Meet the Music Director Teaching Kids How to Sing Like “Dog Man”

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.

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.

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.

We Need to Talk About Money

Features

For the past few years, one of my favorite pastimes has been to read the Money Diaries from Refinery29. In it, a millennial woman tracks her spending for one week. I’ve used it when I was making $40,000 a year in NYC as inspiration for how to make my dollar stretch in one of the most expensive cities in the world (hint: food prep ALL your meals). And I’ve also used it to judge people for the dumb things they spend money on (like being furloughed and using that stimulus money to buy… lingerie from Nordstrom).

But most of all, I love how frankly it talks about money. I tried to get something similar started when I was at American Theatre, when I found six different theater workers willing to give me their annual budgets: how much they made from their theater jobs and side hustles, and strategies they used to make that low income stretch. Through these budget breakdowns, I was hoping to make talking about money in the arts a little less taboo, and for people to talk more frankly, publicly, about how little theater jobs pay and how that leads to greater inequality along racial, gender and class lines.

That didn’t happen as much as I wanted it to. Because here we are during a pandemic, one that has put millions of arts workers out of work, and yet artists are still seen as un-essential, elitist members of society who don’t need federal help.

A recent New York Times article about the state of federal pandemic relief said this: “Hands are out as Congress is set to begin negotiating a new round of pandemic stimulus. Airlines, hotels and restaurants. Military contractors and banks. Even Broadway actors. These are just a few of the special interests already maneuvering to get a piece of the next coronavirus relief package about to be taken up by Congress, which is back in session this week.”

In response, Howard Sherman, an arts administrator and American theater thought leader, tweeted this:

“‘Hands out’? ‘Even Broadway actors’? These are people and families in distress. Live performing arts comprise a major industry brought to its knees. Do not dismiss what we do or our importance to the economy. This is shameful, @nytimes. Treating the performing arts, whether commercial or not-for-profit, as if they are a frivolity looking for a handout diminishes accomplished professionals around the country. Using the arts as a flip coda to a political lede is insulting, @nytimes.”

Sherman then tweeted out an update, saying, “@nytimes has removed the word ‘Even.’ But the sting lingers. People who work job to job, in a field that will be the last to come back from the pandemic, are hardly the same as banks.”

Yes those Broadway actors, who, if they’re lucky, will make $98,000 a year—a modest salary in a city like NYC (the true take-home pay is far lower considering fees to union and agents). And they’re at the top tier of the theater profession. Most actors in theater are lucky if they’re making a living wage.

Leslie Odom Jr spoke frankly to The Los Angeles Times about how in 2015, while working on Hamilton Off-Broadway and playing a leading role, he only took home $400 a week (for a show in a 299-seat house where the tickets cost $120 each). The cast got paid eventually, but it was only after years of little to no pay to help develop Hamilton—development time is an investment expected of any artist who wants to work regularly in the business.

Many Off-Broadway actors have told me they can make more on unemployment than acting (the maximum weekly amount for New York unemployment is $504 a week).

This past spring, backstage at her hit one-woman Off-Broadway show Dana H., I asked long-time, award-winning stage actor Deirdre O’Connell how she makes a life in the theater work. Here is what she told me:

“I have a rent-stabilized apartment and I live on my Screen Actors Guild pension. I had gone away for 6 years to do some TV series and TV movies and stuff like that. I didn’t want to do it, I was kicking and screaming, but I had no money. And I feel like every Off-Broadway actor, that you ask how they’re doing it, has some sort of secret sauce. If you have a great year where you work all year, that means you’re completely broke. Basically actors are giving a non-tax-deductible contribution to the theaters they’re working at.”

And that’s only the numbers for actors; those who work behind-the-scenes, either on Broadway or in Hollywood are not exactly living the champagne life. A mid-career TV writer will make $5,000 to $10,000 an episode but they still need to pay union fees and agent fees, and they don’t necessarily work all year. A life in entertainment will net you, if you’re lucky, a comfortable middle-class lifestyle.

When I was first hired as an editorial assistant at American Theatre magazine in 2011, I was paid $30,000 a year (and when I left 8 years later, my salary was $46,000). When I wanted to write a piece about income inequality in the arts, the part about my own meager salary, was cut from the final article.

I believe that one of the reasons that the arts are considered frivolous and elitist is because the industry itself promotes that image.

It’s hard to walk into a theater building that costs $400 million, and not think that those working in it must be paid extremely well. It’s also hard, when tickets to an Off-Broadway show can cost close to $100, not to assume that the actors must be rich if the tickets are that high.

Like in many other industries, theater workers are not encouraged to disclose their salaries, and in many cases are reprimanded for it. Salary transparency is so toxic that the only time theater workers want to disclose how much they make, they only feel safe doing so in a public, anonymous Google spreadsheet.

When talking about theater, the industry places its shiniest faces forward: the glittering buildings, the lead actors, the star-studded award shows. That’s normal, after all, fewer people click on articles about stagehands and front-of-house crew—all of the other people who help make the work happen and whose incomes aren’t as high. Kids who love theater usually want to be actors first, before they realize there’s a wider theater world than on stage.

At the same time, it helps maintain the illusion that the arts, and the people who work in it, are elite. Theater has leaned into the glamour, to the detriment of its workers being seen as human beings. That is why funders and rich people would rather pay for new buildings than better wages for the people working in those buildings. And why because of that low-pay and long hours and passion required for the job, many people burn out and leave the industry.

Or as one arts administrator told me:

“One BIG problem in non-profits is that funders very rarely want to fund overhead. They want to fund specific projects, not staff salaries. And websites like Charity Navigator make a percentage of money to salaries/overhead a part of their rating, which means even individual donors keep an eye on that and are turned off by companies that a) actually pay staff reasonable salaries, and b) prioritize staff health.”

The theater industry is a microcosm of the entire country at large: a country that for too long has divested resources away from people and into things—buildings, larger budget shows, bigger galas. And it has created an ecosystem where a majority of workers are on contract, going from job-to-job with little financial security.

And like many corporations, during a pandemic, many theaters have laid off their lower-level staff members while maintaining the employment and salary of those at the top. The Kennedy Center, despite receiving a $25-million bailout from the federal government, has laid of 30% of its staff, aka 64 employees, while its president Deborah Rutter is taking a 75% pay cut from $1.2 million, so she now earns $300,000.

That is why in the face of a global pandemic where the arts are shut down and artists are jobless, disaster is looming. Because these workers had been living paycheck-to-paycheck. Said set designer Kimie Nishikawa, who helped launch the See Lighting Foundation to help immigrant theater artists during this time (I’m writing an article about them that will come out soon):

“I hope that people or institutions invest more in the people and not the product. There are so many shows that I have done, where my fee is $2,000 for a whole set design, and my [production] budget is 30,000. And just the gap between how much the institution pays for their people and how much they care about advertising and the product itself is too big. We were all hanging on by a thread. When this pandemic hit, most of us were like, ‘Wow, I don’t even have enough money to pay rent for next month.’ And we’re all working on big Off-Broadway shows. We are supposedly the ones who made it but the industry cannot support their artists and I think that really has to change.”

Many are rightly concerned with the well-being of institutions. After all, if these large theaters fold, where will these artists work after COVID is through? For me, I am more concerned about immigrant artists who may have to go back to their home country, about individual artists who have no job security—people at risk of leaving the field and finding new employment, whose creativity and vision cannot be easily replaced. The death of institutions may be tragic but an exodus of artists and workers will be catastrophic.

I was recently asked by two different people about what I think will happen to the theater industry in the future, post-COVID. I answered that I’m not in the prediction business. But I can tell you all what my hopes are. What I hope for are more frank and honest conversations about how difficult it is to make a living in the arts. I hope more people follow the strategy of the #FairWageOnStage campaign and openly talk about how much a life in the arts pays, or doesn’t pay. I hope those who give money to the arts understand that funding personnel, payroll and overhead is just as important as funding a production or a building. I hope in the future, our society as a whole will value people more than products.

I hope there is a conversation around class, alongside the conversation around race and equity, and more strategies for eliminating the class barrier in the arts (aka pay your interns). If theater is truly for everyone, then everyone must be able to make a life in it, and everyone must be able to afford to go see it.

Let radical honesty be a regular artistic practice.

The arts are nothing without the people making it happen. So I hope for a humanity-driven artistic practice, even a slower artistic practice, that prioritizes the well-being of the people making the art happen. I hope for care and love that starts from the bottom up.

Already I see some change happening. Baltimore Center Stage in Maryland recently announced they were eliminating 10 out of 12s (which is 14-hour days for technicians and 12-hour days for actors, during tech rehearsals), and instituting a five-day rehearsal week instead of the typical six. Producers shouldn’t be announcing productions for the future, they should be figuring out how they can help artists survive right now.

And if in the near future, universal basic income and healthcare become a reality, then perhaps a life in the arts will seem less elitist and more normal. If we’re all more frank about how much money we make, then those who work in creative fields will be seen as part of society, instead of above it.

I hope when this is over, people will realize that while it was doctors and essential workers who saved our lives during COVID-19, it was the people in film, TV, theater who created work that nourished our souls.

And in the words of two-time Obie Award-winning actor April Matthis: “When the dust starts to settle—and I’m not talking about just theater, I’m talking about TV and film—let’s support small businesses. I’m a small business as an independent contractor.”

P.S. Click here to tell your Congresspeople to fund relief for the arts and its workers. #ArtsHero

How Theater is a Form of Therapy for Clare Barron

Interviews

Clare Barron

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.

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.

Listen to the rest of Clare Barron’s interview on the Token Theatre Friends podcast.

Broadway Producer Arvind Ethan David on His Moral Responsibility When Creating Art

Interviews

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.

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 The Phantom 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.

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.

For more on #WhileWeBreathe click here.

Review: Is God Is

Reviews

If plays are similar to living organisms, the mark of a great work must be its adaptability. If its power remains undeniable in a multimillion-dollar staging, as well as in a high school production. If its words stir the soul on the page, but also reveal new layers when delivered by actors on stage.

About two years ago when I first read Aleshea Harris’ Is God Is, I was impressed by the playwright’s ability to combine genres and discover something that felt primordial and new. When I saw the Soho Rep production, I was taken aback by the visions it elicited in director Taibi Magar, who imagined it like the pop-up book version of a Southern Gothic fairytale. And listening to the Wilma Theater audio version, I was enthralled by the musicality in Harris’ words, and the way in which her characters’ journey is the stuff of legends, but their pleas remain as urgent as those of our neighbors.

In director James Ijames’ audio play, Harris’ words take on the form of echoes of ghosts doomed to repeat a cursed history they had no part in creating. When the play begins, twin sisters Anaia and Racine are summoned to the Folsom Rest Home for the Weary where their mother lies on her deathbed. The girls haven’t seen her in years, “We got a mama?” asks Anaia, puzzled not only by the invitation, but also by how the woman they presumed dead has found them.

As with many things in the play, this eerie bid for the sisters’ presence, is rooted not in anything related to naturalism, but in the mystical quality of myth, where the extraordinary occurs so that heroes can fulfill fateful missions.

When they arrive to meet their maker, her request is a simple one, they must find their father and “kill his spirit, then the body.” The sisters, who spent their lives from foster family to family, suddenly learn their father is alive as well. More than that, he’s the reason why they became orphans under the system. When they were nothing but babies, he set them all on fire, permanently incapacitating their mother, and leaving baby Racine with burns that rendered her body undesirable but allowed her soul to flourish (“‘Naia is trapped in a prison of sweetness. Girl so ugly don’t get to be mean,” says her sister).

In Ovid’s version of the Greek myths, Medusa had been a woman so beautiful that the god Poseidon raped her in Athena’s temple. Rather than punishing the abusive god, Athena transformed the beautiful Medusa into a creature with snakes for hair, whose monstrous face transformed men into stone with a mere glance. It’s also a violent man who transformed Anaia and Racine into modern gorgons, sent to avenge a mother they begin referring to as God.

Although the sisters assure their mother they are no killers, they agree to her request and the play then takes on the shape of a road trip, as they set on their journey. Daniel Ison’s detailed sound design and original music bring out the pulpy undertones in Harris’ script, as the sisters shed the remains of their innocence to become literal femmes fatales, vanquishing those who stand in their way.

The cast led by Brett Ashley Robinson and Danielle Leneé as Anaia and Racine respectively, bring out the complexity and humanity of the characters through soulful work. Leneé’s nuance as Racine goes from a being of purity into a tortured soul pierces the heart, while Robinson’s no-nonsense approach to Anaia feels empowering, even as she expresses her desire for revenge.

As the title God (or She as her character is named in the script), Melanye Finister gives her voice the tone of someone who’s died and come back to whisper a warning, while Taysha Marie Canales provides some comedic relief as the unaware Angie, a woman who unbeknownst to herself is perpetuating Athena’s mistake of believing women who are attacked by men are complicit in their own destiny.

Lindsay Smiling’s chilling portrayal of the twins’ father gave me chills. His delivery of the line “I didn’t try to kill you all. Just her,” among the most terrifying things I’ve heard through my headphones. Although the play is dense and there are several moments of violence, and the Wilma Theater’s website suggests one should take breaks if needed, there is something almost addictive about Harris’ play. Even knowing what was coming, I couldn’t stop listening.

In many ways, it was almost revitalizing to listen to the play the day after Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez delivered an instantly iconic speech about the rampant misogyny in Congress to her fellow elected officials in the House of Representatives. As Ocasio-Cortez expressed “I am someone’s daughter too,” in response to the insults she had received recently by Congressman Ted Yoho, and generally throughout her life, I couldn’t stop thinking about Anaia and Racine, their thirst for justice recontextualized in a world where men simply refuse to listen to women.

The father in Is God Is, has no regard for the women who were once in his life, deeming them disposable as he moves on to create a new life, completely unbothered by the gravity of his sins. Harris highlights the many opportunities men are given by society by using mirrors as a metaphor. The sisters meet different versions of themselves later in the play, a reminder about the endless second chances men are given when women fight so hard to justify just one.

Although in no way does the play incite to violence, it certainly makes the desire for revenge understandable, especially when human-made laws fail to provide justice. Listening to Is God Is, reminded me of another of Harris’ plays, the indelible What to Send Up When It Goes Down, her ritualistic take on the violence exerted on Black bodies in the United States.

Although Is God Is happens to be a more traditional drama in terms of narrative structure, with both works, Harris has positioned herself as heir and preacher of the stories we pass on generation to generation. The ones our mothers heard from their mothers, and which we’re meant to pass on to our offspring, in hopes we finally learn the lesson. While we heed the ancestral warning, we’re blessed to have Harris living in this era, because for now, if she doesn’t tell these stories, who will?

How the Homebound Project Brought Stage and Screen Artists Together to Help Fight Child Hunger

Features

For the past few months, director Jenna Worsham has been making theater for people all over the world. “People in Singapore, Brazil, Germany are tuning into the show,” she said. “It’s crazy to think that if I did a show in New York, I would never have this audience.”

That’s because Worsham’s been producing digital theater. Worsham is the co-founder of the Homebound Project, which since May has been commissioning original short plays, and performers to act in them and film it for the web. Homebound just finished its fourth installment, the final one will be streamed on August 5–9.

When all is said and done, Homebound will have created more than 50 new short plays, all created and performed by volunteers to benefit No Kid Hungry, a campaign of Share Our Strength, an organization committed to ending hunger and poverty.

“We found out this morning that we hit over $100,000 in donations, which is just, I can’t even wrap my head around it,” said Worsham. And for the final installment of Homebound, an anonymous donor will be matching all donations, up to $20,000.

Worsham co-founded the Homebound Project with playwright Catya McMullen (whose credits include the play Georgia Mertching is Dead and she is also a writer on “The Auteur,” a new comedy by Taika Waititi on Showtime). When asked about why they started the Homebound Project, Worsham described it as “sustenance.”

A play she was directing Off-Broadway, The Siblings Play by Ren Dara Santiago, was cancelled at the beginning of its run at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater. Another play she was directing in the summer at Lincoln Center was also postponed. Worsham and her wife are also immunocompromised so they both were literally homebound.

“I feel like I was going crazy for a couple of reasons,” said Worsham. “New York City was falling apart and a lot of people were getting sick. And Catya and I both felt like we wanted to make something. And we also felt really useless. Because, you know, we weren’t first responders. As artists, I feel like your job is to feel relevant. I am not a firefighter, so we were kind of like, alright, what can we do?”

Homebound cofounders: Jenna Worsham and Catya McMullen

This was also during the early days of shutdown in New York State and of digital theater, where the focus was mostly on streaming pre-existing shows that had already been staged. McMullen and Worsham wanted to create original works that responded to the current moment.

“I want to hear from the writers who are actually going to speak to this moment,” Worsham said. “Different voices in the theater that we want to actually hear from right now, while we’re stuck in our homes, who can make us feel human. And also give people and ourselves an opportunity to work, even if it’s through Zoom, the sustenance of that creativity is so essential, and just something I think we were dying for.”

Playwright and actor Ngozi Anyanwu (who wrote the play Good Grief and is a writer on the upcoming HBO miniseries Americanah) has both acted in and written a piece for Homebound. In quarantine, she admits that she’s been too overwhelmed with the news to work. So short projects like Homebound have been useful in giving her a creative outlet that isn’t too draining.

“With COVID and the racial uprising, most of the time, I literally want to stay in bed and not do anything,” Anyanwu admitted. “When Jenna called me about doing Homebound, I was like, OK, yeah, feed hungry people, I can do that. It’s low energy, it’s low impact and it’s for a very good cause.” She then added, “It’s really helpful to me to know that I’m being helpful with my work and it does relieve some of the, just like, staying at home all day.”

Anyanwu wrote a monologue for model/actor Hari Nef called Here is Good, directed by Caitriona McLaughlin, which takes place in bed under a blanket. For the playwright, it was freeing to just write what she was feeling, and not go through the years of development a typical play goes through before it’s produced.

“I’ve been using these mini-commissions to take the pressure off of having to toil over the words and every single conjunction, every single preposition,” she said. “For the most part, it’s like, what if I treat everything that I make as worthy?”

Unlike other Zoom theater experiences, Homebound is not performed live. The playwrights are commissioned to create original monologues on a certain theme (the most recent Homebound theme was “promises”). Then the actor they’ve been paired with are taught how to shoot the work on their smartphone. If they want a director to help guide them, they can ask for one, who can help them with props and set dressing. It’s similar to The 24 Hour Plays—solo work where everything is pre-taped and put together with the resources on hand.

Anyanwu performed a monologue by Anne Washburn called Comfort Food, which called for her to sit in complete darkness with her face illuminated by a candle. Trying to find the right candle that didn’t “look shitty on camera” was a process, as well as the right room in her house acoustically (she settled on the bathroom). “This is why tech people are important,” she said. “Just becoming your own producer, it was fun and it was a lot of learning. I literally filmed it by my toilet.” It’s not just Homebound, it’s also homemade.

Then Homebound’s Jon Burklund edits all the videos together, and the Homebound installment is then available for four nights for ticket-buyers to stream. The creators also teamed up with Broadway producer Mary Solomon to help them with logistics (she was the one who put them in contact with Billy Shore, who runs No Kid Hungry).

So far, the artists involved in No Kid Hungry have been a who’s who of theater and Hollywood names: William Jackson Harper, Martyna Majok, Betty Gilpin, Zachary Quinto, Diane Lane, Leigh Silverman, Philippa Soo, Blair Underwood, Michael R. Jackson, Lena Dunham…the list goes on.

“The first two series was just us asking our friends, famous friends that we’ve made through theater to get involved,” said Worsham. But as word got out about Homebound, artists started inviting other people they knew to get on-board. “It’s such a community, like I did a show with Phillipa Soo few years ago, and she’s a friend with Daveed Diggs [of Hamilton]. I feel like once people know who you are, and they have a good time, then they vouch for you.”

It’s an all-volunteer effort, no one (not even the producers) are getting paid. But it’s a way to feel useful during this time. And though the plan is to close Homebound in August, Worsham isn’t saying anything definitive. The team have been talking about doing a live show whenever theaters reopen in 2021, as a reunion special and a final fundraiser for No Kid Hungry.

“I don’t know what the future holds,” said Worsham. “If there’s a need down the line, whether it’s with No Kid Hungry or another frontline organization, I wouldn’t put it past us. We’ll see what happens and if the call is there, I think it’ll probably be answered.”

National Black Theatre’s Sade Lythcott: Optimism is a Superpower

Interviews

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.

NBT has launched the Vision Forward Fund, what will that money be used for?

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.

Support the National Black Theatre’s Vision Forward Fund here.

Hilary Bettis On Life During COVID-19: “We Are All Now Living the Undocumented Immigrant Experience”

Interviews

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.

Listen to the rest of the conversation on the Token Theatre Friends podcast.

You Love Joél Pérez the Actor? You’ll Adore Joél Pérez the Writer

Interviews

“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?

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.

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.

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.

For more on Joél Pérez visit his official site. For more on Remojo, visit Pregones/PRTT.

Putting the POC in the Period Drama: From ‘Hamilton’ to ‘Six’

Features

Daveed Diggs, Okieriete Onaodowan, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Leslie Odom Jr and Anthony Ramos in “Hamilton.” (Photo: Disney+)

Here’s something you might not know about me: I’m crazy about period dramas. Next to musical theater, it’s a favorite form of escapism to me: people in gorgeous gowns having problems with a sweeping string quartet score (and probably starring Keira Knightley)…hand me my wine and snuggie, I’m about to treat myself.

But here’s the thing about being a person of color who loves historical dramas: you rarely ever see yourself represented. I mean, you rarely see yourself represented in ANY form of American entertainment, but the period drama has the biggest gap. That’s because they’re usually about white people who are friends with other white people. If there’s a Black body, they’re probably playing a slave. If there’s an Asian body, it’s probably set in China or Japan (though the last period drama set in Asia, before Disney’s live-action Mulan was Memoirs of a Geisha in 2005, which was based on a book by a white man, which…we’ll get to the authorship question later).

So to put an actor of color in a ballgown? Other than the 2013 film Belle starring a luminous Gugu Mbatha-Raw, that’s an incredibly rare occurrence, you might as well wait for a solar eclipse. Even post-2010, you still can’t cast an actor of color in a period role without someone crying out, “historical inaccuracy!”

When I first saw Hamilton in 2015 during its Off-Broadway run at the Public Theater, it was a revelation. By having actors of color portray the Founding Fathers, it seemed like the world of period dresses and waistcoats had finally opened up to include BIPOC folks. As Lin-Manuel Miranda told the New York Times around then, “Our goal was: This is a story about America then, told by America now, and we want to eliminate any distance — our story should look the way our country looks.” The two-song sequence of “Helpless” and “Satisfied” remains one of my favorite sequences in musical theater.

Hamilton used casting to make the point that the Founders were forward-thinkers and revolutionaries of their time, and that their legacy is one that encompasses all Americans, not just white people. It also used a rap and hip-hop score to make the connection between then and now even clearer. When Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson argue, they do so via a rap battle.

Said Miranda: “We have deified them so much; they’re on rocks in South Dakota. But they were people, and the flaws they had creep into everything we have now. The fights Jefferson and Hamilton have in the show are the fights we are still having.”

A Very Short, And Not Comprehensive, History of Colorblind Casting

Hamilton was not the first popular period piece that used anachronism to make the case for modern relevance. The 2001 film A Knight’s Tale starring Heath Ledger used rock music to show how knights were the rockstar of their days. Modern music as the soundscape for period films were also present in Sofia Coppola’s 2006 Marie Antoinette and Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 Moulin Rouge! and 2013 The Great Gatsby (where the music was produced by Jay-Z). Not that critics took well to anachronism; Marie Antoinette was booed at Cannes and criticized for not being historically accurate. “I wanted to make a personal story and not a big epic historical biopic,” said Coppola to The New York Times. “I didn’t want to get bogged down with history.”

Anachronism in style is one thing. Casting has been another battle. Hamilton was not the first piece of theater to have actors of color in period wear. Colorblind casting, aka casting with no thought about race, was first revolutionized in the 1950s by Joseph Papp, the founder of the Public Theater, where Hamilton debuted. For instance, he cast James Earl Jones as the lead in Shakespeare’s King Lear.

“His vision was initially that you should not notice race at all, and that, you know, this was going to be the transformative event for people then to not notice race in the rest of their lives,” said Ayanna Thompson, a Shakespeare scholar and the editor of the book Colorblind Shakespeare, in an interview with NPR. That production of Lear was an example of colorblind casting, where “[Jones’] race wasn’t supposed to impact the production.”

For most ’90s kids, the most vivid example of colorblind casting is probably the television movie adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, starring Brandy, and her fairy godmother was played by Whitney Houston (making both of them the first to play those roles in any medium). Though the 2013 Broadway revival of the same musical went back to having all-white leads, showing you that progress is not linear.

Not all artists were a fan of colorblind casting. In 1996, August Wilson delivered a speech where he talked about how colorblind casting is a tool of white supremacy: “To mount an all-black production of a Death of a Salesman or any other play conceived for white actors as an investigation of the human condition through the specifics of white culture is to deny us our own humanity, our own history, and the need to make our own investigations from the cultural ground on which we stand as black Americans.”

Indeed, colorblind casting was not without its flaws, most noticeably when it’s been used as an excuse to cast white actors as characters of color (which I’ve written about extensively because there’s been so much of it). More recently, a bunch of white actors have committed to no longer voicing characters of colors in cartoons, though colorblindness was an excuse when they were first cast years ago.

But as racial discourse in America has evolved from an “I don’t see race” approach to one that now acknowledges how proximity to whiteness (or lack thereof) affects every racial group differently, colorblind casting has evolved into color-conscious casting. It’s a way of saying that bodies are not interchangeable, that every person brings an ethnic specificity to their role that can affect how that role is played and how audiences read it. And it’s a way of acknowledging that not all bodies have equal access to opportunities.

Said director Lavina Jadhwani in a 2014 HowlRound article: “I’ve got a big fat opinion on the term ‘color-blind casting,’ which is that it doesn’t exist. I can’t think of an environment, in real life, where race doesn’t factor into relationship dynamics. And if it doesn’t exist offstage—why do we think we can (or should) create that scenario? I prefer the term ‘color-conscious casting,’ by which I mean that race is acknowledged in, and ideally deepens, theatrical conversations.”

Hamilton was not the first work I saw that took the color-conscious casting approach. The first was actually the Dave Malloy musical Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, which I first saw in 2013 (it would later have a Broadway run in 2016). The musical, based on War & Peace, was not historically accurate, at all. It had an Asian-American actor named Phillipa Soo playing the 19th-century Russian aristocrat, Natasha (Soo would later originate the role of Eliza in Hamilton). The music was a mix of electronica, house and pop. Like Hamilton, the music and casting was used to make a point: these characters are not stodgy and removed, they’re vivid and modern, and their emotions are the same as yours, the audience. If you want to make a case for color-conscious casting, just look up a video of Amber Gray singing “Charming.”

But it was Hamilton’s success at the box office and critically, that helped popularize casting as anachronism—using bodies of color to make historical dramas more relevant to modern audiences. After all, it’s no accident that even though it was produced first, Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 went to Broadway a year after Hamilton and was compared to the latter musical for its entire too-short run. Miranda’s musical made historical anachronism cool.

As actor Heath Saunders (who was in The Great Comet) said on the Token Theatre Friends podcast: “The importance of the shift that Hamilton did…was about divorcing character from body, which was a defense of white American theater. That for decades, as long as white American theater has been around, they’ve been defending the fact that these characters would never look like XYZ. So Hamilton did an amazing scalpel-like attack on that particular institution of white supremacy.”

Recently, the Hulu television show The Great also used anachronism in style and casting to make a point about how revolutionary Catherine the Great and her followers were. Uber historically accurate dramas have gone out the window, it seems.

**How Six Succeeds Where Hamilton Falls Short**

With its release on Disney+, there has been a criticism of Hamilton that has come up periodically in the five years since its Broadway premiere, but is even louder now: Hamilton uses bodies of color to put white, slave-owning men and their accomplishments at the center of the narrative. Though Hamilton ends with the phrase “who tells your story,” history is more about who gets to tell the story, something the musical doesn’t interrogate.

“By telling a curated version of events, Hamilton acts as an ad for racial diversity in history and on Broadway while masking the more violent aspects of the past, a dangerous message for a largely white audience, already used to hearing white narratives,” writes Larry Dang on Medium.

Miranda has called such criticisms “valid.” And invites other creators to take over from the space Hamilton helped open. Which is where Six comes in. I saw Six back in March, right before COVID-19 shut down New York. It was created by two young white people: Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss. Like Hamilton, Six uses modern music idioms (in this case pop songs) to tell the story of the six wives of Henry VIII.

Anna Uzele, center, surrounded by Adrianna Hicks, Andrea Macasaet, Abby Mueller, Brittney Mack and Samantha Pauly in “Six.” (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Six builds on what Hamilton was trying to do through casting. In Hamilton, bodies of color was used to make the Founders seem like outcasts and rebels who were going up against a patriarchal and regressive system. But what Six does with its casting is arguably more powerful. Six uses mostly women of color to portray historical white women who were marginalized, victimized, villainized and erased—thus tying in that historical pain to the pain that women of color feel today. And at the same time, it finally gives these women agency over their own story, letting them choose how they want to tell it.

Said Moss to the Telegraph: “We’re at a time when we’re culturally thinking and talking a lot more about who’s been neglected from spaces, and what equality really means. It’s absolutely no coincidence that our two musicals and lots and lots of other things people are writing are about addressing stories that haven’t been told from the perspective of people who haven’t had their voices heard.”

Granted, if you say one of your music inspirations for the show is Beyoncé, it would be inappropriate to not cast a Black woman.

Unlike Hamilton, Six gives us a side of history that we did not know about, from voices that were kept out of the room. It challenges us to look for the voices that are not in the history books, and to take what was in those books with a grain of salt. Was Katherine Howard a slutty temptress who deserved to get her head chopped off? Or was she a 17-year-old girl, a child, who was continually assaulted and victimized throughout her painfully short life? Six argues the latter.

History is written by white men, thus making it biased and incomplete. Six asks us to imagine what history would be like if women told the tale, while commentating on modern feminism, which should be about collaboration, not competition.

But at the end of the day, it all still comes back to white people, Six including. Next year, 1776 is coming back to Broadway, with a mostly BIPOC (and predominantly female, trans, gender-nonconforming cast), and directed by Diane Paulus. Also written by white people, 1776’s treatment of the Founding Fathers is rosy-eyed, to say the least. It idolizes and celebrates them, which seems tone-deaf considering the current moment. What does casting it with people who are not white men say about American history right now? Will it defy what we know of history? Or will it do what Hamilton has been criticized for doing: using bodies of color to make the story of white male accomplishments palatable to today’s audience; to make America cool again.

I don’t think that’s what’s going to be needed in 2021. Despite the success of Hamilton, creators of color, as well as actors, are still underrepresented on Broadway. The season after Hamilton won 11 Tony Awards was another season dominated by white voices. Until that changes, no amount of diverse casting attempts will make up for the gap in agency. It’s not enough for bodies of color to be on the stage, we need to be in positions of power, in the room where it happens.

What’s going to be needed are original stories, that celebrate the accomplishments of people of color, that look at us independent of whiteness—that positions us not as victims, but as heroes. For Hamilton to truly be revolutionary, it needs to lead to BIPOC folks being able to tell our own story, our way.

Or to quote August Wilson’s timeless words: “We do not need colorblind casting; we need theaters. We need theaters to develop our playwrights. We need those misguided financial resources to be put to better use. Without theaters we cannot develop our talents.”