Immigrant Imaginations 2

 

[As a continuation of the examination of how official U.S. immigration policy directly affects the arts, and theater in particular, I’m posting a second article from the “Immigrant Imaginations” issue of American Theatre.  This piece deals specifically with the vicissitudes of visas for visiting artists and troupes.  As you’ll read, the repercussions of this system effect not only the artists who want to come here to show their work, but the host companies that invite them, and how the vagaries built into the system can throw off a festival or a whole theater’s season,] 

“EXTREME VETTING AND EXTRAORDINARY ABILITY”
by Miriam Felton-Dansky

[This report ran in American Theatre, volume 41, issue 4 (Summer 2025). It was also posted on the AT website on 22 July 2025.]

The politics of international artist visas have never run smooth,
but they’ve become increasingly bumpy in a changing U.S.

Last year, before curator Elena Siyanko left her post as executive and artistic director of PS21 [“center for contemporary performance” in Chatham, New York], she programmed Hatched Ensemble, a piece by a South African dance group led by Mamela Nyamza [b. 1976, Cape Town, South Africa], to play the Hudson Valley venue this past spring. This year, in her new role directing a New York-based festival called “Down to Earth” [29 August-7 September 2025], she’s booked the Senegalese circus troupe SenCirk. International exchange is central to Siyanko’s curatorial mission. Yet, when she spoke for this article, she was unsure whether either ensemble would safely arrive in the U.S. Even if visa petitions and consular interviews were to go smoothly, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol could prevent them from entering the country. “I am terrified by what may happen,” she told American Theatre. (Crisis averted in both cases: Hatched Ensemble went up without incident, and SenCirk members all got visas in time for two outdoor appearances at Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park on Sept. 5, and two at LaGuardia Community College Performing Arts Center in Queens on Sept 3.)

Since President Trump’s second inauguration, international travel to the U.S. has become distinctly more dangerous. In an era of international student visa revocations, unlawful renditions of legal U.S. residents, a sweeping new travel ban, and terrifying uncertainty as ICE [United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement] ramps up detention and deportation actions, the U.S. and global artistic community has not been spared scrutiny and stress.

In January, lawyer Matthew Covey [b. ca. 1968], executive director of the nonprofit Tamizdat, which advocates for international artistic mobility and cultural exchange, emailed the organization’s constituents with an update about the potential impacts of Trump’s litany of executive orders. One of these, Covey wrote—with the title “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats”—was, in his words, “the one to watch.” Its broad application could lead to discrimination based on artistic expression as well as country of origin, for “visa applicants—especially those from Global Majority nations [a collective term for people of African, Asian, Indigenous, Latin American, and mixed-heritage backgrounds, who constitute the majority of the world’s population].”

[The link embedded above in the name Tamizdat leads to the organization’s website. It explains the organization’s mission and purpose, recounts its origin, and discusses its works. If, however, you click on “about” at the top or bottom of the page, you will also find an explanation of the organization’s name, about which I was curious. (It’s related to the Russian portmanteau word samizdat, if any reader remembers that from the Soviet days. The Tamizdat site explains that, too.)]

The U.S. performing arts face a range of dangerous unknowns, and for anyone concerned about the fate of international cultural exchange, the current state of the visa system sits at the heart of them. The problems, though newly dire, spring from a system that has long been unfriendly to international artists, particularly artists from the Global South [a broad, non-geographical term referring to countries, mostly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, that are often characterized by lower-income status, a shared history of colonialism, and current socio-economic challenges]. For many presenters and artists, the U.S. was already unpredictable and hostile terrain, characterized by unpredictable geopolitics, American prejudices, and enervating bureaucracy, even before the current administration took office.

Many presenters told American Theatre that this puts the U.S. out of step with the international community. In Canada, international performers must apply for an inexpensive entry visa, often with no additional work permit; in the U.K., visa requirements are conveyed in “plain English” so that applicants don’t need legal teams to parse them. Such distinctions hardly apply only in Anglophone countries. Producer Thomas O. Kriegsmann [b. ca. 1975] of ArKtype, which produces the recently reconfigured Under the Radar Festival, said that in touring choreographer nora chipaumire’s [b. 1965] ensemble to Brazil, he encountered little of the red tape and the expenses he’s seen in over two decades of working with the U.S. visa system.

The challenges apply to artists across the U.S., whether they’re attempting to navigate a long-term career or a short touring engagement. Individual artists have long navigated a costly, confusing, and prejudicial system here, even if they arrive on student visas and work steadily after graduation. Presenters at major organizations suggest that the American immigration system, while generally expensive and opaque, places particular burdens on artists from the Global South, especially those from Africa and the Middle East.

“It’s Islamophobia, it’s racism,” said Siyanko, who led PS21 from 2019 to 2025. Doreen Sayegh [b. 1988] of Pemberley Productions, which has managed major North American tours, from the immersive theatre piece The Jungle [created by Joe Murphy (b. ca. 1991) and Joe Robertson (b. ca. 1990) in 2017] to choreographer Matthew Bourne’s [b. 1960] Romeo and Juliet (ballet, débuted 2019), echoed the sentiment. “We do work harder around petitions where we have artists from certain countries,” she said, naming the Global South and the Middle East.

[Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, known as “The Two Joes,” were also the creators of Little Amal, the giant puppet character of The Walk in 2021. Little Amal was conceived as a character in The Jungle, and I blogged on her and The Walk on 7 October 2022.]

“We know the level of evidence is more than we would need for artists coming from the U.K., for example,” Kriegsmann concurred. Obstacles to artist mobility, he said, stem from a “lack of predictability” around how the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) processing center “is going to receive an application and what materials are going to satisfy their investigation. And of course, that varies wildly between white and Global Majority countries.”

For some presenters, these political pressures date back to changes in U.S. immigration policies post-Sept. 11. “It’s an ebb and flow,” said Lori N. Jones, director of programming and operations at Fairfield University’s Quick Center for the Arts [Fairfield, Connecticut], “and it tends to run in alignment with our government at the time.” 

Others point to more recent changes, noting that policies set during Trump’s first administration lingered, even if unofficially, into the Biden years. Kriegsmann recounted that in the 2025 Under the Radar Festival [4-24 January 2025], the January production of Iranian playwright Amir Reza Koohestani’s [b. 1978] Blind Runner [created 2023; at St. Ann’s Warehouse, 8-24 January 2025]—which included an Iranian cast and production team—encountered heightened scrutiny because the U.S. held outdated information about ensemble members’ military service in Iran. Eventually the company landed safely in New York, but without their stage manager.

This intense, country-specific vetting was expanded by the first Trump administration, the most infamous example of which was Trump’s 2017 ban on U.S. entry for residents of seven Muslim-majority countries (recently expanded to include a dozen more countries in the Global South). For Kriegsmann, the restrictions got to the point that “all of a sudden, we weren’t even able to consider artists from certain countries. That was unprecedented.”

[On 27 January 2017, Trump signed Executive Order 13769 banning entry to the U.S. by residents of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Legal challenges were instituted and succeeded, and Trump superseded the ban with revised orders to include additional countries with full or partial bans, which were also challenged in court. Ultimately, the Supreme Court affirmed the orders, which remained in effect until President Joe Biden issued a proclamation revoking the Trump travel bans on 20 January 2021.

[On 20 January 2025, newly reelected Trump signed Executive Order 14161 restricting entry to the U.S. from Afghanistan, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen, as well as partially restricting entry from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela. As of late August 2025, there are legal challenges pending against the implementation and enforcement of EO 14161, but none has curtailed its being enforced.]

These issues persisted even after Trump left office in 2021. Jay Wegman [b. 1964], executive director of NYU-Skirball, recalled that when Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen [b. 1980] brought a dance ensemble in March 2024, one Iranian-born ensemble member, despite holding a European passport, was denied entry to the U.S. while other company members were allowed through.

Last May, seeing widespread problems like these, Tamizdat submitted a public comment to the State Department protesting continued use of an intrusive questionnaire they described as “extreme vetting.” The questionnaire, Tamizdat wrote, “is predominantly used by non-immigrant visa units at U.S. consulates in Africa and the Middle East, where its use rarely correlates to legitimate security concerns. . . [.] The questions requiring applicants to provide all social media handles, phone numbers, and email addresses used during the last five years chill free speech.”

Global Politics and the Visa Pipeline

This “extreme vetting” form is just one of many types of evidence international artists must provide to enter the U.S.—evidence that ranges from proof that they don’t plan to overstay temporary visas to proof that their work is widely lauded or culturally unique. Current visa classifications, established in the Immigration Act of 1990, are not all created equal. There’s the O-1 [see “Immigrant Imaginations 1” (28 August 2025)], for artists of so-called “extraordinary ability”—a phrase so memorable it has inspired at least two plays, Saviana Stanescu’s [b. 1967; Bucharest, Romania] 2008 Aliens with Extraordinary Skills [premièred off-Broadway at the Julia Miles Theater (WP Theater, formerly the Women’s Project) on 22 September 2008] and Chloé Hung’s [b. ca. 1991] Alien of Extraordinary Ability [workshopped  at the Geffen Playhouse, Los Angeles, 2020], which had a reading at Playwrights’ Center in March. To obtain an O-1 visa (for individuals) or a P-1B (for groups [members of entertainment groups that are internationally recognized]), artists or their presenters must submit dossiers of reviews, awards, and other forms of recognition that will be legible to a USCIS employee unlikely to have a background in the performing arts.

Then there are P-3 visas for artistic groups showing “culturally unique” work. According to immigration lawyer Jonathan Ginsburg [b. 1951], who negotiated the implementation of the O and P visa system in the early 1990s, the P-3 created better access for artists without high-profile English-language press. “That was designed to ensure that we had broader cultural flows of art into the U.S., not just from Western Europe,” Ginsburg said.

Yet the designation “culturally unique” can be even more subjective than “extraordinary ability.” Case in point: In 2009, the USCIS’s Administrative Appeals Office (AAO) rejected an application by L.A.’s Skirball Cultural Center to bring the klezmer-Latin fusion band Orquesta Kef from Argentina, claiming that “fusion” was not considered “culturally unique.” Though their denial was reversed a month later, the performance was not rescheduled. In 2012, the USCIS and DHS [Department of Homeland Security] Administrative Appeals Office issued a new binding precedent decision addressing the term “culturally unique” and its significance in the adjudication of petitions for performing artists—good news, but a bit too late for that performing arts season.

Organized labor, too, has long played a role in the USCIS visa process. As far back as the early 1990s, Ginsburg represented the arts community in negotiations with unions seeking to limit visas as a means of protecting American jobs. Artists or their petitioners must typically conduct a “labor consultation” and obtain a letter from the relevant union (often Actors’ Equity) declaring non-objection to the artists’ appearance in the States. While the website “Artists from Abroad,” a commonly used resource guide for international artists, states that AEA charges $250 for such letters, Equity spokesperson David Levy [b. ca. 1978] told American Theatre that letters have been provided free of charge since at least 2017. Ralph Sevush [b. ca. 1962], attorney and Dramatists’ Guild executive director of business affairs, confirmed that the Guild considers O-1 applicants’ requests for non-objection letters, but declined to comment further on the process.

State Department data reflect enormous variations in results for artistic petitioners from countries in the Global South and Global North. In fiscal year 2023, the U.S. granted 2,747 O-1 visas to petitioners from Great Britain and Northern Ireland and 848 to those from France, while granting—for instance—just 139 O-1 visas to petitioners from Nigeria, eight to petitioners from Iraq, and two to petitioners from Syria.

[“Global North” is not a geographic term but a concept referring to wealthy, economically powerful countries, primarily in North America and Europe, along with others like Australia, Japan, and South Korea, which dominate global wealth and control manufacturing.]

These numbers don’t tell the whole story. For one thing, publicly available State Department data do not include refusal rates by country: We know that two Syrian petitions were granted, but not how many artists from Syria were invited by U.S.-based presenters to apply.

Even that number, though, would hide as much as it reveals. Since even the most globally ambitious presenters take shifting international dynamics into account when planning their seasons, anxiety about securing travel for artists from the Global South and Middle East can inhibit those invitations in the first place. Wegman admitted that he thinks twice before inviting artists from “any of those countries that were on Trump’s ‘Muslim no-fly list.’ Look at the way he’s involved himself at the Kennedy Center—it does play into my head,” he said. “There’s a very interesting company from Bolivia. Is it worth the trouble of bringing them, not knowing what the political impression of that country is going to be in a year?”

Big-picture electoral politics and financial forecasts can also play roles in which artists make it to U.S. stages. In previous decades, multiple presenters said, it was common to seek assistance from congressional reps when the visa process stalled at USCIS or in consular offices. Now that support is less forthcoming and less powerful, they say. Last year, when Jones sought to bring a Senegalese ensemble to perform at the Quick and struggled to book embassy interviews for the company members, Connecticut’s elected officials had limited capacity to help. “What once felt like an empowered opportunity for them to support what we wanted to accomplish, international exchange,” she said, has diminished in recent years. “It feels like their hands have been tied.”

Such assistance is called for because of the U.S.’s frequently opaque, highly expensive visa system. USCIS raises fees regularly, and the system’s complicated requirements compel many organizations to hire lawyers to put together their visa petitions, putting small nonprofits and individuals at a financial disadvantage. Wegman estimated that NYU-Skirball spends $10,000 on visa-related expenses for each international production they present. In 2024, a rate hike made increases ranging from $50 to over $500 a pop, depending on visa type, and extended response times for “premium processing”—often the only way to ensure petitions are reviewed in time for performance dates. Premium is exponentially pricier than standard processing, making it, Sayegh said, “a very high financial burden for having a diverse range of artists from less affluent countries.”

That’s not the only way money talks. As Sayegh pointed out, new tariff policies may affect artists from different countries in different and unequal ways, dependent on each country’s trade agreement with the U.S. Here too, money—or lack thereof—might determine the kinds of work that presenters invite in the first place, another indirect constraint on freedom of artistic expression.

Free speech constraints can emerge indirectly too. Kriegsmann noted that decreased funding for the arts can prompt an institution like Under the Radar to seek out private and corporate funds. With Trump’s executive orders prohibiting DEI and so-called “gender ideology,” corporations may be less willing to support challenging and subversive art, creating de facto limits on which art finds a platform. He added: “We’re not going to stop, but moving forward with challenging voices or artists that are voices of dissent, or thought that is adverse to conservative thinking, could potentially end the life of the festival.”

Facing the System Alone 

Meanwhile, artists who come to the U.S. to stay long-term face additional hurdles, ones not always understood by their American theatre colleagues and employers, which, like the obstacles touring artists encounter, often reflect U.S. positioning in the world at large. Argentine playwright Francisco Mendoza [see “Immigrant Imaginations 1”], who has been working in the U.S. for years, noted that immigrant artists face daily questions to which U.S. citizens and permanent residents may not be attuned.

“When I was on temporary visas, I often found myself being asked to take responsibility for the future,” Mendoza said. “Looking for jobs on my OPT or O-1, prospective employers would ask me: ‘What happens when your visa expires?’ I don’t know! I don’t know the future. I know that I’ll try my hardest to get a new visa; I know if I get this job, it will make that process easier. Would you ask any other candidates to guarantee you that they will never have to leave the job? Would you single any of them out for anything that could potentially impact their ability to stay? No, because it would be discrimination.”

[OPT refers to Optional Practical Training, a program for international students in the U.S. under an F-1 visa, a non-immigrant visa that allows foreign nationals to enter the United States as full-time students at academic institutions. It’s a form of temporary work authorization for F-1 visa students to gain practical experience directly related to their major area of study. Students must apply for OPT through USCIS.]

Immigrant artists are often asked to fight bureaucratic battles that can become deeply personal. Director Hamid Dehghani [Iranian; b. 1984] explained that, after receiving an MFA in directing from Northwestern University [Evanston, Illinois, a Chicago suburb], he navigated a seemingly endless series of hurdles to continue directing in Chicago: years of requesting letters of support and advance contracts to prove he had U.S.-based work and accepting underpaid jobs to prove he was in demand. “It’s something that becomes part of your identity, this visa,” he said.

Even if Equity letters are free of charge for artists touring to the U.S., the union has posed other hurdles to immigrant artists, such as those faced by Canadian actor Jessica Wu. After graduating from NYU with a degree in musical theatre, Wu embarked on a successful acting career that included appearances on Broadway and at the Kennedy Center—yet each time she received a job offer, Equity informed her that, despite holding a legal O-1 visa to work in the U.S., union bylaws prevented her from accepting Equity roles.

“I’m legally allowed to work these jobs,” Wu said, so “why is the union I’ve been paying into trying to tell me I can’t take these hard-earned jobs?” In 2021, following years of research and advocacy, Wu ran as a delegate to the AEA’s national convention, where she proposed a successful resolution to eliminate AEA policy language limiting participation by members who are not citizens or permanent residents.

Wu’s friends and colleagues were overjoyed at the news. “I’m AAPI [Asian American and Pacific Islanders], and because of the nature of a lot of the shows I did, I had a lot of friends who are from different countries, a lot on artist visas, who would go to an audition, get hired by casting just like anybody else, and then receive communications from the union saying: You can’t do it,” she said. A rejection like this can be terrifying. “If a union is telling you you’re not allowed to do this, there’s that threat of deportation always. It ended up forcing a lot of really amazing talented people out, denying them further career advancement, and putting an end to any intentions of immigration.”

All the presenters, producers, and artists who spoke to American Theatre agreed that the U.S. system is confusing, expensive, and dangerous. The confusion is no accident, said Mendoza.

“I think Americans often feel justified in discriminating against immigrants, or at least don’t feel compelled to stand up for us, because there’s this underlying assumption that no one forced us to be here—that there’s nothing inherently wrong with putting Americans first,” he said. “With which I would agree—except, of course, that America is the so-called ‘leader of the free world’ and puts itself first throughout the entire world. Immigrants often come here from countries whose political and economic systems have been manipulated and destabilized by American foreign policy. We are here precisely because America puts itself first.”

In putting “America first,” though, Siyanko reflected, the U.S. downplays the value of culture as a form of diplomacy or even soft power, the way many other countries do. The U.S. once did so as well: Think of the U.S.-sponsored Cold War-era tours by Alvin Ailey [1931-89; American dancer, director, choreographer, and activist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater] or exhibitions of Jackson Pollock [1912-56; American painter; major figure in the abstract expressionist movement; renowned for his “drip technique” of pouring or splashing paint onto a horizontal surface]; this was America attempting to demonstrate its democratic ideals by showcasing a Black choreographer’s dances and abstract artists’ freedom of expression abroad.

Stakes are high and implications are uncertain everywhere. While Siyanko worries for SenCirk, director Andrew Schneider [b. 1981] (best known for YOUARENOWHERE [see “‘Design & Tech: The Magic Of Design,’ Introduction & Article 1” (9 September 2021)] and the trilogy of mind-bending, tech-heavy works that followed it) said that he’s scheduled to perform a world-premiere commission at Jacob’s Pillow [the world premiere of HERE, 16-20 July 2025] this summer with two international collaborators whose travel to the U.S. could be denied at any point.

What can the American theatre community do? A baseline would be for American artists and producers to educate themselves about U.S. visa regulations so that immigrant artists don’t have to bear the burden of briefing every potential employer they meet. “We might not be powerful enough to change the visa system,” said Dehghani, “but for our American theatre co-workers to know what we are struggling with is so helpful.”

More broadly, standing up for artist visas means standing up for the art form itself. Said Sayegh, “Every artist that we are advocating for, we are starting with not just why this piece, why this artist is important, but why theatre is important.” 

Kriegsmann agreed, saying, “I truly believe the answer lies in being louder and more challenging. We have to prove the distinction of what the performing arts alone can do, we have to be brave about what the response is going to be—and we have to act collectively.”

[Miriam Felton-Dansky (she/her) is a theatre critic based at Bard College.]

Immigrant Imaginations 1

 

[Immigrants and immigration has become a top-of-mind subject in recent years, especially so at this moment in time.  When I saw that the Theatre Communications Group’s quarterly magazine American Theatre entitled its Summer 2025 issue “Immigrant Imaginations,” I thought it would be useful and interesting to repost some of the articles on the topic on my blog. 

[The first one that struck me is a conversation among six playwrights working in the U.S. whose origins are all beyond our borders.  In the published discussion, the writers touch on several aspects of their work that have been affected by their change of venue, so to speak.  Some of that has to do with culture, some with language, and some, I was curious to read, has to do with time.  I won’t try to explain that last one; I’ll let you read it for yourself.

[The article ran in volume 41, issue 4 (Summer 2025), of AT.  It was also posted on the journal’s website on 29 July 2025.] 

“HERE, THERE, AND EVERYWHERE:
AN IMMIGRANT THEATREMAKERS ROUNDTABLE”

by Lyndsey Bourne 

Immigrant theatremakers working in the U.S. reflect on what they write 
and who they’re writing for.

“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.”

That’s an Agnès Varda quote I love. I think about it often. These past few months, I’ve been thinking about landscape and place, and how they are present in a play. How, for example, Cuba feels so present in María Irene Fornés’s work.

[Agnès Varda (1928-2019) was a Belgian-born French film director, screenwriter, and photographer. The quotation is from her 2008 autobiographical documentary film The Beaches of Agnès (Les plages d'Agnès; Ciné-tamaris and Arte France Cinéma; distributed by Les Films du Losange).

[María Irene Fornés (1930-2018) was a Cuban-American playwright, theater director, and teacher who worked in Off-Broadway and experimental theater venues in the last four decades of the twentieth century. See a report on Fornés’s play Drowning in “Signature Plays” (3 June 2016).]  

I’m a playwright, a Canadian with an O-1 visa. I’ve been living in New York for nearly 15 years. Even when the plays I write are set in the U.S., somehow I’m always writing Canada.

[According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency within the Department of Homeland Security that administers lawful immigration and naturalization, the O-1 visa is for the nonimmigrant individual

who possesses extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics, or who has a demonstrated record of extraordinary achievement in the motion picture or television industry and have been recognized nationally or internationally for those achievements.

[There are two classifications of O-1 visas; the applicable one for this discussion is the second one (O-1B):

O-1A: individuals with an extraordinary ability in the sciences, education, business, or athletics (not including the arts, motion pictures or television industry)

O-1B: individuals with an extraordinary ability in the arts, or extraordinary achievement in motion picture or television industry

[There are also special visa classifications for those accompanying O-1 visa holders.  See the USCIS website for details.]

In early April over Zoom, I spoke with a group of international playwrights all living and making theatre in the U.S., writing stories and landscapes between places: Bazeed [aka: Mariam Bazeed; born ca. 1976 in Kuwait; relocated with their family to Eqypt during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990], an Egyptian playwright, poet, performer, and multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn; Francisco Mendoza, a playwright who was born in Argentina and partly raised in Brazil before moving to the U.S. a decade ago, now also based in Brooklyn; Stefani Kuo [b. 1995], a playwright and actor raised in both Hong Kong and Taiwan now based in New York City; Khristián Méndez Aguirre, a director and playwright from Guatemala now based in New York City and Austin; and Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke [b. ca. 1988 in Helsinki, Finland], a playwright and director (and sometimes actor) from Sri Lanka now based in New York City.

Together, we reflected on the ways our immigration status, cultural distance, and shifting audiences shape our work. It’s a precarious thing to be an immigrant artist—a tension too often made invisible. For immigrant and diasporic theatremakers working in the U.S., writing is often shaped not only by personal or political urgency, but by the realities of bureaucracy, translation, and institutional legibility.

Here we gathered to engage in questions of authenticity, audience, representation, and survival, from the politics of language and translation to the very real pressures of visa applications and institutional gatekeeping. We considered how lived experience shapes approaches to our artistry, and how for international artists working in America, storytelling itself becomes a site of both constraint and possibility. What happens when you write about a country you no longer live in? How do time, language, and place intervene in the storytelling?

Below are excerpts from our conversation, edited for concision and clarity.

LYNDSEY BOURNE: I want to start by asking about your writing practice. What is your process like these days? How are you thinking about your plays and where they come from? Who are they for?

FRANCISCO MENDOZA: I came to the U.S. as a student and then I transitioned to an O-1 visa. In some ways, the O-1 did shape the writing, because I was writing plays that were most easily going to lead to the kind of achievements that I needed to show for my visa. Then I got my green card, and my writing has gotten weirder and weirder. The further I walk away from the necessity of achievement, the more the plot doesn’t necessarily make logical sense. I am not as afraid to branch into a way of writing that maybe people won’t understand. And it’s okay if they don’t! I think the safety of not feeling like I have to perform has influenced, not necessarily the kind of stories I’m telling, but definitely how I’m telling them.

ARUN WELANDAWE-PREMATILLEKE: In Sri Lanka, I ran a theatre company [Mind Adventures Theatre Company in Colombo; an associate artistic director, 2011-17], and I worked with the same people from the time I was 18 until I was in my 30s. Moving somewhere else, of course, changes the way you work and what your concerns are. The day I got into NYU was the day everything shut down in the world [in 2020], so my first semester was in Sri Lanka over Zoom. But the writing changed when I was writing for that audience, even from home. At that time, we were heavily under the Mahinda Rajapaksa regime—essentially a dictatorship. My work had always been political, and we had always changed scripts to get through censor boards. I was very used to it, and I always felt like I was saying what I wanted to say. But the moment it had the safety of a different audience, the work changed—I became much more willing to point at the thing and name the thing in a very different way. If anything, I found a kind of political freedom.  

[Mahinda Rajapaksa (b. 1945) served as the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka from 2004 to 2005, then the sixth President of Sri Lanka from 2005 to 2015, and then PM again in 2018 and from 2019 to 2022. He was the Leader of the Opposition from 2002 to 2004 and 2018 to 2019, and the Minister of Finance from 2005 to 2015 and 2019 to 2021.

[When Rajapaksa was forced from office in 2022, he launched what amounted to an attempted coup, but ended up signing a letter of resignation. During his political career, he’s been accused of war crimes during the last years of the Sri Lankan civil war (1983-2009) as well as other criminal accusations including human rights violations during his presidency, corruption, and for instigating violence on anti-government protestors during the failed 2022 coup. As of 2023, he’s been sanctioned by Canada for human rights violations.]

STEFANI KUO: I write a lot about Hong Kong and Taiwan, especially Hong Kong. I remember going through a phase where I was reading about all these theatres and their mission statements, which all have the word “American” or “America” in it. So even if I’m writing about an international thing in Hong Kong, it still has to relate back to America. Sometimes the actors I work with in the U.S., even if they have heritage from where I’m from, don’t understand how to relate to my work, even if they speak the language or understand the culture from their grandparents or parents. That was shocking to me; I thought we were all in the same box. But there’s a gap because of where I grew up versus where they grew up.

That gap really interests me—the shared feeling of “I’m not from here.” It leads to my next question: A lot of the plays getting produced in the U.S. telling stories that represent other countries and other cultures are written by second- or third-generation Americans, who are often writing about the experiences of their own parents or grandparents. There are obvious reasons for this: Bureaucracy, gatekeeping, and systemic barriers make it much harder for immigrant artists to break through. As we’ve been saying, there are also the ways in which we have to tailor our writing to an American audience. Is this something you think about? How is this sitting with you?

KHRISTIÁN MÉNDEZ AGUIRRE: Right now, I’m trying to find Guatemalan actors and a director for a reading I’m doing, and you can imagine what that process is like. The assumption is that I have something in common with someone who is Guatemalan but perhaps grew up in the U.S. and is first-generation Guatemalan American. That’s an assumption that makes both of us legible to the artistic leadership of those institutions and how they make us legible to their audiences, because the question always is: Will the audience get it? Will the audience come? 

FRANCISCO: I think Americans are always more comfortable seeing immigration as a cultural issue rather than a legal one, because it demands less work to make space for a cultural experience than for a legal reality. I have been here 10 years and I’ve seen more and more plays about international experiences, and even about immigration, getting produced. Yes, the vast majority of those plays have been written by Americans, even if they come from families who were not originally American. So clearly the appetite for the experience is there. The barriers that prevent immigrants from getting to write and direct their own experiences on American stages are also in place. 

BAZEED: There is a divide that I feel as someone who very much still identifies as “fresh off the boat.” I am not from America. I am not of America. I just live here—and that has meaning in my life. There’s a sense of belonging that isn’t here. I’ve lived in New York since January 2002, so it is the place where I have spent most of my life. At this point, English is more accessible to me than Arabic. It comes easier because I use it every day. But I was born into a condition of diaspora. I was born in the Gulf. I was there for 14 years. Egypt is where I have spent the least amount of time in my life.

All of those things funnel me into a certain perspective and positionality. I’ve worked with first-generation Arab Americans and we’re different—we’re trying to tell the story of these places differently. In some ways, their access to their culture has been mitigated. There’s a local access that happens in the family home, or you may have it in the community around you, but otherwise, in most American immigrant households, it’s these tiny nuclear families that are still getting access to the stories of their cultures through imperialism and through American hegemony and American media. So the version of life that they’re often talking about when they talk about their cultures is a little bit Orientalized, and you can see that filter; mine is becoming more Orientalized as I have more distance from my culture. I can’t make a contemporary reference or joke if my entire life depended on it. For me to name a cultural meme from Egypt that’s big right now? I wouldn’t know. I’m not there. 

[I can’t be certain if Bazeed chose the word ‘Orientalize’ for the overtones expressed by Edward Said (1935-2003; Palestinian-American academic, literary critic, and political activist) in his 1978 book Orientalism (Pantheon Books), but it sounds as if they did. In Said’s terms, the word means to represent or portray cultures of the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa in a stereotyped way that emphasizes their exoticism and otherness, often reinforcing colonialist views of Western superiority.]

I would love to talk a little more about something that you just brought up, Bazeed, which is how time shifts your relationship to your own culture and the ways that you are writing about culture and place.

STEFANI: I write a lot about Hong Kong, but I didn’t used to. I remember in 2019, when the Hong Kong protests [15 March 2019-30 June 2020] started, a friend was like, “Have you written a play about it?” Which I was totally taken aback by, but then this friend said, “Well, you know, if you don’t write it, some British guy who’s never been to Hong Kong is going to write it.” So I wrote a play, and in the play Trump is mentioned because he was president back then. Because of that, because American politicians are mentioned, the play is relevant to America. There’s a relatability thing that I find to be very American. People often ask, “Would you do this play in Hong Kong?” And the thing is, if this play was done in Hong Kong, it would be done entirely in Cantonese. It would be a different play. People think because it’s multilingual, it’s globally applicable. That’s not true. If you put it in another place, it will become a different play. It has to.

FRANCISCO: I often feel like I’m existing in a world that asks me to be sure of who I am. My bio starts with my markers, and I am those markers: I am this sexuality and this race and this nationality, and this is what I’m bringing into the rehearsal room. I have a connection to Argentina, of course, but, as Bazeed was saying, ask me to pull up a meme and I won’t get it. I think the natural instinct is to feel shame about it, like I’m an imposter, and I feel like that shame has the potential to bring in a harshness about my identity—that I have to defend it. So I actively have to build for myself a flexibility that maybe the industry itself won’t necessarily permit. Maybe my experience and my nationality and my passport don’t endow me with an automatic authority to speak on everything that relates to my identity. I don’t want that for myself. There would have been a time where I would’ve felt ashamed of the distance that I’m acquiring from the culture that spawned me. But I don’t live there; I live here. There’s no shame about that. That’s just what it is. 

ARUN: A lot of the stuff that I’ve written is a period piece, now that Sri Lanka has a democratically elected, left-leaning socialist government. An extraordinary thing has happened in our lifetime, and only a few months ago. Finally! So I’m very conscious of the idea of becoming a diaspora writer who is constantly trapped in a vision of a country that you left rather than what that country is now. I’ve had moments back home where we thought we were in a better place, and the work did become sort of irrelevant, and then, five years later, it became relevant again. It is constantly moving, and your work is constantly shifting to both place and time. I think you can’t really escape that.

[Anura Kumara Dissanayake (b. 1968) was inaugurated on 23 September 2024 as the tenth President of Sri Lanka. He is the leader of the National People’s Power, a coalition of left-wing and progressive parties. Dissanayake, however, is, himself, a Marxist.]

KHRISTIÁN: I do think we have this capacity or this privilege or curse of trying to make sense of a thing without having to live it every day by virtue of being outsiders. Some of the environmental issues that are now happening in the U.S. have happened in my country for a long time. My family hasn’t had steady water in northern Guatemala City for over 10 years. I’m able to be here in the U.S. and take a break from not having steady water and write a play about it, which is for sure privilege. It’s also a way to reflect things back to these communities that we come from, and there’s pride in this. The NGO that I was working with to write my latest play, they were like, “Oh my God, you’re in New York, and you want to write a play about the forest fires in Guatemala?” It puts this expectation on the work. I just want to name that transnational tension and privilege and joy too, because it’s kind of cool that the work also gets to serve that.

[Guatemala experienced an alarming number of forest fires in April 2024 and a "state of calamity" was declared. By May, when the start of the rainy season extinguished most of the fires, over 157.5 square miles of land were affected.]

I’m thinking more lately about the use of theatre and performance in terms of writing place, and how that sense of place lives spatially in theatre; it unfolds and exists physically and in real time. How do you write non-American places into American theatre spaces, knowing that translation or mistranslation—cultural, linguistic, temporal—is inevitable?

STEFANI: When I picture plays in my head, it’s just a vacuum. And then I see things, and those things are usually influenced by where I’ve been. So a lot of plays are set in Hong Kong or Taiwan. They are murky, specific places, but a lot of it is influenced by how time is working with the landscape. I don’t really write linear plays, and I think that’s because I grew up watching and reading so much Taiwanese and Chinese stuff that is very nonlinear, very circular. I was reading this book about the colonization of time that talks a lot about how we think of colonialism as mostly a spatial thing. But it’s also a time thing. It’s not just about land; it’s also about how we perceive and experience time. Even the 24-hour clock or the calendar year are very superimposed Western things. That’s not to say it’s American. But I often feel that tension in how I think about storytelling relative to being in America; it almost feels like I’m trying to bring in a different experience of time into how we experience time in the U.S.

BAZEED: Surveillance is in almost every conversation I have these days. I think being strategic is part of this moment. Right now, I’m interested in erasure and allegory as form. What gets left out becomes part of the argument, not just the aesthetic. I think about Sheikh Imam’s protest songs from Egypt with all these veiled allegories like “They’re taking the milk from the cow” to talk about how the British were stealing our resources.

[Sheikk Imam, aka: El Sheikh Emam (1918-95) was a famous Egyptian composer and singer, known for his political songs in favor of the poor and the working classes. Britain controlled Egypt in one form or another from 1882 until 1956.]

STEFANI: I don’t identify as Asian American. I feel like I’m an Asian in America, but I didn’t grow up here. I have a different experience with language and storytelling. I find it really fascinating that so many playwrights try to use English in place of their native language, because I’m not interested in doing that at all. If the play is in Cantonese, I will be writing in Cantonese, or if the play is in Cantonese and English, then we’ll do half-and-half and you can read subtitles. I understand why people use English for access, but for me it feels like hearing the language is a huge part of experiencing the culture—just the environment of being in that language, what it brings out in people. Because people behave differently when they speak different languages.

ARUN: For me, the hardest thing about language is, like, a Sri Lankan sentence in English sort of has too many words in it for an American mouth. There’s a process I can see of an American actor getting used to it and finding their way into it, which is lovely. But the moment there’s a person who’s grown up in Sri Lanka in the room, and they read the lines—it’s like, Boom! Oh, right, I’ve forgotten what the ease was like.

FRANCISCO: Translation is not just about finding equivalents, but rather thinking, approaching a view of the world from a different perspective. Right? With theatre, in some ways it’s always a translation. I wrote something, and the people who are going to put it up will translate it to that time, to that moment, to who they are, to the resources that they have at hand, to the audience that they’re playing to. When we make a play from one country in another country—even a production that’s been transferred—none of us can have the same experience. There isn’t a complete encapsulation of the theatrical experience that can survive place and time. It’s just going to be completely different.

[Lyndsey Bourne is a Canadian writer, teacher, and doula (born and raised in North Vancouver and Penticton, British Columbia, in Canada’s far west) working with The Doula Project. Her plays include The Second Body (2020), Mabel’s Mine (2025), and I Was Unbecoming Then (2020).  She teaches playwriting at Playwrights Horizons Theater School (New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts).

George C. White (1935-2025)

 

[George C. White (1935-2025), who died at 89 on 6 August, was the founder and president of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center and vice president of the American Directors Institute.  He was co-chairman of the Arts Administration Program at the Yale School of Drama (now the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University), founding chairman of the Sundance Institute and Commissioner of the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. 

[White was also on the board of the Metropolitan Operdea Guild, the Arts and Business Council, New Dramatists, and the International Theatre Institute.  He served as a panelist for the Theater and Opera-Music Theater Program of the National Endowment for the Arts and a member of the Tony Awards Nominating Committee.

[In 1986, White delivered the keynote address at the inaugural event of the American Directors Institute, an organization for stage directors and artistic directors founded in 1985 by Geoffrey C. Shlaes.  Below is the text, somewhat edited for length by me as editor of ADI’s newsletter, Directors Notes.  My report on the symposium for DN follows the transcription of White’s remarks.  See the introduction to that report for more information on ADI.  (The New York Times obituary of George C. White concludes this post after the report.)]

“OPENING REMARKS: GEORGE C. WHITE”

[As I noted above, this transcript was published in Directors Notes, the newsletter of the American Directors Institute (1.1 [“Summer Issue”: June 1986]).  I edited Directors Notes from 1986 (this was its maiden issue) to 1988 and I covered the symposium, “The Changing of the Guard in the American Theater,” which was ADI’s first event.  While reading White’s comments here, keep in mind that the theater to which he’s referring existed 39 years ago.]

The guard is changing and if one looks through the current malaise, there are rough waters ahead.  But like any such trip, riding rapids can he exhilarating and exciting.  —George C. White

. . . . From Max Reinhardt to today, the director’s task . . . is to take his materials, which are actors, “in place of paint and canvas and shape and form his group using principles of art and with reason . . . coordinate conception and form,” as Alexander Dean [1893-1939; director, professor of theater at Yale School of Drama, director of YSD; author of Fundamentals of Play Directing (1940)] has written.

[The quotation above from Alexander Dean is a slightly altered passage in Alexander Dean and Lawrence Carra, Fundamentals of Play Directing, 4th ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980), 22.  (The published passage is: “His materials for staging are actors in place of paint and canvas.  He must shape and form his group using principles of art and coordinate conception and form.”)  Whether this was White’s editing for his address or if the sentences are different in an earlier edition of the book, I don’t know.]

Since the mid-sixties, however, a new duty has evolved, for if the director so chooses, he or she can become the artistic director of a theater and thus enter the lists with entrepreneurs, PR men, fundraisers, marketing specialists, accountants and management consultants.

It was not enough to have the Babes in Arms approach of putting on a show, so these directors changed from being employees to being employers.  With the heady trappings of artistic power came the corresponding responsibilities of fundraising, which meant marketing and PR concerns for budgeting and costs, as well as a board of business, financial, and society figures.  None of these things were part of the Yale School of Drama’s MFA in directing.

[Babes in Arms is a 1937 Broadway musical by Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart.  It was made into a 1939 film starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney.  It’s the original “Hey, kids, let’s use the barn to put on a show!” show—which I think was the point of White’s reference.  (In 1959, playwright George Oppenheimer created a “sanitized” version, revising some political and anti-racism material and changing the motivation for putting on the show to something more innocent.)]

. . . .  We have seen the rise of the theater administrator, expertly trained in the requisite techniques which support the art form.  This has allowed the artists to abdicate their entrepreneurial responsibilities to their managing directors on the easy excuse that they can thus pay more concerted attention to their art. . . .

Today, major regional theaters, at last firmly entrenched in their communities with multi-million-dollar budgets, languish for want of new blood at the top.  Boards of directors, unqualified and uninformed, are left to the task of selecting successors to the old guard.  Their quest is made particularly difficult because the well of able candidates is very low indeed. . . .  [For a further examination of the issue of replacing a theater’s leader, see Theatrical Continuity (21 August 2009).]

Some younger directors with a sense of adventure and evangelical spirit have founded alternatives theaters where much of the ground-breaking work is being done.  These people do not wish to leave the excitement of exploring their own artistic visions for what they perceive to be the inhibiting chains of established institutions.  This is also true of the free-lance director who, for all the possible fame and fortune associated with large regional-theater directorships now, would rather have the artistic freedom and geographic flexibility of the employee status.

. . . .  Obviously, artistic leadership is in a crisis state in this country and directors must be willing to take more reins to hand. . . .

. . . .  One burning question remains: Are there enough qualified directors, not only capable of taking up the torch, but simply of directing a play, let alone lead an institution of any size?  Are theatrical directors a vanishing breed?  Of late, the cry seems to be, “Where are the new directors?”

Why is it that in a new era when there is more diverse theatrical activity than at any time in our history, there seems to be a dearth of talent and a lack of directing opportunities?  Has this been the result of having more productions than is possible for the directing craft to service?  Are the producing-directors so jealously guarding their turf that they will not allow new talent to be seen?  Or is there some basic flaw in the system that not only does not allow the cream to rise to the top, but doesn’t even provide the possibility for any cream at all?

. . . .  The age of specialization has hit the theater and though you still hear jokes about everyone wanting to direct, stage managing, production and administration have become separate disciplines and individuals entering these fields generally wish to concentrate on a specific area, leaving no place for the fledgling director to come up through the traditional ranks.

This then puts the onus on the training institutions and the industry to provide the instruction and developmental opportunities to refill this growing void.  At present, we are only at the point of debating how to train directors and ADI [i.e., the American Directors Institute, the organization hosting the symposium] is one the few fundamental programs that actually has begun actively to address the issue.

We must continue to address and redress this situation.  But in order to do so effectively, we must stop the endless quibbling about how to do it and begin actively initiating projects that do the job.  We must cease the knee-jerk sense of competition, which is endemic to the theater, and work as an industry to change the status quo. . . .

The time has also come to question some “basic truths” that have grown up during the last generation:

Can we afford specialization in the current theater?

Are good directors born or trained?

Can artistic directors afford to give over all administrative reins to their managing directors?

And should we not reexamine the entire concept of the non-profit theater?

This last question has haunted me of late because we have . . . forgotten the economic incentives that help bring artists into the profession. . . .   Rather than only breast-beating over the difficulty of raising funds, and the onset of Gramm-Rudman, why not at least consider the centuries-old economic possibilities of the art form? . . . . Is this heresy, or painful truth?

[The Gramm-Rudman-Hollings legislation consisted of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985 and the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Reaffirmation Act of 1987. (The legislations were often referred to as “Gramm-Rudman-Hollings I” and “Gramm-Rudman-Hollings II” after U.S. senators Phil Gramm [b. 1942; R-Texas], Warren Rudman [1930-2012; R-New Hampshire], and Fritz Hollings [1922-2019; D-South Carolina], who were credited as their chief authors.) The original 1985 act was the first binding federal law to set automatic deficit reduction targets, while the 1987 act was a revised version that addressed constitutional concerns with the original law’s automatic spending cuts, extending the deficit-reduction timeline.]

. . . . .   We are, once again, on the threshold of a revolution.  Theater professionals in their thirties will inherit an entirely new world by the time they’re fifty.  The guard is changing now, and we have a marvelous opportunity to insure [sic] that theater at the turn of the century will be all it can be and not a dusty museum of theatrical artifacts.

[In addition to the brief bio of White in the introduction to this post above, following my report on the symposium below is the New York Times obituary of Mr. White, which includes a great deal of detail on his life, career, and background.]

*  *  *  *
“A.D.I. SPONSORS DIRECTING SYMPOSIUM”

[This report ran in the same début issue of Directors Notes as George C. White’s keynote remarks above.  I was present for the symposium, which, as I state below, took place on 21 April 1986 at 2 Columbus Circle in midtown Manhattan, the building which then housed the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.  (New York City’s DCA is now located in the Civic Center neighborhood of Lower Manhattan.)

[“The Changing of the Guard” was held in the auditorium in the basement of the DCA building, referred to as the Mark Goodman Auditorium.  (In 2008, the building became the home of the Museum of Arts and Design and the basement space became the Mark Goodson Theatre.)

[ADI was founded in 1985 by Geoffrey C. Shlaes (1951-2016), a director and theater manager, as an organization intended to inform both theatergoers and members of the theater fraternity who aren’t directors what directors do, and to facilitate networking among directors and artistic directors, and give them a forum for exchanging ideas about and techniques for directing.  ADI was dissolved in 1992.]

On Monday. April 21, the American Directors Institute had its public debut with a day-long Directing Symposium at the Mark Goodson Auditorium in the New York City Visitors Center, 2 Columbus Circle.  The subject of the conference, the premiere in what ADI’s directors hope will be a long run of public events, was “The Changing of the Guard in the American Theater.”  Keynoted by George C. White, President of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, and divided into three panels, the symposium addressed the question, Where will the new opportunities for directors come from?

From Mr. White’s opening remarks [posted above] through the final panel, the thrust of the discussion was the paucity of opportunity for old and new directors.  Participants also agreed that the path of the emerging director is a hard one—more so, perhaps, than in the past.

Mr. White attributed this difficulty to a combination of theater economics and, indeed, general economics.  Additional problems arise from the ever-strengthening tend[e]ncy for theater professionals to specialize.  The rigid categorization of skills for managing director, artistic director, stage manager and so on, according to Mr. White, has eliminated the old route a young director could use to “come up through the ranks” and gain experience.  The fear of taking chances has made it difficult for neophyte directors to try their wings.

Taking Mr. White’s cue, the members of the artistic directors’ panel acknowledges that they had taken over or started their own theaters because of the lack of directing opportunities.  Moderated by Jean Passanante of the New York Theatre Workshop, the panel consisted of Margaret Booker of Hartman Theatre in Stamford, Connecticut; Robert Falls of the Goodman Theatre Center, Chicago; Jack Garfein of the Harold Clurman Theatre, New York; Margot Lewitin of the Interart Theatre, New York; and Arthur Storch of Syracuse Stage.  Many of the members having begun their careers as actors, all were active stage directors before heading theaters around the country.  The frustration of a freelance career drove them to settle down where they could control their own artistic lives.  Few declared, however, that they are ready to hire a director whose work they do not already know.  Taking such a chance is too risky.

The two freelance directors’ panels echoed this same plaint from the reverse perspective.  Not wanting to be tied down to the responsibilities of an artistic directorship, the panelists opted for the peripatetic life of a freelancer.  Listening to moderator Roger Hendricks Simon question freelance drama panelists Susan Einhorn, William Partlan, Steven Robman, Amy Salz and Hal Scott, it was clear that the choices open to young directors without a track record are few and hard to come by.

These panelists also found cause for concern for the lack of deep understanding by other theater professionals of what a director really does.  All the freelance directors complained that, out of ignorance, producers and playwrights frequently dismiss the contributions of the director of a successful production.  There was the sense of a brewing conflict similar to the recent unpleasantness between actors and playwrights in the showcase arena.

[In August 1975, Equity Council released a code for union-sanctioned showcase productions that garnered strong criticism from both the Off-Off-Broadway producers and Actors’ Equity Association actors alike.  Code requirements and restrictions were seen as onerous to both the theaters and the actors.  On 18 August, Off-Off Broadway producers held a huge rally at the Public Theater, threatening to ban union actors from their productions unless Equity revised the code.  

[On 25 August, angry Equity members assembled at the Majestic Theatre for over four hours and the Equity membership voted overwhelmingly to suspend the code “until a new agreement is discussed by authorized representatives of Off-Off Broadway and AEA.”  Talks resumed in 1978 and, after four years of debate and disagreement, a new code for New York City showcases was issued in 1979.  (The code was eventually replaced in the ’80s by the Funded Non-Profit Theatre Code and the Approved Showcase Code.)]

The freelance musical theater panel, moderated by Maggie Harrer of the National Music Theatre Network, included Martin Charnin, Richard Digby Day, Miriam Fond, Alan Fox, Thomas Gruenewald and Dennis Ross.  Though they, too, echoes the sentiments of previous participants, the concern among these directors was for the disparate reins of a musical production, and who should hold them.  The consensus was that it should be the director, but often getting the other artists to acquiesce is difficult—especially when stage-directing opera.

The solution, as for all the other problems raised during the symposium, is two-pronged.  For the director on the job, the answer is tact, patience and perseverance.  In the long run, however, for the craft of directing as a whole, the call was for more open discussion, public forums and networking.

Finally, ADI has answered a crying need in the theater and has a real job to do.  The number of those both in the audience and on the panels who pleaded for more such meetings was impressive.  During every panel and every question-and-answer session, this need was voiced.  It was concretely demonstrated by the number of directors who gathered in the Goodson’s small lobby to talk and share ideas between, and sometimes during, the formal discussions.

This is precisely what ADI is for, and what it intends to encourage and sponsor in the future.  If “Changing the Guard” is any indication, ADI is a hit.  It should run a long, long time.

The art of the director is not sufficiently understood.  But we don’t get together and talk about it enough.  It’s a very important thing to be talking about.  —Susan Einhorn (b. 1948)

[Among its other events in subsequent months, ADI planned a three-day Touchstone Retreat at the O’Neill Center on 10, 11, and 12 September 1987.  (As editor of the newsletter, I attended this event, as I did all ADI activities.)  Though we were in his backyard, so to speak, George C. White was not a participant of the retreat—though I daresay his spirit was present.

[I bring this event up here because Touchstone was a different kind of encounter—a term I use advisedly—and I found it exhilarating.  “The Changing of the Guard in the American Theater” and most other ADI meetings were designed for the directors to confront ideas, issues, or disciplines with which they were familiar, but Touchstone was the opposite.  As ADI Artistic Director Geoffrey C. Shlaes put it, this was a chance for directors to “fill our own pitcher.”

[The retreat weekend brought together a group of theater folk—actors, directors, and playwrights—with a select team of experts from diverse, mostly non-theatrical fields.  The idea came from Amy Saltz, freelance director, and Mr. White, who proposed that “stage directors need exposure to new developments in fields outside the theater.”  ADI’s Touchstone Retreat was conceived to focus not on theater, but on the ideas that feed the theater.]

*  *  *  *
“GEORGE C. WHITE IS DEAD AT 89;
FOUNDER OF A PLAYWRIGHT RETREAT”
by Clay Risen 

[George C. White’s obituary appeared in the New York Times on 21 August 2025 (Section B [“Business”/”Sports”]).  It was also posted as “George C. White, Founder of Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Dies at 89” on the Times website on 13 August.]

His summer conferences gave budding playwrights a chance to try out new works, many of which went on to success in New York.

George C. White, whose Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, on an idyllic waterfront estate in Connecticut, gave generations of budding playwrights a chance to try out their latest works — many of which went on to success in New York and elsewhere — died at his home in Waterford, Conn., on Aug. 6, 10 days before his 90th birthday.

His children, Caleb White, George White and Juliette White Hyson, said the cause was congestive heart failure.

Since its first summer conference for playwrights was held in 1965, the O’Neill, named in honor of the playwright [1888-1953] who spent much of his life in nearby New London, has helped incubate generations of new talent, including John Guare [b. 1938], August Wilson [1945-2005] and Sam Shepard [1943-2017], all of whom made the trek to eastern Connecticut.

There, on a sprawling property that rolled down to Long Island Sound, they lived, ate and worked together, far from the pressure exerted by producers, critics, actors and everyone else who, for better or worse, shape the public presentation of a play.

Mr. White, the child of an artistic, semi-patrician Connecticut family who founded the center when he was in his 20s, called himself its “innkeeper.” He spent most of the year in New York, raising funds and running the admissions process, and migrated north in the summer to run the O’Neill’s day-to-day operations.

“There have been plays here over the years that I think are pretty awful,” he told The New York Times in 1982. “But I stand behind the selection of the playwright every single time. We really are looking for the playwright who shows promise, more than the play that can be a hit.”

Though Mr. White was an accomplished director in his own right, he relied on Lloyd Richards [1919-2006], the longtime head of the Yale School of Drama [1979-91], to act as the center’s artistic director [1968-99].

Together they developed an unerring eye for new talent. Famously, they accepted an unsolicited script from Mr. Wilson, who was still unknown at the time; the work, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” was nominated for the Tony Award for best play in 1985 and established Mr. Wilson as one of the great American playwrights of the 20th century.

Other noted plays and musicals (which got their own, similar conference in 1978) that originated at the O’Neill included Mr. Guare’s “The House of Blue Leaves” (1966), Wendy Wasserstein’s [1950-2006] “Uncommon Women and Others” (1975) and Robert Lopez [b. 1975], Jeff Marx [b. 1970] and Jeff Whitty’s [b. 1971] “Avenue Q” (2003).

Mr. White cultivated a reliable network of actors to perform staged readings of each play. They, too, were drawn from the ranks of the young and promising, and many were destined for fame: Michael Douglas [b. 1944], Charles S. Dutton [b. 1951], Meryl Streep [b. 1949] and Al Pacino [b. 1940], among others, did time at the O’Neill early in their careers.

“He took his privilege and used it to share the goodies for a wide community,” Jeffrey Sweet [b. 1950], the author of “The O’Neill: The Transformation of Modern American Theater” (2014), said in an interview. “And he did it with just enormous heart and enthusiasm.”

George Cooke White was born on Aug. 16, 1935, in New London, not far from Waterford, where he grew up. He came from a long line of noted landscape painters, including Henry C. White [1861-1952], his grandfather; Nelson C. White [1900-89], his father; and Nelson H. White [b. 1932], his brother.

His mother, Aida (Rovetti) White [1897-2002], came from a working-class family and was a seamstress before she met his father. She later served on the O’Neill’s board.

George studied drama at Yale. After graduating in 1957, he spent two years in the Army, stationed in Germany, where he met Elvis Presley [1935-77], who was already a singing sensation but wanted to do more acting. He asked Mr. White for advice, and they spent an afternoon running through a monologue.

After his discharge, Mr. White studied at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, and then returned to Yale to get an M.F.A. in drama. He graduated in 1961 and moved to New York, where he worked for the television producer and talk-show host David Susskind [1920-87; the talk show was Open End/The David Susskind Show, 1958-86].

Mr. White married Betsy Darling in 1958. Along with their children, she survives him, as do his brother and 10 grandchildren.

One afternoon, Mr. White, an avid sailor, was tacking past the Hammond Mansion, an empty seaside home that was slated to be used for firefighting practice by the town of Waterford.

He was already thinking of starting his own theater in honor of O’Neill, and he asked the town if he could lease the estate. Happy to help a local boy, the town gave it to him for $1 a year. The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center opened there not long after [1964].

Mr. White initially wanted to stage full productions at the site, drawing on the connections he had built under Mr. Susskind’s tutelage. But even with his prodigious people skills, the task proved daunting, and in the interim he held his first summer conference for young playwrights.

The conference was a hit, and he soon abandoned his original plans, focusing instead on cultivating new talent. He also began hosting similar conferences on theater criticism and musicals — Lin-Manuel Miranda [b. 1980] workshopped “In the Heights” at the O’Neill [2005] before taking it to New York [2007 (Off-Broadway); 2008 (Broadway)].

Mr. White retired in 2000 but remained involved with the O’Neill, and with theater generally. He was particularly active with other organizations that took the O’Neill as their model. Robert Redford [b. 1936], for instance, used it as a template for his Sundance Institute [formed in 1981], focused on young filmmakers, and Mr. White agreed to serve on the Sundance board.

He also served in the United States Coast Guard Auxiliary as a flotilla commander; in 2014, the Coast Guard gave him its distinguished public service award.

Like many theater programs around the country, the O’Neill has struggled in recent years. This year, the federal government clawed back some of its funding, and the O’Neill has had to slash its budget and employment rolls in response.

But Mr. Sweet, the author of “The O’Neill,” said that Mr. White’s legacy had put the O’Neill in a better place than other endangered programs.

“It’s going to be belt-tightening for a while,” he said. “But I think there’s such a huge community of people who view the O’Neill as one of their homes, and a lot of them are famous and rich. A lot of them owe a lot to it.”

[Clay Risen is a New York Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.  He also writes about spirits—whiskey in particular—for the Food section and was a senior editor on the 2020 politics team, and before that an editor on the Opinion desk, most recently as the deputy Op-ed editor.  He’s been at the Times since 2010 and previously worked at the New Republic and Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.

[Risen’s written eight books, some about U.S. history, some about whiskey.  They include American Rye (Scott & Nix, 2022) and The Crowded Hour: Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century (Scribner, 2019).  His most recent is Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism and the Making of Modern America (Scribner, 2025).]