Photos by Cason Doyle. Videos by Franco Giacomarra and Kelly Prinz

Exactly how much work goes into a theater production? To find out, we went behind the scenes with the cast and crew of Fordham Theatre’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, last fall’s mainstage show, just before opening night.

138 Hours of Rehearsal

After auditions were held and parts cast, Fordham student actors began conducting research and learning lines before starting a month of rehearsals. Working alongside acclaimed director Ryan Quinn and a team of student stage managers, the 13 actors spent about 5 hours a night for 5 nights a week crafting the show. Then they moved on to 28 hours of technical rehearsals and 10 hours of dress rehearsals before the show opened.

“Our director Ryan Quinn was really amazing and receptive to ideas. … Not everything made it! But we all had a chance to contribute something,” said Tyler Bey, a senior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, who played Bottom in the production. “Just that opportunity for possibility, where the director and the actors come from a place of willingness and openness to just play, is really freeing and makes the whole thing much more fun.”

11 Days to Build

All technical elements—lights, sound, video, scenery, and costumes—were carefully designed and built as efficiently as possible during this short but crucial window of time. Students worked under the mentorship of faculty and industry professionals, such as Brittany Vasta, the show’s set designer, to create high-quality designs.

“Working with Brittany was a huge leap in what I have done in the past,” said Sam Deetjen, a junior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center and the show’s assistant set designer. “I haven’t really worked with any professionals in the set design world.”

190 Lighting Units and 11 Loudspeakers

These critical technical elements work in tandem to help create the audiovisual world of the production and support the scenery, costumes, and performers. Each of these units is individually hung, focused, and circuited to create specific moments throughout the show—and they must be checked and adjusted accordingly for each performance.

16 Green Carpets

To create a seamless stage floor, these carpets were sourced, measured, and connected together manually by student workers. The design concept for the show—set in both a nursing home and a magical forest—utilized these green carpets to tie the two worlds together.

“That moment when the curtains open and you reveal the whole upper area of the set, there was a little bit of an ‘ooh’ from the audience,” said Tim Zay, Fordham Theatre technical director. “It was nice because it really did open up this big vast expanse. It’s always good to see the design work get appreciated.”

500 Fairy Lights

Student workers and designers embedded these tiny lights throughout the set and costumes to create the magic of the fairy characters and the world they inhabit.

The production featured 35 different costumes, powered by 7 personal battery packs.

249 Cues

Individual cues from departments including lights, sound, scenery, and costume are built and tested throughout technical rehearsals under the leadership of Production Stage Manager Skyler Purvis, a senior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center.

The production featured 80 sound cues, 34 video cues, and 135 lighting cues, each one triggered by a specific operator on Purvis’s “go.”

7 Performances

Fordham Mainstage productions run for 7 public performances over the course of 10 days, not including the several full show runs, dress rehearsals, and brush-ups throughout the week. This professional-level workload is a challenging but invaluable experience for student technicians and actors.

“I’ll have to see if the vocal training kicks in when we have the 2 p.m. and the 8 p.m. show,” said Bey with a laugh. “I’ve never really done that, but my friends and I said, ‘If we want to do this, we better be ready for eight shows a week.’”

“We are so honored and excited to have the incomparable visionary artist Tonya Pinkins at Fordham Theatre. Her presence will have a transformational impact on the program and within Fordham University,” said May Adrales, director of the Fordham Theatre program.

The endowed chair was established in 2011 by acclaimed actor and alumnus Denzel Washington, FCLC ’77, to connect students with well-known industry professionals. Every fall semester, the chair teaches and works closely with students on performances and productions. Past chairs include Golden Globe-winning actress Regina Taylor, Tony Award-winning director Kenny Leon, and, most recently, Tony award-winning set designer Mimi Lien. 

Pinkins, the 13th chair holder, is no stranger to the stage. She has “won or been nominated for nearly every award there is in the American theater,” according to her IMDb profile. She was nominated for three Tony Awards, winning one in 1992 for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, Jelly’s Last Jam. She also earned Clarence Derwent, Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle, Lucille Lortel, Obie, and AUDELCO awards, and has been nominated for numerous other honors. 

Pinkins’ talents span the entertainment industry. She is an actress with more than 20 years in daytime television, appearing in popular television shows like Fear the Walking Dead, Madam Secretary, and Gotham, and performing in nine Broadway shows. Pinkins is also a filmmaker. Her award-winning debut feature film Red Pill was named an official selection at the 2021 Pan African Film Festival, won the Best Black Lives Matter Feature and Best First Feature at the Mykonos International Film Festival, and is nominated for festival awards worldwide. As an author, she has written two books, Get Over Yourself! How to Drop the Drama and Claim the Life You Deserve (Hachette Books, 2006) and Red Pill Unmasked: A Movie Making Memoir (Red Pill Movie 2020 LLC) and essays that have received international attention. She is also a podcaster, a singer who is performing in Manhattan this summer, an activist, and a mother of four. 

Pinkins is also a longtime educator. She has taught young artists at institutions across the world, including American University in Beirut, Old Globe London, the National Theater, Yale, ACT, UT Austin, Rutgers, UCSD, USD, University of Louisville, City College in New York, and New York University. 

Beginning this fall semester, Pinkins will become an integral part of the Fordham Theatre program, attending and offering feedback for student performances and leading workshops that center on building resilience, learning through failure, and taking creative risks. She will also teach an advanced course in her discipline, Creating a Character, where students will develop the skills necessary to breathe life and imagination into their performances.

“I am looking forward to learning how my work and experience can be of service to the architects of the future of the arts in our world,” said Pinkins.

The evening showcase, The Movement, Melodrama, and Melodies of NYC, featured dance solos from the Ailey/Fordham students and performances of the Grammy- and Academy Award-winning song The Shadow of Your Smile, as well as popular rhythm and blues song Route 66 by the Fordham Jazz Ensemble. Members of Fordham Theatre also performed an excerpt from the play Indecent, which celebrates the love, magic, and hope of the theater. Following the showcase held in Costantino Room, guests wined and dined at a reception held in the adjacent Soden Lounge and Bateman Room. 

In her closing remarks at the end of the showcase, Tetlow thanked the students for their “stunning” performance and their ability to evoke emotion. 

“There’s a world where we would have our business school students discuss a business plan, and watch the law student try to brief, and have a calculus problem on a whiteboard, just to demonstrate their talent and discipline and hard work, but none of them would have made us feel what you made us feel tonight,” Tetlow said. 

She also praised the students for their courage to perform on stage and admired the dancers’ agility. (Watching the Ailey dancers almost made her pull a muscle, she joked.) In addition, she highlighted the students’ nod to American history. 

“I think that you, tonight, really earned our spot on San Juan Hill. I feel the spirits of the people who lived here who were so important in American history and in American cultural history, from Zora Neale Hurston to Thelonious Monk. And you have made it such that we deserve this spot of their making and deserve our spot as part of Lincoln Center of the Performing Arts because we are part of this grand experiment to bring together such amazing culture of this country and in the world,” said Tetlow. “So thank you for demonstrating what Fordham is and your own talent and for making the kickoff to this inauguration so special.” 

Adrales’ directing credits include performances in several cities written by a diverse group of playwrights. She most recently helmed the world premiere of the Obie-winning production of Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Before that, she directed Rajiv Joseph’s Letters of Suresh and Chisa Hutchinson’s Somebody’s Daughter at the Second Stage Theater in Manhattan. These followed productions in venues such as the Actors Theater of Louisville, Milwaukee Rep, and Chicago’s Goodman Theatre.

In 2013, she was featured in a New York Times article about “new power players of Off-Broadway” who were challenging a historically male-dominated field.

A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, Adrales, who is also now an assistant professor of theatre and visual arts, also brings a wealth of experience in the academic realm. She has directed and taught at Juilliard, Harvard/ART, New York University, and Bard College, and served on the faculty at the Yale School of Drama and Brown/Trinity’s MFA program. She served as the artistic director of The Lark, an international play development think tank and laboratory. From 2006 to 2009, as an artistic associate, she spearheaded the Shakespeare Lab at New York’s Public Theater.

In 2010, she directed a production of Mrs. Packard by Tony-nominated director, playwright, and screenwriter Emily Mann for Fordham Theatre’s Mainstage Season, and the experience stayed with her, she said.

“I was impressed with the caliber of students, and the passion and the commitment that they brought to the craft. It was also my first collaboration with Emily Mann, who has been such an important mentor and advocate for me in my career,” she said.

Adrales said she also admired the scope and imagination of Fordham’s mainstage productions, and the participants’ willingness to interrogate tough questions. That’s key to her vision of theater as a self-described “citizen artist.”

“Theater is a unique art in that it is a social art form. It exists in community; it exists in dialogue. Even a solo performance only exists as a dialogue with the audience. That makes it the platform for social change,” she said.

“I think that we all endeavor into this art form as citizens. We participate in a dialogue, and that act of building a stronger citizenry is one of the goals of this program.”

In addition to teaching a class in the fall, Adrales is returning to the departments’ mainstage season this spring, to direct aulis, by Christopher Chen.

Adrales noted that is an especially important time in history to think about ways to truly be inclusive. As a first-generation immigrant from the Philippines who grew up in the small coal-mining town of Covington, Virginia, she understands what it means to be an outsider.

“How do you truly create radical accessibility in theater? How can we really make the vision of equity, access, and inclusion vibrant in all aspects of what we do?” she said.

“Those are those bigger questions I have been struggling with since before I got here, as an artist. I take the responsibility in leading the program to really try to find tangible, workable solutions for how to bring that vision to fruition.”

As a director, she embraced that vision by championing works of new artists—and embracing the power of a good chuckle. In September, in an acceptance speech for the Andrew R. Ammerman Directing Award from the Arena Stage, she noted that all of her work has been rooted in a “mischievous desire to make good trouble,” an echo of the late civil rights leader John Lewis’ call to action, with a twist.

“The most powerful political work I’ve ever done has been comedies. Comedy is a tool that we use to zero in on our foibles,” she said.

“It’s a way for sparking recognition, and of course, if you recognize yourself in any situation, you start to build empathy. It’s mischievous in that way. It’s telling a message through comedy and telling a story through visual beauty. If you’re seeing something beautiful or haunting, that image is going to stick with you, and you’re not going to feel pummeled with a political message.”

The past few years have made clear how important resilience has been, and how important the art of storytelling is, she said. The pandemic also inadvertently revealed how some groups, such as those with disabilities, were being left out of the theater world before technologies such as Zoom opened new opportunities for them. This will be foremost in her mind going forward, she said.

Ultimately, success in her role, she said, will be seeing the spark for a young person that really finds their voice for the first time.

“That happened to me around this age, and it was those moments that really shaped me as the citizen artist that I am. I know that all the students here will do amazing, fulfilling things for themselves, and I hope to be witness to that journey,” she said.

“It’s about the ripples that the program will create rather than the big prizes at the end of the day.”

Adrales herself has received numerous prizes for her work, including the TCG Alan Schneider Directing Award, the League of Professional Women’s Josephine Abady Award, and the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation’s inaugural Denham Fellowship. She has been awarded directing fellowships at New York Theater Workshop, Women’s Project, SoHo Rep, and the Drama League.

For the theater faculty, Adrales is a welcome addition whose vision jibes perfectly with efforts already underway.

Elizabeth Margid, a professor of directing and the person who chaired the search committee, said it’s exciting to have someone who will have the time and space to take the long view.

“She has the ‘vision thing.’ She’s that kind of person. She dreams big, and because she’s so warm and leads with love, and is so articulate, she’s the kind of person that people want to work with,” she said.

Chad McArver, a professor of lighting and set design and chair of the department of theatre and visual arts, said he expects Adrales will help facilitate the ongoing transformation and conversation that the department has been engaged in since the 2020 murder of George Floyd.

“We’re moving into a social justice focus with our anti-racism work that we’ve been doing, so she’s like the capstone for all that,” he said.

“The way she’s been thinking and working as an artist is perfect for us.”

He also embraced the label of “citizen artist.”

“We want to make sure that we are educating students who have been empowered as artists, and will be upright, leading citizens wherever they land,” he said.

Keyes and his mentee, Elizabeth Hawes, were recognized for showcasing “the best of what it means to treat those on the inside as equally human, equally meaningful, equally as capable of stirring our imaginations through the written word,” according to PEN America. Each of the eight winners received $250 and a set of books chosen by their respective mentor/mentee. 

A ‘Golden Partnership’

Hawes, who has been incarcerated since October 2008, contacted PEN America in hopes of getting feedback on her play Supernova, a series of monologues and scenes about women’s experiences in prison. She asked to be paired with a playwright who has experience staging a play. “Was what I had written clear? Was putting a Busby Berkley-style ballet in the middle madness or fantastic? Did the play as a whole come across as too heavy or too sad?” she wrote in an essay on PEN America’s website.

In Keyes, she found not just a source of feedback and support but a fellow writer with whom she could collaborate. “Regardless of where my play lands, I know that it is good,” she wrote. “It is moving and interesting and relevant to the conversation of mass incarceration. I present it with confidence. Jeffrey gave me confidence.”

Initially “blown away” by Hawes’ writing, Keyes said it was clear that he would be working with her not as an educator but as a colleague, an approach that can be rare for someone who is incarcerated. And he got a lot out of the relationship, too, “really [embarking]on a journey together,” he said, and receiving encouragement from Hawes when he needed it in return.

Keyes said his Fordham education made him truly appreciate the value of a strong mentor-mentee relationship, and understand “what it means to be a mentee and also to have extraordinary mentors.” For him, serving as a mentor for PEN’s program is about more than paying it forward—it’s about providing access, too, since receiving quality feedback from other writers is essential. “I think that it’s affirming for writers who have limited resources … to be able to share their work. I’m lucky that I have friends and colleagues that I can share material with and get high-quality feedback—not everybody has that access.”

The PEN America Prison Writing program had been on Keyes’ radar for some time, but he wanted a stronger sense of success and validation “besides just degrees” before he felt qualified to mentor. “Which is ridiculous,” said Keyes, whose plays have been developed or featured at such theaters as SoHo Playhouse, 59E59, and the Old Vic. It “doesn’t necessarily make you any better … or make you more qualified to be a mentor or to share insight on the world. I think that anybody can.”

Writing His Own Path

Keyes, who hails from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, said he has always been a writer, but when he moved to New York to attend Fordham College at Lincoln Center, it was to study theater. “I think theater is an amazing foundation for all different types of literature,” he said, adding that the Jesuit education he received at Fordham allowed him to explore a wide range of subjects.

And explore he did. After Fordham, he enrolled in Columbia University’s MFA program in playwriting and graduated in 2010. Since then, he’s continued to show versatility as a writer. He co-authored a New York Times best-selling novel, Killer Chef (BookShots, 2016), with James Patterson, and he contributes travel and lifestyle features to such publications as Metrosource Magazine and Passport Magazine, among others.

The Next Act

Currently, Keyes is working with a fellow writer from Milwaukee on a script for a new TV show pitch about the city in the 1980s, which he said is already garnering interest, as well as a solo book project.

Another one of his more recent projects, Digital Arrest, took the top prize in the Creative Technology category at the NYC Media Lab 2019 Demo Expo. A collaboration with Columbia’s SAFE Lab, Digital Arrest offers people released from prison “opportunities to gain relevant tech skills and earn a living utilizing their expertise to infuse the tech industry with nuanced cultural perspectives and deeper context regarding social media use, privacy, and ‘freedom of speech.’” Keyes said the project is based on the story of Jarrell Daniels, whose Facebook and Instagram accounts were used as evidence to help convict and sentence him to six years in prison when he was 17 years old.

“There’s a lot of nuance in social media,” Keyes said, adding that he hopes the project can help people coming out of prison to “gain a deeper sense of right and wrong social media practices,” and be mindful of how what they post can be misinterpreted.

“I think that social justice is personal,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of change that can happen and I think that we’re at a place where we can really start making that change.”

Bubnis, who assumed the role last year, said it wasn’t really a hard call.

“As artists, our students are resilient and have the skill set to adjust and adapt accordingly. I felt it was important for our collective morale to forge ahead with the season. Our mainstage season is one of our anchors that we build our year upon and keeping it intact as everything around us was changing so rapidly was important to us,” she said.

“I wanted us to face the challenges of the semester head-on. That meant pushing through and finding solutions. Going off the grid is not what the spirit of the theatre and our program is about. The show must always go on,” she said, adding that most of the program’s classes are being offered in a hybrid online/in-person format.

And so, on Oct. 8 at 8 p.m., the department will kick off a season titled “Into the Unknown” with a virtual production of Jaclyn Backhaus’ Men on Boats. The show, which will be directed by Sarah Elizabeth Wansley, will run on Zoom for three nights, free of charge. It will be followed in November by a virtual production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. In the spring, productions of Water by the Spoonful by Quiara Alegría Hudes and Everybody by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins will follow.

Many of the theater program’s fall classes will revolve around the mainstage season, with professors using remote learning—and remote performances—as a way to explore important elements of acting and collaboration.

Connecting to Each Other Through Screens

Dawn Saito, an artist-in-residence who teaches Acting 1 and Movement for Actors, said she has had success on Zoom teaching the Laban movement analysis, a method and language used for describing, visualizing, interpreting, and documenting human movement.

“I have many exercises for opening up the body so the actor can transform into different characters, textures, and colors,” she said.

“They have enough room to be able to inhabit these images that I prompt them with.”

Scene work between two actors can be a challenge when a student is not in the same physical space as their partner, but that too can be overcome. During class, Saito sends students to breakout rooms, where they work together to listen and respond to each other.

In the exercise, one actor will move while the other remains frozen. The actor that is frozen will then respond to the movement of the one who is moving. After practicing with each other, they rejoin the larger group and share their progress. (To see movement pieces created by Saito’s students during quarantine last spring, click here.)

“A much as possible, I’m asking actors to radiate their energy, so that they’re connecting to their partners through the screen,” Saito said.

To create the appearance of action, students have practiced “handing” a cup of tea to one another by moving it toward the camera, and when they move their hand, the person on the other side will seemingly receive it. Because students are learning how to engage in their whole body, she isn’t worried that it’ll be difficult to transition back to in-person acting once the pandemic has subsided. In any case, actors have a primal need to be heard, she said, regardless of the platform.

“Art is necessary, especially in challenging times. People need an outlet, they need to see their stories told, and the cathartic process is healing,” she said.

Reflecting on Different Aspects of Theater

Michael Zampelli, S.J., an associate professor of theater who moved to Fordham this year from Santa Clara, is one of three professors teaching theater history this semester. His class which meets both online and in-person, focuses on the purpose of theater.

His class gives students a chance to reflect not only on what people thought of the theater historically and how it functions in society, but also what is happening to them right now, he said.

“It’s encouraging a sort of self-implicating reflection on what they do in a way that I don’t think would have been the case if we were doing this pre-Covid. Even though you hoped they were asking themselves questions like ‘How this is affecting me?’ and ‘How are we learning about how theater companies form?’—you could always have not gone down that road,” he said.

“Now it’s much harder to not go down that road, precisely because they’re responsible for generating theater during a time of great upheaval. The questions are not theoretical questions.”

Raekwon Fuller, a second-year student at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, created this piece, which is meant to evoke what it feels like to be in Fuller’s universe, for Dawn Saito’s Movement for the Actor”class.

Learning to Speak the Same Language

Ntokozo Fuzunina Kunene, a designer who joined the faculty last year, has been teaching the class Theater Collaboration remotely from her native Johannesburg in South Africa. The class, which she co-teaches with acting program head Matthew Maguire, helps future directors, playwrights, designers, and actors speak to each other more effectively.

“I’m a costume designer, but I can’t necessarily think in terms of lighting, so I still want to make sure that I’m able to communicate with the light designer, because so much of our work impacts each other,” she said.

“When they say, ‘Oh, this is too bright,’ I need to be able to understand how to help reduce the brightness. Maybe something that the actor is wearing is too white. So how do we work together to combat that?”

To achieve that, the class is structured around productions that students from different theater tracks, such as acting and design, are invited to create independently based on prompts, which range from lengthy conversations that Kunene and Maguire record in advance to simple five-word poems.

Let’s Be More Limber

Clint Ramos, the head of the Design and Production track, changed the syllabi in his classes so that instead of working on several projects, students are focusing on one mainstage production for the whole semester.

Rather than adapting traditional theater to the current circumstances, he sees students innovating to create a new form. When you stage a production via Zoom, for instance, it’s worth investigating what it means to say that characters in a play are together in a specific room.

“Does it mean the actors are using the same background? The same lighting?” he said.

“For designers, that bridge already existed, because a lot of the designs are also created for film. This gave us an opportunity to lean in on that bridge. We’ve kind of overlooked this because we were so into live performance. We’re saying, let’s be more limber and see that you can do. The more limber the students become, the more possibilities they have for the future.”

Ramos has also enlisted five university theater programs in the Northeast for an online production stemming from themes in One Flea Spare, a 1995 play by Naomi Wallace set in a plague-ravaged London during the 17th century. Students are virtually attending classes at other universities and are collaborating with each other on works connected to the play. When it is finished, the recordings will live on a website hosted by Fordham.

Liliana Gutierrez, a second-year student at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, created this piece, which is meant to evoke what it feels like to be in Gutierrez’ universe, for Dawn Saito’s Movement for the Actor class.

What Will ‘the Biz’ Look Like?

Theater is also big business, and that business is facing hard times; Broadway has been dark since March. Students who took Theater Management with Stephen Sosnowski, FCLC ’03, normally attended class at his office in Times Square. Sosnowski is senior vice president at SpotCo, where he has spearheaded advertising campaigns for more than 50 Broadway shows and cultural institutions.

His first remote class featured guest speaker Matt Ross, creator of the COVID-19 Theater Think Tank, which is working on processes for theaters to reopen safely. Sosnowski was reticent about the class at first but said he felt optimistic by the energy students brought to the meeting.

“I got a little emotional at the end of the class. These students coming to class; I’m in awe of them, frankly,” he said.

He admitted it’s impossible to predict with certainty what the industry will look like when it emerges from the pandemic. But he’s tried to provide a window into that future, through guest speakers such as Victoria Bailey, executive director of the Theater Development Fund; and Adam Siegal, managing director of Lincoln Center Theater.

“Everything I talk about is, ‘What was it like pre-March 12, and what do we think it’ll look like and what will the opportunity be like,’” he said.

“The key word is opportunity. I see this as a time where there’s a lot of opportunity to enact change. We can figure that out together.”

For a “backstage” tour of Men on Boats by senior Chloe Rice, visit the theatre department’s Instagram page.

The shift to remote learning last month necessitated by the COVID-19 outbreak has presented unique challenges to students and professors in the performing arts. They’ve been forced to temporarily leave behind concert halls, dance studios, and theaters, and in some cases, to reconsider the very nature and purpose of what they do.

In Theater, Special Attention to the Medium

“It’s a huge challenge to adjust to this, and like any kind of trauma, it plays itself out very differently in different personality types. To be aware of that and sensitive to that is an education,” said George Drance, S.J., artist-in-residence at Fordham University Lincoln Center and a member of the Fordham Theatre faculty.

For Drance, who is teaching the courses Acting IV and Theatre, Creativity, and Values this semester, the shift has involved helping students learn and rehearse plays such as The Centaur Battle of San Jacinto while separated by both space and—for students not on the East Coast—time. Scenes would be impractical to rehearse on Zoom, so students have been working on monologues instead. Drance also split his Acting IV class into an East Coast group and a West Coast Group, and when they meet in person, it’s primarily to review monologues the students have recorded of themselves earlier.

“We decided to really use the platform to focus on individual on-camera technique, because they’re dealing with a camera instead of an audience,” he said.

“So rather than force a Zoom conference to be anything other than it is, we took it as a way to demonstrate how the principles of working with a partner and doing on-camera work are really the same principles but executed with subtle differences.”

Drance said he has also challenged his students to ask themselves what it’s like to be attentive to themselves now that their regular routines have been stripped away.

“How can you be patient with yourself, rigorous with yourself, and generous with yourself according to what is appropriate for each moment? In that way, it’s very Ignatian,” he said, noting that Saint Ignatius, the founder of the Society of Jesus, often spoke of focusing on whatever is more conducive to a person’s place and circumstance.

Clint Ramos, head of design and production in the theater program, said when it comes to set design, students who would have been expected to turn in the second of the semester’s two projects are instead receiving in-depth tutorials. Even if students can’t build models of theater sets from home, they can still dissect the texts of plays and discuss emotional responses that might then be translated into physical forms.

“When we’re looking at a text, instead of immediately jumping to a design, we spend a lot more time talking about the piece, its social implications, what could be a potential design for it. We’ll research materials that could lead to a design rather than concentrate on the practical methods of designing the piece itself,” he said.

Stage Directing a Zoom “Play”

For Lillian Rider, a Fordham College at Lincoln Center junior who will graduate in December with a degree in theater design and production, the pandemic ended her chance to stage manage To The Bone, the final production of the department’s mainstage season.

Instead, the cast came together via Zoom for a reading of the play on April 18, the day that would have been the final performance of a two-week run. Roughly 90 people attended, and Rider supervised from her parents’ home in Hartford. Although it was never meant to replace a real performance, she and director Lou Moreno took small steps to make it more than a regular Zoom meetup, such as making sure the backgrounds behind actors were similar.

At the conclusion, audience members were allowed to turn their cameras on, and the cast could see them applaud. It was a far cry from the real thing, but Rider said she was satisfied that it did what she most wanted it to do, which was reunite the cast and introduce new people to the material.

“We had a few sound problems, which were bound to happen, but we just didn’t stop, and they worked themselves out. I was texting actors throughout, helping with technological things, but nothing that held up the run,” she said.

“I didn’t think I’d actually end up getting to manage a mainstage show this year, but it did end up being a lot of management, a lot of emails and scheduling, and then I got a hand in the running of the show.”

For Music Class, Professionals Record Students’ Arrangements

Nathan Lincoln-DeCusatis, an assistant professor of music, was fortunate that the two classes he is teaching this semester, Music Theory II and Jazz Arranging, are more amenable to online instruction, thanks to music-writing sites like Noteflight. After some trial and error, he settled on a system where he makes a prerecorded lecture of himself playing chords and working with notation software. Live meetings are reserved for questions about the lecture and demonstrations of exercises students can practice.

“It’s like a flipped classroom, because you do the lecture for homework, and then you do the homework together in class. As I’ve gotten better, I’ve been able to do more in real time over Zoom, because I’ve figured out tricks like how to play the music from my computer,” he said.

Lincoln-DeCusatis did lose a live performance element of his music theory class, as he had arranged for professional musicians to visit class and perform pieces that students had arranged. Rather than scrap it, he emailed the students’ works to the musicians, who then recorded them in their home studios and returned tracks to him. He then synced the tracks—one each for a trombone, tenor saxophone, alto saxophone and bass—with a piano track of his own, and uploaded the finished result to SoundCloud.

“It actually sounded better than anything we’ve done before, because that’s how you record in a recording studio,” he said.

“Every instrument is isolated, and you can mix it and add effects to it. It sounded really great; it’s the best-sounding outcome we’ve had so far. That was probably my greatest pandemic teaching triumph.”

Antonio Rivoli, a sophomore at Fordham College at Rose Hill majoring in music and urban studies, and one of Lincoln-DeCusatis’ music theory class students, is also enrolled in the Afro-Latin Music Ensemble course. The course was significantly hampered by the suspension of in-person instruction, but he said that ensemble director Peter “Jud” Wellington shifted the focus of the class to sampling, a change Rivoli has embraced wholeheartedly.

“We’ve really challenged ourselves to make the best out of a really difficult time. No one expected that this could have happened, and to be putting together other kinds of projects that the courses aren’t designed for has been really cool,” he said.

Rivoli said he’s also tried to make the most of his time at home in Battery Park City.

“I have a microphone, and I took music production last fall, so I’ve been doing some mini-recordings to try to be productive. I’ve been practicing more guitar, which I never do on campus. So there have been certain perks,” he said.

A Barre in Brooklyn

Meagan King is, in her words, “trying to find the light in everything.” By now, King, a senior in the Ailey/Fordham BFA program, would have normally auditioned for one of Ailey’s two dance companies, where she hopes to dance upon graduation. Instead, King is studying at her parents’ home in Mill Basin, Brooklyn.

“I’ve been trying to stay ready,” she said.

“I’ve been telling myself, ‘If I put in the work now, I won’t have to feel like I’m unprepared when it comes to the audition.’ I know that I can be naturally nervous in auditions as most people are, but I want to take out all the extra factors that can take away from me just shining.”

In addition to working with instructors, King has been using the time to explore online presentations from other dancers. She’s been working on the custom-made barre her father built for her and her younger brother, who is also a dancer, and she’s dampening her ballet slippers to give her more grip on the floor.

Like her fellow seniors, she has had virtual conversations with dance professionals from around the city that were arranged by the Ailey Company, to address any concerns related to the field. The talks have spurred her to think deeply about why she started dancing in the first place, as a student at LaGuardia High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, just a few blocks from Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

“I realized, that kind of free spirit is the same person I want to connect to now when I get to go out and do my audition whenever this is over. It’s easy, once you have the knowledge, to become critical of yourself,” she said.

“Not to say I should just be reckless and audition, but I feel like I’m taking off layers in this quarantine so I can just dance. I have the knowledge; I have the foundation I’ve been working on.”

Melanie Person, co-director of the Ailey School, said the school has had to rely more on video and written instruction in lieu of in-person instruction, and instructors are particularly sensitive to the fact that students’ living rooms and bedrooms are no substitute for a spacious, well-lit studio.

Person also noted that self-discipline has always been paramount for world-class dancers.

“At Ailey, they’re taking two to three dance classes a day, even via Zoom,” she said.

“This requires self-motivation and self-discipline that you really need anyway for dance, but now you really have to draw more from your own reserves for this. You’re a dancer, this is what you do, you have to have to keep your own schedule with it.”

There is a culpable sense of loss born from the fact that the community is separated from each other, she said. But perhaps counterintuitively, Person said, it can be empowering for a dancer to assume complete responsibility for themselves and their art.

“It’s a different model. It’s time to be reflective. And really, you can sit back and think about, ‘Why do I dance?’ Once you have distance from something, perhaps you come back to it with a different appreciation and from a different perspective. I believe that is what is to be gained from this.”

And indeed, if you sign up for these classes, Jones, a member of the faculty since 2008, will artfully guide you through your paces in these aspects of stagecraft.

If, however, you visited the Connelly Theater, Joe’s Pub, or any of the myriad theaters where Jones has performed over the last decade, you’d have encountered a very different person: Jomama Jones.

Since her debut in 2011, Jomama, a radiant soul diva with her own distinct backstory and career, has been a vehicle for Jones to explore profound questions of race and gender. In 2011, the New York Times described Jomama’s performance as “glowing, making it hard not to surrender to this sequin-encrusted earth mother’s soulful embrace.” In 2015, Jones won a Doris Duke Artist Award, which featured a $225,000 unrestricted, multiyear grant, and this April, he was honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In addition to critically acclaimed performance pieces such as Black Light, which he performed at the Public Theater and Greenwich House Theatre, and Duat which he performed at Soho Rep, Jones has also produced plays such as Phoenix Fabrik, Bel Canto, Ambient Love Rites, and Earthbirths, Jazz and Raven’s Wings, and five albums of original songs.

So what has Jomama been up to these days? In a new podcast, Fordham News tracked Daniel down to find out.

And in a bonus track, Jones explains what the term Afromystical means, and why it’s so important to understanding “Jomama Jones.”

Full transcription below

Patrick Verel: If you visit the Fordham Theater Program’s webpage, you’ll find classes with titles such as acting, theater history, flying solo, and young, gifted and black, all offered by one Daniel Alexander Jones. And indeed, if you sign up for these classes, Jones, a member of the faculty since 2008, will artfully guide you through your paces in these aspects of stagecraft. If however, you visited the Connolly Theater, Joe’s Pub, or any of the myriad theaters where Jones has performed over the last decade, you’d have encountered a very different person, Jomama Jones.

Since her debut in 2011, Jomama, a radiant soul diva with her own distinct backstory and career, has been a vehicle for Jones to explore profound questions of race and gender. In 2011 the New York Times described Jomama’s performance as quote, “Glowing, making it hard not to surrender to the sequin encrusted earth mothers soulful embrace.” And in 2015 Jones won a Doris Duke artist award, which featured a $225,000 unrestricted, multi-year grant.

So what has Jomama been up to these days? Fordham News tracked down Daniel to find out.

So when we met in 2013 you told me, and I quote, “I think terror and art go hand in hand. If you’re not scared, you’re not doing it right.” So 2019 must be a phenomenal time to make art, right?

Daniel Alexander Jones: Yes, indeed.

PV: Tell me about it. How is it making art in 2019?

DAJ: Yeah, well that that idea of fear and its relationship to creating is an important one in that. I think it’s always important to feel what I call a quickening. Like when your heart races a little bit fast. There are a lot of states of mind and states of being that can bring us to that place. Love can bring us to that place. Curiosity can bring us to that place. Fear can bring us to that place. But all of it is for me about getting beyond your comfort zone. The habits that you have, the ways that you are accustomed to doing things. And when you move past that and you get into that place where you get a little bit afraid, your instincts kick in in a different way. And I think you start to see things with more acuity and you start to listen with more specificity. And that means you’re paying attention. And if there has ever been a time in my adult life in the United States of America where we need to be paying attention, it’s now.

Using the arts to explore possibility is a real honor, but it’s also one of the most powerful places to be working because it is about accessing the imagination. And if we cannot imagine what comes next, we can’t manifest what comes next.

PV: Talk to me about Waves, which I understand is a book you’re working on. It’s a book of creative nonfiction and you’re doing live readings of now.

DAJ: For the last three summers I’ve been dedicating my time to crafting this manuscript. I finished it in late August and gave it to my editor who just gave me back my manuscript. So the remainder of this year is dedicated to getting back in there and refining it. But I set out to write and collect the work that I had done for theater performance, techs, plays, which largely had not been published. And a number of friends and colleagues who said, “Yo, you got to publish your stuff.” And I said, “All right, I’ll sit down and I’ll do this.” And as I looked at the different work that I’ve made over the last 25 years, I said, anybody coming to this work not having seen it firsthand or not knowing me, would not probably be able to put it in a context because it’s kind of all over the place, in a way that I’m happy with, but it taps into a number of different ways of making work and different styles.

So I said, let me write a little contextual essay so that it’ll frame this work. And when I sat down to write that essay, that essay exploded into its own project. What I recognized was that I had a deep need to write about lineage. To write about the artistic traditions out of which my own work comes, in which I participate, hopefully which I extend, and which for sure here at Fordham forms the basis of what I teach.

So that meant that I was writing this kind of hybrid of memoir stories about and kind of essays about the mentors that I had in the arts, most of whom were pretty extraordinary black women who came out of either or both the avant garde black American theater tradition and or queer theater traditions. And then also to write about what it meant to integrate the lessons that they taught me into everyday life and everyday practice.

PV: Who’s one that you would think would be good to mention for this?

DAJ: Yeah. I will mention one who actually, it’s very interesting, her name was Dr. Constance Berkeley. Dr. Berkeley was one of my professors in undergrad when I went to Vassar College. I write at length about her and the many lessons she taught me, and particularly about her ability to help me understand better what it means that we live in a society that is so deeply informed by racism, classism, a kind of cultural imperialism that erases the truths of all of our distinctions as human beings. And that’s everybody in the society. And what it means to engage that means that you have to become an extraordinary observer, an extraordinary listener, and someone who can ask really good questions. Because if you make a space where you ask the right kinds of questions, people can reveal the complexity and the nuance of who they are outside of these very rigid, binary and hierarchical systems.

Her argument was everybody is so much more than the categories that they were reduced to. Everybody. And it is our work to take the time and the energy to see one another and to be with one another in that nuanced way. It’s harder. It takes more courage, and it takes more time. And especially in a society where everything moves at such a clip and our assumptions become our certainties and those certainties become things that are a part of that comfort zone I was talking about. The way we can navigate the world, certain of who does this, what that is. You can’t be in the arts, I don’t think, and be true to the work if you’re not willing to engage uncertainty and discomfort and the unknown.

PV: Have you visited many places that might be a little more resistant to this kind of performance?

DAJ: Absolutely. Yeah, and I think that’s actually a very big part of what’s important about making this kind of work. With touring Jomama, we’ve had a number of experiences where we’ve been places that had never experienced anything like Jo and have maybe not experienced a show like a show that I make and there’s been a lot of power in that for all involved.

I’m thinking of one time in particular we brought one of the shows to rural Minnesota, to this town that was definitely the red part of the state. I think a lot of folks who came to the show had seen the poster and they thought Jomama was real, which she is, but they didn’t understand that there was a male identified person portraying this person. And it was intense. And you could see there was a moment of, oh my God. And some people had brought their children. There was a lot of, oh my goodness. And then on top of that, the kinds of things I was talking about were very challenging. What happened was that people stayed the course.

And I think because of what I was mentioning, that I’m really interested in the encounter, the experience of being in the space together. And as Dr. Berkeley taught me, I really want to see who you are and I want you to see who we are and be in the space together. There’s not a trick and I’m not here to attack or shame you. I’m here to be. To talk about these ideas. And my ideas may confront you. I may confront you, you may confront me. But if we can stay in the heat with one another, what might be possible? Because the typical thing to have happen is you get into those highly charged situations and people decamp to their certainty. And this I deal with as a professor all the time. It’s like how do you have a dialogue in a classroom where people’s ideas are so fixed? How do you have a conversation?

PV: Right. So in a way you actually bring your teaching experience to the stage.

DAJ: And vice versa.

PV: And vice versa.

DAJ: 100%. 100%.

PV: Now, you’ve made it clear, now that we’re talking about Jomama, that it’s not a drag act. She’s another side of you that’s every bit as real as Daniel. Was it hard to make that switch the first time?

DAJ: Mm-hmm. For me it wasn’t because the way that she came through, and the first time she actually came through for me it was in 1995 so it was, I was working on my very first full length performance piece. She appeared in a way that was very different than a character that I created. I’ve written dozens of characters in different pieces and performed them, but that wasn’t what this was. So for me it felt more like a kind of channeling, being a vessel for this energy, which led me to number of different traditions. There are spiritual traditions where you’d become a vessel for an energy that is outside of who you are. There are traditions of performance, masked theater traditions in particular that I’m thinking about in in Asia and Africa where the mask, the external identity has a story, has information, has a particular set of characteristics and you as the performer actually surrender yourself to that energy. You take it on and it moves through you, it takes over your body, it moves your body in a particular way. Very often there are dances or songs that the mask knows that come through your body. And that is a valid and millennia old way of working.

The place that can be difficult I think is in how people view what I’m doing. It’s much easier to say it’s a drag act. It’s more complicated to talk about it in this way because it means opening up a different set of questions about what performance is and what identity is. I really don’t claim authorship of Jomama Jones, which is an odd thing to say as a playwright and a creator. I claim that I’m in a relationship with this energy and I create the circumstances. It’s kind of like building a melodic structure or a chord structure for a song, but the song when you play it live is always different every time.

In the jazz tradition, Betty Carter said one time something, she said, “It’s not about the melody, it’s about something else, the song.” So we often know a song by humming the melody. We’re like, oh, this is a song I know and I might hum, but the song is actually bigger than that. It has to do with the interpretation. It has to do with the way that the musicians approach it on that particular day and the epiphanies that lie between the notes. And that’s my work on Jomama, is I can give you a frame, but when I’m letting her through, she’s going to do what she’s going to do. And I’m not authoring that in a conscious way.

Now someone may come and say, “Well, that’s a subconscious thing. You’re still doing it. You’re still Daniel.” Fine. You can say that. But I choose very consciously to view it as part of I think a very ancient way of working. And I’m interested always in a more practical way, PV, in the idea that there are many people inside of us. Many aspects to us. And what happens if we give ourselves more freedom to think about identity as a multiplicity and a process rather than a static and fixed location? That interests me tremendously. And I think it might actually be a balm for some of the difficulties we go through in our culture that increasingly seems to need a static, flattened identity in order to assimilate and process.

PV: Wow, this is so much more deeper on a psychological level than I even imagined.

DAJ: You know that’s how I roll. That’s why these people, they run out of my class.

PV: Meanwhile, when you mentioned a mask, the first thing that came to my mind was the Jim Carrey movie, The Mask, where he literally puts on the mask and then becomes—

DAJ: In the mask itself.

PV: The mask takes over and he takes it off and goes, “Whoa. What was that all about?”

DAJ: What was that all about? Yeah. Which is a really, that’s a very funny pop culture version of this thing that is thousands of years old. Which is amazing to think about that, and what does that ancient wisdom tell us? Because there were so many different cultures throughout the world that masked play was integral to their religious traditions.

PV: Yeah. So you’re picking up on a very, very old tradition here. Speaking of old traditions, you’re turning 50 in February. Can I say that?

DAJ: Now why you going to try to put all my business in the street? You can say that.

PV: Hey, I’m an old man now. I just turned 45.

DAJ: All right. That’s good. Young.

PV: I’m not that far behind.

DAJ: I’m your elder. Respect me.

PV: I’m not that far behind.

DAJ: I love it.

PV: Yeah. So you’ve obviously seen a lot of changes in, when it comes to attitudes about gender expression in this country. And I wonder, do you feel like you’ve changed as well?

DAJ: I have. And I’ve been so inspired by… One of the places I really feel always that I learn from my students. I know that’s a kind of cliché thing that people say and they’re like, “Oh, I learn from them as much as they learn from me.” I’m like, I don’t know that that’s true. I think we have different ways of exchanging. But I’ve been heartened by their clarity. That they no longer wish to reiterate a very limited set of definitions about what identity is. And in regards to gender, that there’s just this steadfast refusal to accept this binary idea.

It’s been interesting because I’ve witnessed in my life the ways that a gender binary has been integral to keeping a lot of the oppressive systems that aren’t explicitly about gender in place. A lot of the power dynamics, a lot of the hierarchies that it slips in. And even if it’s not the thing that you see, if you dig, you’re going to find that binary at work. So I mentioned my book Waves that I’m working on, and I mentioned these mentors. And it is not lost on me that most all of the people who shaped me were feminists, womanist thinkers, particularly coming out of black feminisms. And black feminisms implicitly challenge ideas about flattened identity and challenge ideas about singular ways of being in the world, and a binary. They break all those things open. They demand that you think more rigorously and feel and be more rigorously.

So I’ve changed because I’m starting to experience things that I felt either only I was going through or a very small group of people were going through, I’m starting to see as being very much discussed in the public. So it’s been a very interesting experience to let go of a lot of that sense of isolation and say, “Oh, I’m not alone in my experience of gender,” which has always been a very fluid thing.

Now, I haven’t felt the need to define myself because I think I’m always a little bit suspicious of definition in general, but what I’m clear about is that I can look back at my work for 25 years, I can look back at my life for almost 50 years and say that this idea of ‘the many inside the one’ has always been true for me. That there’s a fluidity and there’s a curiosity in some ways. I think if I can make one other provocative statement that when we are with one another, we bring different things out of one another. Whether that’s a one-on-one conversation, like what we’re having right now, a classroom setting, a collaborative environment, making art, a city, a political party, a nation. We can go to any scale, but we bring different things out of each other. So I also think identity is not only about who you are within, but how you are without. How you are in configuration with other people. That you change in relationship, or different aspects of you are highlighted or suppressed in relationship to the people that you’re around.

PV: What’s next for Jomama?

DAJ: Well, I am currently working on the first stages of a brand new project that I’m building with the Public Theater and New York Live Arts as partners right now, and it is going to be a kind of ceremonial ritual performance project and I’m going to be working on it all year. In the spring we’ll be doing a sharing at New York Live Arts in early May of the first phase of this material, some portion of it. And Jomama is in it as a central figure, but there are a lot of other people who are involved. I just got done with this incredible workshop week with Josh Quat, who’s one of my musical collaborators, and then three extraordinary folks, Ebony Noelle Golden, Alexis Pauline Gums, and Shango Daria Wallace, who are all culture makers, leaders, activists. We came together this week and explored some of the first phases of the core questions of the show, and it blew my mind. So I’m buzzing with all this stuff and going to go sequester myself, rewrite my book, and write this new piece for the rest of the year.

PV: You’ve got a lot of work cut out for you.

DAJ: I do. I do. But thank you so much for chatting with me. I’m very happy to be part of your podcast.

PV: Thank you.

Bonus Track:

Patrick Verel: What does the term Afromystical mean, and why is it so important to understand you and Jomama?

Daniel Alexander Jones: One of the threads running through black American culture, and I would say you can make this observation of Afrodiasporic culture, period, is the relationship between cultural production and what you might call the divine or the numinous; the sense of the mystery of being and how close it is to our embodied everyday experience.

Zora Neale Hurston once talked about this principle called the juke, and the juke is like the juke joint. And we’ve all seen the juke joint in movies about the blues and you know, it’s the shack off in the woods or on the water where people go and they have their party, and they go and listen to the blues, and they get a little tipsy and they dance together. And what she says is in that space, an elevation will happen; that there’s something from the collective gathering and the movement with the music, and the collective energy of the people all dedicated to this kind of celebratory experience that will open up an experience of the life force that is larger than what you walk around with everyday.

And I think you can look at that and you can think about how that threads itself through black music. You can think about how it threads itself through dance, Alvin Ailey. You can think about how it threads itself through popular dance. You can think about how it threads itself through even the kinds of performative conversations and demonstrations and people’s own sense of beauty walking through the world. And then there’s a correlation in the black American sacred tradition in the church where people get the Holy ghost, right? Where you see the divine comes through. You may have seen it with gospel music that it lifts, and you get that shimmer; that vibration where all of a sudden, it feels like God is present, the divine is present, however you want to want to name that thing.

So, I’ve always been aware that what interests me is that meeting place between what we can never know; The universe, our ontology that is rooted in our sense of what cosmology is. That is the site where the work really, really happens. There’s a lift, there’s a change, there’s a transformation.

PV: Do you feel like you’ve been able to achieve that lift?

DAJ: I have. I have. And actually, Jomama has. Daniel does from time to time. But it’s part of the work, and it’s a long tradition. It’s not something I’m making up, but it’s something I participate in in my own way.

We had it recently when we did our show in Boston and there was this moment where the room, and it’s hard to describe if you’re not a performer, but there’s a kind of melting that happens that you can perceive if you will, when you’re presence of an audience. Performing live in the way that I do that involves some improvisation. Everybody in that room, you sense their energy, you sense their intelligence, you sense their perception. And you can feel almost like a circuit; what’s closed and what’s open, how the energy is moving through the room. And paying attention to it, there will be a moment if it does turn, there’s a moment where everybody knows that it turns, and all of a sudden, the circuit works in a different way.

And that thing, it happened, there was one particular show I can think of when we were in Boston that it happened, and I would say over half of the audience started to cry at the same time. It was phenomenal, and all of us who were making the show kind of looked at each other like, “Oh, it turned. The thing—” And it was dramatic because we didn’t expect that to happen quite in that way. But it said to me that there was a place where the individuals making up that audience, and then the collective experience of that audience connected with the subject matter of the piece which in this piece, had a lot to do with race and violence and conflict and the soul. And given what’s going on in the country, it’s like those things can be very hard to talk about in a public space. And there can be a resistance. And if that resistance flips, which is part of the technology of making a work, you know? It can be a tremendously liberating moment.

And again, what happens after when people leave the theater, I have no control over that as an artist, none whatsoever. But I can make an invitation to say to folks, what would happen if we sat with these ideas in these experiences together, and that we making the piece, will hold the room in such a way as not to leave you exposed in a way that’s cruel, in a way that tricks you. Because I think that’s a big part of it too. People don’t … Why would I show you something if you’re going to trick me?

PV: Right.

DAJ: And that’s not how I roll.

PV: Yeah.

And yet, despite her brutal schedule, during a recent Monday afternoon workshop at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, Jackson arguably had as much, if not more, energy than her charges.

“When I get into it, the students give me so much joy and so much hope for what we got for the future in theater,” said Jackson, who sits on the board of the American Theatre Wing. “That they’re even interested! I live in California and most of those kids, they’re just trying to get into movies and TV, and I’m like, ‘Does anyone know what it is to love the theater?’”

Jackson told Broadway’s Playbill that her love of theater began after seeing the musical Camelot. She went on to develop extensive Broadway and off-Broadway credits, including roles in the acclaimed off-Broadway production of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf and the Tony-nominated Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, as well as dozens of film and television productions, including Juanita, U.S. Marshals, Fried Green Tomatoes, and Malcolm X. Her Tony-nominated Broadway run in A Raisin in the Sun placed her opposite Denzel Washington in a production that has since become something of a feeder for the endowed chair he funded at Fordham. The play’s director, Kenny Leon, held the post in 2014 and actor Stephen McKinley Henderson held the chair in 2016.

Jackson said that for her role in To Kill a Mockingbird, a reinterpretation of the classic novel by Harper Lee, writer Aaron Sorkin, producer Scott Rudin, and director Bartlett Sher each played a role in convincing the actress that she wouldn’t be coming to Broadway to play a black maid without agency, as the character is portrayed in the book. The New York Times notes that Calpurnia, as played by Jackson, is the “needling conscience” to Atticus Finch, the play’s lead protagonist, played by Jeff Daniels.

The veteran actress has said in several interviews that to play the role, she has drawn on memories of her grandmother, who worked in service for a family. In her workshops, she tells students to draw on their own experiences, but she also wants them to examine the playwriter’s intent and align themselves to the language and culture they are intended to portray. She said that for today’s students who are awash in the selfie culture of social media, it can prove to be a difficult task.

In a Q&A following a monologue workshop, Jackson discussed teaching today’s acting students, respecting the lines of a playwright, and theater’s role as a conduit for change.

What are some of the biggest challenges facing young actors today?

The generation now seems to be of one mainstream thought that they’re all plugged into: “This is who I am. Find me like this. This is how you got to get it.” They are committed to you coming to them rather than them having to come to you. It’s their thing. I’m here to show you the practical side of working. How to get it together to be a professional.

You require the students to mark up their scripts to denote pauses, inflections, levels, and rhythm. Why?  

When you mark your script, you mark the lines in the natural way that you hear it. This is an unnatural thing that we’re being asked to do, which is to act. So, we actors have to try to render the language and give it back in a way that people already know. And the audience hears that. The students are all smart enough in the academics of it, but they have to go back and try to figure out what’s interesting and an interesting way to say it. This is a safe space. We are here to get it, to understand exactly what it is, so there is no good, better, best.

Watching you reminded me of watching a coach on the field: “Take a breath here, take a count there, modulate your voice, modulate your tone.” Tell me about coaching students in that way.

One of the students has a beautiful voice that is very low, way down here. And I said, “First of all, you’re going to give yourself vocal nodes trying to talk down there all the time.” I understand it’s a beautiful voice, but you can’t stay there. You have to give me some levels. I told them all from the beginning, “We’re going to get a big bag, and we’re going to fill our big, large imaginary bag full of tricks and techniques. So that when we need them, we’ll go into them and use them.” And one is the, “one, two, three,” count that I did today. That’s just a natural sort of beat between a phrase transition. Because sometimes you’ll pause and say, “Am I pausing too long?” And that pause actually can be measured: Count one, two, three. For actors who know it personally, their clock is tuned to that already. Later in your career, you’ll meet people while you’re playing and you pick up on the rhythm of what they know. And by and large you can hear it: your rhythm, their rhythm, and you just fall right in line. It’s like playing a symphony. That’s what I’m trying to teach them. That is taught. You can learn how to do that.

You read the script when the students perform and you stop them on the slightest mistake, even if they replace the word “the” with “a.” You told the students, “This is theater, not TV.” What did you mean by that?

It’s exactly that. The playwright’s a wordsmith. And if you’ve done TV, they write like this: “OK, yeah, do this line, do that line, change that.” But playwrights, they sit with a piece, they go over it, they do each line, they go through it. So out of respect for the playwright, you should really deliver the lines the way they wrote them. Don’t add, don’t take away.

With certain writers there’s a highly specific cultural rhythm. How is that accessed? 

With August [Wilson] people say he has to be taught to a certain rhythm, because of the cadence of how he wrote. But he didn’t create it. He just wrote what he heard. And he was so good at it that everybody thinks that he created this language. But it’s not just from Pittsburgh [the setting for most of Wilson’s plays]. I’m from Atlanta, Georgia. I know people who talk like that. It was the rhythm of their speech that he was able to access. For actors playing those roles, you need to have something culturally that you can lean on to get that.

The president of Ireland was here at Fordham recently and he said that with so many of our established institutions under fire, the arts have seized the moral center. Do you think that’s true?

I’m not so sure about the moral center, but isn’t that just a conundrum? You see how the tables have turned. It used to be that the moral-less people were in the arts. That’s how it was always viewed. But the arts have always given us a reflection of our better selves, of who we should be and while, like in the Janus picture, showing us who we are. It’s our job in enduring the most tumultuous of times: to create. That’s when you rally against what the ills are and try to provide at least a platform for conversation.

Well, I think our time is up.

Really truly. Sam is in town (actor Samuel L. Jackson, her husband), and he said, “Will you be home and have dinner?” I said I would.

That’s the conundrum of Fordham Theatre’s 2018/2019 mainstage season, which opens on October 4 with a contemporary translation of Sophocles’ Antigone. Director Matthew Maguire said that since American politics and culture is in the same state of chaos as it was last year, this was the right time to ditch formal themes, such as last years’ questions of American identity, and Fordham’s outsider roots the year before.

“I got tired of season titles that felt like rhetoric; I couldn’t think of a better title for this year’s season that was substantially different from last year’s,” he said.

Given all that has happened in the last year, Maguire said he felt it was necessary to be smarter and savvier in how plays were selected. Each one is in some way a resistance to a vision of the United States as a country that is nationalist, xenophobic, and dominated exclusively by heterosexual white Christians, he said. The works do share a common thread though: What happens when radical change disrupts to heretofore stable systems?

Antigonick, which was chosen with the November elections in mind, asks what happens when a young woman defies rigid state power. Orlando, a dreamy adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel of the same name, asks what happens when a man is suddenly transformed into a woman. Satellites is set in a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood and features a multi-racial couple struggling to answer the question, what happens when cultures clash?

The season ends with Mr. Burns, a musical set in the aftermath of an unspecified apocalyptic event. The survivors bond over a shared love of The Simpsons episode Cape Feare, and eventually build a tradition around staged reenactments of it. It is, Maguire said, an attempt to answer the question, ‘What happens if people have to rebuild their culture through the art they make?’

“It’s a wonderfully dual question because it says something to the theater makers about the importance of what that they do, but it also says something to audience about how story telling can bind a culture, and how the stories that are meaningful to them will protect them or divide them,” he said.

As is the Fordham Theatre program’s custom, students played a major role in choosing the plays. William Recce, a senior playwriting major at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, participate in the five forums, and made a strong case for Mr. Burns inclusion. He’d been a fan of it since it debuted in 2012, partly because of its realistic depiction of the power of pop culture. It also resonated on a deeply personal level, he said, because it’s ultimately about collaboration and making art in trying times.

“For a theater program that is all about collaboration and building something from the ground up and sifting through the ashes of our everyday world and trying to find something beautiful, I thought, it’s a perfect piece,” he said.

Ultimately, Maguire said he hopes the plays are a positive means of resistance. For those who embrace xenophobia, racism, and nationalism, they’re meant to show there’s another way. For those who already embrace an inclusive vision of the country, they’re meant to be nourishing. Either way, they should make people think, and ideally take action.

“Plays should change people’s lives. You should walk out of a theater, and something should make you decide, ‘I think I’m going to do this,’ he said.

“If it doesn’t change your life, we have not done our job.”

The plays include:

Antigonick by Ann Carson, directed by Rebecca Martínez

Oct. 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12

Orlando by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Ashley Brooke Monroe

Nov. 7, 8, 9, 15, 16, 17

Satellites by Diana Son, directed by Sonoko Kawahara

Feb. 21, 22, 23, 27, 28, March 1

Mr. Burns, by Anne Washburn, directed by Elizabeth Margid

April 10, 11, 12, 24, 25, 26, 27

This year, Fordham’s performing arts programs have taken center stage.

Over the past few weeks, several nationwide rankings have been released online, including lists from OnStage Blog, a theater website, and Playbill. Fordham found its name among the top programs for 2018-2019.

Fordham Theatre is listed as No. 1 on OnStage’s list of Top 25 B.A. Theatre Programs, beating competitors like Vassar College and Brown University. OnStage considered various facets of Fordham’s program: the facilities, faculty, cost/scholarship opportunities, selectivity, curriculum, and performance opportunities.

“The program features tracks in not only performance and design/technology but also playwriting and directing,” the blog wrote. “With four mainstage shows and up to 20 studio shows each year, students are continually learning by doing.”

OnStage also ranked the Ailey/Fordham B.F.A. in Dance program as the No. 2  dance program in the country, second only to NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

“This mecca for dance is located in the heart of midtown Manhattan,” the blog wrote about the Ailey School. “It houses 16 climate-controlled studios equipped with sprung floors, pianos, sound systems, state-of-the-art acoustics, the 275-seat Ailey Citigroup Theater, physical therapy facilities, the Ailey Boutique, a library, and student and faculty lounges. It is [the] largest building for dance education in the dance capital of New York City.”

The program not only has state-of-the-art facilities, it also allows students to study full time at both the Ailey School and Fordham. At the Ailey School, they are trained in classical ballet, jazz, and West African Dance; at Fordham, they are educated in the liberal arts.

Lastly, Fordham tied for 10th place in the most represented colleges on Broadway in Playbill magazine. There are currently 12 alumni on Broadway who star in shows like Anastasia, The Lion King, and Wicked.