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Revolutionizing the Way the American Theatre Interacts With New Black Work with Jamil Jude
82 Plays1 year ago
On this episode Amber talks with visionary Artistic Director (of True Colors Theatre in Atl, GA) Jamil Jude about how he is revolutionizing the way the American Theatre interacts with new Black work - by creating an incredible program with five other collaborating partners across the country called The Drinking Gourd: Black Writers at Work. Listen to hear him announce the first two commissions of that program as well as new play plans that are cooking up for next season! We talk about the gestation of that program and how it came to be, the work of the incredible team at True Colors and how Jamil makes his schedule work as a freelance artist, Artistic Director and dad. We also talk about the road to long term sustainability for non profit theatre and how PWIs (Predominantly White Institutions) need to crawl before they can walk.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Table Work' Podcast
00:00:07
Speaker
Hello, everyone. Thank you for tuning in to Table Work, How New Plays Get Made. My name is Amber Bradshaw, and I'm a new play dramaturg, arts administrator and educator. On this podcast, we asked some questions. What is new play dramaturgy and how do we do it? What do artists want to see in the future of the American theater? And where are we failing in the creative process and how can we solve these concerns?
Sponsorship by Working Title Playwrights
00:00:31
Speaker
This podcast is brought to you by Working Title Playwrights, a new play incubator and service organization based in Atlanta, Georgia, in which I serve as the Managing Artistic Director. For more about WTP and me, check out workingtitelplaywrights.com. That's my list of PWIs. Crawl. Crawl first. And just be good at that. Get good at that.
00:00:58
Speaker
and then maybe organization, maybe you'd be trusted enough or maybe you get the expertise enough that the next time that when you're ready, that it won't be disastrous and that you won't perpetuate cycles of hurt and pain and inequity.
Jamil Jude's Background and Achievements
00:01:17
Speaker
I would love to start today by introducing y'all to our guest, Jamil Jude. Welcome, Jamil. So good to have you. Thank you for having me. This is going to be fun.
00:01:28
Speaker
So, Jamil is a director, producer, playwright, and dramaturg, and is the artistic director at Kenny Leon's True Colors Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia, as well as the co-founder of the New Griots Festival. He is a former participant in the Leadership U one-on-one program funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and administered by the Theatre Communications Group.
00:01:52
Speaker
The program provided him a residency at Park Square Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he worked as the Artistic Programming Associate. Prior to that, he served as the National New Play Network producer-in-residence at Mixblood Theatre Company. Before joining the staff at Mixblood, Jamil served as a new play-producing fellow at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.
00:02:13
Speaker
His interest in social justice and theater continues to drive his work, including co-founding Color People's Theater in Washington, D.C. As a playwright, Jamil was the 2013-2014 Jerome Minnie Voices mentee at the Playwrights Center, where he remains an affiliated writer. He has been commissioned by Climb Theater and has been produced by Climb and by the D.C. Black Theater Festival.
00:02:35
Speaker
So Jamil and I met in 2018, and I believe it was when you began your transition into being the Artistic Director of True Colors Theater in Atlanta. Tell us a little bit about True Colors and the work you are doing there.
Mission of True Colors Theatre
00:02:47
Speaker
At the beginning of my career, I decided that I wanted to be the lead curator of a culturally relevant arts institution. And I didn't really know what any of those words truly meant at the time. But when I got to True Colors in 2017 and walking out on stage and seeing the audience, I realized I had been told a lie.
00:03:05
Speaker
and that I had actually found the place. I'm a dream job. I'm the lead curator of a culturally relevant arts organization. So True Colors founded in 2002, 2003. This is our 20th anniversary season, which is crazy. We are a black theater located in the black mecca of Atlanta, Georgia, founded an amazing American theater storyteller, Kenny Leon and Jane Bishop, who worked as
00:03:34
Speaker
in the management positions at the Alliance Theater, the organization was intended to try to change the way the American theater produced work. Oftentimes, in what we do, it centers a white narrative either explicitly or implicitly, and then tries to diversify from the frame to its true colors that its founding was intended to center a black narrative, and then use that as a launching point to introduce conversations about all different cultures.
00:04:04
Speaker
We have learned that in the superhero world, before there was more diversity in superheroes, that we can still see ourselves inside of that. And I think we talk about it the same way. Through specificity, anybody can see themselves in the stories that we're telling. And that's how we try to move forward.
00:04:21
Speaker
I have a love for new plays, like you mentioned. So I've had and I've brought a focus on contemporary Black writers. I had true colors, but we represent and attempt to try to address the entire history of the work of Black artists. Black theater has been in America for over 100 years, not just the Black Arts Movement, but going back to the African Grove Theater in New York.
00:04:49
Speaker
So we try to represent the full gamut of that history and do it right now through contemporary black plays. But I love black classes as well. So I'm sure color is just the place where people can go. And we always talk about it's a place to go to celebrate black storytelling.
00:05:08
Speaker
I also love just mentioning the ancestry and the genealogy of black theater, which a lot of people I think fail to know anything about. So thank you for mentioning it. We're talking about being a part of a continuum, not just a continuum of
00:05:23
Speaker
a national conversation around Black theater success. Yes, of course we are. But Atlanta has a beautiful history of Black theaters before. It's just us, Jumanthi, just to name a few. So we want to make sure that people recognize that we're part of that language as well, and that true color is rooted in Atlanta in more ways than one.
00:05:45
Speaker
So one of the things I have seen you do a lot of work at True Colors is civic engagement, which I've talked about before in this podcast and something I think is really important, especially in the new play world where we're trying to
00:06:02
Speaker
like bring news stories to the stage, right?
‘Connectivity’ Program Overview
00:06:05
Speaker
As opposed to things that people already are familiar with and might just naturally decide to see. And, you know, with your civic engagement at work, it's a lot of connecting community and bridging audiences to the work on stage. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
00:06:19
Speaker
Yeah, so we call this program Connectivity. It's a larger umbrella term that we use for the work that thrives at the intersection of artistic excellence and civic engagement. Right there at that nexus, we call that connectivity work, where we are, of course, as a theater company, we lead with artistic excellence. But I'm a firm believer that theater in the 21st century cannot be disconnected from community. There are so many competitive
00:06:45
Speaker
media that is striving for the same eyes on that we're looking to. So what is bringing people to a specific location at a specific time these days? And we know things like concerts, but also things like voting. Right. So how can we make sure that what is artistically excellent like a concert potentially or that it's fire civic action like voting that true colors can be right in the mix of that?
00:07:13
Speaker
So our connectivity work led by an amazing, amazing producer named Randall Jones. I will tell you all to hire him, but I want him to continue to add true colors. We go on and we try to find what are the plays, what are the themes that are on the work that we're discussing? How do we tease that out? And then what are the community organizations that are already doing that work and our forces combined can amplify it? And then also, what are those spaces that maybe theater hasn't
00:07:44
Speaker
connected with them before? How can we go and make authentic relationships with people centered around a desire to inspire civic action? And then if and when they decide to remind them that we have a theatrical option for them, but the goal is really just to engage with them about things that they're most concerned about. And then if and when you just extend the invitation,
00:08:11
Speaker
That's not the expectation. And I think that's been a lot of fun too. It's to not go into the relationship expecting anything. Now you go in with your interest, Seema Swaco, who's a really brilliant theater mind and civic partner and uses the arts as a way to inspire civic discourse.
00:08:30
Speaker
She has this concept called consensus organizing. And she goes in and says, whenever you're creating an authentic relationship with community members, you want to start with your mutual self-interest. Because when you hide that, that's when people feel like they've been hoodwinked. So we go and we start conversations with our mutual interests, with our self-interest. And we say, hey, we have this play, and we'd love for you to see it. That's where we want to start the conversation. But we also have all these other things that we want to do. And we'd love to hear from you. And then let's find some common elements.
00:09:00
Speaker
And you have a lot of different programs that do this kind of connectivity work.
Community Engagement Partnerships
00:09:05
Speaker
I know one of them is you do panels, right? And you do like community discussions. Yeah, so we have panel conversations are the way in which we enter into that. We call it true talks. And those are discussions where we are finding people. We just recently
00:09:20
Speaker
and they're called good, bad people. And we kind of talked about the ways in which race, class, justice, all intersect, especially in the lives of middle class and upper middle class black people. So we put a panel together in someplace as diverse as Atlanta, where you have the AUC and you also have one of the largest poverty gaps in the country you have.
00:09:42
Speaker
millionaires and athletics and entrepreneurship and music. You have people and you have a rising house, unhoused population, right? So a focus of that, especially when we start thinking about justice and cop city and all these other things. So we put a panel together of people who intersect all of those different things and talked about it. We did that. It was called True Talks. We did it at a black home, the largest black home
00:10:08
Speaker
arts gallery here in the Southeast. So all of those things intersecting, right? Because class, working with class fall into art gallery and ownership. So those are the types of things that we're teasing out. We also have partnerships with MARTA, which is the public transportation system here in Atlanta. We do partnerships with the Atlanta Opera and do concerts together. We just did a partnership with the Black Legacy Project.
00:10:33
Speaker
And they're moving around the country trying to find artists to remix songs, to talk a little bit about what's happening in our world using music as a place to heal. That's an organization out of music in common. So it looks like any number of things. And again, I'm just really proud of Brando Jones and the way in which he's taken that idea.
00:10:57
Speaker
I love my work at TruCo because I often get to be an idea guy. And if you want something in the space and say, hey, you all, I want to thrive with intersectional artistic excellence and civic engagement. I want to call it connectivity. I want to create authentic partnerships. And then I get to set the plan and the vision for it. And then someone else takes it and expands it wider than my, you know, the dreams that I had for it initially. And that's what's happening right now. Just one of many areas of TruCo is that that happens.
00:11:26
Speaker
I love that. But it does start with your vision. Yeah. Gotta give you credit for that. Yeah. And translating it too, right? Yeah. You know, and what was the name of the gallery you mentioned? Oh, Zukat Arts Gallery. Great. Zukat, C-U-C-O-T. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, I love that. That MARTA program, especially, really interesting. I love that as an idea and a community partnership and engagement.
00:11:54
Speaker
And I've also seen a lot of theaters partnering of late. And I love the partnership with the opera, especially with the way opera has just completely been reinvigorated in the last several years. How did you how did you partner with them? Did you do a production together or how did that work? Yeah, a couple of different ways. You know, we've done a production together where we pair spoken word artists and monologues with opera songs.
00:12:23
Speaker
Arias from various operas performed by black opera singers here in the area and nationally. That's just one of the ways in which we've come together. We've shown up at their event, thanks to Portage Arts. So it's a good partnership. That sounds very cool. I love that idea. Well, so let's talk about
00:12:45
Speaker
One of the new exciting programs, exciting projects that you've been working on called The Drinking Gourd.
Collaborative Project for Black Playwrights
00:12:51
Speaker
Black writers at work. Yeah, tell me about this. It's so amazing. Yeah, this is one of, you know, again, one of those things where I come out, hey, here's this vision and then lots of people take it. So a big shout out to our producer and I guess a friend of working title playwrights, Kayla Parker, doing some really good work here as the new playwright and director here in Atlanta. Absolutely.
00:13:15
Speaker
But the Drinking Board, Black Writers at Work, is a program through colors and six other theaters across the nation, black theaters across the nation, that's dedicated to the co-commission, co-development and co-world premiere of new plays by black writers and groups known as black theaters. Our desire here is to fill a gap in the American theater where all too often black playwrights are finding development and hopefully production
00:13:44
Speaker
What we hear from them often in Tori Sampson's Black Playwright wrote an article pre-pandemic about her experience at a predominantly white institution where not only does she feel like she had to translate the work to fit the aesthetic taste of this predominantly white institution in the producers, but she also experienced microaggressions, not just from the staff, but also from the audience. So what is the experience of a writer that's trying to bring their work to stage in hopes that
00:14:14
Speaker
A producer then likes it enough to give them a world premiere opportunity, but it's the work that actually gets to stage and the very few slots that are available to these writers. If it doesn't actually represent the initial impulse of the artist that created it, is it real? Is it valid? Is it truthful? Is it authentic? And regardless of that answer, what happens if it doesn't get picked up again?
00:14:41
Speaker
and it gets canned by the reviewers. And now that playwright wears the stain of failed shows, and it makes it less likely for the next producer to then go for just work. We call it premieritis sometimes, and it definitely affects black and brown playwrights. So our attempt here is to resource other black theaters at a level in which we can give playwrights the type of commission money
00:15:11
Speaker
that is commiserate to some experiences that they may get out other places. But to build a network that treats development differently, each of these organizations, we all have what we're calling our own special sauce. You know, maybe, Hattie Lou down in Memphis has a really great acting pool that they'd like to bring to the work. And National Black Theater in Harlem has access to so many different things. But Barbara Ann Tear, who founded National Black Theater, and Jonathan McCorran shot
00:15:43
Speaker
of approaching artist care. JAG Productions out of Vermont has a lot of space, just a lot of space for artists to go and just be black and free, you know? The Hansberry Project in Seattle has their own flavor that they put on new work development and the relationships they built with some other people out there, just to name a couple of organizations I'm working with. But now an artist and their work, we get to place them
00:16:13
Speaker
with a company based specifically on the need of the playwright. And now they get touched by so many different organizations working in tandem so that when the work is ready for production, it's not just going to get a single production, it's going to get a role in world premiere at these various cities, at these various, you know,
00:16:33
Speaker
with their own audiences, but the audiences that are ready to experience Black work where the playwright doesn't have to go in and try to lift the culture and be artistic and do the community engagement. We say, hey, we've got this. We have built a legacy of telling Black stories and all these theaters across the nation. We just want you to go and deliver the best way you can and be nurtured in the best ways in which you believe that we can. So we're excited for it.
00:17:03
Speaker
selected our first two commissioned artists. I'm really excited to announce, I guess I'm announcing it right here. I have officially done the press release. It'll be fine. A Pulitzer Prize winning James Irons is going to be one of the first playwrights I've commissioned and then another emerging artist Gethsemane Herron is going to be our second playwright. So
00:17:27
Speaker
Commission for James Ives, and then from Soup to Nuts, production from Gethsemane Heron. So yeah, that's what National Black Theater, JAG, out of Vermont, Hattie Lou and Memphis Ensemble out of Houston, Hans Baer Project, out of Seattle, True Colors Theater here in Atlanta, and Penumbra Theater out of St. Paulman.
00:17:55
Speaker
That's incredible. Thank you. We're excited. It's going to be great. And that's just the beginning of it. Like there are, you know, the more we talk about it, the more black theaters I want to get involved. Sure. At some point, there's always a conversation around new play funding, but it's a good conversation for funders. They love the opportunity to fund multiple theaters with the stroke of one check. So, you know, I think we're trying to build a structure that can sustain itself
00:18:24
Speaker
and revolutionize the way the American theater interacts with new Black work. That is really amazing. And I just want to give kudos like how much work and collaboration and effort that that must have required, just incredible, all those different organizations. And it's really cool to see because I feel like
00:18:53
Speaker
We really can't do this work alone, you know, especially when people are always singing the sad song of how expensive it is, right?
00:19:03
Speaker
which to me just continues to manifest the same issues, to be honest. So I feel like, you know, you're diving right into the solution and just like a such a practical and efficient and also thoughtful way. Yeah, I want to give a big shout out again to Valerie Curtis-Newton, who runs the Hans Weber Project of Seattle. She was a, she said yes to me early when we tried to pilot this program in the pandemic. And again, another shout out to Kayla Parker, who's a great job in producing.
00:19:34
Speaker
And also you. I get enough credit to have a title as artistic director. Yes, I know. I know. I get to be on your podcast. Definitely. There's enough sunshine on my mind. Oh, I know. But, you know, you know, I love to give shout outs to to people doing a lot of really good work in new play development, you know, because it is
00:20:02
Speaker
It is risky work. It takes building blocks. It takes a lot of things that I think some people just don't really want to mess with at all. So I'm always really appreciative of that. So yeah, thank you. Because I mean, you know, some of our playwrights are people we both work with. It's wonderful. I love that about Atlanta and about the American theater. It really is a small world, right?
00:20:32
Speaker
That's what you said. That's what you said. That's really cool. So, OK, so I have one more question about that, that project before we move on. Yeah, I'll talk about it. Delimit yourself the one question I love. I love the drinking, but I just love I love what we're doing. There's some other programs, too, that are happening in the black theater space. North Carolina Black Rep has a similar program that they've
00:20:59
Speaker
Worked with a couple of theaters that are part of the drinking boys some other ones and you know, you know it for me it's like rising tides lift all boats right like hmm, there are a Myriad I was gonna say hundreds and probably hundreds of new play festivals across the country, right? So we don't have to as black artists we don't have to feel any type of guilt or shame or or wish it coalesce all of the things that
00:21:28
Speaker
because everyone else is doing it in their own way and serving different needs and things like that. I just think that, you know, a history of racism has just encouraged people. Well, if we all band together our limited resources, then we would be stronger. And that's not untrue, but it also can take away some of the individuality
00:21:56
Speaker
of organizations. And the thing I love about the drinking court is that we are encouraging the individuality of each partner organization in the development process of the work as opposed to consolidation and trying to make new play, development, a factory, and a facsimile of every single program that's out there. I don't want to do that with this program.
00:22:24
Speaker
But you had a question. That's just me right now. That's great. Thank you for sharing that. My question was sort of a bigger dramaturgical question, which is how did the conversation about this project begin?
The Drinking Gourd Project Development
00:22:38
Speaker
What was the gestation and how did it sort of lift off? Because people love to talk about their ideas, but making them actually happens. The true magic of our work, I think, and that's sometimes the part that people don't get to.
00:22:53
Speaker
So I like to talk about it as something that you can sort of look at as here's a possibility of something that could become a really incredible idea that does actually man itself into existence. Yeah. I love that question. Thank you for that. Um, just gives me an opportunity to kind of think back. Um, some of the fun about being an artistic director would be a visionary. I would say that this program,
00:23:21
Speaker
I pulled from a couple of different things. The first thing, Latisha Ellison used to be the development director at True Colors. When it was announced that I'd be transitioning from associate director to artistic director, she really pushed me and encouraged me to start thinking about what I wanted True Colors to look like in the future. And True Colors also, I received some money from the Bluebird Foundation. We were working with a couple of advisors administratively
00:23:51
Speaker
to help us think about how you project some long-term sustainability onto the work that you're doing. This was all 2018, so pre-pandemic. And that talked about long-range artistic planning. So here's Latisha's in my ear about, okay, what type of company do you want
00:24:11
Speaker
his information about long-term artistic planning and how do you plan out for three seasons at a time and all this other stuff. So at the moment then we challenged ourselves in 2018 and said well what type of theater company do we want to be in 2020? So we put up on a whiteboard in the office here in 2018 said long-range planning the goal for 2020
00:24:35
Speaker
And we put all these things out there. We wanted to be a $2 million organization by then. We wanted to create a new work development program. And that new work program was what I talked about with that feeling the void in the American theater and the waste place were developed. Similarly, I'm a child with the National Nuclear Network, which I know is a lot of love on your podcast. And I had always been excited by the Rolling World premiere model.
00:25:01
Speaker
And then some work and research that I've done in prior spaces around black theater movements and how plays moved throughout the country. And still there are plays that are all like what's kind of maybe pejoratively known as the urban theater market, how those plays kind of move. And there's always been like a network, a connection of how things can spread. So all these things are playing into my mind. And then 2020 actually happened and we're in another sort of pandemic.
00:25:31
Speaker
I'm sitting at home twiddling my thumbs, trying to keep a theater company alive, trying to find my own piece inside of a racial reckoning, but also feeling really inspired by some community work that I had been a part of and that I was seeing out there. So then these ideas kind of came together in my head. And I remember calling up Valerie and a couple of other producers and saying, fool with me on this idea.
00:26:01
Speaker
What if we commissioned playwrights and we shared them and we co-developed their work in an attempt to try to inspire co-productions or multiple productions of writer's work? And again, to Valerie's credit, she's been in since 2020. Other people have come in along the way, but that's kind of like the path through it. And it's not,
00:26:30
Speaker
revolutionaryism is not something that someone hasn't ever thought of again. I think it's revolutionary in the dogged way in which we're saying we aren't going to let it go. So it's also highly collaborative. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's, you know, like this industry will burn you out. Um,
00:26:54
Speaker
Daniel Proxarnical, who was a mentor of mine, still is a mentor of mine, but he was the first person to hire me as a professional in the casting department at Arena Stage. He would often say, you know, it's not a question of if you're gonna burn out, it's like when you're gonna burn out, how you get back. And I mean, you know, I think there's a world in which you say, oh, that's some negative stuff and do we have to be like that? But there's a reality that burnout exists. And then in 2015,
00:27:25
Speaker
a brother named Paul Robinson, who was teaching out of the Shannon Institute of Minnesota. And he talked about, you know, we get burnt out when we're in this alignment with our values. And when that happens, because it's going to happen, because we grow and we change, our circumstances change, we have to be around nutritious people. I said all that as a preamble to say that collaboration helps you in all of those facets. One,
00:27:54
Speaker
can lighten the load and allows many hands to make life work. But then also, whenever you get burnt out, oftentimes those collaborators are the nutritious people reminding you why you got into this thing in the first place. So that maybe I'm not the cheerleader, but Chris at Penumbra can be the cheerleader for the thing, or Jarvis can or Rachel can down at Ensemble.
00:28:21
Speaker
right? Like shot a can of national black theater, someone else can then pick up that torch until I get an opportunity to rest and restore myself. And then those nutritious people who there's a torch bearer, but then there's six other organizations or however many people that are involved in it, that can also be doing the nurturing to help me get back up on someone else's out there running their race. So I love collaboration. It's part of the reason why I love it.
00:28:50
Speaker
but it's also the thing that will sustain us all being a community. So what do you find are the most challenging aspects of your work? You know, I know that's a big question. You know, what are some of the pain points for you achieving your goals? I think the first is just bandwidth. You know, I'm a highly ambitious person and
00:29:21
Speaker
If I could, I would do all the things that I love to do all the damn time. And it's also the mental challenge. For me, I've gotten everywhere I've gotten to up until this point or maybe some point before, just like hard work. I was never the best athlete, but I worked super hard at it. Right. And then I had such a learning curve.
00:29:49
Speaker
getting into the American theater because I really didn't do anything with regards to theater in high school, stumbled upon it in college, and then did it mostly without a real formal education in the theater. So all the catch-up that I tried to do, reading, seeing, taking things in, discussing, breaking it down, asking questions, challenging it all,
00:30:19
Speaker
kind of got through hard work, right? Of course, there's some meritocracy and there's a lot of luck in there and there's some cronyism and nepotism and all the ways in which people get opportunity. But a bulk of it was hard work, right? So I still have in my brain that, well, if I just stay up later, work harder, multitask more, then I can get all of it done.
00:30:49
Speaker
Two kids later, an artistic director position is trying to hold it down. The bulk of my artistic director position has been inside of the pandemic, and there are 90% of it. A freelance career that I'm thankful for, it's nearly impossible to try to be present for all of it.
00:31:18
Speaker
So I say bandwidth. And also because I learned that I can't do it all. It means I had to do a really great job of hiring good people that can take the vision and moment. The thing that when you hire good people is that there are always people looking for good people. So sometimes, especially at a theater company the size of ours, we lose good people because they have
00:31:47
Speaker
great opportunities that allow them to get to the ambition that they have for themselves. So that becomes a challenge. I keep on talking about theater companies our size, and I recognize that as a $2 million organization, there are some organizations that will look like, and say, y'all are huge. And this is not a good or bad thing, but there are several predominantly white institutions that are operating with budgets.
00:32:16
Speaker
five times our size, 10 times our size. You know, theater companies out here that are $30, $60 million here on the American theater, right? So when that is part of the competition that you're known against for resources, playwrights, administrators, director, designers, all the money, dramaturgs, like that can become a challenge, especially when you start talking
00:32:46
Speaker
funding in the way that funding is distributed here. The American theater philanthropic community is trying to do work to create some equity in funding, but it's still far behind. And the nonprofit structure still is constricting. Organizations of color, but specifically black theaters are, have been really faced by a lot of
00:33:16
Speaker
on those issues. Systemically, and just historically, racist tropes have affected, like, oh, you know, black organizations can't manage money well. It's like, well, if you're trying to do all this work on five nickels, it's hard to manage money well. Nonprofit is just a hard thing in general. And also, a lot of that isn't true. Like, we manage money well, we just don't have a whole lot of it.
00:33:43
Speaker
You know, you're also looking at how wealth has been distributed in this company, what people choose to do with their discretionary funds if they have any. Most white organizations, white theaters get 60% of their contributed revenue from individuals. For black organizations, it's 6%. That means that you're looking now for 94% of your contributed revenue
00:34:13
Speaker
from foundations, grants, government entities, corporations, that all are fickle. Individuals give more consistently as the stats prove that. And they do it without restriction.
Opportunities for Black Playwrights
00:34:33
Speaker
But when you go to government grants or foundation grants, it's often for project support, project specific support. So you're really limited in what you are able to
00:34:43
Speaker
able to use that money for. So those are just some of the things that make the work more difficult. Of course, if we teased out that more, I can come up with a variety of other things. But yeah, working backwards, it's funding. It's the brain drain that often happens when you lose good staff. It's on my own bandwidth. Yeah.
00:35:12
Speaker
It's just, it's really that the statistics are pretty intense. And it makes me think, you know, when people say things aren't possible, you know, I would say the way that black theaters have persevered in this country, despite these kinds of challenges,
00:35:33
Speaker
Amazing. I just want to first say that because to me, that is the work and love of a lot of people over a long time. I just hope that you've mentioned that funders are working towards doing better, but I think it needs to happen faster.
00:35:54
Speaker
And they need to keep prioritizing companies that have not been funded. Yeah, I think transformational gifts, transformational gifts, especially general operating revenue. Right. Asking more organizations, more appropriate organizations to give.
00:36:12
Speaker
10, 20% of a theater company's annual budget and give them that a year for a period of three years. That's the type of transformational work that would go a very long way for us if we got
00:36:33
Speaker
$400,000 a year or every year for three years from a funder that says, hey, I'm going to give you $1.2 million, right? Which is, in some ways, less money than they have given other flagship regional theaters for one grant. We're saying, spread that out over three years for us, give it to us in a general operating thing, and just watch what we're able to produce. And we're thankful that there are organizations that are stepping up
00:37:06
Speaker
this is oftentimes I get all these spaces and I'm making it a push for black theater companies and I use the specificity of true colors and we are in alignment with that. We are definitely in a continuum and also I also recognize the immense level of privilege that we have that we have been given funding from various sources over the course of our 20 years that I think we
00:37:34
Speaker
show up and do good work for that. But there are also so many people who show up and do good work, who do not get the same type of recognition that we get. Yeah. No, I hear you. There's, there's never enough money to go around, but hopefully we can figure out maybe some ways to make it easier to access. Absolutely. Right. Yeah, that's good. And there's some people that work in the giving gap, Heather Infantry is doing great work. Yes. Shout out to Heather Infantry.
00:38:03
Speaker
And all the people doing this work, really pushing our funders to make changes. It's been a pretty monumental movement. And in terms of that, what do you think new play artists need from the American theater? What have you found that we can do better?
00:38:27
Speaker
You know, I think we're trying to deal with the drinking court. I think we're trying to give new play artists a safe space to try it out, to try out all their ideas, get it down, be nurtured by them, have someone support them, have someone nurture them.
00:38:50
Speaker
Have someone take them from the initial idea concept through whatever development process they feel like is best for the work that they're creating. And then have the temerity to say, and now we want to produce it. And now we want to put it up. And we don't want to just put it up once. We want to give you multiple shots at this. And we want you to produce under different circumstances. So we want to have you produce actual colors. But we also want you to produce a hattie loop, which is smaller, and a Memphis, which
00:39:27
Speaker
Then we want you to take it to NBT. So we want artists, and I think what artists need are people believing in them, giving them space and opportunity to try and invent and create. And then more people saying, yes, and come do it here. Take multiple shots at it. Get it right the way you want it to, and then go make the next thing. And we'll be right here waiting.
00:39:56
Speaker
I think that final step is a key one that we haven't talked as much about in the podcast is that not only is it several opportunities to have a production,
00:40:09
Speaker
different productions. But, you know, this opportunity to continue to revise and rework with a different community, a very different audience, like that's just so exciting. You know, with the National New Play Network, we get three of those, right? And so the idea of there being three to four to five to six, oh my gosh, that is just, that is an incredible opportunity. And so I love that. More opportunities like that. And
00:40:37
Speaker
and also opportunities that align.
00:40:41
Speaker
Right. One thing you said that really popped for me was these theater companies have built the blocks toward to the community, have built the bridge already. You know, they have a history of serving this audience that this play is written for and therefore is a good partner. Right. Like that's to me, that's just logic. But I think that we sometimes get we miss that. So, yeah, I think that's a
00:41:11
Speaker
One of those things that gets lost a lot in translation and if people would just collaborate more effectively or consider consulting, hiring the right people, re-staffing, offering opportunities to new artists, opening up
00:41:30
Speaker
opening up who they consider and what they consider to be collaborative partners. I'm trying to think, what can these PWIs do to make it better? But a lot of it, to me, is the time building the blocks to the community and not just being presentational but being active in change. I think it's the same thing.
00:41:55
Speaker
This is probably where I could cancel from the American theater, but like it is often told to organizations of color and smaller organizations. You're not ready for that type of thing, right? Like, oh, we need to see three to five years of production history before you're eligible for a grant. Or we need to, you don't have the capacity. We feel like you don't have the capacity in order to manage this grant program with the same
00:42:26
Speaker
included in that, get, you know, like, oh, it's all right. You've never done this before, but skip to the front of the line. It's like, wait a minute. They haven't put a female, a black female playwright on stage in 15 years.
00:42:44
Speaker
But yeah, you're going to resource them with a extra week of rehearsal process through this grant process. And you're going to do audience engagement collaboration funds so that they can go out and find the audience for this play when they've never done it before. Like, why don't they have to crawl before they walk? Will you tell everybody else that they have to crawl?
00:43:08
Speaker
So the thing that I would say without my institutions who are trying to get into this working, oh, we want to do it. Why don't you just crawl first? You don't actually have to do the production. You don't get to do the production. Other people may let you and you're going to just take that. But you want to do the work that these other companies have been doing because you want to change your relationship to equity, but you're doing it in extremely inequitable.
00:43:35
Speaker
And like that level of fairness, I don't think it, I'm just gonna say I had to change four different words. Like I'm not that interested in fairness. Fairness is utopian and I know we don't live in that because I'm a Trumpish president. It's not about that. It is about the audacity of
00:44:03
Speaker
some folks and organizations and producers that feel like the rules don't apply to them, even when they are trying to respond to community need that has said, oh, your organizations have heard us. And then those organizations that perpetuated that hurt say, okay, well, we're going to stop hurting you by
00:44:29
Speaker
fast-tracking a process that we don't have any understanding of how to do. So that would be mine. That's my mindset. PWI is trying to do the word crawl. Crawl first and just be good at that. Get good at that. And then maybe organization, maybe you'd be trusted enough or maybe you get the expertise enough that the next time that, or when you're ready,
00:44:54
Speaker
that it won't be disastrous and that you won't perpetuate cycles of hurt and pain and inequity that you've done when the Wallace Foundation gave organizations a whole bunch of money at the end of the last century to do this or for a foundation when they started to help start the regional theater movement.
00:45:15
Speaker
Whatever. I mean, that's really wise. I think it kind of aligns with a lot of my discussion about in order to really serve artists, especially in the new play process, you just need a lot more time and a lot more thought.
00:45:31
Speaker
Just like, can we please think this through before we rush through everything and throw shit on stage that's not ready and exactly put playwrights in a position to not get a second production because this one did not go well for like all these different reasons that probably could have been avoided, right? So yeah, I absolutely hear you. I think that's really wise. So best advice for new play artists?
00:46:01
Speaker
If I said I would give to artists in general, I talk about artistic life cycles, and I think there are three phases of an artistic life cycle, and again, it's a cycle, so a cyclical, right? In that first phase, it's showcasing your skills, and you're really just trying to prove to yourself and to other people that you know how to do it. And in that space, I tell people to say yes to learn. There's a second phase I think people are involved to, and that's where you're exploring your aesthetic.
00:46:31
Speaker
And in that space, I talk about saying no to growth. Because when you're showcasing your skills, you want to just develop a broad skill set. But when you're exploring your aesthetic, you really want to deepen the things that you know how to do well and get much, much better at it. Sure. At the beginning of my directing career, I was definitely down to do avant-garde and device work and all this other stuff. But once I really realized that,
00:46:57
Speaker
I'm good at character dramas. Then I just wanted to get really deep into that. How can I better communicate with actors? What are action verbs? How do I help structure plot? If I'm doing new plays, how do I get better at new play dramaturgy? How do I deepen in my bag as opposed to adding a whole bunch of different bags?
00:47:18
Speaker
And then there's this final phase where you're sustaining your success. And I talk about that as artists in that space. They want to seek and share. They want to seek out what's best in the world, and then they want to share it with as many people as possible. So saying all that now, flew through to New Play Artists. I think you want to say yes to learn. Say yes so I can read everything, see everything that's out there as much as you can. Then be critical of it. Question it. Challenge it.
00:47:48
Speaker
question the form, take a look at the form, rip it open, analyze the director's choices after reading the script, find ways to be a student of life and how it was reflected on the stages. I think if you do that, then when you want to start playing with form,
00:48:18
Speaker
you may have something else underneath you or that you have more of a spark that's going to push you through the hard work of facing the blank page, rewrites, having other people critique your work. Like that stuff is difficult and it's enduring and it's toxic. It can be, doesn't have to be. So I'm hoping that that can help people along the way. Yeah, that's great.
00:48:48
Speaker
Thank you for that. And where can listeners connect with you and keep up with your work? Yeah, truecolorstheatre.org is the website for true colors. Check all of our stuff out there. Follow us on socials at truecolorstheatre. And then for me, my website jameeljude.com and at Mr. JD Jude on the social platform.
Upcoming Production: The Wiz
00:49:14
Speaker
Awesome. And you have,
00:49:16
Speaker
A really cool production coming up, True Colors, do you not? I'm excited about it. Yeah, I know. All the stuff we talked about in the plays, all the sort of things. And now we're not talking about a new play, but it's a good play. Yeah, but for our 20th anniversary, True Colors,
00:49:31
Speaker
We have talked about last year, this year, and next year, we've been talking about Sankofa, which is this West African Oedinkra symbol, well, it's a symbolic language of Oedinkra symbols. And this one specific symbol, that of Sankofa, is mostly represented by this bird, whose feet are facing forward, but his head is looking back. And the symbol is used to mean a return to retrieve, in order to know where you're going, you gotta know where you're going from, right, essentially.
00:50:00
Speaker
So as True Colors was facing our 20th anniversary, part of my, you know, what kind of company do we want to be in 2020? I started thinking about that concept of Sankofa and how can True Colors honor the past and recognize the continuum that we are part of and also prepare ourselves for a really exciting future. So with season 20, our theme is reclaiming hours under the concept of Sankofa and True Colors and I think maybe from 2005 to 2008,
00:50:30
Speaker
did these productions of The Wiz, which is an iconic black musical, a black retelling of the Wizard of Oz story. And I was in my office and I saw a poster board for it. And Hallie Bailey, who is the new black mermaid, she was in our productions of The Wiz.
00:50:54
Speaker
You're kidding. Her sister, Chloe, who is a protege of Beyonce, was in it. You know, Victor Jackson, who was an amazing performer based here out of Atlanta, among so many other people, Kimi Leon directed it. So, like, part of True Colors legacy is the Wiz, part of Black Theater's legacy is the Wiz of so many artists, audience members, first introduction to storytelling, theatrical storytelling, and then seeing the movie.
00:51:25
Speaker
So we're excited to bring a very, very Atlanta version of The Wiz to town. We've been calling it Lemon Pepper, Lemon Pepper Wiz. So we're excited. We're going to have that on stage in June. And we can't wait. It's a love letter to the city of Atlanta and reminds people of just the continuum that Atlanta Theatre is part of and Truco is a part of that.
00:51:51
Speaker
I love that. I didn't know sort of the genealogy of the show and the theater. That's fantastic. And it is such a great show. Like I think it's a great spring opener and just great energy to it. And really been enjoying the costumes on Instagram that have been posted and all the design stuff. It's really cool. Yeah. Yeah. You have such a great staff over there. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Jamil.
00:52:20
Speaker
Y'all, I am your host Amber Bradshaw and I will chat with you next time.
00:52:26
Speaker
Thank you listeners for tuning in to Table Work, How New Plays Get Made with Amber Bradshaw. This podcast was brought to you by Working Title Playwrights. If you like what you've heard today, support this podcast and all our initiatives by leaving us a review, following us, and or consider making a tax-deductible donation to Working Title Playwrights at www.workingtitelplaywrights.com.