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Compiling a list of Rhode Island’s most influential people in the arts is a daunting challenge and it was a task that we didn’t take lightly. We spent countless hours making phone calls, compiling lists, doing Web searches and interviews. It was our hope that the subsequent list is both exhaustive and representative. Although it was probably impossible not to make some inadvertent omissions, our list certainly includes some names that may not have come to mind. Our desire was to be celebratory, rather than exclusive. These are some of the people who make Rhode Island -- justly known for the arts -- a better place to live, work, and play.
First, however, before we could take on this task, we needed some definitions. What does it mean to be influential?
Webster’s defines it as "powerful" and "effective." Our definition leans more toward the latter. The people we profile in this section, and those we’ve chosen to recognize in our list of the "152 Most Influential People in Rhode Island," are those who influence by effect. They are folks with big jobs to do, and who do them with the purpose of providing a positive influence on Rhode Island. We believe that you can’t truly be influential while having a negative impact. So here’s some attention for those who well deserve it.
BROCHES AND PAGH
You’d think that there would be a lot more clones of Hera Gallery around the country. It was established as the Hera Co-operative Art Gallery in 1974, to circumvent the art museum-commercial gallery establishment’s traditional neglect of women artists. There weren’t more than a half-dozen other such women-run galleries. One, Artemisia Gallery in Chicago, closed this year after three decades of operation, and the overall number has barely increased over the last three decades.
At Hera, roughly half the shows in a given season are by members and half are curated, whether topical, juried or invitational. With the original membership drawn from academically trained artists, most with MFAs, the commitment to serious, quality exhibitions and member artists has been maintained. The Wakefield gallery currently has 15 members. Hera’s walls have also been open to male artists from the beginning, and the gallery now has two male members.
The neglect of women artists at the time of the Hera’s founding can’t be overemphasized. A couple of examples from The History of Hera, written by Valerie Raleigh Yow and published by the gallery in 1989, lend an idea. In one, a gallery owner states, "We already have two women -- can’t use any more." In another, "He holds her slides up to the light, looks at them, munches a Danish, drops crumbs on the slides, and says, ‘No need to put them in a projector.’ "
A member of the gallery from its first months, Alexandra Broches, the president of Hera’s board, has been one of the most active members in recent decades. A former art teacher at Rhode Island College, she now works as a full-time artist. Also instrumental in keeping Hera alive has been printmaker Barbara Pagh, a professor of art at the University of Rhode Island. Surrounded by the work of a recent show, they discussed this New England institution.
Q: Take us back to the beginning, Alexandra. What was the situation with the arts in 1974 that had the original artists looking to establish an artist-run gallery especially for women artists?
Broches: The situation we found ourselves in, in New York and all over the country, was that it was difficult to exhibit our work. We weren’t included in museum collections and exhibitions, and gallery rosters of exhibiting artists. We weren’t taken seriously.
Q: What did Hera initially declare its mission to be?
Broches: It’s pretty much continued to be the same mission from the beginning, and that was to bring opportunities for women to exhibit in Rhode Island, and to bring the work of local, regional, and national artists to southern Rhode Island. To expose the community to women’s art and other artists -- and to bring in poets and performance artists. In those first few years, lots of events went on along with the exhibits.
Q: It came out of a social phenomenon -- Hera developed out of the feminist consciousness-raising of the 1970s?
Broches: There were a couple of consciousness-raising groups here, and artists out of those groups got together. Marlene Malik and Elena Jahn had both talked about their long-term wish to have a gallery, and that’s how it came to be. So I think that we were the seventh women’s art gallery to be formed in those early years, in the ’70s.
Q: Hera has done many invitational exhibitions. So reflecting the art scene at large has been part of your mandate, alongside presenting what member artists have been up to?
Pagh: [We do] trends, things that are happening around the country. We may pick up on a theme, or we might be the first in the country, in some cases. And the chance for member artists to actually curate a show, not only showing their own work, but actually putting together an exhibition. That’s been important.
Q: Barbara, you’ve been deeply involved with Hera for close to 20 years now. What pulled you into committing the time when you could have spent it in your studio making art?
Pagh: I was here for two years, and Sylvia Gutchen kept stopping by my office at URI and saying I had to join Hera [laughs]. Then when I realized that I was going to be staying in Rhode Island, I joined the gallery. I was a little reluctant at first. Yeah, I wasn’t sure I wanted to join a women’s gallery. I was unsure whether I wanted to be in a narrow category.
Broches: I think there are artists who don’t want to join a cooperative, never mind whether it’s a women’s gallery or not.
Q: Preferring to be in a commercial gallery?
Broches: For potential sales. The advantage of exhibiting here is that you’re not under any constraints that you might be in order to make your work salable. You can do just about anything you want. You can make installations and things like that, for instance.
Q: So belonging to a cooperative gallery affects the art that’s produced?
Q: Any organization that relies on volunteer help potentially runs into the problem of just a few people taking on the burden of most of the work. Has that at any point threatened Hera’s continuing?
Broches: Maybe finances more than the lack of people who have the time. I think people are committed to a degree, but don’t have the time anymore. When we started the gallery, our lives were different, the pace of everyone’s life was different, and now people are working full-time or don’t live in the area anymore. Never mind not in Wakefield, but living in Boston -- we have one member in California.
Pagh: There are times when there are fewer people, and we have to make an effort to advertise for new members. All it takes is for one new person to come in and have a fresh idea -- a show that they want to curate, a project that they want to do.
Q: In 1981, Hera had to hold a yard sale to raise money. Did financial problems ever threaten the gallery’s survival?
Broches: A couple of times, it was a little close, yeah. Never to the point of really thinking, we’re going to close.
Pagh: We’ve had a few times. Two years ago, we sent out a special letter in the fall, to supporters in the past, and asked for a special donation. We were a little low.
Q: Was that because grants you had been relying on had dried up?
Broches: Actually, that time, yes. Our relationship to the state arts council changed, in terms of the category we were in, so we were no longer getting general operating support, and were applying for special projects grants. Later, we learned how we could do that better, how to write those grants. That was a difficult period . . . . The thing that got us was that your budget has to be $50,000 a year or more, and we didn’t fall under that.
Pagh: They essentially eliminated the small organization category, of which there were only a few organizations.
Q: So, after 29 years, how much has opportunity for women artists changed?
Pagh: It’s certainly the case today that there are more women in museums and in the Whitney Biennial and shows like that. It’s not 50-50, but certainly there are more.
Broches: Access is still somewhat limited too, but, for example, Ann Hamilton represented the United States at the Venice Biennale.
The future of artists -- whether co-ops or nonprofits? I don’t know where the next wave of artists who want to be involved in this kind of organization will come from. Or if there will be, or how they will want to change these kinds of artist-run spaces. That’s still a question: what direction it’s going to go and where are the artists going to come from who want to be engaged in this way and focus into the community, rather than staying in their studios making their work, hoping that they can be exhibited someplace.
LEN CABRAL
Len Cabral, as he put it, was all "about fun" when he was growing up in North Providence. He played football in high school, went to Germany with the Army, and ran an antiques store on Wickenden Street in the early ’70s. But it was his work with kids at a Fox Point daycare center that tugged at his heart, and by 1977, he was beginning to channel that love into a full-time career as a storyteller. In the mid-’80s, he joined with other Rhode Island storytellers to form the Spellbinders, and in 1989, they founded the Jonnycake Storytelling Festival in South County.
In 1984, Cabral was invited to perform at the Smithsonian’s Discovery Theater for three weeks, for busloads of children from the DC and Baltimore area. Nine years later, he took his stories to Bill Clinton’s first Inaugural, where he shared them with hundreds of families under a tent on the Mall. Cabral has spun tales about crafty spiders ("Anansi"), clever bayou boys ("Wiley and the Hairy Man"), and his own mischievous childhood chums. His repertoire consists of more than 120 stories, with perhaps 70 ready for telling at a moment’s notice.
Cabral travels across the country and the state to present his tales and his knowledge about telling them. His destinations include schools, libraries, theaters, and storytelling and music festivals, including the National Storytelling Festival. This year, he will be one of the featured tellers at the National Black Storytelling Festival, which comes to Providence on November 12 through 16.
Q: How did you get into storytelling as a career?
A: I met a lot of artists through Providence Inner City Arts, including Marilyn Meardon. We formed the Sidewalk Storytellers and started working in inner-city daycare centers. Our very first play, on a nutrition education grant, was "The Mean Queen Would Eat No Green." Eventually, the teachers said, "Do you have anything for the older kids?" [We answered], "Of course, we do -- storytelling and creative writing." So we developed three plays for the older kids about the environment and better treatment of each other, as well as domestic and wild animals. Then we did an anti-smoking play with fourth and fifth graders, and we went wild with that one.
Q: About this time you started doing stories at the libraries around the state, too?
A: Yes, Marilyn, myself, Bill Harley, Marc Levitt, Ramona Bass, Sparky Davis. That’s when we all met each other and started working with one another and honing our skills. Then Bill and I went to the National Storytelling Festival in Tennessee in ’80 or ’81, and we came back and said, "Okay, people are doing this. Let’s go do it."
Q: You still do a lot of your work with kids. Is it hard to sell adults on listening to stories?
A: America has an attention-span problem. People watch TV. For music videos, it’s every two seconds the image changes. Or even if you’re watching movies, the image changes every four, five seconds. So people want short sound bites. Coming to listen to a storyteller is a commitment -- it’s hard work listening. I hand it to children when they sit there and listen for 45, 50 minutes, and not budge, and be so focused and so engaged. A lot of that is because the performer is engaging them. But they’re working. It’s hard work -- the imagery that they’re creating.
When I to go high schools, I know these kids I’m telling stories to have been watching TV every day of their life, playing video games, Game Boys. But yet you sit in front of them to tell them a story and they’re . . . [Cabral’s eyes widen into a mesmerized gaze and his jaw drops]. That’s the power of storytelling and the spoken word -- how we’re connected to humanity, what’s between us. With adults, they want instant gratification. They drive fast, they talk fast. They haven’t allowed themselves to get into a storytelling zone where you’re catching those images and hanging on the words.
Q: Don’t people tell each other stories, in family settings?
A: Parents are often asked to tell a story, and they say, "I can’t think right now. I’ll read one to you." So I ask them a question: "Okay, how many of the people in this room ever got bit by a dog?" Three-quarters of the people in the room raise their hand. Now that’s a story. "How many of you almost got bit by a dog, but you ran fast enough so that you didn’t get bit? That’s a story with a happy ending!" They laugh and nod. "How many have ever stepped on a nail? Slammed the car door on your own finger? How many ever cut yourself and had to go to the hospital to get stitches?"
If I do this in a high school, three-quarters of the kids raise their hands. "How many got stitches?" Half of them. "How many didn’t get stitches but probably should have?" The other half. That’s called a scar story. When I work with adults, I ask them, "Scars? Tonight, if your kid asks you to tell them a story, tell them how you got this [points to scar near his elbow]."
Q: What happens when people no longer tell each other stories?
A: This is the generation that has the earphones on, sitting at a computer. There’s no dialogue going on. And then you can see the disconnect in society. You see cruel things happen and you say, "How could they do that?" Somebody takes advantage of an old woman. My gosh, didn’t you have a grandmother? They don’t hear enough grandmother stories. It’s important to listen to elders, because the elders have the stories. My grandparents used to tell us about the Depression. They [kids today] can read about it in a book, but it’s so different when they can learn first-hand about it.
Q: What about your telling of traditional tales? When did that happen?
A: Right from the very beginning. When I started getting into storytelling, I started reading a lot of folktales from West Africa and the Caribbean. Then I had stories that came from Cape Verde -- I’d heard those from family and friends in the family. I started telling a lot of those. Folk tales from other cultures. I grew up in a community that was very diverse. A lot of Armenians, a lot of Bulgarians, Italians, Portuguese, Cape Verdeans, a French family. Pretty well mixed. And they all came from the old country. All of my friends, either their parents or their grandparents, came from the old country. Now I was about 15 years old, and I still thought the old country was a place where all these "old" people came from.
Q: What kind of Cape Verdean stories did you hear?
A: Here’s one that came down in the family. My mother’s mother was a midwife in Cape Verde. Someone knocked on her door and said, "Come." She followed her right down to the ocean. She took her under the water and she was able to breathe. She helped a mermaid give birth. After she was done, they took her back to the shore and gave her something. My mother said it was like cow shit or she thought it was. They said, "Don’t open it until you get home." But as she walked home, she threw it away. Later she realized it was treasure, it was gold, it was good fortune. My mother said, "That’s why we’ve always been working so hard."
Q: Did you always love words and reading?
A: In high school, I was a real jock. I played football. I spent more time in the gym and the locker room than I did in the library. But my English teacher made us read aloud and made us recite Macbeth. It was like the best thing [his voice gets intense], and I’d take it to the football field, and I’d quote Macbeth. I’d play linebacker and my buddy was playing defensive end. And we’d say, "Would that you had done this?", or, "Never shake thy gory locks at me."
Q: What separates storytelling from theater?
A: Theater is that you have that fourth wall [turns sideways to separate himself]. I’m doing this and you’re observing. Storytelling -- I need the listeners and their energy. You affect my story by the way you go "Mmmmm," or start breathing in unison. With theater, you don’t affect it. In storytelling, we form a circle [Cabral spreads his arms in a huge arc] and we’re sharing.
Q: So, stories are important to us all.
A: Absolutely. I feel blessed to have the opportunity to make my living doing something I love doing. I feel it’s so important that we look into children’s eyes and talk to them. When I’m telling stories and I’m doing a 45-minute performance, I can look, and I should look, into every child’s eyes in that room a few times. I might be the only adult that day that looks them in the eye and doesn’t bark orders at them.
Q: What’s your favorite story?
A: The one I just told, or the one I’m gonna tell next.
PAUL GEREMIA
Paul Geremia is more than an extraordinary country blues musician. He plays mean 12-string and six-string guitars, the harmonica, the piano, and his voice is crystal-clear and earthy at the same time. But since he was 19, he’s also been digging deep into the authentic blues, searching out the last of the old-time musicians, unearthing their records to unlock the secrets of their styles and techniques. At 59, Geremia still takes to the road in his over-the-hill car, discovering and learning, while continuing to write his own music and performing with an energy and style unique among musicians in or out of the blues.
Q: I’ve read that you’ve have been playing the blues since you heard Mississippi John Hurt at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival?
A: John Hurt really knocked me out. Well, he was playing, he was finger picking and just his whole way about him, the whole aura -- he had a lot of charisma, in his own way -- and I just sensed there was something that was really a great deal of depth there, and it really caught my imagination.
Q: I know this is a hard question to ask, because it is so simplistic, but what was it about those blues and that style that drew you to it?
A: That’s a good question. I don’t really know. It has to do a lot with rhythm. If you listen to someone Charlie Patton, Son House or Skip James . . . you realize that they are playing real clean, and the intervals they are playing on the guitar are, they are specific -- it’s almost like piano music. Whereas a lot of interpreters [are] sort of glancing over something, giving a rough idea of what it sounds like, they are not getting the real melodies, not accenting the notes in a way that distinguished one musician from another.
Q: Why were you so taken with the early blues musicians?
A: I realized that what I was listening to was the Rosetta Stone, so to speak, you know. And that if I was going to do anything with that music, I had to be able to get that; I had to be able to translate that musical lingo, and to make it part of my own thing. And so when I would hear something that I didn’t understand, that I couldn’t quite get it, it would be a challenge to figure it out.
Q: Tony Lioce, in a 1982 Providence Journal article, described your life on the road: crashing at friends’ apartment, driving an old Dodge that drank oil as often as it did gas, not having the cash to get a guitar fixed. Is the life of a troubadour still hard?
A: Yeah, I still have to be careful about how I manage my finances. I have to get by on a small amount of money. But I’m working, I’m working a lot more. Of course, the cost of living has gone up at the same time that my income has gone up, so I really feel as though I’ve just been treading water.
Q: How many live performances do you do a year?
A: You know, I really don’t know. Looking at a calendar, I gotta work enough to cover my rent, so forth. I figure if I work every week, that’s 50 some weeks. I think I probably do anything from 150 to 200 a year, something like that.
Q: What are you driving these days?
A: I’ve got a ’71 Nova now. See what I mean? I’m still treading water.
Q: Where do you live -- Newport?
A: Yeah, I live in Newport.
Q: And what keeps you coming back? I mean, you’ve been all over the world.
A: Well, what happened, about 1990, I got married, and then I got divorced a few years later. And I didn’t have any money to move anywhere else. So I answered an ad for a furnished room, which turned out to be a nice converted space, a converted garage kind of space and a place on Ocean Drive. So it turned out to be lucky, and it was affordable for me.
Q: Can you actually see the ocean from where you are?
A: No. Almost. It’s out on Brenton Point . . . . I live with a woman who I met in Texas, who just moved up with me, and we are both living in this space that is probably designed for one person, but we are making it work. She just took her cat to the vet. The cat adjusted pretty well. He’s raising hell with the rodent population, which is fine with me.
Q: You do both what you call traditional country blues and your own songs, some of them topical. What are you thinking about these days?
A: I just finished a new CD, and one of the new songs is a rewrite of the old song, "Bully of the Town." I mean it to deal with our government’s abuse of the Posse Comitatus law of 1878 [which prohibits use of the military in civilian law enforcement], but it’s definitely aimed at the Bushites . . . . I’ve gotta another one called "Evil World Blues," which is also about homelessness and the illogical -- the lack of logic implied with us going to war in a situation like this. I’ve been critical of Bush from the very beginning.
Q: What’s the name of the new record?
A: The name of the record? I’m not sure. I think I might call it Love, Murder, and Mosquitoes . . . . It’s not going to be out until the end of the year, unfortunately.
Q: How do you keep this incredible schedule? I can see doing it in your 20s and 30s, but this is a huge pace.
A: Well, I’m still interested. Now I don’t look up old musicians when I’m traveling, because there’s hardly anyone to look up, anymore. But I do find old records in junk stores. I’m still learning material I didn’t know existed.
Q: Many of the people you talk about -- Blind John Davis, Pink Anderson, Blind Lemon Jefferson -- these guys are gone. But are they are sort of living through you?
A: Well, in a way, I guess maybe that’s true. As long as I can still hear the music, I’ll be inspired by it, and I’ll be learning from it. I can hear a record and tell you what key that it is in and probably figure out how to play it in a few minutes. I’ve had to be able to learn how to do that, whether it’s with a guitar or a piano . . . . The piano has a lot to do with sustaining my level of absorption, I guess you might say, because I’m a rudimentary piano player compared to a lot of other people.
Q: Boy, it doesn’t sound that way.
A: Well, thank you, but I really have a lot to learn on the piano, so I’m always listening real hard. I never get bored. I never get bored listening to music that I like. There’s always stuff that -- I’m always able to find stuff that turns me on or is a challenge to me to try to learn, and I really want to learn it.
Q: Are there new Paul Geremias, young people as inspired by the music as you were?
A: Well, yeah, I’ve been running into some people. There’s a kid who plays here [at Billy Goode’s in Newport] sometimes. I think he’s from, I’m not sure where he’s from, to tell you the truth. But he plays here, and apparently he knows a lot of my stuff, and I don’t even know him. But I’ve always run into people on the road, who do opening shows for me and so forth, who really surprise the hell out of me, even in Germany. When I was in Germany, I ran into guitar player -- a singer and songwriter -- who does his own stuff, but is also doing my material, and who has been playing it exactly the way I did. And some of that stuff is not easy to pick up, I know that. So this gives you a feeling of satisfaction. And so there’s a few, not a whole lot, but there’s a few.
Q:Can the music continue?
A: Oh sure, I think so, oh yeah, I think so. I don’t see why it can’t. I mean, the only thing that’s going to prevent it would be a continued destruction of live music venues, which are -- they are hanging on by a thread in a lot of cases. I just read in the Times where the Bottom Line is in tough shape in New York City -- they may be closing. But as long as there are outlets for people to play live music, I think it stands a good chance. It’s hard to know what the future holds. But barring that, there are still recordings that people can listen to, and there is always the occasional individual who has the knack for picking stuff up and playing it. I realize, though, it does make me feel old sometimes [laughs].
Q: You play in a lot of loud bars and places, people talking all the time, not listening closely to the music -- it’s not exactly church-like. Does that drive you crazy?
A: I think if you are going to play in bars, it’s something you have to contend with. You either deal with it or you don’t do it. I prefer not to have to deal with it, but I have to work, [and] I can’t eliminate all those places from my schedule. I do play more places where they listen more. But I think it’s good training to deal with that. If you can do a good show under those circumstances, it will probably stand you in good stead when you get in front of a concert audience.
Q: You grew up and learned your music and songwriting in an idealistic time. Many of us at the time thought music would change the world. Did you think so?
A: No, no, I didn’t think that. I thought it was very naïve, very naïve way to think, but I did feel as though playing music -- I don’t know -- I felt that it could help, that the music could definitely help . . . and writing songs which inform the public and express views which are contrary to what are looked upon as being immoral, or whatever, is a fine thing. But I didn’t think it was going to change the world. I thought the political activities of the 1960s could change -- make a big change -- and it did make a big change. I was really disappointed that things didn’t turn out a little bit better than they did.
Q: You’ve written how many songs?
A: I don’t really know.
Q: Do you have a favorite?
A: It’s usually the most recent one is the one that goes through my head. I’ve only got four originals on the new CD, but I like them a lot. And I’m not really too concerned how many songs I write. I’m more concerned about whether or not what I’m writing is quality stuff. Although I may not be writing as many songs as I did years ago, I think the stuff I’m writing is better quality. I know the music is more together, and the recordings that I’ve made of that stuff, I think, is probably better than I would have done back in those days.
DOROTHY JUNGELS
Dorothy Jungels, founder of Everett Dance Theatre (1986) and the Carriage House School and Stage (1993), has tackled some pretty unusual topics for a choreographer. She has created dances based on newspaper headlines; education and race; Newton’s laws of motion; the work that people do and what it means to them; and even humankind’s experiments with flight. In the process, she has collaborated with performers trained in drumming, clowning, new vaudeville, voice, mime, acting, filmmaking, and all kinds of dance. The five evening-length pieces that grew out of her vision have garnered rave reviews from New York critics, a "Bessies" Award for dance performance, and a loyal following in Rhode Island.
Jungels has managed to stay very involved with her sizable family (five children, 10 grandchildren) throughout her creative career -- a situation borne out by how one of her grandsons, skateboard in hand, dropped by for a hug during our interview. Her two youngest children, Aaron and Rachael, have always been members of Everett. Several of her grandchildren took part in recent pieces presented at the Carriage House. Her nephews performed last spring in collaboration with Everett, and the theater’s newest piece, Home Movies (premiering this fall), takes a close look at what families and home mean to people.
The Carriage House, as school and as performance space, has also filled a niche in the Mount Hope neighborhood and the dance community. The Carriage House has sponsored break dance open houses, poetry slams, and video nights to draw in local talent, and it has organized a spring performance series to highlight national and local dance and performance artists.
Q: How did you get interested in dance?
A: I just always loved dance and I took a little ballet when I was a teenager, but when I went off to college, though it was always my love, there was never anything available. So I studied art -- that was my second love. My husband and I were high school sweethearts, and we shared a deep love of art.
Q: After a friend invited your husband to come to RISD, and you were at home with five children, how did you get back to dance?
A: I started taking ballet twice a week -- that was my little activity. I was a full-time mother for quite a while, but Gene Kelly had been one of my heroes. I suppose what made me love dance, and even ballet, was that Gene Kelly said that ballet was so hard to do. But I also loved tap dancing, and my only experience in performance came about with Brian Jones, as part of the All-Tap Revue. When I left my job as a housewife, I worked in the Art and Aging program for RISCA [the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts]. As an artist, it was surprising to get hired to do that. I was sent to East St. Louis, where Katherine Dunham was teaching an aging program. I spent a week there, with perhaps a couple of classes about the elderly, but mainly I took Dunham’s classes and experienced all the drumming and all that wonderful African dance.
Q: How did you translate that to what you were doing back in Rhode Island?
A: I started working with drummer John Belcher, because Dunham worked with a drummer, and I’d gotten the exercises for the elderly from her. And with John, we took music and dance to any place you could imagine: elderly [housing], meal sites, the children’s hospital, Ladd School, locked wards at the IMH, the women’s prison. We had no preparation about some of this stuff, but it was very broadening for becoming an artist. You ask yourself, "What is art? What is it when I’m a child hooked up to IVs? When I’m in a locked ward? How do you make the connection?" That was certainly a base for everything else that came.
Q: When did you start creating your own dances?
A: John and I started teaching a dance class at RISD, and you know what they say about teaching: "You use up your material after the first six months, and after that you’re making it up." I guess that’s how choreography happens. You start playing and coming up with ideas. He was a great partner, and we really investigated performance, and imagination, and what can happen on stage. What can you get performers to do? The RISD classes were our first company, you could say -- the choreography and the shows we did there.
Q: How did your own company come about?
A: We were invited by a student at RIC to do something for the showcase there. So it was John and myself, and Aaron and Rachael. Aaron had been going to the Trinity Rep Conservatory and Rachael was still in Juilliard, and it was our first experiment, doing this little family show. John’s ideas and mine would overlap and we collaboratively came up with this piece. After the show, someone said, "You could be a company." Then I spent about six months living in New York, and I made a piece with Rachael and her fellow students at Juilliard. So I submitted the two pieces for a choreographer’s grant from the state. When I got that award, that was fate, I thought. Why go to college and try to get a degree in dance of some sort? Maybe this was a sign that I could do something.
Q: Where did you go from there?
A: We auditioned for Dance Theater Workshop in New York, and lo and behold, we got in. Executive director David White liked our piece, and he liked us and we got our break and almost right after that, we got to do Flight at his theater, our own whole evening. So, it was just falling out of the sky. What are the chances of those kind of lucky breaks? So, then we premiered all our work at DTW. Everything got its first reviews there. It was easier there. The climate here was still hard for dance companies -- to get the attention or even get people used to reviewing dance. So it was ironic that we should premiere in New York, but when you have some New York reviews, it gives you more validation at home.
Q: How did the Carriage House come about?
A: DTW had a very big influence on us. It was the concept that theater could be small. In fact, that small is beautiful. DTW has 90 seats and every great reviewer came to that theater. And they honored these little theaters because often those are the laboratories for new ideas.
That was inspiring to me, that these new ideas could take place, and people could look at them, and think about it, and write about it. Back home, the small theater scene was just happening, and they were getting their reviews.
We had a meeting of dancers one time and I always remember Paula Hunter saying, "Theater has an address; dance doesn’t have an address. We need an address." What’s different than a play is that all the dance companies are doing original work, and it takes them a long time -- they can’t keep season after season going like a theater does. They get their plays, they work six weeks, and they have a new show up. But for a dance company, it doesn’t work that way.
Q: Once you’d found this place, did other companies come here to perform?
A: Yes, I think every dance company in the state has performed here. People cut their teeth here. I remember when we opened it up, [former Providence Journal arts writer] Bill Gale said, "Yeah, you can open it, but will anyone come?" Because it’s off the beaten track. But they did, and it was wonderful.
Q: How did you get neighborhood kids to come to classes at the school?
A: Well, you know, they didn’t. I was very surprised. I just expected every kid on the block to be over here, and what really happened was what I called the all-city band. We were about the first to have an "open house" for break dancing, and people were coming from all over the city to dance here. In the beginning and when it was hitting its second wave, there’d be 70 kids in there and you’d have the best dancers in the state. It was a show every time. I sat through everything. Talk about dedication. These kids would dance five hours a day to get some of those power moves and skills and style.
Q: A lot of people talk about diversity in the arts, and this is one of the places where it really happened. Why do you think that was?
A: I’ve been thinking about this lately, and I think it stems from my own desire for wholeness. And if you think about the parts of the body and their particular connection to an ethnicity, you might think of the tongue as French, for example, and the feet as African. For a dancer, you have to have that connection to the beat, which comes from Africa. It expands you. Imagine if you were a piano player, and you could only play the white keys, or a painter with only a few spices?
Q: Where are you headed with the new piece, Home Movies?
A: We were extremely inspired by Aaron’s last piece -- the two stories about his nephew, Silas -- and we are doing a few stories based on that. The ongoing saga of Marvin’s family, pieces about Bravell’s father, Sokeo’s parents, and Rachael and Aaron’s home. So the local color is fun, with the East Side, the South Side, the West End, and Cranston represented. We even feature the houses. There’s some music by Louis Armstrong, some dance, some comedy. That’s always been a rule -- we’ve always been attracted to people who are funny. I can’t believe that I’m working on another one. And it’s as much fun and as much discovery as there ever was.
BEN MCOSKER
With his thick-framed glasses, black jeans, Black Sabbath T-shirt, whimsical humor, and plans for an imminent road trip to San Francisco, Ben McOsker seemed like an archetypal indie rocker during a recent interview. But it’s on the other side of the business -- as an energetic promoter of the local musical underground -- that the 35-year-old West Warwick native has made his mark. Self-effacing enough to sometimes describe himself as the janitor of Load Records (www.loadrecords. com), McOsker has struck the balance right in helping to preserve the anti-commercial worldview of some of Providence’s most creative bands while also bringing their sounds to the wider world.
It seems a happy calling for McOsker, who launched his record label in 1993 while snagging a master’s in library science at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and his partner, Laura Mullen, another active supporter of the local arts scene. Operating from their CD-and-vinyl-laden home on Providence’s West Side, the couple has helped to rally support for bands like Lightning Bolt, Arab on Radar, and Forcefield, whose distinctive aesthetic -- a fair emblem of the idiosyncrasy of Load’s acts -- was aptly described by pitchforkmedia.com as "a cryptic combination of urban paranoia, suburban acid damage, and Sid and Marty Krofft."
Q: How would you describe the state of the Providence music scene these days?
A: It’s really diverse -- a lot of people doing a lot of things. There’s definitely various people over here on the West Side doing things, there’s clubs downtown, there’s just a lot going on. I think it’s an exciting time. People are recognizing it on a national level. It’s good. I’m very excited, so I think it’s a pretty vibrant scene.
Q: How did you start your label and what was it like starting it?
A: I’d started it on a whim. I wanted to put out music because I did not feel it was being put out -- bands, while I was living in New Jersey, that had come down [from Providence] to New York to play. I continued to come up to Rhode Island almost every weekend. [I] had just wanted to contribute to putting out music, and got involved in a few local compilations. So I always really tried to focus on the community of Providence and surrounding area.
Q: What did you hope to accomplish when you started the label?
A: I don’t think I really, when I first started, knew what I was getting into, didn’t really have a grandiose goal with it. It started with [records that were] seven inches. My first full-length was a seven-inch I’d done by Von Ryan Express. The band broke up and reformed to be Thee Hydrogen Terrors; did that as my first full-length. [I] had always for whatever reason began to identify myself as yes, I have a record label, and continued to do that. [I] later did another compilation, called The Repopulation Program. [I] always felt that there was a lot to give around here in terms of what people were doing musically, and felt I could put this compilation out, and, you know, people could be very excited and it would keep things moving.
I started booking shows around that time. So I was just trying to help out, create an atmosphere of collaboration, fun, people putting on shows, all the things that I think music should include. It should be fun, and there should be places to play shows, and records should come out -- all the things that you can usually identify as a scene -- those are the key elements.
Q: You were a graduate student when you started the label, and graduate students often don’t have a lot of money. How did you go about doing it?
A: That was about 1993. We were coming out of Bush the first’s recession. By the time I graduated, I had been working in Nutley, New Jersey, at Hoffman-LaRoche, doing vitamin research. Basically, it was a Swiss company that did a lot of wholesale vitamin manufacture, and I was doing cataloguing of vitamin information. I had worked in a lot of special/technical libraries at that point. I had worked in the peanut butter library over at Skippy; I had worked over at Tums library over at SmithKline Beecham.
Q: How did you choose what you were going to release, and in what form and quantity?
A: I had been focusing, pretty much primarily, on my friends, as most people do, and people I went to Providence College with, essentially. It included people from Six Finger Satellite; later, Boss Fuel was my first seven-inch. The Von Ryan Express, which later mutated into Thee Hydrogen Terrors.
Q: How would you say the Providence music scene has changed in the 10 years since you started the label?
A: I think there has always been a somewhat freewheeling attitude here in Providence, for good. There were shows over at the Renegade Gallery, which was over at the Atlantic Mills. There was the Terrorstock Festival that happened there. I believe that was 1995, ’96. I had done some shows over there. After Thee Hydrogen Terrors, I started to take some more chances, putting out records by Six Finger Satellite and the Scissor Girls, both relatively abrasive acts. Scissor Girls being from the Midwest, out of Chicago. [I] had really decided I needed to start an aesthetic that was more closely in line with the way I thought; to try to include local bands in that as well.
There was an angularity to the music that I identified with, and concurrently there was a number of other bands in town, coming from a variety of disciplines, doing a lot of similar things, like Drop Dead, longtime political hardcore band. And, you know, here we are. It’s just the net gets cast wider and wider, and I think a lot more people have been included. It’s good. I can’t say I represent everybody, but I represent a lot of somebodies.
Q: How many different bands are with Load now?
A: That is a good question. I’ve had 58 releases as of, it’s going to be November, including now two DVDs and one that’s been out for awhile.
Q: How would you describe the aesthetic of your label or what you look for in a band?
A: I think fun, just fun. That’s what I’m going for, yeah. I probably should have something a little bit more developed for that. But I have a sense of humor; I expect music to have a sense of humor, not necessarily in the same way as "Weird Al" Yankovic or anything like that, but I think music should be fun. There should be quality to it -- try to record and spend enough money so that it sounds good, no matter where it’s coming from.
Q: It seems like a lot of the more interesting stuff in Providence music these days goes on kind of beneath the radar. How would you describe the advantages and disadvantages of that?
A: Well, a disadvantage that I see -- a perception, but not necessarily a reality -- is an exclusive nature to it: You know, you can’t find out about it, it’s in this weird section of town, and it’s going to be tough to find it. That is not necessarily true. If you just go down to Olneyville on any given weekend, there’s just tons and tons of things happening. Of course, I’m really, really protective and paranoid about any mention of it and anything that you can do to preserve that -- just because of Fort Thunder being a very good example of things that can happen with attention. Towards the end, a Providence Journal article really brought the fire inspector calling. Whether that was right or wrong in light of recent events [like the Station fire] is definitely still valid. Fire inspectors -- they’re necessary. And nothing happened, but who knows? That’s a potential negative I can see.
On the positives, it’s a completely unjuried [scene], but on the same token, it attracts a certain caliber. You know, people from all around the country come and are really excited to play Olneyville. Dirty concrete rooms, barely PAs, and people are like, it’s their dream come true. They’ve been sitting in San Jose, California, or wherever they’re from, just thinking about playing with some goofy band with masks on, and it really pumps up their imagination, or just not even. [It’s] just like music without rules and they think it’s some free land here. And it is. It is, for a lot of that.
Q: Lightning Bolt is one of the best-known bands on your label. They’ve gotten some really positive press in establishment newspapers like the New York Times. Why do you think they’ve struck such a chord and gotten that kind of attention?
A: It’s somewhat confounding to me. Why they have? I think there’s definitely a certain quality to the music that is both a) a classic rock kind of sound, and [b] a completely off-the-rails take on it to just crazy music. It’s rhythmically based, so I think it’s easy enough for people to understand, but on the same token, it’s somewhat extreme. I can’t say I don’t try to garner press. It’s a large concern of the label, and any labels -- promote your records. And I’m not going to say I’ve made no effort; I make a constant effort to try to get people to enjoy Lightning Bolt, enjoy all the other bands. You know, I have a Pitney Bowes [postage] machine over there. I have an active relationship with all the postal workers at the downtown postal station.
There’s been a lot of international press, from like, [the music magazine] the Wire and [radio host] John Peel over in the UK, and lots of magazines I can’t read, because I can’t speak Portuguese, or all these other international magazines. It’s been gratifying on a lot of levels.
Q: You described how there’s this tension between the underground scene and concern about the scene being jeopardized if the authorities get too concerned about shows going on in certain areas. Is the scene accessible enough for newcomers to latch on?
A: Yeah, there’s a local music Web site that’s pretty well known, that I don’t even feel I could mention. I’m sorry about my own level of paranoia about this. I don’t want to be the guy that brings the curtain down. It’s a concern of mine. I’m an enthusiastic participant. I don’t play music myself, but I enjoy the atmosphere that’s happened because of it. I don’t book shows anymore, but I did for years. A lot of people have stepped up to the plate. There are so many different players in a music community. There’s people that put together shows, there’s people that do flyers, there’s people that play music, there’s people that work doors, people that have technical expertise that can help out. There’s just so many different people that help out. It makes it pretty exciting.
ED SHEAH
After a wide-ranging career as an actor --12 years at the Trinity Repertory Company, a stint off-Broadway in New York City, a role in a Hollywood sitcom (the name of which slips his memory) -- Ed Shea is back where he began: running a tiny theater over a restaurant. At age 19, after graduating from Portsmouth High School, Shea co-founded the 2nd Story Theatre, first above a Newport restaurant, and later in a Providence school basement. Now 45, Shea has resurrected 2nd Story, this time in Warren. But now, 2nd Story owns its building, including the restaurant below, The Downstairs, which Shea hopes will help make the 100-seat upstairs space more viable both as a training center for actors and a place for intimate, innovative theater.
Q: How did you come to the third incarnation of 2nd story and why?
A: I spent a year [in Los Angeles] smoking and drinking coffee and reading about books about acting . . . And I was reading about [Lee] Strasberg [of The Actors Studio]. I specifically remember the night, on my fifteenth cigarette or something, I said to myself . . . wouldn’t it have been nice to be part of that kind of studio, starting something like that. And I said: " I can start one. " And I was also keenly aware that what we did at 2nd Story in Newport was never duplicated in this state . . . and I said: " That’s my mission, that’s what I’m supposed to do. " So I came back.
Q: So how did you find this theater? You had been to Paris, New York, to LA, and then to Warren. Isn’t Warren an in-between place, like Middletown or North Smithfield?
A: It was a complete fluke. I’ve always liked Warren. I grew up in Portsmouth, but I’ve always thought this was a really kind of funky town. A lot of towns, like the ones you’ve just mentioned, I’m not sure theater would go -- one goes here. You know, there’s something gritty about this town, it’s an urban feel to this town. I love this place, there’s something just a little bit kind of screwy, it’s unprecious . . .
I talked to Alan Crisman, who is director of economic development around here, and he set up this first meeting with Ernie Mayo, who owned the place . . . . Ernie Mayo really didn’t want to be there, you know . . . he didn’t want to open it up. But he got up there, up the backstairs, one set of keys, it was like Shakespeare, the gatekeeper in Macbeth: Open the door, and go in and look around, and I was amazed -- this space is huge. I said: " Well, how much would the rent be? He said: " How about six months free? "
Q: You didn’t really have much money to start up?
A: No, I had to use the credit card. There was a little bit of money left in the 2nd Story’s Theatre’s account, because Pat [Hegnauer, a co-founder of the original theater] had done a couple of things with 2nd Story over the years, too, so there was a little bit -- I think there was like 4000 bucks in there or something.
Q: Who are the actors?
A: We’ve got people who have always wanted to do this and never did it. One of the things I love about that place is that any given time I’ve got -- one of my favorite actors here is a psychiatrist from the staff of Rhode Island Hospital -- I’ve got glassblowers, jewelry makers, I’ve got social workers, teachers, dentists, you know, and it’s people who bring a lot of different experience to the table.
Q: Do they get paid?
A: Well, it’s all volunteer at this point. But that’s going to change next fall . . . . They won’t ever get a living wage -- a living wage is relative anyway -- but they will get some kind of stipend, so it doesn’t cost them anything to do a production. Because right now, you have to pay a babysitter, and transportation, you know, it’s a day off now here or there, when we have to pull something together during the day. I am paid and Lynne [Collinson] is paid as the general manager right now. And if I get somebody in there to do some carpentry or something like that. But as far as actors go, no . . .
I am not taking a bunch of actors, who act in different styles, and putting them on stage together for a little while. These are people who all are beginning to think one way and believe one way of acting. It’s more like a church sometimes, that place, than it is like a theater. It’s a place where people share a common experience, care about each other, nurture each other’s growth, are there for each other in personal ways and professional ways.
Q: Why did you start off, three years ago, with series of one-act plays called Short Attention Span Theatre?
A: It has helped to build an audience that I have always wanted. The dream of a popular theater has been an elusive dream to a lot of artistic directors, [the idea of] a place that all differences classes and backgrounds can come in. And the Short Attention Span did that. It’s kind of a great leveler, in that its irreverence and its kind of nod to the fact that theater can be a little too pretentious, precious, academic, rigid. [It] appeals to both people who never go to the theater, and people who always go to the theater.
Q: But it’s not the Boston Pops or Theater Lite?
A: No, it’s not at all. And a lot of it is by playwrights -- it’s really serious stuff. But I never do an all-serious night. I’ve done all-funny nights. But even the funny stuff can be pretty heady or meaningful. There are so many advantages for Short Attention Span Theatre. One is that you always walk away liking a couple of them: " I didn’t like that one. That one was too long. " Part of the conversation afterwards is, " Which one did you like? "
Q: But now you are starting full-length plays?
A: I’m going in the direction that people want, you know. I heard grumblings of people wanting full-length plays . . . the board of directors wanted to do it, the actors wanted to do it, so last year I did Lady Windermere’s Fan, Death of a Salesman, Betty’s Summer Vacation. The feeling still exists in the room of irreverence, and relaxedness, and lack of an academic approach. And those people who would never go -- those people are starting to come to see full length-plays now . . . . We’ll get people to come see Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance that would never have come to see it.
Q: Why did you want to open your own restaurant downstairs?
A: I want the restaurant to make more money than the theater, because I want it to carry the burden of supporting that building. And if it does, I’m going to be able to put some money . . . into productions, the growth of the art, and provide money to pay actors.
Q: The restaurant will pay the building costs, the mortgage?
A: Hopefully, it will. Whatever the restaurant pays will support that building. And if it does start to make great profit, it will go into restoring the building . . . and eventually, if it does, so that it gets more money from it, that’s all the better, because then I can also keep the ticket prices low.
Q: How many seats do you have in the theater?
A: We cover about 100.
Q: How many performances are sold out?
A: Again, it depends on the play . . . . In the summer it’s different. The winter is a better time for us, the fall and the winter. The summer -- it’s because we are not air-conditioned. If we were air-conditioned, we’d be sold out all the time. We are working toward that. It’s still very good . . . . I think we can safely say we’ve been operating at 85 percent capacity, which is huge.
Q: Why should you have small theaters, when you can have a stadium, Trinity Rep, or something on DVD? What’s the point?
A: The point is that the experience of theater, in an intimate environment like that, you can’t get at Trinity, you can’t get at PPAC [the Providence Performing Arts Center] . . . The limited number of people adds something to it. It’s something to the whole ephemerality -- the whole kind of specialness of the experience -- to have it that small.
If you look around that room . . . the way it’s set up, you do, by the end of two hours, know somebody across the room. You’ve watched somebody who spent his life in business wipe a tear out of his eye at Death of Salesman, and you are moved by that, and you know him, as a result of that. You are not sitting and looking at the back of his head. He’s a part of the experience.
Q: Do you direct the plays?
A: All of them. Pat’s directed a couple of short plays last summer. But since I’ve started this, I’ve directed 81 one-acts and, I think, four [or] five-full length plays.
Q: In a previous interview, you said you produce so you could continue acting. Don’t you miss acting now?
A: Once I mastered the craft of acting, I could continue to do it in a masterful way, or I can teach what I learned. And it was my duty, because I am a teacher by nature . . . it’s where my focus is now . . . . I don’t ask people to act the way that I would act in a play. I get them to act the way that they would, to bring as much of themselves to the role as possible . . . and delight in watching them do things that are totally unique to them and I could never do.
Q: So when you were sitting out in LA, did you imagine in short period of time you’d have a theater running at 85 percent capacity, with a restaurant below?
A: I didn’t figure any of this. And I won’t take credit for it. You could look at this thing and say, " Jesus, he’s a genius, you know. " But I’m not. I’m just doing it. I’m just doing what has to be done, just putting one foot in front of another. I’m testing the water as I’m doing it. If it’s too hot, too cold, I pull out for little while I make it the right temperature. I go right back in . . . . And if this place makes a bundle, I’m not going to add another wing onto the house, buy a faster car. If it makes money, I’m going to put it back into the place, just like any good nonprofit boy would do. It’s what I do, it’s what I do. This whole thing has just been, as I said, the most difficult and effortless thing I have ever done.
PAULA VOGEL
Paula Vogel certainly has been a strong influence on playwrights, as head of Brown’s graduate playwriting program and by giving workshops from Rio to Prague. But she’s also has had a powerful effect on theater lovers worldwide as they’ve discovered her plays in recent years. The first to go big time was her 1992 Obie winner The Baltimore Waltz, a surreal memory journey with her late brother Carl, whom she nursed through AIDS. Then there was her 1998 Pulitzer-winning How I Learned to Drive, which impressed the theater world by dealing empathetically with complex issues in a coming-of-age story.
Yet acceptance in what Vogel now considers her hometown was slow in coming after she came to Brown in 1985. Local non-Equity theaters produced her before Trinity Repertory Company: Alias Stage in 1991 with And Baby Makes Seven, and Hot ’n’ Throbbing at Perishable in 1997, right before Trinity staged Vogel’s The Mineola Twins. It took Adrian Hall’s departure and Anne Bogart’s brief stint as artistic director (1989-90) for a Vogel play to be scheduled at Trinity, although it was promptly cancelled (and a $65,000 AT&T production grant turned down) when Richard Jenkins took over. She doesn’t complain, but it took Brown Summer Theatre to bring The Baltimore Waltz to Providence, although it was widely staged elsewhere. Trinity workshopped How I Learned to Drive, albeit well after Vogel achieved theater celebrity.
Vogel is firmly ensconced at Trinity Rep now that its conservatory has merged with the university’s theater department as the Brown/Trinity Consortium, and by her estimate, she has taught close to 200 playwriting students at the university. New York’s Signature Theatre Company, which is devoting its 2004-05 season to performances of her plays, has further recognized her place in American theater. We spoke in Vogel’s English department office at Brown.
Q: We think mainly of you having nurtured young playwrights, but to what extent have they affected the playwright you’ve become?
A: Oh, much. Much more. I see it more as a scam that I have been managing to get away with. I’m constantly in school without paying tuition. I watch them dare -- they’re 20 years younger, 30 years younger, than I am, so they’re taking leaps in form that otherwise I would not be able to process or understand. I think that Baltimore Waltz is probably the first play that really showed the impact of my students on me. Where I just thought, you know, I don’t really need to have a formal structure. I don’t need to have scenes. I could write something seamlessly. I could not ask permission to start a scene. I think the fluidity of my form is directly related to teaching younger writers. They’re raised on cinema. They’re doing cinematic analysis, in terms of the way that they look at theater, versus myself -- I’m an older generation. They are completely fluid. They are the MTV generation. Look at how quickly they process images, scenes, words, text -- I’m trying to keep up with them. That’s really the truth.
They basically say: "You know, maybe 10 years ago that was interesting, but we kind of expect it now -- you’ve got to come up with new tricks." I mean, they jump-start me forward. But I take their work and say: "You have a fellow traveler here; he was born [in] 1795, here he is, you need to read him, this guy."
That’s what we give each other. They give me now -- I give them the past.
Q: You’ve seen quite a change in the relationship between Brown’s playwrights and Trinity since when you first walked down College Hill. Ten years ago, you told me that Providence had been "a closed shop" for you in 1985, that when you approached Trinity, you were informed the theater didn’t want anything to do with playwrights from academia. Tell us about the change.
A: A wonderful change. A crucial challenge. Well, for one thing, I think that that attitude came on both sides of the fence. From professors who are no longer here who felt that the real world in some way contaminated the purity of the mind. And I think that Adrian Hall’s generation at Trinity felt antipathy towards academia as a result. That generation’s gone. We’re now at a point where we’ve got artist-scholars all the time in academia. The world of doing our craft and the world of teaching our craft have really become one.
Q: To such an extent that there’s this consortium. Once an alliance was suggested between the Brown playwriting program and Trinity Conservatory, it couldn’t have been a foregone conclusion that it would come about. There were things to lose -- control, identity -- as well as gain. What did it take for the proposal to become a win-win proposition?
A: A number of things. Before Oskar came, I tried to get a model up and working, and it just crashed and burned. It was not going to happen. I think that the factor that made it happen was Oskar Eustis coming to town. Because I think Oskar has the vision from his side of the fence of the importance of the university, of the importance of different models coming together. I think he has the mind and heart to make it happen. He’s very, very persuasive. And I think this is something that he really wanted to do. I don’t think it would’ve happened if he’d not taken the job. I think we’d still be separate entities, going, "It would be great if this were to happen," but never really making it happen.
Q: What’s going on?
A: Theater is a political forum, like any place else. It reflects who we are as a country. It’s always astonishing for people to hear that theater can be as misogynistic, as homophobic, as racist. Because we look to theater, we think that theater is always avant-garde, that theater is always moving ahead. I think all the problems we encounter, of being separate, are also reflected in the theater. I think that we still tend to think that white men are writing universal plays and that anyone who differs in any way from that equation is not writing universal plays -- [is writing] plays that will not succeed at the box office. If we believe that as theater organizations -- I do not -- if times get hard, and suddenly our corporate and foundation funding is drying up because we’re having hard economic times, one is even less likely to quote-unquote experiment and be producing plays by women, producing plays by writers of color, producing plays by queer writers, et cetera, and so forth. I mean, there is a fear factor here, there’s an entrenchment that is happening in not-for-profit theater.
The thing that I think has to happen -- and it’s an exhausting proposition, but I think it’s where we are, it’s what I did -- is you start theater companies on your own. You don’t wait for a regional theater, a LORT theater, an off-Broadway theater, to do you. You produce yourself. And I think what’s happening now is we’re having more and more. Perishable Theatre now seems like an institutional theater compared to some of the newer theaters. It actually has a stable space. It’s been running how many years? I think what Perishable did back 20 years ago is happening all over the country.
Q: And yet some not familiar with the specifics can look at three women winning Pulitzers for drama in five recent years, including yourself, and think that the problem’s been solved.
A: The problem has not been solved. I think what we do is we tend to -- and I hate to be used in this position -- we tend to go, "Oh, Paula Vogel’s plays are being done all around the country, so we’re okay. We don’t have to go on developing local women writers, because were doing a Paula Vogel play." I hate being used in the same way that women were used as an excuse to not read my play. And that’s what’s happening. Quite frankly, if people want to call me up, I’ve got a long list of women writers to suggest to them. Bless Perishable for doing a women’s playwriting festival. It’s very necessary. It’s more necessary today than it was 10 years ago, which is frightening.
Q: The Baltimore Waltz and other plays of yours have been informed by your being a lesbian feminist. But How I Learned to Drive didn’t express that perspective overtly. Baltimore Waltz was nominated for a Pulitzer, but didn’t win, as the other play did. Do playwrights put themselves at a disadvantage by dwelling on gender politics these days?
A: Here’s what I want to say: yes and no. If it’s absolutely crucial to the piece, one has to put it in. If it’s essential, if it’s something that people need to know, must know, then I think it’s absolutely essential to put it into the piece. It has been said that How I Learned to Drive won the Pulitzer because the core identity was submerged versus Baltimore Waltz -- which, by the way, didn’t have any lesbianism in it at all. I happen to think that as a writer I just wore down the judges.
I’m out as a playwright so that I can, hopefully, when I go to the page, become completely unconscious and subliminal as a writer, be sexless if you will. Let the playwright determine what is seen in the light and what is submerged, and not my own identity. The reason that I’m a playwright rather than a performance artist is I don’t want to put myself on stage. I’d rather subsume other identities. I’d rather be a 45-year-old pedophile and see how that feels than remain constantly as a lesbian feminist. Does being a lesbian feminist influence the work? Of course, it does. So does my being a woman. So is my being half-Jewish, all of those things. But I wouldn’t hold back, if it’s essential to the play.
HERB WEISS
Herb Weiss’s title with Pawtucket’s Department of Planning & Redevelopment is "program manager, development projects," but this bland description hardly captures the indefatigable approach that he brings to boosting the arts in Pawtucket. Although the 49-year-old Dallas native is quick to note that many others, including Mayor James Doyle, have enthusiastically supported the effort, it’s Weiss’s voice -- the source of steady calls making animated pitches for coverage -- that rings familiar.
Weiss, who took on his Pawtucket job about five years ago, after working in public policy and for gerontology trade publications in Washington, DC, is more than just talk. Emphasizing the concept of one-stop shopping, he has helped develop brochures, flyers, and databases that make it simple for interested parties to inquire about a potential loft space, business location, or tax incentive. The results are evident in the burgeoning arts community in Pawtucket, which has long dwelled in the shadow of its more populous neighbor to the south. Although there’s plenty of room for the arts to grow, Weiss also notes the importance of striking the right balance with economic development, saying, in reference to the now ultra-pricey warehouse district in Manhattan, "We don’t want a SoHo in Rhode Island." We talked in his third-floor city office at 175 Main St. in downtown Pawtucket.
Q: What’s most noteworthy about what’s happening with Pawtucket and the arts?
A: One of the things that we worked pretty hard to do is to ratchet up the level of customer service that an artist or art group would receive by coming to our city. Some people may call it competition or challenge, but I call it customer service. And when we rule out the red carpet in Pawtucket -- that should be rolled out in any city or town across the state. It’s as simple as returning phone calls promptly. We have an open-door policy here, or I do, at least, where people can walk in off the street, and if I’m not in a meeting, or not on the phone, I’ll immediately see them. They’ll always walk out with information, so there’s no waiting for information to be sent.
I will even take people around the town in my car and give them the dog-and-pony show about Pawtucket, pointing out properties that are available for lease or for sale; pointing out Slater Mill Historic Site, the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution. I will drive people around, and they appreciate the time you put in. Sometimes it may take up to two to three hours to spend time with a person. They never forget that.
Q: How would you describe the depth and variety of arts in Pawtucket?
A: It’s getting deeper every day. You’ve got to understand that we started with really not much in regards to evening entertainment. We now have Stone Soup in our downtown -- that plays, I think, over 40 Saturday nights a year. The Gamm Theatre will be in the [Armory] annex to prepare for their official play opening in November, so we will have the Gamm Theatre. One of the things we tried to do with our arts festival was to bring arts to the public, and give them exposure to things that they may not have been able to see. The [Rhode Island] Philharmonic is a good example. Maybe not everybody can pay 30 to 50 bucks a ticket, or 200, 300 bucks a season. With the assistance of the Pawtucket Teachers Alliance and 35 local companies, we’re able to piece together $35,000 to pay for them to come to our arts festival, which included fireworks, and it was free, it was accessible, it was in the downtown. We’re working very hard to get other groups in.
The Foundry artists are coming back again in December. I think it’s the fourth year that they’ll be in Pawtucket, and we’ll do whatever we can to continue rolling out that red carpet. We’re trying to build on the visual arts. The city put $10,000 into a gallery downstairs. It’s a certified art gallery. It’s managed by a local arts group -- the Pawtucket Arts Collaborative. It has 45 exhibits a year that [are] rotated, so that is another thing we’re trying to do with the arts. We don’t have the PPACs, we don’t have that level, and there’s no reason why people from Pawtucket can’t take a five-minute drive and go to PPAC, you know? But we’re trying to do our own thing. We had a sculpture show as part of our art [festival] that had over $750,000 worth of artwork, 35 museum-quality pieces. We had about 17, 18 artists who put pieces in the show. And that show probably was one of the best sculpture shows in the state of Rhode Island. It could probably match a lot of stuff in New York, but it was in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
Q: How is the artistic community’s growth affecting the economic challenges in an old industrial city like Pawtucket?
A: I was talking to a local Realtor yesterday, and he can count, specifically, 200-plus leases signed in the last three or four years of artists he’s signed up in studios. Quite frankly, I know there are more artists than his 200. We see artists moving into the city and buying buildings. We have probably about six buildings within the downtown area being bought in the last year for live-work that were vacant. Most of those buildings were bought by artists, so I can say there is an economic impact with the artists coming in and doing their work. There also is an economic impact for having artists in Pawtucket.
The artists coming into the city are saying, "Hey, where are the restaurants?" We know we don’t have restaurants. We’re working on that and we created a loan program for our arts district, and now we have a revolving loan program for restaurants. We will look at any restaurant, and if they want to put an application in, we’ll review it. We make loans available up to $50,000, prime-plus one, and we realize with an arts district, you need restaurants.
We know that we have been taking opportunities that came to us: Stone Soup called us, we got them in; the Foundry artists called us, we got them in; the Gamm Theatre said, "We want to come to Pawtucket." The Pawtucket Armory Association wanted to buy our armory and create a performing arts center. But we realized we needed a roadmap, we need to be proactive. So we hired Ann Galligan, who is a professor at Northeastern University, and she is working with us to create a vision plan, to create measurable goals and objectives, so we know what we were able to achieve and we have a roadmap of where we need to go. She is totally canvassing lots of artists and art groups to say, "What do you want? What can Pawtucket do to make it a better place for you?" We’re not perfect, but we’re trying.
Q: How has Pawtucket been able to maintain and perhaps even expand support for events like the Pawtucket Arts Festival when some other communities have been struggling to keep up public and private support for arts events?
A: It hasn’t been easy. We started fundraising after Bush declared war on Iraq, with an economic downturn. What we did was, we knew last year we had a successful event [at Slater Park] of the philharmonic, so we had a very good product to sell. People we say we drew 3000 people, but I always thought it was five or six [thousand]. This year, we drew about six-to-seven thousand. We had over 200 businesses come aboard [to contribute], and you can be the first person to report this -- I got my first donation for next year, for 15,000. The Pawtucket Teachers Alliance, who gave me $15,000 last year to be the name of the Pawtucket Teachers Alliance Pops in the Park with the Rhode Island Philharmonic, came back after this year’s event and they met with their board. I had approached them to say, "We want you to come back," and they voted unanimously to come back and support us. So I’m, like, sort of trying to chill out after the three-week festival and the intensity of it; I’ve already got $15,000 logged in for next year. They saw it was a quality event and they heard people talking about it. We sell quality. It was as easy as that. And also, it’s like a relationship, because I know people in Pawtucket. I deal with people all the time and they see what I’m doing. They see how the arts has brought a pride back to our city, and a lot of people love to see that . . . .
When people put back into the community, they create a better value for their property or for their company. If you are a mill owner and you want to contribute to the trolley tours [which bring passengers to six loft buildings], it’s to your self-interest, because what you’re doing is bringing people into the mills, and you may pick up an artist or two who wants to rent space.
Q: There’s been a real squeeze on affordable, decent live-work loft spaces for artists in Providence. How available does such space remain in Pawtucket?
A: We have an abundance of studios. We are still working on live-work space. I was working on that before you came here. Something I realized with my job, over the last four-and-a-half years, I’ve gotten hundreds of calls about live-work space or studio space, okay? I knew we didn’t have live-work space and I knew that one of the things I had to do as a city official was to say, "Here’s this niche. This is a niche; once you get up and running, you’ll never have to advertise for vacancies, because you’re always going to be filled if you’re a good landlord." There was a commission to revise the fire codes before the Station fire. The City of Pawtucket was proactive in passing for the quick passage of the regs, [with Doyle writing to mayors across the state, encouraging them to build support for the changes].
Now, I’m so pleased to say that I’m seeing a lot of things coming on line, [including Parkin Yarn, a long-vacant building behind the registry that will be developed with 25 live-work lofts, priced from $105,000 to $260,000; Lillypad Artist Studio Loft Condos, which will feature 29 units, priced from $163,000 to $220,000; and Riverfront Lofts, with 59 live-work lofts across from City Hall, priced from approximately $180,000 to $460,000. There are also about 100 fully occupied rental studios on Pawtucket and Esten avenues.
You can see that for eight miles in circumference, which is how big our city is, we have a lot of artist development happening. And the planning department has been pushing that, trying to get developers interested in live-work, because there is a need and we recognize the need for affordable live-work. There should be a range of options for people, and that’s what we’re trying to do -- to make sure there’s a range. |
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