JACQUELINE E. LAWTON: Politics impact who we are as individuals, artists, and educators. I’d like to start here. What is one of your earliest memories of politics, and how did it shape you?
KEITH ARTHUR BOLDEN: My mother was an office manager for the probation department of L.A. County. She worked with the mayor of Inglewood; he was also a probation officer. He was paid as a part-time employee as the mayor of the city. It was then that I realized that you don’t always get paid to serve, that you show up to serve, and that you can have a career in something that pays you and still do something you’re passionate about that doesn’t pay you. That’s kind of how I’ve been living my life. I do the thing I need to do so I can do what I want to do.
OMIYẸMI GREEN: Between the ages of 10 and 12, a series of events shaped my growing political awareness. Almost every example I can give from that period falls around this idea of the power of perception and how Black people were perceived by white folks. Having historically been one of a few or the only Black individual in predominantly white spaces, I am always thinking about representations of Blackness and the politics of our imaging. Those two years of my youth played a formative role in my current work as an African American theatre historian, director, and dramaturg.
LISA PORTES: My father is Cuban American and an academic. My mother is a white Air Force brat from Nebraska. I remember I wore these gold sandals from Brazil to school and got called “the jigaboo with the gold-plated shoes.” There were parents who wouldn’t let their kids play with me because my dad was divorced and swarthy. It was my first awareness of being othered. It was shocking, because that wasn’t the world I’d grown up in. Even if my military family might have been more conservative, there was great worldliness. The conversations we were having around the table were about the complexity of the United States. I have an affinity for projects that look at what it means to walk through the world and find your place in the world. That is the American experiment, right? How are we all here together? How do we share space? How do we share stories?
TAMILLA WOODARD: I’m from Houston. When Sheila Jackson Lee ran for Houston City Council in 1989, it was an enormous deal; my understanding is that, at the time, there had not been a Black woman on the council. Watching her work was so profound for me, and seeing how much of an advocate she was for her community was just incredible. She’s just a beautiful, loudmouth, trouble-making woman. I thought she was amazing.
VALERIE CURTIS-NEWTON: I was 14, and I was failing gym. I was a very athletic child; I was successful in all the sports. My father went to school to find out why I was failing gym class. I had a young white teacher. She said that I had a bad attitude about losing, that I would get angry, and that the goal was for me to get better at losing. My father stood up for me; he said, “I don’t want you imposing your white middle-class values on my daughter. She’s got to go through the world, striving for the best, expecting to win and not just get with the program.” After that, I felt better about the times I would be misunderstood or evaluated by somebody else’s scale. I learned that I had to decide what my definition of success is. I had to decide what is truly my best effort and let my best effort be good enough.
Has the current political landscape impacted your teaching or curriculum in any way?
VALERIE: For undergraduates, there’s a lot more concern about identity and language. For my graduate students, it’s a lot more about the existential situation that the field is in now and whether we are training them for it. If we’re not training them for a regional system of well-made plays, what are we training them for? There is a big evolution in our department toward generative work and devised work as foundational to teaching actors, directors, designers, and PhDs. We’ve hired a lot of new faculty and have managed to reach a consensus agreement that generative work is an essential element for the future.
OMIYẸMI: My response is to turn my attention toward the future. Recently, I attended two public meetings of the William & Mary Board of Visitors where several visionary questions were asked. My current project, the Art & Science Exchange, is but one contribution to what will be a collective institutional response to these questions. One of the objectives of ASE is to encourage synergies between art and science that advance university priorities in raising awareness of and addressing critical local, national, and global issues. Through ASE, researchers across the campus and potentially across the globe can come together to generate new work for the public good.
LISA: I’ve been very lucky that at both UCSD and at DePaul University, where I worked before, we have been able to continue to teach our students, who are artists, how to think, create, and envision from whatever political point of view they may come from. What can be challenging, as a teacher, is remaining politically neutral in the classroom, because you can’t help but think that part of your job is to have a point of view. But remaining neutral is crucial for every student to feel that they are safe—that they could be heard and can create in that classroom.
TAMILLA: We have a significant number of students who are international or share international identities. The world impacts the classroom. We also have students from all over the country. What is happening where their families are located impacts the classroom. Their ability to leave something at the door is limited, because the world is feeding their art as much as anything else. They’re deeply empathetic beings. That’s the art form. And the students know they’re privileged—it’s a selective program. In our conversations, I talk about elevating the role of the artist in society as a necessity for our own civilization, for our own growth and humanity. It’s important for students to leave here understanding that their job is to be of use to humanity, to our souls. That’s the job, and it’s deeply political.
KEITH: I mean, she said it all. I was meant to do this: to show up in spaces to show, especially as a heterosexual man in theatre, what it looks like to be inclusionary; what it looks like to be an empath and not to judge; what it looks like to create opportunities for people you may not agree with; what it looks like to forgive in the moment; what it looks like to stay in that moment and be uncomfortable until you are comfortable; what it looks like to be this physical actor, as most Black men are looked at for their physical prowess. In my curriculum, I use my personal stories and experience to excavate and dig for where the human lies in that story, and find where you intersect with that human.
When you started at your jobs, what was most challenging or surprising about it? What is most rewarding about it now?
KEITH: When I first got here, the biggest challenge was feeling that I had to prove myself. I was hired as a tenure track professor, but that wasn’t enough—my résumé and my journey weren’t enough. I had to prove myself. The most rewarding thing has been creating opportunities for students and for my colleagues. As a professional director, I’ve hired everybody in my department for a job.
LISA: At DePaul, the biggest challenge was that there had been an entrenched way that the School of Theatre operated and saw itself. The dean who hired me was starting to envision how we would move into the next moment. Sitting at the apex of that change was challenging; it was also tremendously fulfilling. We really professionalized that program. We were graduating the leaders of the future. In my current chair position at UCSD, the department of theatre and dance had been through a rocky time. The faculty had to figure out how to work within the current resources and distribute them in such a way that we could still train to the excellence that we train at UCSD. There has been a new level set, and now we’re rebuilding. That is very exciting.
VALERIE: There were no people of color on the faculty when I got there as a graduate student—not one. My first three projects were Black plays, and the head of the directing area said to me, “I understand the work you love, but I just need you to know that you don’t have to do that work anymore. Maybe you should do another kind of play.” I was like, “You’re telling me not to do the thing I love? Don’t tell me that. Tell me what skills you want me to get, and I will fi nd material that resonates with me to get it.” Ultimately, we agreed that what was important was the skills, not so much the material. I was grateful that at the time I was there, I was allowed to do that and they mostly got out of my way. Now what I try to teach my students is how to show up as themselves and to have integrity and to not be afraid.
OMIYẸMI: One of my colleagues said something like what Valerie heard, i.e., “You don’t have to direct the Black play.” There were also attempts to exclude me from the mainstage season. So I started publishing. By the time I came up for promotion, I had published more than I had directed. It was rewarding to see how I had circumvented the system in a way that folks were not expecting. Because I’m going to show up in this space 125 percent who I am, right? Either people will embrace it, accept it, and make room for me, or they won’t. But let me tell you, nobody makes an enemy of water. That’s what my name means. Water befits me. Water always knows its direction. And just like water, we find ways, as Black people, to work in these systems and within these predominantly or historically white contexts.
TAMILLA: The thing that was the most surprising was that there are a lot of brown folks here. There had already been a lot of conscious work done to have the program reflect the country. The invitation is very open. We’re going to see everybody who applies. The requirement is simply talent and that you feel something in yourself that cannot be answered on your own—that you know yourself to be an artist. That you’re willing to grapple with your humanity and your talent at the same time. That was here when I came. All I did as bring my ethos: You feed the human and the artist will grow.
Jacqueline E. Lawton is a playwright and advocate for access, equity, diversity, and inclusion in the American theatre. She is currently an associate professor in the department of dramatic art at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a production dramaturg for PlayMakers Repertory Company.
