As we continue to grow and gain more visibility, here's what's been on my mind the last week and I have no answer for what needs to be done so I want to throw it out to the artists out there.

American Theatre is a fantastic publication that you can also read online at http://www.tcg.org/publications/at/nov09/home.cfm?CFID=17255623&CFTOKEN=48956537 .

Not There Yet
Marsha Norman

http://www.tcg.org/publications/at/nov09/women.cfm

Discussing the status of women in the theatre feels a little like debating global warming. I mean, why are we still having this discussion? According to a report issued seven years ago by the New York State Council on the Arts, 83 percent of produced plays are written by men—a statistic that, by all indications, remains unchanged. Nobody doubts that the North Pole is melting, either—we see it on the news. These are both looming disasters produced by lazy behavior that nobody bothered to stop. End of discussion. What we have to do in both cases is commit to change before it is too late.

But, you ask, why is it a disaster that women writers are wildly underrepresented on the American stage? Actually, it's awful all over the arts world for women. My painter pals tell me that at one big museum in New York City, the new acquisitions by men are on the walls, while the new work by women is all in crates in the basement. Only in the orchestra world are the gender numbers equal, and that's because they started holding blind auditions a few years ago.
The U.S. Department of Labor considers any profession with less than 25 percent female employment, like being a machinist or firefighter, to be "untraditional" for women. Using the 2008 numbers, that makes playwriting, directing, set design, lighting design, sound design, choreography, composing and lyric writing all untraditional occupations for women. That's a disaster if you're a woman writer, or even if you just think of yourself as a fair person. We have a fairness problem, and we have to fix it now. If it goes on like this, women will either quit writing plays, all start using pseudonyms, or move to musicals and TV, where the bias against women's work is not so pervasive.

In the late '70s, when I came of age as a playwright—along with Beth Henley, Wendy Wasserstein, Tina Howe, Paula Vogel and Ntozake Shange—we thought the revolution would be over by now. We thought we were changing things, that regional theatres and New York institutional theatres would soon be presenting seasons filled with plays by women. But that did not happen.

The regional theatre movement spun out into a new-play gold rush. Theatres deserted the writers they had just discovered, seeking fresher, newer faces. Even today, newly discovered writers of all kinds find themselves forgotten all too soon, in the theatre's version of Warhol's 15 minutes of fame. This has been hard on all writers, but it has been hardest on women.
NYSCA's aforementioned three-year study of the status of women in the theatre came to precisely this conclusion: Women are welcome at the front door of the theatre but not at the stage door. This goes for actresses, costume and lighting designers and directors as well as writers. (If you haven't read the NYSCA report, you can find this staggering document online at www.womenarts.org/advocacy/WomenCountNYSCAReport.htm.)

At the Juilliard School, I have taught playwriting with Christopher Durang for 17 years. Our students are all fantastically talented and bold—and successful, by and large. They win Pulitzer Prizes, write big musicals and movies, and run TV shows. But upon graduation, our men get far more stage productions than our women. And the women who are produced are likely to get one production, not 10 or 15, as the men almost always do.
Last spring, one of our former students, Julia Jordan, instigated a new study of women writers in the theatre, carried out by Princeton researcher Emily Glassberg Sands. One of the most horrifying facts to emerge from this study was that women have a better chance of reaching production if they write about men than if they write about themselves. Imagine if writers of color were more likely to enjoy a career if their plays were populated by white people.
This past season, theatres around the country did six plays by men for every one by a woman, and a lot of theatres did no work by women at all, and haven't for years. And as the writing has disappeared, so have roles for actresses and jobs for costume designers and directors. It doesn't take an economist to draw a conclusion here. Either women can't write, or there is some serious resistance to producing the work of women on the American stage.

My purpose in this essay is not to compare the two big studies on this subject. The NYSCA report and the Sands study together form an unassailable case. The NYSCA study portrays the scope and depth of the bias facing women's work. The Sands study addresses why fewer scripts by women are submitted to theatres (she calls female playwrights "discouraged workers") and demonstrates to theatres why it is actually in their best economic and artistic interests to choose more plays by women.

As in the global warming debate, nay-sayers will always try to pit the authors of these studies against each other, hoping to derail the discussion and get back to the status quo. In this case, squabbling over methodology is particularly pointless. All the method that is required here is to look at the last season produced by the theatre nearest you.

I have one purpose here, and that is to try to determine why this situation is still so bad. Why does the American theatre ignore its women writers? No other developed nation does this. American fiction and poetry don't do this. The list of top American novelists, poets and short-story writers is easily half women, and reflects all races and creeds. The only American writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature in the past 50 years was a woman, the great Toni Morrison. The richest writer in the world is a woman, J.K. Rowling, and the longest-running play in England was written by a woman, Agatha Christie. The problem is not that women can't write.
And it's not audiences, either—they like plays by women. In the last 10 years, according to American Theatre's lists of the top 10 most-produced plays at TCG theatres, 30 percent of the top 2 on the lists were written by women. That's nearly double the percentage at which plays by women are produced overall. Of these same plays, more than half have female leads. Plays about women have won 7 of the last 10 Pulitzer Prizes for Drama.

Plays by women make money, too. The Sands study indicates that Broadway plays written by women earn on average 18 percent more than those written by men, even when the data are controlled for the type of play and corrected for massive failures and for whopping successes like Wicked, whose book was written by a woman, the great Winnie Holzman. Plays by women sell on average 3,538 more seats per week than do those written by men.

So why, with so much money to be made and so many audiences to please, does the American theatre resign its women writers to readings and development? Why do the critics correct, condescend and admonish women playwrights as if they were schoolgirls trying and failing to write like men?
I don't know the answers to these questions. But let's look at the major players in this situation and see who's saying what. At the very least, we can figure out what role each of us has to play in turning it around.

Literary DepartmentsOne of the most disturbing findings of the Sands study was that literary departments can be reluctant to champion plays by women because they fear their artistic directors won't choose those plays, and that will make the department look bad. This is what Sands and Jordan call "prophetic discrimination." The study also found that women artistic directors had the same fear, and thus failed to credit a work by a women writer as having as much economic value as the same play with a man's name attached.

(This last bit was reported incorrectly by some media sources when the study was announced. They pounced on the sensational and false claim that women artistic directors don't like women's plays. The actual finding, one more time, was that women artistic directors knew plays by women would face bias and thus predicted they would have a lower economic value.)
Literary managers are caught in a kind of limbo. They don't have much real power and they are swamped with work. They probably know more about good writing and good writers than anybody else in their theatre, but in practice, they feel very much on the outside, underpaid and underused. Worst of all, they have been put in charge of readings and re-readings, the process by which most new plays are worn out. We are wasting our lit managers, their time and their talents.

Richard Nelson, writing in these pages in September '07, was right: Theatres need to abandon development, talkbacks and rewrites. I suggest they adopt the rules of the fine art world—if you like it, you buy it. You don't bring a piece into your gallery, take a brush and change the red patch in the bottom of the painting to green, and then decide not to buy it and send it back. That's exactly what happens to playwrights' work in development.

Any artist whose painting hangs in a theatre lobby has more artistic control than the playwright whose play is on the stage. We have to stop letting staff and patrons fiddle with plays; literary managers need to stop second-guessing their audiences and their artistic directors. They need to adopt a gender-blind process for discovering and discussing new work. And they need to do this now.

Artistic DirectorsOkay, artistic directors are in a tough spot, too. They tell you that they have their boards of directors to satisfy, so they have to look for hits. They troll the Broadway crowd for enhancement money and keep an eye out for movie stars looking for some "theatre cred." And as for gender equity—they throw their hands in the air and say, "Women don't send us their plays." This one just kills me. Nobody sends out their plays anymore; plays come to theatres from agents, directors and actors, all of whom can be asked for plays by women. Or, in a pinch, an artistic director could go to the website of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, which for the last 32 years has produced a list of the 10 best plays written by women (http://www.blackburnprize.org/).
The truth is, many artistic directors are too tired to look for any plays they don't already know. But these plays are not locked away in drawers; all you have to do is ask for them. One of the strangest things about my career as a teacher is that for all the glory of my students at Juilliard and NYU, I have never, ever, received a phone call from an artistic director of a regional theatre—or from a Broadway producer, for that matter—asking me to recommend one of my writers for a production. I have called them, to be sure. I have stopped them in parking lots and Broadway lobbies to talk about Juilliard kids. But something about the communication system is off. Artistic directors, stop saying you can't find great plays by women. Call the agents, call New Dramatists, call the Dramatists Guild, call the teachers. Call us.

Funders, Donors and PatronsWhat do funders, donors or patrons have to do with this, you ask? They don't write plays; they don't pick plays. But funders have failed virtually across the board to ascertain whether the theatres they support are presenting the work of women and people of color. This is simply unacceptable stewardship of public and private money. Is this a question that cannot be asked: How many plays by women did you produce last season?
A few years back there were virtually no plays by writers of color on our stages. That is now unacceptable. The resulting work by women of color has been especially notable. But the number of women writers produced in America has remained virtually the same for a century. Cheers to the foundations who ask how many writers of color a theatre produces. But what is this cultural agreement that more than 80 percent of plays should be by white men, and everyone else can share the remaining 20?

The NYSCA report observes that both women and men consistently overvalue the work of men and undervalue the work of women. So maybe we are conditioned by our society to see the ideas of men as superior. Then again, most of us are also hard-wired to want to go 80 miles per hour on the highway regardless of the speed limit. But there are laws that keep us from doing that, so we don't kill each other. If we need rules to give women equal access to American stages, then the NEA and all the big funders should impose these regulations on us until these numbers improve. The Endowment must take the lead here—its guidelines prohibit the support of theatres that discriminate against every group of writers in America except women. This is not okay.

Change is possible. In the example of nontraditional casting, the casting directors of America simply called everyone's attention to the fact that actors of color should be allowed to audition for all kinds of roles, and cast in nontraditional ways. This has produced a huge and wonderful change in the life of the American stage. This is what we're looking for in regard to work by women—a real change in consciousness and in behavior.

The next time you're in a theatre lobby, look up. Odds are, the patron named over the entrance to the theatre is a woman. Women like the theatre. Women buy 70 percent of theatre tickets sold, and make up 60 percent of the audience. But year after year, they are mainly offered plays written by men. Even when the story is about a woman, the play will almost certainly have been written by a man.

Donors and ticket-buyers need to stop being so passive. Women writers need them on their side.
The Writers ThemselvesThis brings us to the final group that has been blamed for the underrepresentation of women in the theatre—the playwrights themselves. Women's plays are boring, people say. They have too much talk and there's no event. They choose "soft" subjects and aren't aggressive enough about promoting themselves and their work.

But I fear that a more accurate picture of the writing complaint can be seen in something the late critic and author Mel Gussow once told me. He said, "Marsha, people like the plays of yours where the women have guns." In other words, Gussow was saying, people like plays in which the women act like guys, talk like guys, wave guns around and threaten to kill each other. In my experience, his observation is true. The critics have liked my "guy" plays—the ones with guns in them—and pretty much trashed the rest. Seven of the nine plays I have written go virtually unperformed. Thank God I had the sense to write for television and film and write books for big musicals, so I could get health insurance, feed my family and can now afford to teach.
Are those other seven plays of mine worse than Getting Out and 'night, Mother? Well, how would you know? You haven't seen them. They are perceived to be "girl plays," concerned with loss and death, love and betrayal, friendship and family. But no guns.

Are you with me here? There's no such thing as a girl play. But the girl's name on the cover of the script leads the reader to expect a certain "soft" kind of play. I don't get this. Lillian Hellman did not write girl plays. Neither did Jean Kerr or Lorraine Hansberry or Mary Chase.
The expectation of soft work from women writers comes from something way more awful in the society—the commercial romantic idea that all female stuff is soft, an advertising idea. Buy these products and you will have soft hair, soft skin and a soft voice. Unfortunately for writers, soft is perceived as playful and decorative and insignificant, not worthy of our time. We don't like soft in this country—we like hard here. Hard guy stuff, like in guy plays.

The problem is—and I say this having seen what feels like thousands of them—plays by men are not more violent or more active or smarter or raunchier or more tragic or more anything than plays by women. But plays by men are expected to be better even before they are seen, even before they are read—even, yes, before they are written. This is bias, pure and simple. And we also don't like bias in this country, so it's time to stop thinking this way. Women's plays are written by women, that is all.

A digression: I spend a lot of my free time reading about the brain. I recommend to you a remarkable new book, On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee. Hawkins founded Palm Computing and invented the communications tool Graffiti; Blakeslee covers science and medicine for the New York Times. Their book sets out a new model for understanding brain function, one with serious implications for our topic. The brain, they say, is a memory machine. It remembers events, sorts memories into bins, and then makes predictions for us based on the contents of the bins.

"Most of what you perceive is not generated through your senses," they say. "It is generated through your internal memory model." This model is made from the stuff in the bins, and you can call it an invariant memory or a stereotype. But "you cannot rid people of their tendency to think in stereotypes because stereotypes are how the cortex works." Our cultures and family lives teach us stereotypes, the book says. But "to prevent the harm caused by stereotypes, we have to teach our children to recognize false ones, to be empathetic and skeptical."
On Intelligence would suggest that the reason we expect women's plays to be soft is because we have them in the soft bin instead of the play bin—and we have them there because we keep sticking the qualifying word "women's" in front of them. So I propose that we stop saying the words "women's plays." We should, if we have to, simply say "plays by women," or just "plays." End of digression.

This is not to say that men and women know the same stories. And this is the final argument for more plays by women on American stages: We need to hear all the American stories, not half of them. When Bill Gates went to Saudi Arabia, he declared publicly that the only way it could possibly compete as a first-class country was if it started using more than 50 percent of its brain power. And the women, covered in burkas, their identities obscured as their society demands, cheered. If American theatres want to produce the best work, they will have to find a way through our own cultural issues in order to grant equal status to the words and work of women.
A theatre that is missing the work of women is missing half the story, half the canon, half the life of our time. That is the situation we have now.

I was deeply moved a few weeks ago, when Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times proclaimed in print that saving the women of the world was the central cause of our time. "The world is awakening to a powerful truth," he wrote. "Women and girls aren't the problem; they're the solution." If you didn't read this important piece called "Saving the World's Women," find it on the Times website. Telling the stories of women is the first crucial step in insuring their safety and their worth. We must join Kristof in this cause. Lynn Nottage's beautiful play Ruined is a perfect testimonial to the power of a storyteller to make a difference.

As women writers, we must demand the best of ourselves. We must travel and learn and listen. And then we must claim our place on the American stage. We have to be more aggressive in this regard and help each other more than we have, and not just side with the boys because we expect them to win.

Finally, communities must insist that critics be removed if they prove they cannot judge the work of women without snide condescension and dismissive ire. There have been several such situations over the past few years that should have ended up in court, in my view. Critics should be put on notice by their publishers and by our theatres. Newspaper boards may not be able to challenge a critic's taste, but they sure as hell can fire people whose reviews reveal a dislike of women. We need more women critics, and we need them to write without the expectation that a woman's work will be less significant than that of a man. And when they like a piece by a woman, they need to write without the fear that they themselves will be found lacking for admiring the work of a woman.

In her book Writing a Woman's Life, Carolyn Heilbrun says: "Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told." That's the challenge here. We have to commit to telling all the stories of this country. We need to make some new rules for ourselves, and do our jobs fairly. We need to stop expecting plays by women to be soft. We need to see what they actually are when we read them. We should've done this a long time ago. But we can do it now. We can even up these numbers and then we will never ever have to read or write this article again.
And then we can get to work on the climate.

Marsha Norman is a Pulitzer- and Tony-winning playwright, co-director of the playwriting program at the Juilliard School, and former vice president of the Dramatists Guild of America.

Before We All Have A Beer
By Anna Deavere Smith
From Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anna-deavere-smith/before-we-all-have-a-beer_b_248245.html


Will we all be having a beer tonight? As soon as the first stones from the edifice of post-racialism began to tumble, the media labeled the conversations of excited onlookers as "a heated national debate about race." That suggests to me that Professor Gates, Officer Crowley and President Obama haven't been the only ones talking. We've all been involved. Maybe theirs won't be the only beer. Will the media folk be raising a toast, for example about a story well told? A word of caution before the wrecking team slaps high fives over their own cold beers in newsrooms, blog rooms, chat rooms, radio stations etc, and erupts in a national "Way da go!" If "way da go" means we have a long way to go, I'd take a suds too. If it means "job well done", the job's hardly begun.

Now that the alarm bell has sounded, some people will address their daily work with a stronger resolve to include race work. Undoubtedly there are teachers planning curricula for next year who are thinking of ways at all grade levels to revise their plans to include histories, books, works of art, activities that take race seriously. Perhaps there are foundations, even hard hit as many are by the economy, who are thinking of ways to include new initiatives into their portfolios. Perhaps cultural institutions will take another look at themselves and ponder why, after fifty years of movements to democratize art and art making, their leadership is not more diverse. There are many practical ways that we can do race work, not just race talk in our daily lives. But should we go back to work the same way as before?

Charles Blow, in a New York Times op-ed, during the flurry of media attention on Gates/Crowley aptly referred to a "club" that many black men are required to join usually, but not always when they are young. I remember a very affluent black woman executive telling me about how she and her husband would prepare their young son for "the club". They decided that he could not get a driver's license until he had passed their tests of what he would do if pulled over by the police. This "other" license test is well known among many black parents. As his mother described the boy and what his life was like, I imagined the young man cuffed and straddled wearing tennis whites beside their fancy car. As the nation has heard this week, these stories are well known to blacks. This time the audience was broader and more attentive for many reasons well documented.

I had my own induction into the club. I get nervous around police officers. Even, after, as an actress, portraying two notable ones on stage - in their own words - in one of my plays - Police Chief Daryl Gates of Los Angeles fame and Theodore Brisenio, one of the officers who beat Rodney King. In fact, despite the many in law enforcement I have interviewed, I have not become more familiar in my feeling towards people in uniform with guns. When I did have a confrontation with the police, I was not at all prepared for what happened. And that's the danger. None of us of any color can afford to be unprepared. When it happens it is very very real.

Listen to this scenario:
I was living in Georgetown while doing some research for a project in Washington. I lived there off and on for five years. It was a stunning property - a town house with a large garden. My hosts were a Republican Congressman and warm liberal Democrat - his wife. Their hospitality was beyond beyond. One night on a weekend, when my hosts were out of town, I came back to the house and found that the front door was locked by bolt on the inside. I could not open the door. I looked up at the house and noticed lights on that were never on. I went through the garden door and into the basement of the house - terrified about what I might find - but nonetheless optimistic that as the lights were on the uppermost floor, that I could successfully call the police from the kitchen phone, the kitchen being as in those old houses, in the basement. I called 911. Immediately, in less than ten minutes I heard police arriving. I went out into the garden and opened the garden door to meet them and tell them what was going on. I found myself surrounded by about twelve police officers, men and women. In the fog of my fear, I saw what I thought were at least three races: white, Latino, and black. Perhaps there were more. Their guns were drawn. I was in a semi circle of guns pointing at me. What in my life and education would have prepared me for what to do? They began to shout in unison and at the top of their lungs "Get back! Get back! Get back!". I began to explain that I was the one who called. I assume that I look and sound like an educated person -at least I'm usually cast that way in movies and television shows. I was conservatively dressed - I had been interviewing political types that day. I tried to explain again - they charged closer and got louder. Suddenly my mind clicked to an interview I had done of a police officer, and trainer of officers in Oakland California. I saw him in my mind's eye and remembered his words about how - when police come into a home they accelerate from making noise - that is breaking down a door, charging in and yelling - to using force. I realized that my reasoning with them was not working because they were screaming 'GET BACK", and I was moving forward. I stepped back into the garden. When it was over, and I was terrified at what had happened I began to wonder what their story would have been if they'd shot me. Would they have shot to injure, or would they have shot to kill, in an effort to both protect property - and supposedly their lives. I was not armed. Where could this have gone - and mostly what would be their version of the story? I do not think this would have happened to a white woman in Georgetown.

At the risk of being misunderstood as dismissing the particularness and the seriousness of what happened to Professor Gates, by saying it happens to whites too, let me ask you to listen to this:
Phoenix, Arizona: I spoke to a middle class white woman - an executive in a well known national non-profit who was stopped for drunk driving just as she was leaving the parking lot of a bar after a happy hour event with people from her office. Her alcohol level was slightly above what is allowed in Arizona. The police were being rougher with her than her boyfriend thought was necessary. He intervened. He had been drinking in the bar too, but he was not driving. The officers immediately threw him onto the ground with such force that she thought for sure his head would crack open. They threw handcuffs on him. When he would not agree to a sobriety test, arguing that he was not driving - they threw him into the police car and took him to a hospital. In an open ward, they strapped him to a gurney, and catheterized him to take urine. When he screamed out in pain - the white officer said to him, in the presence of his colleague, a black officer, "Stop acting like a nigger."

The woman was sentenced to go to Sherriff Arpaio's "tent city" jail. She acknowledged throughout her talk with me that she was wrong wrong wrong to drive under the influence regardless of how few hundredths of a percentage her blood was above the acceptable level. Arpaio's jail is fashioned after what he says soldiers can endure in Iraq. It is a series of tents in hot sun, or cold nights. Whatever the weather in Phoenix provides. The inmates wear striped uniforms and pink underwear in case they try to escape and in doing so take off their uniforms. There is a large neon VACANCIES sign over the jail. One would gawk at the theater of many aspects of the sheriff's policing if it weren't so serious. Her boyfriend was traumatized and the relationship ended.

Again, I don't say all this to simply imply that injustices happen to women of all colors and that injustices happen to whites. I say it to bring our attention to the fact that policing changes all the time. But do we track the changes and how they affect us? Can we afford to just sit back and allow the police to "protect" and "serve"? Should we revive community activism that was alive in the sixties?

But this teachable moment has been framed by the media as more than a moment about policing. It is supposedly about "race." The teachable moment taught us perhaps to look more closely. We sat forward with an intense gaze because neither Professor Gates nor Sergeant Crowley were stereotypes. Ironic that the most shown photograph of Professor Gates in handcuffs looked to be a black and white photo and therefore especially reminiscent of the civil rights movement. And of course the moment would never have become teachable without the teacher - and I don't mean Professor Gates, I mean the President. His cameo performance was flawless, elegant theater. I say that as a high compliment - being a person who studies real life to make theater richer. The teachable moment has caused us to look closely but it has not yet taught us to look more broadly.

As we feel the heat ease off of the national debate let's bring our awareness to the racial tinderboxes of many kinds all over the country. A hot, as in energized, national debate about "race" will cause us to realize that we can pay attention to more than one narrative at once. To name a few -- women, their vulnerability both economically and to the criminal justice system -- the rates of women and young women who are incarcerated has increased exponentially in the last two decades; juveniles and disparities about how they are treated in the courts and in schools; Muslim Americans post-9/11; immigration reform... the list goes on and on.
As others have suggested, there are many ways to work towards ensuring a healthier justice system. Just as health care is about preventative activities and wellness, justice is about preventative activity and equity in all areas of society. There is a lot of concrete work to do. A lot that ends up in the courts or in hands of the police would not, if our public institutions were healthier. This would include cultural institutions too.

Students and practitioners of race relations need to acquaint themselves with all varieties of racial tinder boxes and racial tinder boxes waiting to happen due to crumbling institutions. Not for the sake of only enriching their own tinderbox, but for the sake of enriching America and preparing for leadership in a diverse global community. One of our president's greatest gifts is displayed in how he fashioned his own life to be a true reach across cultures. We should learn from him about the effort, determination, imagination and desire it took and takes to make that reach- even as he manages to portray ease.

What concerns me about the "heated debate" is that as radio hosts and guests talk, I hear the same kind of language that I heard -- and studied -- in the '90s. Talk of "safe places to have conversations," for example. That's not what we need right now. This is not about conversations and "learning about one another." We don't need salons. We need initiatives and resources to spark the work of building a stronger society, one with public spaces that allow for shared excellence. The clock is ticking on affirmative action. Six years down -- not so much of a long way da go, on the clock.

Rethinking Gender Bias in Theater

This is a great article...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/nyregion/13websloan.html?_r=1

Voicing Pain Through Performance
By ANNE BARNARD
Published: April 12, 2009

Standing in a circle, in a windowless classroom near an on-ramp to the Queensboro Bridge, two dozen high school students chanted in unison. Their accents revealed their origins: Honduras, Ghana, Albania, Vietnam.
What are we, why are we, where are we going?
Why are we leaving, what are we doing?
Then, rapid-fire, they spoke the lines they had first uttered in a classroom discussion about displacement and emigration but now were molding into art.
“We had to leave; the rebels took over!” declared Stephanie Saint-Val, from Haiti.
“We left the city for the desert,” Hadeel al-Hindawi, from Iraq, said more shyly.
“You don’t know my struggle, you haven’t a clue,” proclaimed Sandup Sherpa, from Nepal, who had just dazzled the class with his break dancing.
Stephanie’s family fled machete-wielding attackers during a 2004 coup. Hadeel’s father was shot in the face in Baghdad because he worked as a translator for the United States military. Sandup’s father, a legislator, was targeted for assassination by Maoist rebels and now lives in Elmhurst, Queens, selling cellphones.
Leading the recent rehearsal at the International High School at LaGuardia Community College was Judith Sloan, a performance artist and oral historian with a fountain of red hair. She has spent a decade documenting immigrants’ stories and teaching teenagers to transform their experiences into theater — mainly in Queens, which, with 167 nationalities and 116 languages, was deemed the nation’s most diverse county in the 2000 census.
Ms. Sloan’s art and teaching cross-pollinate: She uses immigrant stories that she and her husband have compiled — dozens of them are included in a 2003 book, “Crossing the Blvd” — to demonstrate how to shape narrative and to get students talking about their lives. And the students flood her with new material.
As she helps the students compose the performance they will present in May, she is also coming full circle with a new work of her own. “Yo Miss! Teaching Inside the Cultural Divide,” which she performs with musical collaborators, re-enacts and riffs on her experiences teaching teenagers from myriad worlds: refugee camps, struggling neighborhoods, prisons. It is a performance about performances, a story containing many stories.
And suddenly, “Yo Miss!” has another mission: To raise money to keep the story going. Facing a shortfall of about a quarter of the high school program’s $45,000 budget for this year, Ms. Sloan has earmarked a chunk of the proceeds from her show to finance the workshop.
In one “Yo Miss!” vignette, a patchwork of sentence fragments conveys Ms. Sloan’s jitters as she travels upstate to teach teenagers in a detention center for the first time: “Snow. Rolling hills. Country homes. Farms. Prison. Boys from New York City. Fresh air. Barbed wire. Sky.”
“Yo miss! What good is this going to do us when we get out?” she sneers in the half-whiny, half-aggressive voice of a teenage boy. After trying some answers that do not fly — “Maybe some of you will become writers!” — she finally tells them, “I don’t know; do you have anything better to do right now?”
The workshop at the International High School, run by EarSay, Ms. Sloan’s nonprofit group, is just one of countless cultural programs across the country that are facing cuts.
To cope, Ms. Sloan gave up her teaching pay, found volunteers to help, and even plans to seek financing from the hip-hop artist Nas, who grew up partly in the Queensbridge housing project near the school.
The New York State Council on the Arts was given $48.5 million in this year’s state budget to support cultural groups and projects, but midyear budget cuts brought the allocation down to $39.5 million. Next year’s budget raises financing to $42.4 million —still below pre-recession levels.
Small community groups are most vulnerable to budget cuts, said Lynn Lobell, managing director of the Queens Council on the Arts, who funnels city financing to arts projects like flamenco theater and Chinese opera. But they are vitally important to developing neighborhoods, she said.
And they help in less tangible ways.
The International High School is a public school for students with limited English proficiency who have been in the United States less than four years. Many are refugees whose education has been interrupted by war and displacement.
For them, Ms. Sloan’s workshop does more than fulfill their arts requirement: students say it helps them work through experiences that are hard to discuss in any language.
Stephanie, 18, brought Haitian zouk — joyous dance music that she said “releases pain” — to be woven into the performance, along with patriotic Albanian hip-hop and Arabic pop. That meant sharing something positive about Haiti, even as she talked about hiding from rebels, unable to leave the house, and missing school.
For Hadeel, 15, the performance helped explore feelings of loss. “I have a new life, and it’s fun, but I lost a lot,” she said: friends, her neighborhood, the habit of wearing a headscarf.
Ms. Sloan and her husband, Warren Lehrer, founded EarSay in 1999, and learned to listen to stories of trauma through “Crossing the Blvd,” for which they interviewed dozens of immigrants along Queens Boulevard, the borough’s main thoroughfare. The stories became not only the book but continuing performances and museum exhibits that have toured the country and become part of curriculums for high schools, medical residents and college oral history classes.
On Sunday, as part of the city’s Immigrant Heritage Week, Ms. Sloan will be performing pieces from “Crossing the Blvd” and “Yo Miss!” at UnionDocs, a documentary arts center in Brooklyn.
At the high school workshop, Chenits Pettigrew, a hip-hop artist who goes by the name Chen Lo, had compiled the students’ thoughts into a spoken-word performance, part poetry, part rap. He asked each student to perform the line that meant the most.
Sandup, 14, said speaking his lines made him proud. “It feels like I’m telling the public how I’ve been struggling,” he said.
He pointed to a favorite line: “My homeland screams, ‘Don’t forget me!’ My new life says, ‘Come and get me!’ ”
He said he and other Nepali teenagers spend a lot of time speaking English and having fun, not thinking much about what their parents went through to bring them here.
“I don’t want to forget,” he said.

Dear Ashley,

The Golden Globe Award nominations have been announced by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and once again, no women have been nominated in the category of "Best Director."
This year the omission is worse than usual. Danny Boyle was nominated for an award as "Best Director" of "Slumdog Millionaire", but his female co-director, Loveleen Tandan, was not mentioned in the awards list. "Slumdog Millionaire" has been nominated for "Best Picture, Drama", "Best Screenplay", and "Best Score", in addition to "Best Director".

Chicago film critic Jan Lisa Huttner interviewed Danny Boyle as part of her review of "Slumdog Millionaire" for The Fund for Women Artists at: http://www.womenarts.org/reviews/SlumdogMillionaire.htm. Huttner specifically asked Boyle if Tandan was his co-director, and he said, "Yes, she deserves it! She's a proper director." (See http://www.womenarts.org/reviews/SlumdogMillionaire.htm#co_director )In the 65 year history of the Golden Globe Awards, Barbra Streisand is the only woman to ever win in the Best Director category (for "Yentl" in 1983), and only two other women have ever been nominated - Jane Campion for "The Piano" in 1993, and Sofia Coppola for "Lost in Translation" in 2003.

The people nominated for Golden Globe Awards are often nominated for Oscars as well. Only three women have ever been nominated for Oscars in the "Best Director" category and no women have ever won. We think it is time to give women directors credit where credit is due.

We are asking you to please send the letter below to Ms. Chantal Dinnage, the Managing Director of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to let them know that we think Loveleen Tandan should be recognized for her work on "Slumdog Millionaire."

You can cut and paste the letter below and send it to Ms. Dinnage at: info@hfpa.org Please remember to sign the letter before you send it!! You can send a snail mail to:

Ms. Chantal Dinnage
Managing Director
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association
646 N. Robertson Blvd.
West Hollywood, CA 90069

You can also send a copy to Michael Russell, who has been the publicist for the Golden Globes for the past eleven years: MRussell@MichaelRussellGroup.com

Michael Russell,
Publicist
The Michael Russell Group
1601 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Suite 509
Manhattan Beach, CA 90266

Thanks for your help with this. Please feel free to forward this message or include it in your blogs, Facebook pages, MySpace pages or elsewhere online. The people who make these nominations need to hear from us.

Martha Richards, Executive DirectorThe Fund for Women Arists

Jan Lisa Huttner, The Hot Pink Pen The Fund for Women Artists

****

Dear Ms. Dinnage,

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has nominated Danny Boyle for a Golden Globe award as "Best Director" for his work on "Slumdog Millionaire." Why has the HFPA ignored Boyle's co-director, Loveleen Tandan? Since he acknowledges that she was his co-director, shouldn't she be a co-nominee for the "Best Director" award?

Boyle was recently interviewed by Chicago film critic Jan Lisa Huttner. She asked him if Loveleen Tandan was his co-director. He replied, "Yes, she deserves it! She's a proper director." (See http://www.womenarts.org/reviews/SlumdogMillionaire.htm#co_director ) Also, according to the Internet Movie Database, Danny Boyle is the director and Loveleen Tandan is the "co-director" of "Slumdog Millionaire." (See http://us.imdb.com/title/tt1010048)

In the 65 year history of the Golden Globe Awards, Barbra Streisand is the only woman to ever win in the "Best Director" category (for "Yentl" in 1983), and only two other women have ever been nominated - Jane Campion for "The Piano" in 1993, and Sofia Coppola for "Lost in Translation" in 2003.

It's time to give women directors credit where credit is due. Please include Loveleen Tandan as a co-nominee in the "Best Director" category for her work on the film "Slumdog Millionaire."

Thank you.

The Fund for Women Artists
3739 Balboa Street #181
San Francisco, CA 94121
Phone: (415) 751-2202

Website: http://www.womenarts.org/

Email: info@womenarts.org