Weather forecasters predicted a heat wave on Thursday, June 20, at the start of the TCG conference. But as I walked from the Hyatt Hotel toward Navy Pier for the opening plenary, a cool fog veiled the skyscrapers and the Centennial Wheel, leaving a dreamlike impression of a city swallowed by ash-colored clouds. Or the opposite: a skyline descending, escaping the sky. Whatever it was, my travels had me feeling namamahay—and by the end of the conference, I wondered if American theatre was, too.
Namamahay is a Tagalog word describing the feeling of restless slumber, often induced from falling asleep in a new place, and the disorientation that comes into the waking world. It comes from the verb mamahay, to take up residence or set up a new house (the root being bahay, house/home). The image, then, is the sleeper’s spirit wandering, looking for its home.
American theatre, where are our homes? Where are our spirits?
Prior to the plenary, I attended the “Global Theatre Initiative: Countering Isolationism and Fostering Collaborative Exchange” session, a gathering to discuss how theatre communities could benefit from watching, learning, and working with other theatremakers around the world. With a European parent and an Asian parent who immigrated together to the U.S., I strongly feel this tension between global and local. When physically distant, how do you stay connected to family and culture? What do you do when you have multiple homes and your spirit feels stretched?
Derek Goldman, artistic and executive director of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University posed this question in the session: “Humility, curiosity, and deep listening is something we do as theatremakers, but how about as a field?” He also noted how we can reframe our perspective of “a field” in terms of American, regional, or global theatre.
It’s an opportunity for me to check myself: Am I maintaining humility, curiosity, and deep listening as I approach my parents’ birth lands in a reverse diasporic move? How often I feel like a seedling blown from its source, ripening in a land not of my choosing, now gathering the weight and wings to return to the origins that existed before I did. Theatre—American, global, or in-between—serves as the medium to allow me to fly back and forth, to create in-person connections beyond my initial home. Witnessing theatre around the world gives me a greater understanding of my family, myself, and the social and political forces that brought us to the lands we inhabit now.
At the opening plenary, we received a series of talks: “From the Ashes: Provocations on the Futures of Our Field.” The title evokes a mystical phoenix rising in glory, as well as the ruins of a burnt building, black smudges on the forehead of a penitent, bright forest flowers from a wildfire. American theatre feels like these images: rising, ruined, in search of redemption and renewal. Robert Barry Fleming, executive artistic director of Actors Theatre of Louisville, pointed out how theatre can be “a discipline that saved me and many others in this room.” At its best, American theatre can be a sanctuary, a personal reckoning with truth given relief through a witnessing collective.
But as Vineyard Theatre associate artistic director Jesse Cameron Alick explained, theatres can be hobbled and leaders sabotaged. He noted how the economics underlying theatres have led to cases in which organizations cannot even pay staff enough for their groceries. The namamahay feeling and restlessness peeks out again: “I toss and turn in bed all night and can’t sleep,” he told us. “I worry about all of you and myself, and I know everyone is doing the best they can.”
Sources for this worry include an emphasis on product and profit over process and people, as well as performative actions that acknowledge symptoms but not underlying maladies. Referencing her essay in The Dramatist, playwright Ife Olujobi called out American theatres for dodging their responsibility to pay artists their worth, how they “privilege the art above all else, but mask the play as a product for money,” and how they “treat artists as ideas instead of people.” They added that this includes “platforming more of my words instead of revisiting budgets.” The provocation reminds me of my own unsavory experiences with some theatre organizations, as well as a desire to see no other theatremakers go through the same rigmarole.
Jeanette Harrison, who co-founded the Bay Area’s Alternative Theater Ensemble and co-directs their Arts Learning Project for Native Youth, also critiqued the field for its lack of representation of and resources for Native American and Indigenous artists, and offering concrete actions for practitioners and organizers. “If you have a building, make it free for Natives and Native artists,” she urged. “It is the tiniest land back you can give.”
The proposition is intriguing, bringing to mind the difficulty in finding rehearsal spaces that are functional, easily accessible, and free or low-cost in my chosen city of Los Angeles. (Not to mention empty, boarded-up commercial spaces juxtaposed with unhoused people.) It also raises tensions around the importance of land itself beyond acknowledgements. Because live theatre requires physical land and space, it is crucial to ask if we are honoring, sharing, and stewarding the grounds we walk upon. How do we honor, share, and steward land, space, and its inhabiting communities beyond words, and with actions that address historical and present-day injustices?
If we are going to reckon with and find restoration for our shared history and geography, it’s a question we—as theatremakers and theatre leaders—should be asking and answering.
Furthermore, the conference offered an opportunity to contemplate the term “community.” Is it overused when it comes to theatre? When we talk about a theatre community or a personal community, what do we mean?
“This is not a community, this is a theatre industry,” playwright Erika Dickerson-Despenza declared during an intense closing plenary. The session, “So Many Truths: Lorraine’s Legacy and the Future of Black Artistry and Activism in the American Theatre,” brought together playwrights Dickerson-Despenza, Ifa Bayeza, and Dominique Morisseau, with director Valerie Curtis-Newton moderating. From discussing Lorraine Hansberry’s legacy beyond A Raisin in the Sun, the panelists discussed how to shift culture for the better and the complications around being an activist in theatre. Dickerson-Despenza, for example, cited her own difficulty of being in community with people who prefer reform over revolution.
When is theatre a community and when is it an industry? When are we trying to make a home or sanctuary out of a system or institution devoted to production? Could this be part of our sleeplessness and burnout?
“It’s a thin line between a revolutionary and a dictator, and an activist and a narcissist,” Morrisseau observed as the closing speakers delved more passionately into the ideas of activism and revolution in theatre. For Morrisseau, to be a leader or to make cultural transformation means being in service to the people she loves. The sentiment resonates strongly as I think of transformation happening over a long time scale and out of public sight—perhaps the opposite of revolution or collective catharsis, which some of us seem to long for. It reminds me of waking a sleeper from a dream: They can abruptly enter the waking world into action, or gently bid adieu to a powerful dream that can guide them in the waking world.
When do we need disruption and when do we need gentleness?
This question returns me to the global. Before the closing plenary, I attended “Southern Exposure: Theatre in the Americas,” a discussion of Latin American theatre. I was moved by Chilean artist Roberto Cayuqueo Martínez’s overview of Indigenous Mapuche communities. “Our footprints have been erased and are invisible,” he explained in Spanish, relating how the city he was working in was a “colonial guide,” mapped and built in a way that supported colonial agendas and suppression of Indigenous peoples. He and his community engaged in site-specific performance to find their way back to their grounds and earth. “We found a sacred tree that goes under the land where the train is,” he said. “Its roots cannot be found—like the Mapuche in the city—so we would say hello to this tree.”
When it’s hard to find our homes, who can be our true and reliable guides? Theatre has been a home to me when other homes were unreachable. In this way, this art form has been community in the sense of a place where dreams of belonging become embodied and shared. But theatre has also been a place of exploitation, inequity, and humiliation masked by good intentions or politically correct rhetoric. Behind the anger and thirst for change in American theatre lives a desire for this art to showcase the best in people, which could mean everything from performing riveting, truthful stories onstage to paying employees a well-deserved salary. It’s a desire for our field to remind us of finding wholeness in our humanness.
Standing on a bridge across the Chicago River and gazing at the skyline, I saw clouds lifted as heat returned. I wondered what trees I could say hello to, whether on this land or others. I wonder how American theatres and global artists will root themselves during these turbulent times, and what dreams will bring us into our true selves.
Amanda L. Andrei (she/hers) is a playwright, literary translator, and theatre critic based in Los Angeles.
