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[0:10] Colette Robert: Welcome to Token Theatre Friends. It's a pleasure talking to you today. Can you let us know what The Cotillion is about and what led you to want to write it and tell this story right now?

[0:22] Colette Robert: Yeah, uh The Cotillion is basically a Black debutante ball in real time in a big American city. Um, and the long title is The Harriet Hull and Social Club presents the 84th annual Starburst Cotillion in the grand ballroom of the Renaissance Hotel. Um, I love the long title. And I've been working on it for nine years. Uh, I got the idea in 2014. Um, I had a finance day job at the time, and one of my coworkers was talking about how big debutante balls were where he grew up in St. Louis. Um, and I remember it like jarred my memory of some of my elementary and high school friends who were Black debuting in Los Angeles. And I just was like, I want to see a bunch of Black girls in white dresses. And I was like, because that's a play.

Uh, and I did a lot of research and read a lot of books and interviewed my friends and some acquaintances about their experiences as debutantes. And um, then I applied for some residencies and in one of them I, oh the whole time I thought I would find a playwright to work with me on it as like a true collaboration partnership. And I got into a residency and I had like two weeks over um, like the holidays, uh, Christmas, New Year's, to I had to bring in a scene, like in early January, and I hadn't found a playwright, so I just thought I would um, I was like oh no what am I gonna do now? Uh, but I was like I see the play I see this one scene so I'm gonna write that and see how it goes. Um, and I did that and then it went okay so I was like well I'll do it again next month for the next meeting and I just that's just how I wrote the play like a scene at a time.

[2:31] Colette Robert: Can you talk a little bit about how, because that's really fascinating because I know your work as a director. I've seen many of the plays that you have directed. Can you talk a little bit about what you just said right now about seeing a scene and writing it? Is that kind of how your direction works as well? When you get a script do you have to sit with each scene and then visualize it first in order to get a flavor of what the play is and what your vision is going to be?

[2:49] Colette Robert: Actually strangely it's kind of the opposite. When I direct a play that I haven't written, which is most of the time, I don't see much until I hear it with actors. Uh, so I just sort of enter into every process with like a giant thought bubble over my head with a question mark in it and I'm like I don't understand this or like what's this about or what is this relationship? And then through talking sometimes with the playwright and definitely with the actors, then things start to become clearer if that makes sense. But it's, yeah, I don't see much of anything when I start directing a play that I have not written.

[3:35] Colette Robert: So was it out of the question for you to direct The Cotillion as well? Like did you have to keep those two hats so to speak separate?

[3:42] Colette Robert: Yeah. Yeah, it's been a wild ride. Um, I actually my choreographer Nikki Douglas, uh, sort of two weeks in was like, how would you direct this if you weren't the writer? And it sort of like blew up my mind and has sort of shifted how I'm directing it because now I'm starting to have more, we just started tech yesterday, but um, it's helped me like sort of get back that curiosity that I normally have when I don't because I know the play so well because I wrote um, the whole thing, um, except for the lyrics and music. Um, but um, yeah I'm starting to like have that sort of question mark again which I think is really helpful in writing it to like sort of separate the writer from the director.

[4:22] Colette Robert: I hope this doesn't sound like a pedantic kind of question but I'm really curious, you know, what's the difference between doing a play with songs like The Cotillion and then doing a musical? Why isn't The Cotillion a musical?

[4:22] Colette Robert: Yeah, well the music in this show is sung by like the hired singers that are like hired for this event. So none of the characters sort of sing their feelings as I sort of think of like a traditional musical as being. They're all a sort of a part of the world. The singers are singers and so they sing because they've been hired to do that for this cotillion. But at the same time, the songs are commenting on what's happening on stage and they kind of work as like internal monologues almost for some of the characters, right?

[5:24] Colette Robert: Yes, that is also true. But I still, yeah, that's yeah, I still see it as a little bit separate from like a traditional musical, though.

[5:34] Colette Robert: What are the challenges of doing something like this that's happening, you know, like obviously all theater is happening in real time, but with something like The Cotillion, it's like essential that everything works like clockwork, right? Because it's like real time on top of real time. So, what are the challenges of writing a story like that?

[5:52] Colette Robert: Oh gosh, there are so many. Well, actually, the writing wasn't so hard. The writing was hard, but I've found that directing this in like as a real-time event is like really, really hard. Um, there's a lot of split scenes because things are happening like in the dressing rooms, but there's also something different happening like on stage. Um, so just being able to like make sure the audiences are following both parts of the story um and that the overlap is working has been um quite a challenge.

[6:30] Colette Robert: Cotillions in so many ways, and I mean I've never been to one, like I only know what I know about cotillions because it's art, obviously, right? Movies and theater and TV and stuff. So cotillions are both this artifact that some people often wonder why are we still relying on this? Why are they still a part of our lives, right? Like of our cultural upbringing, because they are almost like a, not almost, they're literally like a rite of passage for women to, you know, go from childhood into adulthood. And at the same time, we have people who want to keep this alive because it, you know, it helps reinstate in so many ways the culture. And there's this really wonderful, fascinating generational divide that we can see in the play with, you know, Madam President and the girls. So can you talk a little bit about your research? Where do you stand? I mean, not that you have to pick a side, but where would you stand on whether, you know, should cotillions still be happening?

[7:30] Colette Robert: That's a great question. And I think when I started researching and talking to women um nine years ago, I had a lot of judgment. And I had a lot of judgment as a teen, like I didn't want to do that, and I really didn't understand why some of my friends chose to do that. But then when I was talking to them, like no one, none of them really had anything negative to say. I mean, they, I think reflecting on it 15, 20 years later, they were like, that was kind of a strange thing that I chose to give like a year of my life to. But I think like the girls in this play and the women that I spoke to, they um mostly like myself went to mostly white high schools where they were like the only in their class, or there weren't a lot of um other Black girls that they spent time with at school.

And so to be in this like space that is almost entirely Black women, there's like a value in that. And to be told that you're beautiful when you might not be hearing that at your white high school, um, there's value in that too. And one of my friends actually, her father died before she got married. Um, but she did debut, so she has a memory of like being in a white dress and dancing with her father, and that there's like value in that too. So I have landed in a place of like I see both the positives and the negatives to something like this.

[8:55] Colette Robert: In so many ways, like cotillion is literally a performance, and I love that in the play, you know, we meet the girls denied up, right? Which means that, like you mentioned, they probably have dedicated a year or more of their life to preparing for this. So can you talk a little bit about building the inner lives of each character leading to this moment that you have to imagine what each of the girls lived through up until that night?

[9:20] Colette Robert: Yeah, that's something I really worked on in the script, especially in the time because the initial production was supposed to be in fall of 2020. Um, so in that time since then, uh I spent a lot of time trying to build up because when I first started writing, I didn't really know who they were individually. Um, so I sort of would go through a draft and like, okay, now I'm charting Lindsay in this in this read and like what's missing, um, and also talking to all of the actors um have been really great and collaborating on um making sure every girl's arc is um very clear and that they do feel like six individual um young ladies.

[10:04] Colette Robert: Going back to the performance element of cotillions for a second, did you find any interesting parallels between, you know, making theater and preparing for a cotillion and rehearsing a cotillion?

[10:16] Colette Robert: Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, it does feel like a show, like there's a lot of um, there's like how you present, and that's sort of what I'm I was interested in initially is like how do we, the performance of like Black girlhood and Black womanhood is something that like we put on or things that are like put on us, and I am very much interested in like how we present Black girls and Black women to the world and how we value them. Um, so that was sort of front of mind in the writing and in the directing and I think what each of the characters in the play is sort of struggling with how they present, how they perform versus what is sort of deep in their hearts and souls.

[11:03] Colette Robert: By having characters, you know, uh speak this conversation and have this dialogue, were you also in a way, and I don't want to be reductive in any way, but were you also able to figure out some of the ideas that you had and some of the notions that you had about womanhood and Black womanhood and performance and all of this by where the characteristics like kind of like surrogates of yourself, like many different aspects of Colette and different ways talking?

[11:27] Colette Robert: 100% yeah, there's a little me in all of the characters for sure and it's been a way to like sort of process things from like my own adolescence and things I'm experiencing now for sure.

[11:39] Colette Robert: It's been very therapeutic working on this play.

[11:43] Jose: I love hearing that! Like, obviously you probably can pick any favorites, but was there a character that maybe took you the longest to crack, so to speak, or that you had to sit with the longest to understand where they were coming from?

[12:06] Colette Robert: Yeah, Madame President is really tough. I mean, there's definitely parts of myself and how I grew up in her, and yes, sometimes some of her lines I cringe as I was typing them, and I still cringe every time I hear them. It's like, ah, that's really not great. But I also want, it's important to me that the audience understands where she's coming from, and that she doesn't ultimately seem like a villain. Like she is a product of her time and her experiences.

[12:44] Jose: Going back to your childhood, and you know, like way before you were supposed to even like make your debut in society, what made you want to become an artist? What made you want to be a director in theater? What made you want to be a part of like what was happening on stage?

[12:59] Colette Robert: Yeah, I mean, I was always interested in art. I would say my parents, when I was like three and four, took me to classes at LACMA, the LA County Museum of Art. So my sort of first love of an art form was visual art. I also always loved to read, and I love storytelling in almost every form. When I was 15, I took a class at my high school. It was like a scene study class, and everyone had to direct and act at some point over the semester. My teacher described—I didn't really even know what a director did—and he said something, and I don't remember what he said, but he said something that I was like, oh, that sounds kind of cool. I was like, I'll volunteer to direct first, and it just clicked. It was the visual element of composing bodies in space, and then the sort of text analysis that I got from loving English classes and reading, that I was like, this is great.

I'm kind of like a shy, quiet person naturally, and so it sort of pushed me to talk more and engage more with humans because I could very easily be in a room and just read or draw. So yeah, it just clicked, and my teachers I think recognized that something was happening with me and told my parents, and my parents were like, oh, okay, surprising, but great. And I just haven't stopped.

[14:27] Jose: How would you describe, and I know this is probably like a tricky question for you being the artist, you know, yourself. How would you describe Colette as a director and Colette as a writer?

[14:38] Colette Robert: Hmm. I think as Colette as a director is very—well, let me start as Colette as a writer. Colette as a writer is very bold, I think, and doesn't really have limitations, and just sort of loves theatricality. I think Colette as a director stays pretty open and tries to step away, like leave space for all of—I don't know why I'm speaking of myself in the third person, but I make space for all of my collaborators to sort of be brilliant. So I'm like a little, I would say removed at first; I just sort of want to fill the space with the ideas of everyone, and then it's like sort of picking bits of everyone's ideas to make it interesting. If that—I don't know if that makes sense, but I feel like that's what I do as a director.

[15:44] Jose: Since you mentioned collaborators, can you talk a little bit about putting the team together for something like Cotillion? Because like obviously it must be incredibly fun to...

[15:55] Colette Robert: Yeah, it's so fun. Well, I'll start with Dion McLean Freeney because she is the composer, lyricist, and music director. I started working with her very early in the process, like before the play was done. I think I maybe had like 20 to 30 pages of it, and we connected, and she just sort of got the world and has a really large breadth of musical styles and has like a wicked sense of humor, and I felt like we just got along, and I think she's a genius. So she's been so important to the process and the making of Cotillion. And then Nikki Douglas is the choreographer, and she similarly is so funny and also was like adjacent to the world when she was growing up. About a year ago, we had a week together, as well as the associate choreographer Niall Harris, sort of building a vocabulary and digging into all of the stage directions that describe all of the dance, and they both really sort of questioned like what do you mean when you say this?

And what is the vibe that you're going for with this? We just looked at a lot of videos together, and that really helped this process this year of putting out the show because we already sort of were so clear with each other on what each dance meant. And then the actors are brilliant, and some of them have been with the show since the very beginning, since the very first reading. I think we all were trying to sort of approach this process as like it's our first time meeting these characters. So asking more questions, even though some of them have been reading like Madame President or the MC for like six years, we tried to be like, let's forget what we know and just sort of like start from scratch again.

And that's been really helpful. And then the designers are brilliant; like Mika Eubanks is doing the costumes. The play asks a lot of the costumes; they sort of transform over the course of the show, and there's a lot of tricky stuff with them. It's been a joy to sort of—yesterday, seeing all the girls in their white ball gowns was just so emotional and beautiful. So I'm really excited.

[18:30] Jose: I'm thinking about, you know, plays that you've directed, like, shoot, and something like Dance Station, for instance. Is it a coincidence that you seem to really like throwing or like working with plays that throw in women in limited spaces and almost like seeing what happens? It's almost like putting people in a fishbowl and waiting for something to happen, right?

[18:50] Colette Robert: Yeah, that's probably not a coincidence.

[18:55] Jose: What do you think attracts you to the dynamic? Because it can work in so many different ways. Like it can work—it's too—I remember feeling almost like watching them, you know, cook a bomb, but I was waiting for something to go off.

[19:08] Colette Robert: Yeah, I don't know. I just love—I think for so long I didn't see myself in theater, that now that there are so many incredible writers writing closer to like my own experiences, I think I—growing up, I had a very tight sort of group of girlfriends, and there are a lot of incredible women in my family that I'm just really drawn to the dynamics of girls and women in art.

[19:09] Jose: From the second the play opens, and you mentioned already, you know, like we are sharing a space with Black women who are themselves in a place that's completely sacred, a completely safe space for them. Can you talk a little bit about how has, if at all, if it has changed at all since you said the play was originally supposed to happen in 2020, right? And we all know everything that happened since 2020. How has your relationship to creating this really sacred space for Black women especially shifted since then? You know, how is Cotillion that's happening in 2023 different than the one that could have happened in 2020?

[20:22] Colette Robert: Yeah, that's a great question. I think everything's just gotten deeper, and I think over time, it feels like more urgent now to share this with people. I think questioning how we see and value and treat Black women has definitely shifted over the past three years. I would say, yeah, everything just feels a lot more urgent.

[21:04] Jose: No.

[21:07] Colette Robert: Like not at all.

[21:08] Jose: Not at all.

[21:11] Colette Robert: I mean, I do love the dresses, and I look enviously at the actors because they look so stunning in those dresses, and I love dressing up. But no, I don't wish that I had a cotillion myself.

[21:24] Jose: Okay, that's fair. I've always worried about asking this to the artists who are making the work, but I find it so—I have to ask you this, particularly with a piece like Cotillion. You know, what are you expecting from the audience? Because like usually when we have, you know, time-specific pieces like this, the audience can either just like really, really become super involved if they know that they can, or otherwise they can become very fearful, right? So like for people who watch or listen to this, and if they come to Cotillion, what do you want them to have in mind? Like should they pretend that they got an invitation to the cotillion?

[21:58] Colette Robert: Yeah, we're really trying to like push, see how far we can push that. I mean, the audience is a character in the play, and I think from very early on, we invite applause, we invite response. I think it's crucial that the audience feels like they're a part of this event.

[22:18] Jose: Especially because of the songs, I think as well, right?

[22:18] Colette Robert: Yeah, definitely, definitely. I'm dying to hear the songs. Will the songs be available at any point, you know, after the play comes out?

[22:18] Colette Robert: Yeah, I hope so. I mean, yeah, Dion is brilliant, and they sound incredible, like the singers, and we're working with—we have a three-member Black femme band on stage, and it just sounds so great. So I hope there's a way for people to hear the music because it's so good.

[22:51] Jose: That's very exciting. And I'm sure there's cocktails before or during intermission if they can, you know, like if they want to loosen up a little bit.

[22:57] Colette Robert: Yes, yes, yes.

[22:59] Jose: So thank you so much, Colette. Would you like to invite our viewers and our listeners to come to Cotillion?

[23:04] Colette Robert: Yes, please, please come. I think it's gonna be a good time.

[23:08] Jose: Thank you so much. It has been a pleasure talking to you.

[23:11] Colette Robert: Thank you so much.