Directing and Dramaturging Culturally Specific Work: Field Discussion Transcription

Field Discussion
Directing and Dramaturging Culturally Specific Work
November 15, 2008, 10am
Moderator: Randy Reinholz
Panel: Oskar Eustis, Morgan Jenness, Yvette Nolan, and Betsy Theobald Richards

Randy Reinholz: So here we are at our panel entitled ‘Directing and Dramaturging Culturally Specific Work’. So welcome everybody, thanks for coming out. So I’m supposed to tell you a few things. We’re recording, so only say things you want people to read later—oh, go ahead, say whatever you think. So here we are with our esteemed panelists. I feel really lucky to be up here and chatting with this group of people. So most of you know Oskar, he’s the Artistic Director here at the Public Theater. Instead of reading his bio, I’ll ask you to read his bio; it’s pretty impressive! But I think the thing about Oskar, that I’d like to tell you, is he made an investment in Native theater a long time ago, he and Betsy made an alliance, and they were talking to a lot of people in community a long time before anything was public, and I really admire the way they went after trying to put something together that would have integrity and have legs to last a while. And then I was shocked when he took this position and it just came with him, and I thought that spoke a lot about his commitment. So, that’s what I’d like you to know about Oskar, from my point of view. Next to Oskar is Yvette Nolan. I’ve known Yvette for a long time and admired her work. She’s the Artistic Director for Native Earth in Toronto. Let’s see, what are you guys, twenty-four years old or twenty-five?

Yvette Nolan: Twenty-six this year.

Randy: Twenty-six, twenty-six years old. In a world of Native Theater, where a lot of people like to talk about firsts, I admire the twenty-six number. Because there’s a kind of longevity and history to celebrate, and Yvette’s been there five/six years?

Yvette: Six years.

Randy: Six years, and really has steered the company in a very straight forward, long term thinking way, and really grounded the work. So, I admire you very much. Betsy Richards, Betsy Theobald Richards, Elizabeth Theobald Richards.

Betsy Richards: Call me what you like.

Randy: Yes, has many names and use the one you like, exactly. Currently at the Ford Foundation, has been there six years?

Betsy: Almost six, yes.

Randy: Has there—what’s the title of the initiative; I just say Native American.

Betsy: It’s called Indigenous Knowledge and Expressive Culture.

Randy: And you founded that, right? You founded that initiative at Ford and really have guided it through—and all the good work she’s doing across culture, in Indian Country, and you know, I think—again, this was a serious investment by an important foundation, and I think it is really going to pay off through the years. Certainly it’s paid off in this venue. And she’s also a theater person, she’s a director, that’s where I know most of her work, she’s an actress, so if you bribe her with candy she’ll maybe get on stage.

Betsy: And a dramaturg.

Randy: And a dramaturg. So there we are. And someone newer to me is Morgan. Morgan Jenness, so she’s been here for a long time, she worked with Joe Papp and George Wolfe, amazing history, and Associate Artistic Director of New York Theater Workshop, wow, Associate Artistic Director of Los Angeles Theater Center, amazing, just keep reading the bio, it’s great! So we’re happy that she’s able to join us. She said she didn’t know why she was on the panel earlier.

Morgan Jenness: I’m delighted and honored to be on the panel.

Randy: This trick of directing and dramaturging culturally specific work, I mean I think it’s something we all wrestle with, and I think about—how do we not only do work for each other, or for the people who already think the stuff we think, and I was thinking that’s what I wanted to talk about. When we had-- over the summer, we had a couple conference calls with the advisory committee, and we talked about what would be interesting for us to learn from each other, cause we have such little time together in the Native theater field, and I thought, I would really like to hear some smart people talk about how they handle culturally specific work, as a director, as a dramaturg. So I mean, that’s the basic.

Betsy: I just want to say something starting out. And this is all very friendly, but the idea of culture, what’s a culturally specific play, I just want to question. Because it seems to be kind of coded language that it’s lack of whiteness is culturally specific. And I just want to kind of lay that out there, and I think it might be better terminology to say, work that is presented in a context of community, or of a community, or that is—

Morgan: I tend to use culturally informed, is that—

Yvette: We’re calling it, in Canada, we’re fighting the diversity label, we’re calling it ECM: Ethno Culturally Mandated. So because it’s that thing of not identifying by the mainstream, but we’re talking about—

Betsy: The community is asking for it.

Yvette: The community, yeah, ethno culturally mandated, so our mandate is about our so-called community, The First Nations, The Native community, but that also means the Asian-Canadian playwrights, the African-Canadian playwrights, so work that’s happening from a place of specific community. But now we’re already into the semantics Randy, sorry!

Betsy: Right, but language is important though. I mean, that’s some of the realm of dramaturgy is that, you know, it’s kind of looking at things and unpacking things, and saying what’s in here. So, just wanted to throw that out. That doesn’t mean that this needs to be what it’s about, but breaking it into a larger world.

Oskar Eustis: But perhaps, since I’m on the right side of the table too, to sort of put a cruder version of it, what I assume, as it impacts me, is I’m a white guy who’s done a lot of dramaturging, directing, and producing of work by artists of color. And what’s that about? Do I get to do that? What are the problems when I do that? What are the advantages? And those issues I feel like I’ve wrestled with my whole career, and it’s actually not just community of color. One of the most dramatic examples, for me, was working with Tony Kushner on Angels in America. I’m a straight guy, and working on that gay play for six years was really a big deal. It consistently—there were periods of time when it went away as an issue, and then there’d be periods of time when it was front and center as an issue, that I was straight, and what the fuck was I doing. And so I feel like, from that context, that’s the part of this paradigm that I feel like I’m always in struggle with.

Betsy: And I guess for me that’s really interesting, it isn’t just about race, it’s about different communities and your relationship as a dramaturg to them.

Morgan: Well it’s always different. There’s a piece that Anne Bogart did years ago called Another Person is Foreign Country. So I kind of feel that no matter who I’m working with, no matter what the writer is, your visiting something you don’t know, because of the individual, so it always is about—I used to write and people said, well why don’t you continue writing, and I always felt like, well … as a dramaturg you have the honor to be allowed to enter all these other landscapes and countries, you know, and to go in as a visitor. I mean I always found, Jorge Cortinas has a great phrase, which I really take as a mantra, called misplaced moral vanity. And I think that’s a really great phrase, a totem to bear with you as you go into those countries, to be aware of that. So like it’s informed by various aspects, multiple aspects you know, and so I always have the attitude that it’s something I need to learn.

Randy: And as I think about that, I think, now we’re getting back to—here we are at this festival, but we really are celebrating playwrights, again this year, and I think a lot of, we’re loving everybody else in the community, but we’re looking at the playwrights again. And I think as we go to work on this, you mentioned Angels in America, how do we, director/dramturgs, enter someone else’s work, knowing they’ve asked for advice, they’ve asked for staging, and not make the voice ours?

Oskar: Good luck!

Morgan: No I think, for me, there’s a genius in the work, and I mean genius like original sense of the word, the spirit, yes, the generative and also the spirit guardian of the place. You know it’s like Manawa, in a way, where it’s located. And you have to find out—I think that’s the first thing you have to do, is you have to find out what that is, you have to recognize what that is. And my whole thing is that I don’t have that. I build like—Rinde Eckert, I think, had this great phrase, “you build a place where it wants to live.” So, I kind of feel that that’s what I can be helpful for, somewhat, is you know, helping to maybe build the structure that has to navigate whatever the realities of the world that piece is going to communicate with.

Oskar: But can I say, more for me, I totally buy that, and that’s the distinction for me between dramaturging and directing. Because as a dramaturg that’s exactly what I feel like I’m supposed to do, and in a way—Randy I didn’t mean to be flip with you—but the point for me of what is, that thing of not making it your voice, is what you’re supposed to do as a dramaturg. It’s why it’s such an insane activity. And really it drives some of us nuts at certain points, I mean clinically hospitalized, medicated, nuts, because what you have to do, to be successful as a dramaturg, is care passionately about, know a tremendous amount and care passionately about something that doesn’t, in any way, belong to you. And that act of investing really deeply, but not getting your finger prints in it, is possible, but it’s a spiritual exercise and it’s a hard spiritual exercise. I also agree with Morgan that it’s a great honor to be able to do it, I love doing it, but if I did it all the time I would be nuts. As a director your voice has to be audible, you know, because otherwise you’re not really directing. And one of the things that sometimes we don’t always talk about with enough selfishness, is that a good director always personalizes a play. So that what you’re seeing up on stage is absolutely the playwright’s voice, but if it’s well directed, the director has somehow integrated what that play is about and you can feel that director’s voice is there as well. And the director can have a very light hand and a very heavy hand, but if they have no hand at all they’re not directing. So that that process of how do you do justice to what a playwright is doing, but add your voice to it in a way that reinforces, in a way that supports that, is a very—it’s tricky no matter who the playwright or the director is.

Randy: So let’s take that a little further, the director on a new piece, where you’re trying to, particularly with unknown playwrights, where you’re trying to show their craft/skill abilities, versus a director of Shakespeare where you’re really taking the piece and making yours. But, maybe you could talk from the point of view from that new piece, emerging writers—

Oskar: You’re doing one right now.

Yvette: Yeah, so I’m a little loath to talk about it because I don’t want to jinx it. We just finished first week of rehearsal, and then I got on a plane and I came here last night, in time to see Cara read, it’s even more difficult and it’s ironic, but I actually believe in the separation between dramaturg and director, really truly. And yet so often, I find that I am both directing and dramaturging the piece. And part of that is that I find the pieces, and then you develop a relationship with the writer, and part of that is there’s such a lack of that particular skill set, in our community, even in the big pool, there’s so few Aboriginal dramaturgs it’s really, and then it’s not about—you can’t just pair them up, like you and you go together, you have to make matches, right? There has to be a relationship. And so I keep finding myself in this position. So I’ve had to create my own cosmology almost, about it, which is, this work that I’m doing with this play that I’m in the middle of right now is the development process. I am serving the play, as much as I possibly can, and she’s a newbie playwright, and this is—she was in the rehearsal hall until yesterday, and she was still tweaking things, but she’s gone now and now I have to switch and serve the play in that other way, as a director. But it doesn’t matter, because this is still the process of development, and I’m hoping that at the end of the run she goes “Okay now I know how to finish this play.” It requires a tremendous amount of humility to be a dramaturg. It’s that thing that you talk about, to be allowed into someone else’s—it’s a bit, I suppose, like having children; where you do all of this work and then you push them out there and hope they do well.

Betsy: And be embarrassed by you.

Yvette: Yes…okay so you have children. But yeah, this one that I’m doing is so different. It’s why every once in a while I have to direct something that exists already, so that I can do that, so I can have the freedom to just have some vision of my own that meets the play and not be so aware that I could be wrecking this person’s work and life and genius.

Morgan: Can I piggy back on something you said? Because the play, like I was once told you’re the playwright’s best friend. And I said no, I’m actually not, because I actually feel I don’t necessarily serve the play right, but I’m looking at the play. It is like back when Margo talked about the Sacred Tree, you know that we’re all ringed around it, you know, and that we need to share that information with each other. And I feel that the playwright is equally responsible to this creation that they’re birthing. I sort of think of myself more as the midwife, you know, to this type of thing, but it’s an interesting dance. And was it you that talked about alliance versus collaboration? I think—that really struck me. It’s an interesting concept, because I think that enters into the sort of--

Betsy: Allies versus collaborators. I just want to add, of all the playwrights here, I just wanted to talk a little bit about the relationship about the tension between dramaturg and playwright. Notice, how many playwrights are here? But if we notice how many, there are other playwrights, probably exhausted or back at their places working, or in rehearsal.

Oskar: Or actively avoiding listening.

Betsy: Or actively avoiding listening. I have found myself in—I wouldn’t call them love/hate relationships, because they’re never hate, never hate, but in—kind of sibling relationships, with playwrights, where you’re looking at each other, and you know you need each other, and we’ve swallowed the same—it’s like I had to digest this piece, and get it through my entire system. It is like a midwife, where it’s their birthing process, but you’re really kind of—you’ve got your arms around them, you’ve got—everything is all over you. And you’re looking at each other going, I really like you, and I respect this thing, and I can’t get inside and flap your arms around for you, but there’s that kind of necessary both trust and distance that is such the world of when I’ve dramaturged, and particularly, just since we’re being culturally specific, in the Native community, versus the non-Native, and that is including other communities of color, but particularly in the Native community, I’ve found that because there is so little protection of the voice, there’s so much of the outside coming in telling people what it should be. And then on the other side of the spectrum, so much because if something is good enough than it’s good. So much, oh my God, this is producible, let’s just put this on. That you’re in this tense place that you really want to understand that often where they’re writing from, even if it’s funny or it’s sad or they’re angry, they’re working from a place of historical trauma, that comes from a conversation that came up the other day, and that there needs to be protection for that. And of the society, not wanting them to actually have their voice, and at the same time to try to get something out that actually holds a different place, and that’s where the brother/sister relationship comes in where it’s like, I hate you get off of my side of the couch, you know, and I love you give me a hug and let’s do this together kind of thing.

Randy: You leaned forward, did you have something?

Morgan: No I was—

Randy: Musing.

Morgan: Musing, yeah. I mean it’s a dance and it changes with every single person. As directing does with every single play, you know you learn the language of your actors and the piece, you know, I think that’s why I love it. Is that, I don’t feel you come in with a—these are all, this is a model that works, and I always think that when that happens, in any kind of situation, that’s the beginning of disaster. That you have certain tools, you have certain information, you have certain gifts, that, you know, that we bring to the table, but it’s always a different configuration. And then—go ahead.

Oskar: No, Randy after you.

Randy: Well I was just thinking—I’m going to change the subject, that’s why I said go ahead.

Oskar: I was going to change the subject too, but you change it first.

Randy: Okay. Actually I bet you’re going to have a more interesting change.

Oskar: Um, let’s not bore them anymore with this. I’m back to thinking about my right side of the table problem. And thinking about, there was a TCG conference at Princeton, probably fifteen/sixteen years ago, I can’t remember which, when one of the things that happens at Theater Communications Group conferences is they pick a few shows that they think are of real interest to the field, and the shows come and do a demo of how they got created and what they were. And there were three big shows at that conference, and one of them was Black Elk Speaks, one of them was Woman Warrior, which was happening in Seattle, and I can’t remember the other one. But what was so exciting was that we had this huge Native American project, directed by Donovan Marley, white guy, huge Asian American project directed Sharon, a white woman, and there was one other really big culturally specific project directed by the white artistic director of that theater, and nobody commented on it for the entire weekend. You see…there’s a problem here, and there’s a problem here that is actually structural endemic, and that certainly influenced everything that I’ve done since, because in a way I feel like, and you noticed I slipped in, for my participation on the panel, it should be entitled directing, dramaturging and producing, because I feel like a lot of what I’ve tried to do since then, both at Trinity and now here, is recognize that we have serious director absences and lacks, we have serious entrepreneurial director, producer, dramaturg—what true of all these functions is that in their different ways their job is to make possibilities. Their job is to—I mean, when I think about, sometimes I would define my job as blocking down field for a playwright, you know , is just trying to be there and see who’s going to hit them and take them out first, so that they can keep going. And it’s real, and you do that sort of aesthetically and you also do that in terms of—there’s that fucking grant, let me get it, got it, here’s the grant, boom, go! You know, you find the money, you find the time, you find the—and it seems that in all the—anyways, it seems that it’s a constant issue, is that how are you not going to simply develop the voices, but then how are you going to develop the people who are going to be able to champion and develop the voices and by doing that, you’ve got, I mean for better or for worse the directors tend to be the entrepreneurs and the structural people in the American theater, so by developing those folks, you’ve got a chance of actually strengthening the institutional voice. So I guess that’s…how I was going to change it.

Betsy: I just want to give a shout out to Morgan, just in case folks aren’t aware of this, that Morgan and Shelby Jiggetts, during their time here at The Public, so that was under JoAnne Akalaitis?

Morgan: George.

Betsy: Was it under George? Okay. Wanted to make sure that there was Native Voices present in the theater. So I also, talking about this, that there has been some throughline here. This isn’t just some thing that popped out. Morgan contacted me, when I was over at the American Indian Community House, and had play by a playwright who’s here, named Terry Gomez—Actually, you guys had first contacted me about Bill Yellow Robe.

Morgan: Yeah, right. Because I had been following Bill for a while.

Betsy: So it happened twice, and Bill’s piece got done in "New Work Now!" in ’93, or ’92, and then in the next year Terry Gomez’s Inter-Tribal was done on these stages. So I just want to take a moment to say that dramaturgs of the Public Theater have not only expressed interest in Native work, but also in trying to pair directors, and to make sure that the community voice—So there is a bit of a throughline. Things had a bit of a lull for a while, but they’re, you know, keeping things moving. Sorry, I just had to add that in there so there was a context. And those two playwrights are here.

Randy: Well where I was going actually, Oskar had a nice segue into it, because I wanted to ask a little bit about the relationship between the play and who might come see it. And you know, we talk about it all the time in the TCG world about who’s the audience, the audience, it’s like this Marxist mass of people that would come at once, and really the audience is so hard to predict, and so important with, we find, with the culturally specific work. We know that if we don’t have enough Native people in the audience on a comedy, at the opening they don’t laugh because people aren’t sure what’s funny and what’s not, and once they have permission they just roll with it. So, you know, does that play into your thinking about—because we’re really talking about shows in production now, not shows necessarily just in development. So really, here we are. So, do you think about that? Do you have any experience with that? Do you forget about that and just focus on the pure art?

Morgan: I mean the idea of pure art, like pure anything, to me is suspect. I mean ideally yes, you know, you have an absolutely pure field where this thing can flame up, but that’s not usually the case. And I have to say, you know like I always like tease people and say the biggest dramaturgs in the US American theater right now are managing directors. Because they really shape what’s being done, you know, and the press department, and the marketing department, because they’ll say: I’m sorry, we can’t do more than a three character play in this slot. And if that isn’t dramaturgy, I don’t know I don’t know what is. So, I mean, I actually in a way—there are places where you can do, let’s just find out what this piece means. The water finds its own level, right? But I mean a lot of times-- and I think water is a really good metaphor, because it is like a river. Like I always feel, as a dramaturg, you’re like weeding the river, you know, getting rid of the stuff that’s, you know, preventing the flow; and that can be things in the structure that’s not allowing things, finding what the real structure is, the real form, you know for the content, for the ideas, for the voice. What’s the intentionality that really drives that river? Because sometimes people say I’ve got all these images, but I don’t know, you know, not hooked into the wellspring of my intentionality. But I also really…pull in context, audience, you know, I mean realities. The whole idea of a piece like Dreaming Beauty, the author is here, which was an adaptation of Sleeping Beauty. That’s something that, I work with a lot of writers from diverse backgrounds and it is adapting a Western classic, you know, both owning it and then also having that as this recognizable hook is a really good entry point; to kind of broaden up, and not only educate and sort of bring in—you know we had a really interesting discussion on what is the wider audience—but also as a way of ownership, that allows the community itself to celebrate itself.

Randy: Any other thoughts on this, or some place else you want to go?

Yvette: Well I can’t worry as much about whoever that audience is, because if I did I would never—The play I’m doing right now is called A Very Polite Genocide or The Girl Who Fell to Earth, it’s not the easiest thing to market—

Betsy: The G word.

Yvette: Because it has the G word in it, right! Polite, but we’re being polite about it. If I had to worry too much about the audience, I would not be able to do the play because it’s about the thing that the mainstream in Canada says they don’t want to talk about, but they actually don’t know anything about, which is the residential school legacy; except it’s not really about that, it’s about memory and family—of course it’s never really about the thing we say it’s about. So I have to go—I can’t tell the writers, you have to write something that palatable, you have to make this palatable in some way, because of the thing we’re dealing with. Because what we’re interested in talking about is how we got here, how we go forward. And there’s no way for us to go forward without looking at where we’ve come from and what our relationship has been in the world; through that. So I have to make this huge leap of faith and go, all right we’ll do the play called Genocide and whatever. And then it turns out that they’re teaching genocide in school, and we instantly sell out our student matinees. Instantly! And we have to add student matinees, which means we have to drop an evening show in order accommodate the student matinee, which is fine with me, because I’d rather have a full house of young people, who I can get into, than you know fifty people who are coming because they’re already sold, because they already believe, because they already have some understanding of their role in this relationship between first nations and dominant culture. So, to a certain extent I have to produce what I can do, on the other hand sometimes it’s a happy accident, and I discover that I can sell genocide, you know, I can’t sell Shakespeare but I can sell genocide. I don’t understand, you know, if I knew I would, I probably would throw away the crystal ball anyway because that’s not—I can’t only make Drews, you know? There’s Drew Hayden Taylor, and that’s great, but there’s also Marie Clements, and there’s also Daniel David Moses, and there’s also, everybody. I mean there has to be room for everybody, so if I think too much about what’s going to bring in an audience, I’m going to get screwed up. And then maybe the next artistic director after me will be able to go to the house with, you know, everybody.

Betsy: Well I think also there’s a lot of different kinds—the audience is not just the focus in the seats, I think in the whole idea of producing, and now I’m a funder so I’m at a completely other level of kind of quasi producing, like even another level removed where I can touch but I can’t touch—at that level, sometimes it isn’t about, I mean financially it can be about how many butts you have in seats, and for the actors, for the folks on stage that are doing it and responding to an audience, but the act of doing it means that your audiences are sometimes just making a statement to the world that this is happening, or to the community that might be involved in the process, that’s asked to come in to have a prayer before hand, that elder. Or, you know, I’ve had more folks say to me, like an elder from a community would be asked to come in and say a prayer before a rehearsal process begins, it’s saying, you know, I’d like to bring some children from my community but it’s just so important that it’s happening, that I can tell them it’s happening, and that maybe we can bring it back to my community. So I just think it isn’t just, you know, do they laugh at the Indian jokes or is it do people shut down. Obviously there’s work we do collaboratively to get to people universally in some way, and that involves everybody, from the actors—I mean I’ve seen actors shift, that’s what they do, they shift. They say, these are little kids or I’m not going to, or maybe it’s not the right time to do full frontal nudity, or people seem to really laughing at these things so I’m going to…a bit more, or they’re not, or we’re going to dig a little deeper.

Randy: Well I know two things we’ve focused on at Native Voices. One, when we started in ’94 trying to put things together, ’93 putting things together, whatever, the precious few reviews of Native plays, meaning that they always happened some place where they were not reviewed, so they counted less, professionally. And then the other thing is working professionally, so we decided to produce under an equity contract, and pay the actors, and therefore have some sense of professionalism throughout the company. God knows how long we’ll be able to keep it up, but that was a huge thing and now we have ten years of major reviews in major periodicals, LA Times, Backstage, LA Weekly, you know, Los Angeles actually has the opportunity to know; whether they know or not is there own thing. But those were two important audiences we felt like we weren’t reaching. The professional theater world, because it always wasn’t professional, we know, and the critical theater world by getting them reviewed. So I mean that was really important, and then we felt like we had to do a bunch of different kinds of plays to say that there wasn’t just Drew, or just Marie—

Betsy: We’ll have to let Drew know that there are other people, not just Drew.

Yvette: Okay lets.

Betsy: Get your blackberry out. Okay: there’s not just you, Drew.

Randy: Morgan you had something you wanted to chime in with.

Betsy: No I mean this whole idea of audiences is a really interesting one, you know, because I grapple with it in terms of how much that enters into the dialogue even dramaturgically. And it totally agree that it’s not about making it palatable to the audience, but it is about being aware about where your audience is, what the zeitgeist of the audience is. And if you have an intention, like frontal nudity, it’s like okay you do that, but what is the intention at the center of that and how can you—it’s like, what are those screw that go in and they open up like that? I kind of look at it that way, that to get in, fit into whatever the little thing is, and then you kind of find a way to push the envelope once you’re in, but I mean awareness of where your audience is at. And it is elusive, you know, if we all could understand what exactly is happening in the zeitgeist we’d probably more successful. And audience often means ticket buyers, just the way that citizens in this country a lot of times just means consumer. So I think it’s getting back to what that is, and that it is a larger audience. So it’s not just the people in the seats, I think that’s so true…but it is a dance. But I think, you know, knowledge of—it’s going to be a different work if you’re talking to your own community, you know, or if you’re trying to impress the sort of dominant culture standard, I mean all groups have gone through this. This has been happening in the African-American community initially too, all the way to Don Barr and those poets who just started writing like Byron, you know, to prove that they could stand toe to toe, and be accepted under that standard, and then start to find their own language and start to incorporate that.

Betsy: Randy, I just want to bring up the topic of—You know, we dramaturg specific works, and then sometimes, and Oskar has always said, since the beginning of this process since when we were working together and I was at Pequot and he was at Trinity Rep, that this is as much about relationships as it is about specific works. And know you, it wasn’t just Angels in America that you dramaturged for Tony Kushner, it was about a relationship with a playwright, and creating, not just a trusting space for a particular piece of work but for them as a writer, and their trajectory, and I kind of wanted to talk a little bit about that. I think at the core of the intention of this festival, and it’s hard to articulate sometimes, and the work that you did at Trinity, was about developing relationships more than putting on—

Oskar: Sure, although—

Betsy: Putting on pieces is core, absolutely, it’s not it unless you’re putting on the pieces, but the tension between those two things.

Oskar: And the way that’s most useful for me to think about is that there’s a whole series of relationships, you know, that start in the most private form for a writer, or a relationship between them and their computer or a yellow pad, turns into the relationship between the director, and a writer, and a dramaturg, and a writer, then the actors, how ever it goes. And then is also about a relationship to an audience, finally, and that’s just a continuation. You are trying to expand the penumbra of who is invested in this work. And Randy, what you’re talking about, and you were also mentioning Betsy in terms of the non-butts in the seats argument, the—putting stakes in the ground like we’re going to get reviewed in the Times, that’s an important part of it, because that has an influence—unfortunately we all know, many many more people will at least glance at those reviews than will ever see those plays, so that’s actually a factual consequence of your production, is creating that review in the paper as part of your production, as part of you artifact, that means something. What does that mean, how important it is, we have make the judge, we have to judge. So much of this about the audience is, for me, is accepting that I’m not crazy, a daily mantra I have to say to myself, that if I were respond to a work, if there is part of me that likes and responds to a writer’s work, there’s probably going to be a lot of other people that do too. It’s not, I’m not going to be alone. So that then, my job as a producer is that if I respond to this piece of work, how do I not only get the work out there, but how do I maximize the possibility that other people will understand what I love about this, that other people will see it. And one of the things that was, unfortunately for me, kind of coitus interruptus at Trinity, sorry Betsy—I guess full frontal nudity wasn’t appropriate—what I felt like we were doing at Trinity that I really loved is we did two wonderful shows, a Bill Yellow Robe show and a Drew show, in full productions for that audience, and we had the festivals where we brought—but what was starting to happen was that the audience was starting to invest, not only in the individual shows, but the audience was starting to get the overview of “oh wait a minute, the theater is engaged in this whole body of work,” and you could tell that—and again it wasn’t everybody, it wasn’t 25,000 people, but people would start talking about Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers through the lens of Buz’gem Blues and connected to that reading they saw in the festival to, you start to see, “Oh, now what’s really happening is I’m starting to get my audience,” which includes funders, but also includes really ordinary ticket buyers invested in the big project, the overall, so they’re not just going on a show by show basis, they’re not just going “Do I like this play? Will I buy a ticket?” they’re going “Oh, wow, I’m actually kind of--.” And I’m sure of all of you guys have experienced, the Native experience is something that can be addictive once the people who are non-Native-- No, no, no! Once the people who are not Native start to connected to it, it’s incredibly compelling stories and realities and artistry, and you start getting—and, so I sort of look at this going, I’ll be doing some variation of this for the rest of my life, and it will enrich my life enormously, because I’m doing it, and how many other people can we convince of that too. And that—One other point I wanted to make about audience, that some of you have heard me say this, or heard variations of this before, but it’s also that your audience surprises you about who they are, you think you know who your audience are, and then sometimes you don’t at all. And for me, growing up in the Midwest, Minnesota, then I spent a lot of my career out on the west coast, and most of my contacts from the Native communities was from the upper-Midwest and the West Coast. I move to Rhode Island, we start this festival, and opening first reading we had at the festival, when many people showed up in traditional tribal dress, and I went “Oh my fucking Christ, I thought all you people were black.” But, because it’s just a whole different ethnicity about the Pequots and the--

Betsy: History, right.

Oskar: The history, and so literarily, not knowing that there was a Native audience, and you could see that all of the people in the theater were sort of looking around going, “Oh my God, I’ve seen you walking down the street, but I hadn’t realized that now I’m identifying you as Native.” And it was wonderful, because it just sort of set off a bomb in Providence, because Providence is just a little town so you know everybody knows each other. But suddenly we go, oh we think we know each other but we actually don’t know who we are. So what you’re trying to create is a platform to change people—and, again, one of the things of, making them proud is go, “Oh, we have a significant Native community in this town.” The town doesn’t, the rest of town doesn’t know it’s there—and…that is really exciting.

Randy: Well it goes to the core why we do theater, right? We want to promote social dialogue, I mean we really do. And meaningful areas as well as fluffy areas. Fluffy… It must be time to open it up to questions from the audience. Yeah, Larissa.

Larissa Fasthorse: …but I probably don’t have a point, but, as a new playwright, who is Native American, and my first experience as a playwright was with CTC with the approaches…and so, the coolest people, the best intentioned people on the planet, but in a white—but…a fricken' white elephant sitting here that was white. And, I guess what I’m trying to say is that, you know, I hear you guys talk about audience, and we’re talking about dramaturgy and stuff, and as a playwright, you sort of work with that and done a Native play in that place, and had an amazing experience and everything, you know—it’s so weird to listen to you guys, you know, have these lovely talks about audience, and it’s like—dude the weight that’s on us in these institutions is unfreekin’ believable, you know, because people are like, and the reasons I say they say their names is because some of you Peter and Melissa and how enlightened and cool they are, but the education is constant. Like every reading is like, education, education, education, and thank god they want to learn…it’s offensive, like what the hell, and you don’t know. So it’s interesting to me that you guys have these really cool talks about dramaturgy and this… stuff, and I’m like, God, I was from day one, from a concept, and I’m sure some people would call be a big old sell out or whatever, but from concept I had to be thinking about audience, and Peter and I, Melissa, had to go through audience, audience, audience. What will our audience take, what will they be able to handle, what will they—you know, and so from concepts that we started with, you know, that’s all there for me, and that’s, you know, and it’s—

Randy: But it is theater for a young audience.

Larissa: Yeah, a family audience.

Oskar: But Larissa, can I also say it’s also theater for an enormous audience, I mean one of the things about CTC is that it’s one of the biggest theaters in the country, period. Not children’s theater, it’s huge. And that produces a kind of pressure there that is different, in different places. One of the things I love about being at this theater is our largest theater down here is 287 seats. So on some fundamental level I don’t have to give a shit about ticket sales. And that’s literary true in the sense of—my caring about ticket sales is a caring about reaching an audience. If we fail to meet our ticket projections on a show, oh my God, that will change the shift in my budget by about one half of one percent. You know, it has no economic consequence because we can’t make any money anyway, the theaters are too damn small; which is a huge privilege. So what it means is the pain that we feel around here when shows don’t sell isn’t an economic pain, it’s a pure pain, it means we’re not reaching our audience. And there are a lot of theaters like that, where you can—and I’m actually thrilled, Peter has always leapt before he thought, it’s one of his great, great qualities as an artist and as a human being. It also can be an extremely frustrating quality, talking to him, because the mouth will move fast than—but what he’s willing to do at CTC is take that huge platform and take big risks with it, which produce hair tearing out tension, but better that happen than we get How the Grinch Stole Christmas again for, you know what I mean? Because CTC has a long history of not doing that, before Peter got there, and some beautiful—that’s where I started as an actor.

Betsy: Really, good.

Oskar: Not entirely good, but you know there’s some wonderful that came with CTC, but a huge history of that theater not caring at all about anybody but the Kentwood kids, the white kids from the suburbs—

Betsy: I just want to say something about hopefully something of this festival, I think there’s a possibility here, I don’t know how it will actualize itself, is I think you found yourself in a very large mainstream theater in Minnesota, as a Native playwright, with no Native director, I assume, no Native dramaturg, no kind of process that linked you to the community.

Oskar: Yeah, very important.

Betsy: And hopefully in the spirit—and there are many communities, so that that’s all for grabs too, is that urban community in Minnesota is it to the tribal communities, I mean, not all theaters can transform themselves really quickly, but hopefully if their part of the intention, and I’m just talking as funder now, part of the intention of seating projects like, complementary projects, like project hoop out in UCLA is primarily not only looking for an urban audience, but looking at working in tribal communities. And this project, that has the power to create alliances, maybe not collaborations, but alliances with other producing organizations. Of ways to say, yah there aren’t a lot but they’re there, and there are models of how this can be done; or there are beginning to be models. Anyway, we’re grasping at how to do this so that you’re—so that not only are you just creating a play for a particular audience, but that artistic and producing directors have something at their—they have a body of knowledge to draw upon and partnerships to draw upon. And that’s what, you know, structurally in the American theater is not there, at all.

Larissa: Exactly. Especially like dramaturgy, let’s talk about dramaturgy, I’ve never worked with any…I haven’t worked with a Native dramaturg, I haven’t worked with a Native director, and I’m writing culturally specific, or whatever you called it EAF…? And I’ve never had it. You know, as a young playwright, it’s already been a mind crazy, whatever, I’m trying not to swear, sorry. You know, like, it’s just as a young playwright, so needing, especially dramaturgs—thank god I had Alyssa Adams who’s amazing, and protected me, but it’s a tricky thing for us to get out there.

Yvette: Of course, because the thing about it it’s fatiguing, right?

Larissa: It’s fatiguing.

Yvette: Like doing Indian 101 all the time. I’m not just writing my play, I’m educating all the time about me.

Larissa: And in rehearsal educating my cast, who were Native, but who were Indians that didn’t know anything, you know, urban Indians--

Yvette: ah, ah—ouch.

Larissa: I apologize, that was so, but you know the work, and we did, and it’s an all day education process and explaining what these ceremonies, or what ceremonies we’re referencing, and, yeah—

Yvette: Sure. And it’s not your job, I mean, to a certain extent as a playwright. That’s where another—an advocate in the room, a dramaturg, a director, or whatever that advocate position is, can help you.

Larissa: I want to inform that way.

Yvette: Yeah culturally, like-minded one.

Randy: I think Terry had a comment?

Terry Gomez: Yeah, came in a little late, so I don’t know I might be stating this wrong, but you’ll let me know. But it sounds like you’re saying that we should be writing towards a specific audience, or thinking about one while we’re writing, but I think that’s total BS, no offence to any of you, because if we’re going to write what we need to write about, I know that I have to have an audience, but it’s not anything specific. And I don’t think I can gear my writing to be commercial, and I don’t want to do that. Because when I see things that are on the stage that are supposed to be Native, and they’re geared toward the commercial, I feel like I’m wasting my time. And I feel like we have such little exposure in such a little amount of time that I want to say something of substance, from our Native people, and I know white people might not understand it, or think we’re slamming them, or trying to put them on a guilt trip, or whatever their issues are with it, but I think it’s very important that we are allowed to say what we need to say; whether it’s controversial or not. And maybe the directors and… going to take a chance with that. Because I’ve seen other theaters and ethnic groups say what they need to say, and I don’t get offended and walk out, I want to go see it even more. To see what their real voice is. Not with the artificial flowers and whatever. So that’s what I’ve got to say about it. Even if I’m never here again, I don’t want to have to write to please someone. That’s not my job as a writer. And I, you know, I know other minority people, not only Indian, and they’ll say the same thing. You know we’re not just products, and it is our voices, so, that’s all.

Betsy: Terry I just want to say—you did come in late. And I think we’re right there with you. A dramaturg is there to create a safe space.

Randy: That’s where we began that conversation.

Betsy: That’s where we began, about creating that safe space for the voice of the writer, and that’s it.

Terry: I feel like I’ve submitted to a lot of Native theater, and it doesn’t get in for some reason. And I don’t want to praise myself, but I know my work is good, but it’s weird because it will be picked up by a like a white person, a white director, or an African-American director, but the Native things are like—they’re scared. And all my work isn’t violent, all my work isn’t, you know, trying to—I don’t know, it is what it is. And I just, I don’t know, I think it’s interesting that that’s the case. It’s not commercial…

Diane Fraher: When you guys said something about the time of the play being about genocide, we had a similar experience here in New York because our first anthology was called Genocide of the Mind, and everything was fine with the publisher until he came in and… they started completely freaking…And I said, well, that’s the title of the book. That’s what we’re going to go with. And we sort of—we let everyone talk it through for a few weeks, and then you get, you hold onto what we felt was right. And the title in the book is Evergreen and it’s still selling. Something in, I heard you say that you were pleased and delighted and somewhat surprised at the response to that, you said but yet you couldn’t put Shakespeare in the school, and what that experience talked to me was about our broken…that might be a useful place. It made me think about, in the dominant society, there’s a real strong sense of –ownership plays a big role. Who owns what, and I don’t just mean physical property, I mean a sense of entitlement that sometimes were not always conscious of, that plays out on important levels in our daily lives. So we, as Native people and colonized people, and religious people…that have been hurt, we have a sense of genocide, that people in the mainstream culture have an ownership of Shakespeare. So, because it comes from their culture and it’s something that their proud of. So our work, somehow, has to be when you work as writers, and directors, and dramaturgs, somehow for us—part of our responsibility is to take our frustration and our anger, and if you can, it’s really hard, but take it and figuring out, for each of us individually, a set of tools about how to say to someone who your working with, “Okay time out; let’s talk about why you think this doesn’t work here; what are you trying to get me to do; what do you want to have happen when that particular dramatic moment—let’s get the word should out of here, and talk about what we could do; what are our choices here; what is it you’re trying to ask of me; you know, you’re used to doing it in a certain way because you own that particular perspective.” Let’s figure out how because we’re creating a new perspective, a new voice, which is our voice, and you kind of have tools that help you dialogue with people. And I found in my own work that that has helped me a lot to do that. But for us, you know the Native people, it’s hard—maybe it’s a …bird, not us, because we had to take, you know, that lifetime of frustration and real disappointment and, you know, in that very moment turn it around. In just those few moments, you know, talking to those people, but the reward is that something actually changes. And when they’re people you work with, you develop a kind of working relationship I think.

Margo Kane: And on that note, I’m sorry I missed a lot of the conversation but, this morning, but I mean it is a struggle, as we’ve all experienced in varying ways, to be on the one hand the artist who just wants to do the work, and then the doing Indian 101, you’re having to…to a field that you compromise in your ability to do the work because of the relationships and the difficulty of the relationships in the room, in the process, so we know that. So I guess what I’m, what my solution oriented brain keeps, because I have this huge growing concern in Vancouver, with my company, and I don’t have enough help, and I don’t have enough people that … I also, the point of coming to this, sometimes, or often times, I don’t have time, or I feel like… I feel like I don’t have time to actually reach out and find my support to bring them into the room with me, or even to bring them into the conversation with me, to initiate a conversation with a theater, or to bring on side those people were going to stand with me, to help me to that work, and I think maybe that’s something we have to consider. That we’re not always out there alone on our own, even though, of course that’s kind of—you know when you’re a visionary or an artist and you have a vision, you know, you tend to be out their on your own, because that’s your vision and your baby and you’re chasing that ability to create that, but I think if our teachings and our elders and our teachings can really help us is, let’s try and find an alliance with our own people. And our own people, I don’t mean just Indian peoples, I mean other peoples who can help advocate for us, and work with us to be the little team that maybe brings forward something, or makes a suggestion. Because you know at the Canada Council for the Arts, you know, and all the juries, the big…when we push through a number of policies, in the early nineties, for Aboriginal inclusion and cultural diversity inclusion into the arts, into the arts programs, and challenging as it still is, and challenging as it was to make it happen. One of the big points was it’s really hard to be the only Indian, or the only person of color on the jury, because then you’re defending every colorful – (laughter) colorful application that comes through. So I guess what I’m suggesting is, can we consider that, while it is our burden, it is also a means or a way for us to begin like connect with each other, support each other, and not just feel like you’re going at it alone with a project; that you actually need those other people to help support and advance and advocate for your—the culturally specific way you wanted to work. The culturally specific material. The attitude—I mean in some ways, it feels unfair sometimes, that we can’t just do our art for art sake. But in reality, it really is about building a community, and building awareness, and a consciousness, around the work.

Randy: Good. I think Betsy and then Oskar, and then Yvette.

Betsy: I’d like to add something to that. I’m an only Indigenous globally at the Ford Foundation, and I thought when I went into being a funder, and I did, I had the opportunity, it was like being able to be a p producer on a very different level. And the same thing happened to me on a very global—I got handed the money, but I was doing Indian 101 every minute, and I literally had people saying to me, you know, you need to prove why you should do Native American stuff here. And I’m like, wait a second, why is this my responsibility if you’ve hired me to do this work? And so I’ve been there almost six years, and after about year number four, cause I got to a real tired place, because what we do is think about making change, because that’s our jobs, how do you create change? How do you take dollars, and other things that come with the dollars like connections, and carrots, and sticks, and—

Oskar: Attention.

Betsy: Attention, and convening, and all those other things that go with it and create change. And what I realized, and a big part of my job is internal change, of an organization, as well as external change. You know I falsely went in there thinking, oh they changed because they’re ready for me. But it’s never the case, I mean I think that just was—I mean it’s never the case. We have internal work to do in places too. I just want to throw out a challenge. You know I think we do a lot of talking, and I like to kind of put things out there for action, one of the things I learned was: you have to make it other peoples’ problems. And how do you make it other peoples’ problems? If it’s your burden, everyone is quite happy to have you carry the burden. So every, I stopped speaking up. I had always been from the mind that speaking up was the only way these things were going to get on the agenda, but somebody would say something stupid, in a meeting, and I just tried for a while to not say anything; not fill the vacuum. And there were a few meetings where I came out and I thought, oh my God! And then a few meetings—and then a couple of times some other people of color, that’s how it first started they stepped in and said, “hey wait a second, did you every think of this from this perspective of the Native people in this country?” And that was a big surprise. And then it started to change a little bit. I guess what I’m saying is, is there a way, just kind of putting minds together with this festival, of who’s not in the room? Of identifying who’s not in the room and who needs to be here? Who needs to have it feel like it’s their burden? And maybe not even a burden; maybe the burden get’s a little lighter if its somebody else’s shared burden, or that it could be a pleasure of a burden. A you know, Ford is always happy to help convene. We don’t have a heck of a lot of granting money or a heck of a lot of convening money, but if there is a way that I could help think about that, that it would have to come from people having minds together, of how to remove—not about here we are and let’s talk about it, but here we are and how do we get healthily to, you know, maybe it’s only this far, but it’s a little bit. So, there’s a challenge.

Randy: Oskar I think you had something, I don’t know if you want to respond to Betsy’s thing, or what you were going to say first, or—

Oskar: She like threw down man!

Betsy: It’s my job, baby!

Oskar: Yeah, I have to. I’ll go back to my early point, but yeah, I think that’s exactly right Betsy. I think that what should come out of today, and these last few days, is some more thinking, and then out of that, thinking a proposal for what is the next step structurally and institutionally that we can do-- and I say we only because this is the place I run—to move the ball forward. My football metaphors, Jesus.

Betsy: Well I’m actually saying even beyond The Public. Is there something that happens even outside The Public?

Oskar: Sure, I’m sure there is. But I’m taking seriously also the idea that we’re actually trying to do something, not just talk about it, so yeah it should, I’m delighted for it to be outside The Public, but we’re the ones—

Betsy: Who are the partners.

Oskar: Who’s going to do it? Who’s going to make it happen? And if I don’t take responsibility for my par of that, I can’t expect anyone else to take responsibility for theirs. The two other things I wanted to say though its—Terry, in terms of, I think what you were saying about relationships is so right and community is so right, and is also so individual ultimately. Is that a huge part of what we need to do, as artists, not as institutions is find the individual people who respond to our work, and cling to them for dear life. I’m serious, because it’s so hard, and there’s nothing that replaces that response. To find the writers, the directors, the other writers, the actors, the—anybody who’s work you like and who likes your work is your community. And that, you know, I feel like most of what I’ve had to do, throughout the thirty odd years I’ve been doing this, is form those relationships and then keep them as close as I can no matter what changes or happens in my life. And there’s constant pressure to drift, there’s constant pressure to distance, and I mean actually, Betsy forgive me, one of the beautiful about our relationship is that when we started this we were both in different states, at different institutions, and we got a ball rolling and it survived this move, and it will survive whatever the next move is. That we actually have a set of shared interest that’s beyond whatever job or state we happen to particularly be in, and we’ll figure out how to keep doing it. And that is investing in those very personal relationships. That people who you feel connected to in a shared vision with—that’s what careers get built on, that’s what at the end of the day you look back and there are some people that you went on this journey with for a long time. And they’re not necessarily the people you planned on with this journey with, they’re the people who stuck with you, through all, and that you kept—

Betsy: There’s little bits and pieces on the floor around you.

Oskar: The other thing is slightly more academic, but I felt moved to say it, because of the place we’re at, because you referred to Shakespeare as, in some way, white peoples’ legacy, as our history. And I’m just so aware of the fact that right in out in front here, 150 years ago, 37 people were killed in a riot about Shakespeare. In the Astor Place Riots, there was two competing Shakespeare productions, William Charles MacReady, from England, and Edward Forrest, from America, that were doing conflicting, not conflicting, were simply doing different productions of Shakespeare, and there was a riot of the Americans saying that Shakespeare belongs to us, he doesn’t belong to this English punk who’s dissed our favorite actor, Edward Forrest, when he was over in England. And in that riot 37 people died. And I’m not advocating that—

Randy: Arm yourselves!

Oskar: Exactly, are you down for armed struggle, locked and loaded. But what I am saying is actually at that time Shakespeare was so clearly property of the English, he wasn’t property of white Americans, he was property of the English. And the American immigrants took him as their property, which is really what the founding DNA of the New York Shakespeare Festival is. That issue of who is your heritage and what belongs to you, is an issue of battle, it’s an issue of contest, where we don’t have to give anything up. You know what I’m saying? I just think that its—there’s a real, I can’t—I’m taking pain killers so I can’t finish any thought today—I just want to say that, that we can’t assume that anything is a given or not a given, we get to struggle about all of it. And I think one of the things we’re trying to do here is, I mean completely selfish from my point of view, is I’m struggling to figure out how a mainstream institution, that has been predominantly, although not exclusively, white lead throughout its history, can actually play a meaningful progressive role within a Native theater. Now that’s a struggle, and it’s a struggle that nobody’s written the answer to. We get to write the answer to it, we get to figure out what that is and that’s, and it, I don’t know—that’s just very exciting to me that we get to do that.

Randy: Yvette and then Morgan.

Yvette: Yeah, I’ve got nothing really.

Morgan: I actually want—Yeah, I’ve been thinking and I’ve been very struck ever since yesterday, when you draw out the fact that we’re all on Indigenous Native First Nation land. This is Native land. And also in terms of like, I’m at a theatrical agency, I’ve been working from that pointed landscape for a while, and I really find that, you know, we talk about interest. I find that you really can talk to people when it’s about self interest, and there’s a self interest, I think, in this country. The fact that this country has not dealt with the fact that it was built, well the whole continent, really, has not dealt with the fact that it was built on genocide, and I think until it’s dealt with, we’re like a tree that’s been cut off from the roots. You know, that we’re never going to be whole. You know we barely dealt with the history of slavery, you know, and how there’s a kind of healing that seems possible. So I think there’s a self interest, you know, that there’s an imperative. And there’s so many things that when you go to that root, when you go to that wellspring, in terms of the environment, in terms of what the nature of the theatrical experience is, you know—I don’t know that a powwow is that different from the Dionysian rituals which western theater is sprung from, in a lot of ways, you know in terms of incorporation of dance and storytelling and music, you know, and how that interested with the audience and the participation with the community. So I think there is a self-interest that you hear, from my little simple cell phone that you know my agency base. But I think it can, and could, and once they should, could be addressed.

Randy: Other comments or questions? Yes, Rhiana hasn’t had a chance to shout yet.

Rhiana Yazzie: Yeah, do you know the thing that has really helped me in working as a playwright, with non-ethnic specific organizations, is getting the language. Articulating the cultural, what colonial hegemony is. Because I know as a young playwright, working in a lot of different places, whether they were ethnic specific or not, sometimes something which would strike me as—doesn’t feel right. And since moving to Minnesota, and having a really amazing education from all of these … people, and scholars, I mean Minnesota is… but I’ve been able to put words to those, to that feeling, and right now I’m working on a project with Mixed Blood Theatre, and I’m heading this multi-playwright collaboration, and as we were preparing for this, it’s going up in April, we’ve been working on it for two years. So it’s me, Jack Reuler, Liz Engelman and Sarah Rasmussen, right here, who’s directing it. And it was interesting for me to see how that dynamic worked. Because at times I felt like I was there to give the theater permission to do Native work, at times I was there to be a cultural mouth piece, and then at times I was an artist. So it was difficult to navigate all those things, just as one person, because I could be outvoted very easily on the subject, and I had to figure out where to split being, you know, an artist and looking at this, you know, dramaturgically and structurally, and where do I step in with saying, you know, this is a cultural thing. So I ended up having a conversation that lasted about three hours with Jack Reuler and Liz Engelman, telling them, you know, I can’t be the only Indian in this room. Because the premise of the project, Jack Reuler said these Native writers who are involved with it, and we’ve had some… write a play as if the entire audience was Native. So with that idea the writers, they came back with that, but at the same time there wasn’t a lot of input from the creation side of it, and I had this very long conversation and because of that fact of the premise of it being such an Indigenous thing, of oh we’re writing for a Native audience, I went in there looking at it as we’re going to do this in an Indigenous way. We’re not going to do this in a Western way that was an assumption I had going in there, and when that assumption didn’t meet the reality, I really started to feel weird. And that’s when I started to recognize all of this colonial hegemony that comes up. Like for instance the fact that we don’t have a Minnesota writer in this project, and Minnesota’s got one of the largest urban Native population. And I began to question that, and it’s sort of like, they didn’t realize that this land that we’re doing a Native project on, in Minnesota, has a specific meaning to that community that’s there, and that’s the Native community that we’re talking to. But instead we’ve got all of these writers, from across the continent, and they thought that any Indian would do to speak for this community in Minnesota. So, I mean, that was an assumption. Also, we didn’t have a Native director, which was interesting to me because if it was a Latino project or African-American project, you know, we would make an effort to do that; but I mean we have a really great director, who’s here. But there were all of these things that I really had to grapple with and figure out and being able to articulate that was extremely helpful. And it was funny, because at the end of this three hour conversation, Jack said “now I know you’re the right person to be in this room.” And I was like, what I’m trying to say, I’m going into this not as an individual but as a community, and the burden of the community is on me. And it’s like there needs to be more than one person, and that’s also sort an assumption, is that, there’s the individual in the Western world who can speak for people, but if you’re doing it from an Indigenous aspect you’ve got to have more that one Native person talking. And you know, there just two completely different world views, and you’ve got to know which world view you’re working with.

Randy: Great. Yvette and then Betsy.

Yvette: Yeah, it’s a thing that we’re going to come back to over and over again about where the power sits. That’s the bait and switch, right? Like write from a Native perspective, write from an Indian perspective, write as if the whole audience is Indian, I don’t get this, this isn’t going to work because I’m not Indian. And once we get into these partnerships with—like I think the answer’s in your name, right, The Public. Like that’s the conduit, you’re the conduit to The Public, so, you know, bravo for you to pick up her pronoun because you’ve got to do it that way, but it’s going to be harder than that. Because if you say, come on into our house, then you don’t get to say what we get to say. And that’s the thing that, you know, I’m fighting it in my own house. Like I’m saying to the young Native writers, come on in, say what you want to say, and they’re like, okay produce me, and I’m like, but it says "genocide" in the title, and then we do, right? Because we have to. That’s a hard thing within my own company, which is a Native company, that’s going to be a harder thing for a company that’s situated in the mainstream, in the dominant culture, to allow, not just allow but empower a voice that may be not what you think an Indian is. And that’s the thing that we’re always, that we’re struggling with now. What it is that we’re looking at and what it is that we want to say. And we want to be heard, and we want to be opening up these doors as well because all the Native companies in Canada produce maybe three shows a year by Native writers. That’s all the Native companies in Canada, and we have it pretty good, so there’s just not enough resources, there’s not going to be enough resources for Native theater in the next foreseeable future to produce all the work that there is, to develop all the voices that there are, so we have to find other ways to get those stages, to have those forums, we have to make those relationships. Whether they’re with schools, or whether they’re with mainstream, or whether they’re with The Public, which I think is standing with a foot in every world right now, we have to make those relationships so that we get in, and then we have to be there and insist, this is what I have to say, whether you like it or not. And it’s tough, I mean we did a show last year, we partnered with the National Arts Center in Ottawa, which is our biggest most well resourced theater, and it was kind of astonishing. We did an adaptation, an Aboriginal adaptation, of Julius Caesar called Death of A Chief, and we did 97% in Ottawa, 97% houses in Ottawa and it was not an issue. The audiences came, they were engaged, they stayed to talk, there was a dialogue, it was really hopeful and exciting, and I’m hoping that we can hold that door open for a little while longer so someone else can get in there. I mean we have a visionary artistic director there who is committed to keeping the Native presence in that company, as long as he’s there; we’ll see how long he stays there because that’s—because he’s also under pressure from the dominant culture--“Why do we have to see more Native work?” “Why does there have to be a Native work every year?”

Betsy: I kind of just want throw something out there that I had heard, from one of the convening’s that I’ve done with of some of my grantees. A Haudenosaunee scholar and curator named Jolene Rickard, who actually named—you’ll hear her name in Re-Creation Story, she’s talked about in the play tonight, and when you go—some of you may know Jolene, she’s an artist too, she’s Tuscarora, she came to a convening of mine, so she works in the realm of visual art, which is very, you know, obviously, in the theater we keep talking about voice, in a matter of physicality and about space, but she said something that really blew my mind as far as creating change. And I just want to toss this out if it’s helpful. What she said is that her intervention, if we’re going to create change we can’t, she mentioned a thing about--it’s not a flat landscape, the moment we mention genocide people shut down—But what she said is her intervention in the world of art history was not going to be about, we need more Native people included in art history, but was about changing the very field of art history on to something else, the idea of visual studies. That the umbrella of—that umbrella worked much better for Indigenaity, to use an academic term, better because, and this is the part that blew me away, was that the society was moving. That much of art history was a text based approach. And we’re from oral cultures, and that the study of the visual history, not history but studies, just in general, what she was that it needed to change that, not just to fit in with a people, but that the world, because of the internet, because of the way our world is changing, because of new technologies, because of globalization, the new literacy is visual literacy. And that the change that is happening to us—she started to flash these pictures to us, up on the screen, of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or cultural icons that we would, that mainstream Americans would recognize. And then she started to flash some icons like this sky woman pattern up on, or pictures of great tribal leaders, and she asked everyone on the room, you know, would you think your colleagues at your universities or at your institutions would recognize these image. And the reason I thought of this was because Daniel David Moses shared his card with me today, and it has a petroglyph on it, from the-what is the name of the document? It’s like—

Daniel David Moses: The Walam Olum.

Betsy: The Walam Olum, which is the Lenai Lanape kind of Rosetta Stone, it’s the kind of—the story, the epic story of literary this place, right here. This is the Lenai Lanape’s place. We don’t know these visual images, I don’t know these visual images. And I’m not saying that, I mean theater is not necessarily always a visual medium, but that the world is changing and that I think I was really struck by how she wasn’t just thinking about, how do we fit in. She just decided to kind of go: no, we’re actually going to lead the way in helping folks understand, our knowledge, our visual, our voice has something to lead the way to a changing world, and there is something that the changing world needs from our intervention. And I just want to throw that out, that I think our traditional knowledge, our connection to place, even though there’ve been huge efforts to displace, there is some power that can be tapped in—so, I just wanted to throw that out because, you know, I hear these things and I’m like I want to tell other folks that are struggling with the same issues.

Randy: Kate you had something?

Kate Josephson: I do. We talking about the relationship of dramaturg and playwright, and I’m really really struck, actually this question is for Yvette, of the relationship between dramaturg and audience, and exactly what you’re saying Betsy, is do you have a method of re-contextualing how a non-Native audience looks at a Native play? I remember seeing your show and you were telling me about what rocks meant, and for me rocks mean something different than what they do in Native tradition, and it brought so much to life and made Death of a Chief so much deeper for me. And I’m wondering—no it’s true—and I’m wondering how do you—what’s your method of communicating that with an audience, re-contextualizing how we see Native theater, and images, and pictures?

Yvette: Well I’m buckling, and I’m doing more and more and more sort of education—Cara’s sitting here laughing, she’s the community liaison at Native earth, which means a lot of this is her job too. We’re doing a lot more contextualizing in every way that we can before the show. It’s easier with students, because we get to do all that work in the study guide, and then put that out there, and they’re kind of a captive audience, and the teachers are very often able and willing to do that work. But for the audience that comes, the single ticket buyer, all they really get is the program. And I’ve always been so resistant to it, because it feels like Indian 101 to me, and I’m tired of saying the Four Colors, the Four Directions, you know, like I’m tired of explain it.

Betsy: But they’re spirited based.

Yvette: But what I learned at doing Death of a Chief in Ottawa with that really nice audience; really nice, really middle class, really white, really nice, really well off, really subscriber based, did I mention they were white, was they wanted all of that. They wanted to be, maybe not spoon fed, but fed, delivered, that basic information which I think people should know because they’re living on our land. I think you should know about the directions because you’re living on our land, I think you should know about the four colors, I think you should know something about the people who were here first and I think that’s your job as people who lived on our land, to educate yourself. Okay so, that’s not going to happen and it hasn’t happened, so I give up. So I’m doing—what they kept saying in Ottawa was, if only there was more of a glossary in the program, if only you told me about the four directions, the four colors, the rocks, the whatever—and some of it we’re just making up too.

Oskar: True, you’re artists, you make it up!

Yvette: We’re totally making it up. And there’s less of a willingness, on a whole bunch of levels—like an audience goes to see Chekhov, or Strindberg, or Churchill, or Hair, and if there’s something they don’t know, they just go with it, because there’s a trust that either they should know, or they can go and find out later, or they’ll just let it be. And they go to modern dance,

Oskar: But but –

Yvette: But don’t pip pip at me, I’m talking. Anyway, I feel that we’re not offered the same leap of faith. So fine, so whatever, I’m doing more contextualizing. For the Genocide, for the "G" show, we are actually, in the program we’ve collected photographs from our peopes, our Native Earth peopes, with their people who are in residential school. Like a picture of me with my mother, a picture Jani Lauzon with her father, a picture of Jackie Carpenter with her aunt and her mother. Because one of things that we’re talking about in the play is that this history is not really history for us. It exists in us right in this moment. And this is how close it is to me, this is my mom who was in residential school, who married my dad, who was a teacher in residential school, and I’m the issue, literary and figuratively, I am the issue. And so we’ve done, we put the apology—We had had an apology in Canada, The Prime Minister got up in the House and said he was sorry for the residential school system. We’re putting the text of that into the program, so that even if they don’t know about the residential school system, they can read what the government is sorry for having done, and then maybe get at it. So we’re doing way way way more contextualizing, but it seems like another job on top of the job that we’re actually doing, which is making art. Wow—that’s a lot of talking, sorry. Pip now.

Oskar: But it’s both another job and it’s the same job. And the thing, I just have to—Randy made a slighting reference to Marx earlier in the, now I have to—he had a beautiful, he said: people make history, people make history, but they do not make it in the circumstances of their own choice, they deal with the world that is given to them. And the world that has been given to us is a continent built on genocide, is a nation, in the case of the United States, I won’t speak about Canada, that is built on a forgetting, denial, repression, and ignoring the consequences that, which has as a consequence, that the vast majority of our citizens don’t know a lot of stuff they should know. The reality is they don’t. So then our job—I have never felt that I can separate my job as an artist from my job as a social activist communicator. They overlap in all sorts of ways that if I try to distinguish them, I would get depressed, and what I have to accept is that in this world, the exciting task is to try and figure out do we communicate with the world we’re actually in. And we can decide who we don’t—we’re not interested in talking to, but if we’re interested in talking, we have to meet people and the education is fundamentally part of it, fundamentally part of it. And of course it’s unfair, I know it’s unfair.

Yvette: Ah, of course it’s unfair because the thing that we’re most accused of most often is being didactic.

Betsy: Preaching, yes.

Oskar: I’ve been accused of that my whole career, and you know that goes off my, I’m sorry, you cannot worry about that. No, didactic is one of the words that the right uses, they approbate these words, and didactic is a word that they use to tell us to shut up. Because fundamentally there’s a right-wing ideology that is assumed to not to be ideology, that that’s just natural, the way things are, and if you ever try to contradict it, than you being didactic, all it means is that you disagree with the mother fuckers. I should watch my language. So you know, the only thing I’m saying is that on some level we have to, I believe, what I feel I have to do, is not resist the educational, struggle aspect, the communicate, that is part of the job. That is not a separate—because if I think of it as a separate job it kills me. I have to think about it, its part of it—and at times that gets really thrilling. I just—end of speech.

Randy: Well if conflict is the center of theater, it’s a very fertile ground. Dianne, you had something?

Dianne Reyner: Yeah, my name is Dianne Yeahquo Reyner, I’m a recently we, a couple of years ago, we started the American Indian Repertory Theatre, which is based just West of… so I was thinking about a couple of things while everyone was talking . One is, one of my plays, Weaving the Rain, went through the Kennedy Center. And for a Native American play, it was selected for full production at the American..Theater Festival and on the regency level, which didn’t go onto the national level, but the script was among the six national finalists in the country. So for the Native artists who are out there, our work does move. It may not get to the top, but it was selected out of the entire country as one of the top six that year. Now, and I mentioned that because during the process you go through a huge judging process and the adjudicators come and you get judged, you get told what the audience doesn’t understand, what they don’t get, why is this there? And there were a couple of things that happened during that whole adjudication process. And one of the people who comes is not supposed to say anything, but he got compelled to tell me that during the process of watching the play, during the first act he was continually writing questions—why are you doing this, why did this happen, why is this going on, this doesn’t make any sense, where are you going? And by the second act, all of his questions were answered. And it was just, he just put his notebook away and he quit taking notes. The other adjudicator made a comment, that’s just in my mind, is—“you know, I didn’t get why the words combined Ibuprofen and Indian Health Service was so funny”-- Because we had a large Native audience—“you know, I didn’t get it. But you know what, I was willing to go along with the ride.” So they were willing to accept a play, just on the merits of the play. And yeah, I went through a large explaining and Indian 101, but the people that helped me the most when I was writing the play were the non-Native readers; the Pilipino, the European, white students at the university. And they were confused, they didn’t see, they thought this family hated each other, and they were looking at it on a surface without the history. They were looking at it on the surface without the experience. So they read this as a very angry play—and the people just hated each other, you know the mother was a psycho, and all this other stuff—it made me crazy, and I had to take it to the Native actors I know and say please read this, you know, I must be really crazy. And they read it and they were laughing, and I’m like—and they got the jokes, and it made sense to them. And it became a real choice, how far did I want to be educator, how far did I want to do Indian 101, and then—we have to. I’m sorry. We have to. It’s just something we have to do. So you have to be very selective about choosing—well how far do I have to go for this particular piece. Another point, and I don’t know if that answers anything you guys have had from your memory of what was discussed, but—I think as Native artists, we have to look for those collaborations, you know, people aren’t going to come and say “Oh, you’re a Native playwright, let’s do a play.” You know, “my uncle John has a barn, let’s do a play.” You’ve got to look for those collaborations. You know we’re moving in and we’re making connections with the lead center of Kansas with Haskell Indian Nations University, last week before I came here I was meeting with the YWCA, I was meeting with other people, and looking for venues that we could move, and not just have one production a year, but that production that we bring up for our season has another place to go. And so we can move that to the Native community to the Kansas City area, maybe build it to tour to the Pottawatomi Reservation, you know. So we’re looking for those collaborations in those places that are open to creating a venue for us, and we really have to be willing to do that. And saying that, with our history, and with everything that comes with it, you know, we’re born with full bags packed, and we carry those with us all the time. We’re suspicious, we’re tired, we’re born tired, so we have built enormous walls to protect ourselves, and we have to. And I’m not talking about crashing through those walls, but sometimes you’ve to look over the wall and you’ve got to see that not everybody’s out to get us and be willing to accept help. One of the greatest blessings that we as Native people give to other people is our willingness to help them, and guide them. So we can’t deny them the same blessing that we give our self. And it’s a blessing to allow someone to assist you accomplish your dream and I think we really have to do that if we are going to not just put our work in a drawer and say nobody will produce me. We’ve got to move in different directions, we’ve got to stay where we are center, with everything, we have to move. It’s like we have to move. If that’s rocky, we just have to move. And if somebody calls us a sell out, so what! You know, if somebody calls you a sell out, think in your mind, crab, it’s the crab ferry, and just keep going. Because usually that’s one person who has so much of their bags that their overwhelming, you know. There are certain problems that are personal and that’s their problem, I’m sorry, and the audience that we talked about, you’ve got to educate the audience, you’ve got to give them the opportunity to learn, and think of it as a blessing rather than you’ve got to pound them over the head. You know, give them the blessing of giving them this information that you are so proud of, that you wrote a play, and you want to send it out there and you want to share it with the world, give the audience the consideration of giving them just a little insight. You know, we don’t have to teach Indian 101 all the time, we don’t have to be only Indian in the world, you know to say, have faith, I’m the Indian, this is how I say it’s going to go. And the plays themselves create the questions, you know, the audience will come and say I didn’t get that, I didn’t understand that, what did that mean? And if it creates the question in the audience, hopefully the play and the piece inspired them to go find the answer. So that releases us from constantly doing Indian 101, constantly writing. I mean they wanted me—by the time it got around to it, they wanted an explanation for everything, you know—“why does that character carry a big purse?” Well, you know Indian women carry big purses; they got everything in it. You know it would have been a small text book, and so you have to say: no, let’s give the audience some credit for having a brain. That’s all I have to say.

Randy: So, yeah I know, we’re coming up on time, so I feel like we need to perhaps wrap up. You’re pointing at Vickie?

Vickie Ramirez: I just wanted to say briefly, this conversation, I caught the second half of it, is adding to this overwhelming, sort of, spring…over my head. If it’s fear—we were talking about Native artists feeling maybe not worthy or incapable to speak, and I think, heck, if we’re representing all Native people and we’re, in every thing we do, and we have to be very conscious about staging the sacred, and then we have to teach Indian 101, and we have to make sure—it’s such a mind field. And I think, is it disingenuous to think that you can just write the story and the fight the fights when they come, and then go out there and, you know, speak, and say, look, I’m not only—I’m Haudenosaunee, Tuscarora specifically, that’s my…so I can answer from—I’ll answer as much as I can for my little area of my reservation. I mean, is it silly of me to think—I couldn’t—it’s just overwhelming the idea that one little story I might churn out suddenly has to represent the voice of all of us, 500 plus nations, very very different nations, with a lot of commonalities, but nation. And so it spooks me, all of this sort of generalized First Nation too, like the fact that we sort of have gotten it as one voice, one… we have really very different voice.

Randy: That’s a great place to kind of bring things back. So maybe the panelists if you have final thoughts, or new insights, or—

Oskar: No new insights, but let me just respond to—the thing that I really feel is the beauty about the theater, and it’s true about any art form and theater’s the only one I know, is that you’re always only voice, and, because you’re an artist, and with your one voice, which is informed by everything about the communities you were raised in and lived in and, you’re then coming to other artists, making a piece of theater, and all you’re responsible for, all that I think, is to try to help communicate what is the story, the truth, the action, that you’re trying to make happen in front of an audience. And that’s a big enough responsibility, it’s just that the givens of what that responsibility of what that responsibility is going to mean, is going to be different for every artist, in every circumstance, who they’re working with, who they’re talking to, and again it’s a strain, it’s not fair that those strains are there, but it’s also that’s what the job is: to take you your vision and figure out how to connect it to other people. And what everybody else involved in the show, from the producers, the director, the dramaturg, it’s our job to be trying to build those paths, and make that easier, and make that happen. And you know I feel like, and this will count as a final thought for me, I feel like the thing that you’re always trying to do, and that we’re trying to do here, is we’re creating this institution, right? The Native Theater Festival, here we go, four day institution, happened a couple times now, that institution is there to try to create an envelope that then allows individual artists to go—you know what, this is what should happen. And then you create another institution on that artistic vision. The institutions, the frameworks, the structures, are only there to let artists blow them apart and say actually, no, the theater shouldn’t function this way, it should function more like this. And whether that’s a paradigm shift, like you were describing, of what the visual is, you know hopefully at the end of all this we have a paradigm shift and it started to happen to a certain limited exemption, so you don’t have the paradigm of ethnic specific theaters and mainstream white theaters. Hopefully we are slowly shifting the cultural landscape so it’s not that simple. Hopefully we’ll continue to shift the landscape of what role does theater play in the lives of the audience, and selling subscriptions and having audiences who are paying large amounts of money to come six times a year, will not be the only primary model for—it’s the shifting of the model, which only comes from the vision of the artists. And it’s a thing that those of us who run institutions, I think, constantly having to keep in mind. The institutions are not there to propagate themselves, the institutions are not there so that we can be healthy, the institutions are there to provide protection, for the artist, who’s job is to fuck up the institution, who’s job is to say, you have to become completely different. And that’s the beauty of it. Then the institution is serving its function. If its function becomes self-propagation, it’s not longer an artistic institution, could still be serving some other functions, but it’s not art.

Betsy: It’s a museum.

Yvette: Amen brother.

Betsy: Well how can I top that? I just want to go back to my throwdown, and say that, you know, I just want you to ask yourselves, not just Oskar, this is where this job, Oskar, must be tough in that everybody wants something from you. Right?

Oskar: Lucky.

Betsy: Lucky, right, the kind of lucky you are the more folks want things from you, it’s a privilege. But I guess I would say, as these conversations develop, with The Public or with others, who’s not in the room? And I would ask you to ask that of yourselves, responsibly. Not like, okay, if I get this person in the room than I get my show, but who can, for the benefit of us all, get maybe something out of this—that can add something to this conversation. I’m just talking conversation, not even cash, but just in the kind of world of—who needs to not only hear this, but who can we hear from? You know, when you’re talking alliances and collaborations, this is really, it has to be something that’s a two way street. And I’m constantly thinking about that, as a funder, and I’m constantly wanting to, and that’s also what we’re talking about around collaboration and around creating that safe space for that. So I just throw that out to folks, to talk to Oskar about, to talk to me about, to talk to everybody about. See what happens.

Randy: Anything you need to add Morgan, I mean you don’t need to.

Morgan: Yeah, I’m just really, you know, off some of the things that have been said. I mean, you know, I really hear the sort of burden of having to do Indian 101, and I guess what Donald Two-Rivers calls sensitivity training, but I do agree that that’s also the non-Native community’s responsibility. There is that idea of a provocation of what the question is, and whatever, and then that we take some responsibility for that sensitivity training. And it’s not only about the Native, you know, being sensitive to First Nations communities, Indigenous, Aboriginal communities, it is a sensitivity to humanity that we live in at large. I mean I think it goes beyond the particular circumstances. And I just think in terms of like the idea of—Eric Ann has this great image for being an artist of any kind, in the American theaters, and it’s like being white heron in Audubon’s book of birds. And I don’t know if you know Audubon’s book of birds, but no matter what were you would have the body, but in order to get the heron on the page, he drew it in a way that basically broke the bird’s neck. And I think that’s kind of an interesting thing to watch out for, but also the idea of that, you know, what your work is and informs it; do you write for audience, do you write for circumstances? In a way, what I do at the agency, what I try to do and fail miserably at on a daily basis, but it’s like all this work is like this particular flowering gorgeous pant, and it’s like not all the plants are in some commercial farm, you know what is the landscape? And it seems to me what I try to do is-- okay here’s this plant, well it doesn’t belong in the desert of the current American theater landscape, it needs more water, so where does it belong? And I do think there’s a place, there is land, there is soil, that can grow any particular plant, you just have to know what the needs are, and place it in the land, in the soil that it’s going to flourish in. And I think that’s a lot about it, you know, it’s not commercial theater, it’s not the institutions, it’s like I think we diss certain venues, like youth theater—there’s been a real dissing of youth theater. I think it’s enormously important, I think theater… the issues they deal with are enormously important because we’ve…several generals. The fact that Hanay is writing children’s books, hasn’t he been writing children’s books? And I mean I think that’s really really important in like it’s not something to be dissed, it’s important to speak for those generations. So it’s like, I think all bits of land are valid…

Randy: Well, what a wonderful discussion. Thank you everyone for your time.