On how to lead with passion and foster opportunity for others

Could you walk me through how you first got into theater and how you started directing?

I got into theater through music in the church. I grew up in Chicago and my grandfather went to a Black apostolic church, which is still there on the South Side. It’s a phenomenal church. And he used to take me. When you walk in there, there’s like a choir of 50 people and a full eight-piece band playing and that music just… It fueled me, it inspired me. And then weirdly at the same time, my mother had enrolled me in a Catholic school on the North Side and they had something called liturgical music. So I was getting this dual church music experience. Through Catholicism and liturgical music I learned how to read music and sing these more classical melodies, and through the Black church I found rhythm and community and soul and all these things.

So music was my gateway drug to theater. I was a performer in many, many shows and then I hit a wall performing. At the time when I was coming up, I felt like the roles available to me were very limited and I just wanted more. I wanted to be a storyteller, but I didn’t know how. So I did a MFA program at Brown University. It wasn’t until this graduate program that I really understood myself as a director, as someone who could tell stories from an omniscient view. And then things really jumped off when I graduated from Brown.

I’m really fascinated that you started out as a performer and then moved into directorial work because in my head, I feel like those feel like really different roles and like different personality types would be drawn to those two things. So I’m curious if you could speak a little bit about how you realized that you wanted to be a storyteller from an omniscient point of view, like you said.

I think that being an artist is a fluid thing and capitalism and the Western world tells you you have to segment yourself and you can only be one thing. I’m a woman, I’m a mother, I’m a daughter, I’m an artist, I’m all these things. Identity is made out of many different parts of the self. The self is constructed from different areas. And I think that an artist’s life is the same way. So directing is the center of my artistic practice, but I still perform, I still write music. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to keep those things up and I do it for survival. It makes me feel alive to express myself through the arts.

I think the thing about directing that’s particularly special is you get to build a complete world from the ground up. Everything you see on stage, a director has had a choice in it. And I think a lot of people don’t understand that. Every costume you see has my opinion in it. Every lighting gesture, every choice an actor makes. And when you’re a director, you get to have an opinion over every aspect of the world that you’ve built. That felt exciting. You could tell a story to the fullest degree. And also you make more opportunity for people. When I’m performing, it’s about me, but when I’m directing, you get to hire designers and actors and consultants and all these things. And it’s exciting to build a team.

Could you speak a little bit more granularly about how you go about that world building? If you’re looking at a script, what sorts of decisions do you make and how do you make them?

It’s all about your concept. I really do believe that every play needs a different conceptual understanding. How are you going to tackle it? How are you going to bring it to life? What happens is I read a script and I’ll spend like 40 hours on one script. And I ask myself things like, “What do I smell when I read the script? What sounds do I hear? What kind of music does the script remind me of? What paintings does it remind me of? Or does it not remind me of anything? Does it feel completely new? What sources are in dialogue with this?” Like for Liberation [and] One Battle After Another, those feel so twins to me, the political struggle and the struggle between self-actualization and family, right? That is the crux of Liberation too. I’ll analyze a script and ask myself every question I can ask myself and of the script. Here’s a simple one. Is the script poetic or is it like normal language the way you and I speak or is it somewhere in between? Okay. Does it remind me of a Shakespeare? Does it remind me of Clifford Odets? Or does it remind me of Toni Morrison? What family is the play in? So I start with that. And then once I start to find answers, then I start to think about, okay, who are the team members that are going to help me realize this concept? And if I read a script and I can’t answer all those questions, if I don’t have a fuller response, then I shouldn’t direct it.

So on Liberation, I got to work with the incredible activists and costume designer Qween Jean. I got to work with Cha See, the first Filipino lighting designer on Broadway. She’s an incredible queer artist. I got to work with Palmer Hefferan, another female artist in sound design, and David Zinn in set. Kelsey Rainwater in Intimacy. And it’s like I picked those team members because of their ability to be patient with women’s stories. They each have a singular ability and love of women and love of women in pursuit of freedom. And I was like, “This is a play about women in pursuit of freedom. I need designers interested in that or else we can’t do this play.”

So would you say then that being a director is a lot about being a team leader? And could you talk more about the role of collaboration in your art practice?

I do think directing is being a team leader. For me, it is. I believe it is the job of the director to facilitate a workspace in which everyone has a voice because if you have a voice, then you’re going to want to show up. And if you show up, then you’re going to want to do your best. So I think it is a leadership role because you need to first demonstrate you’re going to give it your all. And then you need to facilitate a space in which everyone can give it their all.

Collaboration for me is about conversation. You can’t collaborate if you don’t let people talk and you don’t listen to them. And also you have to be comfortable with being challenged. I let my designers be like, “Hey, I think there’s another way to approach,” this and then we’ll talk it out. So I think collaboration is about conversation and being able to pivot off of feedback.

I’m also curious how you go about choosing the shows that you direct and whether you pick them or if people approach you.

Even if I’m approached, I pick them because you can’t lie. Life is really short. And if you’re trapped doing a piece of art that someone just told you to do…. I have to have a connection, an honest connection. For The Last Five Years, I had a deep connection to that show. It was one of the first shows I ever learned as a musical theater artist. And for Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, I grew up in a hair salon, basically going to hair salons all my life. And now for Liberation, I am a Midwest woman and I was raised by women whose ordinary politics and struggles of the daily life were very big political battles and I wanted to cherish the women in my family.

And I’m curious also about how each directorial experience is different for you because I saw Liberation and I saw Jaja’s African Hair Braiding and I really enjoyed both, but I feel like they were extremely different shows. I’m just wondering how you go about bringing your vision to each show.

They are extremely different. Every production has its own culture. I take culture to mean a set of rules and language, rules, understandings that bind a group together. It could be a religion or where you’re from or sociopolitics, but every show creates its own. A little culture, it’s like a microcosm. It emerges. You can’t control it. It’s organic.

I think if we were to talk about Jaja’s and Liberation, they were just extremely different rooms. First of all, Jaja’s was an African diasporal piece. So there was a kind of cultural shorthand at times between the playwright, myself, and those actors. Whereas Liberation, we really are very different people. Kayla Davion and I are from Chicago, but that’s about it.

And I will say a similarity. A similarity between Jaja’s and Liberation was just the rigor with which you had to tackle the language. They’re both language plays. You can’t fake it. The dialogue and dialect work of Jaja’s is fierce and ferocious. And with Liberation, the durational conversational aspect of the piece in the language was also fierce. It was like my love of Shakespeare helped me on both productions because you can’t ignore the language, you can’t skip over it, you can’t fake your way through, you got to work on it.

It’s interesting to hear you talk about language plays because as someone who doesn’t know a ton about theater, I feel like, “Oh, plays are so much dialogue, wouldn’t all plays be language plays?” But what other types of plays would you say there are?

There are plays that are more about poetry and vibe, I think. Because yes, every play has language, but what does the language demand? So for example, let’s take Funnyhouse of a Negro. That’s something I like to reference. There’s a lot of poetry and imagery in that language, but sometimes it’s dissociative and imagistic, so it’s not necessarily about plot. So in that kind of a play, you’re working on your images and the psychological feeling and vibe in there a lot.

Whereas take Clifford Odets, those are what I call sociopolitic plays. You’re looking at a working class family or you’re looking at this slice of life. Yes, it’s about plot, but it’s also about, wow, look at how these people live. It’s an everyday slice of life play. And then you can have something like Ibsen. Ibsen is like one of those big classic plays that is about the act structure, it’s about plot, but the language isn’t necessarily poetic.

It’s about psychology in this way. So I think that playwrights write in styles. Some playwrights care about structure like Ibsen. Some playwrights care about emotion, like Adrienne Kennedy in Funnyhouse of a Negro. And some playwrights care about both, like Jocelyn and Bess. And I think you just have to get honest about what’s the style of the play and how are you going to tackle it.

This is switching gears a little, but could you walk me through what either a typical day or a typical week looks like for you when you’re directing?

Let’s say we’re in week one of rehearsal. I wake up, my husband and I chase our toddler around. He’s ferocious. And then we get him dressed and get him to school by 8:45. And then by 9:00 AM, I am usually in a meeting with a designer.

Then we go to rehearsal and you’re working, working, working your buns off. I always like to start with some kind of warmup, physical or vocal, because health is important to me. And the more you warm up, the longer you can play the game. I typically have a 20-minute or an hour-long lunch break and during that, I typically have another meeting to discuss my next play that’s coming up, or it could be a business meeting because nowadays as a director, you have to be a business person as well. And then we’ll dive back into the work.

I like to do table work my first couple days and then get up and stage. And the table work is really exciting because that’s when you’re talking about what movies inspire you, what books, what albums, sculpture. That’s when we’re building a library around the show. And that’s what the week is like every single day. Get my son to school, take a morning meeting, commute to work, rehearse, take the meeting on lunch, end of day. That’s every day.

Could you also talk a little bit about what you’re hoping for when you look down the line in your career, both in terms of directing and all of the other creative work that you spoke about?

It’s funny. I was literally sitting with my playwright, the beautiful Bess Wohl this morning. And one thing we’re talking about a lot when I think about the future of my career, it’s, how can the artist’s voice be more present every step of the way from not just what’s on stage, but how the show walks and talks in the world, where the show goes, how it’s marketed? I hope as my career grows that I’m able to find people to work with who are comfortable with my voice because you really start to learn the boundaries of that on each show. And I feel like speaking up is never a crime. So I hope as my career goes along, I can have more voice and more aspects surrounding the work that I’m working so hard on.

What does creative success look like to you?

I think that creative success is just continuously finding the will to keep going, to keep making, make anything. My mother, she sometimes sews clothing or makes these beautiful curtains and she’s dealing with such a harsh cancer diagnosis, but she still finds the will to make something. I think that everything you make is an act of creation and it’s a real tragedy when the world destroys that desire to create. So creative success is just finding the will to keep making for as long as you’re alive. And that could be anything from making dinner to making a collage with your kids and making a play, but keep making, keep engaging with the activity of creation. That’s success to me.