Field Discussion
Meet The Public
November 13, 2008, 9am
Staff: Liz Frankel (Literary Associate, The Public Theater), Mandy Hackett (Associate Artistic Director, The Public Theater), Jordan Thaler (Casting Director)
(NB: The first little bit was cut off)
Liz Frankel: I mean the first thing that I want to say in front of everybody, I mean for me it’s such a pleasure to get to know so many Native writers, because obviously that’s what I do in the literary office is focus on writers and read scripts, so while we were only able to do three at this moment in time, we read so many scripts that were so wonderful, so I now feel like my knowledge and The Public’s knowledge of Native writers has greatly expanded. And I just sort of wanted to do my plug, as I keep saying every time I meet any playwright, is keep sending me your scripts, because we are going to—it’s not like it ends here, we definitely want to want to do more Native work in the future. So I just wanted to put out there then, if you have a play that we haven’t read please send it to me, or if you see anything or know of anyone else who’s written a play that we should read, anything like that, we are just completely open and are extremely interested in Native work. So I just thought I’d put that out there, and I think meeting people and getting to know the work and meeting you all here as really been a pleasure for me. So that’s what I would like to say about the festival.
Jordan Thaler: And I would like to just tag quickly onto that. Casting five spaces, here in the building, the Delacorte and any extended programming we do outside the building, is kind of an awesome responsibility and I always sort of say, you know, to give myself the ability to sleep at night, that I can’t find everybody, that somebody has to find me. So to that end also this has also just been an incredible experience of meeting new actors. And so, additionally, as well, that everybody who’s in the sound of all of our collective voices, as this festival builds, it’s been great for us to meet knew artists, and if there are people who we haven’t me yet, that you all know, that I don’t, I’m here and it would be great if we all just sort of sharing information and saying, hey this is something, you know, to make sure the Public knows who you are and that you’re here. And so, I was just going to second the same thing for actors as well as writers, directors. I just would add to that, I mean, part of what’s so exciting about working at this theater, and I was just joking a little bit before with Randy [Reinholz]—about being older…you know I think other people can say the same thing, you know, in all of our jobs I think you get to a place where you say "gee, everyday do I teach more than I learn." And when you get to that place, I’ll say personally it’s a big drag when you recognize that you teach more than you learn. And so this festival, for the past two years, has been a great opportunity for me to have time during the year when I learn much more than I am able to teach, and I thought about that a lot as you were, as a non-Native artist, you know, during the prayer, that it’s been a great great learning opportunity and I’m very thankful for that, because they are few and far between, as you can imagine, as you get up in years, and that’s just been a great gift. I just wanted to share that.
Mandy Hackett: Thank you Jordan.
Sheila Tousey: And I just wanted to welcome every body back. The new faces, you people that are here, Alanis, great to have all of these wonderful minds and talented people here. That’s all I have to say.
Mandy Hackett: Yes.
Tamara Podemski: I’m new here, and I’m just curious how it all started?
Mandy: I think in the biggest picture, I said this last night and you know people may hear me say this again. I mean, this building is built on the idea of giving voice to people whose voices aren’t heard, I mean I think that is the legacy that Joe Papp built this building on, and I think you can look at it in a lot of different kinds of writing that have come to this building, and you know supporting writers of color, supporting disenfranchised voices, giving the stage over to people who’s voices are not necessarily worked into our mainstream culture and society yet—just cuts to the absolute core of what this building is about and certainly informs all the work we do here at the Public. So I think that that is the biggest picture. And then the specifics of this is Oskar, who you guys will get to see over the course of the festival, Oskar Eustis is the Artistic Director of The Public, is deeply, personally invested in Native theater. And as some of you may know, and he, before coming to the Public he was the Artistic Director of Trinity Rep, and he started an initiative at Trinity, to be supporting the work of Native artists, and I think that’s how he met Bill. Bill, is he here? He might still be outside. And did a tour of one of Bill’s plays across the country. So I think when he came to the Public, you know I think if Oskar were here he would say this, I think one of the things that made him the most sad to leave his job at Trinity was to kind of leave the initiative that he had started, in Providence Rhode Island, about and for Native artists. And so I think it was extremely important to him to bring that initiative to The Public Theater and so that’s kind of how we’re here. And then, of course, through Betsy Richards at the Ford Foundation. I mean you can have all the ideas that you want, but you need the leadership and the inspiration of a funder like Betsy and the Ford Foundation to be able to really make it happen. So that’s why we’re here, that’s how we got here.
Sheila Tousey: I think Bill was actually the playwright in residence at Trinity.
Mandy: Yes, that’s exactly right.
Voice: It goes back to like 2003, or something, when we did the first season of the festival at Trinity and one of Bill’s plays, and then I did the second season as well, and that was when he was invited, after that first season, to be a playwright in residence and teaching at Brown, and all of that stuff. But it was exciting right from the start. And I’m so glad that Oskar’s keeping it going down here.
Mandy: Yeah, we are too. Other thoughts, or questions, or things to talk about?
Alanis King: Would you mind sharing how next year the plan is to actually produce a play?
Mandy: Yeah, I mean, I think in the biggest picture, for the Native Theater Initiative to really succeed at the Public, is to really integrate it into the ongoing programming that we do, irrespective of doing a Native Theater Festival. So we’re looking very seriously at ways to bring the work of Native artists into our regular programming. Whether it’s through commissioning, producing—last year, I was saying to the advisory committee, we launched a lot of programs last year, and it’s a miracle that we’re all still standing –and I had my baby.
Jordan: That’s why we’re sitting.
Mandy: But we launched the Native Theater Initiative, we launched our Emerging Writers Group, which brings together unrepresented young writers who don’t have agents, who are really new to the field, creates a writers group around those writers, and we launched the Public Lab. The Public Lab is a series of stripped down, bare bones productions, that rehearse for two and a half weeks, and last year ran for two and a half weeks, and last year ran for two and a half weeks, but this year we’re extending the run to three and a half weeks. And the goal is to produce really raw, immediate, socially relevant work quickly. Fast, immediate theater for ten dollar tickets in the Shiva Theater, which as a side note, I think today at three o’clock Liz is doing a tour of the whole building. So if you’re interested in seeing all the different spaces, we have five spaces in the building, so if you want to get a sense of what the building is like, I would love everybody to go on the tour. So anyways, the Public Lab happens in the Shiva, and we’re, you know, I think the goal is to identify plays that can go into Public Lab. You know, the main stage is a more complicated conversation because we’re literary booked out two or three years in advance, but I think, whatever the specifics are, I think the goal 100% is to look for a Native play for Public Lab, look for a Native writer to commission, look for Native writers to be in the Emerging Writers Group, to really let the work that’s happening in the festival infiltrate at the ongoing current programming that makes up of what the Public Theater is doing. I think sustainability is a word that we use all the time, and I think that in order to truly sustain and succeed the goal is full integration and meshing. So if we were to do the play in Public Lab, all the apparatus, that goes into making the Native Theater Festival, would then happen around the show in the Public Lab. So instead of being a stand alone festival, the field discussions and panel work can happen around the show and Public Lab, and hopefully, down the road, in full production.
Jordan: And the thing that’s really exciting about these guys that imagined Public Lab, that’s different, is that there’s all of this work that’s kind of lived—a lot of the time we do readings, we do workshops, we do a lot of developmental work, and it’s all very sheltered and sort of kept away from the public, and the missing equation is like, oh the audience-- but what happens is, is that they have these truncated rehearsal process, and then they get up in front of people but actually rehearse until it closes, so they never stop rehearsing. So rehearsal goes all the way through the entire run, there’s like a defacto kind of rehearsal period, and then the audience is invited in to launch it, but then the rehearsal kind of continues, so that no audience truly ever sees the same thing. And by the end, you know, it’s not done; there sort of working on the work. So it’s been an incredibly—and we’ve done it both with one-person shows, as well as full cast shows, and it’s an amazing process. And the audiences were—I mean from day one, you know, nobody knew how it was going to work because it was a new thing, and you know, whether it was just people rolling for the ten dollar ticket day of kind of thing, but it was crazy, I mean everyday it was really packed, and the audiences were really responsive and the work was some of the most exciting work that we did last year…we’re giving this away. But, it was really great.
Mandy: I mean I feel like sometimes when you take the roof off, almost, and you take the pressure off of doing a main stage show, and they’re so expensive, and it kind of becomes so formal in a way, that Public Lab can almost have a much deeper, looser, free way of finding the work, finding what the show is, and you feel the electricity in a way that sometimes you don’t feel in other venues. And the best thing about Public Lab too is it’s a new way for our audiences to engage in the work. It’s not part of the subscription series, you can see one show, you can see two shows, it’s ten dollars, the work is in progress, it’s a way for our audiences to really feel apart of the process of finding new work. Not just seeing a reading, but actually seeing something on its feet, fully staged, fully designed, you know but new pages every night and kind of what that process is about.—We just got the two minute warning, so we’ll take one last question. Yes?
Ryan Victor Peirce: Just about what Jordan said earlier, about learning things over the course of the festival, do you mind sharing, any of you, maybe one thing that you’ve learned over the process?
Mandy: That’s a hard one; let me think of one thing. I think for me, what was most meaningful last year, and I hope this doesn’t sound controversial, is how powerful creating a safe space can be, to talk about issues that are facing the Native community and Native artists, and I think it has to do with geography, I think that so many Native artists are spread out. You know, in New York it’s so centralized for main stream artists, and there’s an apparatus that exists for more mainstream artists and what I learned is, how much work is already happening, because we don’t, in any way, undermine the work that’s happening, but how much more we can do to help to bring the work of more Native artists into the apparatus that exists in New York or exists in this theater, and how powerful it is to create a safe space where people can come together and, you know, talk honestly and openly about questions and challenges and hurdles and dreams and ambitions and goals, you know, for where we want Native Theater to be and, you know, for the Public to be able to be apart of that is genuinely a privilege and you really feel like you’re apart of something really important.
Jordan: I mean I can sort of tag onto that, and I know this will be hard one to give within the two minute warning and then out the door but—it may or may not be, I mean I don’t think it’s going to be revelational, but it was just for me, I think that every time I’ve sort of started something, that I don’t know what I’m doing, there’s just an enormous amount of fear. And, you know, I felt like theater is such a hard thing to be careful, but everybody was just a little on the edge of how people were saying things, and I—I mean I hope this is a funny story and not a controversial story—but I was emailing with Kennetch and Darrell and I was having to explain last year that one of the reasons why there was going to be this delay, because the timing of it was actually that we were going to be out of the office for Thanks Giving, and all of a sudden I just realized, wow that’s like bad! This politically hideous, like horrible thing to celebrate, this disgusting holiday, you know hundreds of years of repression, and suddenly I was like, “Hey, we’re going to be away for the Thanksgiving Holiday.” And as I was in the email, I was like…so it was, I mean I realized, in a funny way, but I recognize how much people—fear gets in the way of people just kind of communicating freely. And it was like, just go ahead, just bomb, you know, go ahead and somebody else will go, “you, get your ducks in the row,” and how to say what, and how to-- and that was, people were unbelievably generous, but I would say that’s been the – Learning to be less careful, I would say, has been a helpful thing. Because I would be extremely careful, and people were like, you know, he’s so careful—because it was impeding that communication.
Mandy: I think that’s great.
