Author: Kyle Gerstel

Debra Ann Byrd deserves your attention—don’t worry, she’ll get it. A prolific writer, performer, and artistic director, Byrd is a theatre artist with a wardrobe of many hats and stories to share.

Seattle Shakespeare Company is kicking off 2023 with Byrd’s solo show The World’s a Stage: Becoming Othello, A Black Girl’s Journey, directed by Shakespeare & Company founder Tina Packer. The play follows Byrd’s life as she performs as the titular character of Othello, a play by William Shakespeare known for its underlying racism. “As I was discovering Othello, the character, I started discovering things about myself as well,” Byrd said. “I kept telling myself, ‘I have to write about this.’ I always wanted to perform a solo show, so I thought this was a good opportunity to create one.”

Since this is Byrd’s first solo show, her first step was seeking education. “I went about the process of finding a coach to help me understand what it means to write a solo show,” Byrd said. “Then, I got another coach to help me make what I wrote into a more serious production for theatre audiences.”

After working with the coaches, she was unsure how to continue developing the play. “I’m a praying girl, so I thought about it, I prayed about it,” Byrd said. “Who is supposed to help me with this thing? What came to mind was a colleague and friend of mine, [Dr.] Paul Edmondson, the [Head] of Research at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.”

Edmondson and his team at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust loved Byrd’s concept and wanted to support the play. “They said, ‘Maybe we could bring her out to Stratford-upon-Avon to become the writer-in-residence here for a month and we can help develop the play,’” Byrd said. “We recorded like nine sessions of interviews, 45 minutes to an hour and 15 [minutes] each, to go over what I was thinking, why it was so personal, and why it was also so public. Why would audiences care? Why would it matter to the world?”

Byrd continued to attain opportunities to develop the play through residencies at esteemed institutions such as Columbia University and the Folger Library in Washington D.C. “Then, I wrote a proposal so I could put some dramaturgical elements into the show, the history of Othello,” Byrd said. Eventually, Byrd brought in Tina Packer to mold and direct the production. “I reached out to Tina Packer, who was one of my teachers and mentors, and I thought she would be a great fit for the play,” Byrd said.

Packer’s prior experience gave Byrd a stronger understanding of the needs of solo work. “Tina Packer has worked on other solo shows, including ones that she wrote for herself, so she had a lot of knowledge,” Byrd said. “I went up and worked with her for weeks on end until it was time to go into rehearsal.”

Packer helped Byrd shape the play for regional theatre audiences, which are frequently not diverse in age or race. “I know that a lot of audiences are old and white and as the years go by, the young ones are getting old too,” Byrd said. Packer focused on what the audience takes away from the production. “Tina Packer would help me fine-tune those areas that needed to reach a little bit further to get an audience member to understand,” Byrd said.

“Even before we got to Shakespeare & Company, we knew that this show would first be seen by audiences in Stratford-upon-Avon, so we knew that they would be not only old and white, but old, white, and British. We thought about how we could break it down a little more so that audiences could understand from a cultural point of view what it is I’m trying to say.”

However, Byrd and Packer were confident that audiences would appreciate the production for its Shakespearean references if nothing else. “Because there are over 200 Shakespearean lines in it, we knew that people who like Shakespeare would love it,” Byrd said. “We took into consideration all of the audiences who might come and tried to make sure we had something in there for everyone.”

Throughout the process, Byrd learned the importance of balancing authenticity with tools for audience engagement. “At first, I was telling the story to get it out of my body and into the world,” Byrd said. “How do we take all of these things, mix it in with Shakespeare, and tell the stories? What is it that we can do together to create something that is meaningful in the world?”

The play analyzes Othello from a fresh perspective “to encourage, to challenge, [and] to inspire. Is he a mad man or is he a hurt man?” Byrd said. “When I broke it down, I saw that Othello was hurt. I say it in the play: if we tell ourselves the truth, we have a better chance of making the world a better place. We need to talk about it plainly.”

The World’s a Stage: Becoming Othello, A Black Girl’s Journey, presented by Seattle Shakespeare Company, is playing January 3–29, 2023. Tickets are available online.

Kyle Gerstel is a 15-year-old musical theatre geek who couldn’t be happier to have found TeenTix in 2020. In addition to writing for the TeenTix Newsroom and his school newspaper The Islander, Kyle frequently performs with Youth Theatre Northwest and works with Penguin Productions to foster an equitable theatre community. When not in rehearsal, you can probably find him writing poetry, rewatching Promising Young Woman or obsessing over Bo Burnham.

This article was written on special assignment for Encore Stages through the TeenTix Press Corps, a teen arts journalism program sponsored by TeenTix, a youth empowerment and arts access nonprofit organization.

This fall, The 5th Avenue Theatre and ACT Theatre are collaborating on their 10th co-production, Choir Boy, a play with music about sexuality, intersectional identities, and acceptance. The co-production process allows each theatre to access the other’s unique resources and provide Seattle with a more diverse range of musical theatre experiences.

“We have some really delicious, intimate theatres at ACT and The 5th Avenue is a very big space,” ACT Theatre Artistic Director John Langs said. “As Broadway and the rest of the world started to explore smaller, more intimate musicals, there was a feeling that they were getting lost in the big space.”

Bill Berry, the artistic director of The 5th Avenue Theatre, added that co-productions have longer runs than shows produced by The 5th and ACT independently, so they benefit artists as well. “We also talked about the value [of] producing shows with longer runs to the arts ecosystem and the folks working in our community, particularly the performers,” Berry said.

Thus, a partnership began. Since the co-production program’s inception in 2011, the theatres have produced a variety of small-scale contemporary musicals including the two-hander whodunnit comedy Murder for Two and Sondheim’s acclaimed concept musical Assassins.

Rather than dividing responsibilities evenly, each theatre contributes what they have the capacity to offer. “We are a theatre that is smaller than The 5th Avenue, so they have a much larger annual budget,” Langs noted. “We find a mutual understanding about percentages that makes sense to each theatre, and it’s roughly 70/30 split cost, but the productions are made for the most part at ACT.” 

Then, the theatres collaborate on curating the material, selecting directors, and casting. “The decisions sometimes take longer to make,” Berry admitted, but he stressed that the organizations “work together on all aspects” of the productions.

When Langs and Berry accepted their positions, they felt that the curation model in place did not serve the greater community of artists and audience members. “We needed to flatten the hierarchy about decision-making, about whose voices were represented onstage,” Langs said. They started having conversations “both internally and externally with a lot more stakeholders about what shows go on the mainstage.”

Recently, someone who has helped cultivate these conversations is Jay Woods, The 5th’s associate artistic director of artist engagement. “I always say that a leader at best is a master weaver of the skills and choices in the room,” Woods said. “From an organizational perspective, that means the artistic leadership [team] must be vigilant in avoiding homogeneity in its staff, in its season, [and] in how it communicates with the world.”

The theatres did not initially realize the impacts of increasing the length of a run. “Each theatre really did not have a lot of experience running shows upwards of 10 weeks of performances, so our first few co-productions involved a lot of learning about taking care of the company,” Berry confessed. “Mistakes were made, and we have integrated better and more mindful practices over the years.”

Choir Boy is a coming-of-age story about Pharus Young, a talented, queer gospel singer at the Charles R. Drew Prep School for Boys. Before ACT and The 5th chose to co-produce the show as a part of their 2022-2023 seasons, ACT had planned to produce it in association with Denver Center Theatre Company in 2020. After that fell through because of the COVID-19 pandemic, ACT considered presenting the play on their own, but the theatre is delighted to be collaborating with The 5th in order to deliver as strong of a production as possible. “The production that we could have done would have been a little more modest, but we loved the play,” Langs stated.

This production of Choir Boy is particularly exciting since it will feature a completely unique version of the text. “The director Jamil Jude has been on a long journey with this play; he was a part of it before it went to Broadway and the script got sort of locked, so he has seen many iterations of it,” Langs said. Jude wanted to include some of the moments that were cut on the show’s road to Broadway, so he received “permission from the playwright to take the pieces that he felt were really powerful and told the story that he wants to tell.”

As the partnership continues, the theatres hope to focus on cultivating new works. “Our real dream is to commission and develop musicals from the ground up as we move forward with the co-production slot in our season,” Berry stated. However, their mission is not exclusively based on producing premieres. “We also want to be sure that we are bringing pieces like Choir Boy to have new productions in Seattle.”

Pharus’ arc in Choir Boy represents the values both theatres wish to emphasize this season. “This season [at ACT] is really about journeys of courage,” Langs said. “The characters in the season really stand up for who they are.” In order to cultivate an environment in which artists and audience members can fully appreciate shows with sensitive subjects like Choir Boy, Langs and the teams at ACT and The 5th make sure all of the theatres’ programs are as inclusive and equitable as possible.

“Remaining open and vulnerable to new ways of thinking is crucial to structurally changing a system that never wanted to invite the ‘skills and choices’ outside of the white-approved tool box,” Woods said. “We need to be brave for one another or we might as well hang it up.”

“I think about equity in terms of making sure that everybody who comes into our space feels like their personhood was thought about before they got here,” Langs explained. “We want to create a safe space to do dangerous work, and that takes a lot of diligence.”

Choir Boy, presented by ACT Theatre and The 5th Avenue Theatre, is playing at ACT’s Allen Theatre from September 9–October 23, 2022. Tickets are available online.

Kyle Gerstel is a 15-year-old musical theatre geek who couldn’t be happier to have found TeenTix in 2020. In addition to writing for the TeenTix Newsroom and his school newspaper The Islander, Kyle frequently performs with Youth Theatre Northwest and works with Penguin Productions to foster an equitable theatre community. When not in rehearsal, you can probably find him writing poetry, rewatching Promising Young Woman or obsessing over Bo Burnham.

This article was written on special assignment for Encore Stages through the TeenTix Press Corps, a teen arts journalism program sponsored by TeenTix, a youth empowerment and arts access nonprofit organization.

It takes a village to scare a generation into never swimming in the ocean again. During the filming of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Jaws, Spielberg and his team were faced with incessant challenges involving budget, the weather in Martha’s Vineyard (where they shot most of the film), and perhaps most notably, a dysfunctional mechanical shark named Bruce. Years later, Richard Oberacker and Robert Taylor realized it was the perfect material for a musical.

Bruce, Taylor and Oberacker’s new musical premiering at Seattle Rep this May, follows the tumultuous filming process of Jaws as described in The Jaws Log by Carl Gottlieb, one of the film’s screenwriters.

“Being a film buff, I had always heard some of the crazy stories about what had gone on that summer to make the film and how insane it was,” Oberacker said. “Before I met Rob, around the 25th anniversary of the DVD, they did a documentary about [Jaws] that got released as a bonus feature [and] I started to realize that the backstory of how the film had gotten made was kind of the perfect hero story that musicals often follow.

“There’s something about our brains that finds it very delicious to find out origin stories to things we already know and love. All of the masters have to learn. We’re finding out how Spielberg became Spielberg—he wasn’t born the guy who did Schindler’s List [or] Jurassic Park. He was born with innate talent, there’s no question, but that summer, he was only 26 years old [and] he had very little film experience on this level, so he surrounded himself with people who were much more seasoned than he was. He spent that first film learning from the best and in exchange, with his own innate talent, he taught them something.”

Eventually, Oberacker got ahold of The Jaws Log and thought that if the story was to be adapted as a musical, he would use the book as a blueprint rather than trying to collect interviews independently. Eventually, he and Taylor brought their idea to Gottlieb. “Finally, we got the nerve to cold email and call Carl Gottlieb and say, ‘Hey, we have a crazy idea to pitch you,’ and Richard went out to LA and met with him at the Roosevelt Hotel,” Taylor said.

“We were supposed to actually go have lunch together and we never left the lobby,” Oberacker recounted. “We just talked and talked and talked for a couple hours and he got it immediately. He thought it was hilarious and just crazy enough that it might work.”

Unlike most book adaptations, the writers were able to draw from additional sources. “There are things in discussions we’ve had with Carl that are not in the book, the personalities and things people were thinking,” Oberacker noted. “We’re working from a much broader pallet of inspiration.”

Oberacker and Taylor also took inspiration from their Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Bandstand. “We worked with Andy Blankenbuehler on Bandstand and [he] taught us so much,” Taylor said. “If you can do multiple things at once, do them.” 

“By going through that process with Andy, we wrote into the original draft of Bruce that sense of layering [and] we took stronger risks,” Oberacker added.

For Bruce, the duo is thrilled to be collaborating with director/choreographer Donna Feore. “Two years before the pandemic hit, Richard and I read this rave review of a Music Man production up at [The] Stratford Festival in Toronto and it was Donna’s production of The Music Man,” Taylor said.

“It was just absolutely brilliant. It was functioning on so many levels that I haven’t seen productions of The Music Man function on prior to that or since then, so we kind of became superfans instantly.”

The following summer, Taylor and Oberacker were looking for a director, so Taylor emailed Feore and told her that he was returning to Stratford to see two of her upcoming productions and would love to meet her if she was available.

“By the time I arrived there, about four days after I had emailed her the script, she had been through it three or four times, she had given it to multiple friends, and it was clear that this was the perfect person to direct this show,” Taylor said.

“She’s just so creative and honestly, she’s fun to hang out with,” Oberacker attested. “There are a lot of laughs [and] she is very methodical about every word. She plans very far ahead and expects everyone she’s working with to do their homework.”

Recreating Jaws’ chaotic production process for the stage hasn’t been without its own challenges. “There’s a whole kind of incredible arc before they actually land in Martha’s Vineyard for the summer to start shooting and it’s written on the page very, very fast and it jump cuts from office to office,” Oberacker said. “Donna was very challenged by that, [but] what [she and the designers] created was so different from what we had imagined at all; it is so completely crazy what they have chosen to do and when we saw the design, we almost wept because it’s so brilliant and so simple. It’s an incredible magic trick.”

“Then, we couldn’t figure out how you are going to get from this magic trick to Martha’s Vineyard physically, and when they showed us how it happens, our jaws fell open.”

The show was set to open in 2020, but the pandemic delayed the production. However, according to Oberacker and Taylor, the pandemic has made the show more important than ever. “The show became more relevant over the past two years,” Oberacker said. “It was always fun, it was always a story about imagination and overcoming odds, but it has a resonance now that it simply didn’t have before. We were able to incorporate what was happening to us personally as artists in a very visceral way so it made it onto the page by virtue of sort of living a version of the chaos and troubles they were living that summer as well.”

“The show is an ode to how imagination and the ability to [improvise] is what will take you through almost any situation and it’s what we all have to do,” Taylor added. “This was a group of people that set out to make this film thinking they were going to have access to all of these things, in particular [a] giant mechanical shark, but the shark would just keep refusing to cooperate. Somehow, you still have to find a way to keep moving forward and being creative.”

Bruce is playing at Seattle Rep from May 27-June 26, 2022.

Kyle Gerstel is a 15-year-old musical theatre geek who couldn’t be happier to have found TeenTix in 2020. In addition to writing for the TeenTix Newsroom and his school newspaper The Islander, Kyle frequently performs with Youth Theatre Northwest and works with Penguin Productions to foster an equitable theatre community. When not in rehearsal, you can probably find him writing poetry, rewatching The Cabin in the Woods or obsessing over Bo Burnham.

This article was written on special assignment for Encore Spotlight through the TeenTix Press Corps, a program that promotes critical thinking, communication and information literacy through criticism and journalism practice for teens. TeenTix is a youth empowerment and arts access nonprofit.

It’s not every day you see a musical in which a large portion of the creative team isn’t old enough to legally drink. This summer, Village Theatre is producing three.

“There’s not a lot of opportunities for young students to have artistic control over a production. What we strive for here are professional-feeling productions that are driven by youth. A big part of that is trusting that these students have the capabilities, vision and skills to be able to put together a show—what we do is provide resources, space, time and guidance.”

This is Joel Arpin, the KIDSTAGE production manager at Village Theatre Issaquah. He oversees every element of their productions from auditions and intern recruitment to facility management. Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with him as well as young artists Lacey Jack and Rachel Faria to discuss Village’s Summer Independent Program, a unique project in which youth artists are given the resources to autonomously produce a show of their choosing.

“Village is one of the first theatres to trust kids,” said Jack, a KIDSTAGE veteran and incoming college freshman currently portraying Hope in this season’s production of Urinetown. “Most will hold your hand and as soon as you begin to take a step in the wrong direction, you’re done. Are there negatives to that? Absolutely. However, I don’t mind the mistakes because you’re either going to make them now or in 10 years when you’re finally on your own.”

Unlike most youth arts programs, the Summer Independent Program has been completely youth-driven from its inception. “Students came to us asking for the responsibility of being able to create a show on their own, so we turned the theatre over to them for the summer,” said Arpin. “We offer five shows a year in each KIDSTAGE location, but this is the only one that’s completely student-driven.”

“Students come forward in August/September to submit a proposal that contains three shows they would like to produce as well as why they think they’d be good choices based on ticket sales, messaging, etc.,” Arpin explained. KIDSTAGE’s slogan is “skills for theatre…skills for life,” so Village tries to create as many learning opportunities within the process as possible. “Students used to pitch an entire team, but we later decided to make interviewing designer applications a part of the process so students can build their interview skills—it’s very rare as a young adult that you’re the person learning how to interview.”

However, having such independence can be overwhelming. Faria, an incoming college senior and director of this season’s production of Spitfire Grill, claimed, “I sometimes felt a little bit lost and didn’t know exactly what to do next.”

In order to provide support, Village sets up mentors to help guide these young artists. “You can chat with your mentor when you have questions or need more guidance on how to approach a situation,” specified Arpin.

Faria continued, “It was nice to have advice, but we were never told ‘no’ outside of things due to budget or safety. It’s something you just can’t find everywhere else, to be able to do something at this scale in a way that feels so independent. It’s a huge learning experience for everyone involved.”

This also creates a unique opportunity for the actors, as this is the one program Village Theatre provides in which the focus is on the designers and director. Arpin stated, “We call it summer independent because the designers and director are independently learning and growing, but it’s also a chance for the student actors to no longer have direct professional support.”

“I was so used to working with adults,” Jack commented. “But it’s very exciting for me as an actor to work with these fresh minds because you can relate on more levels.”

Village also helps prepare young artists for the world of professional theatre by running rehearsals with equity rules. Jack emphasized, “Performing is so much more than the physical act onstage—it’s about learning how to deal with friends and how to talk to people as well as how to sing, act and dance. Village wants you to be a good performer, but they also want you to be a great human being.”

Inevitably, the COVID-19 pandemic heavily impacted the program. According to Faria, “A lot of [the artists] weren’t able to be in the same room until tech rehearsals.”

However, this unique situation had its benefits as well. “Typically, the Summer Independent productions are performed in houses with under 200 seats, so instead, we moved to our main theatres (500-seat houses where our mainstage productions typically perform), allowing us to sell 200 tickets, social distance, and be under 50% capacity,” Arpin shared. “This also allowed our students to work in a larger space with more access to equipment.”

Faria added, “We got access to all of these professional facilities including a fly system and construction space that you wouldn’t really expect for a production put on by a bunch of 20-year-olds.” The extraordinary opportunity to access such advanced technical equipment allowed for the designers to fully embrace their creative visions and learn how to operate professional equipment, demonstrating Village Theatre’s effort to do as much as they can to support these young artists.

The tasks of creating three completely youth-led productions and being one of the first live theatres to reopen are daunting individually, but the students learned to overcome both challenges and contribute to Washington’s cultural landscape as we begin to transition back to in-person theatre. As Arpin said, “The students this summer walked into a situation in which they didn’t know what it would look like and I am so proud and impressed by what they have put together.”

The Summer Independent production of The Spitfire Grill ran from July 9-18. Jasper in Deadland is running now through July 25 in Everett. Urinetown will run July 30–August 8 in Issaquah.

Kyle Gerstel is a 14-year-old theatre geek who couldn’t be happier to have found TeenTix in 2020. He recently directed his school’s first musical in over a decade as well as the online production Hamleton: A Quaranteen’d Musical. When not writing articles for the TeenTix Newsroom, you can find him acting in Youth Theatre Northwest productions, writing comedy songs, or obsessing over Bo Burnham.

This article was written on special assignment for Encore Spotlight through the TeenTix Press Corps, a program that promotes critical thinking, communication and information literacy through criticism and journalism practice for teens. TeenTix is a youth empowerment and arts access nonprofit.