WaterTower Theatre associate artistic director Kelsey Leigh Ervi talks with LGBTQ-identified youth at a talkback after “Hit the Wall.” (Photo by Kayla Freeman)
WATERTOWER THEATRE, Addison, Texas
Joanie Schultz became artistic director of WaterTower Theatre in Texas after a long stint as a freelance director in Chicago, including work at Victory Gardens. After 18 months on the job, she feels that the talkbacks she’s instituted are starting to pay off for artists and audiences alike.
The first project she undertook, Ike Holter’s Stonewall-era play Hit the Wall, replaced a previously announced production of Sunday in the Park with George. “We did as much engagement with the LGBTQ community as we possibly could,” Schultz emphasizes. “That was our introduction to community engagement, and discovering ways we could help our plays intersect with all the different communities around us and the things going on in the world.”
The production provided the occasion for panel discussions with “people who could speak about the status of [LGBTQ rights] in that moment, and what was going on in Texas in that struggle. Turns out there was a lot in our state government to be concerned about—a bathroom bill, all kinds of repressive stuff like that coming up.”
Plays like Hit the Wall, with a strong social-justice or timely angle, tend to be an easier starting point for creating parallel programming, Schultz reasons. For Kate Hamill’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, which ran last October, she admits, “It was a little harder. We ended up with a scholar who could talk about rebellious women in literature, and we also had a modern-day matchmaker come in. I got to interview her, and it turned out to be really fascinating.”
Schultz is also aware that asking people with close emotional connections to a story to appear onstage can be tricky. For Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Elliot, a Soldier’s Fugue, which ran in winter 2018, “It was hard to get veterans who wanted to talk about their war experiences. We did end up hearing from one panel of veterans.”
Talkbacks, for many reasons, aren’t always sweetness and light. Schultz recalls one from her time at Victory Gardens during the run of Gardley’s An Issue of Blood, which she calls “a really intense play about black-white relations. A guy in the post-show, an older white man, stood up and started saying all this stuff about how racism doesn’t exist, and white men were getting ostracized—it was one of those moments I felt I didn’t know how to handle. There was a Ph.D student, an African American man, in the audience, and he ended up asking the other guy the right questions. I felt guilty that he was the one to salvage that situation.”
Still, Schultz thinks there is value even in such tense moments. “What we’re asking for is discourse. And we’re not super-good as a society at having discourse and disagreeing with each other. I really want our theatres to be a safe place for dialogue. I think the disagreements can be a kind of training gym, where maybe we can learn to disagree with each other better for the rest of our lives.”