LENOX — Engaging audiences in timely conversations remains the goal of WAM Theatre, despite lingering COVID restrictions that required the live theater company to imagine producing an entire season digitally.
Last month, Producing Director Kristen van Ginhoven, Associate Artistic Director Talya Kingston, and the WAM team announced a 2021 season that focuses on exploring our roots, our ancestors, and our legacy in order to move forward towards a rebirth, a re-emerging, into a future with room for everyone.
“We see our season as a past, present, and future,” van Ginhoven told The Edge, in a nod to “the ancestors who have [come] and [given] us guidance; the dialogues we are having right now and how to navigate them with grace and empathy; and how we will choose to utilize what we learned from the pandemic — and the racial uprising — as we go forward.” This is, according to van Ginhoven, “an overarching umbrella” that encompasses its season’s first two Fresh Takes play readings, “Letters To Kamala” by Rachel Lynett and “The Light” by Loy A. Webb, and its fall mainstage production, “Kamloopa” by Kim Senklip Harvey.
“It was a hard season to program for a number of pretty obvious reasons,” said Kingston, who also serves as curator of the Fresh Takes reading series, pointing to both the pandemic and “a lot of racial reckonings … that have made us rethink [not only] our entire industry, [but also] how we prioritize some people’s stories over others.”
Add to that a presidential election whose outcome, at that time, was unknown. This left WAM grappling with a pair of essential questions: “Whose stories do we want to tell?” and “Who are we in a position to give work to?” As a nonprofit committed to telling the stories of women and girls, this season WAM was particularly keen on highlighting the stories of BIPOC women — specifically, “to take our gaze away from a white-centric storytelling.”
In “Letters to Kamala,” playwright Rachel Lynett conjures three female American political leaders of the past to share their wisdom, perspective, and wry humor with VP candidate Kamala Harris. Sadly, these three powerful women, on whose shoulders Harris stands, are largely absent from history books: Charlotta Bass, the first Black woman candidate for vice president; Charlene Mitchell, the first Black woman to run for president; and Patsy Matsu Takemoto Mink, the first Asian-American woman to run for Congress, the first woman of color elected to the House of Representatives, and the first Asian-American to run for president.
“I wanted to write a play that explored pride mixed with caution, a play that questioned our cultural obsession with firsts, but also made room for understanding the weight that being ‘first’ carries,” Lynett explained. Beyond the ramifications of being first, “Letters to Kamala” looks at what it means to step up and the additional weight that comes with “representing your entire ethnicity, your entire gender, these big identity groups,” said Kingston.
“Being in the [figurative] room [with these actors] was an incredible experience,” Cate Alston, assistant stage manager for “Letters to Kamala,” told The Edge, in a nod to her favorite part of working in theater, “collaborating and experiencing a process.” In just three days of working together, Alston and Director Nicole Brewer “really created a community … an environment that was vulnerable and safe.” This, when working with individuals from Virginia, DC, New York, and Ohio, created a unique opportunity: “We were all across the country, but still able to build a nice connection,” one Alston called both visual and spiritual. Plus, the process “sparked this detective in me to reframe the history I learned about and search for history that centers the stories of people of color.”
Colette Robert, who will direct “The Light,” WAM’s second reading this season, saw the New York production of the play two years ago. “I was really blown away, and couldn’t really speak as I left the theater,” she said. Understandably, she is beyond excited to “dive into this text [with WAM…as] it feels really relevant and important right now.”
This is Loy A. Webb’s first play and, following its successful off-Broadway run, the playwright said: “I had people telling me how much the show inspired them. I have college students asking me to send them monologues. I write to point toward hope. I want my work to be a neon sign in the darkness: This way out. This way to hope.”
Despite being in Los Angeles while working with actors on the East Coast, Robert is not worried about logistics. Instead, she is looking forward to spending time with the text, one she calls “so nuanced, with characters who are so rich.” There will be challenges, of course; internet glitches and Zoom delays rank high. Still, the opportunity for unexpected connection prevails.
In the next six weeks, Robert will have worked with theaters in LA, New York, Utah, and The Berkshires — without leaving her current base. “What the theater community has done in the past year is remarkable,” she said about its use of “innovation and imagination … just to keep telling stories.”
A silver lining to all this is that using a digital platform allowed WAM not only to employ artists and engage audiences from across the country, but also to tell stories “in this intimate way that actually feeds off the online format, as opposed to working against it,” Kingston said. For anyone who has sought solace in binge-watching Netflix in order to escape into another world, “The Light” invites us “into someone else’s house, someone else’s marriage, someone else grappling with intimate issues that have real-world political ramifications,” Kingston said of Webb’s play.
“All three works have elements of hope, of joyfulness … even though they do grapple with real-world issues and inherited trauma,” Kingston said, something “we don’t often see on our stages, especially when talking about plays that depict people of color.”
Note: “Letters To Kamala” is available to stream now through March 21. “The Light” will be available for streaming April 25–May 2. Viewers may book a ticket to the virtual reading and watch any time that week. WAM aims to make both readings as accessible as possible, while maintaining their commitment to providing artists opportunities that are equitable. Therefore, the organization invites patrons to pick their own ticket price, ranging from $15-$50. For more information or to reserve your ticket, visit the WAM website or call 413-274-8122. Dates for “Kamloopa,” by Kim Senklip Harvey, will be forthcoming.
