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How do you solve a bias with ideas? How do you catch and burn the system down? How do you plug conceptual diarrheas? You curate the coolest cabaret in town.
I’m sitting at the Citizen M hotel lobby- I sit here a lot. And I write about sitting here a lot. It’s a cool place where cool people have cool ideas. Take Ellarose Chary. My good friend, colleague and co-contributing editor to Musical Theater Today. Flip around, you’ll find her work. I’ll wait. What you won’t find in this tome is an article she wrote for the Lillys in 2016 called Is the Pipeline a Pipe Dream for Emerging Women Musical Theater Writers? Which takes a stark look at gender inequality in awards-winning. The article itself exploded my social media feed four years ago when it went live and is one of many reasons she’s a rock star. But more on that later. Right now, I have many questions about Tank-aret, the monthly showcase series she and collaborator Brandon James Gwinn co-curate for The Tank.
TH Tell me about Tank-aret.
EC So that started because I was/am good friends with Rosalind Grush who was at the time the co-artistic director at the Tank. I’ve known Rosalind for a long time. She has since gone on to other new adventures, having shepherded the Tank from their big move from the small space on 46th St. to the bigger space on 36th where they are now, and they had two theaters and more equipment to do music and cabaret. And Rosalind went to a cabaret event that someone invited her to downtown and she said to me casually off-hand, “I was at this cabaret event on Monday night and I thought ‘who goes to things on a Monday night? Oh Cabaret!” And so she asked me if I knew anyone who would want to do cabaret at the Tank. I said “Rosalind, I know one or two hundred people who want to do cabaret at the Tank. But you can’t just do that, there needs to be a way
TH Like an angle?
EC You need way to weed out- like they have curators. They have a dance curator. I thought they needed a cabaret curator. Because you can’t just do it.
TH Well, you could…
EC You could. But I wouldn’t recommend it. And then I was mentioning to Brandon and said “who should we give her to help with that? Because someone should help with that.” And Brandon was the one who said “ we should put our money where our mouth is and we should do it.” And I thought we didn’t have time for that. And they can’t pay us…. And we were trying to do the right thing, and he said “All we ever do is bitch about all the people we know who don’t get the opportunities that we want, and all these other cabaret series that are boring New Yorker, cis white…
TH I love New York, it’s such a great town, and it’s dirty but I have my dreams and you love me…
EC And that is not a dig at the many cabaret series around town that I love. Because I love those.
TH Do you? I don’t.
EC I have a great deal of affection for New York Theater Barn.
TH Ooooooh… I wouldn’t consider that cabaret.
EC Oh, interesting. Okay. Well that’s what I think of it.
TH Okay. Great. Now we’re triangulated.
EC Yeah, so it’s not a dig at their new works, which I’ve done many of, and which your wife [former NYTB Associate Artistic Director Laura Brandel] had a hand in. We just felt like it’s really hard to get a chance to do them. We had been thinking about doing Joe’s Pub, and Brandon does the Duplex all the time and we’re looking at these and see that it’s really expensive when you’re coming up-but it’s the first opportunity that I had when I moved to New York, it was the first opportunity that both of us had. It gets you video. It’s this thing to do.
TH I literally fell in love with someone there.
EC So we started to think about the Tank, and what that is, as a venue people already recognize, and so we thought “maybe it should just not be cis white men.” And we should just get people to do this, and it wasn’t really going to be for us. It wasn’t meant to be an opportunity for us- we were just going to go find people that we know. And the first year was very much me being “who are people that I know?” Like Dyan Flores. I said “I know you have a project. I know you haven’t finished it. I really want it to exist and be on stage” so I went up to her and said “I’m giving you a spot. You have to finish your Rahm Emanuel musical so that I can watch it.” So there was that. And then there was Brandon making lists of artists that he knew because he knows of the musical theater people. And so he’d say “it’d be really interesting to have that person do a solo show. Or be given more space than they’re usually given.”
TH I love that.
EC The Tank’s thing is to give us safe space to bite off more than we can chew. The thing for underrepresented artists is always that we don’t get second chances right? You don’t get to develop anything. We have to be good the first time. [Playwright] Marcus Scott said this. He had a 54 Below show not long after his Tank-aret so he got to go very confidently into 54 Below. And that’s what we want. We want people who are not felt empowered to put something together, so we could say “here’s a thing, go do it.” Or we want someone who needs an opportunity. It doesn’t have to be a halfway point, it can be the thing. So we took it to Megan Finn and Rosalind and said “this is what we’d like it to be and what we want to do” and they said “You guys want to do that? Obviously we would like you to do that, we never dreamed that you would be willing to!” And we knew it was crazy but we also knew it should be a thing. So we figured out with them how to do it such that it wouldn’t be too much of a burden on us, and defined what would be expected of the artists. The first year we were more hands on because we really wanted it to fly, but going into our third year now, we have enough artists where we are looking into producing a showcase night where artists who don’t have a full night of material can do ten minutes. So for those, we take on the producorial responsibilities.
TH It seems to me though that if everyone else is benefitting from this platform you’ve created, maybe there’s no harm in you benefiting from it too. Have you and Brandon done one?
EC That first year we did do one for ourselves. We needed content for the series, and had just been given a grant to do a concert of TL;DR [Thelma and Louise: Dyke Rock] so we did do it and counted it as a Tank-aret, but then afterward we decided “this is not for us. We both have opportunities. We don’t need to take up one of these slots.” Though I did do one this year with two fledgling writers which was more on-mission and really needed to be a date on a calendar. So there isn’t a purity there where we can’t program ourselves. We definitely will if we need to, but we’ve discussed this before- one of the things that is both wonderful and maddening to me is how easy it is for me to program this. It’s wonderful because I can, in minutes and without any research, come up with a list of twenty five people that I want to ask, for twelve slots. And it’s maddening to me because I put in no effort and program nine or ten people for a twelve slot season. Why is no one else programming them? This idea that artists who aren’t cis white men are not out here making art, and that’s the reason why we’re under-represented is ridiculous. There’s such a wealth of artists if you put even a little effort in. Maybe others have to put a little bit more effort in, but they’re out there.
TH A commercial producing entity might respond with: we know that those people exist but they’re not ready for prime time yet. Let us know when they’re ready for prime time.
EC I think it’s a mix. I don’t think my entire season is people at the halfway point. I think we have many artists who are ready for prime time. But my real answer to that question is “you are pouring resources into plenty of cis white men who are at that same point. So… it’s not like you’re reserving your resources for artists who are “ready” whatever the hell that even means, but look at who you are putting those resources in to? What’s that demographic look like? Don’t get me wrong- I like a lot of those more privileged artists’ work. It’s not even about that. I just have seen in the last few years on Broadway a lot of stories by those lucky few white men where the women and people of color are poorly drawn. And it feels like anyone else might be told they needed to hone their craft a little bit more before they’re given such a big platform.
TH I’ve seen a few of those myself. I won’t give specifics, but we were having a discussion at the BMI workshop this past week about a show from a recent season centered around a female character and the general response in the room was “it would have been nice if they had a single woman on that creative team.”
EC Right! And I’m just like why? It just seems like with Broadway being as financially risky as it is already, to bring in someone on your creative team who has no firsthand experience writing those characters is to absorb even more risk. Thing is, we simply don’t have trouble finding artists for Tank-aret. And I’m not like “in it” as I used to be either. I used to be really able to know everybody that’s doing everything and now I’m old and no longer in that “unpaid-labor/literary job” tier, going to readings all the time or feel it’s my responsibility to know everything. But we had one person for our 2020 season that I emailed about it and even then I didn’t have to ask them. I didn’t even get to the stage where I had to actively look before I had nine slots filled. I think we have one or two in the fall that we’re waiting on. But we’re programmed February, March, April, May, June, July. I’m glad it wasn’t a ton of work but it’s almost embarrassing how little work it was. To have that amazing group of artists at various levels of success who have been recognized for it.
TH So what do you think is the difference between you, who can’t toss a feather without it hitting someone she can program and someone else who complains about not being able to find anyone?
EC I think for any number of reasons, people feel icky about saying “we’re not going to give this opportunity to cis white men.” So there’s a thing where people don’t create a box that necessitates them finding this person. They give themselves permission to look and not find them and take the easier way out. And again, that’s not the mission of everything. I’m a white person. And I don’t want everything to be unavailable to white people because I also like to write things? So I understand that different platforms have different missions. But I also think you have to be honest with yourself a little bit because if you know that that’s what you’re looking for, then you’re going to see it a little bit more. Also I do think there’s a little bit of infrastructure that I’ve built over the course of my career because I care about that. So I offer that it’s not like it’s immediately possible. You do have to put in some work to build your infrastructure. But I also think building the infrastructure is easier than some people think it is. It’s a three step process. First you accept the premise that these artists exist. Then you accept the premise that they’re talented. If you accept those two things, then you must accept that they’re making work and that they must be making it somewhere. Once you’re there you just have to say to yourself “if it’s not being made in the places that I’m going, then I’m going to the wrong places.”
TH If it’s a given that there is inherent bias. That the whole of Timothy Huang’s pedigree hinges on an aesthetic predetermined by Euro centrism and the patriarchy- I’m not necessarily going to have the facility to even see that you, Ellarose, a female artist creating work are talented. I’m going to see something very, very different. How do I unsee that? How do you open my eyes?
EC I think that’s tricky because we have this entire process that is completely subjective that we’ve convinced ourselves is objective. So the first thing is that you burn it all down. Honestly. The first response is burn it all down and say “those people should not be in power.” They aren’t qualified because their viewpoint is compromised. Instead of saying “They are the authority, and they are right and we have to figure out how to work within that” we say “those people are under-qualified to be in power because they are too limited in their scope and the industry is bigger than them and they are too- it isn’t even necessarily because of their age, but-
TH It might be because they never had to learn how to pass the torch to the generation after them because most of that generation were wiped out in the AIDS epidemic. Nobody ever taught them how to mentor.
EC That’s a really big part of it. And because they live in a society where they are fish that can’t feel water. But truly I feel the people you’re describing are unqualified for their positions and so we have to recognize that and burn it all down. But in the interim, I think we pose the question differently. Marsha Norman and I had this conversation when I did my fellowship at the Guild and commented that the Ebb Award [which pays out $60K to the winning writer or writing team] only goes to white men. She said “should I give them a call and ask if they want to be introduced to any women songwriters?” Which, I don’t know that she did that but it did lead to that blog I wrote for The Lillys about the pipeline. We need to say to people: Look around. Look at the landscape. Separate the question of quality of work and ask yourself “do you think that women are incapable of writing good musicals? Do you think that people of color or incapable of writing good musicals?” If you believe that, I don’t think that I can change your mind. Which is why I’m like “burn it all down.” I honestly think most people don’t believe that if you put it to them that way. The people that I’ve talked to about it truly just don’t know where to find us. I’ve gotten a lot of “I want to do this. Where do I find people.” And that’s a little frustrating because I’m an artist and I’m standing right here. And you haven’t programmed me, but you’re asking me to tell you how to do it and but also for free. But also… Google? Google especially now that trans lab is a thing and Musical Theater Factory lab is a thing but nowadays when I get that question I can just say “come to Tank-aret!”
TH I’d to take a minute and footnote that at the time of your conversation with Marsha, the Ebb award itself was eleven years old and three of its sixteen winners were women. In the four years that followed your article, the number rose to five out of twenty three. Put a different way, before your blog, women were winning once every five years. After your blog, they were winning as often as men were.
EC Isn’t that interesting.
TH To go back to your statement before though, I think the trouble is people rarely say yes or no if asked that way. It’s “I can’t list five women /POCs who write musicals.”
EC Great. So the problem then is that you don’t believe they exist, it’s that we’re having trouble programming them in your sphere. And maybe it’s that you need to bring on somebody else. If you have that bias, and you’re unable to do the work or willing to do the work or able to understand that you are the thing in your own way. Maybe the thing to do is hire someone within your organization who can.
TH Which is thankfully a more and more common practice.
EC I think that the whole underpinning of this conversation and everything we’ve been talking about since the beginning is that as long as we allow America and as an extension of that the arts, to be run by corporate capitalism we have far fewer solutions. It incentivizes certain things because of their monetary value, which are not inherently artistic. The conditions of America create a situation in which we can’t be individuals who can make art because we do not have a guarantee of food or shelter or healthcare. If there was universal healthcare and universal housing and access to food was secured then we could truly have a capitalism that people pretend to want, which is a merit based “best work rises to the top” system. But circumstances being what they are, that’s just impossible. I don’t think there should be an equality of merit in terms of what’s good and what isn’t but it’s so skewed by capitalism and white supremacy and the patriarchy that we can’t even have that conversation.
TH I mean, there’s so many conversations we can’t have until we…
EC Until we topple all white supremacy, topple all hetero-patriarchy, topple all class warfare and predatory capitalism and the denial of basic civil rights. And we haven’t even talked about ethno-centrism, jingoism and xenophobia and the idea of the American musical and what it means to have the American musical.
TH Exactly. So… maybe let’s topple all that stuff before deadline so we can actually have those meaningful conversations!
EC Ha!
TH Anything else you want to close out on?
EC I’m not one of those people who think all work is good. There is work that is bad. And there is work that doesn’t deserve to be funded, or produced. But I don’t think that means those artists shouldn’t be allowed to make art. There should be venues and opportunities for people that are not necessarily steering the culture. There should be more community theater in New York. There’s all these reasons why it should exist at all levels. Everyone who wants to create, write, make something should be allowed to do that.
PC: M aria Belford
ELLAROSE CHARY (she/hers) is an award-winning writer and advocate for inclusion in musical theater. She is a Richard Rodgers Award winner, Dramatists Guild Fellow, NYFA Fellowship Playwriting/Screenwriting Finalist, Kleban Prize Finalist, Kernodle New Play Award Finalist, and winner of a BOH Cameronian Arts Award and the Weston Award for Musical Theater.
Her musical TL;DR: THELMA LOUISE; DYKE REMIX is a winner of the 2021 Richard Rodgers Award and has been developed at The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center (NMTC Incubator Residency, NMTC Finalist), Rhinebeck Writers Retreat (Triple R Residency), and the UArts Polyphone Festival. Her play THE WRONG QUESTION was selected for the 2021 Jewish Playwriting Contest. She is the bookwriter for the award-winning THE DOLL MAKER’S GIFT, which opened at The Rose Theater in 2019 (“Families should flock to this one.” – Omaha World-Herald) and her play THE SÉANCE MACHINE premiered off-off Broadway at Obie Award Winning The Tank in 2019. Her other projects include: COTTON CANDY AND COCAINE, HOW TO SURVIVE THE END OF THE WORLD (featured on Broadway.com, BroadwayWorld, Hollywood Soapbox, and 89.5 FM Star), THE LAKE AND THE MILL, QUEER. PEOPLE. TIME., PATRIETTES (The #FWord Finalist) and the Malaysian musical MARRYING ME.
She has been in residence at Ars Nova (Uncharted), Harvard ArtLab, Catwalk Institute, and has received an Anna Sosenko Grant and a NAMT grant. Her work has been produced, developed and commissioned by the Great Plains Theater Conference, the Drama League, The Civilians and City Center (Encores! Off-Center), Theater C, AFO Solo Shorts, Prospect Theater, Joe’s Pub, and 54 Below. She was a guest lecturer and production studio lead artist at Harvard University in the Theater, Dance and Media department in Fall 2020.
She is an activist and advocate for inclusion in media both on and off stage. She has written for The Lilly Awards Blog, HowlRound, and Musical Theater Today (where she is a contributing editor). She has appeared on panels at NYMF and with Honest Accomplice Theater and co-curates Tankaret, a cabaret series for underrepresented voices. She believes the future of the American theater is universal healthcare. MFA: NYU, BA: Brown University.