Silk Road Theatre Project

I recently heard a playwright of Italian descent describing his cultural heritage in terms of the U.S. discourse about race.  It reminds me that we all exist within the frames of history and of appearance, of inheritance and of choice.  What we claim or ignore, what we seek out in our own histories or appreciate in others’, all fits into this bigger picture.

To honor the big picture, here are two more stories of cross-cultural marriages, sent to us in response to our Yohen conversation:

“I am a Jewish American.  My husband is Welsh and from a Christian-but-not-especially family.  Although there have been some moments of confusion caused by our different backgrounds, like when my then-boyfriend told me on the phone about his favorite jumper and I spent all day imagining him in a dress instead of a sweater, or when we had to explain to my grandmother-in-law what a menorah is, overall it has worked to our advantage.  Our families share NO holidays in common, so there is never an argument about where to go for any of them.  And we think our son will have little trouble distinguishing himself on college applications if he speaks both Welsh and Hebrew.  In general, our family enjoys all of our various cultural foibles.  And in the end, while my husband and I may have originally been attracted by our similarities, it is our differences that have kept us interested.”
-Jemma Levy, wife of Steve Smith

“My grandmother is German and met my grandfather, a US serviceman, right after WWII when he was based in Bremen.  They have a great story - including some interesting things I recently found out regarding her citizenship.  And I have a great classic-looking photo of them embracing on the streets of Bremen….her in total 40s look and him in his uniform….”
-LaRonika Thomas

Thank you, Jemma and LaRonika, for sharing the stories of your families!

Down the street from the Silk Road offices, crews are still taking down the tents in Grant Park.

Regardless of who you voted for on Tuesday, you were part of an historic moment.  Not only did we vote in record numbers, we turned out to share the results in record numbers.  How can I help but share some photos of downtown Chicago?

None of the photos can do justice, though, to our cross-cultural blog topic.  Yet they give some idea of what it feels like to be in a large crowd of people thinking, is this a United Colors of Benetton ad?  No, it’s just Chicago.  Integrated.

I lost track of the combinations of age and color and gender and style around me walking the streets that night.  At some point, it stopped mattering.  But I did overhear a woman in a herringbone coat yelling excitedly into her iPhone, “And there were two lesbians standing in front of me, and in front of them, two Muslims!”

When I told my father how exciting and overwhelming it was to be in city in love with its moment, he told me about another moment that he will now think of as linked to this week: he was in the U.S. Senate observers’ gallery in 1957 at roughly 3am when Strom Thurmond sat down after his 24-hour-and-18-minute filibuster.  As soon as he sat down, they voted to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

And I think, oh right, that takes us right back to the idea of why we do theatre.  Because it’s one thing to look at the big picture, but somehow even more satisfying to hear the individual stories of how humans intersect with each other in time.

Got a story of the week, or of the past to share?

Photo by Guido Alvarez.

Another excellent source for discussions about race: Dawn Turner Trice’s newsblog for the Chicago Tribune.  As she puts it, “We have a moment in history to have a national discussion about race. We should seize it and try to mine it for what it’s worth.”

Siblings. Photo by Steve Gatto.

p.s. In this vein, more notes on 1986:

1986 Academy Award for Best Picture: Out of Africa

(The movie’s a classic, of course–and so is the book by Isak Dinesen.  Talk about complicated colonial relations!)

1986 Song of the Year “We are the World” (Different?  Not so different?  Where do good intentions work, and where do they go awry?)

From 1896, in the Library of Congress. Photo by Bob Bobster.

Meanwhile, at the theater, everyone was busy preparing for the afternoon performance of Yohen. Amanda, our intern-turned-house-manager, put up the welcome signs and tidied up the lobby. In the box office, Amber and Ashley stuffed envelopes of tickets and coupons for guests who would be joining us at the performance. Michelle, the stage manager, flipped through the light cues and turned on all the technical equipment, while Sara, her faithful assistant, set props in Sumi’s kitchen.

It takes about 80 minutes of prep to get a performance of Yohen off the ground. Some shows, such as this spring’s Our Enemies, have taken as long as 2 or 2.5 hours to get set up. The stage manager is the hub of it all, answering questions and helping everyone get organized - including taking calls from anyone who is running late and from the understudies checking in to see if they are needed to go on.

In this picture, Page, the wardrobe supervisor, applies a “bruise” make up effect to actor Ernest Perry. Page is also responsible for Sumi’s “roots showing” hairdo, and all the laundry and ironing that keep the cast looking great!

Even the stage managers need fresh air some times! From left to right - Allie, production manager, Michelle, stage manager, and Sara, assistant stage manager, hanging out in Millennium park between the matinée and evening shows last Saturday.

One lovely answer to our call for blending of cultures photos:

From Carolyn Briones:

“…myself, husband, and our son as a baby. I really love this picture, and ultimately for this project, I feel this photo reflects the beautiful result of two cultures coming together.”

Thanks, Carolyn!

I was nosing around in the theatre last week when my phone rang. It was Lee. He was calling to gently inform me that he had spent way more money than planned on fake foliage. Pause. And there was a very expensive bamboo tree that he wanted. Pause. And if we didn’t want to pay lots of money for the fake one, there was a real one. Pause. But someone would have to water it, and take it out in the sunshine. Fearing the worst for his budget, but also being a bit of a green thumb myself, I agreed to the live plant. Here are the pictures from its arrival at the theater:

Turning the corner at Clark & Washington Note the strategic placement out the sun roof...

A great stage manager once said to me, “I’ve never met a director who liked tech.” In some ways, I agree. I can’t speak for Steve, but I have a love/hate relationship with tech. I love that I get to see all of the elements come together — we begin to introduce scenery, lighting, sound and costumes that help flesh out the world of the play. Actors receive props and costume pieces that help add specificity to the business they do on stage; designers get to see what their work looks like in the space and begin to tweak and adjust their designs as they see fit. But, as a director, I’m inherently a bit of a control freak, and tech is the time that we start to hand the show over to a stage manager, so I kind of hate that (no offense, Michelle!). More time is spent working on transitions and run-throughs, and it becomes harder to spend time working acting notes. I also have many more voices to listen to than I did in the rehearsal room, and some times problems that were easily solved in rehearsal take hours to solve in tech (for reasons that are still a bit unclear to me — maybe just because there are more moving parts?). Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Sunday of tech here in Pierce Main (aka the Silk Road performance space). Jason came in this morning and told us that Chicago got 6.5 inches of rain yesterday and broke a record for the most rain recorded in the city in all of record-keeping. This was about half an hour after Sara and I finished taping garbage bags up over the set to catch the drips coming from the ceiling. There has been a lot of wet socks draped over railings, pants being thrown in the dryer, shoes propped up with the air mover blowing on them during this long weekend. At least it seems that the rain is due to taper off tonight. And then I try to remember how we ever manage to put a show up in February with the snow and ice! Read the rest of this entry »

Last night marked the first official day of tech - my favorite time in the production-creation process! The tech tables have been up since the seating risers were installed, about 2 weeks ago and at 5pm the design team and staff gathered around them to tackle the production as a group. Which is not to say that everyone has not been working on the production for a long time already. Design sketches, models, plots and paperwork have been going around by e-mail and on the production Google group for months already. But much of that pre-tech work is created by one person at a time - the costume designer sketches alone, the sound designer listens to music alone, the prop master shops alone, etc. Tech is the first time that we begin to create with several people working as one team, integrating their ideas on the fly to shape single images that combine music, light, color and shape. It is truly a beautiful thing! Read the rest of this entry »

Yohen takes place in the year 1986.  In 1986, some states still had constitutional bans on interracial marriages, even though the Supreme Court ruled against these bans in 1967. Some judges were still upholding these anti-miscegenation laws as late as 1999. (”Miscegenation,” by the way, dates back to the 1864 presidential campaign, when anti-Lincoln critics feared “mongrelization”–a term that sounds even more racist today.)  The second half of the twentieth century saw, in this country, police bursting into the bedroom of a married couple to arrest them because they were of different races.

(Mildred Jeter Loving and Richard Loving, subjects of Loving v. Virginia)

1986 turned out to be a significant year for conversations on race.  On January 14 of that year, the Supreme Court barred racial bias in trial jury selection.  And, on September 8, 22 years ago this week, national broadcasts began of a new daytime talk show by an African-American woman named Oprah Winfrey.

Now, it seems the world is full of Oprah.  And a quick glance around the media shows us that the world is also full of couples of more than one race.

Michael Caine says it was “love at first sight” when he first saw his now-wife Shakira in Maxwell House commercial.  David Bowie and Iman prove that rock stars and supermodels can stay together for the duration–and Seal and Heidi Klum are chasing their record.  Even a movie critic and a judge can make it work (Roger Ebert and Chaz Hammelsmith).  The list, of course, goes on and on.  Can we learn from celebrities?

Oprah says yes.

(You can read more about the history referenced above at:

http://www.slate.com/id/2193747/pagenum/all/

and

http://www.lovingday.org/loving_story.htm

The full text of the Loving v. Virginia decision, regarding the marriage of the above-mentioned pulled-from-bed Mildred and Richard Loving, is available at

http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/loving.html)