Spirit in Action
Theatre for Transformation - Black History on Stage
Theatre for Transformation is drama designed to open eyes and instigate change. With a cast that is mostly black, their productions often touch on the history and present of USA's racism, seeking to reclaim history so it can be dealt with and its consequences resolved.
- Broadcast on:
- 27 Nov 2010
- Audio Format:
- other
(upbeat music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - We've got the privilege today to visit with some of the cast and staff of Theater for Transformation. I saw one of their productions this past summer. I was immediately clear that they had a message and a modus operandi that clearly put them in the spirit in action mode of being. The production I saw was Show Me the Franklin's, remembering the ancestors, slavery, and Benjamin Franklin. And the cast was all black except for one white member, exploring issues of slavery, history, racism, and perhaps most importantly, how we, white and black relate to these factors and issues. It's a potent mixture of things like hurt and anger, ignorance, smugness, denial, blame, and white guilt. And there's a need to step back and take a breath and look deep in order to find healing, redress of injuries, forgiveness, and a better way forward. At least that's my take on the mission of Theater for Transformation. To get you in the mood, I want to start you off with a brief clip from the play, Show Me the Franklin's, so you can get the feel of what Theater for Transformation does. Here's the intro to Show Me the Franklin's. (upbeat music) - What is the lie that cannot be spoken? The falsehood that cannot be named. What necessarily disrupts and recast all other relationships in this project we call American history. - Slavery. - Nobel laureate Tony Morrison caused the abiding, yet often invisible African presence in early American literature, the ghost and the machine. - According to W.E.B. Du Bois, African Americans of the Rock, upon which freedom stubbed its toe. Ralph Ellison suggests that black people are the secret ingredient that keeps America so blindingly white and unknown to itself. - The enslaved and the free. - Coexisting. - Competing. - One visible, the other invisible. - Today, we make both visible. And I, the scholar, have assembled this wonderful own soul to dramatize the historical record and under my scholarly direction. Together, we make the argument that American slavery paid for American freedom. Our case study. - Benjamin Franklin. - Absolutely. - Slave holder. - Abolitionist. - So that's a little bit of how Show Me the Franklin starts out as performed by part of the cast of Theater for Transformation. And their site is theaterfortransformation.com. Theater ending in R.E. by the way. We've got four members of the group here with us today. Their producer, writer, and one of their actors, Dr. Amanda Kemp, is with us. As is their director, Dave Eversall, plus cast members Mary Farrell and Vanessa Ballard. They join us today from Philadelphia area. Amanda, Mary, Vanessa, and Dave, welcome to Spirit in Action. - Hello. - Hi, how are you? - Vanessa, having us. - How you doing? - Are you all old friends? Have you been doing this Theater for Transformation for a long time? How did you connect up in this enterprise? - This is Amanda. I'll start with that. Theater for Transformation was born at Pendle Hill, which is a Quaker retreat and study center outside of Philly. And one of the first people that I started working with on a play called Show Me the Franklin's was Mary Comfort Farrell, who's on the line. After doing some work with Mary and two other fabulous people who could be with us today, we connected with Dave as our director. Again, on that particular play, Show Me the Franklin's. In 2009, so a little bit over a year ago, Theater for Transformation collaborated with the Chester Senior Center and launched a new play called Coming North, again with Dave as the director. And that's how we met Vanessa, because Dave and Vanessa have a long relationship. I'll let them pick it up. - I'll start with talking about how I met Amanda. I had directed in 2006, I believe it was now, a production of a Raven and the Sun, and I had cast Vanessa in it. The boy who I had cast as the little boy Travis, his mother, about two years later, said I really need to meet a friend of hers who does theater and she thinks we need to connect, which was Amanda and it was at Pendle Hill. So I came for coffee and we had a very long conversation. And that night I would end up seeing stage reading, Show Me the Franklin's, which I would end up directing about a month later and continuously on. So when we were launching into Coming North and there was another character available, I had to connect to Amanda with Vanessa. - And I was totally disappointed, this is Mary, that in the second production of Theater for Transformation, there were no white characters. (laughing) And I kept insisting to Amanda that she write one in. And I think she tried for a while, but then David made her take it out because it didn't actually serve the artistic vision for the play, but I'm still a little unhappy about that. (laughing) - That was my first meeting with Dave and Raven and the Sun. And I thought Dave might tell the story of my audition piece, which he often reminds me of, which was a little piece of Poltergeist, which I used to audition for Mama. And he likes to throw that out at inappropriate times. (laughing) - It was actually the first piece I had directed out of college. So I had held audition and either I had a lot of people and I was expecting a lot of things to be auditions. And this woman walks in and says, "My name is Vanessa Ballard and I will be doing a piece of Poltergeist, it's the Raven and the Sun." So I hadn't expected that at all. (laughing) And I didn't know quite what to do with it. (laughing) - Having only seen Poltergeist too. And in callbacks, my producer was like, "Well, what about the Poltergeist lady?" (laughing) She is certainly not the Poltergeist lady anymore. She was shot at back and she did a reading and she here in Ohio how amazing it was. - So tell me what theater for transformation is about, your next production isn't a version of Poltergeist. Is it Manda? - No, although the line I'm thinking about for Poltergeist is, "Stay away from the light. Don't go into the light." (laughing) And as Quakers, we're like always talking about the light and the light is an attractive thing that we want to be one with. And so we've left Poltergeist behind. It's part of our heritage now via Vanessa and Dave. But yeah, so, think of the transformation. So it's obviously for transformation. So we want to walk away and leave communities and individuals transformed. And so for me, and I would love to hear from the other people who are on the phone here to share with you. But for me, transformation is not just different or better, but it's open to a whole new realm of who they could be where people's hearts are expanded and their minds are expanded and they have a sense of connection and community. And for me, a pathway to transformation is through forgiveness and through adopting an abundant mindset that there is enough. There's enough love for all of us. We don't have to fight each other to have our stories told. - Is your major focus issues of race? I mean, we can have transformation with respect to ecology or we can have transformation with respect to so many other aspects of our life. But I think that race is the center item on the table right now. - It is, that's so interesting that you put it in there and that because it is and it isn't. So it is in the sense of all the plays that we do are about helping us to remember what we've forgotten. And for me as the playwright of the company, the stories that I want to tell are the stories about slavery that we've forgotten, about slavery in the northeast and places like Boston and Philadelphia and Newport, Rhode Island, places where we don't associate slavery and where it's compressed and repressed out of our memory. And where the people who lived and endured on the slavery informed incredible relationships and who created in the context of being enslaved are also been pushed out and marginalized. So for me, transformation, creating a sense that there's more than enough and that the pathway to transform who we are is about remembering and forgiving and creating something new. - So race is on the center stage for you, but that's not the limit of the issues. This is a learning experience of how to move forward. You said you want folks to remember and forgive and usually the phrase that we use in English is, "Forget and forgive." But you put remember and forgive together. Do you realize how much upstream you're swimming in there? - Yeah, usually you remember stuff to sort of hold onto it, to sort of give you a rundown or a litany of what you did that was wrong. Or maybe what you did that was right, but a lot of times we hold on to stuff because we're kind of sick. It has a hold onto us. And even if we don't remember it, it can still have a hold onto us if we don't forgive it. So my intention by remembering is to bring something back that has been pushed out and then to absorb it by forgiving it. So it's not like it doesn't exist anymore, but it's like the energy around holding it back and fighting over it and denying and defending and attacking about it. All that energy can now go into creating something new. - You know, a lot of people would say, let's forget about it. I mean, the shameful history of race relations, not only slavery, but much of the time since then in this country is so abominable. And the guilt and the shame that's all involved with it when you bring it up in your place, doesn't that mean that people get those nasty feelings up? And it undoes some of the healing and connection that we're doing? Is that not your experience? - Well, why don't we have our other artists talk about what happens? - I'd like to respond to that. There's a saying that those of us who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it. And I think in a very real sense, it's problematic to cover up things in our past that are ugly because it doesn't go anywhere by revealing it and by putting it out and looking at it, you can deal with the effects of it and you can move on, but you can't deal with something that you're trying to cover up and you're afraid of it or you're ashamed of it. That doesn't leave your spirit. I think theater for transformation is about raising the consciousness of people. It's about giving people a global consciousness, letting people see the opportunities that life presents us with day by day. I think it's important not to forget about things that have happened to us because all of us have history of some sort. We still have to face it and to live with it. - This is Mary speaking, and I certainly don't intend to attempt to represent the entire white race here, but I am the only white person on stage in these productions, but we are often performing for audiences that are primarily white. One of the things that has become abundantly clear to me is how uncomfortable white people are talking about race. We are afraid we are going to say something clumsy or racist. We do not want to be accused of racism. We want to distance ourselves from it, and it shuts us up in ways that we don't even realize. And when we are around black people, we say things like some of my best friends are black people in some format. We manage to make sure that they know that we have at least some experience with people of color and that we're not one of those, not one of those racists. And I think that comes from this huge, maybe not articulated, maybe not even recognized, sense of guilt. And so when we go onstage and we talk about it and we extend forgiveness before it's even asked for, there's almost this sense of breathing easier that flows through an audience. And it's certainly been my experience working on this for years, is that I breathe easier. And when I can breathe easier, I can look somebody in the eye. And see them in their entirety with their color because it's part of them, but see a full person there because I don't have this sense of I'm about to mess up and I don't want to mess up, it's always there with me. So from that perspective, I think for at least for this white person, the forgiveness freely offered without me even knowing that I needed to ask for it in some way is a great and freeing gift. - What about the rest of you, Dave and Esamanda? Have you experienced a transformation within yourselves in doing this? I assume that the fear, the guilt, the shame happens from both sides. Have those barriers gone down for the three of you who are black and who've been getting this on the stage? And as Mary said, in front of very often largely white audiences. I'll talk about something, I'm actually white and I'm out about it. That's one of the things I love working with this company. When we're on the road, we'll show me the Franklin's, it's myself and Mary and Amanda and two other actors. And I always like to look at us in airports because even though we have two white people and three black people, all five of us look like we don't belong in the same group together. We just look so radically different. And over the past three years, we've really formed this tight knit bond. That personally, it transplanted me 'cause it shows what five people with very big differences can come to the table and create something and start a conversation that helps change things. - Can I just jump in here again? It's very significant in a lot of ways that, so the cast are African-American or people of mixed racial background, except for me and I'm European, I'm white, and the director is white. So that's an interesting dynamic as well, that the person directing this experience of racism and color is a white person. And I know that that was something that Amanda, you really did some work around. I don't know if you wanna talk about that. (laughing) - Oh God. - You know, we could just go on to the next thing I said. (laughing) It was really significant for me. It was really important for me to hear that process. - It was so huge. So for me, data for transformation in lots of ways is about honoring our ancestors. And as Mary said, I'm African-American and I was born in the Deep South. I was born in Mississippi. My people are from Mississippi and Alabama. So we're like, you know, deep South Black people. But our ancestry is not 100% African. We have European-American ancestry, but it's not something that you would know from looking at me. And it's not something that I was even necessarily entertaining prior to, you know, doing this show and getting into conversations with people about it because the medicine of, show me the Franklin's, is a poem called "The Ancestors are Calling You." And the first stand of the poem is, you know the ancestors are calling you. You know the ancestors are calling you. They say, remember me. They say, forgive me. They say, I forgive you. And at some point in a talk back or somewhere in a conversation, it came up, well, which ancestors? And it was clear to me, all of them. So not just the ones who were enslaved, but the ones who participated in enslaving them. But what they say is, remember me. And then they say, forgive me. And who of us doesn't need to be forgiven? And then I forgive you. So it just sort of opened up for me what this piece was about. And so when I met Dave, you know, he was obviously well qualified and he's white. And I knew he was white before I met him, but I didn't know I would have a problem with him being white. Until we had that long conversation and I realized, wow, he could probably do something good here. And then I got very defensive. 'Cause then I thought, well, maybe he'll be better than me. That was one issue I had to deal with. Maybe he'll be a better director than me. The second issue, and really this was even the first one I dealt with. Am I somehow betraying my ancestors by allowing a white man to direct me to have this powerful position in presenting this show about enslaved people? So that was a very emotional and heartfelt inquiry. And of course, this all happened at Pendle Hill. You have to understand that Mary and I were both in a year of spiritual inward looking. Neither one of us were working at full time jobs. We were just in this program of spiritual inquiries. And so there I went looking inward. And what I found was that the answer was yes. And part of the answer was yes, because it wasn't just about me. Like part of the healing was allowing someone like Dave to contribute as he clearly could. And then I asked the cast how they felt. I remember having dinner together at Pendle Hill. And I said, so I'm thinking about hiring Dave as a director for this so it can go to the next level. But he is white. What do you guys think? And they already met him, so he knew he was white. And I remember Dad was like, I think he's great. And then I think it was your answer was Mary. - I was keeping my mouth shut. - Oh, maybe that's why I forgot what your answer was. - You eventually asked, does it bother any of you? - Right, 'cause it really bothered me. And it didn't bother Deb at all, who's African-American. And I remember Perry said, who's African-American, who I really was questioning. Like how would Perry feel being directed by a white man when he's playing a black man who'd been enslaved by white men? And it was all these instances of black male disempowerment, basically. And here we're gonna put a white man over him as a director. And Perry said, I'm gonna roll with you if you trust him, I'll trust him. And that almost made me cry. So that's how that happened. So the process, and then the thing with Dave, it's so interesting. How is when I went to this younger white director who was more conventional theater background than I do, is that he called forth what I was afraid to do with the play. And if it hadn't been for Dave, that vulnerable voice that I wasn't willing to be on stage would not have come out. So if you take from this whole experience of how a white director was in service of the magic and at the heart of the play ultimately, you can see this is where our future is as a country to me in terms of changing our whole conversation about race. It's not gonna come from saying, okay white people, you can be part of it, but you cannot lead. Or no white people at all. I think for the conversation around race to transform in this country, we need to be able to come together as people who each bear gifts and collaborate together. - I wanna mention something that happened at the Friends General Conference gathering where I met you, Amanda. I did an interview while I was there with George Lakey. And one of the things he mentioned as part of the things that he learned with movement for a new society is when there's people who have been privileged, in his case, a white male, there was still an important change to happen that a person like Dave in this case, who's serving as director, not to see him as power, but to see him as a resource. So when you're bringing him in as a director, you could say, are we giving control over us, or are we allowing him into our group to use the gifts, knowledge, experience that he has for the good of all? And it's such a different view. Is that power or is it resource that he's contributing? - I would say that from an actor's point of view, there has to be a little bit of both. Because when you submit yourself to a director, which is what I had to do, when I first worked with Dave, I had those same types of issues to deal with. This is a black lady that was raising in the sun. I'm a person who saw raising in the sun on television and lived at that era as a little child. So you have to deal with them. Well, what is this young white guy going to tell me about life in the '50s or the '60s? What can he tell me? What I said today when he did choose me for the part was do what you want with me, you know? I'm putty in your hands. So a very real perspective in terms of just the art itself. When you have a director, you submit yourself to his vision. And having Dave in a position like this, I mean, we could talk more and more about the wonders of Dave. But he felt open. He has such talent and insight that there is a comfort in doing just that and submitting to what he wants to bring out of you in even the situations which are just really stories being told. He's just wonderful to work with. And all of that forgiveness and all of that openness, that all melts away when you work with him. I don't disagree at all with the assessment of David's talent, but those words and the spirit of it comes from Amanda. And that is the beauty of a company and how all of the gifts work together. What I want to comment on that is when it does come to the art, I think a lot of the misconceptions that people have and even people who are directing and acting have is that the director is in charge and you must submit to it. And I think that's bad direction. I think that's bad direction on stage in art and in life. I always thank my actors for trusting me because I'm the outside eye and you can't really see what you're doing on stage when you're acting. And that's what the director is for is to make sure that you can be the best at the stories being told clearly. A lot of ego and all that can get in there, but that's the director's function. And if I wasn't telling Amanda's story clearly, then I would be failing at my job. - I want to talk about submission. I'm glad Vanessa brought it up because we, especially US people, think about submission as long, in part because we have this heritage of the Declaration of Independence. But when you enter a marriage and a director playwright relationship, which is what I have with Dave, and I also have a director-actor relationship with him, and they are different, but you are entering a relationship where you're going to submit to each other. But submitting to something bigger than yourself than your own personal preference to something that the group can see as a whole that maybe you will come into later is a good thing for example, and sister friend Deborah Billips, who's not on this phone call, but who's a fabulous contralto, jazz stylist, actress and Vanessa Ballard, who's on his phone call and who's a wonderful, amazing soprano and actor. The two of those ladies have a really strong background in music and they put the prologue, which is a poem that I wrote to music. And they changed some of the, not the words, but they repeated some things. And they basically had at it, and they called me on the road 'cause I was somewhere, and they said, "Okay, listen to this." And then I was like, "Oh, that sounds good. Let me talk to Dave." And I was like, "Dave, what are they doing to my poem?" I mean, I was, like, my stomach was all like, you know, like it sounded good, but it wasn't what I thought. Dave was like, "Okay, uh-huh." He said, "Okay, what I hear is that you feel excluded," and he started giving me all this feedback, right? (laughs) And so ultimately, on the playwright, I'm the producer, so I could've said, "Guys, that sounded great, but no." But I didn't, that was a, I mean, I had the power to do that, but that would've been a choice coming out of fear. I guess I'm just elaborating to say, I think what Vanessa said was really true, and there still is power in the operation. There still is a producer, there's a director, there's an actor, you have different functions. And if a director says, "Move stage left," and I really need you to get to the breaking point, you can collaborate all you want, and ultimately, you gave him this job. That's what you're gonna go for. - Even though you're the one who's got the doctor on her name, it's Dr. Amanda Kemp. Dave, you don't have a title like that, you know, like Esquire or something that makes you very important? - You can call me Esquire, but that's not why they go by. (laughing) - What's interesting is that Amanda is the storyteller, and I just remember we were in North Carolina at the National Black Beauty Festival, and we were working on coming with, which turned into a play called Hood Wing, Scout calls Hood Wing. That's when Vanessa first came into the company. We were in a hotel room, workshopping a piece, and Amanda ended up, Amanda wasn't in the original production, but one of the actors wasn't with us, so Amanda ended up having to play her role, and we were working on the piece, and Amanda and I, I mean, not both in rehearsal and out of rehearsal, just changing things and working things. - Around the clock. - Around the clock. (laughing) And Amanda turned to me at one point, 'cause I'm rehearsing this one scene, two different actors, two different characters, that she wrote, and she goes, "Why don't I have a love scene?" That's what I want. "I want a love scene, why don't I have that?" Dave, you're the writer. You write yourself. (laughing) - She has to do that. I just, it's interesting, because I have all that all worked out, and she's a storyteller, like Vanessa said, we all have different stories to tell. Adam and is very good at getting out of the way, and maybe hard for her, but ultimately, she's fantastic at getting out of the way, and letting the story be told, and letting other people tell her story for her. - At the last production, we get a sister friend at the Talkback, 'cause we do a Talkback after each performance. I was sharing that it takes a lot of openness to allow people to take what you've written, and to just to work with it, and to add their own interpretation of it. Amanda is very good at that. That speaks to her, the generousness of her spirit. - I'm sure that all kinds of tensions come up, just personalities, but sometimes they get imbued with the flavor of racial injuries. Have you felt those racial things come up in your group, and then been able to work them out, or not? - I think as a group, and to talk about what Mary was talking about, to be able to allow yourself to talk to somebody, and make those mistakes, and learn from those mistakes. I think she's correct when she says, what people, they walk around eggshells sometimes, when it comes to the topic of race. What Amanda has created is a space for people to say things, both on stage and off stage, that I feel like, how many times did I talk back over there? I feel like this, but I feel that's wrong. One topic, we had a labelman in Santa, I just want you to ask for forgiveness, and Amanda brought her up on stage, and they had a fantastic moment together. The purpose of the company, and her mission statement, it's for people to be able to say those things, to get them on the table, have a conversation. No matter how uncomfortable that conversation can be, because it's the only way you can take another step forward. - You said Vanessa, that you have talk backs after the performances, what are those really like, and how else do you involve the audience, so that you can see what change is coming? - Talk backs aren't just an opportunity for the audience to comment on what they've seen, and how it affected them, to ask questions of the actors, and to ask questions about the characters that they've portrayed. We get all sorts of responses when we have a talk back. Some things are, like I said, are just here to who we are personally, and then some things are geared to how these characters have affected us, and what we have portrayed on stage. It runs the gamut in terms of what we can be asked, and where the conversations might lead to. - Are these talk backs always calm, easygoing? Do people get up and say, that really pushed my buttons, and how could you say that about, I don't know, Ben Franklin, or how could you say that slavery, how could you depict it as anything except horrific, or do you get those kind of emotional reactions too? - I recall a minute, you can talk more about this, but I recall we were doing, show me Franklin, you have the Philadelphia French Festival. We had someone who seemed not needed to take a sense, but you really didn't agree with the whole idea of forgiveness. Maybe you can talk about that more. - Yeah, we had a performance at the Philly French Festival, where I had invited the president of the organization called Attack, avenging the answers to his coalition. This is from what I could see. It was a predominantly black group, maybe even all entirely black, led by a really wonderful lawyer who does a lot of work defending young black men, and who is part of this community, head of this community coalition. He took notes during the play, which is great, 'cause you know, wow, okay, there's a lot going to come out here. And his first question was, thanking us for the performance, and he said, so tell me about this forgiveness. What is it that you see we, as the people who endured slavery, endured the humiliation, the violence, the degradation, the dishonoring and the dismembering of our hands? What do you see us having to forgive, or having to ask forgiveness for? That set off a whole discussion with a multiracial audience, so there were more African-Americans and white people there, people from various parts of my personal life, too, who were there in the room, and who had different ideas about forgiveness, and whether you had to prove that you deserved it, whether you had to ask for it, whether you just gave, you forgave, because you want to keep yourself clear. I mean, there was a whole range of expressions, and discussions about why guilt came up there. In fact, when we ended that talkback, which was captivating, it was energizing, the adrenaline was flowing, it was, you know, sparkling. And tense, we ended it, one of the members from a tack came up to me, and she said, that was the best play I've ever seen in my entire life. And, you know, that's not a comment you forget easily, right? Especially because, you know, it wasn't like she necessarily agreed with it, but it opened up something. It opened up a discussion amongst people of color and white people that wasn't, it wasn't the same old discussion about you did wrong. No, it wasn't me! Yes, it was you, it was you, it was you, you bit of it. No! Just the defending, attacking, defending, attacking. It wasn't that, it wasn't the discussion, the discussion was, what is the pathway forward? And let's talk about this pathway forgiveness. What would it afford us? What would we have to give up? So from that discussion, I now have queries that I have for groups who've seen the play, when we do workshops afterwards, in addition to a talkback, some groups will have us do workshops. And one of the queries is, what would you have to forgive in order to create a new conversation about race? And then the second query is, what would you need to be forgiven for, in order to create a new conversation about race? There are a variety of things that people are ashamed of or holding onto, and it's not just like, it's not only white people who have something to be forgiven for, or who feel stuck in something that they did or they didn't do from the past that keeps us stuck in a conversation about race. Remember, there's, there's, our country's multiracial, it's not biracial. So there's all kinds of conflicts between blacks and Asians and Middle Easterns and blacks and, you know, Latinos and whites. I mean, we got all kinds of history of betrayal and of standing up for each other and then cutting each other down and benefiting from one person's oppression. I mean, it's a complex history. There are no simple good guys and bad guys. So the kinds of discussions that we promote are not simplistic. And I just want to get back to something you said about, are there conflicts within the cast or that have a racial tender? Or how has race shown up within our cast? And I talked about initial discomfort on my part with Dave being white. One of the other things about this whole discussion about who we are as a company is, well, are we a black company? If we have a white director and, you know, how many white people, like if we have too many white people will no longer be a black company, you know? These are the things that I think about. Although I haven't thought about them recently because it's sort of like, well, who are we? What is our integrity here? And one of the things that's important is that Mary, who's had lots of experience leading organizations and management, you know, we've had clashes and it's been really important that we've both been willing to be straight with each other and we've both been willing to be responsible. And her willingness and openness to ask, okay, I said that, what did you think about that? Or does that sound funky to you? Like her willingness to put herself to make herself vulnerable and have a conversation like that also opens up space for there to be constant, for there to be clarity and clearing and comfort. So I hope what you're getting from me is a sense that I think that there's a huge amount of reservoir of trust and love that we have for each other and that comes from having successfully created together and it also comes from having successfully had conversations that went somewhere together where we didn't stay stuck because that's where you get distrust and all that stuff eating away at you and at a company's unity. - That's some good work you're doing. For those of you who just tuned in, this is Spirit in Action. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet. This is a Northern Spirit Radio production. Our website is northernspiritradio.org and visit the site to see our archive of our past five years of programs. You can listen to any of them and you can post comments and we appreciate them. We like to know who's listening and what helps and what doesn't. We're speaking today with a number of people connected with theater for transformation and I have to make a point right away with you Amanda. I assume you chose this spelling. Theater, you spelled it British-ly or Canadian-ly as opposed to American-ly. Isn't it supposed to be ER instead of RE in the US or maybe down in Alabama? That's what they do. I don't know. - Oh yes, that's the PhD talking. That woman wanted it RE. - Their website is theater for transformation and that is T-H-E-A-T-R-E for transformation.com. You can go there and find out about them. You've got a number of productions that you've participated in, created, maybe are looking forward to on the site. Let's talk about a few of them. One of the, well, the one that I saw is called Show Me the Franklin's, Remembering the Ancestor Slavery and Benjamin Franklin. There's also Sister Friend and I want you to talk a little bit about that. We'll play a clip in a moment. You've got others hoodwinked and the sweeter the berry, sweeter the berry. That sounds like a wonderful piece. Is there any way I can get a hold of that Amanda? Or maybe you just come over here to Wisconsin and share it with us. Talk about the different productions where they came from. You mentioned Coming North, which I didn't see on your website yet. Why don't we let Dave talk about them? (laughs) Coming North turned into a play called Hoodwink, which is now our big show, 'cause it has two acts. Sister Friend came out of a historical figure that was weekly, who was the first published black poet, Amanda? Yes. And in America. She didn't vote, she's the one person who appears in both, showing the Franklin's and Sister Friend. And when we first started directing, show me the Franklin's how Amanda had written her and how she was being represented, she didn't come off well. She wasn't coming off when we first started it. And I remember a late-night conversation with Amanda saying, "You talking about her?" And you know, it's feeling like maybe we're selling her out and selling her short, and Amanda said, "Oh, I have a whole different play in mind for her." A few months later at one of the performances I've shown me to Franklin's and audience member called us out as a company about the way we portrayed the character, and we then started working on the character and working on that scene to still make the point, but make her a little less abrasive, which I think fueled Amanda's fire and writing Sister Friend. She's one of the three-dimensional characters. She's one of the only two, one of the two characters or three characters on stage in Sister Friend. It's really interesting to me as a director, directing two plays with the same character, where they overlap and where they pull apart. Deborah Bell just plays, is not on the line, but plays her and Shemina Franklin and Vanessa, who is on the line, plays her and Sister Friend. It's really interesting to see both of those actresses' interpretations of the character. - So, Mark, basically Theater for Transformation is a touring company. So what we do is you contact us from Wisconsin, let's say, or from New Haven, Connecticut, or Cambridge, Massachusetts, or my favorite. We want to go to Arizona. So being able to give us a call and basically, we discuss with you how you want to present it, how you want to present, show me the Franklin, or Sister Friends, or both. Or right now, we're not ready to tour hoodwink outside of the Philadelphia area, but it will be, that is the plan to tour it. So you give us a call and we talk about what you're creating, because we see, bringing one of our plays to your community is an opportunity for you to have a dialogue in your community that you haven't had before. It's an opportunity for you to build relationships that you haven't had before, or to enhance relationships that maybe you've had only on a superficial level. Basically, it's an opportunity for transformation to occur. So we work with you in creating some kind of host group, so it's not just one individual, but ideally there's like a committee or a local host team from people from different parts of the community, where it's multiracial, who then bring out their people to the play so that the audience itself gets to experience the play, but also gets to experience their different perspectives. And the wisdom and the blind spots that people come, that people bring to an experience. So yeah, that's how we work. And we've been at New England Yearly Meeting, French General Conference, other monthly meetings, like Reading Monthly Meeting. We're gonna be at Boston at Cambridge Friends Meeting, and Dorchester Academy and some other Boston area of schools, with both sister friend and show me the Franklin's. We're gonna be at various universities, you know, in January and February. The "Sweet of the Berry" is a solo show, and it's a rare treat, and it's rare because I don't like being on stage without myself anymore. Though I have to be pulled out into that. That's a solo piece, and it draws on stories from my experience growing up in the Bronx, in South Bronx, going up in foster care, and other enslaved women who have encountered as a writer. So it's about the sweetness of life, even in the midst of all of a bunch of pain and challenge, you know, finding the sweetness of life. And that's a piece that we can be convinced to tour. (laughing) We can't convince you to buy something else first. (laughing) You know, we'll do "Sweet of the Berry," and Dave will, you know, Dave would travel. We basically travel with the performing ensemble and Dave, so we're traveling in groups of either four to six, and the "Sweet of the Berry" would be me and Dave. - How is this work supported? How's it paid for? I assume you're all pulling down six figure salaries on this. - Absolutely. We're all independently wealthy. (laughing) Now we have trust funds that support this. This work is supported by, when we perform in low-income communities, we're performing by grants, and we're performing by the grace of the company, because we have a commitment to perform within low-income communities. So I'm the grant writer in the group, so I will write grants so that we can go places that can't afford to bring us. When we perform in middle or upper-middle or college campuses, then they pay us. They pay us an honorarium, and that allows us, that sustains the company. I work full-time for the company. Everybody else has full-time jobs doing other things, and then they contribute at a much reduced rate. They basically, they're honored for their time, but they're not really fully compensated, and so they're really giving of themselves and they're hard to perform in theater for transformation. - What kind of audience do you get out there? You talked about, you do have money to help support reaching out to inner cities and other needy places. Are you able to get out to those areas pretty frequently? - We're not able to get there much. A friend of mine said to me the other, she goes, "Do you wanna do this show "at historically black colleges "or for predominantly black communities?" And the answer, of course, is yes, but she had to ask the question, because we so infrequently or relatively, infrequently perform in predominantly black communities or low-income communities. That's not because the conversation about race doesn't need to be transformed in low-income or predominantly black communities. The need is absolutely there, but that's because we have a need to be sustained financially to keep the work going. So there's a real, there's a gap in terms of who we get to serve right now. One of the things that we're doing to address this is there is a Philadelphia Yearly Meeting working group on racial justice and equality that Theta for Transformation has recently teamed up with. So this is a Quaker group that we've teamed up with to apply for grants to perform at Quaker institutions with the understanding and the encouragement that those institutions will see our performances and our subsidized performances there as opportunities to reach out to and perform and have partnerships with lower-income folks or to create multiracial audiences or to partner with institutions that serve those populations. So we're looking at ways to encourage Quakers to reach out into themselves and beyond themselves to create partnerships in the communities that they live in. So that is one way. And frankly, we need to fundraise so that we can do this in communities that, you know, like in Chester. You know, we've written a grant to do this in Chester. We've written a grant to do this in Germantown and in Redding, which is fabulous. And as you might imagine, there's only so much time and there's only so many grants and we need support from other folks. - Yeah. Now you mentioned doing this with teaming up with the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Committee on racism. Are all of you Quaker, or what's the religious spiritual mix within the group? - Vanessa, do you want to say something about that? - I am a Christian. I attend a Baptist Church. That's where I fellowship. That's where I found the Lord. - I'm a Christian, not a Quaker. I didn't really know anything about Quakerism until I met Amanda. And one of my friends who happens to be Black, when I told her about first meeting and then she said, "I didn't know there were Black Quakers." So it's really been a fascinating experience working at Pendleville with Amanda and going to these different meetings and seeing a different side of spirituality. And it actually helped me go closer to God working with Amanda. - I was wondering, Vanessa, it sounds to me like Amanda's gearing up all these Quaker groups to host your production. Maybe you have a lot of Baptist connection. I thought they probably would be vastly enriched by it too. - Have they been to your home church? - I have not been to my home church. I don't come from a large fellowship. But we are open to bringing in a group. That's something that we will need to explore at some point. Yes. - I think it would be lovely. I don't know much about Vanessa's home church. And it's not like, we're not a Quaker theater company. So, you don't have to be a Quaker to be part of it. And although we do begin our rehearsals with the waiting for worship and for listeners who might not know what a waiting worship is, it's basically waiting for the spirit. And so the spirit comes to people in different forms. And sometimes that's to be shared and sometimes that's just for the person who's listening. I think we're friendly for people of various spiritual paths to be part of us. And I would love to perform at Vanessa's home church. I think it's lovely to nurture, to give back to those who nurture us. We met from Pendle Hill a lot to you because Pendle Hill has been instrumental in nurturing our company by giving us rehearsal space from time to time, by receiving grants on our behalf, by entertaining future partnership with us that we can't talk about right now. But Pendle Hill's been a real, it's been a source for us. So that's how it keeps coming up. But we want to honor what sources Vanessa, which is her home spiritual community and Deborah's home spiritual community. Deborah's an Episcopalian. So thank you for the question, Mark, because I think it will push us in that direction. And it will only, I think this is Vanessa's phrase, to God be the glory, you know, or maybe the dead phrase. You know, it's all good. And, you know, you have to honor your source. Yes. Can I please don't think about the waiting worship? Yeah. It was very new to me when I first came into it. And I talked earlier about meeting Amanda and that night I ended up at a rehearsal. And that's how she started all of her rehearsals. And I would say if there is a process, an artistic process or a spiritual process or anything to theatre for transformation, it is beginning in silence and letting the spirit come. I think, artistically, I said to go, so why haven't I done this in every show I've directed? It really just grounds people and helps them prepare for the work that they have to do in the rehearsal. And spiritually, it just gets you right. And I would say if there is a process for theatre for transformation that Amanda Kemp has, this is it. And it's been my pleasure. And it's something I really hold on to, that whether Amanda is in the room or not, as regards a theatre company, sometimes, you know, Amanda's not there. She's at home grant writing and I'm running rehearsals. I feel charged to make sure that happens. That's cool that it works well for you. It's been great talking to the whole group of you, Amanda, Mary, Vanessa and Dave. I'm sorry the other folks, I didn't get to meet. I really appreciate so much your work. The depth of feeling, insight and spirituality you bring to it, theatre for transformation is a great gift. And I just see you reaching out in larger and larger circles around the world. Thanks to all of you. - You're welcome. It's been a pleasure being here. - You're welcome, and thank you for this opportunity. I enjoy working with Theatre for Transformation. With Amanda, of course, Dave and all the members of our group. This has been a wonderful and a transforming experience for me. - Thank you. - Thank you for having us and happy birthday, Mom. - Yeah. (both laughing) - Having just said goodbye to former members of Theatre for Transformation, again, their website is theatrefortransformation.com with theatre ending in RE, or better yet, just follow the link from northernspiritradio.org. Having said goodbye to them, I want to fulfill my earlier pledge to give you a little taste of one of their other productions, Sister Friend. This is a promo of sorts, which you can see out on YouTube, the Sister Friend Jam Session. It features Amanda Kemp, Vanessa Ballard, and Deborah Billups, who was unable to be with us for today's interview, belting out some music and what looks to me to be a stairwell or hallway at Cumberland College. This is Sister Friend Jam Session. ♪ Are you ready ♪ ♪ Please get ready ♪ ♪ I tell a tale that's not pretty, but real ♪ ♪ Are you ready ♪ ♪ Please get ready ♪ ♪ I bring you tidings ♪ ♪ On letters without seal ♪ ♪ Bill is sweetly asleep ♪ ♪ So lonely in her time ♪ ♪ Oh, but Tana ♪ ♪ Her full slave and a friendship to blind ♪ ♪ Are you ready ♪ ♪ Please get ready ♪ ♪ I tell a tale that's not pretty, but real ♪ ♪ Are you ready ♪ ♪ Please get ready ♪ ♪ I bring you tidings from letters without seal ♪ ♪ Little ones and mean ones ♪ ♪ Last ones and brown ones ♪ ♪ Big ones and tang ones ♪ ♪ Proud ones and sound ones ♪ ♪ Old ones and young ones ♪ ♪ Large ones and round ones ♪ ♪ Old ones and young ones ♪ ♪ Simple ones broke that one ♪ ♪ Please get ready ♪ ♪ I tell I tell for you to hear ♪ ♪ Please get ready ♪ ♪ Up to the girls without parents near ♪ ♪ Please get ready ♪ ♪ I tell I tell for you to hear ♪ ♪ Please get ready ♪ ♪ Up to the girls without parents near ♪ ♪ Please ♪ ♪ Get ready ♪ ♪ Bill is sweetly asleep ♪ She's the melody of her time. Oh, but, Tana, her fell slave and her friendship sublime. You! You! You! Gather! [Music] [Music] The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. [Music] With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing. [MUSIC PLAYING]