Ideas

Hey, playwrights: have you met this wonderful human being yet? (I’m being sarcastic.) TJ Davis is a young white male playwright who performs a character he created called “Juanito Bandito.” His work is pretty racist, as others have detailed in great depth. (Go read the links, if you like. I’ll be here when you get back.) Speaking as an artist, I want to say a few things. I happen to think it’s very important to protect the rights of artists to create whatever work they feel called to create. If we don’t protect those rights, we run the risk of losing them when, say, a totalitarian state comes along. So there’s that. But… …at the same time, I also believe that with rights come, as the saying goes, responsibilities. And I believe that artists have a responsibility to the communities in which they live and make art. How would I define that responsibility? I believe it’s our job to create art that promotes the well-being of the people who interact with it. That’s ju

America is a fiction we have all agreed to believe in for a while. It doesn’t actually exist outside of our minds and our behavior. By imagining the idea of America, we give the fiction power; if we ignored it, if we turned our collective attention away, it would cease to exist. By acting as if America is real—taking our hats off when we hear the National Anthem at baseball games, waving the stars and stripes and setting off fireworks on the fourth of July every year—we maintain the illusion that our country is a tangible thing. There is no “our country.” There are amber waves of grain, yes, and majestic purple mountains—they exist elsewhere on the planet, too, incidentally—but America is pretend. Money works the same way. It harnesses some desire inside of us for a shared abstract representation of value, but our thoughts about money are not, in fact, shared. It strikes me as nothing short of bewildering, in fact, given our different beliefs about value and fairness worldwide, that mo

This is a guest post from Michael Dove, the Artistic Director of Forum Theatre. It was initially distributed to the artistic directors, managing directors, and leaders of the DC theatre community, but it warrants wider distribution. I’ve reprinted it here with Michael’s blessing. Dear fellow theatre leaders: After several days of walking through a fog of shock, anger, depression, and sadness, I did what I do on most weekends: I went to the theatre. On Friday, I had the pleasure of seeing Natsu Onoda Power’s Wind Me Up, Maria, the first Go-Go musical, now playing at Georgetown University. It was the first time since the election that I was able to relax, experience true joy, and I even danced. But it was not escapist. The state and mood of the nation were firmly in my thoughts as I watched this young, diverse company of actors engage with the vibrancy and complexities of DC’s native music genre. The work made me laugh and sing all while engaging with the hard rea

About two months ago, during one of the busiest times in my adult life, I decided to shut down one of the many email accounts I maintain. This was an old account, used almost entirely for signing up for things: a place to collect spam, process transactions, and give out to salespeople I don’t care to hear from. Slowly but surely, day after day, I removed myself from all the lists I’d joined, clicking that familiar little “unsubscribe” button in the footer of almost every email, and updated my email address with a few online presences I wanted to stay in touch with. The task became a kind of ritual unplugging, and it brought me great calm during a chaotic thrall of creativity and construction in my writing life. With every click of the delete button, I felt both freer and more powerful. Eventually, when the account started getting no more than an email or two a day—almost all of them spam—I removed the corresponding icon from both my phone and my tablet; checking messages from my laptop

Knowing when to go is hard for anyone… but it’s harder still, I think, for people in leadership positions. Leadership means responsibility, for one thing, and stepping down feels like abdicating that responsibility. Leadership comes with privileges, too, and we all know how hard they are to give up. More subtly, over time, leadership becomes a kind of engine that generates its own momentum: you lead because you lead because you lead. It can be hard to imagine hitting the brakes, even when they need to be hit, or (more to the point) turning over the wheel to someone else. Not long ago, Clayton Lord asked me to co-facilitate a workshop called Handling Transitions Well at the annual convention of Americans for the Arts. The workshop was devoted to helping arts organizations handle their own leadership changes. Here’s the brief introduction I delivered before my co-facilitators and I started the workshop: Greetings. I’m Gwydion Suilebhan, one of the co-founders and the cu