Genius Exhibition/Frye Museum Commission 2015

Fear and the Creative Process: A Manifesto for Creative Survival

BREATHE./Find the Fear in the room and face it./Its presence says the work is important./Everyone is afraid. It is nothing to be ashamed of./Things that make you afraid reveal your heart./Scared is OK. Paralyzed is not so much. Do what you must to move—to take even the smallest step forward each day./You are not your work. The things we create are not who we are./BREATHE./Leap, if you hope to fly./Do the hardest, scariest thing first. No matter how badly it may go, you won't die. You’ll learn something about the work and about yourself./Practice compassion for yourself and for others./Stay open. Listen. Don’t be so afraid of hearing the worst that you don't stay present to the possibility of hearing the best./Be willing to deal with the consequences of your choices./Be humble enough to ask for support./Cultivate Courage, Confidence, and Compassion. Commit to physical, spiritual, and intellectual practice./Enter the work boldly believing that there are 1,000,000 ideas in the air./BREATHE./Don’t drink the Kool-Aid of approval seeking. To hell with what others might think./Burn the tape that plays “I am not good/not smart/not worthy enough to be among the good and talented. I deserve to be left on an ice floe to die.” Melt the Ice Floe./Try on as many ideas as you can. Be artistically promiscuous./Practice healthy detachment. Lower the stakes—not the bar./Tenacity is showing up. The willingness to show up changes us. Be tenacious./Equivocation is poison. Have something to say. Be brave enough to say it./Use your art to change the world one project at a time./Give what you have./Don’t wait for everything to be perfect. Start with what you have to offer today. It will be more than enough./Don’t erect altars to your failure. Police your self-talk. Root out: “I can’t . . . I’m not . . . I’m afraid that . . . ” They are fear words./Make a choice. And act./Prioritize Joy in the doing./Expect miracles every day. You are built for Success./Know who you are at your core—courageous, competent, strong, free./Celebrate the opportunity to shine. BREATHE. Then, leap again. 

(c) Valerie Curtis-Newton, 2015

INTIMAN 2016 – LET’S DO SOMETHING

By Valerie Curtis-Newton

(delivered at the Intiman Season Announcement Brunch on 11/14/15)

Hello. Thank you for being here this morning. I am very honored to have been asked to co-curate the 2016 Intiman Season. It’s so great to look out and see all of you. 

...So, I wrote a speech. And it was all about having a conversation about racial equity. It was a hard speech for me to write. Not because I don’t believe in racial equity. It was a hard speech to write because I’m tired of talking about talking about racial equity. I’m tired of people’s surprise that we are not there yet. I’m tired of people asking me to make them feel better about themselves. I’m tired of listening to people lament the intransigence of bigotry without making a single step toward action.

I said a year ago – rather infamously -  that I was done talking about racism. And for the last year people have asked me to talk about nothing else. It begs the question: Why I am I up here? What makes this an exception?

First, Andrew Russell didn’t ask me to help Intiman do its racial equity work. Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe for minute that thought wasn’t on his mind. He just knew better than to ask me the question in that way. For 5 years, he has been asking me what lights me up. What gets me excited artistically? What lights me up is the chance to change the world one audience at a time; to move us all closer to the fullest possible expression of our humanity. So when he asked this time, I said I want my community to hear some new stories. I want them sit together and hear some new stories. And after hearing some new stories I want them to be changed. And because they are changed, I want them to really see each other and to move through the world with greater kindness, greater compassion for each other. And because kindness and compassion in action look like courage, I want to make my community brave. And if we can do that - the rest of the stuff will get worked out.

Second, it was Intiman asking. We have history. Intiman was the first regional theatre that I made contact with when I arrived in Seattle. I assistant directed a production of Pearl Cleage’s FLYING WEST in 1994. And when in 2010 Kate Whoriskey’s RUINED was schedule to go to South Africa, Kate asked me to go to Johannesburg and develop a community based program to highlight the issue of sexual violence. The invitation to direct ALL MY SONS came in 2011. It was followed by DIRTY STORY in 2012, and TROUBLE IN MIND 2013. Intiman and I have invested in each other over time. This has become one of my artistic homes. Part of my responsibility as a member of this family is to contribute to moving this institution forward toward action. I feel like we know each other well enough to speak some truths to each other. We can have talked honestly about the givens. About how Seattle is the 5^th whitest city in the country and about how that affects what makes it to the stage here. We have talked about things like yellowface/blackface productions. We have talked about how colorblind casting is impossible in a country as racially conscious as we are. We have talked about how, right now, the conversation about non-traditional casting isn’t about seeing more diversity on stage but rather about how more white people can be cast non-traditionally. We have talked about how the lack of opportunity for artists of color to develop over time becomes an excuse, no - a self-fulfilling prophecy. We have talked. Now it time to move.

So we’re going to make a festival/season that focuses on the work of Black Women playwrights.  When I’m feeling feisty I say that we are part of a movement to correct the historical record and write in voices not always included in our understanding of the American canon.

I’m up here, despite my own protestations, because I’m not built for silence. Especially not if speaking is an action, not a goal. I believe that being here today is about more than conversation - it is about committing to take action. To show up, to buy tickets, to make donations, to evangelize the work of Intiman, to courageously defend the rightness of what we are trying to do here. Andrew says this group is ready to take that on. So I’m here to do my part.

So, what do I want to say about next summer? Let me start with a couple of quotes. In 2014, I was honored to be awarded a Stranger Genius Award. Some of you may have heard me speak as part of that process. Anyway, I had to give an address. It was a kind of artistic mission statement and it included quotes from some amazing playwrights. I’d like to quote them again here because they continue inspire me and because they are foundational to my approach to this collaboration.

My Theatre She-roe Alice Childress wrote:

“I continue to create because it is a labor of love and also an act of defiance, a way to light a candle in a gale wind.”

Arthur Miller wrote:

“… I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.”

In her play, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, Lorraine Hansberry wrote:

"I suppose I think that the highest gift that man has is art, and I am audacious enough to think of myself as an artist - that there is both joy and beauty and illumination and communion between people to be achieved through the dissection of personality. That's what I want to do. I want to reach a little closer to the world, which is to say people, and see if we can share some illuminations together about each other.”

I hope that those of you in the Intiman family know by now that I am an artist committed to the idea that Art should do something in the world to connect us, to remind us of our shared humanity. I believe that to achieve this ideal, the work must be relevant to the lives of people today. Which is not to say that it must be contemporary. The work must ask fundamental questions about our humanity and the values we uphold in its service. It must invite response from and within its audiences. Be it laughter, tears, anger, joy, action, change - some response. And it should do all of these things artfully and with a demonstrated mastery of craft. Whether I am directing a production, workshop or reading; organizing a community event, or mentoring emerging artists, my goals remain the same: telling good stories, connecting people across difference and creating space for discourse.

That’s what we’re going to do next season. We are going to share some illuminations about each other. Our hope is that the result of those shared illuminations will be more civility, more common ground, more activism, … more humanity,

We are going to create a moment worthy of national attention. One that says these writers are valued - even in the 5^th whitest city in the country. That says “Look at how rich the fabric of our community is. Look at how we embrace the challenge of bridging our differences. Look at how we are willing to face the fear around confronting the issue of race. We believe that the stories these writers tell are important for everyone to hear. And we are just brave enough and just crazy enough to take the leap.”

A critical point for me – beyond brave and crazy: these stories are important for EVERYONE to hear. It has been my experience that black theatergoers view white arts institutions skeptically.  It is hard not to feel like a guest in someone else’s house – no matter how well intentioned the host. It has also been my experience that many white theatregoers (even some in this room) assume - consciously or unconsciously - that if the work is by a black playwright, it is for a black audience. That it will indict them in some way. And who wants to go see that. It is hard to convince them that the work is for them, too.

So I want to be really clear, this is not some sacrifice offered up to the black community in pennance. It is not reparations. – this festival/mini season will go out into venues around the city and make invitations to a community interested enough in these stories to join us. We want to prove that by spending time together in a shared space watching the same event. Breathing together, rubbing up against each other, laughing together and crying together, we can be expanded as citizens of the world.

We want to advance the work of these writers in order that we might inspire people to make change right where they are. This is about changing the conversation, no more to the point, this is about moving past conversation to action. Lorraine Hansberry said,”If you want to do something, you have to do something.” This is what we are doing.

Intiman 2016 – A season of Black Women Playwrights. Some people will look at it as a fools’ escapade. They’ll say “It doesn’t look like any season we’ve ever seen a mainstream institution in this city put on before. What about the bottom line? No one has ever heard of these writers. How can this be smart?” I won’t lie. It is not smart. Let me say it again. It is not smart. It is more than smart. It is bold. It is leading. It is Intiman. And if we all do our part it will be successful. It says that we believe in going deeper. It says let’s not just do one gay play or one black play. Let’s do multiple plays, put the work into a fuller context. Let’s go deeper. I’m excited about where this model can go in future seasons.

Anyway, more about next summer, we have not completely nailed down all of the plays but I can tell you that Alice Childress’ WEDDING BAND will be one of them. It marks a personal milestone for me as I will have completed the Childress Trilogy: Wine in the Wilderness. Trouble in Mind and Wedding Band. I am elated at the prospect of achieving this artistic milestone.

A little about the play and why I’m so stoked.  Set in 1918 South Carolina WEDDING BAND is the story of Julia, a black seamtress, and Herman, a white baker, who love each other and want to marry. It is a play about whether we can love across the divide of race taking into account the pressures of the outside world – can we be strong enough to tell the truth to each other and still love. It is about whether or not we can move into the future together. I said earlier that work should be relevant to peoples’ lives.  How can this 50 year-old period play do that? It can because Alice Childress was a freaking brilliant writer. She knew this story in her bones - it is rooted in her own family history. She knew the power of story to connect us and she kew that deep inside we want to figure this fuller humanity thing out. It can be relevant even now because Childress understood fear as a fundamental human emotion. Most of us are mostly afraid, most of the time. She expresses that universal fear through Julia and Herman. Julia is afraid to discover that Herman would be more comfortable if she just swallowed down the dust of the world outside. Herman is afraid that Julia will paint him with the same brush as the small minds that see her blackness only and miss her loving heart. I dare you to tell me that we are not living that moment right now. Isn’t that what the “Black Lives Matter/All Lives Matter” debate is about at its core.  That is part of Childress’ gift. Her work is powerful profound, provocative and timeless.

The thing that people might miss in looking at Alice Childress is that she is not an anomaly. She stands in a long line of theatrical foremothers, who spoke the truth of their present moment. Women, whose legacies are largely unrecognized. Names like:

Angelina Grimke

Georgia Douglass Johnson

Shirley Graham

Eulaie Spence

Mary P. Burrill

May Miller

Marita Bonner

Zora Neale Hurston

Aiasha Rahman

Lorriane Hansberry

Alice Childress

Adrienne Kennedy

Micki Grant

Vinette Caroll

Ntozake Shange

Pearl Cleage

And the artistic daughters of these women continue the tradition. Women like:

Lynn Nottage

Katori Hall

Dominique Morisseau

Christina Anderson

Chisa Hutchison

Kia Corthron

Kara Corthron

Keli Garrett

Rhada Blank

Lenelle Moise

Dale Olandersmith

Cheryl West

And on and on and on….

To honor Childress and the long line of writers in which she stands. Let’s do something. No more talking. Let’s move.

I Need a Minute - delivered at the memorial service for Peggy Rose Johnson

It is so nice to be among so many folks all gathered to celebrate and honor Peggy’s remarkable life. She deserves no less. I have lots of stories of life with Peggy and I want to share the glimpse of her that I got to see. I just hope you’ll bear with me because before I do that I need a minute. A moment to catch my breath. A moment to grieve the loss of her physical presence. A moment to rage at cancer. A moment to curse the healthcare system. A moment to acknowledge and accept that something has in fact ended. That something seismic has shifted. I don’t think it will be along minute but I do need a minute.

Don’t misunderstand. I know that our collective memories can sustain us. I know that spirit is real and some say eternal. I truly believe that the gift of Peggy’s love and being allowed to love her is not diminished with her passing. And I know that there will be joy again. After all, the bible says “Weeping may endure for a night but joy comes in the morning”. The truth is that, for me, morning has not yet dawned. So I need this minute to say goodbye to my sister. To release the grief and find the heart to choose joy again.

I need a minute to say out loud how much I will miss her grace, her wit, her intellect, her style, her heart, her warmth, her easy affection, her artistry, her steadfastness, her love. The way she called me "Valerina" and I’d call her "Peggylita" in reply; and then, we’d laugh a loud knowing laugh. I will miss that. I will also miss her independence, her resourcefulness, her sass, her protectiveness. Hell, I’ll even miss her stubbornness and her walkabouts. Do you know about those? Well, Peggy would disappear for long periods. We learned to hold her loosely, that holding too tightly bristled her. “Has anyone heard from Peggy? ” has been a part of nearly every conversation that my sisters and I have had for more that 20 years.

It is ironic that oh so private Peggy had her private world broken open by her fight to survive. She had to do lots of learning to trust others - to let us all in. And the sisterhood wrapped around her tightly and held her up. On May 28th,  I knew that Peggy had passed away without being called. I knew because my phone was silent that morning. No call. No text. There was no report on how her night went, no itinerary for her day, no planning for her care, no rally for prayer. There was silence. And then, quite frankly, there were no words-there are no words.

So, I’ll need a minute. A moment to remember being on stage with Peggy. And how she danced to Black Butterfly in the opening of SHE SPEAKS wearing the infamous black catsuit. Or that time when Johnnie Gamble forgot his lines during our production of HOME and shooed us off the stage. Peggy and I stood backstage looking at each other incredulously wondering what the hell to do. Eventually, we found our way. We always found our way.

I'll need a minute to remember walking along the highline in NYC talking futures and being old ladies on a beach somewhere with someone young and cute bringing us cocktails. A moment to remember that first Girls' Night and how we brought up the sun, spent from sharing. And remembering every Girls' Night thereafter as we loved each other into our respective womanhoods.

Ellen once wrote that Peggy was "the kind of woman who couldn’t cross a threshold without making an entrance". Make no mistake. Peggy knew the power of her presence and she wielded it like a weapon with both boldness and compassion. I’ll need a moment for remembering that compassion too.

 Recently, I posted a reading about death on facebook. I posted it because it felt like something Peggy would have said. It was written by Henry Scott-Holland in 1910.

"Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened everything is just as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life we shared so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference in your tone. Wear no false air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a neglible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner. All is well."

This piece is so spot on that I hear it now in Peggy’s voice. And I reply: "I love you my beautiful sister, Peggy Rose. I hear you. And I will do my best but all is not yet well with me. I need a minute."

Originally presented on Saturday, May 17, at Rainbow Expansion Unit: Parts 1 and 2, our second event in THE ANGELS PROJECT, co-produced as part of Washington Ensemble Theatre’s Six Pack Series and Velocity Dance Center‘s Speakeasy Series.

My Two Closets

by Valerie Curtis-Newton

Before I get started. By show of hands, how many of you have ever seen that South Park episode in which Tom Cruise won’t come out of the closet? I love that one. Hilarious, right? And something a lot of us can relate to. Closets. We all have them, right? I mean identity closets. Everybody has at least one and everyone claims to want out. There is even a website called “Empty Closets: Coming out resources and a safe place to chat".

Like the closets we put our clothes in – identity closets seem to fall into two categories. They are either super organized, California closets neatly arranged and color-coded or they are like the exploding closets in cartoons. Bursting at the seams in a total jumble. Think about every comedy you’ve ever seen where the closet door gets opened and ton of crap comes crashing down on you. I think most of us hope that we can manage to get one of those California closets but end up standing in a ton of crap.

Me, I‘ve done a lot of closet stuffing in my life. You know how they say that when you finally figure out that you’re queer everything in your past makes a kind of sense? It was sort of like that for me. Not that all of the clues weren’t there in the open all the time. I know now that I have been bi-sexual since before I had words for it. I mean… I wore chukka boots and a skully hat for two years. Hell, I played softball for Christ sakes. But I also liked shopping and makeup and flirting with boys. (And pining over girls.) So, my closet stuffing started pretty early. When you’re a bi-sexual, Christian, you spend a lot time trying to figure out where is safe, where you fit in, where your tribe is.

I remember when I was 12, I had these overwhelming simultaneous crushes on a boy named Michael Patterson and a girl named Aleta Crews. Michael Patterson was 12 too and lived in the house three down from mine on McGuire Air Force base. He had cocoa colored skin and the most beautiful hazel eyes. He was quiet and played sports and had bowlegs which for some reason really turned 12year-old me on. All the kids in the neighborhood would gather at the park or on the quad to play. Usually, it was kickball or sometimes touch football. Mostly because the boys wanted to feel the girls up during the game. I was the most athletic girl in the group. I could really throw a ball with the best of them. But I digress.

Anyway, I was crazy for Michael Patterson and he didn’t know that I was even alive. (Which I found completely hard to believe. Cause if I’m honest, I stalked the poor boy. I staked out his locker. I stood near him at lunch. I would watch him and his dad playing catch in the front yard from behind the curtains of my bedroom window.) One day, I was sitting on my porch waiting for him to come home from baseball practice with his dad. Eyeing him as he passed. Hoping against hope that he would say “Hi”. He just gave me the nod. You know the one. Who the hell ever invented the nod? I’d really like someone to explain it to me sometime. Anyway, on this one day, Michael Patterson’s dad, who always said “Hello” to me, stopped and said. “You really like my son huh?” I was completely embarrassed. Wishing the ground would swallow me up, I nodded.

Then he said, “Well, if you want him to like you, you need to stop throwing the ball so good.” I told you the clues were there. But I was 12. I didn’t know that throwing the ball so well made me ineligible for Michael Patterson’s affections. And now I had a real dilemma. You see, I had to throw the ball well because my second crush, Aleta Crew played… you guessed it: Softball.

Now, Aleta Crews was the exact opposite of Michael Patterson. She was older, 15, and tall and blonde. Like Scandinavian blonde and she played shortstop. Her double play move was a thing of beauty to behold. I’d watch her from the bench – not in an “I’d love to kiss you” kind of way, more in a “looking at you makes me smile” kind of way. I kept hoping she would smile back. But it was a lost cause – Aleta Crews had a boyfriend.

I never told anyone about my feelings for Aleta Crews. It didn’t seem right. But at night when I got home from practice – now this is a huge stepping out of the closet for me – I would sing show tunes – yes, show tunes – and put her name in them. My favorite was “Maria” from West Side Story. I would put the record on and sing at the top of my lungs “Aleta, I just met a girl named Aleta”. You laugh. Ok, but I can tell it is a laugh of recognition. You’re not fooling me. I know I’m not alone. Hey, I told you bi-sexual from the beginning.

As I got older the stuff in my bi-sexual closet changed. You see, I went from hiding my “I Like Girls” stuff to hiding my “I Like Boys” stuff when I discovered that Lesbians don’t like bisexuals. Some don’t even believe we exist – we’re apparently on the continuum on the path to lesbianism, or we are posers unwilling to give up heterosexual privilege. Promiscuous. Indecisive. Blah blah blah.

So as I moved into the Lesbian community I added the “I Like Boys” stuff to the “I Like Girls” stuff already in my cluttered identity closet. If there was a woman I wanted to date, it was sometimes easier not to mention the “I Like Boys” stuff too early. Always before sex but not usually on the first couple of dates.

How am I still in the bi-sexual closet? I think it’s because my wife and I have been together for 17 years, so folks make assumptions. I am with a woman in a monogamous relationship – that makes me a lesbian, right? No, actually it makes me faithful. Even my beloved struggled with this early on. When we first decided to be monogamous, she declared me a Lesbian – with more than a little relief. (If I were a lesbian, she wouldn’t have to break her pledge never to get involved with the dangerous, will-leave-you-for-a-man-one-day bisexual.) Anyway, when she clapped the L Word on me I said, “nope, still bi”. She said, “But you’re in a lesbian relationship so that makes you a lesbian.” So then, I had to break it down for her.

“Babe, I am a bi-sexual in a lesbian relationship. I live largely with in the lesbian community but I’m still bi-sexual.” The quizzical look on her face was kind of precious so I went on…. “You were in an interracial relationship for 4 years, right? Did that make you interracial? No, you were a black woman in an interracial relationship. Make sense.” She got it. Though I’m "out" to my wife and now all of you, most of time I just roll with the assumption that I’m a lesbian. After all there is nothing wrong with being a lesbian. I mean, there are way worst things to be than a lesbian…. like a Christian, for example.

DAMN, more stuff for the closet. Living in a time when the word Christian offends so people, this may be the toughest closet to navigate. A religious practice is supposed to bring you closer to God and the people, As an organized religion, Christianity is often strident and judgmental and flat-out mean. It’s no wonder that so many queer folks of faith are closeted. Church may just be the largest walk-in closet of them all. From pastors to deacons to choir directors to Sunday school teachers, church is full of queers.

It’s true of all churches to some degree but black church has it own special flair. Not just those men in yellow suits with matching shoes and hair fried died and laid the side. Or all those single women church secretaries with their – “roommates” – who sit together in the same pews next to each other for decades. I mean, come on, the gays are all up in the church. And why not, people go to church looking for their tribe. And many of us find it there. Often it’s no more dysfunctional than our families.

You know, before moving here to Seattle – 20 years ago, I contemplated going to seminary. I’m really not supposed to come out like this but…It’s true. I diligently went to bible study, prayed, fasted, preached, spoke in tongues and holy danced in the aisles. Yep, all of that. You’re not supposed to do or say any of that if you’re a woman or queer. After all, religion these days reeks of patriarchy and misogyny and homophobia, right?

In the church’s closet, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is in full effect. The telling comes at a very high price. When I got involved with my wife and moved out of the closet at church, I lost a lot of friends from the “faith community”, folks who “loved the sinner” but hated the sin. Who could no longer come to our house or have us at theirs. It was tough.

The other shoe is that when I say that I’m a Christian in the gay community, my queer family sometimes moves away just as fast. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. Then again what’s the point of running. I’m not a literalist or a fundamentalist. Yes, I believe in God. I believe in Christianity as a philosophy. I live in its contradictions and find comfort and wisdom and peace in it. In it’s mysticism, it’s rituals, it’s optimism, and it’s community. I believe in its call to be our highest, best selves. I believe in faith and kindness. But the fear of rejection in the church and in the world makes it too easy to stay silent. Overstuffing the closet.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a not great screenplay about a woman who leaves her husband for a woman and has a spiritual battle with her preacher father. In the penultimate scene of the script, as she is being driven out of church by her father’s preaching, she’s rescued by that “gay guy in the yellow suit" – the one brave "out" person in every church. He tells her, that God is with her; that God sent her to that place for a reason. He says, “In this moment, right now. You might feel lonely and beaten. But God is here for you. He brought us here to this place for a reason. Our being here means change can happen.” Change can happen. In the end, she finds the courage and peace to hold her place in the church as an "out" person.

So, that’s what I’m doing these days, trying to be brave enough to push open my closet doors. Out in the open is where all the good stuff is: all the laughter and the sharing, all the responsibility and the expectations, all the intimacy and the community. In the open is where all the love is. So, you know, maybe it’s not so awful when our closet doors burst open and the crap comes crashing down… And as crazy as it can look sometimes, here I am standing on my pile of crap: bisexual, Christian, and most importantly out.

Haiku #2

Haiku #2

Hair on borrowed time.

Fear woven into dreadlocks

Destined for the floor.

*on my cutting my hair

Baby Steps

Last year, I gave myself the project of writing a haiku a day.
This year, I am going to post them.

Haiku #1

fog, thick as concrete,

hangs shade on bright city lights.

trees dance a slow grind.

* on a foggy drive home

Videos | The New Republic

Videos | The New Republic As I go deeper onto my research into Childress' Trouble in mind, I stumbled upon heart-breaking gems like this...