I had the absolute pleasure of joining Honest Accomplice Theater (HAT) as a team member this semester through the Student Arts Ambassador Program. My first task was to assist their latest production in rehearsal, A Chip on Her Shoulder, written and directed by Kristin Kelly. This was the first piece of work that HAT did not devise with their team but rather worked with a written script of collected and edited interviews of women and trans people in the engineering field from Virginia and New York City. It was an exciting idea to be a part of as Kristin’s mom who’s an engineer was the inspiration for the entire project, and it all came from her need to understand her mom’s life and work in this climate where we constantly talk about female and LGBTQ+ erasure in our society it was important to understand those who are working in fields that are dominated by white males.
When I first signed on to help I thought I would be assistant director/assistant stage manager however time constraints and the needs of the production dictated that I would serve more as a production assistant coming in and out, helping with filling in spots and all that jazz. But this worked out perfectly as my course load got heavier over the course of the semester.
In the rehearsal room most of the focus was on getting the voices right as the actors were each acting out about at least 3 characters each who were all real people. The reading included excerpts from their interviews so a lot of documentary theater work went into the first few weeks of rehearsal. The staging of it was really more to make the words shine and get some comedic moments across, but for the most part actors were going to be standing by music stands and reading their monologues.
At the time of the performance, I had not seen a full run of the play so I did not know what to expect, or how much blocking was added since I hadn’t been to the last few rehearsals. When the actors came on stage and one of the actors, Jordan, started xe’s monologue I had butterflies in my stomach, I was nervous and excited for everything that was about to happen. And all of the stories; the actual chip in Vivian’s hand, the metaphoric chip on Rosemary’s shoulder, the situation of queer people in the field, women who are silenced at work and in classes, the sexual assault narratives, and finally “woman in tech” as a power statement, all seamlessly flew from one into the other, it was extremely funny, sad, and over all exciting to see these narratives that are so often overlooked told on a stage full of amazing actors, who were as diverse as a performance could get.
This performance really made me think about the place of diversity in theater and “color/gender blind casting”, and if it’s ethical to do so. “Blind” casting has a connotation of anyone being able to take part in a project, but shouldn’t we focus more on color/gender conscious casting? This is what we did for O, Earth and it felt so much better to be conscious of the choices being made. This also would address the POC acting the part of a white person conundrum. What do I mean by that? It’s when a director casts a POC to cast a POC but none of the POC culture, personality, political meaning, etc. is implemented into the play. Kind of what casting one the gay men in the Ellen show portion of O, Earth as a POC does. This has been my conundrum for a while, and I think seeing Chip and working on O, Earth has answered it in some ways but it feels like there is still more to explore on this topic in relation to Ethical Performance Producing.