I Am From The 1900's
What six women directors leaders, and makers put on the record in Chicago on March 28.
Photos by Joe Mazza
"I am not emerging. I have been here."
Miranda Gonzalez said that at On Record Chicago, and you could feel the room full of practitioners release something tucked deep.
She is a writer, director, producer, and the producing artistic director of UrbanTheater Company in Humboldt Park. She is a founding ensemble member of Teatro Luna and has been devising original work in Chicago since 2000. On March 28 she said out loud what the field has been too embarrassed to hear.
"I am from the 1900's."
The laughter was loud. The truth landed harder. Every woman in that circle, and a lot of us watching, had been living with the exact same experience: a field that calls you "emerging" when you have been building it the entire time.
Six visionary leaders of varying ages and specialties sat together at The Guild Row for two hours and ran the conversation this field has owed them for decades. Carmen Morgan, executive director of artEquity, held the circle. Jackie Taylor, Lili-Anne Brown, J. Nicole Brooks (who goes by Snooks), Ericka Ratcliff, Roxanna Conner, and Miranda Gonzalez sat in it. Nathalie Thomas opened. I offered the ground. HowlRound livestreamed. It is permanently archived.
Here is what that room taught.
The opening was not the opening
Carmen had a plan. She set it down inside of two minutes. "I wanted to start off with you all just affirming one another. Like nobody else can do as Black women."
The women looked at each other. Then one of them picked up the mic.
"It is really interesting to be friends with your heroes." That was Ericka. "I feel like I have come up in Chicago as an artist and as an actor and have done it arm in arm with you all. I'm just really grateful to be in this space and to talk about what we do and how we have been doing it and how we will continue to do it and have each other's backs while we do it."
Another voice: "I don't exist without you all. The only people that really can fill my cup when I need it are other Black women because it is a very specific filling that needs to happen."
Jackie Taylor took the mic. "If I need a cup of sugar, or if I have a hankering for some grits, or if that bank account is saying, 'no you ain't,' just last night I ran into Weezy at the bar. And she was like, 'what you got?' And she said, 'I got you.' And that was all I needed to hear."
Lili-Anne: "I am a gang mentality kind of person. If you are fighting, I'm fighting. If you say we are going to chill, I'm going to chill. As long as we are doing it together."
By the time it came back around to Carmen, she was crying.
"I've just got to say this practice that was just made public is what happens all the time with Black women, for Black women. What others won't give us, we give to each other and fill each other up. What a gift it is to watch that."
She steadied. "Let me get my facilitation back."
Then she named the 50th year of Black Ensemble Theater and the room clapped. "That is not a small feat. As a Black-led institution, the statistics say the funding gap is 300 percent. White institutions got 300 percent more funding and access to resources than we do. A 50-year legacy and gift to the community. Let that be on the record."
The text thread
Carmen's first real question was about intimacy. What are you texting each other? What is on the thread? What will you share?
The answers were the point.
Snooks said her text thread is about the American theater more than about being a Black woman, because the things she wants as a Black woman are not necessarily theater things. "Sometimes it is hard when everything is put on me as, 'but as a Black woman in the American theater, what are your specific needs?' The things I want as a Black woman are not necessarily theater things."
Ericka shouted out Chicago. "I've lived on the east coast, the west coast, and I'm not dogging anybody, but the community here has always been so strong. We would come out of an audition and be like, 'don't miss out on that one.' 'Wink at that one.' 'If I don't get it, you get it.' That generosity is beyond."
Lili-Anne added: "That is happening in the threads also. Can you pull up. Can you support this. Can you write a recommendation. Can you come over, I want to hang out. That is a balm."
The thread is infrastructure. It is what ensemble practice looks like outside of a rehearsal schedule. Daily discipline of showing up for each other, with no program, no grant line, no payroll.
The glass cliff and what gets felled
Carmen named the next question clearly. "Black women are brought into organizations in crisis. The institution was beleaguered and no one else could deal with it and then Black women are brought in and expected to address all of the impossible issues that nobody else could address. How do we interrupt this?"
Lili-Anne did not flinch. "American theater has a problem. The system is broken. We are trying to solve problems through casting. The same lame galas. The same subscription models that are not working. We saw overcorrection. We saw Black women, whether they were playwrights, managing directors, executive directors, artistic directors, we saw these trees get felled by bullshit."
Snooks added the structural reframe. "The issues I have are the issues that everyone has. As a Black woman that has already been devalued, to have your personhood devalued and then to be in an art form that is devalued, it is really difficult to feel like what you do is valued."
Two reframes at once. The first names what the field does to Black women specifically. The second names the field's larger rot. Both are true at the same time, and that is what makes the glass cliff sit where it sits.
The Gen X bridge that got skipped
This is where Miranda landed the anchor.
"Our generation was literally skipped over as far as panels, leadership, and all of the things. Even though we built a lot of the things. The generation before us sacrificed themselves. They put themselves on the front line to build the things they wanted to build. We came in and we were like, 'OK great, there is double now.' And then all of a sudden, I am by myself. I am siloed."
Then: "You can look at American Theater magazine and see the generation through the last 30 years of their magazines. Where are my friends? Are my friends on there?"
And the line. "No one called me as much as they called me in 2020. No one. I have been in this for 20 years. Then they are like, 'somebody gave me your name.' I have openly been like, I am not emerging. I have been here. I am from the 1900's."
The room laughed and nodded at the same time. Because everyone in it had been told they were emerging, had been asked to mentor without having been mentored, had been called for the first time the year the field panicked.
Snooks inside the same beat: "The nothing came. It looked like strong hands. Never-ending story."
She was joking. She was also dead serious.
What mentorship actually looks like
Ericka offered the reframe that holds this whole problem.
"In terms of the mentorship, we take care of each other. Me being in leadership now is about, I get to look out for who did not look out for me."
Lili-Anne built a whole shadow infrastructure around the same principle.
"My focus now has been heavily on mentorship. I did not have any mentors. Once I really had anything of value, my first thought was, 'how do I make it so the next people do not go through what I went through?'"
Then: "I have just started grabbing up anybody who looks like me. I have not sought to get it accredited or funded because I feel like that is when stuff gets ruined. Real G's move in silence."
She kept going. "I have been slowly and silently creating a cultural shift. It sounds very grandiose but I feel like that is the only way we can do it. To actually believe I can change the world. I can shift the culture. For the nerds, it looks like the Avengers but I'm trying to create SHIELD. A silent network that takes over."
A silent network that takes over. That is what has been happening in Chicago for years. It does not show up on a 990. It does not get reported in a trade publication. It is how Black women have been building a pipeline the field refused to build. And it is why the field's data is wrong about what leadership already exists here.
Roxanna extended it into the academy. "Young Black artists who are women in academia are still not mentored. They are not given what they need. My office is always open. People always know they can come to me. 'Do you have some chips?' Yes, I have some chips. The chips turn into a bigger conversation."
One of the women told a story about being brought a bottle of champagne by a Chicago theater elder on opening night, while she and her friends were drinking Andre. "That is mentorship. It is showing up."
Preciousness is a luxury
Someone asked Lili-Anne how she handles high-pressure technical rehearsals.
"When you come from storefront in a cornfield, you learn to be ready with Plan A through Q. I am very un-precious. I don't really have time for preciousness. I have never been able to afford preciousness and I am disinterested in preciousness. As Black women, generationally, we had all of our work stolen many a time. You learn to have another idea ready. Always."
On pushback from institutions, Jackie was fast. "When you get pushback, you push back. Don't lessen what you believe and how you feel. If that person does not listen, go to somebody else. You have to disrupt. If you don't disrupt, there is no change."
Lili-Anne told a story about directing a play about Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball. She built a lobby installation that segregated the audience entrances. The executive director asked her to take the signs down because sponsors might be offended by a play about segregation having segregated doors. She complied on the signs. The segregated installation still drove the audience conversation every night.
"The thing they tried to make me not talk about, that is the subject of the play. It came out. The conversation continued. There will always be pushback, so you have to push back. Sometimes you have to let them do it to themselves. And they do."
The archive
Someone in the Q&A asked how future generations would remember them. Books? Documentaries? Libraries?
"I guess you all will have to write a book." That was Jackie. Half joke, all truth.
Snooks picked it up. "I truly believe that what we do will be imprinted. Revolution comes from storytelling. Therefore we must win, so we get to tell the story. Some printing press could help get these names into libraries. I want my work to end up in the public libraries."
Lili-Anne: "I want people to come in the room. That is why I always have open rooms. I want somebody to say, 'I was once in her rehearsal and she said a thing that made everybody feel better.' That is how I would like my name to survive."
Miranda was in her body. "Diane Rodriguez died in 2020. I could not be with her but I was able to send a voice memo. I was part of the phone tree. There was a group of us. I think it is important for there to be something for someone to scroll through one day. I look for Diane's speeches everywhere. Just to be near her again."
Then the truth. "Somebody has to figure it out but it is not me. I am busy."
The archive is not theirs to build. They have been building the work. The field has to build the record. This On Record conversation is one piece of it, permanently captured at HowlRound. There need to be a hundred more.
Jackie had already named the whole project in the first ten minutes. "Us getting together here is part of the archiving."
What they need
Carmen closed by asking each of them what they need to keep doing the work. One sentence each. Direct quotes.
Miranda: "Somebody to fund this cohort here in a rest and relaxation, some form of retreat. Flexible space that we can just not worry about money and just make art together."
Snooks: "Health care. Mental health care access. I also need to be OK with living in the moment."
Roxanna: "Retreat space, time, funding. Because I am at a university, I need people to support higher education. The arts are in serious trouble in higher education."
Jackie: "Seventy million dollars. So I can complete 'Free To Be.' I need to be kind to myself. I need to learn how to not work all the time."
Lili-Anne: "Access to the big bucks. The kind of theater you can get points on. Legacy stuff. We have less access to that. I want to be able to do a show or two that I live off of for a long time."
Ericka: "Rest. It is a lot of grant. It is a passion. Rest. That is it."
Retreat. Healthcare. Protection for higher education. Seventy million dollars. Legacy-bearing commercial access. Rest.
This is a budget. It is also a policy agenda. It is the map of what the field has been refusing to fund for the people it has been asking to fix it.
What this was
Six Black women who have been building American theater for a combined two hundred years sat for two hours and named what they know. They are the architects. The field has called them emerging for decades.
The archiving is not theoretical. It is the room. It is the permanent HowlRound record. It is the body of work each of them has already made and the bodies of work they will continue to make. And it is the 175-plus years of experience Carmen named at the top of the circle, worth more than any institution that has ever claimed to steward them.
The field has been waiting for emerging Black women.
They have been here.
They are from the 1900's.
Listen.
In the practice of us,
Alex