17 October 2024

Zelda Fichandler (1924-2016), Part 1

 

[Zelda Fichandler was one of the principal pioneers of the American regional theater movement of the mid-20th-century post-World War II era.  Following in the footsteps of Margo Jones (1911-55), who started Theatre ’47 in Dallas in 1947, and Nina Vance (1914-80), who launched the Alley Theatre in Houston, also in 1947, Zelda Fichandler, with her husband, Thomas C. Fichandler (1915-97), and Edward Mangum (1913-2001), founded Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage in 1950. 

[This was the beginning of the surge of resident, non-profit theaters across the United States.  If readers have been following my occasional series on the regional theater in this country, you know the extent to which that movement has influenced the development of theater in the U.S.

[Full disclosure: I was born and grew up in Washington.  The Arena Stage opened when I wasn’t yet four years old, so it was part of my growing up to be a theater-lover.  (As I explained in “A Broadway Baby,” [posted on Rick On Theater on 22 September 2010], my parents were born in New York City and were inveterate theater-enthusiasts.  They transferred this habit to the Nation’s Capital and passed it on to me—and Arena was a big part of that.)  ROTters may well detect a certain level of D.C. and Arena chauvinism in my viewpoint.  I own that.  It’s who I am.

[But Zelda Fichandler, who died in 2016 at 91, was, all bias aside, a significant figure in the life of the American theater.  I, therefore, take some pride—justifiable, I believe—in presenting the following reports, in tribute to the late Zelda Fichandler. There will be one more homage to Fichandler, to be posted on Sunday, 20 October.]

“THE LEGEND OF ZELDA”
by Rob Weinert-Kendt 

[AT editor-in-chief Rob Weinert-Kendt’s review of two books on Zelda Fichandler published this year was posted on the American Theatre website on 20 September 2024 (AMERICAN THEATRE | The Legend of Zelda).  “The Legend of Zelda” didn’t appear in the print edition of the Theatre Communications Group’s quarterly magazine.

[In addition to co-founding Arena, Fichandler served as artistic director from its start until 1991. She assumed the artistic directorship of the New York City-based Acting Company, co-founded in 1972 by John Houseman (1902-88) and Margot Harley (b. 1935) out of the first graduating class of the Juilliard School’s drama program, from 1991 to 1994. She was also chair of the graduate acting program of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts from 1984 to 2009.]

2 new books show and tell the instructive story of Arena’s path-breaking co-founder, Zelda Fichandler—both the work she did and the work she left for us to continue.

The postpartum-like depression that follows any creative act is familiar to anyone who works on a project-by-project basis, and most certainly to everyone in the arts. The book is published, the film or album released, the painting hung—now what? Do we really have to start over and do it all again tomorrow?

This morning-after crash is even more acute for those who toil in the ephemera of the performing arts—forms which live entirely in a series of shared public moments, only to be struck with the sets or packed away with the guitars or pointe shoes, the sole remaining record of all that effort existing in the individual memories of hundreds, possibly thousands of disparate people (not counting stray video captures and/or the things we theatre journalists write). To get up the next day and go through that dance of the mayfly again—most often not only with no hope of a durable record but with a strong likelihood you won’t receive extravagant material compensations either—might almost fit the famous definition of insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. A lifetime of such ups and downs is definitely not for the faint of heart.

Imagine, though, if you built an institution that could serve as a permanent container for such moments, a fixed address for these fleeting appointments—a garden where these flowers can bloom in their season, then be pruned away for the next. Might that give an artist some sense of continuity, lasting impact, artistic home?

This is the question I kept coming back to as I read two indispensable new books by and about Zelda Fichandler [see Part 2, coming up on the 20th], the late, great co-founder of Washington, D.C.’s mighty Arena Stage, who died in 2016. Fichandler inarguably built one of the nation’s leading arts institutions around precisely this impulse—to make for theatre artists, as she often put it, “a home and not a hotel”—and in so doing inspired generations of leaders and artists (which she also did in her subsequent role as head of New York University’s graduate acting program).

But rest on her laurels? Nope. On the evidence of the speeches and essays collected and lovingly edited by Todd London in The Long Revolution: Sixty Years on the Frontlines of a New American Theater [Theatre Communications Group, 2024], Fichandler was hardly shy about celebrating the achievements of Arena and of U.S. regional theatres more broadly. But she could never be mistaken for a simple cheerleader. In a 1970 essay, she tidily sums up the rationale for the movement she helped pioneer over the previous two decades: “The impulse . . . was to remedy a grievous fault and reverse a direful trend—the contraction and imminent death of the theatre. The goal has been, to a large degree, accomplished.” She hastens to add a cautionary note: “Not secured, but accomplished.”

More plaintively, in a 1967 speech, she wonders aloud:

How old do you have to be to be “permanent”? How far up is “up”? Where are you when you are finally “there”? . . . When I get up in the morning I feel about twenty-eight days younger than the Comédie-Française [founded in 1680]. When will the proof be acknowledged to be actually in the pudding? How long must we scramble, pushing that damn stone up that damn mountain only to have to push it up again? How long, O Lord, how long?

[The reference to pushing a stone up a mountain is an allusion to the fate of Sisyphus in Greek mythology. In the underworld, he was condemned for eternity to push a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down before he reaches the top and he has to push it up again repeatedly forever. The myth is featured in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Ovid’s Orpheus and Eurydice, and Albert Camus’s 1942 philosophical essay, The Myth of Sisyphus.]

A certain divine dissatisfaction also thrums throughout Mary B. Robinson’s extraordinarily vivid mix of oral history and biography, To Repair the World: Zelda Fichandler and the Transformation of American Theater [Routledge, 2024], in which Zelda is quoted as saying, philosophically, “It’s never all in place. It never needs to be in place. Motion, change, transformation—that’s where the energy comes from.” That is also where the anxiety comes from: In an impassioned letter to the Ford Foundation, whose largesse helped launch Arena but whose direct support waned over the years, Zelda wrote, “I feel that there is no more successful theatre anywhere and NONE THAT IS IN A MORE PRECARIOUS POSITION.”

Robinson’s book even winds up in meta-contemplation of The Long Revolution itself—a collection that was in the works before Zelda’s death but was only completed earlier this year. Robinson quotes London on Fichandler’s “Jewish and Talmudic” impulse to “keep questioning the thing that you’ve made.” London adds, poignantly, “Without the opening night, or without the structure of school year/graduation, she couldn’t bring herself to stop the process. It just felt so continuous—her inability to just say, ‘The End.’”

[The Hebrew term Talmud (literally ‘study,’ ‘teaching,’ or ‘learning’) refers to a compilation of ancient teachings regarded as sacred and normative by Jews from the time it was compiled until today. It’s still regarded in this light by traditional religious Jews. The Talmud is the primary source of Jewish religious law (halakha) and Jewish theology.

[The compilation of the Talmud started with Ezra the Scribe (Book of Ezra) in the 5th century BCE. It was first published in 1523-24 in Venice, Italy, with later editions following. From the time of its completion, the Talmud became integral to Jewish scholarship.]

I think I’m drawn to this strain of Fichandler’s thinking, and the note of unmistakable pathos in it, not only because it seems abundantly clear that a questing, never-settled spirit was central to her forward-driving leadership, but because the theatre field she helped create is currently going through yet another rolling existential crisis, with contracting audiences, declining funding, widespread leadership turnover, and overdue but contested programs of diversity and equity. As many crucial lessons as these books contain about company-building and decision-making from one of the best who ever did it, they are possibly even more instructive on matters of company-sustaining, rethinking, regrouping, learning from failure, grounded in a strong connection to the ancient human roots of why and how we gather to tell stories in the first place. What would Zelda do? is a question very much worth asking now. These two books, read individually—or, as I did, in tandem—provide an abundance of answers.

[The two links in the paragraph above take readers to a pair of articles on the topics laid out. I have some posts on this blog relating to the same topics, however. First is the occasional series on the regional theater I mentioned in the introduction to this post, which includes, among other articles, “A look at the regional theaters fighting to save their historic art form” by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport (PBS NewsHour) and “Theater is in freefall, and the pandemic isn’t the only thing to blame” by Peter Marks (Washington Post), both in “The Regional Theater: Change or Die,” 3 October 2023.

[As for the second issue, see “Theatrical Continuity” (21 August 2009), my take on this same situation some years ago.]

Among her other striking qualities, Fichandler was searingly prescient—or, to put it another way, she was ever alert to the afflictions that perennially plague the lively arts. Consider “Hard Times for High Arts,” a speech she gave in the early 1990s, when recessionary pressures were forcing theatres to close, federal funding was in more or less permanent retreat, audiences were declining, artists were leaving the industry, the religious right was on the march against free expression—sound familiar? But it’s not just her diagnoses but her prescriptions that seem to point the way to our current moment: Rather than retreat into either the elitist or populist postures favored by some of her contemporaries, she full-throatedly advocates diversity and equity as central to theatre’s future (not least for their aesthetic and cultural benefits), and she sees robust arts education as a prerequisite for both a healthy civilization and a responsive audience.

Or look to “Whither (or Wither) Art?” [reposted on ROT in “‘Art Will Out,’ Part 4: Responses (continued),” 12 August 2024], her spirited 2003 response to a series of provocative essays in this magazine [i.e., American Theatre], including Jaan Whitehead’s critique of stultifying “institutional art” [reposted as “‘Art Will Out,’ Part 1,” 3 August 2024] and Todd London’s lament about the painful chasm between artists and institutions. Reflecting back on the lessons of Arena’s early years and the fieldwide struggles of the succeeding decades, Fichandler clearly recognizes in these voices a familiar call to create artistic sanctuaries from an extractive job-to-job economy—indeed, it was largely this impulse, in contrast to the “one-shot” Broadway model, around which Arena and like-minded theatres were founded. While she first mounts a partial defense of the regional theatre’s record as a talent incubator and culture creator, and issues her share of cautionary wisdom about windy idealism in the face of material challenges, she is ultimately not defensive. Instead, she ends up conceding the point that, yes, artists should get higher pay and an increased say on theatre boards and staffs, and that more theatres should be run by playwrights.

In fact, when she wrote that, the playwright and director Emily Mann [b. 1952] was already leading the McCarter Theatre Center (and would be followed by other playwright-leaders like Chay Yew [b. 1971] at Victory Gardens, Kwame Kwei-Armah [b. 1939] at Baltimore Center Stage, and Hana Sharif [b. 1979], Arena’s current artistic director). But acknowledgment of her successors wasn’t always Fichandler’s strongest suit, especially if they were women. Indeed, Mann appears in the pages of Robinson’s To Repair the World as one of many women leaders who honor Fichandler’s path-breaking example on the one hand, and lament her failure to lift up the next generation of women on the other. As Mann puts it bluntly, “She was not a friend [to women directors]. . . She did not want any peers,” though she adds that Fichandler’s praise for Mann’s play Execution of Justice “meant a great deal to me.”

[Emily Mann’s documentary play Execution of Justice, based on the transcripts of the 1979 trial of former San Francisco Supervisor Dan White for the 1978 murders Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, opened at Arena on 10 May 1985. The production was directed by Douglas C. Wager (who would succeed Fichandler as artistic director of the company) and designed by Ming Cho Lee. The production closed as scheduled on 16 June.

[The play was produced on Broadway at the Virginia Theatre, running from 13 to 22 March 1986 under Mann’s direction on Lee’s Arena set. The play is mentioned significantly in my article “Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama,” 9 October 2009.]

Robinson’s bracingly frank book is full of this kind of complication and texture: praise tempered by criticism, and vice versa. In one paragraph an actor will testify to the life-changing opportunity Zelda gave them, and in the next will starkly, sometimes bitterly, recount their falling out (and sometimes, though not always, weigh an invite to work together again). From a series of alternately harrowing and hilarious backstage tales, triumphs and setbacks, a portrait emerges of a glamorous, inspiring leader with exacting standards and a seemingly innate genius for seizing the reins and setting the agenda: in the rehearsal room, the boardroom, and later the classroom. This was coupled with a closely guarded vulnerability and self-doubt that would sometimes surface in her work as a director and as an essayist, but which Fichandler would not admit as an impediment to her work.

Some of those doubts arose from her role as a woman leader with children, and the impossible bind of the sexist expectation that she would somehow juggle these responsibilities without complaint, which never dogged her male colleagues. While she later confessed to friends that she wished she had spent more time with her family, she had always felt that her work was worth some sacrifice on the home front.

The most dramatic chapters of To Repair the World concern her struggles to hold together another kind of family: the acting company that was Arena Stage’s central attraction for decades, through which passed the likes of James Earl Jones [see “In Memoriam: James Earl Jones (1931-2024),” 22, 25, and 28 September 2024], George Grizzard [1928-2007], Jane Alexander [b. 1939], Robert Prosky [1930-2008], Frances Sternhagen [1930-2023], Melinda Dillon [1939-2023], Roy Scheider [1932-2008], Rene Auberjonois [1940-2019], and Ned Beatty [1937-2021], among many others. Anyone who idealizes the storied early years of the regional theatre, when institutions like Arena or the Guthrie or Trinity Rep employed resident acting companies doing repertory work, should read these passages carefully. Can a standing company achieve a uniquely lived-in ensemble synergy onstage, a la Moscow Art Theatre? Sure—but for every such triumph (1974’s transcendent Death of a Salesman, starring Prosky, shines in most memories as a particular highlight), Robinson’s book recounts dozens of tense meetings, competitive struggles for creative agency, and enduring grudges. It becomes clear that as tough and uncompromising as Zelda could be, and as much as she put actors at the center of her theatre—literally and otherwise—it took an immense toll on her to carry “so many souls that you are attached to,” as she put it to a colleague.

That may explain why, when she became head of NYU’s graduate acting program [1984-2009], she seemed to feel somewhat liberated, since the job of an educator is not [to] attach herself to souls but to equip them to soar to the next aerie. Though she had devoted the lion’s share of her career to building what she called, in the long, breathtaking essay that opens The Long Revolution, “Institution-as-Artwork” (her successor at Arena, Douglas Wager [b. 1949?], said she “dramaturged the institution”), Fichandler was finally more at home inspiring than hiring and firing. The testimonies of the actors who thrilled to her annual speeches and blossomed under her tutelage—including Rainn Wilson [b. 1966], Mahershala Ali [b. 1974], Karen Pittman [b. 1986], Danai Gurira [b. 1978], Angel Desai [b. 1972], and Corey Stoll [b. 1976]—are nearly universally awestruck and grateful.

At an evening earlier this year at NYU’s African Grove Theatre [“Celebrating Zelda Fichandler and Book Publications,” 18 September 2024 (the date is the 100th anniversary of her birth)], celebrating Fichandler’s centennial as well as the release of these two new books, many of the actors whose lives she’d helped to shape, from Jane Alexnder [b. 1969] to Randy Danson [b. 1950] to Miriam Silverman [b. 1977], read their testimonies and/or speeches by Zelda, and a few acted scenes from plays that were especially meaningful to her (Uncle Vanya [produced at Arena in 1997 under Fichandler’s direction], Awake and Sing! [staged at Arena by Fichandler in 2006; see “Awake and Sing!, et al.,” 3 April 2017]). As Maggie Siff [b. 1974] puts it:

Zelda was really important . . . in terms of defining purpose, making yourself believe you had a purpose as an actor. We get a lot of messaging as young actors that what you do isn’t a real art form. It wasn’t until I heard her speak that I could give language to this deep feeling I had inside that what I was doing, what I wanted to do, had a very important role in society.

Even in the NYU chapters, though, Robinson’s oral history pulls no punches, detailing a dust-up in 1992 when Black actors in the program vocally objected to Fichandler’s attempt to give them roles by programming a play about slavery, Carlyle Brown’s [b. 1946?] Yellow Moon Rising. Victor Williams [actor; b. 1970], on hand for the NYU celebration, recalled clashing with Fichandler on this issue and learning, as he puts it in Robinson’s book:

There is no perfect first time around . . . [Zelda] was always proactive and assertive in trying to be at the forefront . . . I think the reality is sometimes she hit the nail on the head, sometimes she didn’t . . . You’re not always going to be on the same page in terms of how to get there, but you’re still on the same path.

That seems a fair summation. Directionally, Fichandler, like Joseph Papp [1921-91; founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival, now the Public Theater], was raised with left-wing politics and remained more or less firmly on the side of the angels (“to repair the world” is the common translation of the Talmud’s “tikkun olam”). When it opened in 1949, Arena Stage was the only racially integrated theatre in Washington, D.C. And while she struggled fitfully to diversify her acting company, programming, and audience, in a city she recognized was predominantly Black, one of her final legacies at Arena was to establish the Allen Lee Hughes Fellowship [the AT article to which this a link, “The Pipeline: All Set to Succeed” by Crystal Paul, is reposted in “Theater Education & Training, Part 3,” 9 October 2024], a career development program for theatre professionals of color, named for the theatre’s Black lighting designer.

[According to every source, including the theater company’s own website, Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage was founded on 16 August 1950 by Zelda Fichandler, who became the long-serving artistic director; her husband, Thomas C. Fichandler (1915-97), who was the executive director; and Edward Mangum (1913-2001), a professor at George Washington University. There are administrative records the archive of Arena’s papers on reposit at George Mason University in Fairfax County, Virginia, that are dated 1949, but I assume they are preliminary planning documents as the theater didn’t open until 1950. (There is a sketch of Arena’s history on this blog in “Washington’s Arena Stage: Under Construction,” 26 November 2011.)

[The Hebrew phrase tikkun olam (pronounced tee-KOON oh-LUHM) means ‘repairing the world,’ as Weinert-Kendt says: tikkun means ‘repairing,’ ‘amending,’ ‘fixing,’ ‘improvement,’ ‘establishment,’ and ‘preparing,’ and olam has diverse meanings, including, ‘world,’ ‘existence,’ ‘lifetime,’ and ‘eternity.’ In modern Judaism, tikkun olam has come to mean social action and the pursuit of social justice.]

By the time she had a stint running the peripatetic troupe the Acting Company, in the early 1990s [1991-94], multicultural casting was enough the norm that the ensemble was only about half white. As she put it: “The subliminal message of this company was, we can make a world this way. We didn’t preach it. We didn’t say it. But there was a vision of it in front of them.”

[Coincidentally, one of Fichandler’s predecessors as artistic director at the Acting Company was Michael Kahn (b. 1937), who held the post from 1978-88. In 1986, he also assumed the position of artistic director of another prominent Washington theater, the Shakespeare Theatre Company (then known as the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger until 1992), from which he retired in 2019.]

Show, don’t tell, is as good a theatre motto as any. As these books demonstrate, though, Zelda Fichandler could tell with the best of them. Her arguments have a persuasive shape and rhythm, but she also had a near-Wildean [that’s Oscar, of course: the Irish playwright (1954-1900) known for his snappy aphorisms] gift for paradox (“Progress is a snail that jumps,” “We must hang on to our despair. Without despair, everything is hopeless,” “I know too much about it really to know anything”) and a pithy, aphoristic streak. Some favorites:

Success is always an accident, only failure can be counted on.

A mind, once stretched, never returns to its original dimensions.

Imagination is the nose of the public: By this, at any time, it may be quietly led.

A theatre gets the audience it signals to and deserves, and repertory is destiny.

Be a genius. If you aren’t a genius, try harder.

Risk-taking is not a line item in the budget but a style, an attitude toward living.

The basic law of [acting] technique is that something inside of us is always in motion.

Movingly, after ranging across the decades, The Long Revolution closes with her 1959 manifesto for the Arena, written at a time when the theatre she had founded 10 years earlier, somewhat capriciously, with her husband, Thomas Fichandler, had established a track record and a loyal audience, and was poised to move into a new home and become a Ford Foundation-funded nonprofit. It was a pivot point into a heady new era, and Zelda Fichandler boldly staked her claim to “A Permanent Classical Repertory Theater in the Nation’s Capital,” writing:

The art of theatre, whose true function for over two thousand years of human history has been the interpretation of man to man, has dwindled in contemporary America into nothing more significant than a “night on the town,” or a method of achieving prestige by having seen approval-stamped bits . . . The answer to the dilemma of the art of theatre in this country is simple and readily turned into a practical, living reality: We must create more theatre that, as Brooks Atkinson [1894-1984; esteemed New York Times theater reviewer, 1922-60] says, “is not so much show business as a form of culture.”

She also writes, in this prehistoric dawn of the regional theatre scene we now take for granted at our peril, of the intrinsic value of the resident model: “The permanent acting company is the actor’s best friend. It is also the audience’s best friend.” There’s that word again: “permanent.” Zelda lived long enough to witness the brittleness of that notion—not only the inherent fragility and insecurity of nonprofit performing arts but, perhaps more terrible, its zombie durability in a diminished, corporatized, quasi-commercial form. Writing in 1978, with a bit more hard-won wisdom under her belt, she gave a typically clear-eyed assessment of what the field she’d help found had accomplished, but could not, should not rest on:

We set out to create a form for theatre that would enable us to insert meaning and beauty into our culture so that people could reach out and touch it simply and directly. Despite hazards and harassments, we have in our various ways done just that. Our greatest achievement has been to decentralize or make “popular”—that is, part of the lives of people all over the country—the art of the theatre. It is a miracle of sorts. For not only did we have to construct the method to carry our idea, but we had to train an audience to know that they wanted to have what we wanted to give them. And that was not an easy struggle. It still goes on.

Indeed it does. When her successor, Doug Wager [tenure: 1991-98], visited Zelda in her final weeks, he said he told her, “We’re so lucky that we had the opportunity to transform the lives of so many thousands of people.” Zelda’s response haunts me, as it rightly should all of us: “No, no! More!”

[Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is editor-in-chief of American Theatre.]

*  *  *  *
“EDITOR’S NOTE”
by Rob Weinert-Kendt 

[Editor Weinert-Kendt’s note in American Theatre’s October 2016 issue (33.8) was a sort of personal obituary.  AT’s official, formal farewell by Laurence Maslon, a fellow member of the NYU faculty, follows.]

I’ve been struggling since Zelda Fichandler died at the end of July [29 July 2016] to come up with a suitable analogue for her outsized foundational stature in the American nonprofit theatre. Was she our George Washington, the level-headed general turned clear-eyed executive? Surely her four decades at the helm of Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage [1950-91], which she left only to head New York University’s graduate acting program, had a founding-mother patina about them. Or was she our Steve Jobs-like innovator, making something seem inevitable and indispensable that we didn’t even know we needed before it appeared? The regional/resident theatre movement we now think of, for better or worse, as an entrenched fixture of the U.S. and world theatre was not solely her handiwork; like Jobs she had partners, and she built on the ideas of earlier mavericks, in her case especially Margo Jones. But Fichandler can claim a large part of the credit for making theatre outside the commercial capital of New York City not only a force to be reckoned with but almost a force of nature—a part of the given cultural landscape that simply wasn’t there a half century ago but which now even (perhaps especially) the commercial theatre couldn’t do without.

Or, to make the analogy more direct, was she our [Konstantin] Stanislavsky [1963-1938], our [Bertolt] Brecht [1898-1956]—a leader both in theorizing and enacting the way to an ideal theatre of her own conviction and imagination? I’ve been eagerly diving into some of Fichandler’s writings (which will be collected in an upcoming volume by the estimable Todd London), and I mean no aspersion on the great theatre leaders of today when I say that I can think of few writers of any era—and I include critics—as tough-minded, searching, and circumspect about the many-faceted art and practice of the theatre. In a remarkable essay she wrote on the occasion of Arena’s 35th anniversary, and published by TCG [the Theatre Communications Group, publisher of American Theatre] in 1986, “Institution-as-Artwork,” Fichandler took sobering stock of the state of the movement she’d helped create, more or less ex nihilo, over the previous three-plus decades, alongside a far-flung breed of dreamers and doers, and wondered aloud, with breathtaking transparency: Is this really the world we wanted to build? She looked around at a field that had impressively professionalized itself but was at risk of what she called “the dry rot of institutionalization”; which was forsaking its commitment to well-trained, well-compensated actors and company artists; and which was too often at the mercy of bottom-line-oriented boards. If that litany sounds familiar, it’s because these dangers are still with us, unvanquished. [Some of these same concerns are addressed in Jaan Whitehead’s 2002 “Art Will Out,” posted on this blog on 3 August 2024.]

So, though, is the ever-renewing potential of this human-scaled art. I like to think that Zelda would be heartened by this issue, not only for Laurence Maslon’s [b. 1959] lovely memorial tribute to her (p. 20), but because our season preview (starting on p. 29) shines a light on the fertile new-play landscape in the U.S., and because there are two richly satisfying stories about an oft-neglected practice that was central to Arena’s origins: rotating repertory (p. 46, 122).

It finally occurs to me that I don’t need any analogue to measure her against: She was our Zelda Fichandler, and we were fortunate to have her.

*  *  *  *
“ZELDA FICHANDLER: 1924-2016
by Laurence Maslon 

[Laurence Maslon’s obituary for Zelda Fichandler was published in American Theatre’s October 2016 issue (33.8).]

As seen through the frame of American theatre at the midpoint of the 20th century, the idea of Zelda Fichandler as a producer was unlikely casting—or, perhaps, to use a phrase to which we’ll return, nontraditional casting.

Most producers back then were men, inflamed by the hip-hooray and ballyhoo of the commercial theatre. Zelda was as far away from the self-promotional solipsism of a David Merrick [1911-2000; some anecdotes the illustrate Maslon’s estimation of Merrick are related in “The Power of the Reviewer—Myth or Fact?: Part 2,” 26 January 2011] as you could be and still use the word “producer” to describe them both. She disdained interviews and couldn’t bear to have her photo plastered in the papers; she’d much rather devote her acute intelligence to a position paper than a press release any day. When a purely commercial opportunity beckoned from a northerly distance, she went screaming in the opposite direction. If, in the 30 years I knew her, both at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage and in New York University’s graduate acting program, she ever hung around for an opening-night party, toasting herself with champagne, I never saw it; I’m sure she spent the evening back up in her office, drafting a memo about not-for-profit funding or creating a burgeoning “to-do” list on a yellow legal pad, late into the night.

Not for her the bright marquees or gilded proscenium arches that enthralled the Broadway Bialystocks. Perhaps that’s why she embraced the idea of an arena theatre so passionately: nowhere to hide; the focus on dialogue and discourse; the rethinking of human interaction in cubic space, not the artificial choreography mandated by a box set. For Zelda, the Arena was, first and forever, an arena: a forum where conflicting ideas could be battled out until the last righteous man or woman remained standing.

[Maslon’s invocation of “the Broadway Bialystocks,” for those who can’t place it, is a reference to Max Bialystock of Bialystock and Bloom. He’s the gonif producer, played in the 2001 Broadway première of the musical The Producers by Nathan Lane (and in the source movie by Zero Mostel), who came up with the idea for Springtime for Hitler and the scam that went with it.]

At the center of those ideas was always the essential instrument for broadcasting passionate thought, the human being—or, in its quotidian representation, the actor. I say this not to denigrate the actor, by any means; I simply mean that Zelda loved people and their problems—their motivations, their contradictions, the “Shadow” that T. S. Eliot [1888-1965; the reference is to lines in “The Hollow Man,” 1925] wrote about that falls between the motion and the act. She was obsessed with the human psyche, and actors were the best way to explore that vast, furrowed landscape. Had she to live her life over again (and it was three normal lifetimes’ worth), she’d have been a psychoanalyst. I think she was always more interested in actors than characters; characters were limited by even the best playwright’s imagination. Human beings, however, were infinite and circumvented neat or easy conclusions.

That may be why Zelda was always drawn to [Anton] Chekhov [1860-1904], [Arthur] Miller [1915-2005], and [Clifford] Odets [1906-63]; they came closest, in her mind, to capturing the elusive conundrums that human beings bring to real life. She always loved Bessie Berger’s line in Awake and Sing!: “We saw a very good movie, with Wallace Beery. He acts like life, very good.” Her taste in playwrights notwithstanding, she was hardly grim or humorless to anyone who knew her; she used to say, “I love a good joke—but it has to be a good joke.” But Zel rarely tried her hand at Molière [1622-73] or George S. Kaufman [1889-1961] and [Moss] Hart [1904-61] or musicals; those she left to the extremely capable hands of associates such as Garland Wright [1946-98; artistic director of the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota (1986-95)] or Douglas C. Wager. I suspect that comedies or musicals simply didn’t intrigue her mind as much; by their very definition, they must always conclude—usually in a happy fashion—and Zelda believed that “real life” always held a next chapter.:

Few things made her happier than gossip: She loved it when I, or one of my colleagues, walked into her office and spilled the beans on some post-opening-night tryst or an ongoing affair between classmates that had escaped her attention. These were secret chapters in the lives of people close to her—and the more incongruous the assignation, the better. She always embraced the unexpected as the best possible turn of events.

Her great pleasure was in the unexpected revelation of people. Zelda would kvell her deepest kvells when an acting student made an unforeseen breakthrough in a production [for the goyim: to kvell is ‘to beam with great pride and delight’]. “Wasn’t she amazing?” she’d ask rhetorically (she was big on rhetorical questions), like a career botanist observing the bloom of an exotic flower.

When I first interviewed with her in 1988 for a job at Arena, we attended a visiting production of the Gate Theatre of Dublin’s Juno and the Paycock [1924; Sean O’Casey (1880-1964)], directed by Joe Dowling, on Broadway [John Golden Theatre, 21 June-2 July 1988]. (True to form, Zelda loved it and immediately hired Joe—whom she hadn’t met before—to direct the production at Arena [4 May-10 June 1990].) As we walked to a restaurant on West 44th Street afterward, I nattered on about my meager achievements in theatre, and I could see Zelda’s eyes glaze over; a recitation of my résumé had clearly not provided enough to spark her prodigious curiosity. A polite but semi-opaque film had been drawn between her and my ambition to work at a great theatre. But, as we were seated at the restaurant, I asked her if we could switch seats, as I was (and am) completely deaf in my left ear. “Really?” Her ebony eyes swelled behind her immense designer frames. “Since when?” [This anecdote is told from Dowling’s point of view in “Zelda Fichandler, Valiant Striver in the Arena,” coming up in Part 2 on the 20th.]

The one area that, in my opinion, stymied her was the terrain of multiculturalism. Zelda believed in the flowering of human potential as much as any human being I have ever met. Her efforts in giving opportunities to actors, students, writers, directors, designers, producers of color were second to none during the time in which she had opportunities to wield at her disposal. As early as 1968, she tried to create the first “nontraditional” ensemble in the American theatre. In the 1980s, she took on the challenge with renewed vigor, diversifying the Arena company once again, hiring associate artists such as Tazewell Thompson [director and playwright; b. 1948], commissioning plays by diverse writers with diverse stories, and digging deeply into the ranks of aspiring actors for the graduate program to produce an ensemble that looked like America. Working in tandem with lighting designer Allen Lee Hughes [b. 1946?], she created a fellowship in his name at Arena Stage, an incredible program that has encouraged and developed the next generation of theatre artists of color.

And yet, somehow, I believe Zelda never felt she had done enough in this regard. Ironically, for someone who enjoyed the irresolution of an ambiguous dramatic message, Zelda couldn’t quite bring herself to believe that the diversification of an American art form was—and always will be—a process. Zelda’s can-do resolve wanted to make sure this mission was definitively concluded, but, in this one arena, even Zelda, with her immense willpower, couldn’t knit together the warp and woof of human history. It’s an ongoing experiment, and to my mind Zelda has never gotten enough credit for what she did manage to achieve in diversifying the American theatre.

I heard that Zelda was not well and that she was declining quickly during the last week of July. On the night of July 28, the Thursday before I wrote this piece, I watched Hillary Clinton accept her party’s nomination as president and give a pretty darn good speech (Zel would have had a few notes for her, though). I went to bed and when I awoke early the next morning, I learned that Zel had passed away during the night—about half an hour after Hillary’s exit from the stage in Philadelphia. What timing! Did Zelda, in her serenity, muse to herself: “You know what? I created a major American theatre, the first resident company to send a play to Broadway [The Great White Hope by Howard Sackler (1929-82)], the first to tour the Soviet Union [Our Town and Inherit the Wind to Moscow and Leningrad, 1973], the first to win a Tony Award [special Tony for theatrical excellence¸1976], and the first to provide a platform for hundreds of major artists. I transformed an MFA acting program into one of the country’s finest. Let someone else crack a few ceilings for a change: Here you go, the torch is yours.”

[GWH débuted at Arena on 7 December 1967 and ran through 14 January 1968 under the direction of Edwin Sherin (1930-2017).  The production starred James Earl Jones as Jefferson and Jane Alexander as Eleanor Bachman. 

[The production moved to Broadway’s Alvin Theatre with the original cast largely intact; it ran from 3 October 1968 to 31 January 1970 for 23 previews and 546 regular performances.  Produced by Herman Levin (1907-90), it won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Drama (Sackler); three 1969 Tony Awards: Best Play (Sackler and Levin), Best Actor in a Play (Jones), Best Featured Actress in a Play (Alexander); and two 1969 Drama Desk Awards: Outstanding Performance (Alexander and Jones), Outstanding Director (Sherin).

[There’s discussion of this play (and the film adaptation) throughout my tribute to Jones, “In Memoriam: James Earl Jones (1931-2024),” 22, 25, and 28 September.

[The trip to Russia was between 27 September and 17 October 1973.  Arena traveled with 67 members, including 49 actors; the rest of the company were crew and techies. Thornton Wilder’s (1897-1975) Our Town [1938] and Jerome Lawrence (1915-2004) and Robert E. Lee’s (1918-94) Inherit the Wind (1955) were presented in Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg).]

And then, to paraphrase the end of one of Zelda’s beloved Chekhov’s plays: She would rest, she would rest, she would rest. [The play is Uncle Vanya (1897) and the character who’s speaking at the vert end of the last act is Sonya.]

[Laurence Maslon is arts professor and associate chair of New York University’s graduate acting program.

[The second and last part of this tribute to Zelda Fichandler will be posted on Sunday, 20 October.]


12 October 2024

Theater Education & Training, Part 4

 

[This is Part 4 of the “Theater Education & Training” series, and the last of the six articles I’m reposting from American Theatre.  I recommend going back and reading the earlier installments of the collection, if you haven’t already done so.  As a reminder, Parts 1 through 3 were posted on 3, 6, and 9 October 2024. 

[ROTters shouldn’t be surprised if I return to the subject of theater or arts education, as it’s a topic about which I have very strong feelings.

THE HBCU EDGE
by Christopher A. Daniel
 

[Christopher A. Daniel’s “The HBCU Edge” was published in the Winter 2024 issue of American Theatre (40.2 – 22 February 2024): “Theatre Training: Passing the Torch.”  It deals, as the title states, with the unique assets offered in the theater arts by Historically Black Colleges and Universities.]

Alumni, faculty, and students from historically Black colleges and universities weigh in on how their training prepared them to take centerstage.

When two-time Academy Award-winning costume designer Ruth E. Carter [Best Achievement in Costume Design: Black Panther (2019); Best Achievement in Costume Design: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2023)] delivered the commencement address at her alma mater, Hampton University [Hampton, Virginia], in May 2023, she put both of her gold statues on the podium. The students immediately cheered and jumped out of their seats as she captivated the graduating class with a simple message:  If I can do it, so can you.

Carter, the first Black woman to earn multiple Oscars for creating the Afrofuturistic looks for both Black Panther films, also received nominations for her work on Malcolm X [1993 Academy Awards ceremony] and Amistad [1998]. Originally studying to be an actress, she graduated in 1982 with a degree in theatre arts, splitting her undergrad years between performing and becoming the school’s lead designer after one of her professors gave her the key to the costume closet. Having unlimited access to that space is what changed her career path and laid the foundation for her to make history.

“Nobody wanted to do costumes, so I didn’t have anyone competing with me,” said Carter of her time at Hampton. “Everyone had the dream of becoming a star or actor in Hollywood. I was creating my own curriculum, so I was a little unsure if I had enough training. That mentorship put into my head that I had a future.”

Carter is among the plethora of film, television, and theatre professionals who either attended or graduated from a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) with an emphasis in theatre. At D.C.’s Howard University, the drama program turned out such talents like Oscar-nominated actress Taraji P. Henson [Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2009)], Tony winner Phylicia Rashad [Best Actress in a Play for A Raisin in the Sun (2004); Best Performance by an Actress in a Featured Role in a Play for Skeleton Crew (2022)], her multi-talented, Emmy-winning sister Debbie Allen [her latest two: Outstanding Television Movie and Outstanding Choreography for Scripted Programming for Christmas on the Square (2021), of which Allen was director, choreographer, and co-producer (shared with other co-producers); see more below], Lynn Whitfield [Primetime Emmy as Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Special for The Josephine Baker Story (1991)], orchestrator Harold Wheeler [received numerous Tony nominations for Best Orchestrations and a Special Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2019; Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Orchestrations for Hairspray (2003)], and late actors Ossie Davis [recipient of many major honors; see below] and Chadwick Boseman [three NAACP Image Awards; details and other honors below].

[Also see the repost on Rick On Theater of Rashad’s memoir about working with James Earl Jones on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in “In Memoriam: James Earl Jones (1931-2024), Part 3” (28 September 2024). Rashad was also nominated for Tonys as Best Actress in a Play for Gem of the Ocean (2005) and for Best Revival of a Play as a producer of the revival of Purlie Victorious (2024), written by Ossie Davis and premièred on Broadway in 1961.

[Allen received many Emmy Award nominations, and won quite a few: for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography for Fame (1982 and 1983); for Outstanding Achievement in Choreography for Motown 30: What's Goin' on! (1991); and the Governor's Award for “her unprecedented achievements in television and her commitment to inspire and engage marginalized youth through dance, theater arts and mentorship” (2021). She directed the 2008 all-black Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof which starred her sister opposite James Earl Jones. Allen received two Tony nominations: Best Featured Actress in a Musical for a revival of West Side Story (1980) and Best Actress in a Musical for a revival of Sweet Charity (1986).

[Actor and playwright Ossie Davis (1917-2005) was married to actress Ruby Dee (1922-2014) for 57 years until his death, and they frequently performed together. Together, they were inducted into the NAACP Image Awards Hall of Fame (1989), awarded the National Medal of Arts (1995), recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors (2004); in 1994, Davis was named to the American Theater Hall of Fame.

[Chadwick Boseman (1976-2020)] won two NAACP Image Awards as Outstanding Actor in a Motion Picture (Black Panther, 2019; Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, 2021 – posthumously) and one as Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture (Da 5 Bloods, 2021 – posthumously). Boseman won a 2022 Primetime Emmy as Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance for What If . . .?, a 2021 Golden Globe as Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and a 2021 Screen Actors Guild Awards as Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Boseman received a 2021 Oscar nomination as Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (all awards and nominations after 2020 were posthumous).]

Myles Frost, who took home the Tony for Best Lead Actor in a Musical for MJ the Musical in 2022, attended Bowie State University in Maryland. Grammy-winning singer Erykah Badu [19 Grammy nominations, 4 wins; see below] studied theatre at Grambling State University in Louisiana, Oprah Winfrey majored in drama at Tennessee State [University, Nashville], and alumni of Atlanta’s Morehouse College include [actors] Samuel L. Jackson, Brian Tyree Henry, and John David Washington, among others.

[Badu won four Grammy Awards: Best Female R&B Vocal Performance for “On & On” (1998); Best R&B Album, Baduizm (1998); Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group for “You Got Me” (2000); and Best R&B Song for “Love of My Life (An Ode to Hip Hop).”]

A History of Possibilities

There are currently 102 HBCUs in the U.S and 35 of those institutions offer theatre. Students and faculty at Clark Atlanta University [Georgia] started staging plays on campus at the turn of the 20th century, producing classics such as The Rivals [comedy of manners by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (Irish; 1751-1816), 1775] and The Taming of the Shrew. Dillard University in New Orleans, which trained veteran talents Garrett Morris and Beah Richards [1920-2000], created the first HBCU theatre degree program in 1936. Thirteen years later, Howard University launched its drama department.

Theatre programs at HBCUs include hands-on training to prepare students to become well-rounded and competitive both on- and offstage in the real world. Most majors are required to take courses in acting, directing, voice, stage management, improvisation, theatre appreciation, and creative writing. Enrolled students often have to perform, design sets, market and publicize their productions, and write research papers. It’s a strategy professors use to empower students to take pride in themselves as people of African descent as well as in their work.

HBCUs often lack infrastructure, available faculty, and state-of-the art facilities to perform and train talent, as they are underfunded by both state and federal government, along with relatively low alumni philanthropy because of devastating student loan debt. Still, Black students work through those limitations at HBCUs to learn the art of being self-sufficient and collaborative. “That’s a training in itself that creates drive in students,” said Garry L. Yates, Clark Atlanta University’s former speech and theatre chair-turned-mass media arts associate professor. “Because we lack equipment, it just makes us work a little harder, and the things we did have, we cherished those things.”

Tony-winning director and producer Kenny Leon has directed 15 Broadway productions (and counting [current: Our Town (1938) by Thornton Wilder (1897-1975); Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre (10 October 2024-19 January 2025)]) after completing his studies at Clark Atlanta University. Studying political science but taking all theatre electives, the director made it a point to regularly observe people in public spaces and “on the yard,” or on campus, to help actors mold characters onstage. He acknowledges one of his professors, Joan Lewis, as someone who made him appreciate discipline as part of directing.

“I was taught to not let anybody outwork you,” said Leon, who founded True Colors Theatre Company in Atlanta in 2002. “She would demand that you stay in and not go out to the party to work on your character. I was trained to believe in myself and know that anything is possible. You didn’t have to go to Juilliard, Harvard, or Yale. All you have to do is understand the practicality of what creates a character, and now I’m on top of the world.”

That type of tough love and mentorship is a cornerstone of the HBCU experience. For many students, it’s their first time having numerous Black teachers at one school. Professors in turn care for their students like their own birth children, getting to know each student by their full name and turning semesters into lifelong relationships with their pupils.

Like Leon, [actress] Keara Jones also received her bachelor’s degree in theatre from Clark Atlanta University. The 2020 graduate took courses for her major, taught by Atlanta-based actors, while balancing a work study job as an assistant in the theatre department’s main office. She noticed the way professors would acknowledge each and every student on a first-name basis in and out of class, and credits that family-oriented atmosphere, as well as her instructors’ life lessons in class and their professional experience, for setting her up for success.

“It reassured me that I was learning the tools necessary to be a working actor,” said Jones, an alumna of the American Theatre Wing [the New York City-based organization, “dedicated to supporting excellence and education in theatre,” that sponsors the Tony and Obie Awards]. “It opened doors for my classmates and I to audition for professional theatre in Atlanta, gain internships, and work under some big names, too.”

Being a student in one of these departments can be so inspiring, it’s not uncommon for alumni to return to their alma maters as faculty. Luther Wells, associate director of Florida A&M University’s (FAMU) Essential Theatre [Tallahassee], graduated from the school in 1984. Among his classmates was In Living Color [sketch-comedy television series (1990-94) created and written by Keenen Ivory Wayans] cast member T’Keyah Crystal Keymah, and the department’s alumni include Tony winner Anika Noni Rose and Emmy nominee Meshach Taylor. Wells remembers the theatre’s late director, Ronald O. Davis [1934?-2014], keeping track of his theatrical work post-undergrad and offering him a job to teach at FAMU following his thesis presentation for his MFA in acting from the Ohio State University [Columbus] in 1993.

Davis encouraged Wells to view theatre as a space for problem solving and critical thinking. “We were a small program that didn’t have a lot of money, but if we went to Dr. Davis with ideas, he would then challenge us to bring those things into fruition,” Wells said. “I wanted to come back and help improve the program and expose students to experiences and opportunities that I didn’t have while I was an undergraduate student.”

Preparation for the Future

P-Valley series regular J. Alphonse Nicholson enrolled in North Carolina Central University’s (NCCU [Durham]) theatre department in 2008 after then-Prof. Karen Dacons-Brock cast him in his first lead role because of his personality. The two-time NAACP Image Award nominee, who appeared on Broadway in the Leon-directed revival of A Soldier’s Play [by Charles Fuller; Broadway revival won the Tony for Best Revival of a Play and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Play] in 2020, credits NCCU’s late theatre department chair, Johnny Alston, for teaching him to balance his studies with his professional work, since he was already doing community theatre by his sophomore year.

[The NAACP Image Awards, established in 1967, honor outstanding representations and achievements in the arts by people of color. Dubbed the “Black Oscar/Emmy/Grammy,” many people of color consider the Image Award “the one that matters.” Nicholson was nominated in 2021 and 2023 as Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for P-Valley.]

“It was like having a grandfather or an uncle as your professor,” said Nicholson. “He had a very low tolerance for anything. He didn’t want you to be late. Your clothes had to look a certain way, and he didn’t want you coming in smelling a certain way. He cared about you and wanted you to do well, and even when you did wrong, he still loved you.”

Alabama State University [Montgomery] alumnus Anthony M. Stockard is the founding artistic director of Norfolk State University (NSU) Theatre Company in Virginia, and founder of the HBCU’s drama and theatre degree program. Responsible for the school constructing a new state-of-the-art theatre in 2017 with full support from the school’s dean, Stockard takes pride in building partnerships among NSU, Equity actors, and theatre companies to help students learn how to put a price on their contributions to various stage productions. [Actors’ Equity Association, known as Equity, is the union that represents stage actors and theatrical stage managers in the United States.]

“The students will eventually have agents and managers,” said Stockard, “but they have to start learning how to negotiate and set the bar for themselves, because once they get paid, it puts the monkey on their back, because now they’re being treated like professionals.

“I was taught to be in control of our own narratives, to make our own opportunities, know my worth and to teach people how to treat me,” Stockard continued. “The university can block whatever they want to at any time, but they gave me my wings and really supported me to make it happen. I was so used to asking for permission to do everything, but there was a confidence and trust that was there.”

That infectious energy from Black students is often reciprocated, motivating the faculty to bring their best selves to the department. Being in the company of hip, youthful energy, whether in class or during office hours, empowers the instructors to incorporate more up-to-date terminology and spirit into their lectures or face-to-face engagement.

“The students are very enthusiastic,” said Karen Turner Ward, artistic director of Hampton University Repertory Theatre in Virginia. “They keep you young and working. It keeps you wanting to influence them to have successful careers themselves. They know from the very first moment they step on campus that they’re going to be really supported and pushed to their limit to be creative.”

Learning Beyond the White Gaze

Advancing to conservatories and graduate theatre programs to pursue advanced degrees at predominantly white institutions (PWIs) can be a challenge for students coming out of HBCUs. The family-oriented atmosphere, intercultural diversity, and being the majority on the yard gives way to Black students typically being the first or one of few in the classes.

Auditioning for roles usually results in Black talent being pigeonholed, typecast, or not considered at all for full production seasons. “It’s Black privilege here at HBCUs, because everything is about them,” said Morgan State University’s [Baltimore, Maryland] theatre arts coordinator Janice Short. “Black students don’t have to wait for a role to come to them. The role that looks like or speaks to them is all created for them. We get to share stories from us, for us, by us with our community.”

By contrast, white professors’ lack of cultural awareness, classist attitudes, and tendency toward micro-aggressions at the conservatory level can make Black students uncomfortable, leading them to second-guess their abilities. Playwright and screenwriter Mansa Ra, formerly known as Jireh Breon Holder, studied theatre at both Morehouse College and at the all-male college’s all-women sister campus next door, Spelman College [Atlanta, Georgia], before earning his MFA in playwriting from Yale School of Drama in 2016 [New Haven, Connecticut; known as the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University after 2021].

Describing the change of environment as “a hard culture shock,” Ra—who would go on to become a staff writer on the NBC medical drama New Amsterdam [2018-23] and have his play . . . what the end will be premiere at Roundabout Theatre [New York City; 2022]—often clashed with the graduate faculty over his writing style and voice. It was the supportive and nurturing energy that he had experienced at the Atlanta University Center campuses that kept him encouraged enough to persevere, defend his creativity, and complete the Yale program, though he considered leaving.

[The Atlanta University Center Consortium is a collaboration formed in 1929 among four HBCU’s in Atlanta, Georgia: Clark Atlanta University, Spelman College, Morehouse College, and the Morehouse School of Medicine.]

“It was like night and day,” said Ra, who changed his name in late 2020. “I had to advocate for myself as a Black man in a way that I never had to do in school. It was new to me, standing in front of 60-year-old white men and women who had a very specific goal for my story, and to refuse what they wanted me to do.

“It’s the type of environment where you really have to have a degree of grit and personal fortitude to really survive, because Yale is the type of place that wants to break you down,” added Ra. “At HBCUs, the goal is always to build you up as high as you could go.”

Grambling State University assistant professor of theatre Prince Duren spent 10 years teaching theatre at his alma mater, Jackson State University in Mississippi. He too experienced culture shock and felt inadequate as the only and first Black student to earn an MFA in playwriting and screenwriting from University of Arkansas [Fayetteville] in 2013. Duren, the recipient of the Lorraine Hansberry Award from the American College Theater Festival [2012 – third place award for Delta Secret], struggled with imposter syndrome as he received white colleagues’ feedback and notes about both his writing and his racial identity.

[The Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, established in 1977, recognizes the outstanding plays written by students of African or Diasporan descent that best express the African American experience. The play must be produced by a college or university or publicly presented in a “rehearsed” or “staged reading” format following a significant development process. The Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival provides the awardee with an all-expenses-paid professional development opportunity and the Dramatists Guild Award provides the recipient with Active membership in the Guild.

[The annual Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival is a national theater program for students from colleges and universities across the country. In January and February, eight Regional Conferences showcase the finest regional productions, offer workshops, and celebrate students' work. The National Festival takes place each April at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.]

“If they told me my name was wrong, I would’ve changed that, because at the time I didn’t know any better,” said Duren. “I didn’t feel like I belonged there, because the other people there had been practicing theatre for so long. There were several instances where I was overtly reminded that I was Black.” He remembers it all as a “nightmare.” What saved him, he said, is that he had still had people in his life “who believed in me and saw things in me that I very much didn’t see in myself.”

Recruiting high school students to consider HBCU theatre programs can be challenging for professors and staff, who sometimes experience anti-Blackness from teens at college fairs who may have been advised by guidance counselors that they won’t benefit from a Black college experience.

“Black students will intentionally divert themselves away from the booth or table because they are told that going to an HBCU is less than,” said Wells. “Some students will go other places and then find themselves at an HBCU, because they go to those other places and they’re not seen or have opportunities to get on the stage.”

Jones, on the other hand, believes her time at Clark Atlanta “gave her the tools to strengthen her Black voice.” She went on to train and catch numerous performances in London’s West End, crediting her professors’ constant encouragement to be her unapologetic self as the element that will help her land opportunities and future roles.

“I’m equipped to make theatre out of anything, whether it’s a black box with two chairs or fully immersive theatre with the top sets,” she said. “I can take nothing and make it whatever it is I need to tell a compelling story.”

Stockard’s intense preparation and ongoing conversations with his students past and present allows them to own the room, unlike what Black students typically face in predominantly white spaces. Christopher Lindsay, who went on to earn his MFA in Acting from Brown University’s Trinity Rep [Providence, Rhode Island] program in 2021 after finishing at NSU in 2017, originally shared the stage with his mentor in his first Equity acting job while he was in undergrad. The experience allowed him to perceive himself as just as talented as any professional or his grad school instructors onstage.

“A philosophy Prof. Stockard has imparted to his students is that regardless of what a space might be, predominantly white or otherwise, it is your job is to stay true to yourself and tell the best story possible,” Lindsay said. “It’s impossible to portray someone else authentically when you’re still discovering who you are.”

Reaching Back for the Next Generation

There’s a misconception at HBCUs that their theatre programs only read and produce plays written by the likes of Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson, and Suzan-Lori Parks. HBCU professors beg to differ: They often reimagine Greek drama and works by [Edward] Albee, [Anton] Chekhov, [Arthur] Miller, and [Thornton] Wilder with a more modern perspective by setting the stories in Black neighborhoods, giving the characters more familiar names, or incorporating current events, pop culture references, and historic moments relevant to Black folks, so that their students can better relate to the subject matter and find the universal themes in the storytelling.

“HBCU programs allow us to discover who we are not only as human beings but as African Americans,” Wells said. “We do William Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, Moliere, and Sophocles, but we approach those with an Afrocentric lens instead of a European lens.”

Tajleed Hardy, an NSU alumnus currently in the final year of his MFA program at University of Louisville [Kentucky], concurs. “HBCU theatre gives students a chance to find their identities as Black artists in the world,” he said. “It allows students to recognize their Blackness and make it their greatest strength when operating professionally.” 

Nicholson shares Wells’ and Hardy’s sentiments.

“A lack of resources doesn’t mean we lack the knowledge,” he said. “The professors who are there are well-versed in their understanding, and I wouldn’t be the actor I am today without the HBCU theatre department. The care, love, and understanding are irreplaceable at an HBCU, and you won’t find that anywhere else.”

HBCU theatre programs also often encourage students to be productive citizens who reach back to uplift the younger generation once they become successful. Professors recommend their star pupils for gigs and various off-campus opportunities. In other cases, alumni will also reach back, whether through guest lectures in individual classes, shadowing, or apprenticeships. Not only does this create pipelines; it also helps current students have an idea of what’s possible for them.

“PWIs can’t tell our stories like we can tell them,” said Duren. “Yale, Harvard, Columbia, or NYU can do a Black play, but we have the Black and HBCU experience to bring these stories alive. It’s not just the cast or director; it’s the environment and the support that can never ever be duplicated.” 

“The magic from our programs brings our students back,” added Short. “Graduates are going on to work at these theatres, and they reach back because they know that the students are being trained, and trained well.”

As such, HBCUs can provide the ideal incubator for change agents and game changers in the entertainment industry. They allow Black and brown students to dream big and strive for excellence in everything they pursue, especially, but not only, in theatre.

“You have to have a tenacious spirit, exceptional work ethic, respect for the work, and a heart filled with gratitude,” said Bonita J. Hamilton, an Alabama State University alumna who’s portrayed Shenzi in The Lion King on Broadway for the last 19 years. 

“Students from HBCUs offer unfiltered, honest experiences from our culture, and half of Black Hollywood wouldn’t exist without it,” said Stockard. “It’s about realness, connection, bringing yourself to the stories, being bold about it, pushing yourself to your limits, and remembering who it’s for: representing your culture and all that comes with it.”

[Christopher A. Daniel (he/him/his) is an award-winning journalist, cultural critic, ethnomusicologist, and college professor based in Atlanta. Daniel is a Black Culture reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and has taught at Morehouse College, Clark Atlanta University, and Georgia State University.]

*  *  *  *
 CRITICAL STEPS: UNDER COVERED
by Alexis Hauk
 

[The article below is also from American Theatre’s Winter 2024 issue (40.2 – 28 March 2024):Theatre Training: Passing the Torch.”]

Even with arts journalism jobs in decline, emerging theatre critics keep training and finding new outlets for their voices.

The way critics are depicted in pop culture, you might mistake them for mortal enemies of the striving artist (or at least as the shadowy nemeses of plucky rat chefs in Paris). But the reality is that the relationship between artists and those who magnify and examine their work is much more symbiotic.

Take it from New York Times critic Wesley Morris, who put it beautifully in his Pulitzer Prize remarks in 2021: “Criticism champions, condemns, X-rays, and roots out,” he said. “It explains and appraises and contextualizes. It also dreams and marvels and mourns. You need some kind of knowledge to do it, sure, and maybe (hopefully) some humor, but really—truly—you need feeling. You need feelings.”

[The rat chef in Paris is a reference to the character Remy from the 2007 animated film Ratatouille. His nemesis is probably Anton Ego, the food critic.]

This emotional connection between the theatremaker and the theatre digester is all the more poignant of late, as journalism and the arts have both been struggling for their very existence over the last few decades, with the sustained pattern of cutbacks in state and federal funding for the arts, the corporatization of local media, and then—boom—the pandemic.

Measured in layoffs, this past year was the worst year to date for journalists. According to employment firm Challenger, Gray, & Christmas [an outplacement and career transition services firm based in Chicago], as of December 2023, the media industry had already slashed 21,417 full-time jobs.

The good news, though it’s cold comfort to anyone out of a job, is that people continue to appreciate the arts—as an idea, at least. This has been confirmed by the latest economic and social impact study from the nonprofit organization Americans for the Arts [seeks to advance the arts in the United States]. Their report found that 86 percent of attendees to arts and culture events state that “arts and culture are important to their community’s quality of life and livability.” The report also noted that 79 percent of that same group think the arts are “important to their community’s businesses, economy, and local jobs.”

This belief in the arts, of course, doesn’t necessarily translate into widespread support for full-time theatre critics. Many major theatre markets no longer have anyone being paid to write about performing arts at all, let alone for a legacy publication. But just as there is still theatre to cover, there are still folks finding ways to cover it.

Amid these daunting financial and industry realities, what does forging a path in theatre criticism even look like these days? Where does one go to learn best practices? To learn how to craft an expert pitch? Is it all learning by doing? If so, how and where do you get started?

To examine these questions, we spoke with six rising critics, all graduates from one of three theatre criticism programs, each designed to give cohorts real-world, boots-on-the-ground experience. They are:

 The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center National Critics Institute (NCI), a two-week workshop designed for arts writers and critics to sharpen their tools of the trade. Founded in 1968 and based in Waterford, Conn., the program is framed as a “boot camp” experience, owing to the intensive amount of writing and workshops with a variety of leading industry professionals.

• The BIPOC Critics Lab, a program founded in 2020 by veteran arts writer Jose Solís with the mission to train and create work by emerging critics of color. The program is designed to travel to various cultural organizations, and it has been hosted by the Public Theater, the Stratford Festival & Intermission Magazine, and the Kennedy Center.” [The acronym BIPOC refers to “black, indigenous, (and) people of color.”]

 The Kennedy Center’s Institute for Theater Journalism and Advocacy (ITJA), launched with the mission “to provide writers the opportunity to grow at the same pace as the artists whose work they review, celebrate, and interpret.” Eligible college students are required to be enrolled at a learning institution at the time of the program, or to have graduated within the last year. This program also provides a national scholarship to attend the NCI. 

What have young writers learned from these programs? What have they learned on their own out in the market? And what new opportunities, if any, remain in this shrinking market?


 Throw Your Best Pitch

When Billy McEntee [theater editor at The Brooklyn Rail] was studying theatre at Boston College, it was a feature writing class with [Boston Globe] critic Don Aucoin that sparked his interest in criticism. Mentorship from an experienced writer “opened the door to the potential of arts journalism, criticism being a thing that I could pursue,” McEntee said.

Like many young critics, McEntee was a theatre kid. Growing up in New Jersey, he quipped, “I was not the best at sports. And I was fortunate to grow up in a school system that had pretty good arts extracurriculars.” His grandfather would also take him to see “Golden Age” musicals like Oklahoma!Paint Your Wagon, and South Pacific—trips that were “kind of my gateway drug, so to speak,” McEntee said.

McEntee attended the National Critics Institute (NCI) in 2018, about three years after moving to Brooklyn, having completed a fellowship at Berkeley Repertory Theatre [California]. At the time he relocated, he was attempting to freelance as a writer while working a day job as a communications associate at Playwrights Horizons, an Off-Broadway theatre [in New York City] focused on new work.

While he had assembled a few clips at HowlRound [theater website] before NCI, that program opened McEntee’s mind about what was possible—not only in terms of how and where to pitch his wares but also in terms of how he could up his game as a writer. The writing boot-camp aspect of NCI, in which young critics must file a review every night for two weeks, gave him a chance “to see a show, get out at 10 o’clock, file a review that night, and then look at it with everybody the next morning at 10 a.m. That was foundational and helpful.”

He recalled a few high-pressure moments—like the time a critic from The New York Times was going to be the evaluator the next morning, and the play McEntee had under consideration was eluding his comprehension.

“That was definitely my worst writeup, and I felt so upset,” McEntee recalled. He needn’t have worried: The Times critic “gave very candid, honest, and helpful feedback,” he said. Gaining access to and feedback from seasoned writers through the program “made the bridge between my career and theirs feel shorter, and that was really meaningful.”

Since then, his writing has made it into The New York TimesVanity FairPlaybill, the Washington Post, and American Theatre. But even a thriving freelance career still involves cobbling together a myriad of hustles. While stringing as a writer [working as a freelance journalist (not a staff reporter) who contributes work to a news organization on an ongoing basis], McEntee also works as theatre editor for the nonprofit publication The Brooklyn Rail, teaches and tutors, and occasionally writes copy [writing text for the purpose of advertising or other forms of marketing]. His main part-time teaching gig is with the School of the New York Times, which hosts students in high school and those doing a gap year before college.

One thing he teaches all his students is to be relentless with where and how many times you pitch—something he learned both from conversations and networking with the contacts he built at NCI, and by simply trying and failing, over and over again, until he finally landed assignments. One rule of thumb McEntee has picked up: Send your ideas to what may seem like an absurd number of outlets before you throw in the towel. “I think my record was, I sent a single pitch to nine different publications before I said, ‘Okay, fine, nobody wants this story. I’ll move on,’” he said.

[‘To pitch’ or ‘to throw a pitch’ in journalism is to send a brief description of a proposed article idea in order to convince an editor, agent, or publisher to commission the piece.]


 Be a Fan First

Journalism wasn’t something Brittani Samuel thought she’d pursue when she started college at SUNY [State University of New York] Geneseo. On the other hand, she said, “I’ve always had a fascination with art in all capacities.”

Fast forward to today, and journalism is what Samuel is all about: She’s co-editor of 3Views on Theater [online theater journal], a contributing critic for Broadway News [online theater journal], and a freelance theatre reviewer for The New York Times. She participated in the BIPOC Critics Lab when it was hosted by the Kennedy Center, as well as the National Critics Institute. In 2022 she was the inaugural recipient of the American Theatre Critics Association’s Edward Medina Prize for Excellence in Cultural Criticism [intended to honor theater critics and journalists in the United States from under-represented backgrounds who write about theater].

It was a winding path that brought her here. Immediately after graduation, she had a “ridiculous job in the fashion industry that I was unqualified for,” which she left pretty quickly. She picked up blogging and landed on the radar of a woman who owned an e-commerce site that sold Tarot and affirmation cards and was looking for content. “I would write articles for her about pop culture or about women in the arts or anything that was kind of trendy in bringing people to her website to ultimately buy her products.” At some point, she recalled, “It just kind of clicked for me that all the articles I’m reading online are written by regular people. You don’t have to have a PhD in writing for the internet to do this.”

She then moved into a marketing assistant role at Signature Theatre [Off-Broadway theater in New York City] and began to build up her connections and pitched her first article to American Theatre. Arts journalism at first was an opportunity to engage with work “that I would’ve probably been talking about all night anyway.”

Most of the practical nuts and bolts of freelancing, Samuel said, were self-taught: how to seek out editors online, how to create and send invoices. Through it all, she said, “I was very against the notion of calling myself a critic. I thought they were the enemy.”

What changed her mind was building a network of like-minded peers through the BIPOC Critics Lab and then the NCI, where she realized “we all come to it as champions and fans first, but the job is to critically engage. It’s a wonderful privilege to have your thoughts be the labor that you do.”

What’s more, Samuel sees tremendous value in the historical record that criticism creates around theatre, especially given that by its nature it is fleeting, only living onstage for a short time before it closes. “In that way,” she says, “you’re contributing to a kind of archive that people can turn back to in a hundred years.”


 Take a Chance on Yourself

David Quang Pham is all about reaching for the stars, literally and figuratively. As a kid, he attended both theatre and space camps, and was encouraged to aspire by his parents, both of whom emigrated to Michigan from Vietnam.

An astrophysics and theatre major at Michigan State University, Pham went on to apprentice with the 2020-21 New Play and Dramaturgy cohort of Working Title Playwrights, based in Atlanta, where he said he absorbed the value of being “open with your quirks or niches, because there will always be someone out there who wants to hear another unique thought.”

Then, in 2021, Pham was a moderator of Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas “Dramaturging the Phoenix” Zoom forum, the topic of which was “BIPOC Reflections: Critic/Dramaturg Relationship.” Jose Solís of BIPOC Critics Lab and David John Chávez of the American Theatre Critics Association were the guest speakers at that virtual event. Pham connected with Solís, who shared that the BIPOC Critics Lab application was open-ended—you could send in a sample work “of literally any kind,” as long as it was personally connected to your interests.

“As an astronomer-songwriter, I wrote a music composition expressing my desire to be a part of Solís’s orbit,” Pham said. He got in, as the program is by design extremely open to a wide range of creative responses to theatre.

Throughout the course of the 10-day program, Pham discovered that journalism can be a lot like the scientific fields of astronomy or physics, in that they both involve “a lot of reading, a lot of research, a lot of meticulous, careful consideration to make sure the facts are right, everything’s correct,” as well as bringing in context and empathy for those doing the work you’re looking at.

It was through this program that he got his very first shot at an interview with an artist: Carrie Rodriguez, the composer and lyricist of the musical Americano, when it ran Off-Broadway [New World Stages; 1 May-19 June 2022]. The BIPOC Critics Lab partnered with TheaterMania [theater-review website] to compensate Pham and cover his trip to complete the article. Originally, he told his family that he’d be back in Michigan in a couple of weeks. 

Then another week went by, then another. Enchanted, as many writers have been, by the artistic delights at one’s fingertips in the Big Apple, he signed a one-year lease to stay in the city. Since then, he’s been working as a playwright and arts journalist. Of course, relocating to an expensive town like New York City takes some financial finagling, and Pham combined his income from a yearlong Playwrights Foundation Literary Fellowship [organization dedicated to the development of the creativity and careers of contemporary playwrights], freelance dramaturgy work, and a full-time job at Great Performances Hospitality [catering and events company] toward a move to Washington Heights.

Thinking back to his inaugural trip to New York, Pham recalls taking in The Music Man revival on Broadway [Winter Garden Theatre, with Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster (10 February 2022-15 January 2023)], a canonical American show that he’d never seen before. 

“I was like, ‘Oh, wow, I didn’t know this play was about scammers,’” he said with a laugh. Pham realized that many of his fellow critics may have seen “thousands of plays and dozens of versions of The Music Man,” but that he could bring a fresh set of eyes to the well-worn subject.

One angle Pham could bring to the brass-heavy show, though as yet no one has hired him to write it: As it happens, he is an accomplished trombonist.


Write for Your Community 

At 32, Kelsey Sivertson knows she’s an outlier from her classmates at Hope College in Holland, Mich. But there are some benefits to going through undergrad after several years in the working world. Now a senior, Sivertson said that taking time in her 20s to work full-time in economic development while taking courses at Grand Rapids Community College [Michigan] taught her valuable time management skills. And it gave her the room to realize her true passion: creative writing.

To pursue that calling, she quit her full-time job, trying to ignore the pain point of losing the full-time income. After all, she had grown up most of her life grappling with factors well out of her control. Her mom died when she was 13, and she grew up in “survival mode” economically. Her early exposure to performance came through her family’s church, which would “put on these big productions for Easter or Christmas, like a Passion Play or a commemorative drama. That truly was my theatre,” she said.

Sivertson didn’t become a Shakespeare fan until her mid-20s, but it happened thanks to a community college literature professor. “I’m such a dork, but King Lear changed my life. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is what theatre can be,’” she said, remembering how she thumbed through a thrifted copy of the 500-year-old tragedy, marveling at the writing. 

“From a more allegorical lens, what Shakespeare is saying about sight and blindness and mental capacity is fascinating,” she added. “I think it was a credit to my professor for illuminating the text to us.”

Through her advisor at Hope College, Sivertson connected with Kennedy Center’s ITJA, winning the competition for her region, which allowed her to attend the program. “I just said yes, which has been the philosophy of my life the last couple of years—just saying yes to the opportunities that check the boxes of what I’m even slightly interested in,” she said.

When she attended NCI later, she began to realize that she was most drawn to criticism as a way of getting to write for her community and those like her, who might not automatically feel comfortable articulating their thoughts on art. In communities like the one that raised her, Sivertson said there can be a great deal of stigma around the art of live performance. People don’t want to feel dumb or uninformed, like they “didn’t get it,” she said.

“I found myself wanting to write in a language that people like me could understand,” she said. “The idea of making a review accessible to people who may come from backgrounds like mine, who were not afforded the opportunity to go see theatre growing up but have a desire to understand it, and to engage in that critical conversation—that is what I’m most interested in.” She added, “Writing in this way would’ve helped me growing up.”

The growth continues: Sivertson is looking into MFA programs to pursue after she graduates from Hope.


 Mind the Margins

For most of Sravya Tadepalli’s life and career, she’s been keenly aware of how social justice and art are interwoven—and also cognizant of the unequal amount of attention that some artists get over others.

Since elementary school, she’s been writing plays, and in fact writing theatrically stretches back through her family roots. Her great-grandfather, a playwright in India, wrote works condemning British colonialism—something she said landed him in jail for four years and got his plays banned. “To this day, we don’t know what the plays said or where they’re at, because they were probably destroyed by the British,” she said.

Tadepalli will tell you that she does not consider herself a theatre critic, but a journalist and a writer. Under that broader umbrella, she contributes regularly to Prism Reports, an independent nonprofit newsroom run by journalists of color, focused on reflecting “the lived experiences of people most impacted by injustice,” including people like her great-grandfather. “One of the things I’ve tried to do is figure out ways that journalism can be used to help whatever entity I’m writing about,” she said. 

When she was in college at the University of Oregon [Eugene], she said she “really loved journalism,” but realized that it would require long, intense hours in return for an insubstantial salary if she decided to pursue it full-time. Not only that, but the pace and amount of work in a full-time gig seemed “super, super intense” and “exhausting,” especially the prospect of daily assignments she wasn’t necessarily interested in.

Tadepalli said that one of the valuable questions she was able to examine when she attended ITJA as a college senior was the question of what constitutes the theatrical experience for populations outside of hubs like New York City.

“Almost all Americans have an experience with theatre, but it’s not Broadway—it’s not even a professional theatre,” she said. “It’s maybe their high school theatre or part of a festival. What does that kind of theatre, and theatre that most Americans experience—what does that look like? What are those trends?”

It all came full circle last year when she wrote for American Theatre about Off-Kendrik, a Bengali theatre company in Boston that strives to make Bengali stories from the early 20th century relevant to contemporary culture in the United States. Raising awareness of this kind of theatre company is mission critical for her.

She also said that working jobs outside of journalism while freelancing gave her “breathing room” to be able to pitch what she wanted when a story truly interested her. It has also helped pay the bills lately, while she pursues a Master’s in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Full-time graduate coursework at Harvard combined with freelance journalism sounds like it might get hectic, and Tadepalli affirmed that the juggling act can sometimes get overwhelming. “I feel like I’m constantly not doing something I should be doing, or like I’m behind on things,” she said. “I think editors have been really generous with me about deadlines, so that’s really helpful, because in the non-freelance world, you don’t have that.”


 Dissect, Don’t Dismiss

Writer, director, and actor Ana Zambrana’s dad was a doctor, so naturally she gave pre-med a shot at the very start of college. But—“clearly,” she jokes—it didn’t last. She was already way too invested in theatre.

Since her earliest days as a Puerto Rican kid growing up in South Dakota, Zambrana recalls being enamored with the way theatre allowed her to communicate in “real time” with a gathered crowd. “The feedback you get immediately from the audience as a performer—that’s the thing that got me.”

She earned a BFA in Acting from the University of Central Florida (UCF) [Orange County] and is currently a Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers Directing Fellow [SDC is the union that represents stage directors and choreographers in the U.S.], a Kennedy Center Directing Initiative alumna, and a Van Lier Directing Fellow at Repertorio Español. As an actor, she recently completed her first lead role in a feature film [Don't Turn Out the Lights (2023); Oops Doughnuts Productions].

While she was still completing her undergraduate studies at UCF, she connected with the Kennedy Center to do a couple programs with them. It was through the Kennedy Center that she met Solís, who encouraged her to apply for the BIPOC Critics Lab. Zambrana said that one of the major highlights from her time as part of the Lab cohort was being reassured that her “voice and opinion were valid,” she recalls. Before the program, if you had said “critic,” Zambrana might have conjured a stock image of a “man with white hair and a beard and a little pipe,” she said.

One of Zambrana’s first assignments through the Critics Lab dispelled that image forever: She was assigned to interview Carmen Rivera, a playwright whose La Gringa has been running for more than 25 years at ​​Repertorio Español on East 27th Street in Manhattan. Though she didn’t know Rivera’s work going in, Zambrana said she went to see the show with her mom and walked out sobbing. “It was exactly the experience I had gone through as a Puerto Rican woman born in the United States and the trouble I had connecting with my roots,” she recalled.

Zambrana, who is now based in New York City, has also come to realize the value of her background as an artist in fostering empathy and respect when she’s writing a critical appraisal of a theatrical work.

“When I see a show, I know what it’s like to be in the creative process,” she said. “I know if something gets messed up here and there, I don’t chalk it up as like, ‘This is the worst show I’ve ever seen.’ Putting up a show is hard work.”

Still, she has also come to appreciate the need to speak up when something onstage is offensive or demeaning. “Sometimes women of color who are critics, there’s a fear of talking about things that should be criticized, like, maybe I’m not going to get work after this,” she said. “I think it’s important for us to never be afraid to use our full voices, because odds are, if we’re thinking it, there’s probably someone else in the audience thinking the exact same thing.”

The Last Word?

The uniting aspect of all of these emerging arts writers’ journeys is that our careers as theatre critics, or as freelance journalists, are constantly in flux. Life sometimes places opportunities in our path that demand to be pursued. Sometimes a voice cries out for us to take a pause or to go in a different direction for a while.

Coming out of the pandemic lockdown, with the move toward more sustained remote work, ideas are continuing to shift around what the structure of work in general even looks like. Arts journalists and freelancers know this gray area well, which may give us the nimbleness to adapt.

As audiences slowly but surely return to theatres, they will seek out new voices to guide them. And just as there is no single linear path to recovery for our nation’s theatres, there is no one way to become a critic or arts journalist. Writers who do make a go of it share three key traits: talent, drive, and a belief that even the seemingly impossible and thankless career path is worth pursuing.

[Alexis Hauk (she/her) is an Atlanta-based writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Bitter Southerner, Time, Mental Floss, Washington City Paper, ArtsATL, and more.

[In “Critical Steps: Under Covered,” Alexis Hauk writes about ‘critics’ and ‘criticism.’  As a rule, I make a distinction between a ‘critic’ and a ‘reviewer,’ and what Hauk is discussing is ‘reviewers’ and ‘reviewing.’  Many, probably even most people use the words interchangeably, but I try not to.  I’ll uphold that distinction here.

[Just to keep the distinction clear, let me set it out briefly.  My friend Kirk Woodward, who, among his other talents and occupations, is a writer—both a writer of plays and a writer of essays and other prose pieces (many of the posts on Rick On Theater are Kirk’s work)—and wrote a book in 2009 entitled The Art of Writing Reviews (Merry Press/Lulu, 2009).  Since he, too, makes the same distinction I do, I’ll base my definitions on what Kirk says in his book. 

   A critic primarily views works within a larger cultural context,

   A reviewer primarily looks at works as single objects in themselves. 

What’s more, critics and reviewers write for different reasons: 

   A critic writes primarily in order to expand awareness of the art, or even of life.

   A reviewer writes primarily to tell people whether or not it’s worth their while to see a particular performance of artwork. 

[So, in the lists of posts on this blog I’m about to compile, you’ll observe that I write about reviewers more than critics (except when the article’s a republication and the title’s a quotation).  First, a list of posts on ROT having to do with reviewers and reviewing: 

•   “On Reviewing,” 22 March 2009

   The Art of Writing Reviews by Kirk Woodward,” 4, 8, 11, and 14 November 2009; this is my commentary on my friend’s book

   “The Power of the Reviewer – Myth or Fact?” 23 and 26 January 2010

   “’Dante update neither divine nor comedy’” by Kyle Smith (New York Post), 1 December 2010

   “Reviewing the Situation: Spider-Man & the Press,” 20 March 2011

  “Joan Acocella: Critic, Historian, Or Critic-Historian: An Interview,” 31 May 2019

   “Reviewers,” 6 July 2020

   “Max Beerbohm’s Theater Reviews” by Kirk Woodward, 2 November 2020

   “‘On Criticism’” by Maria Popova (The Atlantic), 24 October 2021 

[Now a shorter list of posts on dramaturgs and dramaturgy: 

•   “Dramaturgy: The Conscience of the Theater,” 30 December 2009

   “A History of Dramaturgy,” 31 December 2022 and 3 January 2023

   “Dramaturgy Analyses,” 22 and 25 January 2023 

[The is the final installment in my “Theater Education & Training” series.]