Medieval theatre was similar to American community theatre, with home-made sets, costumes created by town craftspeople, and locals gathered to watch family and friends’ performances. They worked with townsfolk’s talents to tell Biblical tales, complete with anachronistic jokes and references that resonated with audiences. Some became local stars, with people clamoring every year to see them play a favorite role, and the guilds that produced the plays used sets and props to showcase their skills.
The plays that medieval Britons produced brought about the warm, fuzzy feelings we associate with modern community theatre. We imagine our friends and family performing, with everyone watching and clapping. We think of the solidarity and camaraderie it brings, reminding us of why we love our communities. Underneath the medieval fun of putting on a show, though, were scripts that asked difficult questions about values and morality. Of course, in such a top-down society, only so much could be challenged, but subtle moments addressed poverty, greed, and other problems affecting townsfolk’s lives. Community theatre can easily just be the former, presenting fluff that makes us feel good without actually benefitting people in the long run. Of course, it should be a fun experience, but to truly benefit the community, it needs to also incorporate the latter. It needs to address concerns of local people and voice ugly truths that we might suppress as we go about our daily lives. Last summer, Artists From Suburbia found a balance between entertainment and challenge with our Evening of Original One Act Plays. We asked Massachusetts-based playwrights to submit their writing, leading to staged readings of plays confronting classism, fascism, and loss. Rehearsals weren't all doom and gloom, nor was the final performance. We had our laughs and so did the audience, but with those moments of joy and humor came explorations of societal issues. This summer, we’re once again giving local artists the opportunity to explore problems affecting the personal and public spheres. We want artists to enjoy coming to rehearsal, whether they're old pros or first-timers, while also bringing new and marginalized voices to the stage (or, in our case, an available public space). Our goal is similar to medieval thespians - entertain audiences while challenging them. With every production, we strive to fulfill the need for fun and introspection on Boston's south shore. Gavin Damore oversees all publicity and press for AfS. His expertise in social media and public outreach have ensured packed houses for all of AfS' projects thus far.
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It is time for us to begin to heal. As a community, as a nation, and as a world, we have recently experienced turbulences that have shaken our cores and unearthed hidden knots of ugliness and hatred which had previously laid buried for decades (at least buried from the eyes of the mass media). Recently, it has seemed that every day, something new has stirred up questions which reveal fundamental disparities between our own belief systems and those of our friends and neighbors. Whether we subscribe to it or not, we are surrounded by a lifestyle that perpetuates fear and insecurity based upon those beliefs which contradict our own.
It is time for us to begin to heal. As artists, it is our job to present the world through a lens that is informed by our pasts. Our ethnicities, sexualities, gender identities, religious beliefs, abilities, family backgrounds, and economic standings affect who we are as people, and therefore determine the way in which we register and reflect the world. As theatre artists, we are often tasked with presenting the world through the lens of another worldview. We take on the personas of different characters, given speech by playwrights who may have lived hundreds of years ago or may live down the street from us today. We are tasked with the impossible job of viewing the world through someone else’s eyes. While the adopting of worldviews requires extreme amounts of imagination, it also relies heavily upon an artist’s capacity for empathy. It is time for us to begin to heal, and we need to begin the process by challenging our own senses of empathy. This summer, Artists from Suburbia is thrilled to announce “The Suburban Summer Theatre Surge”, where we plan to flood the local area with new theatrical works which stretch the boundaries of conventional theatre and allow our community to engage in the theatre as a pastime instead of a costly event. All of the works we present this summer will reflect upon the theme, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter”, a line from John Keats’ poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. Our first project will be our Second Evening of Original One Act Plays, where we will present staged readings of new plays written by playwrights from Massachusetts. We have asked all playwrights who are submitting their works to us to consider how they can use their plays to give voice to an ‘unheard melody’ or a perspective belonging to a group marginalized by our society. We hope to build off of the success of last summer’s event and continue to provide a space for local playwrights to share their works. Our second project will be a workshop of a brand new, full-length play which (without revealing too much information) promises to challenge the way we view an important era of turmoil in world history. This work will be presented in a series of readings, allowing the audience to interact directly with actors, playwright, and director, and see their feedback taken into consideration as the work is reshaped over time. Our third project is one that I am thrilled to be helming, as it is one I think will be personally restorative and productive. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, or What Happened at Miss Minchin’s encapsulates messages that are vital for us to examine. We see a girl whose treatment is solely based upon her economic standings and whose story is interwoven with anecdotes of mysticism and mystery from the distant land of India. How do these awe-inspiring images of foreign lands shape us when we are young and at what point do they begin to lend to our xenophobic tendencies? We at Artists from Suburbia have been busy at work for many months now planning for this upcoming season. We want to start back at square one, not assuming or accepting anything. What conventions of the theatre experience innately exclude members of our community from attending events? What conventions exclude members of our community from partaking in theatrical endeavors? We hope many of you will join us as artists, volunteers, and audience members this summer. Keep an eye out in the coming weeks for announcements of further details about each of these events and, of course, please continue reaching out to us and allowing Artists from Suburbia to be an integral part of the community. We, as artists and as human beings, have much work to do in the world right now. We hope you will allow us to continue to do this work right now. Andrew Child serves as artistic director for AfS. This summer, in addition to curating the Second Evening of Original One Act Plays, he will serve as director for A Little Princess, or What Happened at Miss Minchin's. When I began researching queer drama for my senior capstone, I found myself confronted with the lack of mainstream drama that represents non-male queer individuals. Even when I discovered plays depicting other queer identities, most had not drawn as much attention as plays by queer men. Both scholarly work and reviews in popular magazines were scarce, and many of these plays were out-of-print or had never been published. This led me to analyze this gender disparity by comparing the strategies used to negotiate with the dominant culture used by two plays: The Normal Heart, a well-known 20th century play about queer men, and A Late Snow, a lesser-known 20th century play about queer women.
The Normal Heart clearly illustrates the negotiation between the heterosexual, gender-normative dominant culture and queer subculture that takes place in successful mainstream queer theatre. In his essay “Strange Bedfellows,” Peter Cohen examines how Kramer’s play switches its focus between the “love plot” between Ned and Felix and the “politics plot” surrounding his involvement with the Gay Men Health Center. Ultimately, he concludes that in order to fulfill “its mission of reaching middle-class, heterosexual theater-goers,” there needs to be focus on a love story. It provides “an excellent vehicle for conveying a challenging political message to mainstream audiences more familiar with dominant theatrical conventions,” and prevents the play “from becoming one long polemic, transforming it instead into a satisfying theatrical experience to which dominant audiences can easily relate.” The love story between Felix and Ned is not the only part of the play that caters to a mainstream audience so that its political message is not undermined; we see this as well with the conversations between Ned and his brother, Ben. Ben “always dresses in a suit and a tie,” and it is clear that he is wealthy and successful. Performing the male gender in such an overt way, Ben’s main purpose is to provide a character that the dominant culture can identify with. This becomes most apparent during Act 1, Scene 6, when he voices his distaste for depictions of queer subculture depicted in the media. Kramer’s play could easily polarize the dominant culture due to its cast of characters consisting almost entirely of queer men and its attention on politics surrounding queer subculture, but Ben prevents this from happening. He provides a means by which the dominant culture can have a voice rather than feel excluded from the conversations happening onstage. While Kramer’s play was able to find mainstream success, though, it is not simply because it negotiates with the heterosexual aspect of the dominant culture; it also negotiates with the male aspect of it. Save for Emma, all of the characters in the play are men. Granted, the play focuses on the AIDS epidemic among gay men, using theatre as a platform for activism and education, but we still cannot ignore the fact that the dominant culture privileges men. Even if Kramer’s decision to include a cast almost entirely featuring men was a necessary one, the decision negotiates more with the dominant culture than a play featuring less male characters would. In fact, plays by and about queer individuals who do not identify as men may use similar strategies for negotiating with the dominant culture, but their lack of male characters hold them back. A Late Snow by Jane Chambers provides an example. First produced in 1974 at Clark Center for the Performing Arts by Playwrights Horizons, an off-Broadway theatre company, and written by a self-identified lesbian, A Late Snow utilizes many of the same tactics as The Normal Heart in order to negotiate with the dominant culture. Unlike The Normal Heart, though, it did not receive as much widespread attention. It is not remembered as well, either; while The Normal Heart received a Broadway revival in 2011 and was adapted into a movie in 2014, A Late Snow only lives on in smaller productions. This could be attributed to the fact that The Normal Heart opened amidst the AIDS crisis, making it politically relevant at the time, while A Late Snow does not respond directly to any major events. This does not mean that the discrepancy should be ignored, though, especially when we examine how similar Chamber’s and Kramer’s strategies for negotiating with the dominant culture are. A Late Snow depicts five queer women who find themselves trapped in a house during a snowstorm. The house’s owner, Ellie, lives there with her current partner Quincey, and she was previously in relationships with the other women, Pat, Margo, and Peggy. The action revolves around the tensions that arise between the women while they stay together, waiting for the storm to pass. Similar to Ben in The Normal Heart, though, Chambers includes a character who does not openly identify as queer. While Peggy’s sexual identity is a bit more ambiguous than Ben’s, she is still more firmly part of the dominant culture than the rest of the characters. The character description that Chambers provides makes this explicit. She is “a chic suburban housewife trying to do everything ‘right.” The only aspect that holds her back from her stake in the dominant culture is her possible queerness, which Peggy denies despite Ellie’s reminders about the relationship they shared in college. Peggy may possibly have a queer sexuality, but her disavowal of it allows her to maintain her place in the dominant culture. Chambers also ends her play with the beginning of a monogamous relationship. While there is no deathbed wedding like in The Normal Heart, the play ends with Ellie and Margo deciding to live together, suggesting that they are beginning a long-term relationship together. This allows Chambers to end on a note that the dominant culture can relate to, conveying that queer couples are not much different from traditional heterosexual couples; they are just of the same gender rather than different genders. Given the fact that A Late Snow uses tactics similar to The Normal Heart to negotiate with the dominant culture, it may seem that Chambers’ play would find more success than Kramer’s play, but as mentioned previously, this is not true. While Chambers does live on in theatre history through the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award, which recognizes “plays and performance texts created by women that present a feminist perspective and contain significant opportunities for female performers,” her plays do not receive the same level of recognition or the big-budget productions like The Normal Heart. In an interview for the New York Times in 1981, Chambers relates her own opinion on why plays about lesbians do not reach the same level of recognition as plays about queer men: “'Lesbians have been ignored,'' she added. ''People turn their heads the other way as if to say, 'We know you exist, but we don't want to have to deal with this, so let's all keep our mouths shut and we'll all pretend it's not there.'” There is a willingness to ignore the sexuality of queer women, but this same willingness does not exist as much for queer men, or at least not as much. This ultimately results in extreme gender disparity within understandings of queer theatre history in America. Even in books and essays that look specifically at queer drama, there is a lack of information about plays in the mainstream by and about queer people who are not men. So many works focus on plays by men, mainly The Normal Heart and Angels in America. These are important plays of course, but they shouldn’t be queer theatre history’s sole focus. It is difficult to come up with recommendations on how we should proceed in remedying this disparity, though. After all, queer playwrights who do not identify as men are already using the same tactics, or even more tactics, than their male counterparts to negotiate with the dominant culture in their work. While not the easiest or most accessible way forward, it seems that the only way that these playwrights can begin to find wider success in the mainstream is through a cultural shift. Culture must turn away from privileging male, heterosexual writers and favoring plays that view queer individuals who are not men through this lens. Instead of expecting lesbians and other non-male queer individuals to fit self-loathing and undesirable stereotypes, culture will need to be open to representations that do not necessarily fit into this idea. While this does not sound reassuring, we may actually be in the midst of this change due to the musical Fun Home, which premiered on Broadway in 2015. Adapted from the graphic novel memoir of the same name by Alison Bechdel, a queer woman, the musical follows Bechdel’s life as she grows up realizing that she is a lesbian and that her father is a closeted gay man. It has been far more successful than most plays by queer women up until this point in American theatre history, winning five Tony Awards including Best Musical. Of course, one incredibly successful play by and about a queer woman does not mean that gender disparity in queer American theatre is solved; still, it does suggest that the cultural change needed to begin solving it may be on its way. Gavin Damore serves as General Manager of AfS. He is currently overseeing marketing, publicity, and outreach for our Evening of Original One Act Plays. As a woman entering the professional artistic world with a BA in English, a passion for storytelling, and many insightful, though unpaid, internships under my belt, I can only speak about my experience as a female artist and leader….
- And already I feel the need to preface and justify my thoughts with a disclaimer! Whether this is due to socially imposed gender norms or just a simple acknowledgement of my relative inexperience, being 22 and just at the dawn of my professional life, I’ll leave to readers to decide! - My early acting career consisted of many ingénue roles. These “classic” roles were rewarding experiences and I look back fondly on them; however, they did not train me well in terms of handling more complex characters. I would watch as fellow male student-actors were given complex roles to grapple with, involving rich subtext and revealing monologues, while my own work consisted of reactionary exclamations and less-lengthy lamentations of love gone awry. Again, I was and still am fond of those productions. But, in looking back now with a critical eye, I realize the majority of the female characters I portrayed consisted of female stock types: naïve ingénue; insane, Brontë-esque “woman in the attic”; bitter gossip; promiscuous, young college student; etcetera. Of course, these women were fun to play, but beyond the form and phrasing of the lines, the character work was noticeably shallower than that of my male fellows. With this in mind, I think a difficulty for female actresses, directors, and artists alike is simply finding and drawing out what complexity they can in works that may not afford such depth of female roles at first glance. This isn’t to say all male roles are inherently complex or that there are no “deep” female roles out there – Every year, high school English classes all over the US introduce teenagers to a famously challenging female character: Nora in Ibsen’s “A Doll House” (her transition in the final scenes takes a lot of work for the actress to pull off successfully). - My experience is that male actors have more of a variety in character depth at their fingertips compared with what’s available to actresses. This trend, I think, holds true for film and television work as well. Beyond watching what’s on TV or at the movies, one look at movie producer Ross Putman’s Twitter account (@femscriptintros), a feed dedicated to shedding light on the sexist descriptions for female characters, convinces me this tendency carries over into these industries as well. One of the tweets that was particularly gag-inducing to me was: “JANE pours her gorgeous figure into a tight dress, slips into her stiletto-heeled f***-me shoes, and checks herself in the dresser mirror.” I pity the actress forced to squeeze a believable woman out of that. The screenwriter has provided her with fewer character dimensions than a James Bond-intro silhouette. It’s not all bad news, however. In 2015, when “Fun Home” had the First All-Female Writing Team win a Tony, I cheered at their win! I also cheered when I first learned about Vinetta Strombergs’ all-female Shakespeare productions. An actress reciting “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves”? The possibilities and opportunities that can be born out of that were exhilarating. (Ironically, though, Shakespeare typically provides relatively rich female roles due to the conventions of his era, male actors playing women and girls as well as men.) Beyond the frustrating lack of complex female characters (strong or otherwise), it’s difficult to be a female artist, or indeed, a female professional of any kind. Despite the progress made towards gender equality, women are still paid less and required to prove themselves. Researchers at the University of Washington recently examined how male and female students perceive each other and found: "for an outspoken female to be nominated by males at the same level as an outspoken male, her performance would need to be over three-quarters of a GPA point higher than the male’s.” How do we, both men and women, combat these tendencies for women to be underestimated and undervalued, both in character-work and in reality? I don’t know if there’s any clear answer. For me, Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron of “Fun Home” summed up a simple fact in their 2015 Tony Award acceptance speech: “For girls, you have to see it to be it”. I think there’s a lot of truth to that in any situation involving identity, be it gender, race, sexual orientation, or religion - representation and opportunity matters. If we can work together to create and take advantage of these for others and ourselves, then young actresses will have more than stock types to sink their creative teeth into and women in the arts will be able to call themselves “artists” rather than “female artists”. This post cites information that can be found by clicking here. Gabrielle Jaques provided the voice of Mrs. Jenkins for The Witches and will be directing one of AfS' upcoming one act plays. As the deadline for submission to our Evening of Original One Act Plays slowly approaches, I am thrilled to be able to announce that we have enlisted the talents of three incredible directors, all of whom have presented works that I respect very much. As we enter into National Women’s History Month, I am thrilled to be able to announce that all three of our enlisted directors are female. In the coming weeks, we will be sharing with you their thoughts and commentary on the current gender disparity in the theatre and other sectors of the artistic world, as well as their own reflections on past theatrical endeavors. Although many major theatre companies around the world have announced promising statistics or plans to drastically improve gender and racial representation in their programming (possibly most significantly, The National Theatre in London aiming for gender parity by the year 2020), and numbers of productions written or directed by women or persons of color are slowly on the rise, sadly, the theatre, as so many other job markets, is still dominated at all levels by white males. I have heard plenty of arguments against gender and race equality initiatives (as I’m sure many of us have), claiming that positions should go to the most qualified candidate, regardless of race or gender. These closed-minded arguments usually drone onward, citing "reverse racism" and “meninism” to argue that, with these initiatives in place, eventually white males will struggle to find work. These arguments cannot be given validity because they suggest that white males dominate the work force simply because they are the most qualified candidates for the jobs for which they apply. There are countless examples consistently presented by the media negating this idea.
In her 2014 play, Straight White Men, Young Jean Lee raises questions as to whether, in an attempt for social progress, a white male can do anything aside from stepping down and allowing a person of another gender, race, or ethnicity to take his place in power. Does the appointment of a white male to a position of power innately constitute an affirmation of dated societal structure? As a white male serving as a theatrical artistic director in today’s society, the size of the theatre company in question does not matter. If we want to see change in representation and employment in the theatre, even small companies, like Artists from Suburbia, have a responsibility to ensure that diversity is a factor assisting in determining who we enlist to work on our projects and what projects we choose to undertake. At the very heart of the theatre lies the desire to share our stories. Even as we take on works that have been presented for centuries, we approach them with a fanny pack full of our own opinions and statements about the world in which we live. It is the prerogative of the director, the designers, and the actors to serve as the intersection between playwright and audience. Why should we, as artists, serve as middle-men, taking what Euripides, Shakespeare, or Arthur Miller serve to us and regurgitating it to an audience like an over-heated clump of unchewed food; trying to spit it out of our mouths as quickly as we can? We cannot help ourselves. We naturally scrounge for connections and look for ways we can help our audience understand what we have understood in the text. Suddenly, Medea becomes a feminist icon, Henry V becomes a critic of the Vietnam Conflict, and Abigail Williams takes a stand against our reliance on social media. Although these interpretations sometimes go too far, without even trying to, any time we stage a production, we subvert the text with messages about our views on the world. In this way, the theatre has presented us with a living scrapbook, documenting snapshots of moments in the history of civilization. Artists from Suburbia’s premiere production of The Witches was an ideal snapshot of the community that came together to present it. Amongst our cast and crew were actors who continually work professionally all over the south shore, recent college graduates who have just begun their professional theatrical careers, high school students who have been involved in the theatre programs at their schools, performers who have made a second life starring in community productions, a Shakespearean actress, a banjo-playing aspiring chef, a Muppets-enthusiast, and a woman who had never been on stage before in her life. Although we set out to tell the story of a boy who, after being turned into a mouse, manages to conquer all of the witches in England, it wasn’t until I spoke to an artistic director (whose work I greatly admire), that I realized how much our production revealed about the artists who had collaborated to bring it to life. As we spoke after the closing Sunday matinee, we discussed the absolutely fascinating phenomena that was this diverse cast. An interesting story unfolded as classically trained voices were heard juxtaposed against the dance moves of a rag tag ensemble from the surrounding suburban towns. Professional quality puppets found themselves weaving amongst set pieces that had been salvaged from the side of the road. Two young men animated a grandmother puppet as an actress within the age-range to portray a motherly figure donned a pink wig and took on a villainous role. The story we told was enhanced by the diversity of the cast who presented it. Every artist brought their own voice to the work, a voice which, like it or not, is inevitably informed by the life the individual artist has lived. In our society, we cannot deny that we walk through life differently based on our race, gender, and set of beliefs. By incorporating artists who represent a variety of lifestyles and backgrounds, our productions and our art form are strengthened. We allow our stories to reach a wider audience when we allow those stories to be interpreted and retold from a wider range of viewpoints. I am thrilled that, of our three directors, none comes from the same history of experience. While one has been directing for over thirty years, another has just ventured into the world of directing, and a third will be making her directorial debut with Artists from Suburbia. Each of them will bring their fanny packs of opinions to these stories, seen through an individual lens informed by their work as artists, their training, their economic situation, their religion (or lack thereof), their race, their gender, and countless other factors that make us each individuals. Both artistic and non-artistic experiences will inform the decisions they make in interpreting local playwrights' works. It is important that theatrical productions are presented by artists who represent a wide spectrum of backgrounds because it is then that they can speak to a wider audience. Andrew Child serves as artistic director for AfS. He is currently producing our Evening of Original One Act Plays. |
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AuthorBlog posts are written by various members of Artists from Suburbia's productions and staff. Archives
July 2017
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