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[0:00] Martín Acuña: Hi, everyone. I am Martín Acuña, and you are listening to Backstage Talk.

[0:16] Martín Acuña: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Backstage Talk. Today's guest is Ryan Donovan. He is an assistant professor of theater studies at Duke University. He is also the author of Broadway Bodies, A Critical History of Conformity, and Queer Approaches in Musical Theater. Both books will be published in 2023, the first one in February, and the Queer Approaches in the summer of 2023. Ryan, I am so excited to have you on the show, mostly because the conformity and the conversation about the bodies Broadway has had on stage is very near and dear to my heart. So, welcome to Backstage Talk. I'm really excited.

[1:04] Ryan Donovan: Thank you so much. It's my pleasure to be here.

[1:08] Martín Acuña: So, what did I miss on your bio? How did you end up teaching at Duke? How did you end up being in theater and in the arts?

[1:16] Ryan Donovan: Well, I think it all began for me really early, actually. My earliest memory of my interest in theater was in first grade when we did a stick puppet version of Peter Pan, and I was absent the day that my teacher held auditions. And I really, really wanted to be Peter Pan, and I came back and found out that not only did I not get cast as Peter Pan, I was cast as Captain Hook. And so, I was really disappointed, but I think in the long run, I look back at that now, and I understand why I've had this lifelong fascination with casting, and who gets cast, and which part, and who doesn't, and all of the complexity of the choices that go into casting, and body type, and every other kind of vector that informs casting from the way you look, the way you sound, the way you move.

And I still don't quite know why the teacher saw me as Captain Hook and not Peter Pan, but I look back at that moment as a really formative experience that I think, it's funny to look back and trace your history. And so, for me, it all kind of begins there, which is, I didn't realize that until I was finishing up writing Broadway Bodies and asking myself, why was I so interested in this, and where did it come from? And it's been brewing in me for decades, apparently.

[3:02] Martín Acuña: Yeah, it sounds like it has. So, tell us a random fun fact about you.

[3:09] Ryan Donovan: A random fun fact about me is that I grew up in a really small town in Maryland called Chesapeake Beach, and my dad was the mayor of that town for 25 years.

[3:23] Martín Acuña: Oh, wow.

[3:24] Ryan Donovan: Yeah.

[3:25] Martín Acuña: That is a lot of time, being in that position.

[3:29] Ryan Donovan: He kept running unopposed, so he kept winning.

[3:35] Martín Acuña: Yeah. So, which was your aha moment in which you said, I want to be in the educational side of the arts and the theater?

[3:48] Ryan Donovan: Well, like a lot of theater professors, I started out as a performer, and I was working my way up, getting equity points, equity membership points at theaters around the country, and then I finally got my equity card, and I was doing summer stock at the Merry-Go-Round Playhouse in upstate New York. I think now it's got a completely different name. I think it's called the Roundhouse, but I was doing Brigadoon one summer, and there was a cast member, Megan Duffy, who was in the middle of earning her PhD in theater and performance, and I didn't even know that was a thing that somebody could do, and so that kind of planted a seed within me, and then as the years went on, and I was transitioning out of performing and thinking about what do I want to do next, I remembered Megan working on her PhD exams that summer, and I guess that was my aha moment that I thought, oh, I could do this, and not only could I do it, I should do it, and because I was, you know, when I was a kid, I would do two things to play.

I would dance around the yard barefoot, and so of course it made sense that I became a dancer later, and the other thing I would do is play school, and I used to have a grade book, and you know, it's funny now because grading is my least favorite part of being a professor, but I used to have a grade book, and I'd make lesson plans, and so you know, somehow I made both of those kind of childhood play dreams come true, and you know, I was doing the one when the other planted itself in front of me, and so you know, thanks to Megan and her journey on the PhD, I pursued it, and you know, it led me to where I am now, and to write the books that I've written, and ask the questions I'm interested in, and really to make, to really try to make all of that legible to non-specialists, like I really want people that are Broadway fans to read my work, and it's not just written for other PhDs and scholars, you know, the conversation that I'm having I think is aimed at everybody really.

[6:26] Martín Acuña: I love it. So let's double click on your book on Broadway Bodies. Why write a book with this name, and also with such a heartfelt intro? Maybe we can say it like that, because I remember reading the intro where you said, this book is written for everyone, for every fat, every too fat, too thin, too Latin, too Black, too Asian, people, individual that has always been denied an opportunity in a row. So why write this book, and why write now?

[7:06] Ryan Donovan: It's a great question. I know that all of us who are performers often feel like we're either too much or not enough, and usually not enough. I mean, at least that was my case. But I just, you know, as a historian, I was really interested in finding out, you know, why is Broadway casting the way it is right now? And the way that I wanted to understand that was looking back over the past five decades, and thinking about what are the different factors, and not just external factors, but internal factors to Broadway musicals that led to the histories of exclusion that I write about in the book. And, you know, when I was doing this research, and I was diving in, in particular, I began with looking at size and casting women in Broadway musicals.

And I realized that there were only two Broadway musicals of the past five decades that were available to plus-size actresses to play a romantic lead, to, you know, to specifically play a romantic lead. And there are scores of roles where they could play the comedic sidekick, or the mother, or the best friend, but only two. And, you know, one is, and they're both very specific in terms of the requirements of race, because in Dreamgirls, it's Effie White, and she has to be black. And in Hairspray, it's Tracy Turnblad, and she has to be white, because both of those stories are explicitly about race. And so, you know, that's two roles out of hundreds of Broadway musicals. And so, you know, I started there, and then I started to also think about what other kinds of identities are so stigmatized in the United States that we don't see them on stage, or if we do see them, they are played by actors who don't share the qualities of that identity.

So, for instance, the section in the book on disability and physical difference, you know, we can all count on probably, you know, one hand the number of disabled actors on Broadway who have really made it, you know, and most people begin and end that list with Ali Stroker, you know, for her Tony Award winning performance in Oklahoma. And then in the middle section of the book, I was interested in kind of digging deeper into the way that Broadway includes queerness and queer characters with a lot of ambivalence historically. And, you know, that's due to the changing social position of LGBTQ plus people in the past five decades, which has been enormously changed. And yet, we often think that musical theater, and Broadway in particular, is a very queer friendly space.

And on the one hand it is, and on the other hand, it's not quite so simple. And so I was interested in teasing that out in the book as well. And I guess to return back to the dedication of the book that you mentioned, I think that part of the work that I did in this history was to amplify voices that hadn't been seen in history yet, in Broadway musical history. I mean, we've all heard the typical canonical narrative of Broadway history, and I wanted to challenge that a bit and to introduce other ways of looking at our Broadway history.

[11:17] Martín Acuña: Yeah, there was something else I wanted to say about that, but I forgot. No worries. And I love that you're challenging that. You're challenging that perspective that only certain type of built bodies are made for the stage. Because that in today's world, that is mainly not possible. Because the standards that we've been taught have been for a specific type of race with a specific type of features, we call that. But in the end, in today's society, it's so unbelievable that we still have those standards. I remember going to my general physician and him saying, like, hey, you're overweight. And I was like, yeah, if you take into account that my body is way different to the BMI, quote-unquote, supposed body, so you're taking into account a standard for a white male that probably is straight, that probably has this array or this amount of specific background things to his life that I don't have. So it's very mind-blowing to me that in today's world with today's medicine, we still are cataloging bodies under that factor.

[12:51] Ryan Donovan: Yeah, absolutely. And one thing that I underlined throughout Broadway Bodies is that all of the identities I look at are still held up against this norm that you're discussing, the white, straight, Protestant, tall, athletic male. And in the book, each group identity category that I study faces a wage gap.

[13:47] Ryan Donovan: Everything that I'm writing about, it's always returning to this question of value and who is valued in representation and also in our economy, and how actually the representation translates into someone's ability to earn a living. And one thing I really think is important for people to know is that the norm on Broadway is to discriminate based upon appearance, which directly translates into somebody's ability to get health insurance. If you're in equity and you don't work a certain number of weeks in a year, you don't get health insurance. And all of these things are deeply intertwined, and it's about bigger questions than just who gets to be in a musical, which to me is a big question, but it's so much more than that.

Thank you so much for highlighting those types of stuff. Inside Doors, inside our group of friends, we do have these conversations, but these topics need to go wider and need to reach a bigger audience. And for international people that are trying to get to Broadway that don't understand what equity is or how equity works, we need to know how this works and the challenges that as foreigners we would probably be faced with. So thank you for doing that in your book.

[15:31] Martín Acuña: You're welcome. Let's dive into your journey as an educator. So how would you summarize this whole roller coaster that has been your teaching experience?

[15:50] Ryan Donovan: I always knew that I wanted to be a teacher, and I waited until I really felt like I was ready to begin teaching. So a lot of people start teaching when they're much younger. I didn't start teaching until my mid-30s when I was in graduate school. And I am always interested in making the classroom as inclusive and participatory as possible and as experiential as possible. And I try to model for students the way that I think that they can intervene in the world. And I guess for me, being a teacher is also getting students to question the status quo and to not just accept things as they are, as something that's fixed and not changeable. And since I am a historian and I teach musical theater history and other theater histories, I emphasize that nothing's fixed.

Everything's always changing. And that's really important to me because I think that we can want to hold on to certain things or ideas or time periods. And everything is always in flux. And so to be able to emphasize that to students and to empower them to know that they can make change in the world and they don't have to wait for permission from someone who seems like they have all the power, that they can create the change that they want to see. And to do that in a way that calls people in and attracts people to your movement rather than necessarily calling out or getting too involved in that. Actually, making the world that they want to see come to reality is important to me as an educator.

[17:53] Martín Acuña: I love it. So what advice would you give to those that want to be in this industry, that are starting to get their education, that are looking for programs, and all related to this body type stereotype that we have in this industry, both for sizes but also for queerness?

[18:15] Ryan Donovan: In doing research for the book, I talked to so many people who told me about experiences in their college programs where if they were plus size, they were told they weren't going to work until they were 40. If they were a queer guy, they were told to butch it up. I remember being told at auditions, dance like a man. And this is not that long ago. And I actually found out from a colleague that at her school, as recently as four years ago, they were still doing weigh-ins in their BFA program. So yeah, I mean, it's shocking but not surprising. And I'm sure it's still happening in programs around the country and around the world. So I guess my advice to people who want to enter the industry is that you don't have to enter one of the top BFA programs to have a career.

In fact, I think that what the industry is sorely missing now is the kind of individuality in performers that existed before everyone started going through these training programs. And they're great, and you will get amazing training, and you will come out ready to work. But I think that a little bit of individuality gets kind of stamped out of people in these programs. So I think it's always great to pursue your passions, but also think about what you're going to do in the meanwhile, because not everybody works constantly. I remember studying with Anne Reinking, and she shared with us that even she had auditions where she left in tears after being Tony nominated and being in all these Broadway shows, and that she had years where she didn't work.

And she's one of the most talented Broadway performers ever. So you have to think about what else you love to do, because the auditions are the real job. When you're in a show, that's the fun part. But auditioning is the job. And so you have to approach it that way. You have to have a support system and a way to deal with the constant rejection. You need to be able to network and understand that networking is not a dirty word, that this business is built on relationships. And so prioritize building relationships with people. And I think also, as I said before, don't wait for permission. Create the work you want to be a part of. Don't wait for the audition. Get together with your friends and make it.

And also recognize that Broadway doesn't need to be the center of your world. Broadway will break your heart, as we've seen time and time again. And I'm thinking in particular this season with the fast closures of a few shows like K-Pop and Ain't No Mo' among others. And it's really hard not to take all of the rejection in this industry personally. But you have to recognize that it's not a referendum on your identity, your personality, your worth, your being. It's not really about that, for good and for bad. So look for opportunities wherever you are. And love Broadway, but also question it too. And don't be afraid to think beyond it, because there are amazing things happening everywhere. And there's a great line from Gypsy where Rose says, New York is the center of New York. And I take that to heart. So do the best work you can wherever you are.

[22:32] Martín Acuña: Yeah, I agree. Totally agree with you. What is a risk that you've taken that has totally paid off?

[22:40] Ryan Donovan: A risk that I took that paid off, but not how I expected it to pay off, was one time I was at an audition. I really, really wanted the job. I didn't get it. A few weeks later, I'm at Equity, sitting in the waiting room to go in for another chorus call. And my phone rings, and it's the casting director of the job I didn't get. And she says, the person we cast hurt his knee. Can you be here tomorrow? And I said, absolutely, book my plane ticket. And I got to do the gig, which was great. But the way that that job paid off was through lifelong friends. And I've been friends with so many people from that cast for 16 years now. And so I think that's the payoff are the relationships that I have. It's not just that I got to do this great gig, but it's that that job gave me all these friends who are so important to my life. So I think what you say yes to is really important, as is what you say no to.

[23:53] Martín Acuña: Yeah, absolutely. And we love cast friendships, because they are for life.

[24:00] Ryan Donovan: Yes, absolutely.

[24:03] Martín Acuña: Ryan, last question. What are your top five favorite musical theater shows?

[24:09] Ryan Donovan: This is really hard to narrow down, as I'm sure everyone says, but I'm gonna go being a historian, you must have a pool of a lot of musicals.

[24:16] Ryan Donovan: Yes, I do. And actually, none of these shows that I'm going to list are shows that I ever performed in as a dancer, but I wanted to be in many of them. So I would say my favorite show is Gypsy. It just rewards almost every time I see it and listen to it. And a very close second is A Chorus Line. And that's a show I always wanted to be in, but I could never, I just didn't look like anybody who was in the original cast. And I'm short, but I'm not a mic. So you know, like that was always, you know, the rub at auditions. Okay, then number three would be Dreamgirls. Just obsessed with Dreamgirls. Four is Chicago. And because I am such a huge, a huge Fosse lover, and candor and ebb, and it's perfection.

And then just to add a more recent show into the mix, I would say Fun Home, because that musical, every time I saw it, just actually left me speechless for a long time after I saw it. And I think it speaks to a completely different side of musical theater than the other shows and shows that what musicals can do and how deeply they can move us.

[25:46] Martín Acuña: I love it. I absolutely love it. Ryan, thank you so much for being here. I wish you all the best with both of your books. So thank you so much for being here. And if someone wants to contact you to buy the books when they're out, how can they find you?

[26:00] Ryan Donovan: They can find me on my website, which is ryan-donovan.com or just Google Broadway Bodies and you'll find me.

[26:07] Martín Acuña: Awesome. Thank you so much. This was such a delight. Thanks everyone for listening to this new episode of Backstage Talk. Remember to follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Backstage Talk Podcast.