A Conversaton with Sheila Tousey, Liz Frankel & Kate Josephson

Putting It All Together:
A Conversation with Sheila Tousey, Liz Frankel, and Kate Josephson
by Tom Pearson

Working under Artistic Director Oskar Eustis and Associate Artistic Director Mandy Hackett, Liz Frankel (Literary Associate) and Kate Josephson (Native Theater Festival Associate) with the advisement of Sheila Tousey (Native Theater Festival Consultant) were responsible for the nuts and bolts of the festival planning. Together they reached out to Native theater community members to really assemble what we all experienced during the frantically paced, three-day intensive. I sat down with Liz, Kate, and Sheila to find out how they approached this task, what their roles were in shaping the festival, and how this year’s event grew out of what they learned from working together on the festival last year.

Tom: You all have a very special relationship in the context of this festival, working together last year and this year, Sheila as an advisor, and Liz and Kate, really putting it all together. How does this year compare with last year’s experience? What informed your decisions and process this year?

Liz: I think the one word that comes to mind in comparing this year to last year, in terms of what we’ve done, is the word “more.” In terms of the field discussions, there literally are more, and our list of people that we know and that we are inviting is larger. And because we actively tried to grow the list as wide as we could, we asked every Advisory Committee Member, “Who should we know? Who should we add to our list? Who do you think we don’t know?” And then we tried to spread the word as widely as possible by sending it to our list and asking people to spread the word, and obviously the result is that there are more people here. Also, the result is that we know more people now, which has been the real pleasure of this is, that we’ve met so many more people personally and institutionally since we started work on this second festival, and the amount of people that we brought into the Public, or that haven't come yet but still know what we're doing, it's so many more than it was about six months before the first festival. And of course the "more" has kept us busy."

Tom: Has your staff, your support system grown to support that or have you just taken more on yourself?

Liz: I think the biggest addition to the internal planning process is that now Kate is our Native Theater Festival Associate, because this time last year she was a Literary Intern and was involved in planning the festival from that perspective and was involved in all the field discussions. Now she’s our Festival Associate, so the whole focus of her job here is to help organize the festival, and we still have a literary intern, so the staff has clearly grown. It’s just that Kate’s role has shifted, and Kate has been invaluable in organizing this festival and really the one reaching out to people individually with phone calls and emails.

Kate: First of all, I feel very privileged to be a part of this festival and have the opportunity to reach out to everyone individually, which has made it much more personal for me. People aren’t just names. I’ve spoken to them. Also the Advisory Committee, I had the opportunity to sit with this tight-knit committee, and this year I just treasure them more. I’m listening much more this year.

Tom: [to Sheila] When you began this process, in your role as advisor, what was your first nugget of advice?

Sheila: To these guys?

Tom: Yes.

Sheila: Listen to me dammit [laughing] no, no. I mean these guys know what they are doing. I didn’t have to say anything, in fact. I just help them with names and maybe reaching out to people, and I know a lot of these people that are here, and they just continued that expansion of reaching to people and including people, inviting them to come in to the festival. I think we work really well. We are dependent upon one another. I mean, I’m a big slacker, and these guys are like the opposite.

Kate: [laughing] That’s not true.

Sheila: They’re just so great at what they do, and I offer whatever I can and these guys just take the ball and run with it.

Liz: I think you’re underestimating what you do, Sheila. I think it’s a given that the Public Theater is capable of producing a festival, producing a show, organizing a mailing list and e-blast, of course. And, of course anyone who works here can do all of these things, but the Native Theater Festival is all about your contribution of helping us find the work, helping us meet the people we need to meet, helping make those connections. I think that invaluable. It’s not like we could’ve just figured this out without you. We couldn’t have. You know, and even some people that we’ve met that we’ve talked to possibly more than you at this point, it all springs from connections that you’ve helped us make, with the directive of “call so and so” and “so and so says yes, you should talk to this person.” There are a lot of individual relationships at various levels and at different stages, and some people, most of them, have known you for years. It all stems from working with Sheila, because it’s obvious it would be insane for an institution to try and have a Native Theater Festival without a Native person deeply involved in the organizing of it.

Tom: I know that each production, any festival, any event, that an organization produces can become its own organism and have its own internal logic sometimes. In a festival of this kind, did you find that there were different protocols that you needed to learn, or is there a different approach you had to take with this festival?

Liz: I think that what we’re learning is that we need to. Because I think it’s obviously easy to think that we are going to have a reading series. We’ve had one in the past. We have New Work Now!, so this will be a variation on our annual New Work Now! reading series. In terms of questions like, “When does rehearsal start?” and ”Let’s make a contact sheet”, there are a lot of similarities, But I think it’s been really interesting in learning, well, if you are going to have a Native Theater Festival, and you’re bringing in all these people, then you should start with a prayer, which we did do this year. We didn’t do that last year… and, hearing other people say we could take that further with having more prayers or one person in our Advisory Committee saying this morning that we could have smudging every day or that we could end with a closing song of some kind. I think it’s been really a huge learning process. How do we adapt or change or even throw what we normally do out the window because there’s a new context to bring to the standard festival model? So, I think we are very much still learning about that. I think that the prayer we had this year and didn’t last year is an example of one small step. I imagine that will be taken even further as we plan more events.

Tom: [to Sheila] Do you have any thoughts on that as well?

Sheila: We have an Advisory Committee, and we’re getting really great feedback, both pro and con, and I think that that’s a great thing. You know people sort of assume that there’s going to be all kinds of ceremonies going on. That doesn’t happen. I mean not everyone’s life, not everything you do is a ceremony, but I think if it’s something that, and I think that this is what The Public is trying to do, is they are trying to reach out to garner ideas from the Advisory Committee. What do they feel? And we have a lot of communities/artists, community activists/artists, and they are very connected that way, and that’s the way they like to work. I think that they bring something very valuable by saying, “You know, we find this very helpful.” So I think it’s good. That’s why they’re there, the committee is there.

Tom: I think it would be really interesting for people who have been participating in this festival to hear what some of the challenges of putting the festival together were from your perspective, a little about your process. When did you start planning for this year? When did you start laying the groundwork for the festival?

Liz: After last year’s festival ended, we sent out surveys to the Advisory Committee asking for their feedback, including thoughts on what the next year could be. In terms of really going into full-on planning mode, that was in May. We basically started, we were hoping to finalize our season here at The Public so we could know, “well this is when that shows in that theater” and “this is when that show is in that theater, therefore this one week will be free in the middle for the festival.” So, had that happened earlier in the year, we probably would’ve started earlier, but basically you can’t start to tell someone when it is or ask artists when they are available until you know those things. So we started in May, and that’s when Kate came on and we started doing the weekly calls, the three of us, and we sent out our call for submissions and created an e-blast saying “save the date” and telling everyone we knew and started building up our mailing list, and then reading the scripts as they started to come in.

Tom: You were the ones brokering these connections, in terms of matching playwrights with directors and looking at the artists and actors you would bring in. Can you tell us what that process was like and how you made some of your choices?

Sheila: I think the Public is great in that it’s the playwright that they support in any way that they can. A playwright might say, “Geez, I absolutely love this one director. Is it possible that I can work with that director?” Or someone is, as in the case with Eric Gansworth who’s just written his first play, is not familiar with all the directors that are around and the Public, I think, suggested some directors that might be good for the particular kind of play that he has written. And, I think in terms of actors, they have a great casting office here and know a lot of people, and I know a lot of people. I’ve worked with a lot of people, and sometimes, just logistics like maybe someone doesn’t have an agent or they’re traveling or they’re around, I saw that person last December and I have his phone number. Let me give you that number. Just call him. I think that was sort of the easy part I think, don’t you think?

Kate: Casting also. I have to give a shout out to, I know they’re not here, but Jordan [Thaler], and Heidi [Griffiths], and Amber [Wakefield, of The Public’s Casting Office] have been working so hard at trying to target the Native community and in the case of the Hawaiian play [The Conversion of Ka Ahumanu], working so hard at looking for Hawaiian actors.

Sheila: I guess it wasn’t that easy, sorry. [laughing]

Kate: [laughing] It was looking through a talent pool and hoping that people are available.

Liz: I think also the casting office has worked much harder on this than they would’ve done for readings in the model of New Work Now!, our reading series that we do here. They wanted to make sure that we were casting Native actors for Native roles, which was a huge learning curve. In talking with writers and directors, they would often hear about people they didn’t know, or they hadn’t met, in other cities, who possibly had never worked in New York. One thing Jordan was saying two days ago was that he has worked here for thirty years and often does more teaching than learning, and he was saying that in casting this festival he was learning, which had been a pleasure because he’s learned how to find Native actors, native Hawaiian actors, and sort of how to find out who these actors were. And even last year, when he knew he’d have to cast a number of readings for the festival, they did an open call for Native actors so they could meet a lot of the talent quickly, which is not at all standard practice for a reading here. So it’s been a huge education for them and for all of us.

Tom: I had an opportunity to talk with Eric Gansworth and also with Leigh Silverman on the first day of the festival, and Leigh talked about the “Egad!” moment when you have a script and you have such a clear logical connection, like having Leigh direct Eric’s work. Were there moments of that, where there was a really clear, dramatic flash of blinding light where it’s like, “Yes, this person and this person?”

Liz: I thought watching the reading of Victoria [Kneubuhl]’s play [The Conversion of Ka’ahumanu] that we were right in reaching out to Marie Clements for that because it was one of the most beautifully directed readings I’ve ever seen. Marie’s work is so visual that it would make sense that she would be able to beautifully direct a reading, and I think her being involved in that really enhanced the project. The thought of having the stage directions reader write with chalk on the floor, or instead of just having the words said in English or in Hawaiian, having them translated by the person reading the stage directions. You know, it was just beautifully, beautifully staged which really helped bring out the play. I mean, I thought Marie was a good choice when the idea first came up, but then watching, I realized that was a really great fit, and hopefully they’ll be interested in working together again.

Tom: There was a strong response after that night too. A lot of people said that they walked out feeling that they forgot they were at a reading. They felt that they got a full production. It felt so rich in that way. [Pause] I also wanted to ask you if there is anything you want folks to know, anything about your process and involvement and work together on this?

Sheila: I have to say this to a man of letters, these guys [Liz and Kate] did an unbelievable amount of work. I just, every time I’d like hear from them or we’d talk, I was just impressed by how they pulled this thing together.

Liz: And Sheila was right there with us. I mean this is our job, but Shelia is doing a million other things while doing this too, which is her job, but not like… I was very much impressed by how much Sheila did fit in while directing a play and doing many other things. And I would also like to thank Sheila for getting a cell phone this year [laughter]. That’s a huge contribution and a plus from last year. And I had one follow-up thought actually, and I’m just saying this because I think I can’t possibly say it enough, which is basically that even though we did this festival and we had a call for scripts, I think we made it clear it’s not the end of our interest in Native work, but I also send this message to anyone who will listen: Send us more scripts, Native writers, or any talented writers, but especially talented Native writers, because I would not want someone to wait for the next call for scripts, which we’ll do. There’s no reason not to have another official for call for scripts, but I hope that we get to keep reading Native work between now and whenever we set the dates for our next festival. We should be reading Native work all year long, and we’ll be pushing to do that, to integrate it into our programming and find ways to do more.