"The Future of Theater" by Brittany Allen, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, C.A. Johnson, Hansol Jung, Heather Raffo, and Sanaz Toossi
Almanac submitted the following questions to playwrights Brittany Allen, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, C.A. Johnson, Hansol Jung, Heather Raffo, and Sanaz Toossi. We collected their responses — as well as their comments! — via Google Docs and organized it all into the roundtable conversation below.
ALMANAC How are you right now? How does this moment find you? And is theater anywhere in your thoughts?
HANSOL JUNG It’s such a difficult question — how am I. I keep writing and rewriting this section. @Ashley Is that allowed? Unsure. Maybe it’s hard to be honest, when writing in dialogue with other writers that you admire but don’t really know.
When you’re together in real time, you just say things, and you can’t delete it, so you just suffer, but this format is definitely different.
How am I. I am definitely overthinking everything underdoing anything.
SANAZ TOOSSI Me too. I have very little focus right now. I try to write every day, but I’m lucky if I can focus for more than five minutes or get through one page. Theater is definitely in my thoughts, though. I weirdly (or maybe it’s not weird) miss our medium so much and have an urge to write plays and nothing else. Maybe theater feels extra shiny to me these days because it’s been taken away. That makes me sound like a child. Anyway, my answer is that I write one page a day and spend the rest watching the "Real Housewives of New Jersey".
BRITTANY K. ALLEN Some days are better than others, and this one is hard. I am often unfocused and anxious and sad, but get these frantic spurts of energy sometimes, in which I'll sign up for, say, seven free poli-ed teach-ins, or freewrite six angry genre-less pages that later prove unintelligible. I'm looking for places to put the energy and the rage, and I'm looking to feel helpful, but my creative musculature is really not rising to the occasion so far. Things that help: yoga, reading a lot of Black feminist and Black Marxist history, taking classes, bingeing "The Good Fight" (so good, you guys!). Things that hurt: spending too much time in the ouroboros of the internet.
I haven't had a lot of room in my heart for theater in the wanting-to-write sense — it feels really painful to revisit right now! — but I have begun to frame these days as a gathering period. I'm thinking deeply about what needs to be said, and questioning personal, professional, and artistic patterns in ways that feel productive.
How am I. I am definitely overthinking everything underdoing anything.
- Hansol Jung
C.A. JOHNSON Well I don’t even know if there is much for me to add after these responses. I feel so much of the same. I am feeling a gargantuan amount of anxiety and depression these days. In my usual fashion, I don’t sink too low and instead find ways to fill my hours with outlines for pilots I will never write, playing The Sims on my Xbox, and watching endless amounts of film and TV. It’s a dark but entertaining time in my Brooklyn abode, but I’m making it work. Have to say that theater has felt very far away these days. Maybe I’m too sad to write without knowing it will land anywhere that it will feel valued? Or maybe this is what we’re meant to do? Stop and just witness? I’m not sure. But I saw this Charlize Theron movie on Netflix that really rocked my world. So for now I’m going to hunt that feeling. And family phone calls. And laughter. Please.
HANSOL How are you all writing? What are you writing? Is it for theater? Is it for self? Is it that you aren’t writing at all but spending most of your time playing Bejeweled like myself?
BRITTANY Oh yes, praise this question! I am so curious about what other people's brains look like right now. I've been writing, but not for theater. Working on a fiction project at the moment, for self. I have complete control over it, and it's creatively engaging but doesn't feel tethered to sad questions re: when the industry can open back up on its own terms. I'm also reading a lot, and I’m taking a class via the Brooklyn Institute of Social Research (Philosophy of History! Big fun!) and another creative writing class, through Catapult, and a bunch of poli-ed teach-ins from assorted leftist non-profits. Feeling like a student has been my main pathway to feeling productive, curious, and galvanized in this moment. But then also — I'm questioning the kind of productivity that's been drilled into us. I'm moving and thinking very slowly, which feels right? And yeah, "The Good Fight"…
SANAZ I am dying to know how/if/what others are writing. I’m writing plays. I think it’s for me? It may or may not be? At the beginning of quarantine, I was like… okay, Sanaz, you have a lot of time now and who knows what the New World will look like so write like you used to write before you ever even had the notion to send your play to someone else to read. When you would come home from work and write because it was fun? A hobby? I could barely bring myself to write “write because it was fun” just now. My thesis here is that we should all sit down and play Bejeweled.
FRANCES YA-CHU COWHIG I am writing because, for better and worse, my most powerful coping mechanism in the face of uncertainty and anxiety is escapism through (a) learning new skills that help me create imagined worlds, and (b) creating imagined worlds. However, I really benefit from a feedback loop, so right now my days are occupied with (a) online visual arts classes, as I am working on learning how to ‘write’ with pictures, so that I can grow into a writer-illustrator. It is fun to see how the skill-sets of playwriting really translate into my illustration assignments to create character sheets, antagonists and protagonists, etc. — and being back in ‘school mode’ where I am getting weekly critiques from my teachers and fellow students is keeping me motivated and focused in that realm. Also, (b) when the workshop production of my musical The New Planet got cancelled at the Guthrie, my composer, Michael Roth, and director, Maija Garcia, decided that we were just going to keep on developing the piece amongst ourselves. So, while I have no interest in ‘Zoom Theater,’ having weekly ‘Zoom Workshops’ with my collaborators has been very helpful in terms of keeping me engaged in the rewrite process.
This moment is actually finding me in the midst of a big life transition, in that I decided about a week before the pandemic began rolling through China, near the end of December, that I needed to get out of three abusive relationships that were crushing my soul and making me feel hopeless about my life and my future: (1) full time academia, (2) car culture and the year round fire season in Southern California, and (3) a creative life centered around institutional new-play development — so a month ago my partner and I drove our van with most of our stuff in it cross country, and we are in the midst of a move to Providence, RI, where I plan to pursue a much more localized walkable life, and growth from writer to writer-illustrator via coursework at the Rhode Island School of Design. This move is certainly complicated financially by the evaporation of all upcoming productions, but I’m frankly feeling grateful about the timing, and so happy to be back in mostly full-time learning mode for awhile.
BRITTANY I have to say that reading FRANCES's story of brave rupture made me smile so much! The possibilities, the bravery! (Oh my god, can we all just up and move to New England and escape unhelpful environments? SHOULD I???)
I weirdly (or maybe it’s not weird) miss our medium so much and have an urge to write plays and nothing else. Maybe theater feels extra shiny to me these days because it’s been taken away. - Sanaz Toossi
HEATHER RAFFO I’m so inspired by you all. I want to be in school with you! I was deep in a project about migration and the global economy when the pandemic hit. The play was trying to uncover our relationship to human value, by dismantling our ever-present relationship to economic value. As much as I wanted to drop everything and just be a mom and grieve the loss of my father, I did find I had to keep writing this piece, because the very web of interconnectivity I was trying to map, was suddenly laid bare for all of us across the world.
It’s funny, but right now these feel like conflicting questions: ‘How am I’ and ‘is theater in my thoughts’?
This is so personal, but with my particular DNA, I feel like it is 1990 or 2003 again; like it is another acute moment where America is behaving individualistically, not collectively. Only this time, we are at war with ourselves.
At my most hopeful, I feel we will embrace our potential to create equity, care, and human-centered safety nets in every aspect of our national, local, and personal lives. At my most pessimistic, I see everything getting profoundly worse. I suppose I don’t see much in between. I believe this is a moment of such great consequence, and one to which we must give ourselves entirely. With stakes this high, I wonder about the place of theater at all. Is theater vital? Can it be?
The reinvention of theater has always been in my thoughts. Decades ago, I graduated with my MFA into a business that did not represent Middle Eastern artists or even have a genre of Middle Eastern American theater, so I had to both invent and dismantle cultural norms. I soon found tremendous colleagues, also in the process of invention. We worked intently to create a movement, through 9/11, through America’s wars with Afghanistan and Iraq, through decades of occupation, intensifying conflict and rising phobias surrounding all things Middle Eastern. Although our desire was to focus on creation, much of our work was (and remains) spent on viability and value. In 30 years of professional work, I’ve rarely had a moment to turn my focus from unspoken traumas, uncomfortable representations, and the need to create a vital national conversation. So yes, theater is in my thoughts because the stakes are yet more critical.
I'm thinking deeply about what needs to be said, and questioning personal, professional, and artistic patterns in ways that feel productive.
- Brittany K. Allen
Mostly, I’m wondering what is globally possible in this collective moment? I’m hoping it brings an end to our national obsession with individualism and exceptionalism. Then, I find myself recognizing (I’m screaming from within) that, in five months of lockdown, I have not had a moment alone, to close a door, to deal with personal grief. I essentially want this to be a time for the collective and the communal, to rewrite the rules of what it means to be part of humanity. But I also understand we must reckon with individual needs. Like most of my life, I’m hoping there is a place where incommensurable worlds can meet.
ALMANAC In mid-May, critic Charles McNulty asked 25 theater artists, “What will the post-pandemic stage look like?” The piece, published in the LA Times, ranges over the artistic and political possibilities of a theatrical landscape reimagined, from a “theater of junk and reclaimed nooks” (Quiara Alegría Hudes) to a “theater that looks like its community” (Luis Alfaro). How has the pandemic transformed your relationship to the theater, particularly given that the virus has “ruthlessly exposed all longstanding, preexisting inequities in our world” (Michael R. Jackson)?
SANAZ All I can say right now is I’ve been struck by my own lack of imagination in what our field could look like, feel like, etc.
FRANCES I would love for our society to stop making being an ‘artist’ a primarily professional path, and shift towards finding ways to nurture the artistic sides of all people, so that there can be more original plays written and produced on the community level, by people who are also teachers and social workers and janitors. Instead of theater being produced in a few cities and then ‘trickling down’ to smaller towns and rural areas, I dream of a world in which everyone has time to make art and grow in their artistry and share it with others in their community — and perhaps some of that production will travel and be seen in larger cities, but it should be decentralized and grounded in community. This is also the kind of theater that is not ecologically catastrophic — because, let’s be honest, people flying around the world to see plays and rehearse plays (and I include myself in this indictment) are doing far more harm ecologically than good.
With stakes this high, I wonder about the place of theater at all. Is theater vital? Can it be? - Heather Raffo
HEATHER I’ve been wanting a Green New Deal for the theater. It’s an unsustainable economic model. A musing of mine, but if there were a universal living wage, might the theater be transformed? Would artists be able to create, irrespective of sponsorship? Or as FRANCES articulated, could it free people in all kinds of different walks of life, to express themselves through art? Would there be an explosion into different platforms?
Some days I don’t know what I mean by ‘a new platform.’ But in saying it, I feel I am in pursuit. I’m in pursuit of a more direct interaction with audience. An audience that comes from the different worlds we all navigate, not audience cultivated through a few voices at the NY Times or who can afford a $100 ticket. I think this time of quarantine offers access to new conversations with people across locales. I like to build my work in community, but building community with our work might be more possible now that we can communicate from our living room into our audience’s living room... and with their extended family, who might be listening in to something they never would have been exposed to before.
C.A. I’d like a theater more interested in ensembles of like-minded creators. I’m just tired of walking into new buildings with new producers that I have to convince that my version of theater is worth financing. Wish we had financial models and government funding that supported putting production into the hands of like-minded artists who want to build something together. It could mean artistic ensembles built around queer and POC community. I personally have been craving that so deeply lately.
ALMANAC In June, following a string of state-sanctioned violences against Black bodies, righteous protests and calls for justice erupted across the nation. Numerous theaters issued public statements in support of Black Lives Matter and made promises of action, with some taking steps like raising funds to benefit anti-racist organizations, opening their lobbies to protestors, and issuing awards and commissions to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color artists. How did you find yourself processing all of this?
SANAZ I was a little prickled by the lack of specificity, the vagueness in a lot of the theater BLM statements… and part of me really craves specific acknowledgements of anti-blackness, racism. Do you all think it would be healing for theaters to basically say, “hey, this production we did” or “this play we chose” or “this all-white creative team” was not okay? Can theaters call themselves out without throwing some of those artists under the bus? How would you feel about theaters taking responsibility for that explicitly?
FRANCES I just read the 30-page Demands Document issued by We See You W.A.T. — which is the most beautiful document I’ve read since the Green New Deal! I’ve been thinking about the concept of ‘Transitional Justice’ — which, as it applies to the institution of theater, might include Truth-Seeking, Reparations, and Reform. In terms of Truth-Seeking, I think it is very difficult for people inside any given institution to see themselves and their collective and historic actions with clarity — and I think this idea of ‘self-confession’ can actually be used to hide larger systemic problems, by bringing to light smaller, flashier issues. I think that it would be much more helpful for theaters to submit to external reviews and trainings from organizations like artEquity — where the process of self-reflection and calling oneself out is housed within a more deep-tissue process that also includes work on Reparations and Reform. Given that the goal is structural change and transforming individuals who (perhaps unknowingly) helped uphold the structures of white supremacy, I would be inclined to be very careful (and conservative) about the ways in which the shaming of self or others is used in public discourse. While it might play well with optics and the media cycle, in the long run it might not be more productive than institutions doing the deep work themselves, at every level of their organization, in active partnership with an equity-based organization.
I think less and less that art alone will save us. - Brittany K. Allen
BRITTANY I feel complicated about all this! On the one hand, I say bravo to initiatives like the open-your-lobby push, which seemed to have a concrete goal and tangible effect: in a very physical way, theaters could be helpful in a moment of rupture. (Though it's worth saying, I feel like that initiative was completely architected by artists pressuring institutions, right? I heard about it first from the writer Jeesun Choi!) On the other hand, and speaking broadly, I find myself suspicious of the speedy responses to this latest iteration of the BLM fight, which seem to me to have a lot in common with a larger, performative, corporate response that's nominally "woke" but lacks both specificity and material goals. It galls me that this fight is as old as the existence of police, but so many have "just woken up" to systemic injustice against Black bodies, or feel the need to frame their solidarity statement in such terms. But even THAT is all bound up in the Covid-exacerbated aspects of this moment, in which many of us, for the first time, are sitting with the sorts of insecurities that the most vulnerable people in this country encounter daily (i.e., unemployment, food insecurity). I am one who feels more politically engaged in this moment than I have been in recent instances of police murdering Black folks, in part because I have this time and anxiety; this time, I am reading the abolitionist texts and feel compelled to find a foothold in the larger, longer work of what I hope is a revolution. But then I'll talk to my Dad, a fifty-something Black man, and hear the weariness in his voice when he says he hopes that "something changes this time." It's... a lot.
This is all to say, I'm trying to balance — in both my own body and in the larger, physical bodies of our industry, the country, the world — the invitation in this moment, where so much good listening seems possible, and my skepticism as to how or if ultimately corporate bodies, like our beloved theatrical institutions, can meaningfully contribute to all the great cultural undoings that need to take place. I'll also say: I prioritize the battle of the state brutalizing Black people above the battle of diversifying institutional theater, and though it's OF COURSE all bound up in the same social ill, I worry sometimes about how discourse collapses these fights. I love theater. I know I will be looking to my favorite artists for help processing these contradictions for the rest of my life, and I think the way I can contribute to the conversation will be through art. But I think less and less that art alone will save us.
FRANCES I am finding myself inspired by this uprising and how it is spreading globally — and contributing to worldwide conversations around the legacies of colonialism. But I’m frankly a bit cynical about the sudden eruption of the term BIPOC, and have complicated feelings about the idea of diversity and what it means to try to cultivate it. One of the most useful ideas I was exposed to during my five years in academia was from the campus Diversity Officer, who made it very clear that during hiring conversations, the only way diversity could legally be considered was through the lens of contributions to a diverse field, work/education environment, etc. — that we should not consider a person diverse because of something they had no control of (i.e. their race/ethnicity/country of origin.) So I’m wondering how one might bring to this idea of creating these platforms a lens of what individuals have done as advocates and citizens and community members, rather than just knee-jerk attempts to commission people who will look good in photographs for their grant material, and make the commissioning/awarding institution appear ‘woke.'
I’m frankly a bit cynical about the sudden eruption of the term BIPOC, and have complicated feelings about the idea of diversity and what it means to try to cultivate it. - Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig
BRITTANY I think there's a lot more to say about FRANCES's point about how we frame conversations around diversity, particularly to include intellectual diversity in addition to (or over?) race, gender, etc. Right now, I'm wary of that point because I resent how intellectual diversity and census diversity is often framed as mutually exclusive (to Hansol's q — if your ideas matter more than your race or gender, what to do with the fact that your race and gender are often constitutive of your ideas?) — but I do appreciate the call to think creatively about what a truly motley community could look like. Out with the box, in short! Fuck the box!
As a recent beneficiary of professional attention by dint of being a Black lady artist, I'm also trying to unknot the double-bind that such attention will always prompt so long as white people are giving out the awards, i.e., is this because I deserve it, or because I check a box? Related: Kiese Laymon recently spoke on a podcast about the perils of the anti-racist reading list (he was referencing this Lauren Michele Jackson piece, which I quite love) and went beautifully deep on this idea that we — let us say Black artists — don't want to be read chiefly as empathy-enriching machines. I think eventually this conversation about how to un-racist theater will have to find ways to encounter that point, so as to liberate Black artists and other ostensible "box-checkers" from the onus of spending their careers proving they exist.
HEATHER I want to advocate for how theaters will care for Black artists in the present. The theater must take this time to commit to a future of more fully supporting and upholding the work that Black artists are doing. Yes. Yes, and, what if support also means not asking them to create and articulate in the middle of trauma and upheaval? How can the theater embrace an artist’s whole self, no matter if that individual is full of articulation and ready to be the voice of the moment or is in deep contemplation, becoming instead the voice of the future? How can we all offer up space to listen now, while also reserving space for the work of tomorrow? Because creating in the midst of trauma can be both actionable and retraumatizing for an artist. I know this personally, because after 9/11 those of us in the Middle Eastern theater movement didn’t have time to consider our full voice, the times were too imperative. We were racing to protect our at-risk communities, hoping to create political impact while simultaneously trying to use the stage to redefine the narrative of war. Theaters became primarily a place of censorship. They did not easily welcome or offer respite until it was deemed ‘safe.’ As someone who came of age as a playwright through America’s decades of war and occupation, I’ve learned that care for the person, not just their work, needs to be one of the support systems on offer.
Personally, I feel the urge to both bridge-build and bridge-burn.
- Heather Raffo
I want theaters across the nation to do everything possible to be part of necessary change, but the theater is essentially a marketplace for narrative, so I think we need to remain vigilant to the narratives put forth, and vigilant to what actions follow. Being vigilant with the marketplace also means we need a rigorous look at how capitalism influences every aspect of our lives and art and decision making. I want this to be a watershed moment.
Personally, I feel the urge to both bridge-build and bridge-burn. I think in any movement these things can happen simultaneously. What’s the saying? When an artist sees a fire, they run straight into it. Artists need care to do the visionary work.
C.A. Oof. I worry my thoughts about this won’t be the most positive. Likely because I, too, have wondered a lot as of late whether art can save us. And if so, will it be art as we currently know it, or some new art that we’ve yet to find.
Speaking specifically to the theatrical conversation, I’ve started tuning out this debate among artists about how exactly artistic institutions should establish anti-racist policies — not because I don't think it matters — but because Black people are literally dying in the streets. The issues are getting conflated and theaters are patting themselves on the back for publicly saying, "We agree that Black folks shouldn't be dying," which feels... idiotic. Shouldn't the answer be anti-racist institutional movement to unite their artistic function with political function, by centering social justice in their missions and creating artist activists in the process — not just saying, "We promise we're nice." It all just makes me think more POC artists are being brought into PWIs to be mistreated — only now it's under the guise of new commissions and well-intentioned (but mostly misguided) PR statements.
I’ve started tuning out this debate among artists about how exactly artistic institutions should establish anti-racist policies — not because I don't think it matters — but because Black people are literally dying in the streets. - C.A. Johnson
Additionally, lately I’ve been really trying to remind folks that theater as we know it is a capitalist endeavor. It’s built on money from the top (white) earners in any given locale and the requisite boards they put together. So something feels oddly hilarious to me about waving our fists and demanding these people care about Black and brown bodies. What reason do they have to do so now, if they never did before? Good PR? Being PC? Feels flimsy. And I think I’d rather spend my time calling a senator and tracking the courts.
ALMANAC While theaters are shuttered, what do you want them to learn, to rethink, to remember, to embrace anew?
C.A. I really just hope every theater-maker who has received a complaint, a letter, a voicemail, or even a tweet from an artist they harmed, is taking that complaint seriously. And I don’t mean reading a bunch of books and praying you’ll become a better person. I mean thinking critically about institutional change, institutional apologies, and not begging that artist to show you the way forward. Figure it out. Do better. Be better. And never pull that crap again.
SANAZ I have a small request. Do not subject your artists to talkbacks unless you are absolutely prepared to mediate and protect them from what are often extremely racist, demeaning questions.
Brittany speaks to something beautifully in the question above — about the danger of using Black artists “chiefly as empathy-enriching machines.” This got me thinking about my answer here. I have terrible thoughts sometimes that the reason I’ve received work as a theater artist is because I am the “right” kind of Middle Easterner. I write about Iran. I write about immigrants and Muslims. I feel sort of gross and lucky that my writing sensibilities line up with what the white American imagination thinks a person who occupies my identity should write about. And so I want theater to think more capaciously about identity so we don’t have to be successful on just their (read cis-white-hetero) terms.
I hope the people who run [theaters] are having some deep dive spiral existential crisis about why these institutions exist. - Hansol Jung
HEATHER Since we have gotten on the subject of empathy (the excessive focus on which, for those that know me, is my great criticism of the American Theater), I would like the theater to stop centering empathy as its reason for existing. In other artistic genres, empathy is not considered a prerequisite to making art. Empathy keeps artists in service. Creating empathy is not the same as creating value. Empathy asks audiences to feel for another but not to see them as equals. I’m not sure in the ‘liberal’ theater if empathy is the watershed we make it out to be. I think value demands more of an understanding of the role we actually play in each other’s lives.
I am also concerned with any future business model of the theater post-pandemic. Is it viable? Was it ever? How will we nurture institutions, audiences or artists when economic inequalities become ever-more pronounced? Theater, for me, has always been a financially impossible conundrum, especially as a parent. The hours (even under lockdown) that I have been absent from the needs of my children in order to ‘create’ does not equate to being able to provide for their present or future. I’ve long been wondering if working in the theater, as a parent, is an act of negligence. More so now, I wonder, post-pandemic, who can afford to make theater? Who can afford to support or fund theater? And who can afford to go to theater?
HANSOL If we’re talking about theaters as institutions, venues … I hope the people who run them are having some deep dive spiral existential crisis about why these institutions exist. What community are they serving, to what end. Where do they stand in the pipeline of new play development to commercial profit-making through story? Who are they including as their community and who are they excluding? To that end, do they still need to exist?
As for the artists who make theater… I am trying to remember why I do it. Who I am trying to reach? Where is the line between professional development and deepening my artistry? What does it look like if there is no line, but the two things are merged, and merging this trajectory becomes my priority — not “what is my next commission” or “where am I submitting these plays to”?
ALMANAC What do you think theater does in the world? When has it done that in the past? Or when could it sometime down the line? In thinking about the future of theater, is there anything from the past (yours, the theater’s, the world’s) that feels vital to carry forward?
HANSOL The intimacy of physical proximity… feels suddenly so potent.
FRANCES I have zero interest in Zoom Theater, haven’t watched any, don’t want to watch any, and would rather just wait ’til live theater is back, and would also happily switch to a lot more outdoor theater, drive-in live theater, festival type theater — which is all much more in line with the type of theatrical rituals I grew up seeing regularly as a kid in rural Taiwan, where I still think that what we think of as theater in the US/Europe is largely irrelevant because of all these crazy-vibrant Chinese Folk Religion type festivals that are going on around all the gods' birthdays. There are puppet shows for the gods, strippers on truck beds dancing for the gods, giant bobble-headed gods on scooters... Participatory theater, created by and for specific communities, is vital to carry forward.
Theater before the pandemic was getting a bit cynical for my tastes. I wanna see more plays about big earnest emotions and people striving for touch. That’s all there is right? - C.A. Johnson
SANAZ Physical proximity, which I guess I think of as the ritual of gathering, has never felt so sacred to me. I sometimes joke that gathering is “all we have” in theater. But not sure why I ever knocked that. That togetherness really is sacred.
C.A. I think this discussion of proximity and hugs is everything. Theater before the pandemic was getting a bit cynical for my tastes. I wanna see more plays about big earnest emotions and people striving for touch. That’s all there is right? It’s all we’re craving? Put it on more stages and stop making me watch stories about jerks.
HANSOL Is theater one of the few things that requires people to gather, and have communal feelings? Like church. Good theater always feels like church to me. Creating a communal space that is physical as well as emotionally bringing together a group of strangers… so we might emote together, and feel like we as individuals share so many things with other individuals.
The individual recognition of self on stage, while experiencing all these other individuals in the other seats having those emotional recognition, destroys the notion of loneliness for a while.
C.A. Gotta echo Hansol here. Theater is church for me. It makes me feel like if I’m standing in a crowd, there are at least a handful of people feeling the same emotions I’m feeling. And if we’re brave we just might wave our hands a bit or have a good cry. That feels big and positive. Does it enact change in the world? Yes and no? Once I saw this super sad lady on the train who wouldn’t give up her seat to an older woman next to her, and I was pissed. I mean I was fuming. But then I really looked at her, and I realized she didn’t even see the older woman. Not because she was an asshole, but because she was so deeply sad that I don’t think she could see her own two hands in her lap. How did I know this about her? I thought she reminded me of an Annie Baker character — those plays taught me something about the dangers and pains of sad white people who can’t see the hands offering them love from every direction. They deserve some compassion every now and again. Even on their worst, privileged days, they need a little help. So I let her off the hook. That being said, I think tons of MAGA people love Hamilton but still vote against the interests of POC Americans. So…
HEATHER I think, in theory, I echo proximity and theater as church. It was why I went into the theater. But I realize I haven’t actually felt that way at the theater for a very long time. Not in NYC. Not since the last recession.
I want the theater to remain a place of vital creativity. Of truly visionary possibilities. I aspire to thinking of the theater as Zaha Hadid thought about architecture — she envisioned shapes and structures that only became possible decades later, when innovation in construction could finally articulate her vision. I think the theater will eventually catch up to the artist’s vision for it. I want us to carry forward our innovative collective ambition.
Good theater always feels messy to me and makes you sit in that mess.
- Sanaz Toossi
SANAZ I’ve been thinking about what theater does. What is good art supposed to do? Does good art enact political change? I want to say that it is rare for a play to enact political change, and so no — I don’t think that political change is a prerequisite for good art. Or I’m being too restrictive in how I conceptualize political change — maybe seeing your history, or your family, or your bad behavior onstage does lead to political change. OR theater, as it is today, is not set up to incite political change. I don’t know how to tackle this question, and maybe I’m trying to answer a different question.
I can’t answer right now what theater does in the world, but I can answer what it’s done for me. At its worst, it has made me feel completely alone and erased. At its best, I suppose it does the opposite. It’s not just that it makes me feel seen, but that it names and points to my secrets, confuses me, muddies my worldview, and stays welled up in my throat after I go home. Good theater always feels messy to me and makes you sit in that mess.
HEATHER Theater in my opinion speaks what can’t be spoken.
In doing so, sometimes it is censored. Sometimes, it is so ahead of its time, people have to learn how to listen. Sometimes, it is able to create a national conversation.
