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[0:07] Harrow: Hey queers, welcome back.

[0:09] Meghan: Thesis on Joan is a podcast dedicated to amplifying voices from the LGBTQ+ community and the New York performing arts scene and examining the industry from a queer perspective.

[0:20] Harrow: Join us as we sit down with groundbreaking theater folk from Brooklyn cabaret performers to people backstage and on Broadway.

[0:28] Meghan: For many queers, theater has been an escape.

[0:30] Harrow: This podcast looks to have open conversations on where we've come from and where we're heading as a community while queering the canon along the way.

[0:43] Meghan: Hi, Harrow.

[0:44] Harrow: Hi, Meghan.

[0:45] Meghan: Happy Pride.

[0:46] Harrow: Happy Pride.

[0:47] Meghan: We're here.

[0:49] Harrow: Can you believe we've been putting out podcast episodes for almost a year now?

[0:53] Meghan: Wow.

[0:53] Harrow: Nope.

[0:54] Meghan: Can't believe it.

[0:55] Harrow: Feels so much longer and so much shorter.

[0:58] Meghan: That's true.

[0:59] Harrow: I mean, last year's Pride, I feel like I just have 2019 memories like superimposed over 2020 Pride.

[1:06] Meghan: Like I don't even remember what I did for Pride last year.

[1:09] Harrow: Shouldn't you go hiking or something?

[1:11] Meghan: Oh, probably.

[1:12] Harrow: That sounds on brand.

[1:15] Meghan: Yeah, I did nothing.

[1:19] Harrow: Yeah.

[1:20] Meghan: It's true.

[1:21] Harrow: It was a very strange year.

[1:24] Meghan: Um, but I feel like I always am so excited for different pride events and like seeing the things that people come up with.

[1:33] Harrow: Um, so if you were planning your dream pride celebration or event, what would it be? What would it involve? Who would you have there? What are your thoughts?

[1:44] Meghan: This is such a good question.

[1:46] Harrow: Um, I think it would not be in summer.

[1:51] Meghan: Uh, it would be in the fall, where I would 100% gather in because queers look so cute in layers.

[1:59] Harrow: So I want to be able to wear at least like two to three layers in a jacket.

[2:03] Meghan: Um, so then I also wouldn't feel like I don't want anyone to touch me because I'm sweaty and hot.

[2:09] Harrow: True.

[2:10] Meghan: So first of all, I move pride to fall, so like October.

[2:13] Harrow: And then uh, I think I'd be better with like crowds.

[2:17] Meghan: Uh, because you, because yeah, the parade and even like the festival stuff feels like really overwhelming to me.

[2:24] Harrow: I like totally like the Dyke March is usually my favorite event because it feels less crowded because we're moving and everyone's just so happy to be there, and it doesn't feel like corporate pride.

[2:38] Meghan: Um, and then I went to the Queer Liberation March in 2019, and that had a very similar vibe.

[2:45] Harrow: Um, and that was a really great space to be in too.

[2:48] Meghan: So what about you? What's your dream pride?

[2:51] Harrow: Yeah, something that is definitely not June.

[2:53] Meghan: I feel like every memory I have of pride has like an underlayer of me feeling like I'm dehydrated and need to take a nap.

[3:01] Harrow: So it's that's an unfortunate thing.

[3:04] Meghan: Um, yeah, I think fall is my favorite season, so I just assume it's most queers' favorite season, right?

[3:11] Harrow: So, and you're right. I love a good flannel layer, I love a good like boot, you know.

[3:16] Meghan: So we gotta, I feel like fall's where it's at.

[3:19] Harrow: Um, but yeah, definitely outdoors with a lot of space, a lot of room to like take your people and go have conversations and hang out, um, where we can all partake in the things we like to enjoy freely and without any oversight, yeah, and entertainment too, just like a rotating like maybe there's a stage somewhere and there's like some rotating drag kings we can check out and like different performances and things, and um, I just like to be entertained.

[3:52] Meghan: I like to be um, I don't like to be hungry and I don't like to be hot.

[3:56] Harrow: So lots of bathrooms that are clean, so many bathrooms, gender neutral.

[4:03] Meghan: Where's the most practical queer?

[4:06] Harrow: I mean, you need a practical queer to plan a pride.

[4:09] Meghan: I feel like every pride committee needs a really good practical queer.

[4:12] Harrow: Yeah.

[4:12] Meghan: I feel like it kind of sounds almost like a Comic Con situation, but outside, uh, where there's like panels you can attend, or like instead of panels, it's like a poetry reading or a performance or you know, whatever, a drumming circle.

[4:29] Harrow: Um, that's true.

[4:30] Meghan: Like how at cons they have like if you love like this show, come into this room.

[4:37] Harrow: Yeah, like the queer version of that.

[4:39] Meghan: That would be so fun.

[4:40] Harrow: We should go all the niches.

[4:42] Meghan: Yeah, we should go to Flame Con this year.

[4:44] Harrow: It's like um, I haven't been, but you know you sound like you know.

[4:48] Meghan: No, I haven't been, but I know all I'm like very excited to check it out.

[4:52] Harrow: Yeah.

[4:52] Meghan: Uh, because it's like queer nerd stuff, right?

[4:55] Harrow: Yeah.

[4:55] Meghan: What if there was a book swap?

[4:57] Harrow: Oh, dreams.

[5:00] Meghan: I would say the only way I would be okay with it not happening outside is if it's in a giant bookstore or somewhere.

[5:06] Harrow: Yeah.

[5:06] Meghan: It could be like all over the city, like you go to the book swap at uh, you go to Blue Stockings or the Bureau of General Services Queer Division bookstore, which is the only queer bookstore in New York that's left.

[5:20] Harrow: Um, yeah.

[5:22] Meghan: So like a full scavenger hunt, like choose your own adventure around the city.

[5:26] Harrow: Yeah.

[5:26] Meghan: I mean, in my dream, all these places are relatively close to each other, so you don't have to like go too far either.

[5:32] Harrow: Yeah, that was a very good point, too.

[5:34] Meghan: And there's just a giant like Central Park area that no one else can be in except queers and their people.

[5:43] Harrow: I feel like we need this.

[5:45] Meghan: And everyone has their dogs at this imaginary pride, too.

[5:49] Harrow: Um, I'm excited to just have any sort of pride like festivities this year, and we'll talk a little bit more about that with the action of the yep, along with some other things.

[6:03] Meghan: Um, yeah, folks here have other like interesting pride things, or if there's an event that actually is what we described, please send it our way.

[6:13] Harrow: We'll see you there.

[6:14] Meghan: Yeah, what a dream.

[6:16] Harrow: Um, we just finished, like very recently, especially for you, Meghan.

[6:22] Meghan: If you finished watching uh, ONCE UPON a Korean Time.

[6:26] Harrow: Uh, in celebration of AAPI Heritage Month, MaYi Theater Company presents a benefit reading of Daniel K. Isaac's ONCE UPON a Korean Time.

[6:33] Meghan: Mixing traditional Korean fables with the horrors of the Korean War.

[6:38] Harrow: Isaiah's new play is a funny and deeply moving analog for the experiences of the Korean American diaspora.

[6:45] Meghan: Isaiah definitely moves his characters through time, tracing the legacies of trauma that are passed from one generation to the next, and the various coping mechanisms each one uses to soldier on.

[6:56] Harrow: And it's written by Daniel K. Isaac and directed by Ralph B. Peña.

[7:00] Meghan: Yeah, so this show was a multi-part kind of vignettes, but they all really wrapped up in a beautiful way eventually, um, with some little interludes that were more modern era, like pop culture-y to camera or to audience.

[7:19] Harrow: Yeah, the interruptions.

[7:21] Meghan: Mm-hmm.

[7:22] Harrow: Um, which I love.

[7:23] Meghan: I would watch a whole show of the interrupters.

[7:25] Harrow: Yeah.

[7:25] Meghan: I was really, uh, first of all, I just have to say, like this show, oh my, I was dying over all of it.

[7:32] Harrow: Like I was so funny and smart and beautiful.

[7:37] Meghan: Um, really hit me in the feels as a queer Korean, as an adopted person.

[7:45] Harrow: I didn't know there was gonna be an adoptee story in it, and that kind of floored me.

[7:50] Meghan: Um, yeah, but oh my god, I love the show.

[7:55] Harrow: And it was way more queer than I think either of us were expecting it to be.

[8:00] Meghan: I was like, oh, okay, there's hints of it.

[8:02] Harrow: And then like as I kept watching, I'm like, oh, this is like kind of like really cool undertones, radically queer.

[8:10] Meghan: Um, yeah, so that was a great surprise.

[8:14] Harrow: It's also so much fun to like I love seeing shows that aren't marketed as like, come on in, gays.

[8:21] Meghan: And it's just like there, like you don't have to like note to the audience before you watch it that it's queer, you know, it's just like something that's part of the show.

[8:30] Harrow: Um, so I enjoyed that.

[8:31] Meghan: When we were trying to figure out what show to watch for this episode, I suggested this play, and I'm like, I mean, Diana Oh's involved who's a previous guest we know is queer and the playwright's queer, so I'm like, I'm assuming there's gonna be some queerness, and oh boy, it paid off.

[8:48] Harrow: Oh can we talk about Diana?

[8:50] Meghan: Oh my god.

[8:53] Harrow: Incredible.

[8:54] Meghan: Well, first of all, what an entrance.

[8:56] Harrow: Um, they play the like model wife of one of the soldiers, and um, they show up in kind of like a photo spread in a newspaper, like a model would.

[9:12] Meghan: And it's so funny.

[9:14] Harrow: It's hilarious.

[9:15] Meghan: Um, she sings "Adi Long," which is a Korean folk song I learned about in my Korean language class, and it was very exciting to see it here.

[9:24] Harrow: Um, she does it in like this like pop voice, Britney Spears voice.

[9:30] Meghan: Oh, it was hilarious.

[9:33] Harrow: I mean, so good throughout.

[9:35] Meghan: There were like so many different care, everyone in the show was incredible, and like the acting it asked a lot of the performers because they're playing some very different roles throughout.

[9:49] Harrow: Um, I think everyone had like a really cool standout moment, so I'm excited to follow all these people and everything they ever do ever again.

[10:00] Meghan: And another one of the interruptions that really just hit me in the face was um, Diana Oh's actually, and they were talking about the man who created the surgery for cleft lips to repair cleft lips, and I had a cleft lip, and that was like one of the main reasons why I was put up for adoption.

[10:20] Harrow: And uh, and I did know that it was um someone in Korea during the Korean War who created the surgery, and it's just so ironic that like I couldn't get it done there and had to be adopted to get that.

[10:34] Meghan: Yeah, anyway, but also he developed the double eyelid surgery, and Diana reads from this paper, this book that he wrote about developing this work and the blatant terrible racism about Korean people, uh, or the way he talks about them.

[10:53] Harrow: And uh, yeah, it was and then there's like photos of like before and after, and like this is still a very common practice in Korea.

[11:02] Meghan: Very popular.

[11:03] Harrow: Yeah.

[11:04] Meghan: And uh again, it's just like a way that like how gen like one thing has spawned like generations of, you know, trauma.

[11:14] Harrow: I don't know if you would call that trauma, but like how it's affected us, like for decades since then.

[11:21] Meghan: I'll take an entire class that Diana would teach on like their views of Korean history and culture.

[11:28] Harrow: That was also the return of emoji faces.

[11:32] Meghan: It's a thingly used, uh very, very well used to turn into a white person when they were quoting the white people.

[11:42] Harrow: It was great.

[11:43] Meghan: I'd have to tell you that I was uh, I started following a lot of the cast on Instagram, and one of the actresses, uh, Shannon Teo, forgive me if I'm mispronouncing that.

[11:56] Harrow: I was like, oh, she looks so familiar.

[11:57] Meghan: I've seen her in something, and then I realized I had seen her in a reading of a play called Ms. Oriental, um, that a friend was involved in, and I'm like, great, now I know.

[12:07] Harrow: And then I was looking at her Instagram, and she played a Joan in uh the Baltimore stage production of Final with Andrea Prestonorio.

[12:20] Meghan: Yeah, wait.

[12:23] Harrow: Which actor is this?

[12:25] Meghan: What role were they in this?

[12:26] Harrow: She plays a third woman and she plays the adoptee at the end.

[12:31] Meghan: Oh my god.

[12:32] Harrow: Yeah.

[12:35] Meghan: I was gonna text it to you, but then I wanted to get your reaction.

[12:39] Harrow: But like, yes, I see it and it's perfect and amazing.

[12:45] Meghan: Oh, where can we get that recording?

[12:47] Harrow: We have to call up Angria.

[12:49] Meghan: They're like, hey.

[12:51] Harrow: Oh my goodness.

[12:52] Meghan: I love that's incredible.

[12:54] Harrow: Yeah.

[12:54] Meghan: I love in the interruptions.

[12:56] Harrow: Um they did it with like the actors in front of a white screen.

[13:00] Meghan: And first of all, shout out to the lighting and like the video videography and the editing.

[13:05] Harrow: It's incredible.

[13:06] Meghan: And it makes you feel like you're watching a movie.

[13:08] Harrow: But um for Shannon's interruption, she you get like a full body shot, and just her her costume, her outfit, whatever.

[13:15] Meghan: I was just like, oh, such a Joan.

[13:19] Harrow: Yeah.

[13:19] Meghan: And that was honestly the moment where I'm like, oh, okay, this place's queer.

[13:25] Harrow: Wendy had her interruption.

[13:27] Meghan: Yeah.

[13:30] Harrow: Cause she was talking about Korean Cinderella, right?

[13:32] Meghan: Uh-huh.

[13:33] Harrow: Yeah.

[13:34] Meghan: And have and realizing that that moment when she was a lesbian is because um what the this turtle that's helping out Cinderella blushes.

[13:43] Harrow: And she's like, Yeah, I blush too, because Cinderella's hot.

[13:48] Meghan: Oh that was a great moment.

[13:50] Harrow: So good.

[13:51] Meghan: Um and the way the stories connect together.

[13:54] Harrow: I thought I was following it and I wasn't.

[13:56] Meghan: Um, but like not in a it wasn't clear way, in a way like the playwright had other intentions for it and wanted to wrap it up at the end for you.

[14:05] Harrow: And the way it was done was just so like beautiful and rewarding and like overwhelming.

[14:13] Meghan: I it was awesome.

[14:14] Harrow: Yeah.

[14:15] Meghan: I was curious of like how much the actors have been involved in creating this play because the the interruptions seem really personal to them, but maybe that's just they're really great actors.

[14:26] Harrow: Uh but also like they use their real names in a lot of the um scenes.

[14:33] Meghan: So yeah, I'm not sure.

[14:35] Harrow: Um but yeah.

[14:37] Meghan: Yeah, I was wondering that too.

[14:39] Harrow: It reminded me a lot of have you read the book Homegoing?

[14:42] Meghan: Yes, yeah, yes.

[14:44] Harrow: It reminded me a lot of that um where that's also an excellent book if you're if you're want to read it.

[14:51] Meghan: Um, but kind of like generations of folks um and how they how kind of like war and colonialism or slavery in terms of homegooming have like affected this different families through hundreds of years.

[15:07] Harrow: Like the inherited trauma of it and how it um I wish we could tell everyone to go watch this.

[15:15] Meghan: I hope that it has another it honestly it worked so well as a digital piece.

[15:22] Harrow: I'm sure it would be incredible in person as well, but it was really well done this way.

[15:27] Meghan: Yeah, um and they I couldn't believe they say in the beginning that all the actors were shot separately for COVID safety, but there's like group scenes where they're all talking to each other where I'm like, I can't believe that they weren't actually in the same room because they are reacting so well to each other.

[15:46] Harrow: Yeah, shout out to the editing on that.

[15:48] Meghan: Oh and this was so funny too.

[15:51] Harrow: Like, I couldn't believe there's um the second kind of chunk is about uh comfort women, and like oof, what a heavy, heavy topic, but like it was also so funny.

[16:03] Meghan: Yeah, the way that they related to each other in the scene was hilarious, and it was so dark, but like I was laughing through it too.

[16:11] Harrow: Yeah, and and like I it felt nice to not be like so weighed down by like the heaviness of it that you could like their coping mechanism was through humor, um, and it allowed you to like watch it without feeling as traumatized as like what the actual situation was.

[16:32] Meghan: Um and yeah, and like just them building community and like solidarity, or not even solidarity, but like yeah, community with each other um was really beautiful to watch and woof, what a trip.

[16:46] Harrow: Yeah, and some of these Korean folk tales are like kind of dark.

[16:53] Meghan: Yeah, that was I I didn't know any of these, like these stories or these versions of you know stories, and it was that was cool in and of itself to just kind of learn a little bit more about the folklore that was a shared uh understanding for a lot of the characters in the play.

[17:11] Harrow: Yeah, no, I didn't know any of these stories either, and it brought up a lot of feels for me about like as an adoptee and like not having access to Korean culture at all growing up, and like, oh yeah, these were you know, one of the monologues, the interruptions was about like how much an actor knew about uh like American culture, um, going on and on about details that he knew about like theater and pop culture and even like philosophy um that's white centered, and he's like, and I can't like can you name a single Korean story or like a Korean song and you can't and I'm like oh yeah that's definitely been my history and you know we were talking you know with Melissa and Kit about um Asian elders and that's a thing that I haven't had in my life because I haven't known any um elder Asian people or people to pass these stories on to me.

[18:06] Harrow: So it's only through things like this or like for me seeking it out um do I get these these like glimpses of Korean culture.

[18:17] Meghan: So it's so important for me to see things like this too and I wish there was more of it.

[18:22] Harrow: Um yeah oof and that uh the last story with the adoptee and her birth mom oh that like gutted me that was yeah it wasn't what I thought it was gonna be and then as it kept going I was like wow this is yeah and that it was it's paired uh with the background of like the LA race riots right and her birth mom owns uh like a convenience store that's being attacked um people are throwing like bricks through the windows and she's her birth mom's telling her folk stories Korean folk stories to like get them through it and I couldn't believe that it was like talking about this moment of history and personalizing it so and humanizing it so deeply and also just being like an amazing scene between a birth mother and an adoptee, which we very rarely get to see.

[19:22] Meghan: Um, so that could that just blew my mind.

[19:25] Harrow: Um, and I also wanna, I'm so happy that when the final moment without giving it away, but it's more like contemporary.

[19:33] Meghan: Um the two, the lesbian couple shouts out their queer sex party.

[19:38] Harrow: I was like, Yes, it's not just the men.

[19:42] Meghan: Well, they have like a baby session.

[19:44] Harrow: Yeah, I loved that.

[19:48] Meghan: That was like that's the queer community I want.

[19:53] Harrow: Oh, I know.

[19:54] Meghan: It's like that that seemed like a great uh Korean barbecue party was happening in the end.

[19:59] Harrow: Also, it was like an LGBTQ adopted Korean support group, and I'm like, how do I find that?

[20:05] Meghan: Yeah, is this based on reality?

[20:08] Harrow: Yeah.

[20:08] Meghan: The playwright also has um a series called According to My Mother, uh, where he talks about his relationship to his mom and like being gay and having a Korean mom and what that's like.

[20:22] Harrow: Um I've watched what's available and it's also amazing.

[20:27] Meghan: So check that out.

[20:28] Harrow: So we we encourage everyone to stay attentive.

[20:33] Meghan: If this comes back, we will let you know for sure.

[20:36] Harrow: It was only this past weekend.

[20:38] Meghan: We're recording this on uh May 23rd.

[20:41] Harrow: Um, but yeah, really incredible show, and hopefully it lives on in some capacity.

[20:49] Meghan: Yes, produce this.

[20:50] Harrow: I will come see it many times and bring everyone I know.

[20:55] Meghan: Okay, so as we mentioned at the top of the episode, June is very much upon us, uh heat and all.

[21:01] Harrow: And you know, unfortunately, until our dream world happens and pride gets moved to fall, um, we are excited to celebrate with everyone uh with the upcoming events this month.

[21:11] Meghan: So we just wanted to shout out a couple of our favorite events.

[21:14] Harrow: Uh the first being Dyke March, which is happening this year on June 26th, 5 to 8 p.m.

[21:20] Meghan: As always, a step off is happening from Bryant Park, um, heading down to Washington Square Park, led by the incredible drummers of Fogo Azul.

[21:29] Harrow: I mean, you can't have Dyke March without them.

[21:32] Meghan: Um, also wanted to mention if folks are interested, they are doing new Marshall training via Zoom.

[21:38] Harrow: They also have a couple trainings in person.

[21:41] Meghan: Um, but for folks who don't know, Marshalls lead the Dyke March, they run ahead, block off the traffic.

[21:48] Harrow: Um, they're incredible.

[21:49] Meghan: So if that's something you're interested in doing, uh check out uh NYC Dark March to find out more about becoming a Marshall.

[21:57] Harrow: Uh they're also doing a fundraiser, uh, which I thought was especially uh might be interesting to our listeners at a queer barber in the East Village.

[22:07] Meghan: Uh hurrare.

[22:10] Harrow: Oh, really?

[22:11] Meghan: Oh my gosh.

[22:11] Harrow: She just started there.

[22:14] Meghan: Oh, that's perfect.

[22:16] Harrow: Um so if you go on June 12th or 13th, 20% of all their uh proceeds are going to support Dyke March and their affiliated um uh uh efforts.

[22:27] Meghan: So we can post that in our show notes as well.

[22:31] Harrow: Uh and then the next day, save up your energy because queer liberation march is on June 27th at 2 30, also at Brian Park, same place, easy directions to remember.

[22:41] Meghan: Um and Queer Liberation March was founded on no cops, no corporations, no politicians.

[22:47] Harrow: I have not been, as Holly mentioned, they've been previously.

[22:50] Meghan: I'm very excited to check it out this year, and we'll post um links in our bio so you can find out more about the Queer Liberation March.

[22:59] Harrow: We support MIC Pride's decision to exclude any police from participating in the parade for the next few years.

[23:07] Meghan: We are still supporting the Communities United for Police Reform and their efforts to defund the NYPD.

[23:14] Harrow: And there are still actions going on now.

[23:21] Meghan: So now they're trying to put pressure on Congress members and representatives to actually make that happen.

[23:28] Harrow: And you can help.

[23:29] Meghan: So check them out.

[23:30] Harrow: They're at Change the NYPD.

[23:33] Meghan: And there's links we'll put in the show notes that you can contact a representative to demand the defunding of the NYPD that they've been working on for a long time before even last summer.

[23:45] Harrow: And we still need to maintain the pressure to get this accomplished.

[23:49] Meghan: Also, demand for New York City budget justice with tweeting, Instagramming, emailing your Congresspeople that despite the promises, the NYPD budget was not reduced by one billion dollars last year.

[24:01] Harrow: And CPR, what they're called for short, will have the information for you to do that.

[24:07] Meghan: So today we are excited to welcome two Adams to the show.

[24:10] Harrow: Definitely our first time having two Adams.

[24:13] Meghan: And our first Adam is Adam A. El-Sayigh, is an Egyptian playwright, dramaturg, and producer.

[24:20] Harrow: Through his producing and creative practices, Adam interrogates issues of immigration, colonialism, and the experience of queerness in the Middle East.

[24:27] Meghan: Some of Adam's plays include Memorial, Jamestown Williamsburg, and Drowning in Cairo.

[24:33] Harrow: Adam is a co-founder of the Criminal Queerness Festival and a fellow at the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics in Georgetown University.

[24:40] Meghan: Adam's work has been seen at IRT Theater, Dixon Place, Golden Thread Productions, and the NYU Abu Dhabi Arts Center.

[24:48] Harrow: He holds a BA in theater with an emphasis in playwrighting and dramaturgy from NYU Abu Dhabi and is currently a PhD student in theater and dramaturgy at CUNY's Graduate Center.

[24:58] Meghan: And then Adam Odsess-Rubin is the founder and artistic director of National Queer Theater in New York.

[25:04] Harrow: At NQT, Odsess-Rubin helps conceive of the Criminal Queerness Festival, Write It Out, Sage Elders Theater Arts Series, Pint Size Plays at the Eagle NYC, and Queer Village Reading Series, formerly the Education Associate at New York Theater Workshop.

[25:19] Meghan: His work as an actor, director, and playwright has brought him to the Guthrie, Lincoln Center, BAM, The Civilians, ACT, New Conservatory Theater Center, New York Theater Workshop, Fix in Place, and Arts Emerson.

[25:31] Adam A. El-Sayigh: He has also worked as a teaching artist with Refugee Homeless LGBTQ and incarcerated youth all over the world.

[25:36] Adam Odsess-Rubin: In 2016, Opsis Rubin served as personal assistant to AIDS Memorial Quilt founder Cleve Jones, with whom he directed LGBTQ and Union Solidarity Campaigns.

[25:46] Adam A. El-Sayigh: His writing on theater and activism has been published by HowlRound and the Teaching Artist Journal.

[25:52] Meghan: Hello, Adam and Adam.

[25:55] Harrow: We're gonna distinguish between you, as you suggested, kindly suggested as Adam O. R. and Adam A.E. But thank you for being here with us for Thesis on Joan. Welcome to the podcast. We usually start with having our guests share their name, their pronouns, and then anything else you'd like to share about how you identify. Do you want to start with Adam A.E.?

[26:14] Adam A. El-Sayigh: Sure. Thank you so much for having us. I'm very excited to be speaking with you today and talking more about our platform. My name is Adam A. El-Sayigh. I use he and his pronouns. I'm a playwright, theater producer, and immigrant from Egypt living in New York.

[26:33] Adam Odsess-Rubin: Hey everyone, my name is Adam Odsess-Rubin. My pronouns are he, him, his. Thank you so much for having us. It's great to be here. And I am an American-born theater maker from Berkeley, California.

[26:48] Meghan: Welcome, welcome. So let's start with talking about National Queer Theater. Can you tell us a little bit more about the origin of the National Queer Theater and how your work crosses generations? And maybe we'll start with Adam O.R. for this question.

[27:02] Adam Odsess-Rubin: Absolutely. I founded National Queer Theater in the spring of 2018. We're three years old. We're having our birthday, yay for National Queer Theater. And I was so shocked when I arrived in New York City and realized there wasn't really an established queer theater company. I had worked at the queer theater in San Francisco, New Conservatory Theater, and felt like I needed that home as a queer theater maker and knew other young queer artists who needed a place to work and also to just get more active in the community to give back to the queer community to use our art as a tool for queer liberation. And while I was in grad school at NYU studying applied theater, working with refugee youth, immigrant youth, working with seniors, really doing theater in non-traditional contexts, I realized I wanted National Queer Theater, this queer theater company, to really focus on education and community engagement as much as it focused on producing new queer plays by and for the queer community.

And so a lot of our work, in addition to the productions we do, the readings, the workshops, and all those amazing programs with professional artists, we also work with a lot of community members through LGBTQ nonprofit organizations. So, in terms of our cross-generational work, you know, a lot of our artists are millennials, they're in their 20s, they're in their 30s, young professionals, but a lot of our students are teenagers, young adults who may be homeless or experiencing homelessness because of being rejected by their families after coming out. We work with a group at Sage in New York City, working with LGBTQ elders who some of whom were like around at the time of the Stonewall riots, which is really incredible and are really the pioneers of our movement.

So we love working with our, you know, 20-something young artists, but also want to make sure we're engaging with our youth and elders who are even more vulnerable as members of our queer and trans communities.

[29:19] Harrow: Yeah, thank you. And you know, you mentioned queer liberation when talking about the company and how does National Queer Theater center queer liberation in your work?

[29:31] Adam Odsess-Rubin: Yeah, it's a great question. You know, a lot of theater companies, their mission is about creating exciting new plays. Like that's kind of like the gist of a lot of New York City theater companies, which is great. And their goal is to create amazing productions and get a New York Times review and get a show to Broadway or, you know, something to that effect. Our mission is different. We do want to create, you know, great plays and great productions, but the mission is liberation, equality, equity for queer and trans people. That is the end goal. Theater is the vehicle, is the tool, is the resource to how we get there. And so we really view National Queer Theater as kind of the artistic creative wing of the queer rights movement rather than another New York City theater company. I almost care more that we are doing our job as a community center more than we're doing our job as a traditional theater company.

[30:37] Adam A. El-Sayigh: Yeah, we all often in when we're programming the festival or when we are speaking about other programs, one of the first things that come up in conversations is the community outreach, the community engagement. Who is this for? We've often spoken about the company and the festival, obviously, as at the intersection of community engagement and social justice and theater, which is not my experience working with a lot of other theater institutions. It's the community outreach can often feel like it's the thing we're thinking about after the play has been built or after we've decided on what the season looks like, and that's for us the model is very much the other way around. It's very different from having a DEI person who is just trying to make small changes happen when that work is kind of just baked into your mission.

[31:31] Harrow: So, speaking of the community that National Queer Theater is working so hard to build, for a theater that works so much to build in-person community, how have you continued to build that community with all of the challenges of the last year has brought?

[31:46] Adam Odsess-Rubin: Yeah, when COVID started, it was a big question can we create community online? Can we create community through Zoom? And we were all kind of skeptical. We were like, you know, community feels like something that needs to be experienced in person. Theater is such an in-person art form. It's about sharing food together and wine and seeing a show and talking about it afterwards. And you do lose a lot online, for sure. I'm not saying doing this work online is as good as working in person, but we found that we still could create community online. And I'll give you one example is our program Write It Out with The Lark and Moby and Danye Our Love, an incredible, incredible queer playwright. We started this program for playwrights living with HIV, or any writer living with HIV, and it was a 10-week-long playwriting course.

It ended with a sharing read by professional actors on World AIDS Day. And through this playwriting course, which was focused on writing and not on acting, which is really difficult to do on Zoom, we were able to build community amongst this group of students, of writers, of playwrights. That was really beautiful to do online, and we could engage people from all over the country. And in our Criminal Queerness Festival, which we did online with Dixon Place and the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs last summer, we were also able to invite people from all over the country and all over the world. And we had people tuning in from countries that actually censored LGBTQ art like ours, which was incredible because the whole point of the festival is promoting, celebrating, showcasing the work of LGBTQ artists who are facing censorship in their home countries, and the fact that we could actually reach people in those countries using Zoom was mind-blowing and has opened up a whole new world to how we engage audiences outside of New York City.

[33:50] Adam A. El-Sayigh: I think as an international artist, I came on first in my engagement with the festival as a playwright. The festival Adam Nyiko founded the festival when I shared after I shared one of my first plays with him while still living in Egypt, which was about the Queen Boat, which is an event that is like in a lot of ways similar to what Stonewall represents in the American Zeitgeist in the Egyptian context, but I could not really produce this play in Egypt. And Adam and I had this discussion about criminalization and about how many countries continue to criminalize queer art, queer experiences, and that was where the idea for the festival really came from. And so in the first iteration, I was a playwright, after that a dramaturg in this year coming on as a co-producer.

I think part of that journey for me was that like there was this question of like why are we really doing this? We're doing this for an American audience. Why does it matter if the people who these stories are about can't really hear these stories? Like, what is the impact and like what are the ethics of what we're doing? And I've been navigating that question for like two or three years now, and it's changed how I've thought about it in many ways, and I found a lot of value in the work we do. But COVID, and I just want to put it out there, I don't love Zoom theater. I do not hope that we continue to make Zoom plays after this moment. But COVID very much helped define this question and this work because we were able, as Adam said, we were able to present the plays and create community and cast and create community engagement and outreach with people all around the world.

And this year we pretty definitively knew we did not want to be virtual, but we did not quite know. One of the first things that I came in with was okay, we're not going to be virtual, but we're not gonna go back to only thinking about a New York City audience. Like we're gonna think about everything we learned from Zoom in the last year, year and a half, and think about what it means to continue to create performance that is live, but that will also in some capacity be accessible to audiences and artists and communities elsewhere. And I'm very excited, I think we've found some exciting solutions and ways to engage that. And yeah, I mean, at this point, the first iteration of the festival was an indoor theater festival, and then it was on Zoom, and now we're doing an outdoor theater festival. It feels like we're constantly queering the form, and the form is allowing us to do new things.

[36:44] Adam Odsess-Rubin: Yeah, I feel like queers really know how to reinvent themselves. So that's exciting. I mean, I can't wait to see where next year's festival will be, like in space. And you know, you already mentioned some of the programs that National Queer Theater is doing. Are there any more that you haven't mentioned yet that you want to talk about? And you know, we're especially interested in this new partnership with the Dramatist Guild, the New Visions Fellowship, and when can we see the New Visions Fellows' work?

[37:14] Adam A. El-Sayigh: Absolutely. I'm really excited about the New Visions Fellowship. It's a new partnership between the Dramatist Guild of America and National Queer Theater to really amplify the voices of Black, trans, and gender nonconforming playwrights in the US. And this came about. We started planning this kind of at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests last June, and really thinking about how both organizations can really step up for Black Trans playwrights specifically. We are working with Roger Q. Mason, who is a terrific playwright as our lead mentor in the program. We got 44 applications from playwrights across the country, really stepping forward with new visions for the American theater as Black writers, as trans writers, as gender non-conforming writers, in really inspiring, innovative, daring ways.

[38:16] Adam Odsess-Rubin: And we've selected two fellows who are both receiving a $5,000 stipend, a year of mentorship from Roger, a five-year membership at the Dramatist Guild of America, and a final showcase of an hour of their work in a final stage reading with trans actors, directors, stage managers, which is also a great employment opportunity for those other artists who are not playwrights.

[38:44] Adam Odsess-Rubin: And um, I can't tell you their names yet. We are getting them new headshots with some photographers, which is gonna be really fun. So we can really do a splashy showcase announcement of their incredible work and their incredible achievement getting this fellowship.

[39:03] Adam Odsess-Rubin: And we are so excited to work with these playwrights at National Queer Theater for the next year as kind of playwrights in residence to really change the face of American theater because I mean there's never really been a TGNC playwright produced on Broadway, and we're trying to change that or off Broadway and really trying to change what the American theater looks like and queer the stage.

[39:26] Meghan: So staged readings, is that something that the public will be able to see as well, or will that be more internal for you guys?

[39:33] Adam Odsess-Rubin: Yeah, the staged readings will not be until next spring, because we're just starting workshops for the fellows right now. Uh, and we're looking, we're talking to different theaters in New York City and around New York City to potentially host that staged reading.

[39:47] Adam Odsess-Rubin: So all the producers listening, you know, email me. Uh but yes, they'll be open to the public. Uh, and we're gonna really focus on inviting literary managers, artistic directors, producers, um, people who can champion these playwrights' work um to, you know, come see these plays because we don't want anyone to have the excuse of saying, like, oh, I don't know any black trans playwrights.

[40:15] Adam Odsess-Rubin: I I don't know any um of these writers to produce their work. Uh, we're gonna be like, no, here are two incredible playwrights, and we're also gonna showcase all of our finalists, all of our honorable mentions, so that there is a whole cohort, a whole um, you know, team of incredible playwrights whose work we can just amplify to, you know, have visibility in the industry.

[40:43] Meghan: Awesome. We'll have to have a new visions episode of the podcast.

[40:47] Adam A. El-Sayigh: That would be so cool.

[40:51] Meghan: Um and so going back to the Criminal Queerness Festival, which we're gonna spend the bulk of our time talking about with you guys, um we talked a little bit about the inspiration, which is the two of you meeting and exchanging Adam A's play. But how did it go from the idea to produce Adam's play to the idea of a full festival? Where did that come about?

[41:11] Adam Odsess-Rubin: Yeah, uh once Adam and I started talking about Drowning in Cairo, Adam's play, and I'd like to say we met on Skype. This was pre-Zoom. We've been on Skype, throwback to Skype.

[41:26] Adam Odsess-Rubin: Um I had worked with a really phenomenal um playwright from Tanzania named Nick Hadigwa Molucko in San Francisco when I lived there. And Nick uh was a Columbia MFA playwriting graduate, um, had been in the United States for a while, but was not able to produce um any of his queer trans plays in East Africa, and told him about Adam's play, and um I don't remember the order of things, but I think the three of us together on an email chain were like, you know, we really need to put these works together and find other playwrights um in this situation where they can't produce their works in their home country, and and Nick actually, I want to give Nick credit for the wonderful name Criminal Queerness Festival.

[42:18] Adam Odsess-Rubin: Um and we brought together uh we brought in Yilon Liu, who's an incredible playwright from China, and Fatima Man, who is a wonderful playwright from um Pakistan, who Adam introduced us to. Um, and we did this little version of the festival at IRT Theater in the West Village near Stonewall, and got recommended by the New York Times, this tiny little, you know, nugget festival, and it was just so exciting.

[42:45] Meghan: That's amazing.

[42:46] Adam A. El-Sayigh: Yeah, yeah, and I feel like you all shot up into the queer theater world after that.

[42:53] Meghan: Um you talked a little bit about thinking about the ethics of, you know, getting these plays from other countries and then only the folks in New York being able to see it. What do you think about your responsibility to the artists, you know, as a whole for presenting um their work and and their respective uh queer communities and their countries?

[43:14] Adam Odsess-Rubin: I mean, I think I very much approach this from the lens of um being a playwright myself and having been like in like the shoes of these artists, um it's always a question of we're interested in supporting playwrights and uh and people's experiences rather than centering a specific narrative.

[43:35] Adam Odsess-Rubin: I think that's something that is very foundational to how we have conceived of and talked about the festival, which is to say that we're very interested in um in supporting playwrights' vision, whether they want to talk about criminalization, whether they want to talk about something else.

[43:51] Adam Odsess-Rubin: We are very strongly uh proponents of um centering stories of queer joy, centering stories of queer community, beyond um just um manifestations of queerness that might that some might interpret as trauma.

[44:06] Adam Odsess-Rubin: Um and so we're very much interested in obviously the safety and security all as well of artists, and so every year one of the first questions that come up is what is your comfort levels around um how we could talk about the festival, how we can talk about your play, who do you want in the room when the play is happening, um, what are the institutions you want in the room, um who who do you want to see display, what is the kind of conversation that you want to have dramaturgically around the play.

[44:36] Adam Odsess-Rubin: And so we very much see the playwrights we serve, specifically international playwrights as our key constituency.

[44:43] Adam Odsess-Rubin: And this year the festival centers on plays from Lebanon, Mexico, and Iraq.

[44:48] Meghan: What what came first? The artist or the ideas for the countries of focus this year?

[44:53] Adam Odsess-Rubin: The way we choose our plays for the Criminal Queerness Festival is fairly similar to our season planning process. Um we always work by committee.

[45:03] Adam Odsess-Rubin: I really don't like the model of an artistic director just choosing the plays themselves because I think you end up with a very narrow view of what is quote unquote like good and bad, which is entirely subjective and different depending on your lived experience.

[45:21] Adam Odsess-Rubin: Um so we get together a committee of artists, we open submissions and try to promote that submission process as far around the world as we can and go through a lot of institutions working with um international artists like the Artistic Freedom Initiative or The LARC to try to get the word out there as far and wide as possible.

[45:43] Adam Odsess-Rubin: Um and then we read scripts, we select ones we think could be a good fit for the festival, and then this year what I really love is that the finalists were determined by previous playwrights from the festival.

[45:58] Adam Odsess-Rubin: So it was a panel of all international queer playwrights who were evaluating these plays and choosing other international queer playwrights whose work they wanted to support with these productions.

[46:11] Adam Odsess-Rubin: Um so we want to make sure we're uplifting um playwrights from countries where they might not be able to preserve uh present the work otherwise.

[46:23] Adam Odsess-Rubin: You know, we get a lot of playwrights from Kansas and Canada and England who don't read the instructions.

[46:32] Adam Odsess-Rubin: Um, as long as they meet that criteria, it's really the focus on the work, on the craft, on the human, on the artist, rather than trying to like hit these certain countries, if that makes sense.

[46:46] Adam A. El-Sayigh: Yeah, I think I the thing that I was going to say initially as a response to this question was that I'm very interested in cultivating voices that we're excited by, and um and I'm much less interested in I think there's a model of curation that I see coming from an outsider lens um in the American theater that is like addressing specific subjects or specific regions because they have some local relevance to the United States, or because we're trying to make some political statement about what is happening in other parts of the world.

[46:46] Adam A. El-Sayigh: And I'm much less invested in that model of curation or programming. I'm interested in um, you know, examining voices that feel like they will contribute to the zeitgeist that will contribute to the conversations that we're having, and um, and starting from there.

[47:39] Adam A. El-Sayigh: So in the in the first year, we had plays from Egypt, Pakistan, uh well, playwrights from China and a playwright from Tanzania. The second year we had plays from Venezuela or playwrights or theater makers from Venezuela, India, um, Lebanon, and Syria.

[48:01] Adam A. El-Sayigh: And this year we have these three plays from these three countries, and it was never a conversation that started from who are what are these count what are the countries we want to put together, but rather like who are the people that are exciting us at this moment? Why are they exciting us?

[48:15] Adam A. El-Sayigh: Um, what can they contribute to the idea of this festival and what what would it mean to support them?

[48:21] Meghan: Awesome. Thank you. It's uh interesting to hear about the committee selection too.

[48:26] Meghan: Uh, and then also thinking about how you put the team together.

[48:30] Meghan: Um, do the playwrights and the directors come like as a package deal, or do you pair up folks? How what's that collaborative process like?

[48:38] Adam Odsess-Rubin: Yeah, part of our the constituencies we're interested in supporting, and our community is also uh BIPOC and immigrant theater artists who are queer here in New York.

[48:50] Adam Odsess-Rubin: And so something that I again, like when this festival first started, I was not in New York, and something that I feel like I was so uh grateful to have had through the festival is to have built um this community and company of theater makers from all around the world who are immigrants who are BIPOC core New York-based.

[49:08] Adam Odsess-Rubin: And so at this point, we have a fairly robust community of queer international artists that are part of the festival community.

[49:15] Adam Odsess-Rubin: And we've historically paired um artists that are playwrights that we think are in line with directors and so on.

[49:24] Adam Odsess-Rubin: Um this year was our first iteration where a playwright and director applied together with a play as a duo.

[49:32] Adam Odsess-Rubin: Um and it's really exciting to see artists um from very different cultural backgrounds from very different stages of their career who were just very excited to work together.

[49:42] Adam Odsess-Rubin: Um we're gonna see how we're gonna see that play um happening both at Lincoln Center and at the United Nations through the Open Culture Program.

[49:52] Meghan: So let's start talking about the plays themselves.

[49:55] Meghan: Um can you tell us a little bit about each of the plays in this year's Criminal Queerness Festival and why everyone should see all of them?

[50:03] Adam A. El-Sayigh: Absolutely. So the first of our plays is called WHEN WE WRITE With Ashes by Victor I. Cazares, who is a very exciting Mexican-American non-binary playwright, and it's a two-character play that is told uh essentially how Victor describes it is it is uh a play that happens between borders, and it's a story of these two lovers who are stranded in a truck as they over three different timelines cross the US-Mexico border, cross state borders, uh, and as they have like very absurdist and yet very viscerally real conversations about meth addiction, about uh HIV status, about coming out to their families, and about the pandemic in the latter scene.

[50:50] Adam A. El-Sayigh: So the second play is by Dima Mihael Mata, who is an incredible solo performer, queer woman from Lebanon. It's called Um This Is Not a Memorized Script, This is a Well-Rehearsed Play. Um, and it is a play about her experience as a queer woman in Lebanon and essentially telling stories about representation, what it means for her as an international queer artist and how she's being read by the international media, and it's very much just a one-woman show that is about representation and the effects of that on her psyche, and it's just very exciting work.

[51:32] Adam A. El-Sayigh: And our third piece is by an Iraqi American playwright who is actually a past company member in the last iteration of the festival, Martin Yousif Zebari, who is presenting his play in development with us, called Laalina, and it's a play that is also straddling two different timelines across acts, telling the story of this Iraqi family as they migrate to the United States in the aftermath of the Iraq War, and then as they navigate the pandemic and live the Black Lives Matter protests as an Arab American immigrant family in 2020 in the second act.

[52:11] Meghan: Oh, they all sound amazing.

[52:13] Meghan: Uh, and you know, there's such different experiences for each one. And do you see any common themes that run through them?

[52:21] Adam A. El-Sayigh: I would say that what I'm most excited about in all three plays is how the characters and the playwrights in these plays are very interested in the question of how the other is seeing them. So the not necessarily the white gaze, but maybe it's the white gaze in certain moments, it's the straight gaze, and the gaze of someone who was born in the United States from an immigrant lens. But a lot of what these playwrights are navigating in terms of the thematics of the pieces are very much about what it means to be looked at and how the trauma of being looked at from an essentialized lens or tokenized lens or a minority lens impacts how one moves through the world.

[53:07] Meghan: And how do those plays, I guess with that in mind, add to the mission of building a more equitable future for queer people everywhere?

[53:16] Adam A. El-Sayigh: Yeah, I think our vision for the festival is really that in the future, moving forward, that there is no queer playwright on the planet who does not have a platform to share their work. We, you know, we are activists, but we're not politicians. We're not necessarily going to decriminalize homosexuality in some of these 70 countries that are currently criminalizing LGBTQ communities, but we hope to have an impact for writers around the world who are queer and trans. And in a more political sense, we do hope to influence policies, whether it's of American politicians, Americans working in the nonprofit space, that people can see these plays and have a more nuanced understanding of international LGBTQ issues.

[54:10] Adam A. El-Sayigh: Um, I learned that a former UN ambassador in the US would take foreign leaders from more hostile countries to go see Rent on Broadway and did this for years, and was like, you know, your country criminalizes queer people, and instead of just scolding them, which can be very patronizing, was like, hey, you know, here is an artistic depiction of this community that we support, that we want you to support, that we want to be safe, and was trying to change the hearts and minds of these foreign leaders. I don't know how effective that was, but I think that's the power of theater to create political change. It's not necessarily directly changing policy, but it is giving people new frameworks to think about issues.

[55:03] Adam A. El-Sayigh: Um, I remember being part of The Laramie Project when I was 16, and that play had such a profound impact on hate crimes legislation that led directly to President Obama in his first few months in office signing the Matthew Shepherd Hate Crimes Act. So plays and musicals, they can change minds, they can change people's hearts, and you know, hopefully that creates an impact around the world that playwrights know that there is a place for their work and that there are people out there who are interested in their stories.

[55:38] Adam A. El-Sayigh: Yeah, and so much of our work is very also about the community outreach and scouting that is international. So part of me coming on as a co-producer has been part of the goal of what I'm aiming to do is to continue to scout and identify new playwrights who are queer elsewhere, and it's been truly like some of the most exciting and transformative parts of the festival's operations, which is to say that hearing from a playwright through someone who knows someone who knows someone who is suddenly like, oh my god, you actually want to read my play. This thing has been sitting on my Google Drive for I don't know, like six months, and no one has—I have not been ready to share it with someone in my community, or I knew that it wasn't going to be produced here, and just having these conversations, knowing that there's a continuing uplifting of these voices and people who are continuing to be inspired to work just by virtue and to continue to make artistic and creative creations based on our existence as a platform is so meaningful, and we obviously in the future hope to continue to grow in a way that allows us to accommodate and support and contribute to the professional growth of more of these playwrights.

[57:00] Meghan: Yeah, that's really amazing. I um, I had a friend that also worked for the US ambassador in a previous administration, and I know that she like arranged a bunch of diplomats to go see like Fun Home together, and uh, yeah, who knows? Like, who knows how to directly trace the impacts of that, but you know, subconsciously it does humanize queer people in a way that I think, you know, no other media can.

[57:28] Adam A. El-Sayigh: Um, and thinking going back to the festival and where it's taking place this year, it's taking place outside and socially distanced. Um, and what opportunities and challenges has that provided for your artists?

[57:46] Adam A. El-Sayigh: I think the opportunity is that, I mean, the big opportunity is that we can just do theater in person, and to do theater in person in a way that helps the artist feel safe, that helps the audience feel safe, where people are not thinking about COVID while they're watching the play, they can just sit there and enjoy the play. And thank God, you know, COVID is really plummeting in New York City as we're talking. So by the end of June, I think we'll be in a really good place. But you know, June is beautiful in New York City outside in the summer, and how great to be outdoors and enjoy a play. I mean, we all love Shakespeare in the Park and are so excited it's coming back. And to present queer work outdoors feels like a liberation in and of itself.

Like we're not hiding, we're not in our closet, we're not in our theater, like we're in the streets of New York City, we're at Lincoln's Center, which is incredible. You know, presenting openly queer work that's really provocative and empowering, and it's not meant to teach straight people or cis people about queer experiences. Like it's really by and for our communities, which is really special to us.

[58:57] Adam A. El-Sayigh: And there are a lot of challenges. I mean, you have to think about rain, you have to think about heat, you have to think about where you're gonna get power, bathrooms. I have not talked about bathrooms more in any other part of my life. It's like where does the audience pee? Where do the artists pee? Uh, can we find a place with gender neutral bathrooms? Um, all the city permitting, sound permitting, locking off the street, parking, sound, lighting. I—it's really like endlessly logistically complicated. I have had to learn so much about like technical elements and generators. I didn't know what a generator was until like a week ago. I feel like this festival is actually making me straighter.

[59:52] Adam A. El-Sayigh: Or more of like a butch lesbian, you know.

[59:55] Meghan: Yeah.

[59:57] Adam A. El-Sayigh: I think the really exciting opportunity that we're trying to take advantage of is this Open Culture NYC program, which for those of you who don't know what that is, it's basically like outdoor dining for the performing arts. So since I believe the beginning of April, any performing arts organization in New York City has been able to apply for a $20 permit to perform outdoors and can charge tickets. Whereas previously, if you wanted to do an outdoor performance, it costs like a thousand dollars and you couldn't charge for tickets. So it's creating a huge economic and cultural opportunity for our nonprofit arts organizations, which is incredible. And it gives the people of New York like this great gift of being able to walk around the city and just stumble upon amazing art, or to, you know, get a ticket and support artists and see a great show outdoors, whether it's a salsa group or it's a poetry slam or it's a musical.

[1:01:00] Adam A. El-Sayigh: Um, so this Open Culture NYC program has given us the ability to present this work outdoors and do it in a way that's accessible for a smaller budget theater like ours. I hope they find a way to keep some form of that in the future. I understand the safety benefits of it now, but like you're saying, the cultural social benefits of it are incredible. So, um, more outdoor theater, please.

[1:01:30] Meghan: Um, less bathroom problems. That sounds terrible.

[1:01:33] Adam A. El-Sayigh: More important for New York City.

[1:01:38] Meghan: So as queer stories continue to appear in more and more mainstream spaces, in terms of the festival, but also the theater in general, why is it important to maintain queer creative spaces and homes and create authentic community engagement?

[1:01:55] Adam A. El-Sayigh: I think it goes back to the mission of National Queer Theater that our goal is queer liberation. Our goal is not the New York Times critics pick. When you have a queer show on Broadway, it's great, it's fun, people will go to see it. But the audience is mostly straight people, mostly cisgender people, and the level of community engagement is usually pretty minimal. Like, I know The Inheritance worked with Broadway Cares to give out red ribbons. Um, but that's about the extent, and no shade on that. But you know, what we're doing is we're creating really impactful, robust, free community programming for our queer youth, for queer elders, for trans artists, for immigrant youth. Um, I think it's actually that community engagement that is what makes it queer.

It's not two guys or two girls kissing on the stage, it's actually queerness as a political act. It's actually that counterculture, that community benefit that makes the work significant. I mean, when people think back to the Black Panthers, and I was just watching Judas and the Black Messiah, like people think about, you know, afros and guns and berets, but really like the Black Panthers were about breakfast programs for black and brown youth in Oakland, California.

[1:03:38] Adam A. El-Sayigh: So, you know, I think it really comes back to giving back to the community that has given so much to us. Um, and the fact that our artists also become teachers in a lot of these community programs is incredible and it's um it's transformative, and I forgot the question you asked, but yeah, that's that's my that's my answer.

[1:04:02] Meghan: You answered it.

[1:04:03] Meghan: Why is it important to have queer taste?

[1:04:07] Adam A. El-Sayigh: Oh, and I I mean, I would also add I I think creating a safe rehearsal room for queer artists is really important to safety, it's important to respect. Um, you know, we we always are practicing sharing pronouns. Um we always are using spaces with gender neutral restrooms. We are building queer community, we're we're uh giving people resources if they need queer affirming healthcare, queer affirming um therapy, food resources. It's like a more holistic way to look at working with artists than I think a lot of other theater companies.

[1:04:50] Harrow: I was just gonna jump us to our final sections that we do with every guest. Um, the first one we call Queering the Canon. Uh so is there a musical or a play that you would like to queer?

[1:05:03] Harrow: Um why don't we start with Adam OR.

[1:05:07] Adam Odsess-Rubin: I I actually don't have an answer to this question because I so firmly believe that the canon needs to be completely ripped apart. That we need um not even a new canon, like we just need to get rid of this idea of a canon because it hasn't really served us as queer and trans people, and we need to really invest in new plays, new musicals in that development. It's gonna reflect a much more diverse and accurate representation of what our community actually looks like compared to the traditional canon.

[1:05:39] Adam A. El-Sayigh: I was going to say, uh I mean I 100% agree with Adam Odsess-Rubin on this notion of the canon. Just the notion of like categorizing things to say that like this is the representation of blank. Um I find that inherently not queer because in my in my uh I think queerness is about multitudes and about expansiveness and uh about not limiting and not categorizing things. Um all of that being said, though, I'm interested, I feel like we do have um we do have like a long queer lineage of plays that are just not talked about enough. And so many plays where queerness is um where queerness is in uh is written in subtext, or even like looking at um vaudeville and variety shows where like there was so much queerness and like that history, I'm very excited about um an excavation project of uncovering queer history in a way um I know that like in Germany for example um they uncovered a lot of the like uh Weimar Republic era cabarets that were before the 1930s before the Nazis took over um there were a lot of queer cabarets happening in Berlin and a lot of uh a lot of the immigrant theaters today in Berlin um have found uh the the libretto to these operas or these operettas and perform them with immigrant communities and with new Germans and so on and I'm very interested in the embodiment of history in that way I'm less interested in like a rejection of our history but more like how do we contend with it and how do we navigate it.

[1:07:33] Adam A. El-Sayigh: I'm so here for any revivals of German vaudeville cabaret queerness that sounds like I will do like the zeitfilled follies and drag I will take it it basically was a dragon like all the elements of it. Just yeah take the same costumes out of storage and wherever they are and just put it up um amazing and so outside of theater so books, TVs, movies, we have people talk about live events um what is your queer culture indulgence currently?

[1:08:12] Adam Odsess-Rubin: Uh we can start with Adam OR again. I've been really impressed by HBO Max during the quarantine and how much like really awesome queer content they've put out. I loved watching Generations. I loved watching Veneno, which is an incredible Spanish show. And um I found It's a Sin, uh the British AIDS drama really heartbreaking and compelling. And uh like I I think there was like a lot of queer artists involved in making these shows, and oftentimes like queer movies and TV are made with a lot of like straight people writing and directing queer stories, and it's great to see that like high quality, you know, globally distributed, authentic representation. It's awesome.

[1:09:02] Adam A. El-Sayigh: Adam, you literally took like two of the three like three of the things you said were things I was also going to say because we have talked about them. But like it's it's a sin for sure, uh, Levanenio. Um I'm honestly like, I had this weird conversation with friends recently about like the queering of reality TV, which is to say that like reality TV used to be such a such a straight genre, and I think it's recently like competition shows have like become so much more queer, and I'm actually enjoying it. Like I I was someone who hated reality TV until like a year ago, and I feel like I watched so much reality TV, and not drag race, I'm talking about other things. Um, but that is like so queer. Um, so that's exciting for sure.

[1:09:51] Harrow: Do you have one you would recommend?

[1:09:53] Adam A. El-Sayigh: So they're like the thing about the thing that's actually exciting about them, and I want to actually like it goes back to like the larger themes of Magic Queer Theater, is that they're not explicitly about queerness in any way. But like The Circle, which is a reality show where like people compete in a social media setting. Um, like it's not that the show is explicitly about queerness, but like the most recent season, literally half the contestants are queer, and it's like a non-thing, like they're just there living their lives, and they just happen to be queer, and like the form relies on each other because they're queer, which actually like works great. And that's kind of like, you know, that's like my utopian queer fantasy, where it's like not that it's a non-issue, like I don't I don't see the world in the lens of like we're all exactly the same.

That would be very boring world. But um, I want to live in a world where I'm not being tokenized because I'm queer, or where um where we're celebrating queer artists um not just for their queerness, like I don't just want to support a queer playwright because they're telling this super queer story. I also want to celebrate a queer playwright who's just telling, you know, an average family drama about a family that just happens to be queer, but where the queerness is not the like central tension in any way, and so um so it's just exciting to be to see. I mean, I think queerness should often be politicized, but it's always it's also exciting to see contexts where it's being depoliticized.

[1:11:20] Adam A. El-Sayigh: Awesome, thank you. Uh and for our queer gifts section, how can our listeners support National Queer Theater?

[1:11:28] Adam Odsess-Rubin: So folks can donate at www.nationalqueertheater.org/slashdonate, and no gift is too big or too small, it makes a big impact for a smaller organization like National Queer Theater. You can also volunteer either remotely or in person at events, and you can buy a ticket to come see the Criminal Queerness festival, June 22nd to 26th, coming right around the corner for New York City Pride, and it's gonna be outdoors and socially distanced at the United Nations and at Lincoln Center as part of their restart stages program. It's going to be very safe. We're going to require masks and distancing. It's all going to be very orderly. So you can return to theater with a sound mind. And you can buy tickets starting at $30 at nationalqueertheater.org. Or you can buy a festival pass and see everything in the Criminal Queerness Festival for just $50. And special opportunity.

[1:12:41] Adam A. El-Sayigh: So come check us out.

[1:12:43] Harrow: Great.

[1:12:44] Harrow: Well do. What a deal with that festival pass.

[1:12:48] Adam Odsess-Rubin: That's a good idea.

[1:12:50] Adam A. El-Sayigh: And last but not least, how can folks follow National Queer Theater and you both as well online?

[1:12:57] Adam Odsess-Rubin: People can follow National Queer Theater on Facebook or Instagram at National Queer Theater. And that's theater with an ER, not an RE, because we're queering the theater. So please give us a follow and also sign up for our emails at nationalqueertheater.org. And you can follow me on Facebook or Instagram at Adam OdsessRubin on Instagram underscore 92. And you can keep track of what I'm doing on my website, which is just my first name and last name in my middle initial, adamalsayigh.com. Or you can also just follow me on Instagram or Facebook or New Play Exchange.

[1:13:40] Adam A. El-Sayigh: Adam posts a lot of um charcuterie. That's like his thing.

[1:13:43] Adam A. El-Sayigh: So if you want to see some like hot charcuterie pics, it is follow Adam LSA on Instagram. It's a lot.

[1:13:51] Adam Odsess-Rubin: All I want to see is my Instagram is like 90% charcuterie and drag race moves. It's pretty bad.

[1:13:59] Adam A. El-Sayigh: Oh man. Now I need to find some meat and tea somewhere.

[1:14:07] Harrow: We will link to that so no one will miss a second of charcuterie content.

[1:14:14] Adam Odsess-Rubin: Love that.

[1:14:15] Adam A. El-Sayigh: Well, Adam and Adam, it was so amazing to have you.

[1:14:19] Meghan: Yeah, we so appreciate having you both here and cannot wait to see the shows in the Criminal Queerness Festival. It's gonna be amazing.

[1:14:27] Adam Odsess-Rubin: Thank you so much, Meghan and Harrow, for having us. This was great.

[1:14:30] Adam A. El-Sayigh: Thank you for having us. It was lovely to speak with you, and I look forward to hopefully seeing you in like I don't know, is it five weeks now?

[1:14:37] Adam Odsess-Rubin: That's amazing. Can I bring my charcuterie to the festival? Is that allowed?

[1:14:41] Adam A. El-Sayigh: Oh my god, I I will make you charcuterie in the festival.

[1:14:47] Adam Odsess-Rubin: I'm gonna find the generators and just like fawn over them.

[1:14:52] Adam A. El-Sayigh: Please don't. Please stay, please stay ten feet away from the generators.

[1:15:01] Meghan: Thanks so much for listening. If you like what you heard, please rate and review us and share us with your friends.

[1:15:06] Meghan: We'd love to hear from you if you have any queer culture recommendations or other ideas about how to queer the canon. You can call us and leave us a voicemail at 845-445-9251.

[1:15:19] Meghan: Or email us at thesisonjoan at gmail.com. And you can follow us on social. We're on Instagram and Twitter at thesisonjoan.

[1:15:28] Meghan: Until next time, keep it queer.

[1:15:30] Meghan: Not that it'd be that hard for y'all to do.

[1:15:38] Harrow: Firework time already, baby. Someone's like shooting a gun in our alley, and it's like well that's not great.

[1:15:44] Harrow: That's not fireworks. It's like, I'm like, Lizzie, are you sure that's a gun? She's like, yes.

[1:15:51] Harrow: Oh, it's like every night. It's weird.

[1:15:58] Harrow: Maybe rats, who knows? I mean, that's kind of that's not fair. You shouldn't shoot a gun for rats, but like if there's anything that's justified to shoot at, like it might be rats.