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| Shannon Wooley (foreground) in Fabric, Flames, and Fervor: Girls of the Triangle. Photo by Michael Taggart. |
By Keith Waits
Entire contents are copyright © 2012, Keith
Waits. All rights reserved.
This week Looking for Lilith celebrates their
10th Anniversary with two programs performing in repertory at The Bard’s Town: 10 Years: 7 Stories collects segments
from the seven original productions that have been developed throughout the
company’s history; while Becoming Mothers
seeks to add to that number with a staged reading of a new play about
motherhood.
The company’s mission draws
inspiration from the rabbinical myth of Lilith, the first woman created by God
and given equal importance to Adam. According to the myth, she was eventually
replaced by Eve, a new partner created for Adam and intended to be deliberately
subservient. As stated in the company’s mission statement: “Lilith's story
represents to us an instance where a strong woman's voice was quieted, and her
story lost.” In creating theatre that uncovers history largely forgotten,
Looking for Lilith brings forward women’s stories that have been lost, just as
Lilith was lost and rediscovered.
Recently we spoke with co-founder
and current Artistic Director Shannon Wooley about the company’s origins, its commitment
to education, and the creative process behind the unique Lilith vision.
Arts-Louisville: How was Looking for Lilith started? What was the
original inspiration?
Shannon Wooley: A vision from God in the
middle of the night – I know that makes me sound a little bit like a lunatic,
but I’m telling you, that’s how it happened. I got my B.F..A from Southern
Methodist University, which has a really cool theatre department, a
conservatory program for two years – very intense work, a lot of freedom given to
the students. While I was there I was a part of a project called 1968: Vietnam, which was interviews with
women about their experiences with the Vietnam war: military women, Vietnamese
women. Then we took the interviews and turned them into a performance piece.
It was the most amazing piece of theatre I had ever worked on. Then I graduated
and went out into the world and found that there really weren’t projects like
that to get involved in. That had been “university,” but now I was out in the
real world, with my resume and head shot – this was in Chicago. Then I was
invited to join a repertory theatre in Denver called Horse Chart Theatre, which
was all men. I was the only woman in the theatre, and we did a lot of David
Mamet, and I was pretty unhappy. So I literally woke up in the middle of the
night remembering the 1968: Vietnam
project and voice saying to me, “Why aren’t you doing that? You could be doing
that all the time!” So I called my dear friend Trina, who was living in Chile
at the time on a Fulbright scholarship, and I told her I had this idea: I want
to start this collective of women artists and we are going to create original
theatre based on interviews with women. We are going to choose periods in
history and interview from all perspectives and we are going to do devising and
then we are going to make them into plays. We moved to New York, because I
didn’t really know how to do this thing that I wanted to do. There was a
great program at NYU – a master's in educational theatre which differs from
theatre education – which is about teaching theatre in that it is about
devising theatre that educates. While working on that master's I met Jennifer
Thalman Kepler; and after graduating, Trina, Jennifer and I signed the
incorporation papers for Looking for Lilith. We created our first play within a
year.
A-L: The company was founded in New York City. When and
why did you move to Louisville?
SW: I think it was important that we began in
New York and learned to create and promote theatre where things are more…stringent. But New York is glutted with theatre. Not only were we one of
thousands of theatre companies, but we were one of hundreds of women’s theatre
companies. Every show we would create there we would tour to Louisville and
play to packed houses and people were thrilled to see original work like this.
Whereas in New York we were, just to be frank, spending thousands of dollars
to produce plays that our friends would come and see. After five years of that,
I remember the show was Class of ’70,
we had a very successful run in Louisville first and then took it to New York
and we said to ourselves, “Why aren’t we just doing this in Louisville all the
time?” So I came back in 2005 and Trina came back the following fall and we
have been using Louisville as our home base ever since. We still tour to other
places, even returning to New York with Fabric,
Flames & Fervor: Girls of the Triangle, but it has been much more
profitable for us financially and artistically to be here. Louisville has a
fantastic theatre community, and we certainly are not the only theatre company
producing original work. But here we occupy a very specific niche that people
get very excited about.
A-L: You have successfully produced scripts by other
writers, but this commitment to developing original material has largely defined
the company.
SW: That’s kind of our foundation. Usually
once a season we produce an already published work, and we’ve even done some
works by men, which has been fun. We did House
of Bernardo Alba last fall; and Frederico Garcia Lorca’s viewpoint of the
oppression that was going on in that family of women was profoundly touching, and
it definitely fit within the Looking for Lilith mission. He knew women and he
wrote pretty well for them.
A-L: The original pieces are designed to educate as
well as entertain. How important is the educational mission and how do you
continue to develop it?
SW: We have a Community Outreach Department that
does educational outreach from kindergarten through post-graduate level. We
have some projects at the adult level, particularly in Guatemala, so we try to
have our outreach accessible to children of all ages. About three years ago our
program really exploded when we were commissioned to create Choices: An Interactive Play on
Cyberbullying and Suicide, which is a theatre of the oppressed piece about
cyber-bullying. And in this piece the audience meets a 15-year-old girl named
Hannah who is progressively and viciously cyber-bullied through the computer,
through the phone, through IM (instant messaging), to the point where she
withdraws from everything in her life and she decides that the only way out is
to kill herself.... The play ends with her dumping a bottle of pills into her
hand. But with theatre of the oppressed work, you see a play that ends with
what Augusta Boal calls the “point of brutal rupture,” where things can’t get
any worse. But then you stop and the audience begins to work. One of the actors
begins to speak to the audience in the role of “The Joker” and asks the
audience: "Did the play have to end this way? Were there times that you wanted
to see the main character do or say something differently?" Usually they say
“Yes,” and then we start again from the beginning except. This time they are
invited to stop the protagonist at any point – they are only allowed to stop
the protagonist; if they could change the bully’s behavior it becomes beside
the point.
Jefferson County Public Schools got so excited
after the first show that they asked us to do it in every school, so we’ve been
performing Choices a lot and doing a
lot of educational work on the high school level, which has been fun and is
kind of new for us. We are also very active with the Kentucky Arts Council and
they subsidize in-school residencies, so we do get invited into the schools
fairly often on KAC grants. We love to work in social studies classes and have
the students look at a particular event in history and develop a process drama
about that event where the students are living out the roles of the people in
that history.
A-L: Yet Choices doesn’t really draw from history…
SW: No, it is very of the moment, and while
cyber-bullying certainly affects young women more than young men, it is definitely
not just a young woman’s issue. We frequently have young men in the audience
say, “No, she should be doing THIS…” and they are brought up onstage. We change
the name and do it as a boy. What’s interesting is that I think the young men
see different ways to deal with the conflict than the young women do, some
positive and some negative. It’s often, "She needs to find out who that is and
kick their ass after school!” – which allows us to make the point that Hannah
does not necessarily know who is bullying her on the computer and she might (inadvertently)
choose to brutalize the wrong person; and now she becomes the one who has committed
a crime.
A-L: You put so much energy into the outreach. What are
the challenges for LFL in maintaining its public profile in such an active
theatre community?
SW: I feel like what we do is so unique – just as
what Le Petomane or Pandora does is so unique – that we’re not going to lose
audience for Lilith plays because they are seeing other great plays in
Louisville. Because what we do is pretty different, so, no, I don’t really think
it is a challenge. I think that Louisville is unique in the support that the
independent theatre companies give to each other. I did not really have that
experience in New York. It’s more competitive. Here we share
more resources, and not just people and materials but resources of wisdom
as well, which I think is kind of unusual.
A-L: This retrospective of scenes from past LFL
productions is running in repertory with a staged reading of a new piece,
Becoming Mothers. What can you tell us about that?
SW: I would say a lot of the energy goes into
the outreach and a lot goes into the show creation. When we create something
new, like Becoming Mothers, which we
are unveiling as a reading this week, it is six months of research and
interviews and another six months of transcribing and playing with the
interviews and rehearsals and figuring out what’s theatrical and performative.
It’s interesting because in the end you do have the two-week run with eight performances, and there is so much work that goes into it. But I enjoy the
process of creating it as much as I do the sharing of it.
Looking for Lilith plays never die: they live
on and on. Part of that has to do with the specificity of the plays. What My Hands Have Touched deals with
the oral histories of women during World War II, and during Women’s History
Month the Blue Star Mothers might bring us in to do that show because it is
specific to their community. Same thing with Crossing Mountains, which is about the Hindman Settlement School.
We’ve been invited to come to Big Sandy Community College, which is about an
hour and a half from Hindman in the Cumberland Mountains. They keep being
reborn, and we sometimes recreate them to a certain degree to fit the community
that wants to see the work.
A-L: You spoke at the beginning about the creative
freedom you experienced in the educational environment of college. Do you feel
the educational foundation and collaborative process of Lilith capture any of
that energy?
SW: I think so. The seven excerpts have been
rehearsing separately, and last week we brought them together for the final
rehearsals. Suddenly the room was filled with all of the actors, directors and
designers who have worked on Lilith shows over the last 10 years. And people
started talking about how working for LFL is so unique – the creative freedom
and the nurturing and support that we have for one another – and that was so
touching to me because that IS what I always wanted to create. I don’t just
want to create exciting and dynamic plays; I want to create a community where
female and male artists are excited about exploring a topic through theatre.
Together we have created this fertile ground that is similar to what I felt at
SMU. So maybe you don’t have to leave college.
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| Shannon Wooley (right) in What My Hands Have Touched – Women of WW II. Photograph by Michael Taggart. |
10 Years:7 Stories- May 31, June 2, 7, 9 at 7:30 pm • June 10 at 2 pm
Tickets $15, $10 students/seniors
Becoming Mothers- June 1, 8, 10 at 7:30 pm • June 3 at 2 pm
Tickets $10, $7 students/seniors
Two-Show Pass: $23, $15 students/seniors
Tickets $15, $10 students/seniors
Becoming Mothers- June 1, 8, 10 at 7:30 pm • June 3 at 2 pm
Tickets $10, $7 students/seniors
Two-Show Pass: $23, $15 students/seniors
Birthday
Party!!!
Come
June 10 to see both shows and celebrate
our 10 years with a reception at 4:30 pm.
$30 (both shows & reception)
$25 (10 Years: 7 Stories & reception)
$20 (reception & Becoming Mothers)
$15 (reception only)
$30 (both shows & reception)
$25 (10 Years: 7 Stories & reception)
$20 (reception & Becoming Mothers)
$15 (reception only)
For reservations, call
502-638-2559
Looking
for Lilith
At The
Bard’s Town
1801
Bardstown Road
Louisville,
KY 40205
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