Sarah Norris

“the time I adopted my son”
adopted my son
two weeks later the world shut down
experience one of the greatest things i’ve ever experienced
immediately dovetailed by global pandemic
govt and leadership not deserving of the name
i was aware of many different ways the world was changing, affected by this
his life was cloistered, tiny
day in day out, running around house, unable to play with friends of go outside
been a very long experience
having my wife, a nurse, in a pandemic.
that too has resulted in anxiety and lethargy
we as people find ourselves tired
the dance parties we do with him are a source of rejuvenation
working hard to keep that
began with a bang...flowed into something tight and oppressive...been doing our best to take our existing energy and break out of that.

“art”
I’ve been spending time lately making sense of family and family history
my father died 15 years ago. Holocaust survivor
mother died 8 months ago...holocaust survivor of a different sort.
Have been thinking abut stories of growing up, traumas that came with that.
He was an amazing man, incredible optimist.
would take me out of school...we’d go to museums in new york, he’d give me tours, I’d give him tours. seeing art, Canopic jars that were 4000 years old made me feel connected. It felt like time travel
I’ve been trying to make sense of that and write about it.
my sister and i have gotten close, and since my mother dies even closer. embarking on writing family stories, what matches up or doesn’t between our accounts.
connecting my own history with the holocaust with what’s happening today.
on the one hand we don’t need another holocaust story, there are plenty, so the purpose, what i am seeking out, is connecting that to the other forms of racism that are happening today. contributing to social justice movements today.

Laurie Baskin

New York, NY 

I’m going to talk about how my community and I have been affected by the government response to COVID-19, and the community I'm going to talk about is my religious community. I think most of you know that I'm in a chorus. It's a Jewish chorus in Westchester and I've been singing with this group for probably four or five years and while it's secular we do sing both religious music and secular music. And it's a real opportunity to connect with a community of other singers and mostly other Jews  – they’re not all Jewish, but also at concert time to bring together family. And my rabbi found out that I was singing with this chorus about three years ago, before the Jewish high holidays that year. She said she wanted to connect me with the cantor at our synagogue and asked if we would sing a duet, which totally freaked me out because usually I do not sing solo type stuff. I love the choral environment. But, I agreed, we rehearsed, we sang together, my parents came – my parents are in their 80s. They cried. It was amazing and it brought everybody together, and my temple community was also quite moved and appreciative. And a tradition started. I sang again with the same cantor the next year again, deeply appreciative, and then we came to the COVID year. That was the third year and we couldn't do services together. We weren't in person, couldn't rehearse together  – you can't sing together on Zoom, there's a time lapse, so, as we all know, it doesn't work. We actually did go to the temple for a recording before the high holidays – they hired somebody to record and we each sang our parts separately. And then, the video person mixed our parts and they played the recording during remote high holiday services. We couldn't be together in a place. Together, praying, singing, and being joyous. My parents couldn't come. It’s just such a year of disconnect and the government has, for reasons we all understand, forced us to be separate. It's so isolating and I've found that there's just so much joy lacking. I can’t connect with my family and religious community, which I think people across all religions are probably feeling at this time. So, it's been bittersweet.

Jessica Cermak

My Story: 

I am a  collective member of WOW Cafe Theater.  It's a women's and trans theater space.  I joined many years ago as a budding actor, so that I would be able to use the theater space for cheap or free, being very self conscious about the fact that I was one of the only cis or hetro women in the the space. 

Years past, and I began getting close to my fellow collective members.  One night, one of the members said that she needed someone to fill the role of "Derek" in her play.  While the character is male, she wanted it to be played by a woman. I found myself saying, "I can play a man!" I am not quite sure what possessed me to do this, but between my enthusiasm and the director/writer's desperation. I found myself wearing a beard and mustache as Derek.  The process was so different from other plays I had been in, with a cast of mostly trans POC folks, it included Sunday dinners and many cast members pitching in to help with design aspects of the show.  When we finally opened, I was surprised to realize that the piece had a great artistic value and audiences loved it.  Our sense of community had ended up enriching the piece. 

Months later, theaters shut down because of COVID-19. I helped organize a Go-Fund me campaign so that WOW could pay its rent. I was so impressed with how many people, from all over the world were willing to contribute because they had once been a part of WOW.  I had said that people who donated would get a "shout out" at the fundraiser. Not knowing what else to do, I ended up pulling out "Derek's" beard and mustache and recording a song for zoom that included all of our donors. Six months later, another member of the collective "needed' me to play Derek in a virtual boy band for a holiday show. 

Through community, WOW has survived as a theater collective for 40 years. It just keeps coming back and reinventing itself (even on zoom).  Just like the character, Derek, I'm sure WOW has many performances still yet to come. 

THEATER COMMUNICATIONS GROUP

Sarah Machiko Haber

Brooklyn NY

I feel like I'm going to answer in a mishmash but mostly this is about the last prompt, about the future that we envision. I'm also going to point out that I didn't really have a story coming into this moment, and I’m still not really sure this is a story, but one of my backgrounds is Quaker and so I just sort of trusted that the message for this moment would come out of the silence. And it did, some pieces I thought were separate are actually connected. 

So I'm just going to share that – I mean it's not a surprise, we all found this year to be incredibly tough, we're still in it. And that, for me, alongside the frustration and the sadness and incredible waste of human life that has happened this year, I have also found so many moments of hope and connection. And hope for the future, because something really broke this year. Or, not broke – it was already broken and I think more people woke up to the fact that things were broken and not working for so many. And I just have this dream of a future from this year - that was percolating in me anyway, that I think many people have already been creating and dreaming - of the future of theater where we have universal basic income or health care, where we’ve redefined what the ‘canon’ is, where decisive action is being taken around climate change. A future of systemic changes that create a more equitable field. Changes that mean anyone can be an artist, regardless of income level, education, race, etc. Systemic changes mean you don’t have to worry about making rent or if you can afford to eat, you can just be an artist, and being an artist is enough to support you. I’m in theatre, I think for the same reason so many other people are, because I really believe in the power of a story to change hearts and minds, to make change in the world, to help us question the ways things are and dream about the way they could be. And theatre does that, but it could do so much more if in turn we took better care of our artists, of people. We can’t value the art and not value the people who make it.

And the other piece of this is that, and some of you know this already, I have been folding paper cranes during meetings in order to help me focus. Everybody's focus has been totally shot, and this has become my coping mechanism, recently, to fold paper cranes. It’s allowed me to actually listen to what people are saying, instead of thinking about the next thing I have to do. The thing that came to me, as I was folding a paper crane during this meeting and listening to all your stories and thinking about the future - cranes and paper cranes are really symbolic in Japanese culture, right? I think that the story of Sadako folding 1,000 paper cranes is pretty well known, but the gist is that she folded 1,000 paper cranes so that the gods would grant her wish of healing from illness.

And the realization that I had is that as I'm folding paper cranes in the meetings that we’re having – really what we're talking about is the future of theater and our hopes for the field. How the field can heal from this pandemic and how TCG can become an anti-racist organization. And those discussions and thoughts are kind of getting folded into the cranes that I'm making. And I don't know if I'll have a 1,000 by the time we’re back in person, whenever that is, but maybe I'll bring them to the office and they can live there, in the lobby, and just be a reminder of all the conversations we had about turning our wishes and hopes for theatre into actions.

NATIVE ROOTS NETWORK

We wanted to share a Proclamation that came out of our Wednesday, March 3, 2021 virtual People’s State of the Union - Redding event. Thank you for this and all you do to help us make the world a better place.

THEATER COMMUNICATIONS GROUP

Shawna, TCG staffer (at her last play of 2020)

I was thinking about visioning for the future, because...there's someone in my life, my boyfriend – love him dearly – has never seen a play in his whole gosh darn life, and I said, “Sir, we have to fix that.” But, we can't because we're in this thing called a pandemic. He's a designer, and he works for an ad agency and so he’s used to flexing the creative, storytelling part of his brain, and so the best way that we've been communicating about the thing that I do – this thing I love, which is theater, is talking about the experience of being at a play. And so, in a very funny way, we've sort of started our own little story circle that happens, probably once a week well he'll ask me very innocently about what it's like to go see a play. And I tell him a story, as if we're in some post-apocalyptic world where plays don't exist, and I have to describe plays. What I've been recently telling him as we talk about seeing a play, and the act of gathering and community, is this moment that I can't wait for that I think about sometimes just to soothe myself to fall asleep. It’s the thing that I think is going to happen when we come back – we’ve been so starved for connection and the act of going to a play can offer that to us. I'm imagining going to see a play and the artistic director is going to come out, and we're sitting in our seats, we look up from reading our programs (he’s also never seen a program before and I spend lots of time trying to describe the contents and what a dramaturg does). But when someone gets up on the stage and looks me dead in my soul and says “Welcome Back” it makes me emotional just thinking about it. The time where I can be in a space and know that everyone around me is experiencing something again, for the first time, and I am addicted to that thought, and I think about it all the time. The first conference where someone says, “Welcome Back” and I live for that – it's like an anesthetic for my depression about this time. So I'm thinking about hearing those words, for the first time, many times.

THEATER COMMUNICATIONS GROUP

Josh Smalley, TCG staffer

The arts have played an essential role in my life—it was through the arts that I began to understand that racism wasn’t simply a single act of hatred, but a system inherited from the past that bleeds into our daily lives here and now.

In college I read the play “We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884 - 1915” by Jackie Sibblies Drury. It’s about a troupe of actors who are creating a theatrical lecture on the little-known German genocide of the Herero and Namaqua people between 1904 and 1907. I distinctly remember having a revelation as I read the play’s climax. I won’t go into spoilers, but there was a moment as the characters were rehearsing the presentation together, some as Germans and others as the Herero, that the reality of this historical atrocity of mass racist and colonialist death broke into the present instant the characters were acting it out, and this hit me right in the gut.

I realized that I am not separate from the past, that I am a part of the historical arc of this global, political, systemic force of white supremacy. And at the end of the day, it’s not enough that I make sure I am not hateful or biased towards my People of the Global Majority friends and colleagues. Instead, I need to be actively healing myself and other white people of this sickness of the mind, actively advocating for the rights and power of People of the Global Majority, and actively changing the direction of our local, national, and global history that has been poisoned by this idea that some bodies are more worthy than others.

Thanks to Drury’s words on a page, I began my journey of deepening, of stretching, of healing, and of action in the service of others. I am forever learning. I am forever grateful.

THEATER COMMUNICATIONS GROUP

Anne, TCG Staffer

I did a production in the New York Fringe Festival, when it still existed, my very first summer out of college. I was asked to stage manage, and I had met these people somewhat randomly and the director was a fellow recent grad from another school who I didn’t know. She was living in Chicago, and she hadn't moved to New York City yet so we had this entire pre-production process where we just never met in person. We developed this incredible collaborative relationship and friendship just over the phone for like this two month period leading up to this rehearsal process and... this story has a sad ending because we continued to be friends for a time, but in the next year or two I – unknowing what exactly my theater journey would be and following the stage management path for a little bit longer – got an Equity contract. And because the messaging that we had received in theater is just: “you have to give up everything in your life for theatre,” I ended up kind of blowing off another project that that director was writing, performing, and self producing herself. A project that I was really interested in, but it conflicted with my Equity contract rehearsals where I was making more money. I think at the time, I told myself I was doing it because I had to, but I think it was also – there is something about connections that are created with distance that almost feel safer to me. I'm sitting in that realization that it's a risky business of letting people in and getting close to them, but also how sustaining a career in theater has made that so challenging. I met her through theater and, ultimately, our friendship was lost because of theater and my own actions, but – because theater told me to.