survive. And not everyone feels that way. So we just needed to protect this kind of oasis, for folks to find us when they are at that place in their journey. To be able to say, this is what I’ve been missing my whole life. I always say when people like, “Oh my god, I didn’t know you even existed.” I never take that personally. I’m like, you found us when you were supposed to find us and I hope you never leave. Welcome to your home away from home. So it’s kind of the way we approach everything: this is your home. Sometimes you have to kind of traverse the world in order to find it. But when you do, like we will be there to embrace you. And that for us is really across the board.
We look at LGBTQ+ community, we look at our deaf and disabled community, we look at our artists from every vantage point. We are slow, we are different and we are just as Black as anything else that’s qualified on the main stages of American theater or on film or television. We want to be that place for all of Black culture. And simultaneously, our audience members are from all walks of life, because I think they identify with the courage and the bravery of the stories that we tell. And that helps them be a little bit more courageous and brave in their own lives. And so yeah, sorry, that was a soapbox. I apologize.
No, this is so empowering. I love hearing you and Jonathan speak. So my final question for you is, considering what you said about the ’60s when your mother founded the theater is not so different from today, and we’re still having the same conversations around race and justice, what is making you hopeful right now? How do you keep on believing that change will happen?
Wow. This is not having to do with work but I’m a mother of a three-year-old Black boy. And so I can’t afford not to be radically hopeful about the future because his life and his survival depends on it. So one, being a mother makes me hopeful that I will continue to play a role in the frontlines, trying to make our community and our world a better place, for his well-being.
I would also say that with COVID in particular, there’s this very interesting thing that’s happening with the uncertainty. The uncertainty coupled with this revolution really is forcing folks to reimagine everything right, like the uncertainty of reopening, you know? Whether you’re Lincoln Center, Roundabout Theatre or NBT—this idea that we are all startups, all of a sudden. None of us know what we’re gonna do. All of the resources that we thought we had, or the principles in which by which we gathered, are all out the window.
You look at startups that happen during times of crisis, some of the most innovative systems get built, and get put in place. And when you couple that with the revolution that’s happening, people are also needing to rethink their mission, their programs, how they see the world and relate to their leadership and to their staff. So there’s this idea of being a startup and really leaning into the innovation of our times, the creative innovation of artists to build a more sustainable world—both physically when we will reopen, but also morally and how we identify, who and what our family is, and who and what are our brothers and our sisters. Really question those spaces in which we haven’t seen each other as brother and sister in the past.
We get to write that now because we’re all startups. We get to remap it, reimagine it. And so that makes me very hopeful for the future—that work that we all get to do.
Playwright Hilary Bettis is finally getting some alone time. She recently gave birth to a baby boy and she and her husband, actor Bobby Moreno, have been taking care of their infant in shifts. So during her down time, Bettis has been doing a lot of reading and soul-searching: “I’m spending a lot of time digging deep into my own family’s story and the history of this country,” she said in a Skype interview from her home in Brooklyn.
The Mexican-American playwright writes quite a bit about family. Her play, 72 Miles to Go, was produced Off-Broadway earlier this year at Roundabout Theatre Company and was about a torn apart when the matriarch, Anita, is deported. The Ghosts of Lote Bravo, which has been produced around the country, is about a Mexican mother who is haunted after her daughter is murdered. Bettis is also a writer on FX’s The Americans, for which she won a Writers Guild of America Award for her work.
Bettis is also passionate about representation. She is a member of the Kilroys, a group of theater activists who advocate for more women and non-binary playwrights on American stages. Their annual list highlights plays that need to be produced (Bettis was on that list earlier in her career). The 2020 list is a little bit different: it focuses on plays by women and non-binary writers who were cancelled. And it’s a living document, which will be updated until the theater comes back.
When asked what people should be doing right now, Bettis responded with, “read all of those plays, and especially the plays by unknown writers by you know,” she said. “make a commitment to bring these plays back when theater comes back.”
The conversation below has been edited and condensed.
One of the reasons why we wanted to talk to you is because you’re representing the Kilroys. Every time the Kilroys List comes out, it’s like a, “fuck yeah” moment about all these plays that haven’t been produced yet and that are there for people to read them and start producing them. And this year, we got the heartbreaking, the sadder twist to that, which is the plays that could have been. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, the idea behind this year’s list?
It is really heartbreaking. I have multiple productions that were canceled. Every playwright on this list, I know how gut wrenching it is—you work so hard and so long, and you finally get an opportunity and overnight, the rug is pulled out from under your feet. And I’m sure a lot of these writers are wondering, will I ever get a chance, will this play ever get a chance again?
None of us know what the landscape is going to look like when theater comes back and who knows when that’s going to be. But I think for us, we really wanted to respond to the moment and we wanted to really think in big-picture terms about what is happening, not just in theater, but across the world right now.
The spring production especially is when theaters take their riskiest plays; women and people of color overwhelmingly are the plays that are scheduled in those slots and so it’s like an extra, “fuck you” from COVID. And so I think our thinking was like, well, we really want to honor these plays. We want to honor the pain and heartbreak and grief that so many of these writers are feeling and experiencing. We want to keep these plays alive. We want theaters, when theater comes back, to say, “Hey, these plays are still here.” Please don’t like fall back on like musicals and revivals of old dead white guys. Do these plays, read these plays, keep these plays alive.
This is really a living list. We know that more plays are going to be, unfortunately, canceled and postponed. People can continue adding to this, so that we really document what is happening right now in this era.
The Kilroys (Photo: Jenn Spain Photography)
I went to 72 Miles to Go, a few weeks before quarantine started. There was that line from your play, about touch [in the play Anita says, “I miss touch. I miss hands. Rough skin… fingers… I think a person dies inside without touch.”]. It struck me like lightning, even not knowing what was coming. And ever since, I’m like, it’s Hilary Bettis is a prophet.
I’ve been working on this play for years. But this feels like we are all now living the undocumented immigrant experience in our relationships—having your entire life, your entire connection to your family through phone calls. My two-month-old son still hasn’t met most of his grandparents yet. That’s the experiences that family [in the play] was going through and so many families go through. If there’s a silver lining in all of this, my hope is that this country will be able to have a deeper understanding and empathy for undocumented people. For us, it’s temporary. For them, it’s not.
You talked about the undocumented experience like so vividly in your play. How did you research it? What was part of like, what was a part of the process of like getting into that headspace?
It’s personal, partially. It’s a subject that I’ve written extensively about. I feel like I’ve been talking about it long before it was ever even in our news cycle. My mother grew up on the border, and my father’s a minister, my brother’s in the military. My mother’s a nurse, and so the character specificity, the characters were people I love and conversations that I’ve had. And then, in terms of being undocumented, I worked with a lot of different actors that are undocumented throughout the process. I met with immigration attorneys, and spent some time in an actual attorney’s offices—with different clients coming through and like, what the day was like for them and what the language was like for them. I feel like this is like the greatest human rights issue of our generation. And I think because of that I feel like attention must be restored.
You’ve had a lot of success doing television writing in The Americans. I would love if you could talk what what you have learned from writing for different mediums that you kind of wish more TV writers incorporated this theater thing more often. And that playwrights incorporated this TV thing more often.
The more I worked in TV, the more I really have a deeper love and appreciation and understanding of what makes a play a play. You can have empathy. Theater is a live experience. And so the way that our brains experience time in theater verses TV is very, very different. And you sort of have permission in theater to just live with characters in real time and space.
In TV, audiences get very bored very quickly staring at a screen and when you have cinematography and you have editing and you have all of these other camera tricks, you can get a point across much more quickly. I think in theater, the characters either need to say it or their relationship needs to say it for an audience. I think that’s probably the biggest difference.
Honestly, I wish that we could take some bigger theatrical risks. Like a traditional American kitchen sink drama, how do we take that and take the pacing and the sort of big gestures that you could have in television—how do you use that in theater to make it more immediate.
Speaking of audiences, when you did 72 Miles—we all know the audience at Roundabout, it’s not the audience that we would like. But you were exposing them to a personal story that they would not have had knowledge of otherwise, because undocumented immigrants are usually quite villainized or other-rized in media. Do you think the play did what you wanted it to do in terms of like making people feel empathy, and hopefully inspiring them to do something?
I think some people yes—definitely conversations that I had with some people felt like, “Oh, I never really thought about about immigration from a family perspective. I never thought about it from like, the small things in life that we take for granted that are missed.” And how massive that is. There definitely were people that for sure were inspired.
And then of course, there’s people that are like, “Oh, it’s, political—trying to make me feel something for people that I don’t want to feel for.” I think because there are not enough Latinx stories, I think for a lot of the audience, the only time they’ve really ever thought about Latinx people and this particular subject is from like, The New York Times or CNN. And it’s always gut-wrenching stories about detention centers and children being taken from their families, and harrowing journeys across multiple countries and the violence and the death and the cartels. That is part of it, but also for so many more people it is this quiet, everyday life. That’s what I wanted to highlight.
I think that there was a real expectation that this play was going to be like trauma porn. And I think a lot of people were disappointed when it wasn’t. And I think this is a bigger issue. White audiences, they want that shock, they want to be like, “Oh I’m a good person because I would never be this horrible. And therefore I don’t actually have to take a deeper look at subtle, insidious racism in our culture and how we’re all a part of that.”
That’s kind of what I came out with in this experience. I came in writing this play thinking like, “Oh, we’ll see how similar we are, then people will have more empathy.” There were certainly people that that happened for. But I also there were many people that don’t want that, that don’t want to feel similar. They want to feel like, “Oh, these poor people. I have pity therefore I’m a good person.”
Jacqueline Guillén, Triney Sandoval, Tyler Alvarez and Bobby Moreno in “72 Miles to Go” at the Roundabout. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel)
What is like some of the things that you have found yourself doing during quarantine? That you were like, Hilary, not in a million years I would have ever imagined you doing this in your life?
[laughs] Oh, besides having a baby. I have definitely been doing a lot of soul searching about what kinds of stories I want to tell and what kind of writer I actually want to be. I’m really asked myself uncomfortable questions: is theater, the right place for, my voice or the audience I want to reach. Your reactions are amazing. I really want to write really messy plays like Alligator, but I want to reach an audience like Roundabout and I’m like, how do you do that?
Part of me is like, maybe I should be a novelist. Because it’s complicated navigating these big institutions and how do you hold onto your point of view and your concept of this thing that you wrote, when there’s so many like moving parts and other departments and other perspectives and other stuff coming at you. I’ve found that hard to navigate in every production that I’ve had period, whether it’s been Roundabout or a tiny theater in Kansas City or whatever, it’s hard. It’s hard. It’s a hard thing to navigate, which I feel like is part of the conversation that we’re also having right now.
I feel like it’s one of those lies that that theaters like to tell themselves, that we’re not commercial like Hollywood is. But no, you’re making all kinds of artistic compromises in production because you think, Oh, this is what our white audience might like.
You are. You really, really, really, really are. And you have, very well-meaning artistic directors and producers and people that really know their particular audience that are giving you notes behind the scenes that are about their particular audience. And you’re like, well, I want this play to resonate. I want it to be successful—especially like, Latinx plays that is on Off Broadway, you’re like, God, it has to be successful so that they take more risks like this. Suddenly you’re carrying the weight of an entire community. And being a woman on top of that.
I personally know that I fall into the trap of second guessing my instincts or being like, I’m not being collaborative, or I should listen to them because I see it this way, but maybe that isn’t going to resonate with the audience. So I should cut that part of the play. Or I should tone that language down. Or make this more of a WASP-y repressed scene instead of a big Mexican family that’s like shouting at each other. It’s a lot of like those little tiny, this constant, like, mental calculation that you’re doing.
Which I feel like white male playwrights don’t do because everybody behind the scenes and in the audience shares their perspective. And so they can sort of be bigger and take risks in ways that I feel like, my instincts says this and my pragmatic brain says this, and it’s a constant emotional wrestling match. I feel like I’ve hit the glass ceiling of my career.
To counteract that, have you been revisiting any specifically Latinx pop culture, or food or anything in quarantine that’s given you joy?
I don’t know enough about Chicano history and especially women’s history. So I’m spending a lot of time digging deep into my own family’s story and the history of this country. I grew up in like public schools where basically we were taught that the Bible is founded on God, and the Constitution’s founded on the Bible. And the men behind it were all white men and they’re perfect and we should all try to be like them. And there was like, no conversation around how women played a part in our history. I think our Black history month was like, Martin Luther King Jr. was great, the end. And how great white people are again.
I can’t expect our country and our culture and our society to understand our history until I really start to look at it and understand it for myself and understand why my family made the decisions they did, what were they dealing with coming of age in this country and trying to carve out their own place. It’s one thing to like, look back and say, Why didn’t my grandfather teach us Spanish? It’s another thing to look back and say, wait that was during like the repatriation Mexican-Americans and that his mother and his family were living in fear and the Juan Crow Laws in Texas that like nobody talks about. So you can understand it in that context.
That’s what I’m really trying as well—having a baby now and wanting to teach my son, who we are and where we come from. And also like there’s more to the world than what you’re going to be taught in school.
“Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.” Credit: Monique Carboni
The day before the Mayor shut down theaters in New York City, I found myself sitting at a matinee performance of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. As much as I enjoyed Duncan Sheik’s music and getting to see Suzanne Vega perform live, I was grinning from ear to ear because it was the first time I’d seen Joél Pérez as a leading man. Playing the suave Bob, who thinks of himself as a modern man ready to embrace an open relationship with his wife Carol (Jennifer Damiano), Pérez brought indelible charm, surprising vulnerability, and sang Sheik’s score like Andy Williams at his peak doing Burt Bacharach on a TV show, all while sporting a killer mustache. Bravo, Joél.
It was remarkable to see a Latinx actor bringing to life a character played in the 1969 movie by Robert Culp, the white actor who went on to play FBI Agent Bill Maxwell on The Greatest American Hero. As Pérez sent me back into what quickly would turn into a live-theatre-less nightmare of a world, I kept thinking how he is my idea of what an American hero should be: extremely talented and always willing to show us new sides of his craft.
When Pregones/PRTT announced their Remojo series, in which they highlight works in progress, would be streamed on their website and other channels, I was thrilled to discover a new side of Pérez: he’s also a writer. I quickly read the excerpt he sent me of Colonial, which will be shown on July 20th, in which he sets up an enchanting tale of a young man who inherits a house in Puerto Rico, leading him into an examination of self, and identity. I spoke to the multi-hyphenate Pérez about writing, being a Latinx stage actor, and why comedy might be the most efficient way to show the truth.
Before seeing that you were doing Remojo at Pregones/PRTT I don’t think I even knew you were a writer. How did you end up wanting to write Colonial?
Well, you know, I’m Puerto Rican and Puerto Rico has such a complicated, messy history with the United States and it’s not something people really talk about. Even my parents, my dad moved to Massachusetts when he was 12. And then my mom moved to Boston when she was like 22 after she graduated college. So they’ve never had a boricua kind of attitude. We have family in Puerto Rico, but they’re not super politically active. And then moving to New York, my very first acting job actually was at Pregones, and it was interesting to meet all these theater Puerto Ricans. I was like, this is a thing? I guess so, cool. I didn’t know there were other people like me. Expats who were politically active too.
When I started to actually research the history of Puerto Rico, and its treatment of that kind of colonial mentality that still exists on the island, I found it really interesting. I just read this really great book called War Against all Puerto Ricans, that tracks the history of the colonization of Puerto Rico. And that’s really where the the nugget of the idea started. I did the national tour of In The Heights and we did a stop in Puerto Rico. I remember acting there and performing and I had this dream of someday I’m gonna move back here, and have a chapter of my life here. So that kind of led me on this thought exercise: if I were to be a young person and moving to Puerto Rico and trying to reconnect with my culture, what is that? What does that mean?
Then I learned about the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, and how these mythic figures like Pedro Albizu Campos, which had a lot of parallels with the Black Panther movement in the United States and fighting for independence of the island. It’s interesting now thinking about how the Black Lives Matter movement is really mobilizing even more in the States and how linked I feel that is with the colonization of Puerto Rico. It feels like it’s just a really an important story to tell. A lot of people think Puerto Rico is just a vacation spot where cruise ships stop and hang out, but the actual citizens of the island are really treated as second class citizens.
I’m a sucker for alliteration and in the first page of the script you write “spicy servant stepchild,” about Puerto Rico, which was heartbreaking and hilarious. The script is tender and lovely and human, but also very funny. How much of your training at the Upright Citizens Brigade influenced your sense of humor?
I love comedy, it’s a really powerful tool to get people’s defenses down to really cut into deep feelings. I think of people like Stephen Adly Guirgis and his writing is like, you’re laughing one second and then crying the next. So that’s usually kind of how I approach a lot of my writing: try to start from a place of humor to let people’s defenses down. Because it’s already a pretty heavy subject, I don’t necessarily want to add more shit on top of it. I’d rather try to find a way to make it feel accessible and entertaining. A big thing at UCB is their approach to comedy is truth and honesty. The audience laughs at something because they think, “wow, that’s so true.” So it’s not really about being like a big crazy character or being super witty or crazy, it’s just like being really honest.
The Wednesday before New York City shut down theaters, I actually went to see Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, which I really enjoyed. I wish that had been my last show instead of the depressing The Girl from the North Country, but that’s another story. What have you been up to during quarantine? How long did it take you to go from uncertainty into, “I might as well create something” mode?
I’m the kind of person who always has a bunch of stokes in the fire, I’m always working on 30 different things. So, in many ways, there was a period of despair in terms of I can’t believe I can’t do anything and I’m really being forced to just slow down and be with my thoughts. I had really exciting projects that I was supposed to do. I was going to do As You Like It again this summer for Shakespeare in the Park, I was really sad about that. I had a really small part in the Tick, Tick…Boom! film that was supposed to be shooting this summer.
As an actor, it’s all about momentum. Working is like an avalanche, the next work begets work and the next job your next job. And so when you’re forced to just stop, that’s really scary because that’s our livelihood. I don’t have a backup plan, I don’t have another source of income, I don’t have a desk job that I’m doing on the side. So it took a while to be strategic about what you want to do next. But then it also gave me the time and energy to work on some writing projects that had been percolating for a little while.
This opportunity to write Colonial was something that I had talked about to [Pregones/PRTT Co-Founder and Artistic Director] Rosalba Rolón about a while back. She told me about Remojo which would be online and something I could work on from home. This was such a great opportunity to finally sit down and start working on that thing that’s been kind of marinating in my brain for a while.
There’s also this movement on the side with, We See You White American Theatre and it’s bringing to light a lot of the issues that exist in our industry. We’re all kind of being able to sit and think about how we have been treated. I think a lot about my own career as an actor and ways that I’ve felt both tokenized, but then also given opportunities that other people haven’t gotten and people that have opened doors for me. I always try to keep that door open for the next generation of people.
As an actor, it’s all about momentum. Working is like an avalanche, the next work begets work, and the next job your next job. And so when you’re forced to just stop, that’s really scary because that’s our livelihood.
joél pérez
I don’t mind being alone, but sitting alone with your thoughts for over 100 days is too much.
In the past I’ve always been like, I’m such an introvert. But who the fuck am I kidding?
I don’t miss hanging out with people necessarily but I miss dealing with their problems instead of dealing with my problems. Have you in all this time picked up maybe a new skill or have you learned something about your own craft that you want to continue exploring if the world ever goes back to live performances in community?
I’ve been forced to really look at the tools that are at our disposal. I feel like theatre is such a collaborative art form. As an actor, you’re just like one little piece of the puzzle. And so, I’ve been thinking about new ways to be creative and tell stories. I’ve got camera, I’ve got a green screen, I’ve got some lighting equipment. Why not think about new ways of telling stories and not necessarily feel like we need to follow the systems that are in place?
And I think a lot of that about in thinking about Broadway, why is the goal or the dream that we’ve all been told that Broadway is the thing, and then we stop and think, is that really the thing? Why do I think that that’s the thing and actually when I stop and think about it, what are the opportunities that are presented?
Courtesy of Joél Pérez
Last year I was doing Kiss My Aztec, for example, in California, and that was cast by Tara Rubin casting, but I didn’t get cast with her—I had been doing readings of the show for a while. She saw the opening, and she was like, “Joél, I had no idea that you were so funny.” In my head I was like, “Yes, I am!” But to her credit there is nobody writing musical theatre comedies for Latinos. That doesn’t exist. It’s not even like I’ve had the opportunity to audition for those roles, because nobody’s writing them. It doesn’t exist in what’s being offered for Broadway or regional theater audiences. There isn’t even the opportunity for Latinx actors to be funny. We’re always in torture porn or it’s some kind of bad story that we have to tell.
After she said that to me I thought: maybe there’s a new there’s other ways to get the kind of career that I want. Quarantine is a time to really think about what’s the access, what are the opportunities? What are we investing in? I’m so grateful that the very first job I ever had in New York was at Pregones/PRTT, so why not try to uplift theaters and groups that are already trying to give voice to these groups, rather than feeling like I’m begging for scraps from these other institutions that just see us as diversity quotas?
It’s very funny to me, in a very twisted way, that we are aware that Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway is where the experimental, fun, and interesting things are happening. And yet we all talk about Broadway constantly. I think about Broadway almost as the current president. If we just had ignored him from the beginning and not given him so much power, we would be living in another world. There’s something that I’m also very interested in, you said, for instance, that no one’s writing musical comedies for Latinx people. And this brings me to the burden of representation. People who aren’t white are often asked to open doors for others, and many of us live in fear that if we get something wrong, no one’s going to hire anyone who looks like us again. White people get to only think about their individual careers, meanwhile I’m like: if I fuck up, Latinos are being cancelled.
Totally. With that in mind: why do you want to make theatre? And do you ever feel that fear about messing up and hurting other POC because institutions see us all as the same?
Yeah. So, I grew up super religious. My father’s a Pentecostal minister. I grew up very fundamentalist Christian, and so there is something that I find very similar to the experience of going to church that I get from going to the theater. It’s like the same ceremony. The stage is the altar, the play is the sermon and the audience is the congregation, and we’re learning about human experience and, I feel, a kind of connection to this divine storytelling.
It’s a feeling for me that I think has evolved over time. I think the older that I’ve gotten and been in this industry, it’s kind of distilled into how that’s a very powerful tool for storytelling and for social change. A younger version of me was more interested in the fun entertainment side of it, and I think the older I’ve gotten, I am more interested in telling stories of underrepresented people and bringing to light experiences that people don’t know that much about.
Theatre can be like a teaching moment or a way to see the world differently. And there’s something so special about being in a live audience, surrounded by people, breathing together and seeing a thing together. Every performance is different, and every show is a little different. I think that’s why I love it, why I keep coming back to it.
Theatre is such an actor’s medium. It’s really on us to be the ones to tell the story. Sure the director directs it, and there’s lighting and there’s sets, but the people who show up every day to tell the story are the actors on stage, and the stage managers backstage, and we’re the ones who are telling that new story every day.
And then in terms of, if I represent all Latinos, I don’t know. I try to just do the best that I can do and I hope that it sets the precedent for better representation. But that’s not always the case. I think a lot about when I did Fun Home, for example [Off-Broadway at the Public Theater and then on Broadway], I met Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron at the Sundance Theatre Lab, they thought, “You should be in our musical.” So when they did a reading, I got asked to be a part of it. My Latinidad wasn’t part of that story, though.
Courtesy of Joél Pérez
Yes, I existed on stage and that is cool, but you know, Roy, was based on a white man. There was nothing about that character or that story that pointed to my Puerto Rican-ness or Latinx identity, which in some ways, that’s really great. But I would have liked if that meant that then all my understudies were Latino, which wasn’t the case, every understudy was a white guy. It’s not like that set a precedent to be like: when we think about this track, let’s think about it as a non-white person, let’s have a person of color in this role.
There was just white guy, after white guy, after white guy, as the people that were brought in to replace me, or to be understudies, or vacation swings, and stuff. At the time I didn’t really think much of it. I thought it wasn’t really my place because I wasn’t on the creative team. But I always kind of clocked that. Same with Roberta Colindrez, we had a joke where we called each other the Browns, that was our fake last name. It was so weird that the two of us felt we kind of like snuck into this room, but all our covers were white people.
So it always felt a bit like we were an exception to the rule instead of setting a precedent for what this role could be going forward. At the end of the day, Broadway is a business. When I did Oedipus El Rey, this super cool Chicano take on Oedipus by Luis Alfaro, which Chay Yew directed [at the Public Theater], I also got cast in a lab of Moulin Rouge! The Musical. I played this character named Santiago, who in the movie was the Narcoleptic Argentinian. I don’t know if you’ve seen Moulin Rouge!
I have. Love the movie but didn’t like the musical.
That part is just so shitty. I guess he has like a little more to say now, but when I was doing the reading there was like nothing to do. He was just a hot-headed Latino, just a one-dimensional character. They weren’t doing the movie, they were doing the musical, the trope of the hot-headed Latino has been done a bajillion times.
If you’re interested, you could perhaps do something different, and I got the vibe that they were not into that, or that they were a little flabbergasted because I think for them, it’s like: you’re a Latino in a big Broadway musical. That should be enough. The existence of this character should be enough. I had to kind of reconcile these feelings of, I should be so happy doing this big fucking musical, I should be on cloud nine.
But actually, I was really happy at the Shiva Theater doing this tiny little Oedipus El Rey. But Moulin Rouge! paid more than being at the Public. We’re often forced to make financial choices or compromise our feelings or stance on stuff because of money. We all need to make a living and you think it’s worth my soul dying a little bit because this project will pay a lot.
We’re often forced to make financial choices or compromise our feelings or stance on stuff because of money.
joél pérez
Can we talk about this homecoming of sorts of yours to Pregones/PRTT? What does it mean to be back and to see the company do such remarkable work when it comes to access?
I’ve always been a part of the Pregones/PRTT family since I started here. I always pop in and we’ll do a little reading. I love going to see their shows. It’s the only place in New York where I feel like my culture and my art mix. Quarantine has been a time to really think about where I want to focus my time and energy. I think a lot about how Pregones/PRTT has this gorgeous theater in the Bronx, they have this gorgeous theater right in midtown on 47th Street, right in the middle of everything. They have these beautiful spaces that can present really interesting art, and so then I think about: why am I focusing on really trying to get to be in a Manhattan Theatre Club play literally around the corner from the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre?
Why can’t I do a show at the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre that actually, I care so much more about? I feel like we often have blinders on as to like: performing in these big, cultural institutions means success. But then that also means Pregones struggles all the time to get press to come to see their shows. You wrote a really wonderful article about last year, right?
I reviewed ¡Guaracha! for the New York Times. The way I see it is, if I do work for predominantly white institutions, I might as well cover the works of my people.
Yeah, and people don’t go to these theaters because they don’t know about them or they’re seen as, I don’t know, cultural experiences as opposed to a really good play—put in this box of like, I’m gonna go see a Museum of Natural History experience about Puerto Ricans rather than, I’m just going to go to the theater and to sit and see a play. I also think it’s one thing to sit back and complain about it and another to do something about it. Let’s try to contribute to the cultural landscape and feel like our voices can be heard and that our stories matter, because they do.
Courtesy of Joél Pérez
I don’t know how often you get to talk to a journalist who’s not white…
Never.
…as a learning process, although this is obviously not your work to do for me, as I try to decolonize my own mind from the type of white journalism I read and grew up with. But in the spirit of trying to collaborate and show the world how we can un-learn things, what is something about your craft you’ve always wanted to talk about, but that journalists, including me now, haven’t even asked about?
I’m finding myself in a in a weird place. I’m thinking a lot about how a lot of people of color go through these training programs and go through musical theatre training programs. I have my book where I learned my Hammerstein and I learned my Sondheim and I learned all my classic musicals—I have this legit musical theater training. And when you actually get into the field, you’re then forced to do hip-hop musicals, or “urban music,” because that’s the roles that are being written for people of color.
Those are the roles that are being produced for people of color. And so you have this whole generation of incredibly trained people of color who never get to flex those muscles because we’re not part of that narrative. Or we are like a concept—it’s a black Oklahoma! or a Latino version of XYZ.
This doesn’t really answer your question about craft stuff…
I do feel a burden sometimes that when those opportunities are presented to me, I want to do a really good job, so that hopefully, when an opportunity comes up for another Latino actor, they are taken seriously and they’re not tokenized. I want them to feel like they have an opportunity because hopefully, I showed a producer, director, or writer that I have craft and the training to back it up.
But then that brings me back to why am I even trying to work with people I need to prove so much to? Lisa Kron said something about women versus men that I think also applies to people of color and white people: Men get jobs based on potential, women get jobs based on their accomplishments. White people sometimes get opportunities based on potential, people of color get those opportunities only after they’ve proven themselves. It feels like they’re not opening doors especially for young people. This still doesn’t answer your question about craft though…
Maybe we can come back to that in the future.
I guess what I’d say about craft is keep yourself really as a multi-hyphenate. It’s really important to have people who can write, direct, act, produce and create in an all-encompassing way. That’s how we’ll be able to lift each other up and create work outside the system we have.
Token Theatre Friends 