by David Dower
This morning I caught up to these two posts about diversity. Here's Michael Kaiser. Here's Mission Paradox. I stumbled on them in the midst of putting the final planning touches on "Defining Diversity", the first convening of the American Voices New Play Institute at Arena Stage.
Early in my tenure as the founding Artistic Director of The Z Space Studio in San Francisco, a funder and friend told me that I was going to struggle to build the organization and my own place in the field because I had "no definable artistic aesthetic". She would come to programs produced by or developed at Z Space and one time she'd see a fully-staged short story, another time a solo show, another time a puppet opera, and sometimes a classically structured play. I countered that my personal aesthetic was that "theater is a big tent" and I wanted to foster its diversity. "How's anyone supposed to follow that?" she asked, gently but firmly.
I know she was right about the struggling part-- lord knows I lived it. It was five years before anyone got paid. Fifteen years later, hardly anyone's making a living wage at it. It was hard to build the Board. Harder, still, to build the audience. We had (and Z still has) loyal fans of individual aspects of the aesthetic, particularly the Word for Word ensemble-- they of the fully staged short stories, represented in the NPDP by the collaboration with Octavio Solis and California Shakespeare Festival, which is itself a diverse mish mash of cultures, form, content, and audience! There was also a loyal fan base for each of the solo performers, especially my dear friend Josh Kornbluth, and always more producers willing to commit full productions of the classically structured plays we developed than the other forms incubating in the studio.
We stuck to our guns at Z, holding on to the notion of the "big tent", and the welcome mat is still out to multi-media 'happenings' like David Szlasa's "My Hot Lobotomy", the first plays (and first drafts) of Peter Sinn Nachtreib, Margo Hall's staging of James Baldwin's short story Sonny's Blues, and Cajun solo performer Anne Galjour's first foray into issues of class and culture in New England (You Can't Get There From Here).
Being open to diverse aesthetics meant we were working with other elements of diversity: cultural perspectives, class, age, sexual orientation-- you name it. The people and projects cover the waterfront to this day there. And I cherished that.
As I was driving across country to start the job at Arena Stage three years ago (!), I was excited to be carrying this inquiry further. Arena was the first company in DC to integrate its audience, and I knew from conversations with Molly and with Stephen Richard how hard the company had worked to diversify its audience-- a project that's gone on for decades here. It is also the home of the Allen Lee Hughes Fellowship Program, developing tomorrow's leaders in our field with a focus on communities of color. And I knew that the new building was going to occasion a repurposing of the organization as a center for the production, presentation, development, and study of American work. And "American work" means the building will have to be the actual big tent I've always talked about as a metaphor.
And I've been working on this notion every day here. I've worked with Molly (and our Communications Team) to create space in the program for forms and content that push at the boundaries-- modestly thus far, but resolutely. If anyone ever tells you its not risky to push at those boundaries they haven't really tried it, or have had little at stake if they failed. (I sometimes miss those days of having little at stake if I failed!) But Arena's been publicly committed to this transitional period, where we are out of our building during its renovation, as "Arena Restaged" and we're attempting to stake out broader aesthetic terrain in advance of opening The Mead Center next year.
I also very consciously (self-consciously?) populated my staff, the Artistic Development Team, with a diverse group in many directions. We're from different cultural backgrounds, the ages run the gamut, the aesthetic preoccupations are all over the place, even our religious and political backgrounds are divergent. And we talk about this stuff as a staff. A lot. We kid about it, we argue about it, we worry about it, and we wonder about it.
Here's the thing I most wonder about it: What difference does it make? Or, better put, what difference can it make? What do we do with our diversity as a staff that will make a contribution to the organization and to the field?
This weekend I was also sitting in the rehearsals for our production of The Fantasticks. And I was working on outreach ideas for the spring production of Sophisticated Ladies, planning an event with Edward Albee for December, and reviewing the final casting for Stick Fly. And I'm writing up the plans for the NPDP Festival, where we present all seven selected projects over two weekends next Fall. Not a puppet opera or choreopoem in the mix. And, truly, at this point-- who's afraid of Virginia Woolf. Yet, listening to our Luisa sing Much More, or talking with Charles Randolph Wright about his sophisticated ideas for the Ellington musical, or plotting how to present the "South Bronx Bus Tour" The Provenance of Beauty, or thinking about discussing casting and design ideas with Mr. Albee next month I am as delighted by my work and my field as ever. All of this, all of it, is American theater and to zoom from Groovelily to Albee and back to Ellen MacLaughlin's new musical about an unknown French soldier, all the while humming tunes from The Fantasticks mashed up with Next to Normal is my idea of the sweet spot. So, my San Francisco funder/friend was right: who, in truth, can follow any of that?
When a group of us went to New Works convening at The Humana Festival last spring, our casting director Dan Pruksarnukul and the NPDP Coordinator Vijay Mathew were two of the only brown faces in the mix-- and the only ones who were on the staff of a major theater. As they listened to the hand-wringing over the lack of diversity in the group, they heard it as hand-wringing over the lack of African American voices in the room. And they came back fired up about the discussion, in turn firing up the rest of the ArtDev staff. Amrita Mangus, one of the inaugural class of New Play Institute Fellows, decided to produce a convening called "Defining Diversity", which will take place on the weekend of December 4-6 here in DC. There are 20 or so people coming in from around the country to try to advance this conversation. We'll focus on diversity as, itself, a diverse universe: a rich mix of cultural background, aesthetic terrain, generation of origin, geography, class, political orientation, gender, sexuality. We'll try to wrestle it all into something productive about how it matters and how to advance its beneficial attributes around the field.
We'll post the resulting documentation here for everyone. And we welcome your own thoughts on the subject here any time. Maybe even more helpful if we have your thoughts and questions before we gather.
What does diversity mean to you and why does it matter to anyone else?
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