by Allison Considine,
Jessica Lit, Jordan Stovall, and Nadine Smith
[On
30 July 2023, I posted “Censorship on School Stages,” my take on a trend that
had been developing across the United States for over a year at that time. The Rick On Theater post was inspired by newspaper
reports such as the Washington Post’s “The culture war’s latest
casualty: The high school musical” by Hannah Natanson (2 May 2023) and “On
School Stages, Politics Plays a Leading Role” by Michael Paulson in the New
York Times (4 July 2023).
[“Censorship
on School Stages” (Rick
On Theater: Censorship on School Stages) was my first post focusing specifically
on school censorship of theater, but I’d blogged on censorship, suppression,
and other forms of repression of the freedom of expression in numerous other articles,
including “Degrading the Arts” (13 August 2009), ”The First Amendment & The
Arts” (8 May 2010), “Disappearing Theater” (19 July 2010), “‘The Arts Are Under
Attack (Again!)’” by Paul Molloy (22 May 2011), “Culture War” (6 February 2014),
and “The First Amendment & The Arts, Redux” (13 February 2015), among
others.
[Over
the years since I started ROT, which just passed its 15th anniversary last 16 March, I’ve
established an ad hoc series on the accommodation of theater and the
arts in our society. Sometimes I
addressed this topic directly, and sometimes I addressed a closely related
subject, such as arts funding or arts education.
[At
this juncture, let me quote myself (in slightly reformatted form) from “The
First Amendment & The Arts,” just to make one thing clear before you read
this article on my blog:
I ought to confess here that I’m pretty much a First
Amendment absolutist. One of my favorite
theater lines is from Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards’s musical 1776. Stephen Hopkins, the iconoclastic and
cantankerous delegate from Rhode Island, declares, when asked to vote for or
against an open debate on independence, declares: “Well, I’ll tell y’—in all my
years I never heard, seen, nor smelled an issue that was so dangerous it
couldn’t be talked about. Hell yes, I’m
for debatin’ anything . . . !”
That fairly well sums up my feelings: we should be
allowed to talk about anything in this society, even stuff most other people
don’t want to hear. The only proper
response to speech we don’t like is more speech. You don’t cut people off when you don’t like
what they’re saying, you debate them.
[“‘The
Courage to Produce,’” which is a conversation between Nadine Smith and Jessica
Lit, ran in the Winter 2024 issue of American Theatre (40.2), and was also posted at AMERICAN THEATRE | The
Courage to Produce: A Conversation on High School Censorship on 1 April 2024. (American Theatre, now a quarterly magazine, is
published by the Theatre Communications Group, an organization for non-profit
theater companies in the U.S.)
[Nadine
Smith, a former journalist, is the Executive Director of Equality Florida, the
state’s largest organization dedicated to ending discrimination based on sexual
orientation and gender identity. In
2022, she was named to the Time 100, Time magazine’s annual list of
the 100 most influential people in the world
[An
award-winning journalist turned organizer, Smith was one of four national
co-chairs of the 1993 March on Washington. She was part of the historic meeting with
then-President Bill Clinton (42nd President of the United States: 1993-2001) on
16 April 1993, the first Oval Office meeting between a sitting president and
LGBTQ community leaders. She served
on the founding board of the International Gay and Lesbian Youth Organization.
[Smith,
who lives in St. Petersburg (which she calls “St. Pete”) with her wife Andrea
and son Logan, is a Florida Chamber Foundation Trustee and served on
President Barack Obama’s (44th President of the United States: 2009-17) National
Finance Committee. She’s been named one
of her state’s “Most Powerful and Influential Women” by the Florida Diversity
Council and has received the League of Women Voters’ Woman of Distinction
Award. In 2018, she was named one of the
100 Most Influential Floridians by Influence Magazine, a magazine of Florida politics.
She currently serves as chair of the Florida Advisory Committee to the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights.
[Equality
Florida is a political advocacy group that promotes civil rights and
protections for LGBTQ residents of Florida.
Equality Florida was formed in 1997 by Smith and Stratton Pollitzer, an
expert in LGBTQ non-profit development, just before Governor Jeb Bush took
office (1999-2007) and Florida's state government became considerably more
conservative.
[A
former actor, Jessica Lit is the Director of Business Affairs of the Dramatists
Guild. She’s an intellectual
property and entertainment attorney with a focus on empowering artists of
diverse backgrounds and disciplines to take control of their careers by
educating them about their legal rights. She recently decided to channel that interest
into launching a solo practice, The Lit Esquire PLLC, aimed at doing just
that.
[Lit
has a strong background in the arts, having earned her B.A. in theater
performance from New York City’s Fordham University in 2011 before she went on
to start a theater company with fellow classmates that focused on producing
works exclusively written by women.
[After
stepping away from performing, Jessica earned her real estate license in New
York and worked for three years as a full-time agent under several high-profile
brokerages in New York City, where she specialized in working with performing
artists to help find their first apartments in the city.
[While
she no longer performs as a career, Lit has stayed involved in the arts in any
way she can, including serving as a co-producer on a weekly magic show on New
York City’s Upper West Side from 2014 to 2015 and appearing in an episode
of The
Perfect Murder (2017-18) on Investigation Discovery, a cable channel
dedicated to true crime documentaries.
[Lit
earned her Juris Doctor (J.D. – Doctor of Law) degree in 2019 from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of
Yeshiva University in New York City with a concentration in intellectual
property. While at Cardozo, she
facilitated student-led discussions sponsored by the Office of Diversity and
Inclusion, was an active member of the Moot Court Honor Society, and served as
Problem Editor for the 2019 BMI Entertainment and Communications Law Moot Court
Competition. Jessica was admitted to the
New York State Bar in 2020 and recently relocated to her hometown of Charlotte,
North Carolina.]
A dialogue on how students, teachers, and parents can
push back against a wave of conservative legislation and intimidation that
threatens to chill theatrical expression.
The kooky, macabre
musical The Addams Family was named the most-produced tuner on
U.S. high school stages for the 2022-23 school year. But there will be at least one less mysterious and spooky
production for next year’s tally since a Pennsylvania school board voted
to cancel a 2024 production, citing the show’s “dark themes.” [This
instance was an example in “Censorship on School Stages.”]
Since 1938, the Educational Theatre Association (EdTA)
has polled theatre educators to identify the most-produced musicals and plays,
but its latest survey also measured the impact of a troubling resurgence of
censorship. A whopping 67 percent of educators told EdTA they are weighing
potential controversies when they make show selections—and with good
reason.
In recent years, a so-called “parents’ rights” movement has
staked a claim in controlling the K-12 curriculum, leading to a surge of banned
books and restrictions on performances. Florida’s House Bill 1069, which
restricts media with sexual content, has even put Shakespeare’s oeuvre
under scrutiny. Many lessons now only excerpt the Bard’s plays rather than
teach them in full. As part of a counter-movement, the New York Public Library
recently launched the Books for All initiative,
making censored playscripts and musical libretti available online to teenagers
nationwide.
[Considine
is slightly misleading here. NYPL is not supplying censored books
in the sense that the texts to which the library is providing access are edited
or abridged. NYPL is providing online access to the original texts of books,
plays, and libretti that have been banned elsewhere.]
The polarized political climate has only added to the
backstage drama at high school theatre auditoriums, the latest arena for the
culture wars. Parents and school board members are challenging show choices,
requesting script changes, and outright canceling student productions with
social or political themes, especially LGBTQ+ content. Last year, a Florida
school gained traction on social media after canceling a production
of Indecent, which centers on a queer Jewish romance. [This case of
censorship is also in my post.] And last fall an Illinois school board canceled
a production of The Prom, a musical about a group of Broadway
actors who travel to a conservative town to help a lesbian student banned from
bringing her girlfriend to the prom—though in response to uproar over the
decision, the show will in fact go on this spring.
In Indiana, students took matters into their own
hands, independently staging the gender-bending play Marian, or
the True Tale of Robin Hood after a school canceled the production for
its LGBTQ+ themes. An Ohio school requested 23 revisions before
staging The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, removing
explicit language and the mention of gay characters. A Texas school board canceled
a school field trip in response to a social media post accusing a
production of James and the Giant Peach that featured actors
playing both male and female roles as being a form of “drag.”
This disheartening trend of censoring playscripts and
productions coincides with an uptick in conservative legislation aiming to
limit queer representation in the classroom. The ACLU is currently tracking a
staggering 233 schools and education bills that directly target LGBTQ+ rights
and expression.
This threat of censorship not only robs theatre kids of time
in the limelight; it also deprives young students in the audience of the
opportunity to witness different human experiences. It targets educators and
their beliefs and impacts how—and what—they teach. These attacks also affect
dramatists and composers, whose works are being amended and pulled from
libraries and stages.
Censorship was a major theme of the 2023 EdTA
conference in St. Pete Beach, Fla., where middle and high school theatre
educators gathered last September. The programming included “The Courage to
Produce,” two sessions curated by Jordan Stovall, the director of Outreach
and Institutional Partnerships at the Dramatists Guild of America (DG), about
navigating controversies and best practices for educators. The sessions were
inspired by the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund’s “Dramatic
Changes: A Toolkit for Producing Stage Works on College Campuses in Turbulent
Times.” The following excerpt from a conversation between Jessica
Lit, the DG’s director of business affairs, and Nadine Smith, co-founder
and executive director of Equality Florida, has been edited for length and
clarity.
 |
| Illustration for American Theatre by Colin Tom |
JESSICA LIT: Welcome
to “The Courage to Produce.” If you’re not familiar with the DG, we are a
national trade association for playwrights, librettists, lyricists, and
composers, and our mission is to aid dramatists in protecting the artistic and
economic integrity of our work. Our sister organization, the DLDF, was created
in 2011 to advocate and educate and provide resources in defense of the First
Amendment. Since its inception, it’s been an active voice in supporting
institutions which have been the targets of attacks on free speech, including
the recent cancellation of Indecent at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts in
Jacksonville, Fla. The DLDF also recently partnered with the EdTA to establish
standards for protecting free expression when theatrical works are taught in
educational institutions.
Today I am joined by the co-founder and executive director
of Equality Florida, Nadine Smith. Equality Florida is Florida’s statewide
civil rights organization dedicated to securing full equality for Florida’s
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community. Would you like to
talk a little bit about Equality Florida and introduce yourself?
NADINE SMITH: Good
morning. I live in St. Pete, and we founded Equality Florida when we realized
that we were doing lots of local work, but this place called Tallahassee [the
capital of the state of Florida], out in the middle of nowhere, was where big
decisions were being made that impacted our lives. Actually, we’ve been around
for 27 years—formally in January of ’97, but we existed before then.
For decades, we held at bay all of the anti-LGBTQ+
legislation in Florida. But 20 years of increasingly extreme Republican control
of every level of government has sort of metastasized with [Donald] Trump [45th
President of the United States: 2017-21] and [Ron] DeSantis [Governor of
Florida since 2019]. And so we saw in these last two years what began first and
foremost as an attack on the transgender community, trans kids in particular,
and we also saw a whitewashing of history—no more racist dog whistles; it is a
foghorn. We’ve seen bodily autonomy attacked in every way, from abortion bans
to banning access to medical care for the trans community, and a stripping away
of rights.
One of the ways that’s shown up most visibly has been the
banning of books and theatre. I think it’s important for people to understand
that this isn’t some movement that has grown organically from concerns raised
by parents. The Florida legislature wrote the law in such a way that any
resident of the county, they don’t even have to be a parent, can get any book
pulled off the shelf in Florida. It’s a de facto ban even when it’s not a
technical ban—i.e., schools fear they are vulnerable to lawsuits if they don’t
remove books preemptively.
We were talking earlier about, how often do you think of
eras in American history, where we see these book bans, a clamping down on art?
And what else usually arrives with that? We have to raise the alarm at how
perilous this moment is, at how normalized things that should be not just
abnormal but hideous to us have become. You know, when they banned The
Life of Rosa Parks, we were like, “This is outrageous.” And now it’s like,
yeah, there were just another 10,000 titles pulled off shelves.
[The
Life of Rosa Parks by Kathleen Connors (Gareth Stevens Classroom, 2013) was
pulled from second grade classrooms in the Duval County public school district
in Florida in 2022.]
I’m a Shakespearean actor, paid for it as well. In schools
in Florida, they will not do Shakespeare because of how many gender-reversed
roles there are in Shakespeare plays. So they will do excerpts.
JESSICA: Thank
you, Nadine. I’m going to introduce myself. I’m the director of business
affairs for the DG, and I do a lot of advocacy work. I also help in creating
resources for educators, and for our members, to help advocate for their rights
in the industry.
We’re all here because we love theatre and its ability to
bring people together to tell stories that may not have been told, to be a
vehicle for change. We understand that censorship and cancellations aren’t new.
They’ve been around for as long as stage plays have been around. But as Nadine
has just talked about, there are new trends, and it’s not just angry voices.
It’s legislation coming down from our local, our state, our federal governments
that we need to start thinking about as we enter this new era.
Today there is proposed, pending, and passed legislation in
many states. Nadine, you talked a little bit about the book banning that’s
happening in Florida, but is there other legislation that theatre educators
should be aware of as they move through this new time?
NADINE: Yeah,
bans on drag queens or drag performances. The insinuation is that any time
somebody is performing in drag, it is inappropriate for children to be present.
So if you bring your child to a play like Twelfth Night, have you
brought them to a drag show? Have you exposed them to a dangerous ideology that
will play “tug of war” with their gender identity?
In Florida there was a program at a theatre in Orlando,
similar to a drag Christmas. They ended up putting on tickets for the first
time that no one under 18 was allowed. The governor insisted that law
enforcement be present. They left the theatre and said nothing untoward
occurred, nothing inappropriate. The governor went after their beverage license
anyway, claiming that the language on the ticket was printed too small to be of
value, and that even though there was nothing
sexually inappropriate, the fact that there were people performing opposite of
their gender was sufficient to pull their license. They only just settled with
three businesses; one of them was Hamburger Mary’s [a restaurant that
presents a “family-friendly drag show”]. People are touting it as a win, but
the chilling effect is very real.
The chilling effect is intentionally vague so that it casts
a big shadow. The impulse is to go, “I don’t want any problems. I will do the
least dangerous thing. I will do the thing that is so far from the line that I
can’t get caught up even in their overzealous prosecution.” And slowly, the
impact of that, not the actual letter of the law, begins to create the worst
kind of censorship, which is self-censorship, where we don’t even permit
ourselves to think things or pursue things because of a fear of what that
vagueness might ensnare.
In the same way they say sunlight is the best disinfectant,
ensure that anything which is vague is made concrete. Say to them: “Would you
put in writing why this play is impermissible by law?” Six months from now,
that could be the most important document in a lawsuit. Make them be explicit
about why. And if you’re in a place where these restrictions aren’t being put
and you’re not constrained by them, I would say, make sure that you’re building
this into all of your performances.
It’s a time for courage. You might be that person in your
school district, in your institution, along the chain who’s going to disrupt
people sinking to the path of these resistances.
JESSICA: I
think what you highlighted specifically is that schools are where kids are
being introduced to ideas and cultures for the first time, and we shouldn’t shy
away from introducing them to these cultures and different opinions and
different viewpoints and different lifestyles because we’re afraid that they
can’t handle it. If anyone can handle it, it’s young minds who haven’t been
exposed to the discrimination, the hate, and all those things yet. This is
actually a great segue to our next question for you.
[Jessica
Lit addresses the lessons students can learn from being exposed to a variety of
plays, a subject I introduce in “Censorship on School Stages,” but I also write
about the unwelcome lessons the efforts to suppress and censor what students
can see or read in secondary school can teach.]
Can you speak about the importance of addressing topics of
queer identity, relationships, self-actualization in the classroom? We know
that high school and middle school theatre is an entry point for many kids who
identify with the LGBTQ+ community.
NADINE: You
know, I am 58. I know, I look good. [Laughter.] I remember
being young, being fearful, and being homophobic to try to put people off the
trail, especially playing basketball and softball. I had to throw out a lot of
diversionary tactics, though not very effectively. So I understand how
internalized homophobia shows up as bigotry in the world. And all of that is by
way of saying that, I felt an extraordinary amount of isolation. And there are
a lot of young people who do not survive that level of isolation. The suicide
rate among LGBTQ+ young people is often talked about, but there’s also the
homeless rate, the dropout rate, the self-medicating rate, when you have no
place you can turn and the only places that you spend the majority of your time,
which are school and home, are hostile environments—the world gets very small
very fast.
Representation and visibility are literally life-saving. I
want to ring the alarm bell so loudly. The dangerous normalization of these
hideous laws has created a world in which young people are watching their
favorite teachers who created safety for them leave the profession. They’re
seeing empty spaces on bookshelves. All of the books are being taken out of
classrooms because they haven’t gone through the approval process. Even
donating books that reflect different experiences is no longer permitted.
For people who live in other states, start organizing. In
Illinois, they passed a ban on book bans. It’s important that there be a
countervailing message, and in places where you’re not having to fend off these
attacks, go on the offensive and make a big deal. Vilify what’s happening in
Florida and other states. We have to take it that seriously and not just wait
until the wolf is at the door.
JESSICA: Thank
you. I’m actually going to take a question out to those in the room. How many
of you have faced challenges when you’re teaching or presenting works? Or had
students come to you asking questions about the current legislative landscape
that we’re living in?
A show of hands indicates there are educators present
that have experienced this. One educator in a Catholic school speaks on the
particular challenges they faced with administration when attempting to cast a
transgender child in a production, and navigating bringing works by different
artists into the classroom.
NADINE: The
only purpose of this is to create moral panic. It’s a playbook, and it plays
out again and again. Because we haven’t gone through the conciliation process
required of our history, we have all of these unexamined and unresolved ways of
dealing with difference in America that show up episodically as this massive
backlash.
There’s a professor at Boston University named Stephen
Prothero and he’s written several books. One of them is about this
phenomenon. He says the backlash is a lagging indicator of how much progress
we’ve made. The only reason they’re going after us is because young LGBTQ+
people are visible, do feel like they have a place in the world, are showing up
as their full selves in school, are finding a support network among their
teachers. And so, basically, he says, by the time the backlash arrives, the
cultural tipping point has already come.
I think of it as a slingshot, where they are grabbing that
slingshot and they’re walking us backwards. But what they don’t realize is
they’re creating this dynamic tension that will leave their grip. We won’t just
go back to where we were when they attacked. We’re going to propel forward into
a world that looks much more like one that includes all of us.
Another educator speaks about the experience of dealing
with community-wide controversy and issues with their administration over a
production of To Kill a Mockingbird.
NADINE: I
think we have to come out of the closet and tell these stories, share much more
of how these things are happening. Every time we make them shut things down or
we make them explain, we also are kind of showing this universe of people how
to fight back.
One university in Florida was told they had to take down the
university’s equity and inclusion policy. And what they did was they said,
“Here’s our former diversity, equity, and inclusion policy. We have been
ordered by the state to remove it. So we want you to know that this is no
longer our diversity, equity, and inclusion policy.” Of course, then everybody
read their diversity, equity, and inclusion policy.
I’m saying we’ve got to be creative. I love that you keep
taking it back to the students and saying, How do we tell this lesson that
teaches them how to navigate? Coming up with these ideas and strategies that
don’t put students in the position of, “Hey, I’m going to defend you, I’m going
to risk it all to defend you,” which is one instinct, but rather, “You’re not
powerless in the face of this. They can’t stop your voice. They can’t stop your
TikTok. They can’t stop your message online. Here’s the phone call to PEN
America, you may go to the Dramatist Legal Defense Fund, or here are the
articles that have been written that can contextualize this. Here’s the
background on these organizations that are systematically going after art.” By
showing them these things, I think they’re going to emerge into society as
people who don’t quietly capitulate. They want you to be fearful.
NADINE: Even
though young people are experiencing these really ugly, fascistic impulses that
are curtailing their rights, how you guide them in those moments may produce
more of what we need in this world.
Another educator speaks on their experiences with
censorship, community backlash, and having books and plays removed from their
school’s library system after attempting to add them to the curriculum.
NADINE: We
started a group called Parenting
with Pride precisely because [of issues like these]. One of the things
I encourage is to be proactive and work with the PTA, work with the parents’
groups, work with the parents of the students in whatever you’re creating. And
say, “Listen, I don’t know if you’re even watching these timelines, but this
atmosphere has developed where one parent will complain on opening night, try
and shut down all of the hard work of your kid, and we really need to be in
this together.” Which is a thing you probably never would have had to do or
think about, but in this atmosphere, we have to go on the offense and we have
to engage parents so that it’s not a mom consciously defending the virtues of
children from sinister forces.
JESSICA: I
want to speak a little bit about the First Amendment. It is different in high
schools and middle schools than it is on college campuses, because your
students are minors. But the Supreme Court has said that students and teachers
do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate. That is from
Tinker v. Des Moines [I describe this case briefly in my 2023 post]. It’s a
well-established freedom in our country.
I want to encourage all of you to use your voices to speak
up, because while there is limited academic freedom, school boards and school
administrations have a wider discretion in determining what kinds of materials
can be taught. Discretion does not mean that they can censor something because
they’re hostile to the ideas that are presented. There has to be a legitimate
educational purpose for why they are removing or moving something.
I’ll take the example of evolution. They may say, you know
what, maybe fifth graders aren’t prepared to understand this concept so we’re
going to move it to the eighth grade curriculum. That’s okay, but to say we’re
not going to teach evolution because we don’t believe in evolution, we don’t
understand evolution—that’s unacceptable.
Also, speaking about personal freedom as it relates to you
as teachers: Nadine talked about organizing in your community, using your voice
outside of schools. They can only really go after you if what you are doing
outside of school is substantially and materially disrupting what’s happening
in schools. So if you are going on your social media, you are organizing in
your communities and creating protests outside of the school grounds or
encouraging your students to do the same, you have that right under the First
Amendment. I really want to make sure that you’re aware of that. Even though
you are in a different situation with schools, it doesn’t mean that you’re now
completely eradicated of your First Amendment rights. It’s something to really
think about as you move forward.
And creating allies, not just with your parents and the
kids, but within your community. One of the things that DLDF has done is rally
people to attend school board meetings. Not just parents, but members of the
community or people who care. Recently there was a cancellation of The
25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee in Ohio. We put out a
statement, and many people attended a virtual school board meeting. The show
went back on. It wasn’t parents that were even local to Ohio. It was people who
care about theatre, people who care about seeing different points of views.
When these things happen, don’t think that you are isolated.
Don’t think you’re alone. Think about the educators who are sitting here today.
Think about the work that Equality Florida is doing. Come talk to us at the DG.
We will do everything we can to help. We put out many statements, but we also
have tried to help students find different venues to put a show on. There are
resources available for you. Take advantage of them.
It’s a scary time, but the louder we can be, the
better.
To find out more about the
Dramatists Guild, including the rights theatre writers have against censorship
and cancellation of their work, visit www.dramatistsguild.com.
To find out more about the
Dramatists Legal Defense Fund [DLDF], find out how to support this work, or to
reach out regarding additional resources including “Dramatic Changes: A Toolkit
for Producing Stage Works on College Campuses in Turbulent Times,” visit www.thedldf.org.
To learn more about Equality
Florida, find out how to support this work, or to reach out regarding
additional resources, visit http://equalityflorida.org/.
[Jordan
Stovall/Wanda Whatever (they/them) is a playwright, arts administrator, queer
events producer, and drag artist based in London. They presently serve as the Director of
Outreach & Institutional Partnerships for the Dramatists Guild, where they
have worked since January 2016.
[Stovall’s
plays have been shortlisted and selected as Finalists for the Eugene O’Neill
Playwrights Festival and Relentless Award, among others. They have studied playwriting and have
received artistic mentoring from the likes of Tina Howe, Tanika Gupta, Ola
Animashawun, Deborah Zoe Laufer, Michele Lowe, Stefanie Zadravec, Gary
Garrison, and more.
[Stun premièred at The
Cockpit Theatre in London after several developmental public showcases in the U.S.
and U.K.; corpus premièred at the Midtown International Theatre Festival
in New York following its showing at the Manhattan Reading Competition; Aviary
premièred at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama after a showing as
part of LGBTQ+ Tiny Shows at Omnibus Theatre. They are a Resident of the Hamilton Project IX
at the Barn Arts Collective.
[As
a drag artist, Stovall is the founder and executive producer of the Time Out London
Award-Nominated Boulangerie: A Queer Variety Show, and FUSSY, a bi-monthly
ongoing party and series of queer community gatherings/arts-focused events at
Dalston Superstore (formerly in residence at The Yard Theater, Hackney Wick).
[They
can be seen on upcoming miniseries Pistol on FX directed by Danny Boyle and Meet
the Richardsons (BBC Studios). They
have performed in Bushwig NYC and Bushwig Berlin festivals, Sink the Pink, were
a finalist in Season 1 and winner of the Christmas edition of drag competition
The Gold Rush at The Glory. They regularly
perform in multiple venues across London (Dalston Superstore, Royal Vauxhall
Tavern, The White Swan, etc.), as well as New York venues such as The Rosemont,
Hardware, Club Cumming, Metropolitan, The Duplex, The West End, and more.
[They
are Program Manager for the New Visions Fellowship, founding Co-Administrator
for End of Play, National Playwriting Month, and founding Executive
Administrator of the Dramatists Guild Institute.
[Stovall
has an MFA in Writing in the Stage and Broadcast Media from the Royal Central
School of Speech and Drama in London (2019) and a BA in Theatre/Performing Arts
from Florida’s University of Tampa (2011).
[Allison
Considine, who wrote the introduction to this dialogue transcript, is the
senior editor of American Theatre. She studied
literature and cultural studies and theater arts at New York City’s Pace
University. She is a Brooklyn-based
writer and editor whose writing has appeared in American Theatre
magazine, Backstage, Broadway Style Guide, and TDF Stages.
She contributed to the book American
Theatre Wing, An Oral History: 100 Years, 100 Voices, 100 Million Miracles (American
Theatre Wing, 2018), a 100-year history on the celebrated organization behind
the Tony Awards.
[After
college, Considine took a sidestep from acting and turned her attention to arts
journalism, which allows her to explore the creative process behind the stage
magic. She enjoys connecting with
emerging theater professionals educators about theater training—and, of course,
seeing it all come together on stage.]
