A Conversation with Betsy Theobald Richards

Creating a New Table:
A Conversation with Betsy Theobald Richards
by Tom Pearson

On day three of the festivalm, Betsy Theobald Richards (Program Officer at the Ford Foundation in Media, Arts and Culture) and I got a chance to catch up with one another, and I asked her a few quick questions about her festival experience thus far and her role as a festival participant, a funder representing the Ford Foundation, and her partnership with the Public.

Tom: We are now in the third day of the festival. We’ve heard a lot of great dialogue in the field discussions and with the readings on the stage, and I wanted to see if you would talk a little bit about your involvement as a panelist and as a funder and also speak a little to the mission of the festival and the mission of the Ford Foundation and where the two intersect.

Betsy: Well, I just want to give a little bit of establishing information. Oskar [Eustis, Artistic Director of The Public Theater] talked a little bit about it on the panel today. What this festival is now grew out of when I was the Director of Public Programs for the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, and he was the Artistic Director of Trinity Rep. We were introduced by a funder named Sam Miller who was the Executive Director of the New England Foundation for the Arts at the time. Oskar and I had a conversation that turned into a collaboration. The Pequot Museum had an interest in supporting the voices of Native writers, and particularly because I come out of play development, specifically out of Native play development, that part of that the Pequot’s writer’s series was about supporting playwrights. Oskar and I found a place where the tribe could support writers, and he could…Trinity was primarily about producing, about putting work up. They were a resident company, and what grew out of that work were a few festivals and two full productions.

Then, around the same time, within a year of each other, he came to the Shakespeare Festival [The Public Theater], and I came to the Ford Foundation, and I’m in a completely different role now. I work for the Ford Foundation, and they are the funder. I don’t direct nor am I an artistic participant or a curatorial participant. But as a funder, I’m in the role encouraging specific interventions, and my work at the Ford Foundation is specifically on strengthening the field of Native American arts and culture.

One of the ways my work at Ford has done this is through building philanthropy, getting stronger philanthropic infrastructure to support it, and the other way is through an initiative called Advancing the Dialogue on Native American Arts and Culture. I noticed what I keep going back to in these sessions is reminding folks that the core of this funding from the Ford Foundation is for advancing discourse, of getting people’s minds in a different place, of having a way that isn’t just preaching to the choir. Folks aren’t separated from each other and just bearing the burden of doing Native drama all the time, but kind of coming together and hearing the different voices and hearing how we can do this together. What are our specific needs and what are the needs that carry over to other communities? So that’s where it comes from as far as my work for the Ford Foundation. It’s as much about the relationship that Oskar and I had, the great respect and artistic friendship at Trinity. If he had gone to a very different kind of theater it would not have worked. But the idea that the Public Theater is about the public sphere, the cross-pollination of plays, and for all the things that it means to be the Public and what he is trying to do here, it really made sense that Oskar and the Public be one of the sites of really trying to work on strengthening Native arts and culture. I believe in a multi-level approach. I’m funding folks that are in university settings, that are only targeting reservation communities, and folks that are working cross-culturally, and also mainstream organizations like the Public Theater that want to create alliances.

Tom: In terms of really fostering a discourse, it’s been hugely successful. And I’m wondering if you’ve seen any overarching themes or issues that have began to emerge over the course of the festival that seem to give it a larger thematic, as opposed to last year. Or maybe there are so many different concerns that one does not isolate itself?

Betsy: I don’t think it’s so much about any one theme as it is about un-sticking the discourse. A lot of producing organizations or service organizations don’t even go there. I think what it allowed was for folks to say the stuff of why producing Native theater is not happening enough. Why do we have the first peoples of this country and of this continent not having their work produced? Or even at any table? Any conversation? Why? There must be something that is not working.

Tom: Issues of invisibility?

Betsy: Or, there are other things. That the table isn’t set up the right way maybe, or that the questions are the wrong questions… so that the participants, or the hosts of the table don’t necessarily… Just like country to country, if diplomats have no clue of what they are dealing with, then diplomacy is not going to be effective. And you know, what I’m most excited by is when the conversation moves beyond getting seats at the table and onto creating a new table. How do your differing audiences and differing producers and directors, all different publics, go to an indigenous table, but also how is a whole new table created? You know. Is that possible?

Tom: One thing I’ve been hearing is that it’s the language issue. And not an English versus a Native language or Italian or French but the rhetoric…

Betsy: … how we talk about things…

Tom: How we talk about things has to be different. We have to go to things on different terms and learn a new language and talk abut things differently. Even for something as simple as when we were talking in the panel about “at-risk teens,” and deciding we’re not going to call them that. We are going to call them “youth with potential,” you know, just having that shift of language.

Betsy: Also, one of the things that really excited me about some of the conversations is when people were there just having the depth and breadth of experiencing all the Native people that were present, and beyond that, having an engagement between someone like Suzan-Lori Parks [Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Master Writer Chair for the Public] and Dianne Yeahquo Reyner [playwright and founder of American Indian Repertory Theater and Thunderbird Theater], I mean, of having somebody coming through an African-American experience, who’s been both marginalized and successful, and to feel what that trajectory feels like, and have folks come together and say, “this is the part that’s just about being an artist and making choices as a person. This is the part that’s really specifically about what you’re going through, or maybe it’s not exactly the same, but here’s something that I learned and can share with you about trying to navigate this territory, or a way to re-imagine this territory.” That was really exciting, and I hope more of that happens. That’s the whole kind of cross-pollination thing that’s so exciting about the Public. I loved it, and I think Oskar likes that kind of mixing it up too.