This Hispanic Heritage month, I had the pleasure of teaching kids about the wonderful and amazing Frida Kahlo. While brushing up on my knowledge of her legacy, I was deeply inspired with how vulnerable she was to include herself in her art pieces. As a child, Frida found solace in creating art when her illness (polio) made it so unbearable that she was paralyzed and oftentimes bedridden. Her roots as a creator stemmed from communicating the truth of her pain. Frida found herself expressing her big feelings by centering herself as the focal point of her work.
WHAT? Girl, how?
“My painting carries with it the message of pain” Frida Kahlo.
When I write plays, I center those around me. My mother, father, sisters and friends. Where I’m from, my culture and parts of my upbringing like Spice Girls and double dutch. But when it comes to writing about me, I just don’t do it. I steer away from telling my story because I feel like I’m better at telling other people stories because it’s more relateable. It’s not like I’m not in there, I’m just not the lead… or supporting but more like the understudy. But Frida challenged me. And boy what a challenge it is.
Have you ever told the truth about yourself? Like telling the paper what it is you truly believe of how you really are and who you know yourself to be? My god, it is not for the weak. When Eugene O’Neill wrote his semi-biographical play Long Day’s Journey Into the Night, he made it so that it would not be produced while he was alive. The play is his truth. How he sees himself and the toll his toxic upbringing had on him. The play was so revealing, it exposed him in this vulnerable way that he refused to share until years after his passing. Baby, I get it.
Engaging with Frida’s boldness as a truthteller, I challenged myself to write a play about myself (cringe!). I am able to see myself on paper in a way I’ve only been able to think about and I don’t always like who or what I am seeing. A friend from my graduate cohort once said during a lecture, it’s important to “show your scars, not your wounds,” as to say if there is something we are not yet healed from, we do not have to feel pressure to write about it or share it with the world. And I agree. However, I have the scars, yet refuse to confront what caused them or who caused them due to the fear that more often than not, it was me.
Each scene in this new… experiment has me feeling all undone and exposed in a way I’ve never been in my life. I write a little bit then hide from it. Scared that it’s not good or I’m not good or that I’m not telling the whole story or that it’s a poor depiction of my memory and how I want to communicate who I am and how I think of myself.
In the portrait The Two Frida’s, created after her divorce with Diego Rivera, we see two versions of the artist holding hands. Both have their hearts exposed. While one (the traditional Frida) heart is bloody and open and… undone, while the other, a newer version, heart is closed. Healthy though exposed. For me, this is what I hope for myself. The chance to see a healthy part of me holding this raw version of myself with love. The way I’d like to approach that is through playwriting which is my art and accept myself through it all.
I look to Frida as my north star in writing about myself in the most honest way I can understand. I look to her for guidance as I think about how I see myself on paper and in the mirror. It’s okay to confront pain and lies and truth and my ugly through my art work. But I’ll also be available to hold my hand and allow for each version of myself to be seen, loved and accepted. By creating this work and even sharing it (if I feel like it) I’m giving each version of myself the chance to be visible by the world. A world who has been harsh, unkind and unforgiving to me but also, caring, generous and graceful.
I love you Frida Kahlo! Thank you for your truth which has set me free.
Should I spend $200 to buy my theatre pal Marc’s Olympus OM-1 camera at the end of my sophomore year of college????
Here’s some back story from my childhood to explain why this was such a big decision:
When I was in the third grade, men in suits came to the front door. I thought they were insurance salesmen because back then, those type of guys came a knockin’ to sell policies. But THESE Men in Black took the car away. Oh. NOT insurance guys. I later learned the term Repo Men. As in repossession. Apparently Dad had fallen behind on the payments for our Thunderbird.
We went through a bunch of cars the next few months. Dad had a little red Corvair for a bit…
… not to be confused with a snazzy little red Corvette and no need to cue up Prince’s song.
Then Dad got into an accident where the Corvair was totaled. Great. The guy living next door to us was a mechanic so he loaned us an ancient gray clunker from the 1940s. Eventually we got a green 1951 Hudson that was the color of Dino the Dinosaur (of Sinclair gas stations fame) – and it was about the same size.
At first I was okay with Green Dino, it beat to hell and back driving around in that gray clunker. I showed my aunt (she was just six years older than me) that the back seat was so wide I could lay down across it without having to bend my knees. She rolled her eyes implying the Hudson wasn’t even remotely cool, since this was the mid-60s. Shame washed over me.
About this time of us going through cars left, right and sideways, I became fascinated with Mr. Potato Head. I’m not sure why. I already had some Legos and had started collecting Matchbox cars. Maybe it was the fun of creating a funny face, so I asked my mom if I could have a Mr. Potato Head.
She said no, we couldn’t afford it. Wanna know how much Mr. Potato Head cost in the mid-60s? Ninety-eight cents. I’m not kidding.
I begged and pleaded with my mom until she finally drove us down to Ayr-Way where she bought me one. In hindsight, I’ve often regretted pushing Mom so hard for that toy… but when you’re in early grade school, how else do you stand up for yourself?
I did have a small plastic bank back then (it looked like a vault)…
… where I put my tiny allowance when Mom could afford to give me a nickel or a dime (my job was to take out the trash and dry the dishes). But Dad stole money from the plastic vault one Saturday morning when he thought I was asleep so he could go buy coffee at the corner diner. I ratted him out to Mom and she chastised him big time. I don’t remember him paying me back.
So you can see why I was nervous and my mom was freaked out by me wanting to spend $200 on Marc’s Olympus OM-1 35 mm camera.
How could I even afford it, you ask? Well, I worked summers at Eagle Creek Park in Indianapolis to save up for college, plus I did work-study jobs at the University of Evansville (set building, publicity, box office), and I got grants (BEOG – the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant) and scholarships. No loans, I did NOT want to end up in debt like my dad.
All of that added up to my bank account giving me the green light to buy Marc’s camera. Not to mention my intuition and instincts that were yelling, “GO FOR IT!” So, I bought it. And used it for close to 30 years. A truly fabulous investment.
(It says 28 millimeter but the film that fit inside was called 35 mm)
Now that I had this fancy schmancy camera, what was I going to take pictures of? Surely more than just water droplets on clover and raindrops on roses (as much as I loved Julie Andrews in TheSound of Music)…
Wait, hang on… I was in the Drama Dept. at U of E…
Yes, photo ops there started to call my name…
(An action shot of mine from The Boyfriend, a musical production at the University of Evansville)
Lily Tung Crystal, artistic director of East West Players in Little Tokyo of Los Angeles, has made a full circle back to Southern California. While the path may have been unconventional and circuitous, every place she’s had the pleasure of making home along her artistic journey has contributed to her role as a thoughtful and influential leader in the Asian American theatre community.
Lily’s first stage was the raised fireplace of her childhood home in Rancho Palos Verdes. She’d use the handle of the fireplace screen pulley as her microphone and sing the showstoppers she’d learned from outings with her mother to the Pantages or the Ahmanson. Having once been a competitive dancer and carrying a natural ear for music, Lily’s mother held a deep appreciation for the arts and passed this on to her daughter. At the age of seven, Lily began taking singing and piano, which ultimately led her to musical theater—roles in Oliver, The Sound of Music, The Wizard of Oz to name a few. Despite being one of the better singers, Lily never got the lead, possibly because the directors couldn’t square Lily’s Asian face with the traditional white casting of these shows. At the time, representation was barely a conversation, and it never dawned on Lily that she could ever see her onstage talents as anything more than a hobby.
After graduating Cornell University, Lily moved to China to work as both an educator and a journalist. All the while she kept her hand in the theatre—but mostly as an avocation, something to keep her creative spirit nurtured. Eventually Lily made her way back to her home state of California, but this time to San Francisco, where she found herself joining community theatre and acting classes. Even as she was immersing herself in the Bay Area theatre scene, she never considered herself a professional actress despite joining the union and landing significant onstage roles. Claiming the identity was a slow process, and Lily recalls herself thinking, “Maybe I can say I’m an actor now. Can I really say that?” Asking for permission is an all too familiar refrain for artists in the shadows, especially those of color—I certainly have had my fair share of imposter syndrome around my creative life—but once Lily gave it to herself and said YES, there was no holding her back.
In 2009 Lily received a Theatre Bay Area Titan Award, which led her to start the Bay Area Asian American Actors Collective, where she found kinship with fellow actor Leon Goertzen. A year later the two co-founded Ferocious Lotus, an Asian American theatre company in the San Francisco Bay Area. As it turns out, in one year, Lily birthed a theatre company and a baby! She remembers sitting in rehearsals for their first show—a night of one-acts co-sponsored by the Asian American Theatre Company—with her infant strapped in a baby carrier. I am particularly delighted by this image in my mind’s eye—a scrappy and determined young Lily with a script in one hand and a bottle in another, baby nuzzled up against her body—as it demonstrates the grit and passion that Lily has always brought to her work. With Lily at the helm as founding co-artistic director and later, artistic director, Ferocious Lotus went on to produce and support many emerging Asian American playwrights and artists and became a vibrant and influential theatre space with national recognition and reach.
In 2019, Lily moved on from Ferocious Lotus to become artistic director at Theater Mu, the premiere Asian American theatre of the Midwest based in Minneapolis. There Lily continued to grow the landscape of Asian American theatre and stretch the boundaries of definition and opportunity, always striving for diversity and equity in development, education, production, and outreach. Five years later in 2024, Lily found herself back in Southern California, the stomping ground of her youth, taking on the role of Artistic Director at East West Players (EWP).
EWP is the longest standing Asian American theatre and theatre of color in the nation, and Lily is ushering in its 60th anniversary. Honored by the task, she was particularly mindful of the curation of such a milestone season, aiming to create balance between the OGs of Asian American theatre–the elders like Philip Kan Gotanda and David Henry Hwang, who laid the foundation when there was no Asian American representation to speak—and the next generation of playwrights, like Lauren Yee, Prince Gomolvilas, and Jaclyn Backhaus, who have created works that have become Asian American classics in their own right.
In what she coins a “widening circles” vision for EWP, Lily focuses on several values that undergird her goals. Think of the concentric circles in the frequency of sound waves. In the first circle, Lily wants to encompass as much of the Asian American diaspora as possible. While Asian American representation in the theatre has historically limited itself to East Asian cultures, Lily recognizes the need for wider visibility for all Asians American voices including those from South, Southwest, and Southeast Asian American communities. Her second circle aims to acknowledge all the creativity and labor of the people backstage. What of the set and sound designers, costumers, and stagehands? Lily is doing just this by inaugurating a fellowship for backstage artists, where recipients will get paid on-the-job training to learn firsthand the behind-the-scenes work of production. The third circle aims to address intersectionality with other marginalized communities— LGBTQ, disability, or specific racialized communities to name a few examples. The fourth circle—and there’s some overlap here, but that’s the point—considers the question of how we make theater accessible to all people. EWP has made moves to make the theatre more affordable with $20 tickets or pay-what-you-can performances as well as affinity evenings for specific audiences. For example, for Cambodian Rock Band by Lauren Yee, EWP worked with Khmer leaders in Los Angeles to ensure that the show could be accessible to Khmer audiences; it stands to reason that a play about a people should be viewed and experienced by them, or else, whom and what is it really for? The final circle aims to innovate alongside and in collaboration with the film and television industry. A great example is in this season’s revival production of Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yankee Dawg You Die, which utilized high level film projections to capture the old-timey feel of Hollywood circa 1930s.
Notwithstanding all the managerial and administrative duties that come with leading a theatre of EWP’s size and stature, Lily has found space to nurture her own creative projects. This springtime, she will direct a revival of David Henry Hwang’s Flower Drum Song for this season’s last show. This is especially exciting for Lily who has known Hwang for years as a mentor and friend—and whose name is on the EWP theatre—but has never collaborated with him artistically. Hwang is also updating the musical after first rewriting it in 2002 to be more relevant to the times—Oh the times! Combine that with Lily’s musical theatre sensibility, and the show promises to be a tour de force.
The show runs from October 19 through November 16 at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.
Secondly, as I write this, Lily is completing her first tech week as director for नेहा & Neel (pronounced Neha and Neel) written by playwright Ankita Raturi and produced by Artists at Play. नेहा & Neel is about an Indian immigrant mother who goes on a road trip with her teenage son, in a last-ditch attempt to teach him his culture before he is off to college. Raturi’s play resists preachy polemics and instead engages with serious issues—racism, colonialism, identity in America—through humor. In another serendipitous collaboration, Lily found herself crossing paths again with Raturi, an artist she’d supported during her tenure at Theater Mu, but whose new work Fifty Boxes of Earth, which Lily programmed for Mu’s 2024-2025 season, she did not get to see to its fruition because of her departure last year. So, it was an honor to be asked by AAP and Raturi to direct this piece and to celebrate, as Lily describes, a play that centers on “Asian joy.”
Given the current political climate and the blatant assaults from this administration on people of color and the arts—EWP lost all its NEA funding—Lily does not take lightly the mandate of EWP. She says, “It is more important than ever to continue to tell our stories and to lift up BIPOC stories. When people don’t know our stories, it’s so easy for them to perceive us as other.” She goes on to emphasize how important it is that “people see us for the true Americans that we are.” Everywhere we turn, this administration is pushing us to the margins, rendering us invisible as people of color, and telling us in so many words that “we are not patriotic or don’t belong here.” Lily is adamant that we counter the bigotry with our own narratives of community. She is committed to making EWP a “safe and joyful space to create art together” and it is with this spirit that Lily carries the torch for many generations of Asian American theatre artists—past, present, and future.
Finally, when I ask Lily, how she likes being back in Southern California outside of work, she quips, “the traffic sucks, the food’s great!” And to that I say, “Welcome home!”
I’ve been working all summer on a new podcast. Honeymoon Road: Pete & Me & our Model T.
Exactly 100 years ago, my Felde grandparents drove across the country on their honeymoon, riding (and sleeping!) in their cranky old Model T Ford. My cousin Marie Felde and I recreated that journey, stopping at all the places along the way that “Gert” wrote about, to see what remained of the America they saw back in 1925. My actress cousin Terri Felde Shauer voiced the 25 year old Gert and the show includes interviews with folks at the Kansas State Fair, honeymooners from the Grand Canyon, and gal campers on their way to North Dakota.
I assumed the audience would be the 32 grandchildren of Pete and Gert. I was wrong.
At the going away party for my niece, heading off to college, I played the first episode. Three of my brothers got up in the middle of it and headed to the kitchen for dessert. I was crushed.
It was the same kind of rejection we all feel when our scripts are rejected by the theatre we were certain would jump for joy at our work. Ouch. It makes us doubt our talent, our work, our very sense of ourselves as writers.
But really, it should make us reassess who our audience really is.
I know that my plays are highly unlikely to ever be performed at the Taper. Or any other regional Equity house. I don’t write knockoffs of Jane Austen or small cast musicals or edgy political screeds. That doesn’t make my work bad. My war crimes play found its audience on college campuses around the world. A one-woman piece about Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice played twice in her adopted hometown of Washington and among retirees in Naples, Florida. A piece set among the water lily garden of a feisty entrepreneur got a reading in her lily garden.
The key is not to get discouraged. Think creatively about the people who NEED to see your play, hear your message, experience your creation. Don’t let somebody else’s rejection sink in and make you think your work is worthless. You just haven’t found your audience. Yet. Believe that. Find your people. They are out there. I promise.
Oh, and that podcast? Honeymoon road did find an audience. It’s people who have their own tales of family journies. Every time my cousin and I told folks on the road trip what we were doing, they had an equally interesting story to share about their own family history. In fact, we set up a place on the honeymoonroad.com website for them to post them.
I haven’t given up on my entire family. Some of our Felde cousins have become our biggest fans. One even wants to write an opera with a song called “Meet Pete.” Perhaps the rest of my brothers will come on board. But if they don’t, I know they are just not my audience.
Kitty Felde hosts three podcasts, including Honeymoon Road: Pete & Me & our Model T. She is the author of The Fina Mendoza Mysteries series of childrens books.
life is clearer, not easier, yet I feel brave and bolder.
Although time has brought blessings, I can’t help but hold my breath as I pray for the mothers who huddle and hold hungry babies in their arms in the midst of rubble.
As I walk through this unfamiliar Italian town, I hold my head high | I remember I’m the first of our matriarchal line on my mother’s side to leave the country:
I hear my grandmother’s voice in my ear__remember / we’re Black and we’re proud….so I keep moving.
During dinner, it begins to rain in Genoa. The wind blows remarkably heavy; it starts to speak /
I wonder if I am the only one who can hear our ancestors whispering?
It’s 3am and I’m still awake. Naked, I lay down in this bed that is not mine on top of a vintage mattress. How many before me have laid their head down in this same spot, staring out into the darkness // dreaming of a future that may not come.
I drift. I allow my eyes to close. Allowing my body to find a sense of renewal | I give control to the darkness as the Medeterrian Sea sings me to sleep.
I’ve recently (as in the last few years) accepted that I am a horror writer. Perhaps not a super traditional horror writer, but horror is part and parcel of everything I do; horror and horror-adjacent is often what I default to, as my work is not always scary per se, but it uses the tropes, characters, and structure of horror in various ways. I find horror to be the thing that is most accessibly in my brain, and the lens that I filter the world through. Sometimes we just don’t have much control over these things; if my mom had her way, I’d write nothing but rom coms.
I was talking about this with a writer friend of mine (an immigrant, a father, sober) — about this newish embracing of horror in my work — and he had a visceral reaction when thinking about his own work in conversation with that. He enjoys horror (we have watched many a horror movie together) but he cannot write horror, at least right now. For him, the horrors of the country and the world at large is already horrific enough—and he can’t spend his creative time living in that space.
And I think this is valid. There are two modes of thinking here — you write to respond to the world you see around you, or you write to create the world you want to see. I’m not trying to make a binary rule here, and sometimes you’re doing both…but these are the buckets I tend to see my writing peers fall into. Sometimes this changes as we get older, as our priorities or responsibilities change. Sometimes the world IS too horrific, and we have to find hope in the story worlds we choose to spend our time in.
I’m not so great at imagining the world that COULD be. Maybe I’m too materialistic or nostalgic to be able to do that; I’m fixated on and reacting to the good and the bad in the world we’re in right now. And horror continues to be the genre-language of my processing.
No matter the genre, what kinds of stories are you finding yourself writing? Are you reacting or imagining?
fog they say can dissipate like rain and humidity back to the clouds it does not linger – unlike night sweats that soak the bed linens drenching you cold or hot depending on the season it’s the sporadic discomfort of momentary confusion i hate when i wake to my body sweat-soaked in full on visceral self questioning of how this outside the shower wetness is a wet all over wet, that needing a towel wet that checking for pee wet ’cause it can’t be sweat wet but it is even the palms of my hands are wet, closed tight and almost clammy wet
they tighten – my hands – when i sleep laying down but only at night perhaps due to the dream voyages i wake hands always clutched around some invisible treasure so tight i have to pry my fingers open i look expectantly eyes straining to see what i am holding if i check before i am fully in waking consciousness, i might be able to see what it is before the day hides it because i still feel things in my hands just before and there’s a faint image visible just before there isn’t
what is in my hands?
and that is when i discover i am holding my breath too as if i were deep diving without gear and need to inhale because there is no air in my lungs
when dad died, a year to the date, i passed out on my couch from the held in grief and when i awoke four hours later, i gasped for air as if i had been coming out of something or someplace where air was not there, as if raising from the dead
it’s the same feeling and the fog rises grey and grainy enveloping the room hovering till i force myself to remember the day of the week, the time of day, and what i need to do next
We don’t always know how our work affects others. We hope it inspires. We hope it bears witness to the thing, any…thing, some…thing. We hope it marks time or opens the windows to let time out. We hope, yet can only speculate.
In January of this year, Los Angeles was burning. Sleep was a luxury for those outside the fire lines; prayer was a necessity for those inside. Food was an afterthought. I called a friend, “Can I come to you if I have to evacuate?” Otherwise, where would I go? The urgent evacuation alert told us to pack important items and be ready to go. My car would not start. No matter how many times I turned it over, it would not catch. Time slowed like a scene from Inception. Streets were blocked, curfew was in effect, and there was no one to come get me. It was a long night of praying the evacuation order didn’t go into active status, praying the fires didn’t turn toward me, praying the wind would just stop blowing. I spent the night checking funds and rental car agencies in the area. In the morning, I walked to a car rental agency and rented a car.
I packed water and more water, copies of my work, funeral programs, Bibles, important papers, and clothes I could re-wear over and over again.
I packed the lump in my chest and the memory of what it’s like to be physically on fire. After all these years, I could feel ten-year-old me running through the house, screaming as my terry cloth robe burned. Where was I going? Freakin’ flashback.
Even though I was affected on the outskirts, there were friends in the thick of it who had to leave because the fire was upon them. Friends who lost some and friends who lost all. Nevertheless, they are alive, and that was my biggest prayer for them. Loss is always devastating. Reconciling yourself to what is left is a long, hard task.
I wrote a poem for one of these friends ten years ago. It was on my mind to replace the framed copy I gave them. I don’t know why. A few days ago, I received an email from another friend who said that of all the things this person lost, they mentioned the poem. This other friend wanted to know if I would mind them reframing it for our friend. Imagine.
The poem took me ten years to write. It was a conscious, subconscious project that I mulled over, making mental notes while checking the air for signs of shifting timelines. After all that mulling over, the poem did not come to the page until the night before the reading. Printed, framed, and stuffed in a bag, I made my way to the event. I did a quick read-through with another friend outside the venue. The reading was a success. And now, ten years after that, the words are still speaking.
I am honored, humbled, and encouraged.
Lately, I have been wondering if my work counts, and by extension, do I? Guess that’s an all-around “Yes.”
Words count…even the time it takes for them to be born matters…
I wanted to share the article in this week’s issue of THE NEW YORKER, it’s an interesting take on what is happening for women playwrights. It’s a bit of a read, but I found it very informative. Here it is:
In the late days of June, as the old theatre season was ebbing away and new-season announcements were streaming in, a shock hit New York.
Playwrights Horizons, the birthplace of shows including the Pulitzer Prize winners “Sunday in the Park with George” and Annie Baker’s “The Flick,” announced its programming for 2025-26. It was, in some ways, a standard mix, including works by returning Playwrights artists (John J. Caswell, Milo Cramer, Shayok Misha Chowdhury) and several writers new to its stage (Jacob Perkins, Nazareth Hassan, the writing team of Jen Tullock and Frank Winters). These days, a six-show season is a surprisingly full slate; many theatres of similar size, crippled by rolling funding crises, have reduced their offerings. But something else stood out, too: in a notably diverse lineup (the majority of lead artists are queer, and two are nonbinary), there was only one woman writer, and she occupied half a slot.
Playwrights Horizons wasn’t alone. Other major theatres revealed their programming, some of which reverted to familiar patterns from a decade ago. The Roundabout Theatre will give one slot out of four to a woman, whose work will appear in the nonprofit’s Off Broadway space. The Manhattan Theatre Club, which, like Roundabout, uses both Broadway and Off Broadway theatres, will host two plays written by women of the four shows it has announced so far; however, in what’s become a common trend, both will be produced on its smaller, and thus less remunerative, Off Broadway stage. Classic Stage Company, under its artistic director, Jill Rafson, confirmed a season of three shows, all written and directed by white men. And the Williamstown Theatre Festival, enjoying its first summer under its new director, Jeremy O. Harris—the playwright who, in 2021, requested to withdraw his “Slave Play” from Center Theater Group when it presented a season with only one woman in it—has zero plays written by women among its 2025 productions.
In 2015, the Lillys, a group that honors women in the American theatre, published the Count, a national survey that assessed the demographic makeup of playwrights found on the country’s stages. As one of the group’s founders, Julia Jordan, puts it, “Statistics are our superpower.” For years, advocates had been protesting the underrepresentation of women playwrights, particularly women of color, but they were getting little traction. Some theatres pointed to the canon and shrugged helplessly—was it their fault that Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and Shakespeare were inconveniently male? Notably, when a theatre did program a woman, her play was relegated to the so-called “second space” or to a reading series. The Count gave theatres a way to see their place in the larger field. Individual programming choices—reflections of one theatre’s, or even one person’s, taste—looked rather different when placed in a national context.
Attention-getting methods like the Count—and, later, accountability projects such as “We See You White American Theater,” which published an extensive statement calling for the American theatre industry to address racial imbalance, as well as publishing hiring metrics on Instagram—pushed the field toward change. In 2023, the Lillys announced at its annual awards that, for the first time, New York theatres had achieved what the Lillys called “parity,” with the city’s playwriting lineups roughly paralleling the gender and racial distribution of the country at large. Was this victory? The Lillys began to think about disbanding; perhaps its work was done.
So when the new Playwrights season hit inboxes, Jordan called the company’s artistic director, Adam Greenfield, to ask what had happened. (Greenfield is a longtime friend of the Lillys; the group actually got its start at Playwrights, in 2010, back when Greenfield was still an associate artistic director, and the group holds its annual awards ceremony on the Playwrights main stage.) The Lillys told him that it wanted to convene an open meeting about what felt like a serious backsliding, and Greenfield instantly responded.
At the ensuing town hall, the Tony Award-winning playwright Lisa Kron said, “Adam acknowledged it as a ‘misstep,’ ” and noted that he quickly offered the Playwrights theatre for the occasion. Six days after the Playwrights announcement went public, a capacity crowd turned up to talk about representation and curation, and to try to imagine how to regain progress already fought for and, if temporarily, won. “We are here to mark that something seems to be amiss,” Kron said from the stage. “It feels emotional to us because this happened at Playwrights; it happened under Jeremy O. Harris. We feel these people to be our allies—they are our allies.” She went on. “Our issue is not with each other but with a system that considers one group central and the others as disposable.”
In the meeting, Jordan noted that the low representational numbers for women are difficult to square. By various measures (including the numbers of women graduating from degree programs in the arts), roughly two-thirds of the field’s writers are women—there is not, as artistic directors once argued, a pipeline issue. It seemed particularly bitter that, even as theatres made passionate arguments for diversity and new artistic directors took over from the old guard, certain habits were creeping back. Are we seeing a reflection of the country’s increasingly misogynist politics? Is there a kind of moral fatigue at play? “Last year, an all-male, all-white season didn’t exist,” Jordan said. “But this year . . . permission has been granted.”
At the meeting, Greenfield answered some questions from the crowd. “What does balance mean? In the past week, I’ve been thinking about that topic a lot.” Greenfield later wrote to me about his reasoning and about whether “misstep” actually describes his feeling about the season. “At the meeting, I wanted to immediately acknowledge that I should have prioritized women writers more in my decision-making. I see that, and I agree that it’s a shortcoming. In my efforts to uphold diversity and bring range to other aspects of the season, while staying mindful of budget constraints, I failed to make enough space for cisgendered and trans women,” he said. “But I would never call this slate of plays and artists a ‘misstep.’ I deeply love every one of the plays and artists programmed next season.”
Greenfield continued, “One of the many questions this meeting left me stewing over is, are we working from a shared definition? The definition of a ‘balanced’ season was vastly different five years ago than it is today, and it will be vastly different five years from now; it evolves alongside a global cultural conversation. Can any one season hold perfect balance from every person’s perspective?”
Rafson, from Classic Stage Company, wasn’t in attendance, but she told me later that she was aware of the paradox of announcing a season with no women in it while also strongly believing in inclusivity. “It would be wildly misleading to say I hadn’t noticed, and I feel confident that my colleagues were in a similar position. We know that it’s an issue when it’s happening,” she said. Rafson noted several factors that contributed to the situation: the brevity of a three-show season (“It is so hard to get a full representation of your theatre’s interests across so little work”) and the Classic Stage mission to reëxamine the canon (“I only have two commissions out right now. They are both to female writers doing adaptations of classics.”) “Don’t judge me by one season. Judge me by the breadth of work,” Rafson said. She takes comfort in the openness of the conversation around the issue. At least, she said, “we will not pretend that this is perfect and O.K.”
At the town hall, the question of what might happen next still seemed very much up in the air. One person suggested that artistic directors announce their next seasons early, weighting them more heavily toward women writers. One commenter levelled criticism at the Lillys for not studying another underrepresented group, disabled playwrights; others advocated for women writers over fifty. The playwright Chisa Hutchinson asked that the room stay “solution oriented” by reminding those present that women buy the majority of theatre tickets. “Show up! Buy some tickets!” she said.
And there did seem to be a certain amount of exhilaration, in fact, in the showing up itself. In the weeks after the meeting, Jordan said that she was actually feeling optimistic: “Our theatre community is so small and is so easily shamed!” She spoke warmly about Greenfield’s response, as well as Harris’s, who wrote to her immediately expressing his allyship. And—more than most—Jordan knows that this is a tide that can move back in the other direction. “There’s not that many theatres, maybe five hundred across the country, and, by and large, I would say 99.8% of them do not want to be assholes,” she said. “They don’t see themselves that way; they don’t want to be that way. Before, all we had to do was show them the mirror; once they looked in the mirror, they actually changed really quickly,” Jordan said. “So I just—I am extremely hopeful, and I feel like, if anybody can, we can make this correction of turning the ship.”
Perhaps the old strategy will work again: a public calling out, appeals to the well-meaning in power, careful application of both pressure and gratitude. But what’s worrying is how easy it was for the most conscientious among us to overlook such a huge swathe of the landscape. It’s true that it’s possible to program a diverse season—the Playwrights lineup shows a thrilling range of race, gender expression, sexuality, and artistic approach—and yet still almost ignore half the population. What is it that makes women so invisible? So many are standing right here. ♦
These last lines: “What is it that makes women so invisible? So many are standing right here.”
I feel this so deeply right now. Here’s to a changing culture.
Cynthia
Sharing an image of mine, very much in alignment with chaos, structure, and foundation.
