My Mouth Cost Me Work: How, Why, and What Next

My partner sometimes calls me mouthy. It's an endearment, before you get the wrong idea. And refers to the fact that I don't really know how to play the politeness game when it comes to speaking my mind about the injustice inherent in the theatre world. See previous blog posts here and here.

Recently, this mouthiness lost me a scenic design opportunity with a midsize theatre company in Seattle. (N.B. I'm not sure if my definition of midsize is your definition of midsize... so the operating budget just passes $1 Million. In comparison, A Contemporary Theatre [ACT] has an operating budget of around $7 Million).

I am intentionally not naming this organization.

The point of this blog entry is not to cry foul and point fingers at a specific organization. I want to talk about (1) the thing that I was "mouthing off" about, (2) how my privilege allowed me to say something, and (3) where the theatre community can go from here.

Ready?

The Thing I Was Mouthing Off About

I posted on the Seattle Theatre Artists and Seattle Technical Artists Facebook groups the following message:

"Asking/requiring freelancers to get a business license to work with your org is a barrier that disproportionately negatively affects artists of color and artists of other under-represented groups. As Seattle Theatre figures out that representation around the table matters, there is a going to be a time where orgs will want to hire a freelancer that isn't making bank on their gigs (due to size & number of projects offered). And an independent contractor does NOT need to apply for a business license UNLESS they meet some specific criteria, most of which don't apply to theatre freelancers (we're not hiring people or selling anything that needs to be taxed). But most importantly, if you make less than $12,000/year, you're not on the hook for a license according to the state. Just food for thought, theatre companies, as you work towards EQUITY and diversity at your organization. (BTW, in 2018 I've made less than $10,000 so far with all my stipends... just to give you some perspective on someone who "works a lot" including stipend-ed production management gigs.)"  (Permalink) (Also, permalink to the convo in the Seattle Technical Artist group)

Whether or not you agree with my choice of words or use of all-caps for emphasis, this is a real thing that is happening in Seattle/Washington State. In conjunction with this post, I also asked questions of the original theatre company that requested a Business License from me, two other theatres that I've worked with or have personal connections at, and my fellow freelance artists. 

What I heard: This is not something that theatres have been asking of their freelance artists. BUT, theatres are also waiting to find out what comes of the audit that the original company is undergoing. (Oh yes, the original company [OC] is undergoing an audit, so this request comes from a place of both high tension as well as lawyer advice.)

I thought to myself, okay, clearly I need to know more about this for myself as a freelance artist in Seattle. And thus I went searching for information about Business Licenses in Washington State. This included looking at it from the side of the person needing to get a license but also reading through the document sent to me by the OC: The Independent Contractor Guide published by the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries. In this document, the employer asks a round of questions about the potential contractor/employee to determine their status. It's really unnerving, I think, to have a theatre company answering questions about whether I have a place of business outside of their organization that I can prove on a tax filing form, among other distinctions being used by LNI.

So I decided to ask LNI directly for some insight. First I ended up in just General Inquiries, then a representative who deals with Workman's Comp Claims in Seattle, then the Small Business Liaison Office, then finally Workers’ Comp Coverage Determinations Office. Apparently, you can e mail a contract to the Determinations Office to have them tell you if you're a Volunteer, Independent Contractor, Covered Worker, or Employee. Take note!

After going over my interpretation of the six questions asked by the Independent Contractor Guide, the Determinations officer advised me that I would be considered a Covered Worker and that the OC would be responsible for paying Workman's Comp and reporting my hours regardless of if I provided a Business License (aka UBI).

Hmmmmm.

This left me with even more questions about what to do as a freelance artist because the fact that a non-profit theatre company in Seattle is being audited (much like the rash of audits in 2005) and changing their contracting policies while other orgs watch... there is a change in the air. And the fact that the individual artists that are going to have to start getting those licenses don't really know what's going on, well, that IS a problem. I stand by what I said in my original FB post, that this requirement -- whether originating from the state, city, or the theatre company -- disproportionately negatively impacts artists that are under-represented in our industry, namely POC, LGBTQ+, Women, Disabled, etc. Access to knowledge about these decisions and laws takes time to get. Advocating for yourself and knowing your rights takes time. Being a freelance artist who barely makes minimum wage on the amount of things we're contracted to do, well, doesn't leave a lot of time.

Needless to say, I'm going to be staying tuned to this and seeing how I can advocate for transparency from our theatre organizations and the city and state.

How My Privilege Allowed Me to Say Something

Do y'all know about white privilege? If not, please pause and go read (just one of many) essays answering "What is White Privilege, Really" you can find on the internet. White people, this means you.

So, I'm white. I have white privilege. My ability to speak up about the impacts of this thing -- that is also impacting me as a white artist -- is related to the fact that my indignation and frustration is less upsetting than if a POC artist took to social media. In our society, people of color are not afforded the same understanding of their anger. Their responses must be milder and less incindiary or face harsher criticism and retribution from our society at large. Yes, even in Seattle. Privilege number 1.

But there is another privilege I lay claim to that opens this door for me (because I'm also a female-passing, queer-identifying individual, so it's not like I'm not a target): I have a day job and don't need the design gig being presented by the OC to survive. I'm not cobbling together my bill payments via my measly freelance checks.

This is not nothing.

I might be an independent artist in the theatre community, but I'm not as vulnerable as many. I can rabble-rouse and, while it still stings to lose the opportunity to design the set at the OC, it isn't going to make or break my life (my career is another story and covered in the last part, below).

Where the Theatre Community Can Go From Here

Again, I'd like to reiterate that the outcome of my Facebook post and educational traipsing through state and city licensing was to be removed from consideration from the job at the Original Company (OC). I spoke about my white privilege and economic privilege that allowed me some freedom in speaking out. But clearly I'm not immune to pushing a hot-button issue to the point of losing work.

And it stings. I'm not going to pretend it didn't. I wanted to work on this show with this director and at this company and on this script.

But more importantly, I'm disappointed that the OC felt so threatened by my posts to drop me from consideration. Which is not how they passed it off to me in our e mail exchange. No, I was originally told that the time it took me to respond to the production manager -- four days -- meant they had considered me uninterested and they had moved on. But that wasn't the whole story. I was fortunate enough to have the director want to continue to advocate for me in a forthcoming phone meeting with the OC. Then the director was made privy to my FB-related dismissal. So, I got to hear the real reason I was no longer being considered because the director had already committed to keeping me in the loop.

#WhyIndividualArtistsDoNotSpeakUp #ButTheyDoSpeakToOneAnother

I don't regret what I said. I don't regret what words I used or my indignation. I don't even really blame the OC in letting me go from consideration (I don't AGREE with it, but I also can see their side of things).

What I can't stand is that we have this very big issue that is about to impact every theatre artist in our community in relation to freelance work -- regarding getting and paying for business licenses and subsequent taxes, whether or how freelance artists are covered if they get hurt on the job, whether they will get paid the same rates -- and we have theatre organizations that are lobbying on behalf of themselves as they navigate this and making decisions and communicating out new policies without much transparency for the rest of us.

Seattle's theatre ecosystem is a mess, and not just because of our lack of representation and diversity on and off stage and the inherent racism that gets played out on our stages under the guise of "progressive plays": we're not really a whole community made up of artists and organizations. Organizations close ranks because they have the resources to reach out to their peer institutions for help and also warnings. But theatre artists are getting the short end of the stick with the lack of transparency about decisions that are impacting us directly.

I mean, in this case alone, it's good to know that the OC isn't cool with me being mouthy. That gives me some really concrete information about where to go from here with that particular company and the artists they work with. But I also don't feel comfortable revealing who this company is because I don't want to create backlash against myself (or the company). The environment here is very "behind closed doors and backs."

But we also have no advocacy in these organizations when we're not represented by a Union -- and so, so few of us will ever be represented by a Union.

Thus, I ask, where can we go from here, Seattle? Transparency. Communication. Heck, if I could have had the opportunity to actually respond to the OC about the issue they took with my Facebook post, well, we could have had a really great conversation. Probably still parted ways because I don't feel comfortable getting a Business License at this point in my career, but again, conversation would have happened.

Instead, I'm out here as an independent artist hoping to educate myself about this law that is impacting me and wondering what other organizations or individuals I have rubbed the wrong way by stating a fact that our government systems are part of a system of racism and oppression.

What's next for me, Seattle? Not going to stop being mouthy, that's for sure. And maybe not going to see another design contract for a while either because I'm too much trouble for y'all or because getting a business license is NOT in my best interest. (N.B. Once you get a Washington State Business License [$19] you'll also need to get a City of Seattle Business License [$45]. Don't listen to anyone that says it's just $20! Don't forget to do some reading about taxes as a business, too.)

Your Gender Politics Cannot End at the Wings: Seeing Richard III at Seattle Shakes

Sarah Harlett as Richard III and Suzanne Bouchard as Buckingham. Photo by HMMM Productions

Last night I went to see Richard III at Seattle Shakes, produced in partnership with upstart crow collective. Last year I saw Part 1 of Bring Down the House, which enthralled me, as it did most of Seattle. At the time, my concerns over representation on creative teams was nascent and not fully formed. So forgive me for not having written about this before.

From upstart crow's website:

upstart crow collective was co-founded by Betsy Schwartz, Kate Wisniewski and Rosa Joshi in 2006. We are dedicated to producing classical works with all-female casts for contemporary audiences. Focused on telling story and living characters honestly on stage, our work is text centered and visually imaginative.

What an amazing, admirable mission. Really inspiring for me (user of she/her and they/them pronouns) to read and then absorb their work. Shakespeare has always felt too elite, too wordy, too distant for me. Even when I've designed for Shakespeare, the dated gender politics frustrate me, especially when I'm responsible for clothing the female-identified characters -- often in modern dress -- to fit in with the tropes of womanhood: virgin, mother, whore. So to get the opportunity to take in the power and politics of the histories told by some of the most formidable performers in the area who would not otherwise get to play these lords and princes and kings: awe.

And then I look the production team page.

And my heart sinks.

First, let me be clear that I admire and respect every single designer who worked on this production and really loved their choices and designs. This is not commentary on what was represented on stage by their artistic vision. I also recognized that the same creative team worked on Richard III also designed for Bring Down the House. And that there is great comfort in not having to re-establish visual language and vocabulary when taking on adaptive work that is risky (yes, all female-presenting performers doing Shakespeare will probably always be risky even if you've proven it's amazing).

However... why is the design team still a representation of our male-dominated theatre field? Set designer, lighting designer, co-sound designer.... all  male-presenting if not -identifying designers. Costumes, props, and co-sound designer are holding down the other part of the identity pool, but that's pretty normal for our industry. Check out this HowlRound report from 2015 if you'd like statistics to back this up.

Yes, this frustration about the utter lack of representation at the creative table comes from a selfish place. Let's just get that out there. I see my male-counterparts get asked time and again to do scenic designs and I look at my resume--MFA, Award-winning Designs, GENERAL AWESOMENESS--and ask why not me? And then I get the call to design costumes for that same show and I'm like, cool, my chromosomes dictate where my skill lies.

But this goes beyond me. And gender. While it's easy to be frustrated that theatre, as a field, is lead by cis-het white dudes when you're definitely not checking many boxes in that identity, it's even more angering that, in the name of equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) as well as novelty and marketing buzz, theatres are mounting these amazing productions that examine how stories can change, grow, and deepen when the bodies presenting them (aka performers) are as diverse as the population in 2018.

And that is really important.

However, the people who are creating the world of these gender-swapped, racially diverse stories ALSO have to be a part of the under-represented groups. The voices around the table making decisions about architectural angles, ephemeral lighting, and subconscious-gripping sound cannot continue to be (cis-het, white) men if we're truly going to end white supremacy and patriarchal control of our art form.

I look at the production team of Richard III, and my first frustration comes from the male-domination in those creative roles. And then I look on stage and see the choice of director Rosa Joshi to pit the transcendent Porsche Shaw as Richmond, savior of England, against the gripping, equally-talented Sarah Harlett as Richard III, twisted monarch, and I cannot help but see (and feel) the politics of 2018: a Black leader (dressed in white, shout out to the costume designer) standing above the slain White leader (still dressed in black), declaring victory and peace for England.

The conversation expands, knowing full well that the racial and cultural identities represented on that list of creatives are dominated with whiteness.

The set design, along with lighting and sound, create the container of the production. It sets the tone, the visual language, and the boundaries of the world that the story exists in. When producers and producing companies do not consider who is making those decisions -- sure, to be molded by a director who often does sit at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities, but damn that's a lot of burden for one artist to bear -- they are continuing to bound the story by cis-het white male privilege and thinking (and art). It's hidden to the audience, the donors, the media. But not to the performers and the members of the creative community. We see this inequity, we can feel the oppression of decisions that impact our identities (in June 2018, American Theatre Magazine published an article that discussed how the white-gaze plays out in lighting design -- where designers have to light all skin tones).

If we are going to turn a corner as an artistic pursuit, our equity and inclusion politics cannot stop at the wings. We need to infuse our creative teams -- and our admin teams -- with the voices of everyone who resides in our universe in 2018, but specifically with the ones that we haven't been hearing or listening to.

I want to be hired. But more importantly, I want to see the world through intersectional eyes.

My Hair. My Gender. My Identity: Part Three

"How about we stop here and let you live with this length for a bit." The hairdresser who I'd asked to cut off 8"+ of hair in January was nervous. Hairdressers are always nervous cutting my hair, but I think he particularly felt pressure because he is also a friend who had read my blog posts.

Suddenly I had come face-to-face with a reaction to my writing and my journey. And the reaction tested my resolve to make this change. To discard my femininity calling card.

I didn't push further for the hair cut I wanted.

Because I was scared, too.

In part, I was scared because cutting that much curl would inevitably take some time to see what would actually happen with the hair shaft. But also because his concern about such a drastic change, someone who knew what I had thought about and written, and who was having a direct conversation with me about gender identity made me question everything I had resolved.

Which meant that if I had sat down to write Part 3 then, I would have wallowed in my self-doubt rather than continuing to move forward.

Since beginning this writing project, all I could hear in my head was my mother asking "What's the point? Why are you dragging the skeletons out of the closet?" Though she died six years ago, her influence is still great.

And then I was cute again. My Shirley Temple curls, resting at my ears, healthy and very springy, had returned.

I resigned myself and put this thought experiment on hold.

Until this week.

On Thursday, I watched Hannah Gadsby's beautiful, heartbreaking, oh-so-personal piece "Nanette" now available on Netflix. I encourage anyone reading this to watch it, no matter what you think about comedy, the #MeToo movement, or me. Really.

What struck me and had me balling was when Hannah (and yes, I'm going to use her familiar name for many reasons, not least of which is that I feel personally connected to her and I don't want to distance myself by using her last name -- though I recognize the issue with this since most females and female-identifying people are often spoken about like this as part of the misogyny of our world) relays her realization of years of internalizing the message that she was "the wrong kind of woman." And that, even in her later years, that she is the wrong kind of lesbian. And I... can't really put into words how much that broke me open.

In Part Two of this blog series I said my hair is my claim to femininity.

But you know what? I like my hair. I like that it is distinct and different and that people are jealous of it. What I don't like is being called cute. Which I can't do much about apart from aim to not look cute... which then gets rid of this part of me.

--

In 2018, we've caught up with my small liberal arts college peers in being able to discuss and proclaim gender as a social construct. As someone who works in the business of choosing costumes to tell stories and hint at identities on stage, I have long been tapped into ways that we perform and don gender on any given day. But until this year I hadn't really sat down to scrutinize how my trauma and upbringing had been molding my identity and making me deeply uncomfortable in my own skin.

About a year ago I started to adopt the pronouns they/them. I still use she/her, as much out of habit as out of my wish to. In the last few months I've answered surveys that allow me to identify outside of the binary as gender-non-conforming or gender-queer.

And in the past two months I've thought a lot about gender and how I want to not be "gender-non-conforming" or "gender-queer" because gender shouldn't be a binary thing that I have to be nonconformist about or queer (verb usage there). Why has this been floating to the top again for me? Because I'm pregnant. With a baby that, according to tests, has XX chromosomes. And now, being pregnant means that I am relegated to a world of dresses and leggings and tunics (aka feminine clothing) and an acute awareness of my own breasts (which I've always seen as a necessary evil of one day giving birth and have otherwise fantasized having removed in, what is now considered part of a gender reassignment journey). I also want my child to know that their chromosomes do not equate any type of being, while simultaneously wanting to be able to say, when people ask, that I'm having a girl because I'm really excited about that. I'm excited that I get to have a mini me and show her a world that isn't the one I grew up in. Where she can wear pink and blue, dresses and jeans, she can build houses for her barbies, make mud pies and bake real pies. I want her to be a girl with no strings attached in her mind about what that means; which I know is unrealistic given society today. And also that this little one might want to use other pronouns and labels than haven't even been dreamed up at this point.

Which will be awesome. And I'm up for the task of letting this little one know that their curls (which they'll probably have, let's be real) are just curls and theirs to describe, define, change, grow, and anything in between.

And I'm here to publicly say and lay claim to an identity that is more encompassing of me and my journey: I'm gender-queer because I queer gender, both in my personal day-to-day life as well as in how I want to raise my child and how I enact my art.

To answer my mom's question of why all of this: It's because being open holds me accountable to not allowing my trauma and discomfort to win. It also allows me to reach others who may see themselves in my story. Because for too long women have been told to shut up and sit down. And by not doing that, I'm queering gender.

Thank you.

My Hair. My Gender. My Identity. Part Two

2000 - Seattle Aquarium Touch Tanks

“I told them to look for the girl with the curly, blonde ponytail. You’re hard to miss.” My supervisor sent me down to the floor to meet with a tour group. My hair was my defining feature. My calling card. Easily picked out of a crowd, my halo of frizzy, blonde hair, even only 5’6” above the ground, was distinct. Commented on. Marveled at. And even ridiculed.

My father’s genes are responsible for the texture of my hair, but his hair, like his sisters’, is coarse and mostly short. I didn’t understand the texture of my hair very well until high school (and then really didn’t truly master it until my late twenties). Taking a second period, high school swimming class meant that my hair had to air dry while I sat through Algebra and lunch. No longer fussing with it or sleeping on it, the natural curls that I inherited from my Irish family emerged. My hair went from frizzy and nappy (yes, a particularly venomous middle school acquaintance used this to describe the blonde bird’s nest atop my head) to curly and frizzy.

And so began my life as a host to blonde curls.

In high school Latin class, someone tried to convince me to play Eros (aka Cupid) in their class project.

I would regularly get stopped in parking lots and asked who did my hair. Even extended members of my family told me how much people paid to get hair like mine.

And then hairdressers would marvel that my hair wasn’t fried to kingdom come from products when they sat me in their chair.

Those same hairdressers would blow my hair out for me after the appointment because I had no patience to do that on my own. I’d live for a few days in an alternate reality of straight blonde hair, able to run my fingers through it, and completely unrecognizable to people at times. Without my curls, who even was I?

2012 - Straight Hair

Blonde curls. Heart-shaped face. Female. Cute.

My first boyfriend, and later my fiancé, was into my cuteness. I’ll admit that I was easily mold-able in this six-year-long relationship. Eager to please and to keep the primarily long-distance relationship alive, I asked his opinion about everything, including my hair. He met me when my hair was curling to somewhere between my shoulders and chin. As my hair length fluctuated and I toyed with the idea of growing things out, he always voted for a bob that made me look “cute.”

It was easy enough to oblige; remember, I didn’t get a handle on the texture of my hair until my late-twenties and, until then, really hated how brittle and frizzy my hair got as it grew out. I would often fantasize about that bob with an undercut I tried to get when I was ten. What if I just shaved off the kinkiest, most offensive curls at the nape of my neck? Maybe then I’d have beautiful, flowing locks like the movie stars that were embracing a tousled, loose-curl look in the early 2000’s.

I have never done that. Instead I fell deeper and deeper into the cult of my blonde, curly hair. A love-hate relationship that most people with natural curls will understand. My calling card. Unique and different. Hair that made me conspicuous (and clogged my bathtub drain).

When that ill-fated relationship above finally ended, I was as cliche as the movies, declaring I would shed my cuteness and the baggage of my first love! Time for a drastic change! No, I did not shave my hair off, though I did offer to. (Shortly after this relationship ended, my father’s other daughter was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma. I offered to shave my hair in solidarity with her chemo treatment that would result in hair loss. She did not take me up on it. I was mostly relieved.)

Instead, it took me over 3 years to be drastically changed. I grew my hair out long past my shoulders. I graduated with my MFA. I moved to California with a new beau to follow my post-graduate school dreams of being a resident scenic designer at a theatre company. And I started over.

Though my hair can never reach my waist, like my mother’s when I was little, because it’s too brittle and prone to tangling (and I’m not patient enough to coax it to that length, really), I had turned in my cute card to become what I was told was Woman.

And yet, I was still the woman in a male-dominated field, with soft, curly hair.

My identity has always been at odds with society. And itself.

I was told by one side of my family that women were to be docile, dress-wearing, long-haired housewives. The other encouraged me to follow my dreams to become the first person in my family to graduate from a four-year college. When my dreams took me into building and painting for theatre where t-shirts and jeans were the primary uniform, I was labeled a lesbian by my family and peers. Never mind that I, like so many teenagers, was too painfully self-conscious to consider dating (let alone being the survivor of sexual abuse).

The only thing that has remained constant: my blonde, curly hair. My calling card. My claim to femininity.

2003 - Grinnell College

   My claim to femininity.

   My claim to femininity.

   Why do I need something to claim that part of myself?

   ?

My Hair. My Gender. Part One

1994 - Before & After

My step-mother likes to say this haircut happened when she wasn’t looking. We both went into a bargain place to get our hair cut. I wanted to cut my long hair into an inverted bob with an undercut. It was a cool new 'do in the early ‘90s and I was headed back down to California to live with my mother for a year and did not want to deal with sweaty hair on the nape of my neck.

The stylist sat me down and started to hack away at my hair. It’s important to note that at this time my hair wasn’t curly like it is now; that kicked in with puberty. There were small curls at the nape of my neck and at the crown of my head and I definitely had a wave, but no, not ringlets. She got the hair up to roughly the length of the bob and then began the undercut. Then she realized that my bob was uneven. One correction led to another, and suddenly I was getting a pixie cut with a deep fade

My step-mother was livid. I was pretty traumatized, but only because I wasn’t prepared. I thought it didn’t look too bad. Maybe.

Thus shorn, I embarked on my last prepubescent summer. We took a road-trip up to Vancouver, BC, and then through Victoria. A Canadian adventure with my dad, very pregnant step-mother, her mother, and her step-father. It was a really fun experience that I remember fondly. And then we road-tripped down to California and a milestone of sorts occurred.

On this day, I was wearing knee-length shorts and a lose, magenta tank top that was about a size too big for me. With certain movements, it would shift and you could see more of my chest than would be considered appropriate if I had any breasts at the time. We stopped at a rest stop where I quickly hurried, by myself, to the restroom. Being summer in the full swing of early ‘90s road-trips, there was a tiny bit of a line, and there I stood, just passed the entrance, when a woman stopped me.

“Excuse me,” she said.

“Huh?”

“You know this is the women’s bathroom.” I can still hear the accusation in her voice.

“Yeah.” I had no idea what she was on about. Thank you for pointing that out, lady.

“The women’s bathroom,” she repeated. Perhaps she thought I didn’t speak English.

“Yes. I know.” I probably looked at her with a mixture of confusion and horror as my brain figured out what she was implying.

No one else said anything. She probably sighed or huffed before leaving. And I used the bathroom. But while standing at the sink washing my hands, I looked in the mirror and it hit me. She thought I was a boy.

I ran back to my parents’ vehicle and shared the exchange in disbelief. We had a laugh. At ten it was funny given the haircut debacle. I brushed it off. We went on our way, driving deeper into the heartland of California where my mother lived: Bangor, CA. A place that is more akin to the American South than to the liberal-leaning California cities everyone has actually heard of -- San Francisco, Berkeley, Los Angeles.

I had no intention of keeping my hair short, but it became even more imperative that I grow it out as my body began to change that year. Hips. Gaining weight. A period. And little breasts that my mother insisted on showing off to my grandmother during one exceptionally embarrassing afternoon. The two women declared I was finally a woman. Hooray. Suddenly conversations about crushes and boys and sex came into focus in a very overwhelming way. Living with my religiously conservative family, in the farmlands of California, meant that I needed to toe the line, which included growing out my hair. My mother’s hair at this time was at her waist.

Cross Country

Nevertheless, I fought hard to stay on the cross country and basketball teams. I could always be found playing soccer at lunch. I was also skipped from fifth to sixth grade shortly after I was enrolled in Bangor Union Elementary, a K-8 school that only needed one classroom per grade level, that was how small it was! I became conspicuous. A short-haired, pale girl from the big city who thought she was so smart and got called up at the quarterly all-school assembly to be presented with certificates of achievement, including perfect attendance. Who did she think she was?

What my classmates didn’t understand was why I kept my nose buried in my school work and welcomed away-games and meets to get me out of the house. It wasn’t just my mom and grandmother who remarked on my change into womanhood. My mother’s partner at the time paid me a lot of attention. We lived in a one-bedroom mobile home. He and my mother slept in the bedroom on one end, and I slept with my three younger siblings (one of whom was his first child with my mother, a daughter) in the living room area of the mobile home. The only door I really had to change behind was to the bathroom. Despite my pubescence (and her born-again religion), my mother, a child of the 1970’s, encouraged a free-love experience of being naked at home with her partner, even in the communal spaces. With no boundaries placed around this behavior, and the regular disruption of domestic abuse in our home, my mother's partner’s behavior during this time wrapped my formative, sexualized gender identity in a thick patina of sexual abuse and toxic patriarchy.

I wanted nothing more than to disappear.

Or at least revert back to my “tomboy” days that were not filled with hormones or a changing body, and when short hair didn't matter. But I also wanted to avoid being teased by my peers and my extended family. I wanted to fit in and be a woman they understood. I was a mess: a product of the collision of a religious upbringing that holds hard to patriarchy and heteronormativity combined with hormones and puberty.

I vowed to never have short hair again.

Left: 1994-95 School Portrait
Right: 1995-96 School Portrait
(I liked vests. It was the 1990s!)

To Be Continued...

Designer's Notebook: Why We Have A Body at Strawberry Theatre Workshop

Mahria Zook as Renee and Alyssa Keene as Lili.
Photo by John Ulman.

Last night I opened my sixth show of 2017: Why We Have a Body by Claire Chafee at Strawberry Theatre Workshop here in Seattle. I was brought onto this project about seven weeks ago in a hurried conversation with director Rhonda J Soikowski who reached out to me on the recommendation of one of her colleagues. Rhonda pitched the show -- a four-hander that explores the role of gender, sexuality, mental illness, and family and was a sensation in the 1990s. Immediately images of pleated pants and shoulder pads flashed through my head.

Just a month before this call, I had made a decision to be more picky about the shows that I take on. My more stringent criteria was not about pay or working conditions but about the mission of the organization and/or the voices that would be amplified by the project. Coming off of one big musical with over 80% white or white-passing actors in the cast into a three-hander with an all-white cast and creative team, and then going into production managing and designing for Sound Theatre Company's Hoodoo Love by Katori Hall, there was a light bulb that went off in my head. I could only give my energy and life-blood (which is what we freelancer do give) to companies and shows that put their money where their mouth was and elevated under-represented and vulnerable voices in order to disrupt the white supremacy we are all now too familiar with in Trump's America. (Yes, duh.)

Rhonda's call and request for me to squeeze Chafee's non-linear, monologue-filled examination of women writing their own definition and future in a patriarchal world was my first test of my conviction. I had planned August to be a month of recuperation and preparation for the last of my 2017 shows. And yet, this was not a case of not being able to say no, which I definitely am afflicted by. This show was calling to me.

Back in my Feminist Theatre class in grad school at UNC Greensboro, I wrote a paper called "Becoming a Feminist Designer: Troubling the Traditions of Design." In the paper, I dissected traditional theatre design techniques and pedagogy using a third-wave feminist framework. It was the beginning of putting into words something I had long felt in my bones: my identity is imprinted on my designs and adds (positive and/or negative) value to them. And, by that logic, so does the identity of any designer. Thus, who is designing a production is as important as who is directing it, who is acting in it, and what it is about.

But I was only scratching the surface, struggling to apply inadequate language and theory to something much, much bigger than this.

Enter intersectionality.

Coined by civil rights activist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989 essay, intersectionality is the complex, cumulative manner in which the effects of different forms of discrimination combine, overlap, or intersect. Now, in 2017, intersectionality is being used to expand our understanding of identity, white supremacy, and white privilege.

I have a more indepth write up about what I'm beginning to coin intersectional design practices (instead of feminist design theory), but the gist of it is that, as a designer, you have to interrogate your own position of power and privilege, interrogate the expected audience's, and then, and only then, do you start to break out the design decisions that build the world or clothe the characters. (Again, more later.)

So, back to Why We Have a Body for which I acted as the costume designer.

In Chafee's stage directions, she explicitly calls out various costume needs like Mary's orange coveralls and Eleanor's bib-waders, but it is in her stage directions for Renee, the married paleontologist caught in a love affair with female private investigator Lili, that demands an understanding of gender performance of the 1990s -- because that's when the play was written (and our production was set) -- and that of 2017. While in Mexico, trying to patch things up with her perpetually off-stage husband, Chafee's stage directions read, "She gives a tiny wave. Picks up his wallet, and she picks up his watch and puts it on. She feels its weight on her wrist...feels what it's like to wear a man's watch. She stares out." In that little ellipses, Chafee is telegraphing the subtext of Renee's navigation of her identity just a few scenes after we've heard her say to Lili, "Maybe I'm a man. Is that a possibility? I feel like a man..."

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

I'm not going to do a thorough job unpacking this -- this blog post is not intended to be an academic paper -- but can you see the power of identity, gender performance, and power all wrapped up in the act of a woman wearing a man's watch? Layer onto that the very real trajectory of gender expression in the 1990s LGBTQ+ community, what was fueling Chafee's script, and this costume/prop piece is explicitly emblematic of what each stitch of clothing means in conveying character to drive the narrative as well as bring the audience along on that journey.

This stage direction is an explicit demand of Chafee that particular attention had to be paid to the costumes of these characters. As a cis-gender, heterosexual female, I knew I needed to rely on the authorities in the room to guide me. I had to unpack my privilege and experience to know that while I might think something looks right or is the right price, I am not the authority on that.

On the night of preview, I gave the actress a new watch -- we had been using a personal piece that I didn't want to risk during the show -- and while it fit as a 1990s men's gold watch, on stage it read more as a woman's watch. I saw it that way, from the other side of the audience. But, more importantly, Rhonda (the director), who had told me in my initial phone conversation about the personal connection she has with the play as a "lesbian of a certain age", told me it wasn't right. Because--and this is why intersectional design is more than just applying an understanding of the intersections of oppression and power but is in fact about navigating the intersections of the history of that oppression and power as defined by modern, regional, and generational understanding of our world--what a 2017 audience knows as an undoubtedly "heavily coded masculine" watch (which were the exact notes in a rehearsal report for the watch) is an almost comically large metal watch.

While there were so many other in-depth conversations about the costumes as they pertained to the presentation of each character that I could go into, the story about the watch is the epitome of how design must take into account everyone from the playwright to the director to the audience, and also the designer herself.

It was a such a wonderful opportunity to hone my definition and understanding of the intersectional design process with a play that demands it. I'm grateful that I said yes and I hope that, in my more curated 2018 season, these opportunities will multiply. But I am also excited to start formulating and sharing out this philosophy with the world.

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See Straw Shop's Why We Have a Body by visiting the brown paper ticket page.

Even Plays That Interrogate Racism in America Can Uphold White Privilege: Welcome to Braggsville at Book-It Repertory

Ku Klux Klan Gathering, Crystal Pool (2nd and Lenora) in Downtown Seattle, WA. March 23, 1923.
Photo courtesy of the Washington State Historical Society

It has been a long while since I left a theatre performance physically ill. Thinking back, I believe it might have been the night I left Bad Apples during the second intermission.

I admit that I don't know the source material -- T. Geronimo Johnson's lauded novel Welcome to Braggsville -- but the adaptation and staging of it by Daemond Arindell (co-adapter) and Josh Aaseng (co-adapter/director) that I sat through at Center Theatre last night left me wanting to scream into the night.

Why?

Because this production is masquerading as something it is not. Because, for being a show billed as a satirical interrogation of white supremacy (in the American South), it fails.

Why?

Because the person we, the audience, are meant to empathize with is the white guy : D'Aron Davenport, born and raised in the eponymous, fictional Georgia town of Braggsville where he was called a faggot because he was smart and sweet and sensitive, or so we are immediately told in the opening lines of the play. All that to set us up to see him as an outcast from his hometown and elicit sympathy from the audience.

The show follows D'Aron and his three friends -- "the four little Indians" (which is NEVER unpacked) -- on a journey to stage a "performative intervention" during a Civil War Battle re-enactment in D'Aron's hometown. The dramatic fallout of their ill-advised "intervention" -- a staging of a lynching in the midst of said-re-enactment -- is the sub-plot of the play. What, then, is the main thrust of the nearly 3-hour show?

It is not about how Charlie, the one black member of the quartet parses the experience of being thrust into the racial tensions of a Confederate-flag-waving community while being asked to play the lynching victim for "authenticity."

It is not a dissection of the culturally-appropriating behavior of the dread-locked Becky that comes up with the whole idea in the first place.

And it is not even an analysis of the racist behavior of the Chinese -- sorry, Malaysian -- comedian of the group who primarily appears to provide comic relief, even in the aftermath of the lynching-gone-wrong while he sports, among other problematic accoutrements, a spray-painted red clown wig.

Instead, the play focuses on the hometown boy learning about how the years of saturation and maturation he spent steeped in a stereotypical, Confederate-proud Southern town has actually made him a pawn in the white supremacist hatred that he and his three friends have come to town to protest in the first place. Which could be useful and interesting for a we're-not-racist-Seattle audience, except....

Every opportunity presented to interrogate the white guy's journey down the rabbit hole of his complacency in the violent, destructive race relations in America -- from a powerful and yet ineffective slam poetry-style dialogue between D'Aron and the black narrator/poet to D'Aron's final line of the play going completely unchecked by any dramatic reaction by the characters, actors, or, hell, dramatic environment itself -- is completely lost. Making this production, which is actually full of beautiful performances and a fantastic design, yet another opportunity to uphold the white privilege and soothe the white fragility that actually underlies the decision of some white Southerners to get the Confederate flag tattooed on both of their forearms, to re-enact Confederate battles, and to use the N-word in everyday speech without any consequence. More importantly, this production reinforces Seattle's own "we're not racist" mindset while this weekend one floor above the theatre was Festival Sundiata celebrating Black history, culture, and accomplishments that included tables full of documentation and commentary about Seattle's racist history from red-lining to KKK gatherings (oh yes, we had our own klan).

How does it do that?

The reasons hinge much on action I do not want to give away in case you're on your way to see the show, but let me start with the simple fact that the story takes place in rural Georgia. Did we not see the disjointed, "racism/bigotry/ass-backward thinking doesn't happen here" mindset during our 2016 election? It's too easy for white Americans outside of the South to distance ourselves from the cultural, systematic, and historic racism that is overtly played out in small, rural communities in the South because that racism doesn't look like our racism. And yet, it's all connected because our entire country was founded and populated by the same people and laws that originated in the 13 colonies. And I point, once again, to the fact that Seattle had it's own KKK activities, which means our hands are very much not clean, let alone for our decimation of the native tribes of the Duwamish, the internment of the Japanese, and countless other acts of white supremacy.

Along with the geographic/emotional distance inherent in the location of the play, let me give away one plot point to drive this home: D'Aron doesn't change. No, he doesn't. Faced with the brutal, violent truth of his family's and community's role in the oppression of the black people of "the gully", he chooses to protect them. HE CHOOSES TO PROTECT HIS FAMILY AND TOWN. And the only response to that is a well-delivered but lost punctuation point about how what we saw in Braggsville is not unique to the South, delivered by Charlie (remember, the black member of the "four little Indians") before lights out and curtain call.

Again, I can't speak to the source material, but I am going to call a spade a spade: Welcome to Braggsville, while it attempts a running leap at vaulting over white privilege and fragility in the hopes of sparking conversation and inciting change, it falls flat and keeps the white audience firmly on the side of not dealing with our white privilege and our role in white supremacy. It does not dare us to stand up against all odds, our family, our community and call out behavior that is insidiously reinforcing white supremacy because poor D'Aron -- who does honestly struggle with realizing how he has internalized years of racism just by being alive in such a community -- isn't forced to. We even get to watch him cry tears of white fragility as he draws parallels between a survivor of the atom bomb explosions in Japan being protected because he was underwater only to resurface and see his family, friends, and village destroyed, shadows of their former self (if that isn't a poetic interpretation of Robin DiAngelo's "we're all swimming in the same water" of racism, I don't know what is).

In 2017, we should be past showing that white people are just now realizing there is racism that they just didn't know about. The stories we need to be telling, that will truly change our society and the world, are the stories that force those same white people past their fragility and into action. Barring that, the producing company has to shepherd further conversation around the play through talk backs, dramaturgical resources, lobby displays, and continued conversation through public outreach.

If you do go see the show, white Seattle, do me a favor and look around at who is in the audience and how they react. The night I saw it, there were maybe 10-15 people of color and they were not standing en masse like the white audience at curtain call. Why? Because I don't think this play was a revelation to them. And it shouldn't be a revelation to any of you, either.